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Guava Summer is is one of my longer short stories, now available from Radix Media, in the form of a chapbook.
In an authoritarian world where nearly everything is illegal, rules are bound to be broken. But with the summer heat comes the unexpected.
That’s about as detailed as the copy can get without giving too much away..
The story does have a strange origin: before I wrote it, I wrote a different story which was very much intended to be scifi noir. Specifically, I was trying to do something I had seen on an episode of The Simpsons where Lisa tells a story that has a story embedded in it which has a story embedded in it, etc etc. Anyhow, I did a story that sorta-not-really did this called Terrorcry, about a private detective living in a totalitarian world. He gets hired (almost not by choice) by a sketchy mobster-turned-politician to find out what happened to his missing girlfriend. The detective finds the politician—Sebastian Black—sort of frightening, but has a grudging respect for him.
I have no idea how I went from that story to Guava Summer, which is essentially a sequel that stands alone. It’s not noir—just straight scifi. I won’t say much more other than I had been reading a lot about the USSR, specifically Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. (Just a little light reading—actually, research for a related project.) I absolutely love reading this story out loud because of the ending, and unfortunately, I will probably never get to read it at a reading in its entirety because of its length.
After I wrote it, I did do a lot of thinking about if Guava could stand on its own without having read the first story. It helped to have some time away, and readers who never read the first story—I definitely didn’t want to give up on it, change the characters into fake new ones, or try to squish two really different stories into one. I do have a sense in the back of my mind that there will be a third story down the line in the same world.
Guava Summer was also a different experience for me because with all of my other publications there’s acceptance, then some editing, then the story disappears into a void until you get a magazine in the mail. Radix Media invited me to stop by their shop in the spring to check out their operation and make a wide variety of decisions. The above video is the printing of the chapbook. We discussed cardstock, paper, the overall design, colors—pretty much everything. Because the title “Guava Summer” could possibly bring to mind completely the wrong idea (a woman in the Caribbean having a How Stella Got Her Groove Back summer vacation?) I definitely wanted the cover to convey that this was not that type of story. I wanted it to bring to mind a combination of Soviet-era propaganda and something almost occult-like. And I liked the green because it brought to mind the Sage little green statistics books that got me through grad school.
Number of submissions: 5. Ratio of positive feedback to number of submissions: 0%! Time from completing story until publication: 2 years.