{"id":9135,"date":"2014-03-17T18:46:10","date_gmt":"2014-03-18T01:46:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=9135"},"modified":"2014-03-17T18:46:10","modified_gmt":"2014-03-18T01:46:10","slug":"operation-sb-4-the-curse-of-the-lifewalker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/operation-sb-4-the-curse-of-the-lifewalker\/","title":{"rendered":"Operation SB #4: The Curse of the Lifewalker"},"content":{"rendered":"

Title:<\/strong> The Curse of the Lifewalker
\nGenre:<\/strong> Post-Apocalyptic
\nWord Count:<\/strong> 4,340
\nTime:<\/strong> 1 day (sort of)<\/p>\n

So after “L’enfer, c’est la solitude,” I was kind of in a short story mood for a couple of days and decided to bang out another one. This one is actually an adaptation from my novel Lifewalker,<\/strong> a post-apocalyptic tale where a global pandemic kills everyone older than 25. The story takes place several hundred years after the apocalypse, where a society of children and teenage adults has evolved to fill the void left over by the collapse. It’s told from the point of view of a “lifewalker,” someone who is naturally immune and lives out a normal lifespan. Normal to us, at least–not to anyone else in the new society.<\/p>\n

It actually wasn’t that hard to adapt the first chapter to a short story. It very much has its own narrative structure, with a beginning, middle and end. Obviously, it finishes on a rather open-ended note, but I think I was able to turn it around and focus on the premise: “when all the world is afflicted by the plague, sometimes the greater curse is to be whole.” Touched up the first couple of pages quite a bit, setting the stage for a short story and not a full novel, then went over the rest of it with a light pass and wrote a summation paragraph at the end to wrap things up.<\/p>\n

Obviously, it took me more than one day to write the bulk of the chapter–in fact, I think it’s been through a couple of drafts now. But the adaptation to short story form went fairly well, and I’m quite pleased with the result.<\/p>\n

Since I’ve already got stories at the top three markets (Writers of the Future, Asimov’s, Analog) and Clarkesworld is on cool-down, I sent the story to the next magazine on the list, Fantasy & Science Fiction. They only take snail mail, though, so I had to print out the story, print out a cover letter, take it to the post office, buy a letter envelope, stamp, manila envelope, fill out the SASE, etc etc. It was like a blast from the 00s or something.<\/p>\n

Anyway, as I was walking over to the post office, I had this AWESOME epiphany in which the end of the novel came to me. It’s SO MUCH BETTER than what I’d originally had in mind, and actually got me excited to work on\u00a0Lifewalker<\/strong> again. I probably won’t pick it up until I’ve finished the first three Sons of the Starfarers<\/strong> books, but now I have an awesome, amazing ending to work toward.<\/p>\n

All I have to do is write it. \ud83d\ude1b<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Title: The Curse of the Lifewalker Genre: Post-Apocalyptic Word Count: 4,340 Time: 1 day (sort of) So after “L’enfer, c’est la solitude,” I was kind of in a short story mood for a couple of days and decided to bang out another one. This one is actually an adaptation from my novel Lifewalker, a post-apocalyptic… Continue reading Operation SB #4: The Curse of the Lifewalker<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Oh hey, I wrote another short story!","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[170],"tags":[222,322,887,107,363],"class_list":["post-9135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-short-stories","tag-endings","tag-novels-vs-short-stories","tag-operation-short-blitz","tag-post-apocalypse","tag-story-structure","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-2nl","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9135"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9135\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9136,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9135\/revisions\/9136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}