if you want to read my novelette, “The Second Engineer,” it’s in the October-November issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction which goes on sale next week. Ask for it at your local bookseller.
The history of this story demonstrates how s-l-o-w-l-y I write. It began as an entry in a contest to write a short story in a weekend. I didn’t finish the story that weekend; in fact, it took almost 18 months — and wise council at a con — to produce the version that was a “Writers of the Future” semi-finalist, and another few months of subsequent clean-up to get to this version.
For the contest, the story prompts were, “Think of a human body part and a physical object that should never, ever come into contact. Write a story about the day when they do,” and selections from three poems, one of which was Sylvia Plath’s “Tale of a Tub” which includes the lines “when the window, / blind with steam, will not admit the dark.” I can’t remember how my brain went from there to here … but there is a window in the story that won’t admit the dark.
The entire table of contents is laid out in this SFScope post.
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