DP FICTION #125B: “The Saint of Arms” by Mason Yeater

edited by Ziv Wities

Content note (click for details) Gun violence, fetishization of violence, brief mention of child death

Black barrels and magazines spread from his back like wings. He was larger than the world, but he sat the same as a man. Stoic, ankle resting on his knee. He was straight-backed in that antique at the top of the stairs. He’d claimed it a long time ago—this uncomfortable wooden chair—tall, carved back, and arms straighter than the horizon. I stared up the carpeted steps from the second landing of our mansion. Shaking, because I’d finally made up my mind.

***

We met in the Gulf of Mexico under the shadow of an oil rig. He was naked. He didn’t look anything like a man, but once we fished him out of the waves I swear his body changed to look like us. His face was a copy of my boss’s, spitting up water like a cat. My boss was standing next to me on the aft deck of the OSV, wondering what to do. But I didn’t say anything. I don’t think he noticed.

Back then, I was a derrickhand. Weeks at a time on a rig. I was lonely. We weren’t sure if he was a capsized fisherman or if he fell out of the sky. The Coast Guard took him before the sun set. When I was off duty I tracked down the hospital where he was recovering. He could only say a few things: “Easy, easy.” “We’ll find out where you came from, bud.” “Mind if I ask you a few questions?” But he never asked me any follow-up questions. It was strange listening to him talk at me, repeating everything he’d heard.

They thought he was Mexican (my boss was), so they were ready to kick him over the border as soon as they were sure he wasn’t dead. An idiot could tell they were wrong. The thing is, he sounded like a Texan—without a shadow of a doubt. It wasn’t amnesia from almost drowning. He was hearing English for the first time, eating it whole. His throat was a mirror.

I took him back to my place, made him sign something. He trusted anyone then. I wanted to sublet the spare room in my apartment, and I knew he didn’t have a lot of options. At this point he could already carry on a conversation.

“You live alone?” he asked me.

“Used to.”

He showed his teeth because he already knew what I meant. He got subtext. That surprised me more afterward than it did at the time.

The sublease wasn’t just for the money. He was corn-fed. He only looked a little like my OIM now. I knew there was something wrong with him, but I wanted him anyway. I hadn’t been close to anybody since I started working. I bought him a few outfits, corny stuff—bolos and boot cut jeans. I cooked for him. Nobody ever came asking where he was. Guess they didn’t really care as long as he wasn’t their problem. We lived like that for maybe three whole days before it happened.

I was coming in from the gym, already changed back out of my shorts so I was wearing my holster. I was a single woman in the city. You always carry a gun. I stepped through the doorway and I guess he wanted to say hi. I was his only friend at the time, so of course he waited at the door. I didn’t even know what was happening. He reached for me, and the Glock lifted my shirt and flew to his forearm.

It stuck there. Like a magnet.

“Sorry, Odessa.” He said it like all he did was knock over a glass of water. It was humiliating. Blood was rushing through my cheeks. I guess I was rattled.

“Give me that.”

I reached for it, not as careful as I should have been. My finger brushed the trigger. It didn’t go off but I almost wished it had, to put me out of my misery. My head was buzzing. I yanked back: one hand on the grip, the other on the barrel. It didn’t even budge. I pulled his whole body to me instead. Then I pushed him away because I was scared.

We didn’t talk about it. He tried, but I told him to shut up. I realized pretty quick the sublease didn’t matter. He had no money and he couldn’t get a job. I had to buy him button-downs that were way too big. I bought him a jean jacket. The gun wasn’t coming off, so we had to hide it.

I was getting anxious. It was six days without a gun, and I never went outside without a gun. I couldn’t really afford it, but I walked to the armory and bought a Taurus. I opened the apartment door. I was ready this time, had it gripped like a vice—so it almost took off my fingernails. It flew to him like a dart. He was all the way in the kitchen. I had to cut away his shirt. The pistol was glued to his upper rib. I locked myself in the bathroom for an hour. Couldn’t stop breathing. Ugly, heavy breaths. I bit down on a towel until all I could taste was wet cotton.

“Odessa?” He kept calling through the door. “Odessa?” Soft and gentle like he was a boy. I didn’t answer.

I calmed down, but I wasn’t really calm at all. I said let’s go to the air show. He was worried about getting deported, because before this, it was all I talked about. How he wasn’t allowed to go outside, or talk to anyone. He asked what would happen if somebody recognized his face. I took a deep breath. His face had already changed enough anyway. Forget scared, I thought. It was all in or nothing. I said, if you can do this to a whole crowd, no one’s gonna be asking anything except, “How’d you do it?”

Of course everyone was carrying. In broad daylight, in the hot sun, he walked through the crowd like a knife cutting through the sheets. My breath caught in my throat. As he walked by, every gun flew to him, shrapnel in reverse, sticking to his clothes like merit badges. Three fighters broke the sound barrier overhead and all anyone could do was gawk at him, slack-jawed.

I had to change my thinking. It wasn’t “Crap, I’m defenseless, I’ve got no gun.” Now I was thinking, “This man is every sidearm you’ve ever seen. And you’re his only friend.”

I quit my job and we started touring. Local news stations, gun shows, podcasts nobody’d ever heard of—they thought he was some kind of mascot. They kept saying, “Just make sure we get the guns back when you’re done.” They didn’t believe me when I said that’s not how it worked. They thought it was a magic trick.

I had to take out a loan to keep traveling. It was months before things took off, and I was scared all over again. There’s nothing more boring than being scared of money. Flights weren’t really an option, for obvious reasons. Had to drive states at a time, so I was losing sleep at the wheel. Half the time it felt worse than working rigs. But there was this little glow over everything. This energy.

Finally we landed a talk show, in California of all places. No one was immune to guns. Try eight hundred. We used to keep count but it was impossible now. They’d started overlapping. Fusing together. Falling somewhere into his body. You could still see parts of his skin but half of it was layered over like scales. His back was sprouting wings from the AR stocks.

After the talk show, people started throwing money at us. They knew his name. I couldn’t tell if they thought he was the real deal, or just the greatest magic trick they’d ever seen. They wanted him at the RNC. Wanted him for a show in Las Vegas. Labs asked to study him, but that was the only thing I wouldn’t agree to. Whatever he had, I didn’t want anyone else to have it.

“Caisson,” I said. “You ready to be a millionaire?”

“Will I lose you?” he said.

“What?”

“I like when we’re together.” He looked at me like a puppy.

“The Army just offered us six million for a fifteen second ad. I’m not going anywhere.”

Everyone wanted a piece of us. Of him, but I was his manager, his only friend. I was always there and I saw the way they looked at him. Terror, then awe, then greed.

We bought a house with the earnings. Moved back to Texas, where we both felt at home. The heat, the people, the guns. But the guns were ours now.

The house was more than a house. A big stone thing, historic, eight bathrooms, a chapel, stairs that had to wrap around the entryway twice to reach the top floor. 

The day we moved in, we leaned over the railing, admired the square of hardwood at the bottom.

“Something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” I said.

“What is it?”

His face had changed. It didn’t look like my old OIM anymore. Not even close. It was dark, almost gunmetal. The sharpest jawline I’d ever seen. And his eyes were black. Like they opened once in the dark and never stopped dilating.

“How’d you get here?” I said. “You’re not human, are you.”

“No, I’m not human.”

“You some kind of squid? Shapeshifter?”

The truth was, I didn’t care. He was exactly who I needed him to be. But I was still curious.

“Polarity,” he said.

I laughed. “Caisson, come on. You know I’m not a geek. I told you we were gonna stay away from those guys.”

“How I collect the guns,” he said.

“Just tell me already.”

“It’s the weight.” 

“Okay…”

“When I started, it was Earth. It’s larger than me, so I was the one who moved. But there’s weight everywhere, pulling.”

I stared at his grey face and the tiger’s eye bolo around his neck. At the start, he said. Weight. Did that mean it didn’t have to be guns? I didn’t know how to reckon with that. But what did it matter? He picked guns, and I picked him.

“A little green man, then.”

All he did was laugh, light and airy, and it echoed down the stairs.

I don’t know why I let them come. Maybe there was never any stopping it. Women, men, people I wouldn’t have expected in a million years. They flocked to our home, climbed the stairs, and they screwed him right there in that wooden chair. Put their lips on the barrels, long trails of spit on the metal, wove their fingers through the trigger guards. The line went out the door. Instead of makeup I put headphones on in the morning to keep out the moans. The rate we were charging, it was a fair trade. And no babies to worry about. He always kept his pants on.

It started by accident after a conference. A couple found us on the way to our truck. They had a look on their faces. The stars were out. I would have said no—groupies were either dangerous or distracting—but I felt safe with Caisson. He was my gun. His body kept catching on the seatbelts and I was sure the woman was going to grip one of the triggers and light up the cab, but he was always in control. The man stroked him like a treasure, played with his bolo. This was a different kind of magnetism. Not like whatever pulled the guns to his body. It didn’t affect everyone. But when it did, he was all they wanted.

Of course it got political. The sex—or whatever you called it—it still happened, but governments wouldn’t leave him alone. Activists wouldn’t shut up. They figured it out. Knew it wasn’t magic. It was real.

They flew him to war-torn Taiwan. And he walked through the streets, stepped over rubble until he collected every last gun. China never officially pulled out, but their mouths were stuffed with humble pie. Somehow I didn’t care what happened. I waited in a hotel. Couldn’t even read the room service menu. He swiped the keycard, slipped inside. He sat with me on the bed like we were lovers. I wasn’t sure what I was, but now he was a goddamn war hero.

They sent him to Russia next. Colombia after that. All of a sudden he was global. Idiot newscasters started calling him “The Serpent” on account of his skin. He ate guns faster than people could shoot them. Count must have been in the hundreds of thousands, but he hadn’t gotten any bigger. They were inside him, or maybe it was a new kind of physics, another dimension, I don’t know. It was like he got denser. Where the guns rested flat, where they were scales, they overlapped so many times it was like a maze—black grooves as thin as lines on a fingerprint. He was nothing like a man.

I didn’t like him strolling into warzones without me. There was no chance I was going in with him, either. It was awkward. But everything was fine, I guess. It was working. I had exactly what I always wanted: protection, somebody I loved. He was doing everything but I was in control, or I thought I was, and I liked that. I thought he did too.

It happened in a rest stop between Dallas and home.

He was buying pretzels from the vending machine. Somebody wanted an autograph. At this point, it was harder to find someone who didn’t recognize him. Everybody wanted an autograph. This guy, though, he had a special request. Wanted Caisson to fill him with bullets. Some kind of death wish. Caisson said he’d never fired a gun. He said he wouldn’t do it.

I knew that was true, but it was strange when he said it out loud. Everywhere he’d been. Everything he’d taken. All this time I’d thought of him as a perfect butcher. I don’t know why. It was what everyone thought. They assumed he could level a city. The way he disarmed me when I let him into the apartment. I always thought he could do that to anyone, save me if I needed it, neutralize any threat. But here he was acting like a dove.

“Do it,” I said.

“Sorry?”

“Give him his autograph.”

The guy was shaking. He looked like he’d never slept in his life. You could tell he wanted to die more than anything. He thought Caisson was some kind of death god.

“I don’t want to.”

“Do it.”

“Odessa, I don’t think I should.”

“Everyone’s waiting on you,” I said.

A crowd had gathered around the three of us. Somebody came through the door and their pistol flew through the air and stuck to Caisson’s shoulder. He flinched.

I leaned close and whispered, “This is how we keep the world safe. They need to know you don’t have any weaknesses.”

His face was all tensed up, the metal bending. I could barely hear his voice. “I don’t want to kill him.”

The guy lurched forward. There was something wrong with him. He reached for one of the triggers on Caisson’s arm. I jumped behind him, screamed that he was going to kill us.

And there it was. Like a light switch.

My ears were ringing as I opened my eyes, watched the blood pooling under Caisson’s boots. The man was crumpled at his feet, bent over like he was bowing.

He didn’t hate me the way I thought he would. It was something else. He started changing. We were still charging people to come worship him on his chair. Swarms of people. Nobody cared that that guy was dead. It just confirmed what they already knew: Caisson was the Devil. No use fighting him, so you might as well try to have his babies. The thing was, he didn’t stroke their hair anymore, didn’t encourage them. “Yes, wonderful,” he used to say. “Just like that.” He was silent now, with a steel jaw. He used to tease their fingers away when they groped for his triggers. Now he let them pull. A dark rose bloomed on the floorboards under his chair.

He still left when officials called. They flew him to London for a bomb threat. Bombs. Criminals thought they were clever now that guns were worthless. He shot the guy from a skyscraper half a mile away.

I didn’t even follow him anymore. Just read the news while I waited to pick him up from the private airport. They flew him to Yemen. Eighteen hostages held at gunpoint with unclaimed rifles. He lit up the captors like a firestorm. Then he took the guns. Prison riot, Buenos Aires. Gunned down forty-six inmates. Another bomb threat, Times Square. Fired on the suspect. The bomb detonated anyway, collapsing the 42nd Street Shuttle, killing a hundred and three. Invasion, Syria. Decimated three tanks, downed a plane, wiped out the ground forces. They said there wasn’t time to evacuate all the children. 

It was nothing, all of it. A flick of his wrists. Nobody cared. Sometimes he stole their guns like a cheap magician, and left just as quickly—for old times’ sake, I don’t know. Most of the time it was extermination—everyone on sight. There was no way to know which one it was going to be. It didn’t scare me. It was beyond that. It felt like everything was over. Us most of all.

I found him upstairs after Syria.

“I want you to stop,” I said. “They’re already under our thumb.”

“Stop what?” He said it calm and slow, like I was the hothead.

“People don’t need to die for no reason. You should know better.”

“What’s a good reason?” he said.

I exhaled hard. Everything had been easy before. “I don’t know, when they’re going to kill you, or they’re going to kill somebody who doesn’t deserve it.”

“Isn’t that what I’ve been doing?”

I stared at him for a long time. He was tall in his chair, the red stain under him, his silver grin. It was impossible to reach him now.

***

I thought about the man at the rest stop. He wanted to die. Caisson was designed to kill. It made sense then. What was I supposed to do, stand there eating his pretzels like a dipstick?

I snuck into Caisson’s room and found a ruby bolo. I couldn’t remember if it was the first one I bought him. He started collecting them when money was falling into our pockets. Wore a new one every day. His neck was solid steel now. It wouldn’t even work, would it? I didn’t have a lot of options. Maybe if he didn’t see it as a weapon, he wouldn’t take it from me.

I walked down the hallway. It looked longer than a lifetime. Every board creaked under my weight. I climbed the steps, paused on the landing. He was there, like always, staring from his chair into empty space.

His lip turned up, seeing me. My hand tightened around the bolo and I rose to the top step.

“Odessa. I’m glad you’re here.”

My heart was beating up to my skull. I could still see the grip of my old Glock buried in his forearm.

He glanced at the bolo and smiled. “You’re a doll.” He put a hand on his bare, silver neck. “I’ve been feeling naked all day.”


© 2025 by Mason Yeater

3276 words

Author’s Note: I’m a fan of unlikable, unheroic protagonists. Originally, I wanted to write a love story between a human and an alien. I’d always planned for the alien to betray them in some way, based on the fact that the alien’s motivations wouldn’t be entirely comprehensible. In a way, all of that appears in the final story.

Mason Yeater writes speculative fiction near the Great Lakes. His work has appeared in Diabolical Plots and in TL;DR Press’s Curios and Through the Grinder, Darkly anthologies. He can be found sometimes @snow_leeks on Twitter.


If you enjoyed the story you might also want to visit our Support Page, or read the other story offerings. Mason Yeater’s story “Ketchōkuma” previously appeared here in Diabolical Plots.

Interview: Jeff Carlson

Jeff Carlson Jeff Carlson was a shortlister for the Campbell, a finalist for the Dick, and a first placer for WOTF. He is the author the alien Frozen Sky series and the post-apocalyptic Plague War series. His latest novel is the post-apocalyptic Interrupt. His short stories have appeared in Asimov’s and Strange Horizons. His short story collection is Long Eyes. His stories have been published in 16 languages.

 

CARL SLAUGHTER: I listened to a podcast of “Topsider” on StarShipSofa. I was very impressed with the writing. So clear and efficient. Every passage is relevant, every sentence is in the right place, every scene is vivid. How did you learn to write so well? Did you attend a workshop? Do you have a ghost writer? Do you have an army of editorial assistants hidden in your basement combing over every word, every line, every paragraph? Are you an alien sent here to intimidate us human writers with your superior skill? Or do you just have a natural gift?

JEFF CARLSON: The truth is I’m the evil pod clone host of the poltergeists of Hemingway and Eliot. Every word is pure gold. Kneel before me, you fools!

Aha ha ha.

Thank you. No, actually I’m just an obsessive freak who fell in love with the spare, evocative styles of authors like Joe Haldeman, John Varley, Connie Willis and Spider Robinson right as I was coming of age as a fledging writer myself. Short story collections like Dealing In Futures and The Persistence of Vision made a vibrant impression on me. At their best, Haldeman and Varley could pack more human complexity into one sentence than some writers accomplish with a full page.

Most of their works are dated now. The science and the geopolitical scenarios in their books can seem alien to 21st Century thinking†which isn’t a bad thing if you enjoy the “what if” sense of wonder on which science fiction is built. Seriously. Go read the Worlds trilogy or Steel Beach or Bellwether or Night Of Power. Those books are mind-croggling even if there’s not an iPhone in sight.

Early in my teens and twenties, I did attend a lot of conferences and book signings, soaking up as much as I could from established authors. I joined a local writer’s group. I have a B.A. in English Lit. Mostly I read a lot and wrote a lot. Trial by fire.

I came up the once-traditional path in writing. When I was fifteen, I cranked out a sprawling, million word epic novel. It was pretty bad but it had heart. Then I got serious, buckled down, and began writing short stories. Of course I tried to emulate the minimalist, shock-ya story arcs of Haldeman and company. It’s a real challenge to squeeze an entire plot and character development into the space of forty pages, especially if you’re also introducing new worlds and explaining futuristic science and weapons tech. Each story was also a different opportunity to play with voice or POV.

In time, I began selling short pieces to small press publications, then to semi-pro and finally to full-on professional magazines with glossy ads and comparatively nice pay rates. Then I wrote a new book. Landed an agent. Sold the book in a minor bidding war. I think some people still become writers that way even now after the e-revolution.

What I should add is that in the process, I learned everything I could about editing. Some of this education came through studying what the magazine editors and the staff at Penguin did with my manuscripts. Other tricks I learned through sheer repetition.

The brain is a muscle. You can strengthen it.

From first draft to final proofs, I read Plague Year more than forty times. The sequel, Plague War, I read thirty times. The third book in the trilogy, Plague Zone, I read twenty times. By the time I got to The Frozen Sky and Interrupt, I was reading my books fifteen times. I don’t know if I’ll go less than that, but I hope I’ve streamlined the process. I’ve learned to avoid some mistakes.

Oh, just to clarify: “Topsider” is an excerpt from The Frozen Sky, and Sky and its sequels are self-published. Yes, I have beta readers. No, there are zero professional editors involved. These books are essentially a solo act. I’m working without a net, although I have surrounded myself with a small squad of keen-eyed volunteers as well as paid masterminds like the cover artist, Jasper Schreurs, who’s a freaking genius.

 

The Frozen Sky includes a lot of science and several fields of science. Astrophysics, biology, geology, pharmacology, AIs, computer hacking. How much research do you have to do for all that science to be feasible and accurate? Or do you have a rolodex of consultants on speed dial?

I read a lot. I remember what I read. The bulletin board on my office wall is layered in a madman’s stack of print-outs and clippings. Oh, and I have this thing called the internet, ha ha. I’m constantly jumping online to reach how granite is formed or what’s the capital of Finland or because I need to examine the molecular structure of hemoglobin. As a sci fi guy, I’m also fortunate to know any number of real-world engineers and scientists. I pester them from time to time.

 

Frozen SkyThe aliens in The Frozen Sky are intelligent, but they look a bit like squids, they don’t speak and they don’t have sight. Why not bipedal aliens like Vulcans or Klingons or Romulans with vocal cords and eyes?

Because I’m not constrained by a production budget! Ha. “Let’s glue some ears on him. We’ll glue some forehead thingies on them. Okay, we’re done.”

Star Trek is good fun but limited in presentation. That’s the beauty of being a novelist. The medium requires the reader’s imagination. Yes, I direct the action, but hard sf readers are smart readers. They want to be strangers in a strange land. So I can say, well, I have this claustrophobic three-dimensional low-gravity environment like the mazes of an ant farm inside Europa’s icy crust. What would kind of creatures would evolve here? Six-foot-tall bipedal creatures like people? Heck no.

 

The aliens have a math system and hieroglyphics type alphabet. Have they invented the wheel yet? How technologically advanced are they?

Man, I can’t tell you that! You’ll have to go deeper into the ice!

 

The novels of The Frozen Sky are told through the POV of Alexis Vonderach, one of the European astronauts. Why not the POV of a member of a different team like the Chinese or the Brazilians? Why not the POV of one of the aliens?

Great question. I have written novels with multiple POV storylines like Interrupt or the Plague Year trilogy†but for The Frozen Sky, the setting is already so complicated, I wanted to ground the story as best I could.

Also, I really like Vonnie. She’s smart and brave and capable and resilient. Does she have her weaknesses? Yes. She’s very human. I felt like staying within her mind was a necessary focal point. The catacombs inside Europa’s “frozen sky” are a bizarre and horrific environment. Adding more storylines was too much.

Having said that, an early draft included some chapters from the POV of an alien. Holy cow, was that a chore! These aliens are really strange, am I right? Trying to convey their thoughts in English was like dropping acid at the bottom of a Vegas swimming pool with Hunter S. Thompson, three tigers, a box of cookies and leaking SCUBA masks while reciting a Latin mass with the pope on your waterproof phone to Snooki as she’s driving drunk in downtown L.A. through commuter traffic. Did you follow that? I don’t know what it means, either. That’s just an approximation of how convoluted it felt trying to write from inside the brain of a sunfish. Whoa, Nelly.

I hope I managed to convey their very foreign way of thinking in their dealings with Von and the other human characters. The transcripts of their sonar calls and body language were incredibly fun to write. Also, I love comparing so many of things we take for granted with the pure, straightforward existence of my alien tribes.

 

If there was an alien main character, what would he be saying to his friends about Earthlings? Kill them and feed them to our offspring. Perform an autopsy on one of them. Steal their technology. Maybe they’re causing all the geological instability.

Examples one, three and four are reasonable. Number two doesn’t sound like the sunfish because, well, they’d just eat yaâ€

 

In the recent movie Europa Report, people travel to the same moon and encounter a similar alien. Then it turns into a body count horror movie as the squid picks off the entire crew. Instead, you have the two species interacting. What type of issues do they face trying to communicate with each other and understand each other’s cultures?

I haven’t seen Europa Report because I know I’d be disappointed. My book was first. More important, movies tend to suffer from the exact same problems you laid out for Star Trek and from the necessity for a body count.

That’s not to say The Frozen Sky doesn’t include sex and violence. Heck, the first 100 pages are basically one big chase scene, and among my favorite haters of all time is a lady who chastised me for using this novel to depict human beings as “just rutting animals with no purpose other than to destroy everything in sight with the exception of a few enlightened yet rutting souls.”

Hee hee. The oh-so-graphic depictions of sex in The Frozen Sky amount to a few interested glances between the heroine and her crewmates, one deep kiss, and an erotic thought or two from her POV.

Do I believe sex and violence are not only central to the human condition but also go hand in hand? God, yes. Look at what we consider entertainment. Look at the geopolitical scene. Every problem we have , pollution, racism, religious strife, war, disease , can be traced to overpopulation and the pressures between various groups or nations. Now that’s a nuts-and-bolts view of an extremely complex planet. We could spend our lifetimes connecting the dots. It’s easier to simplify everything to a basic dogma of “We’re right, they’re wrong,” but that easier view is part of what makes life harder on everyone in the world.

If sexuality makes you uncomfortable , if you think it’s scary or forbidden , I’d like to suggest that you have an immature sense of reality. Where did these seven freaking billion people come from if raw desire isn’t a major element of human motivation?
If greed , if destroying everything in sight , isn’t another major element of human motivation, why are our cities and slums expanding while the forests disappear and the oceans fill up with trash and poisons? Why are we fighting ancient wars over worthless deserts except to control everything we see? Granted, the oil in select areas of those deserts is valuable, but doesn’t that further prove my point? Is killing people for religious or racial differences better than killing them for energy sources?

Anyway. Too much coffee for me again this morning.

From what I see, we’re barely able to communicate among ourselves. Human beings cheat and lie and hurt each other. We have so many forms of insanity. Developing The Frozen Sky, I thought “Why wouldn’t intelligent aliens have their own delusions and conflicts?” Those fallacies would make it even harder for people and aliens to communicate.

 

Your work has been translated into 16 languages worldwide. How big of a chunk of your sales comes from foreign markets?

Never as much as I’d like. It is really, really fun to see my stories in languages I can’t read with new titles and new cover art. The experience is a mix of dÃ’ jÃ’Â vu and that awesome, twisty sense of “What if?”

When a foreign edition appears, it’s like having written an all-new book without having put in the work because those publishers have their own translators and artists. Every now and then a new magazine or a new novel shows up on my doorstep and I examine it with a smile, imagining how it reads in Spanish or Czech or whatever. Less frequently, I get fan mail from someone overseas, occasionally in broken English but usually in more grammatically precise English than my own, which is even more of a pleasure. Over time, I’ve struck up e-friendships with readers in the Netherlands, Estonia, Germany, you name it.

My job description is I sit alone in a room with a laptop listening to the voices in my head. It’s spectacular to hear from real live people who enjoy the books.

 

A lot of novelists continue to write short stories to keep their name out there. They have bylines on the cover of Asimov’s two or three times a year. They get nominated for multiple Hugos and Nebulas. They get top billing at conventions. You chose not to go that route. What was the reasoning and how has that worked out for you?

Ha! Is that a trick question? I would love to be nominated for Hugos and Nebulas and receive top billing at conventions. I didn’t choose not to go that route. I haven’t been invited!!!

Regardless, I don’t know that bylines in Asimov’s equate to Hugo nominations and GOH slots at the big cons. I’ve had three stories with Asimov’s, and Penguin took out a lovely full-page ad in the magazine to promote Plague Zone, which was seriously cool. Also, Sheila Williams is a gracious, witty, hard-working genius and a pleasure to work withâ€

†but these days I write very little short fiction because I have a family and a mortgage, and short fiction rarely pays well. Equally important, as a reader I prefer to sink my head into a good novel and stay with the characters for a while. Most people are the same way. Hence the pay rates for short fiction. There’s just not as much demand for short stories.

I’m totally overwhelmed with my life in the real world plus my own writing / editing / research / etc., so my choice is to write a chapter of the next book rather than a short story. I only have so many hours in the day. Having said that, surprise! I recently accepted an invitation to contribute to a new anthology, and I have two more pieces of short fiction in progress. It’s just a matter of carving out enough minutes to get to everything. I definitely need some Carlson Clones.

 

Big open-ended questions: After the ebook revolution, when have you opted for self-publishing and what was the result? When have you opted for traditional publishing and what was the result?

Late in 2010, I self-re-e-published the original short story of “The Frozen Sky” on Kindle, Nook, and iTunes. It sold 40,000 copies.

I’d always wanted to develop it into a novel. The setting is literally as large as an entire moon. That’s plenty of room for new storylines, surprises and reversals. So I moved this project to the front burner. Going solo involved any number of new learning curves, but, again, I’d been paying close attention to the game while working with Penguin for the Plague Year trilogy.

Late in 2012, I self-published the all-new The Frozen Sky: The Novel. To date, it’s sold 37,000 copies. For a hard sf novel, that’s a very strong number, better than a mid-lister would expect with a Big 5 publisher in NYC. Color me excited. Japanese rights recently sold to Tokyo Sogensha, and our hope is the book’s success will lead to more interest overseas and in Hollywood. Let’s face it. It’s a cool idea, and far better executed than Europa Report.

If I had to pitch The Frozen Sky in a few words, I’d say: “This story is Pitch Black crossed with The Thing, and it features a strong female lead in impossible situations.” Also, it wouldn’t demand a massive budget, more like Lucy than Prometheus.

As for the many forms of publishing in our brave new e-world, these days I’m sort of climbing back and forth over the fence. Traditional publishing was good to me, and I’d happily accept the right deal. In the meantime, Interrupt was published by 47North, one of the new Amazon imprints stocked with top editors and publicists who were headhunted out of New York and released from many of the usual corporate restraints. They’re wild-eyed e-pirates on the laser’s edge of the future, man! Working with 47North was a delight. The book did well. You can’t really say 47North is a traditional publisher because their focus is ebooks, but the process was similar and I take pride now in being a triple hybrid , a traditional, a new model, and a self-published writer.

 

What comfort level have you reached as an author? Do you have liveried servants, do you still mow your own lawn, or somewhere in between?

Uh, yeah. Someday I hope to become such a jaded bigshot that I float in a pool lazily dictating my lunatic visions to a super model while legions of butlers and maid polish the silverware and fold our all-organic silk wardrobes. Hasn’t happened yet. I’m still barely making an honest wage in part because the money’s up and down. I have fat months. I have lean months.

But it beats working for the man!

 

Hollywood used to be into spaceship sci fi. Now they’re into alien sci fi and post-apocalyptic sci fi. You’ve got both. Any feelers from Hollywood?

Paging Steven Spielberg†Paging Mr. Spielbergâ€

 

Which actress would you chose to play Von?

Someone who’s smart and bright-eyed. Quick of wit and quick in combat.

 

Got any advice to aspiring writers?

Get a job, hippie! Bwah ha ha ha.

No, seriously: writing is a sketchy way to make a living. It takes a lot of work (which you can control) and some luck (which you can’t control), so the main thing is to put butt in chair and grind away. Try not to make yourself too crazy. Use the crazy to drive you. A little monomania never hurt anybody. Finishing a novel can be a long, hard marathon, which is why I always recommend starting out with short stories. It’s a joy to finish something, and each short story can be a different experiment in voice or pacing. Love ‘em and leave ‘em. Move on. Work hard. Read a lot. Improve.

I suppose those sound like slogans, but there’s truth in slogans. Very few of us are the magic wunderkind who simply writes a perfect book and hits the bestseller lists. Most of us labor at our craft for years. We always labor at it. That means you need to enjoy the work. Write because you love listening to the voices in your head. Write because language and imagery and the human condition are fascinating to you. The work isn’t always fun, but should be satisfying.

That’s my five cents. If you don’t take satisfaction in the challenges you set for yourself, you’re doing it wrong. Enjoy the solitude. Enjoy the thinking. Believe me, when you get an email from Moscow or Dallas or Poughkeepsie informing you that you’re a genius, it’s worth the hours spent.

 

Carl_eagleCarl Slaughter is a man of the world. For the last decade, he has traveled the globe as an ESL teacher in 17 countries on 3 continents, collecting souvenir paintings from China, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, and Egypt, as well as dresses from Egypt, and masks from Kenya, along the way. He spends a ridiculous amount of time and an alarming amount of money in bookstores. He has a large ESL book review website, an exhaustive FAQ about teaching English in China, and a collection of 75 English language newspapers from 15 countries.