I've been in three out of the five volumes of this series, and I can't say enough good things about them. They are awesome, the stories are all about young girls in science, and all profits go toward helping actual women become engineers.
So I am very happy to announce that The Girl With Silver Feet is published in this year's volume. It's a Wizard of Oz retelling, and getting it published has been an adventure.
I wrote the first version of this in 2016. Over the course of two and a half years, it got rejected 10 times, in various iterations. And then I just kind of gave up. I liked the story, but I didn't love it enough to keep seeking publication only to get rejected. I didn't believe in it in its current form. There was something missing and I couldn't figure out what.
Then came the Brave New Girls submission call. I've been in the last two books, each with a retelling: first Rumpelstiltskin, then My Fair Lady. So I knew exactly what I was going to write this year: Mama Mia… but with dinosaurs!
Yeah… that didn't happen. I still want to write that story, but it desperately does not want to be a middle grade story. It wants swearwords and innuendo.
The deadline was getting closer and I didn't have a dang thing. But I couldn't just not submit something. I love these books and I love what they stand for, and being in them has been my tradition for the last two years. I needed to submit something, because even if it gets rejected, it means I tried and I really needed to try.
For some reason it was in my head that I still needed to do a retelling. I think it was more desperation than anything; with limited time, it's a little bit easier if the bare bones of a plot already exists for you to play with. And my mind drifted back to Silver Slippers, which is what I had been calling it. Maybe I could tweak it again. After all, there couldn't be much wrong with it, right?
Wrong. So very, very wrong.
What I thought would be a quick editing ended up being an almost entire rewrite. Which I did in basically one day, submitting right before the deadline. But in the process, I finally found out what was wrong with my story: it wasn't really a retelling of the Wizard of Oz at all.
The Wizard of Oz is about an innocent young girl who gets swept away to another land and accidentally killed a witch. My story was about an adult assassin who grew up in "Oz" and she had no remorse about murdering the witch.
The Wizard of Oz shows that the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion always had a brain, heart, and courage. In my story, they were useless until Dorothy came along and fixed them. (And my story was also very ableist about fixing people who are different. And sacrificing them.)
In the Wizard of Oz, the wizard is just a man. In my story, he was integral in saving everyone because even though Dorothy masterminded the whole plan and very clearly had skills, she still needed a man to save the day.
In the Wizard of Oz, the shoes were, well, extremely important. In my story, they were merely an annoyance, the result of the witch starting to lower Dorothy into a pot of boiling liquid metal in order to turn her into basically a Cyberman like from Doctor Who but the process was stopped.
Yeah… I think it's much better now, and I hope you will agree.
Then came the Brave New Girls submission call. I've been in the last two books, each with a retelling: first Rumpelstiltskin, then My Fair Lady. So I knew exactly what I was going to write this year: Mama Mia… but with dinosaurs!
Yeah… that didn't happen. I still want to write that story, but it desperately does not want to be a middle grade story. It wants swearwords and innuendo.
The deadline was getting closer and I didn't have a dang thing. But I couldn't just not submit something. I love these books and I love what they stand for, and being in them has been my tradition for the last two years. I needed to submit something, because even if it gets rejected, it means I tried and I really needed to try.
For some reason it was in my head that I still needed to do a retelling. I think it was more desperation than anything; with limited time, it's a little bit easier if the bare bones of a plot already exists for you to play with. And my mind drifted back to Silver Slippers, which is what I had been calling it. Maybe I could tweak it again. After all, there couldn't be much wrong with it, right?
Wrong. So very, very wrong.
What I thought would be a quick editing ended up being an almost entire rewrite. Which I did in basically one day, submitting right before the deadline. But in the process, I finally found out what was wrong with my story: it wasn't really a retelling of the Wizard of Oz at all.
The Wizard of Oz is about an innocent young girl who gets swept away to another land and accidentally killed a witch. My story was about an adult assassin who grew up in "Oz" and she had no remorse about murdering the witch.
The Wizard of Oz shows that the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion always had a brain, heart, and courage. In my story, they were useless until Dorothy came along and fixed them. (And my story was also very ableist about fixing people who are different. And sacrificing them.)
In the Wizard of Oz, the wizard is just a man. In my story, he was integral in saving everyone because even though Dorothy masterminded the whole plan and very clearly had skills, she still needed a man to save the day.
In the Wizard of Oz, the shoes were, well, extremely important. In my story, they were merely an annoyance, the result of the witch starting to lower Dorothy into a pot of boiling liquid metal in order to turn her into basically a Cyberman like from Doctor Who but the process was stopped.
Yeah… I think it's much better now, and I hope you will agree.
Tech-savvy girls in sci-fi worlds.Journey into sci-fi realms where girls use their skills and brains to save the day. See scouts who save the world from AI overlords. Travel to the edges of space with girls who dare to go head to head with giant interstellar corporations. Watch as ladies take down nefarious hackers, innovate space travel, and defeat aliens. This 29-story collection has something to delight, enthrall, and fascinate every age. All revenues from sales of this anthology will be donated to the Society of Women Engineers scholarship fund. Let’s show girls that they can be the next generation of innovators and inventors. Stories by: Julie Bragdon, J.D. Cadmon, Glen Damien Campbell, Russ Colchamiro, M.L.D Curelas, Paige Daniels, Caroline David, M.M. Davies-Ostrom, George Ebey, Mary Fan, Janina Franck, Thomas Gondolfi, Margaret A. Hanson, Monty Harper, T.A. Hernandez, Andrew K. Hoe, Nicole Iversen, A.A. Jankiewicz, Blake Jessop, Kris Katzen, Claire McCague, Jelani-Akin Parham, Josh Pritchett, Mackenzie Reide, Jennifer Lee Rossman, J.R. Rustrian, Joanna Schnurman, Denise Sutton, Raphael Sutton.
No comments:
Post a Comment