Behind the Scenes of “The Exomaton of Panner’s Bend”

My latest story, “The Exomaton of Panner’s Bend,” has been out for almost a week now (in print and on Kindle), so I thought this would be a good time to write a follow-up post about how it came together.

This was one of those rare prompts where I developed an idea pretty quickly. Especially because this was a contest issue, I knew I wanted to put a unique spin on the theme. The steampunk aesthetic jumped out to me, and I figured that would help the story stand out. After settling on the steampunk angle, a wild west setting seemed like a natural fit.

The theme also meant jumping into the action as quickly as possible. Readers don’t pick up a kaiju story looking for long soliloquies about where the monsters and robots came from—they want action! In my earlier beginnings, I tried introducing the exomaton through its inventor, or framing the story as a newspaper story. Ultimately, these (and a couple other starts) took too long to get to the actual fight between the exomaton and the monster. By shifting the perspective to one of the pilots, I felt more comfortable starting right as they’re all loading up to protect the town.

But even then, you’ll notice that describing the exomaton takes up a lengthy third paragraph. This description was one of the first things I wrote, and is largely similar to its original draft. Combined with the description of the ridgeshaker (which was also one of the first things I wrote), that’s about 120 words already accounted for.

After realizing this, I decided to not limit the story to <700 words. This is what I usually aim for since Splickety typically just acquires a couple stories longer than 700 words. But since this was a contest entry, I opted not to constrain myself if I thought it would make the story stronger.

The action of the story flowed naturally after getting to the battle. Rather than narrating the fight blow-by-blow, I focused on a few key moments to convey the idea of destruction without using too much word count. And even though the image of two giant beings fighting is really cool, I wanted the climax to be a more personal scene, which is why the main character is able to scare the ridgeshaker away with the steam. In another stroke of serendipity, the steampunk angle presented a great reason for the combatants to get stuck close together for a period of time.

In terms of names, “exomaton” is a riff on “automaton”—which has a loose steampunk connotation, but wouldn’t accurately describe something that needs to be piloted. “Exo” seemed like the perfect prefix to convey that people needed to be inside to run, but also provide a sense of scale. For a long time, the town had the placeholder name Golden Springs, but that felt way too tropey for a wild west town. After toying with the idea of the town being named after the panners who lived there rather than the gold they were finding, I settled on “Panner’s Bend.” Once both of these were settled, I put both in the title to clue readers into the fact that this wasn’t the usual kaiju setting.

And that’s how “The Exomaton of Panner’s Bend” came to be! I hope you enjoyed this little glimpse into how I wrote it—not to mention the story itself. If you have any other questions about the story (or the world it takes place in), feel free to ask in the comments!

Behind the Scenes of “Returning Home”

Last week, Splickety published my most recent flash fiction story “Returning Home” in their Heirs and Spares issue. If you haven’t read it yet, you can get a print or digital copy or check it out on Kindle. And as is my new tradition, this week I wanted to write a little behind-the-scenes post about writing it.

The moment I learned about this month’s theme (royal intrigue), I knew I wanted to put a unique spin on it. Also, based on feedback to my Splickety submission from a few months ago, I wanted to make sure I highlighted the main characters as teenagers (which seems to be a driving force of this year’s themes).

One thing that tripped me up early in the process was wondering whether I was supposed to invent royalty or take inspiration from historical figures. I thought it might be easy to see through something totally made up, so I opted to base it on real royalty. Since I expected many submissions would take place in white European settings (or at least be inspired by them), I wanted to set my story apart from the majority by staying away from that setting.

I’ve held a mild interest in Maya history/culture since visiting Guatemala with my family in high school. We lived with a host family on two separate occasions, and visited Tikal during both trips. And since I received good feedback on a story set in Maya culture last year, I thought it would be a good fit for this prompt. But that meant research.

In that vein, one of the first tidbits I learned while researching is the fact that “Maya”—rather than “Mayan”—is the right adjective to use. “Maya” is used when describing elements of their culture (Maya people, Maya history, etc.), while “Mayan” specifically refers to the language family. The more you know!

I started researching by trolling through Wikipedia for names of Maya rulers. (Don’t worry—real research does come into play later.) I figured I could get a feel for the royal dynamic in different Maya city-states and develop a short story about brothers conniving for the throne, or perhaps a forbidden love between members of rival kingdoms. This is where serendipity comes in.

While reading through articles, I learned about Dos Pilas and its relationship with Tikal. It was … complicated. Dos Pilas was a smaller settlement than Tikal, which was one of the powerhouses of its time. Its king claimed to be part of Tikal’s royal line, but its allegiance bounced between them and Calakmul (another major power) over the years.

If that doesn’t set the stage for royal drama, I don’t know what does.

The relevant information was scattered through a few different articles, but I pieced together the gist of Dos Pilas and Tikal’s relationship, the main players, and an inkling of what a short story could look like. At this point, I used Wikipedia’s references to track down Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens by Simon Martin. It helped flesh out a few more details, gave more credibility to certain name translations, and generally bolstered my confidence that this story could work.

Not that “Returning Home” is 100% historically accurate. I definitely took liberties with Bajlaj Chan’s and Nuun Ujol’s ages to better fit with the teenage element, and there aren’t many details about why the two were at odds. Nevertheless, the broad strokes about the two of them being brothers and the contentious relationship between the sites do have a basis in history.

Speaking of the kingdoms, you’ll notice that neither Tikal, Dos Pilas, nor Calakmul get name-dropped in “Returning Home.” That’s because those are our modern names for the settlements. In the Mayan language, Tikal was likely called “Mutal” … at least until Dos Pilas was founded and began using the same name/emblem glyph. At this point, Tikal started being known as “Yax Mutal”—the first Mutal. Dos Pilas is a Spanish name meaning “Two Wells,” though it was probably known as Mutal in its heyday. To avoid the confusion of two locations named “Yax Mutal” and “Mutal,” I used this Maya Hieroglyph Dictionary website to create a name based on the Mayan words for two wells (“Kach’en”). Similarly, Ox Te’Tuun was the Mayan name for Calakmul. It was unfortunate that all these place names took twice the word count, so I tried to limit using them as much as possible! (That’s also why Nuun Ujol only calls his younger brother “Bajlaj” instead of his full name, Bajlaj Chan.)

The only other name in the story is Coyopa, which is taken from the Maya god of thunder. It seemed like an appropriate name for a loyal war general. Yajaw, which is mentioned a couple of times in the story, is the Mayan word for “vassal lord,” which I thought gave the story the right amount of additional flavor.

Once I had the setting and premise of the story, it came together quickly. Like “The Journal of Wonders,” I wanted dialogue to drive most of the story. I thought focusing on a time before the kingdoms officially turned on one another would allow the brothers to have the type of conversation that could reliably drive a story. Nuun Ujol needed to already be convinced that Bajlaj Chan wanted to usurp him, so I wanted this scene to focus on the younger brother’s realization that he was no longer welcome in Yax Mutal. I was pleasantly surprised with the way it came together allowing me to contrast Bajlaj’s definitions of “home” at the beginning and end of the story, giving the title a nice double-meaning.

There you have it! You can see from this post that a big chunk of this story was research and prep work, and it came together … comparatively quickly after those. You probably know more about Maya history now than you ever expected to learn, but I hope you still enjoyed reading about the process and maybe even had a few questions answered. If you have any more questions, feel free to ask them below!

Writing Sword of the Stones

In case you missed the news last week, my most recent story “Sword of the Stones” was published in Havok’s latest issue. Get a print copy here or check it out on Kindle. Today, I wanted to share a little background info on its creation.

First off, since I knew I wanted to submit a story to Havok’s Extraordinary Exploits issue, I started with the prompt. I latched onto the examples of Indiana Jones and The Librarian. But, as is usually the case, my first few ideas looked very different from the final story.

One idea was to submit a story that read like an artifact retrieval form. It would include stats like where a certain relic was recovered and what properties it possessed, as well as a brief report of how it had been retrieved. Another idea began with a teenage boy cleaning out his grandmother’s attic, then finding a hatching dragon egg. But when I got into writing both of them, I realized that it was taking way too long to get to the action.

So I started brainstorming ideas of how to get straight to the action—as well as what kind of relic would lend itself to the pseudo-supernatural element of the prompt. I decided the best place to start would be literally seconds before retrieving the artifact, which would in turn activate some sort of (again, supernatural) defense system that would try to prevent the adventurer from escaping. (It should also be noted that, in my head, the main character is known only as “The Adventurer,” and doesn’t have a real name.)

That was when I had a mental image of an angel statue perched on top of a building, holding a sword while lighting flashed around. Those first few paragraphs went through quite a few revisions as I tried to balance scene-setting with action (and a little humor/sarcasm).

Funnily enough, the sword originally was the main relic—and would’ve been a lot more effective against the gargoyles. But the more I thought about it, “able to defeat animated stone” felt like a really random power, and wouldn’t be very useful in other scenarios. That got me thinking about what would be a cool supernatural ability bestowed by an artifact. Wings and flight seemed like a natural answer given the angel statue, and so the medallion worked its way into the story.

It wasn’t until after I started writing the animated gargoyles that I realized they are an unintentional callback to a short story I wrote in college. Something about those monstrous faces and the notion of living rock just strikes me as sinister. Technically, these ones are probably grotesques or chimeras because “gargoyle” specifically refers to carved spouts that carry water away from buildings, but I elected to keep the term “gargoyle” because it’s the one that most people are familiar with for what I was trying to get across.

Half by virtue of the sword losing its abilities, and half due to rapidly shrinking available wordcount, the fight on the roof ended up being shorter than I had first envisioned. I would’ve liked an epic battle on the monastery roof between Adventurer and gargoyle as lightning flashed and thunder roared, but by the time he picked himself up from the fall, I realized that the story needed to start wrapping up. I was happy to get that epic leap from the roof timed perfectly with a lightning strike. In the movie version, that scene is in slow-mo.

For the ending, it’s worth noting that my first draft was a couple sentences longer. I wanted to bring a sense of completion into the story, and I did that through a brief exchange of the duo talking about their next course of action (and the Adventurer thanking Veronica for saving his life). But when my brilliant wife/first editor read it for the first time, she pointed out that the story ended just fine with the “You got the short straw of artifacts this time” comment. Realizing that she was right (as usual), I removed the dialogue for an even shorter word count! Plus, I think the way it draws attention back to the relics gives the story a better sense of completion.

And those are the main points I remember from writing the story. I hope you enjoyed this look behind the scenes of “Sword of the Stones”! Just in case it didn’t come across, I had a blast writing the story—and I hope you enjoy(ed) reading it! Have any other questions about how it came together? Or about my writing process in general? Feel free to ask in the comments 🙂