Background to my stories

I was asked about the background to my stories. This is another way of asking, "Where do you get your ideas?" The two most popular answers are that, 1) there is a PO Box in New Jersey; send them $5 and they'll send you an idea (Harlan Ellison and Larry Niven used this answer extensively). Of course you have to be a published author before you're told the PO Box. And 2) you take your secret password to www.ideas.com and get an unused idea from there. You have to be a published author, of course, before you get the password.

Actually, the proper answer is neither place. Ideas come. A lot of times they come from outside sources. Kassandra's Song came from my practice novel Kalliste. And that came from the TV show Highlander. I wanted to write my own story about somebody who was effectively immortal. But I wanted to include my interests in Bronze Age Greek history and computer operations/security.

Kalliste is the principle human servant of Potnia or P'dania, the Earth Mother Goddess. In Greek Myth she is the mother of the Titans. Her name name translates as 'Most Holy', by the way. I wrote a vignette about dancing and Crete without knowing any more about the character. Then I ran across a report of an unofficial project where people entering the country were photographed as far back as the 1880s. That brought the story together. The main character is researching a problem. Somebody found 12 photos dating back to the 1880s. They are all of the same woman, and all have roughly the same biography: birthplace, Crete/Greece; parents deceased. He suspects this is a hoax and investigates it from the computer security aspect. He finds her, too, and discovers there's more to this than he thought.

Kalliste was born on Crete a few years before the eruption of Thera (Santorini) in 1628 BC, and is 3,600+ years old. She was the spy chief for Augusta and Livia, was the midwife at Christ's birth, was present at Buddha's enlightenment, prevented the assassination of Lenin in 1916, was raped by Hercules (Herakles), and showed up at other critical points in history. She acts under P'dania's orders; she seldom acts on her own initiative, but has been known to from time to time (the incident with the Buddha was one). She is currently working as an archaeologist, though she owns several shipping lines and is thought to be a spy for some unnamed group (suspected to be either British Intelligence, the Greek government, or the Greek Orthodox Church - hint, she isn't).

The story meandered through some 500,000 words before ending on Delos. Along the way various characters showed up that I enjoyed learning about: Kassandra of Troy; Carlos Maria Martinez, the personal servant of Baron Samedi (homework assignment for extra credit - find out who Baron Samedi is); Britomartis (extra credit - find out who Britomartis was), and two others mentioned only by their first names, the personal servants of Vishnu and Amaterasu. It was a fun ride, but its most important purpose was to convince me that I could complete a novel that was interesting to read.

I've been urged to rewrite Kalliste and seek publication. I'm ambivalent. I can see their arguments (why let all of that work go to waste), but I do have other stories I want to tell. I did extract 12 of the vignettes and e-published them on Stories Online. This came from an article in Writer's Digest about mining practice/failed novels for shorter material. There may be another Kassandra story lurking among my untold novels. We'll see.

The Families stories came about because I'd read a lot of military science fiction, and except for the Honor Harrington stories, they didn't deal with the naval aspects. I wanted to write a story about somebody who is a brilliant strategist and tactician. She doesn't rely upon super secret technology or some secret weapon, which is a staple explanation for military success in SF. I hit upon the idea of a culture of all women from a chance remark somebody made about how a ratio of 1 man to 100 women was an erotic fantasy. I got to wondering how such a society would come about, and how it would organize itself. I didn't want to get into fantasy power trips or erotic fantasies; I wanted to be hard-headed and create something that could appear on the shelves of a bookstore. I also didn't want to do another take on Bikini Planet.

Of course how such a culture could come about had to be answered. Why didn't they just go out and get more men? The answer to that was the 'lost colony' gimmick. But why was the colony lost? And how did they get to where they are? Ans: very few of the original party survived, and when survival is at stake you need wombs and multiple births; but you also need to very thoroughly understand how to make the most of your limited genetic base.

The war was the easy part. I had run RPGs (a notorious traveler game) and piracy was part of Science Fiction. But piracy, especially on an interstellar scale, doesn't pay. It does, but only if piracy isn't the goal. Everything else followed logically from that (including the question of what do the Families do when they encounter men).

The Cross-Time stories had a different set of parents. I've always been interested in history. When I was in college I took 300 level History classes for fun and distribution. I have an extensive library on military and political history. I've read the alternate history stories where Lee's Lost Order isn't lost, the Confederacy wins at Gettysburg (not as likely as some think after Day 2), and so on. I decided to put all of these to use.

Stories about people traveling between alternate times was probably started by Murray Leinster's Sideways in Time, and given its most famous going over by H. Beam Piper in the 1960s. These were his Paratime stories. The most famous of them is probably Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, but there were a couple of short stories and at least one novella in the collection. He also pioneered the idea of a cross-time police agency.

In 2004 Conquistador appeared by S. M. Stirling. It was about a group of people who discovered travel to an alternate timeline, and what happened next. I read it, and got intrigued by the premise.

I initially started a story about a novice detective who is investigating a 'locked room' mystery. Somebody had stumbled on a way of going 'around' walls by using a form of quantum tunneling, and used it to commit murder and drum up business for an alarm company. I got up to 6 chapters and ran out of steam. Right about then it was learned that a Professor of Oriental Studies at the University of Washington was an advisor to a factory in the People's Republic of China that manufactured antiques. By then I was also interested in mysteries, and things began to click.

Counterfeit Line was originally written about an all-purpose criminal who runs a counterfeiting operation on an alternate timeline (hence the name). He also grew pot on another timeline. This is what I took to the Maui Writer's Conference and Cruise. And this is what I greatly simplified after my experiences there. In the current version he steals pottery from XIIth Dynasty Egypt. He thinks he has a time machine, and that these are real.

The question, of course, was how did this machine do these things? I decided to use some research I read about that the Nazis were conducting in 1943-45 that was detailed in The Hunt for Zero Point. Their scientists had some odd results, and I decided that made a perfect explanation. A GI 'liberated' a box of tubes with some blueprints and brought them both home. Fifty-five years later the box is sold at an estate sale to an antiquities dealer who thinks he has an old radio, and discovers otherwise. Throw in a murder and a scene from 1759, some speculation, and we were off to the races (hint: Lord George Germaine of the American Revolution was also Lord George Sackville of the Battle of Minden fame). It still needs a better title.

Cross Time Cop came about from the first attempt at a sequel to Counterfeit Line. There is a police agency that monitors cross-time travel, and they detected the use of the device in the first book and sent somebody to check it out. That grew into Body of Evidence, a story about cross-time travel, anarchism, and basic police work. I was 8 chapters into it when I got more interested in telling the story that became Cross Time Cop. Somewhere in there I also started Different World, which is the real sequel to Counterfeit Line. This one features a murder that may have been committed by someone else with access to a box that can take them between alternate timelines.

Story ideas can come from the strangest places, and often come from several places working together. The real trick, though, is asking basic questions and following through logically. You never know where it's going to lead you. Who knows, it might lead you to: "Once upon a time...."