"Gin And Rummy" New Story! In Analog!

I have a new story published, and it’s in Friggin Analog Magazine!!! (My second one there!)

And check out the names on the cover!! Friggin’ all-star cast to be published alongside. :D

As always, here’s a tidbit about the story-writing process for anyone interested—

The core of the story germinated way back in 2018, during the week-long Writers of the Future workshop. One of the exercises was rolling some dice to give us constraints (“this sort of character” (robot) + “this sort of setting” + …), and then writing as much as we could on that in fifteen minutes. I got maybe two paragraphs, but I had the concept of an old man fixing a broke-down robot dog from that.

Years later my local monthly writers workshop had a “proof of life” month, where everyone was required strongly encouraged to submit a piece of flash fiction. I took those two paragraphs and built out the rest of the story.

Everyone agreed it was a pretty good story. It was fun, it was punchy, and had a basic plot in terms of “a thing happens that’s interesting.” But something was missing. A thing happened, but it lacked an emotional beat. There wasn’t a satisfying resolution of emotional tension.

This story really benefited from being shelved for several months. I’m not sure how exactly it happened, but during a re-read a few months later when I was trying to figure out how to give it that little extra depth something clicked in my head. “Oh, make the sheriff his son. Make the doggo a serendipitous key to that long-ago-rusted-closed lock.” I changed one line at the start, and added two lines at the end. And suddenly I had a complete story. A short, simple story, of course, barely a thousand words. But now it had a single heartbeat right at the end, and that made all the difference. It was now good enough that Analog bought it. <3

The fact that it is so short really helped in the revision process. It’s significantly easier to reread an entire piece multiple times (and dwell on it) when the reading only takes a few minutes. Novels are so much harder. But that’s another blog post, for another time.