I have an exciting update to share with everyone~

My short story, “The Heebie-Jeebie Beam”, has been accepted by Metaphorosis Speculative Magazine and is in the July 2022 issue! You can read the story here.

This is the second short story I’ve placed with them (the first being “Singot”). Like my previous inspiration posts for “Singot”, “The Hole in the System”, and Perceiver, I wanted to talk about why I wrote “The Heebie-Jeebie Beam”, what I learned about my writing process while writing it, revising it, and working with the editor of Metaphorosis to publish it.

Inspiration

First thing to know about me: I take a really, really long time to write short stories. “Singot” alone took over 80 hours from first draft to published manuscript. That’s longer than it takes for me to revise a draft of a novel.

Why was I so slow? Before writing “The Heebie-Jeebie Beam”, I identified more as a writer than a storyteller. I could write a mean sentence, but I lacked the ability to sense the elements of a good story underneath. Because of that, I often got stuck when writing. I didn’t have a sense for the story, for what needed to be fleshed out, what could be skipped, what details were the most important, or how to create momentum. I revised as if rooting the words from mud, blindly searching for them. What was holding me back was something enormously simple and obvious in hindsight.

I didn’t know how to get better or faster until fall 2021, when I stumbled across two strange musicians on the internet. One had an afro that tripled the diameter of his head. The other had a porn stache and wore silk robes and boxers on stage. Both of them went on stage without knowing what they would play. No set list, no sheet music, head empty.

If you recognized them, bravo. Please be my friend. For the rest of you, these two were Messiers Reggie Watts and Mark Rebillet. It would be easy to call them musicians, because the usual outcome of their work is music. They use loop machines, synthesizers, and mixers to create loops of beats, rhythms, and other sound patterns, which they then sing over. But the product is pure astonishment.

I had a thought watching them improvise together with Flying Lotus, each man in a nest of wires and machines, making the most incredible music based on nothing but energy and response. How is it that people can make something up on the spot AND have it be coherent and engrossing and awesome? As someone who practices what she’ll say to the barista before she orders, going on stage unprepared was the stuff of nightmares.

I knew I had to try it.

I took an online class hosted by Watts, but I don’t remember most of it. I do remember that it was about responding to the material that’s already there, rather than editing endlessly. As performers, Watts and Rebillet can’t take back a sound. Once it’s out, you have to do something with it. So it was important to listen deeply and keep an open mind.

But writing is different. Unless you’re a spoken word poet, most writing is rewritten. Often multiple times. How could I apply what I had learned to writing stories?

Around that time, I had read two important books on writing that influenced my thinking. The first book was A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, by George Saunders. His advice echoed what I had learned from Watts and Rebillet.

Be honest about what you think and feel.
Be responsive to what’s there.

But Saunders also added a crucial third element:

Always be escalating.

The second book was Lisa Chron’s Story Genius. Her definition of a story made everything click: A story is about a character striving to do something difficult and how they changed inside as a result.

Because I like being publicly humiliated, I’ll admit it: I didn’t know what a story was until I read her book. Nobody had spelled it out for me. It’s like trying to understand what the sky is. I mean, you and I can recognize a story from twenty paces. But as every reader knows, when you see it in words, it’s life changing.

So: I wanted to test what I had learned about storytelling from Chron and Saunders, but also Rebillet and Watts. I also had other pressures upon me. For my 2022 New Year’s Resolution, I vowed to let no story take longer than 15 hours from draft to done. On top of that, I had twice asked for an extension from my editor for the sequel to Perceiver. It’s due after Thanksgiving. I’m still working on it, as of this writing.

I didn’t realize it then, but what I was truly testing was a core belief: that writing does—and should—take a long time to write and revise for the finished product to be great. If this experiment worked, it would fundamentally change how I wrote.

All I needed was a starting element. An opening note. A beat.

Good thing I had one.

The Writing Process

I had been obsessed with the phrase “heebie-jeebie beam”. Something about that short-long, short-long, short phrase with a three-in-a-row internal rhyme, the silly phrase “heebie-jeebie”, and the intriguing “beam” caught my imagination. The theory of aspiration, or the philosophy of trying to become a certain person (especially the book by Agnes Callard), weighed on my mind too. More on this later.

I thought, what about a ray gun that transforms people? What kind of person would make a gun like this? How would it work? Who would need it the most?

And I was off. The story came out like a river. My editor brain turned off. I threw in the first words that came to mind: oodles, frick, cromulent—rather than their plain language counterparts. I used that funny saying I’d been saving—the challenge forced me to use everything I had been holding back, and I was surprised and excited by what came up.

Later, I read a book titled, “If I understood you, would I have this look on my face?” which is about how to be better at communicating science. It’s really a 245 page plea for people to take improv lessons. What I learned during the first draft (and later, when I started taking lessons) was that improv teaches several crucial skills.

It teaches you how to be responsive to another person—listening
It teaches you how to build on the material that’s there—resourcefulness
It teaches you how to let go—fearlessness

The first draft of the Heebie Jeebie Beam took 7 hours total to finish. 8 hours to revise and workshop.

Revising was similar to writing, except that the material changed. Though I’d set out to write something fun, I couldn’t help but think more seriously about the Beam itself. How would the raygun change people? Fear, was what I wrote. What kind of person makes a raygun that frightens people? Why do we feel fear, and how far would we go to stop ourselves from feeling afraid?

The protagonist is not a self-insert character by any means. Yet, to write them, I had to take census of my own fears, even the ones I was ashamed of.

Back to Agnes Callard. She wrote a book called Aspiration, which was about the philosophy of trying to become a certain kind of person. “The aspirant makes pictures of himself in order to resemble the picture.”

The aspirant has a vague idea of the person they’d like to become, like you have a vague idea of what you look like in a foggy mirror—but what that person values, how they act, what they believe is ill-defined. They have to act as if they value, believe, etc, before it becomes authentic, i.e., fake it ‘till they make it.

For me, aspiration was a serious business. I’d identified as a writer from a very early age, fixed my estimation of my intelligence on it, did (and valued and believed) several stupid things for the sake of being a writer. Especially that the more time spent writing and editing something, the better. An aspirant is someone who tries to become someone they’re not.

Trying to become someone you want to be can go two ways: you can become someone who would inspire others and awe yourself. Or, you can warp yourself to fit an image you were never meant to take.

Like I said, in middle and high school, I took pride in being smart and competent and being seen as smart and competent.

What I didn’t realize that everyone thought I was too—forgetting that I was a child.

A close family member had regular bouts of anxiety, depression, and psychosis. Every two years, some malicious timer in their brain would click and a bad brew of chemicals flooded their mind. They did many of the things the mother in the story did. Like the protagonist, I took a disproportionate burden in making sure they were okay.

I tracked visiting hours in the psych ward. I drove them to the hospital more than once at night. I called the police. I just did it. I researched the COPES line, the research on depression, how to keep people calm during a mental health crisis. I got good at that.

I thought I could self-improve myself into fixing someone else. In hindsight, a stupid thing to do.

Sending off the story

After I revised the story for clarity and streamlined or expanded some scenes, then sent it off to my writing group to workshop. Overall, they enjoyed it. After addressing their comments, I sent it off to short story magazines that I thought would be a good fit.

I got an automatic rejection from the first magazine I sent “The Heebie-Jeebie-Beam”. It was also the best-paying magazine. Wah. But I caught the mistake and sent the short story off to my second choice. I got a personal rejection with feedback, which made me feel pretty good. The third magazine was Metaphorosis Speculative Magazine, who offered an acceptance contingent on rewrites.

I knew when I agreed to revise that I wasn’t going to make the 15-hours-or-less challenge. The magazine’s editor, Morris, pays lapidary attention to every part of the story. This meant a few rounds of editing and more hours of work.

Yet, I learned so much from the process of revision that I would happily do it again.

The Editing Process

The first round of editing started with a short paragraph of comments over email—no comments in the document until I addressed the overall.

Morris pointed out three major problems:

The relationships in the story needed work
What happened to the mother was unclear—was she ill or had something happened to her?
Why had the father left? What did the protagonist, Will, think about him leaving?

This was more or less what my writing group and the second magazine had pointed out. I thought I had addressed those comments, but apparently not enough.

When you write a story that is heavily weighted towards the theme or philosophy, it’s almost structured like an argument (at least, that’s how I think of it), with a thesis and points and counterpoints. But the argument is based on the character(‘s) experience. And people build their philosophies of being based on how they are treated—aka, their relationships. So my first thought was that I needed to:

Add flashbacks, details, and other experiences that reveal the parents’ characters and
Do in such a way that showed the protagonist’s changing attitude towards them

The thing about working with editors is that they’re really good at asking questions that you ought to ask of your work. Really good editors ask the unconscious questions readers have when they read. Six drafts I sent to him returned highlighted with comments; not a single paragraph was unexamined.

(By the way, if you want to read about how this magazine goes about its editorial process, it tells all in the anthology here.)

I failed the 15 hour challenge spectacularly. But I will try again.

The End

Something I learned while researching for the story was that emotions show you what you value. Fear tells you what you are afraid to lose.

During the pandemic, it was deeply difficult to write. I kept up my three pages, but they changed to diary pages, in tiny notebooks. When I wrote during that time, it felt like I was writing with my own blood—it scared me, how much something I loved drained me and how little I had to give. I felt there was something lacking in my own work—some fundamental energy—that makes stories breathe, shake out its wings, and soar.

“The Heebie-Jeebie Beam” is the fourth short story I’ve ever published, so I wasn’t expecting a huge response. But all of the responses validated the exact thing I was aiming to achieve with the story—that readers thought about it long after it was over, and they went back to reread it to find more things to think about. It’s funny, that the thing I thought would take me away from writing the stories I want to write brought me closer to them. Reading those books and watching improv changed my understanding of what was needed to create something good. It became easier, more joyous to write, though my process has changed radically.

The last line of the story could not be anything but this: “Fear lets you know you’re alive.”

Again, you can read the story here.