“Why did I say I’d do this?” I wondered as I sipped a soy latte at À la Caffeine.
À la Caffeine is the chic coffee boutique for itinerant writers in our uncharted provincial city. Managed by a library school dropout who has posted “Shh” signs on the wall, it is a nearly silent cafe.
“Shh” isn’t everybody’s favorite word. And so the clientele tend to be Renaissance Fair organizers designing Celtic Clan flyers, nervous Ph.D. students writing snappy dissertations on Sexuality in Small Towns in Willa Cather’s Later Fiction, and freelancers desperately polishing reviews of “The Ten Best Homeless Shelters in Town”–for the alternative paper.
I often write such things myself, but today I’m editing a pulp SF novel about a race of “Uplifted” animals– animals who are biologically modified in labs to have human intelligence.
I am doing this as a favor for an editor friend who is forced to publish this thing.
Wow! This is ineffably bad. I asked in an email, “Did you know the hero is a lemur whose ancestors are blue ponies?”
She wrote, “Yeah. Delete ALL adjectives and adverbs and cut to 30,000 words. Then we hide it in an anthology, submit it for an SF novella prize, and call it done.”
But where to start? Here is the astonishing first paragraph.
And so it came to be that Hal the Lemur flew through the tall green trees of Madagascar Not-on-Earth on the morning that Mam was attacked by the Madagascar Hawk. Hal bravely fought it. His Mam was not alive…not dead. He could get help from the blue Ponies who’d trained him in Rhetoric and Medicine. And then he saw the Pony Ship was gone. Gone through space……time was a concept…time and space beyond Ponies beyond Earth…beyond…and he was alone.
But will it win the novella prize?
I’ll have another soy latte.