Ideas and Also-Rans
Or, a Peek Into My False Starts Folder
I don’t talk much about the writing here. Maybe that’s a mistake, but generally the only ones interested in essays about writing are writers, and I want to reach readers, babies! I want to give them a peek into my brain and intrigue them enough to seek out my paying work.
And maybe I want to write essays, too, and put them somewhere they can be read.
I’m sans-contract at the moment, and it doesn’t feel good. I did four books in four years, 2020-2023, and now I’m back in the submission trenches. My agent has two fresh “R.W.W. Greene” manuscripts in her portfolio, but that don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got ka-ching.
So, I keep writing. If the ones she has now don’t stick, maybe the next one will. Or the one after that. I have a full draft of a new one in the drawer, and I’m working on another.
Writing novels is an iterative process for me. I start a lot of things, play with them, and keep going on the ones that start to talk back to me. I leave a lot of pieces on the workbench or on the floor underneath it. Here’s a bit of something that didn’t make the cut (or hasn’t yet):
Drag watched his arm and leg vanish behind the security screen.
“This is a raw deal, Ace. You know I’m good for more.”
The pawnshop owner rippled. “I know you’d be good for it eventually. There’s no telling if I’d live long enough to get it.”
“Har-dee-fucking har.” Drag pulled the chit emerging from the payment slot. “What am I supposed to do for the rest?”
“What else you got? I’ll give you twenty times that for Clementine’s paperwork.”
“You’re not getting your slimy pseudopods anywhere near my ship. Give me the drawer again.”
The business end of the transaction drawer yawned open. Drag put his gun inside and, after a moment’s thought, his knife. “What would I get for those?”
“I bet you have a backup piece.”
“Of course, I have a backup.” Drag snarled and reached around to the small of his back for his holdout blaster.
“That’s not the only one.”
“It’s the only one you’re getting.”
“Add the belt and the holsters,” Ace said. “The leather’s not doing you any good without something to put in it.”
“You gonna ask for my dick next?”
“Which one? Add your collection to the deal we’ll start talking real money.”
“Frag off.” The belt, holsters, and sheathe joined the weapons in the drawer. “That’s it. That’s all I got.” The drawer closed and retracted. A new chit appeared where the first had been. Drag inspected it. “Enough. Barely.” He put both cards in his sporran. “I thought we were pals, Ace.”
“We are pals.”
“Last time we did this, you gave me twice that for my prosthetics.”
“They were state of the art and brand-new then. Been a long time since those words applied to anything associated with you.”
Drag’s flesh hand floated to the metal side of his face. It fell before it made contact. “Yeah, well. None of us are getting any younger.”
Ace rippled. “Speak for yourself. I’m due for a regen this month.”
“Least you can’t wipe me up with a roll of toilet paper.”
“The shift just started,” Ace said, “and you’re getting smaller all the time.”
Drag stumped back toward the docks, his kilt hanging weirdly over his in-case-of leg. His spares weren’t much better than a hook and a peg, but they’d do. The change in his gait would make it harder for the bots running the security cams to pick him up.
He waited for his turn at the window. “I got your money.”
“Excellent.” The intelligent lifeform inside the booth looked like a crocus made from old boots. Its dockmaster tag was pinned directly to its skin. “Let me bring up your paperwork.” The security drawer under the window opened. “Chits, please.”
Drag put the cards inside.
“Let me check the spelling of your name,” the dockmaster said. “Given name, D-R-A-G. Surname, C-O-E-F-F-I-C-I-E-N-T?”
“Don’t hurt yourself on it.”
“Is that correct?”
“Yeah.”
“Your ship is registered as Clementine. C-L-E-M-E-N-T-I-N-E?”
He nodded.
“Is that correct?” the dockmaster prodded.
“A nod means ‘yeah’ in human.” He nodded again to show.
“Thank you for the language lesson. Are you here for business or pleasure?”
“Is that an offer? Buy me a puff, and I’ll consider it.”
“Are you on station for business or for pleasure?”
The ilf’s tone hadn’t changed. Maybe it couldn’t. Maybe it sprayed poison pollen all over the place when it got miffed. Drag recognized the species but couldn’t remember its defense mechanisms. “Both,” he said. “Seeing some people and looking for work from some of those same people.”
“Bloodseal, please.”
Drag put his meat thumb on the sample pad, barely feeling the probe that swiped a few cells from his bone marrow. “We good?”
“Your docking fees are up to date.” A card emerged from the printer. “This is a sixteen-shift pass. If you need to extend it, return here. Otherwise,” its body language remained unchanged, “have a nice visit.”
Sixteen shifts. Four days by the system used in The Backwater where Drag had been spending too much of his time. Four rotations of a dead planet to scratch up enough to cover his pawn ticket and find a job worth all the trouble he was taking.
Drag pawed through his clothes for loose coins, and moved all he found to a single pouch. He gave up on trying to square his uneven shoulders and let the limp show. Drag Coefficient, down and out. Not a pot to piss in, not even a knife to defend himself with. Play the role. He snorted. “Not too damned far from the truth.”
A passerby with four legs and an armored thorax looked at him strangely.
“Spare change?” Drag said hopefully.
The ilf averted its eyes and hurried down the corridor. Drag went the other way.
Thirty-two varieties of body odor, twenty types of puff, and the miasma of cheap-hooch greeted him at the door of the Shit Poke. Drag went nose blind for a few seconds as his processors caught up with their cataloging. One smell in particular caught his attention. Two, really, a klatof in heat, but he wasn’t here for that.
“Get the fuck out of here, Drag!” the source of the first smell hollered across the bar. S/he was a little taller than s/he’d been the last time, s/his cheek fur a little grayer, but there was no mistaking the voice. “I told you never to come here again.”
“Give me a break, Growpa.” He pushed through the dazed crowd, making sure s/he could see his mostly empty sleeve. “I just came in for a drink.”
“That’s what you said the last time.” S/his lowest pair of hands went to s/his hips. The other set continued pouring drinks and loading puff pipes. “I was picking chitin out of the walls for days!”
“I’m not even carrying, star-spout.” Drag’s three-fingered prosthetic followed his meat hand to shoulder level, palms out. “No trouble here.”
“You could make trouble with a cocktail napkin.” S/he leaned over to push a snoring patron off their bar stool. The ilf slipped to the floor without complaint and disappeared into the scrum. “It’s a good thing I don’t have any.”
Drag took the stool. “I appreciate it, love. You won’t-.”
S/he put a taloned finger in his face. “Don’t. Do not. Get started with that ‘love’ shit. You lost those privileges a long time ago.”
“OK.” He nodded. “Agreed.”
“What are you having?”
“Water.” He grinned sheepishly, “It’s about all I can afford.”
“You son of a leto!” Heavy hands went back to s/his hips. “Just ‘came in for a drink,’ my puckered cloaca. You need money.”
“I do, but not from you.” He put a few coins from his stash on the bar. “Beer. Cheapest you got.”
“At least that hasn’t changed. What happened to your arm?”
“Ace happened. Leg, too. Needed to pay my docking fee.”
“Still flying that garbage truck?”
“Refuse hauler, thank you very much.” He smirked. “You weren’t always so down on it.”
“Dumber days,” s/he said. “Young dumb and full of … whatever.”
“Drink to them.” He held up his beer box. “To the old days.”
Growpa didn’t bite. “What do you want, Drag?”
He set the box down on the seldom-used coaster. “A connection. A hint. Hell, I’ll take a rumor. I need to make some quick money?”
“How much?”
He told s/him.
“For that kind of scratch you need to go uplevel.”
“Look at me,” he rotated his cheap metal hand on its flimsy wrist, “there’s no way in hell they’ll take me seriously.”
“What do you need that much money for?”
He told s/him.
S/he hooted. “Drag Coefficient, gentleman farmer! You always hated groundlings!”
He sipped at the straw built into the beer box. “Things change. Anyway, it’s not my farm. I owe someone a favor.”
“You owe everyone a fucking favor! I’ve lost track of the markers you’ve given me!”
“Fair.” He ducked his head. “Look, just this one time. This one last thing. Then you’ll never see me again.” He held up two metal fingers, an inch apart. “Give me this much, and I’ll go the rest of the way on my own.”
“Promise?”
“On my ship.”
S/he sighed. “I might know someone who needs something. But you’ll need a weapon.”
“Got one I can borrow?”
The address s/he gave him had never even heard of uplevel. It had pipe dreams of reaching the level where the biodigester facility was. It was lucky it had a door, thin enough for a whisper to penetrate much less a bullet. Drag stood to the side of it and used his three-fingered hand to knock. “Growpa sent me. Said you needed a hand.”
A slow, shuffling sound from inside. “Growpa sent you?”
“Old friend of mine. My name’s Drag.”
“Are you packing?” The voice was slow, gassy sibilance. Drag’s translator identified the speaker as a grax.
“Yeah.”
“Keep it in your pocket and come in. I see a gun, I’m leveling you.”
“Got it.” Drag fumbled with the door. It was so primitive he needed a few extra seconds to figure out how it opened. “I’m coming in.”
The stench had been bad outside; inside it made Drag’s meat eye water. Almost anywhere else, the grax would have been nobility. Here it floated in a tank of nutri-ooze polluted with its own castings. The ilf had fallen hard and hit every rock on the way down. “You don’t look like much,” it said.
“Neither do you.”
The grax gurgled like bad plumbing. “I suppose not.”
“What do you need doing? I warn you I don’t come cheap.”
“If you’re down here, you’re not as expensive as you’d like to be.” The ooze in the tank bubbled, releasing a fresh wave of putrescence. “Someone owes me money. I want you to collect.”
“You a shark?”
“Something like that. I’m between collectors at the moment.”
Drag nodded at the auto-turret set up next to the tank. “Is that your HR department?”
“My last employee simply wasn’t up to the task. The debtor refused payment and returned her head to me.”
“This isn’t an audition. I do this, it’s a one-time thing. I bring you the money, you pay me. No stringing me along on a job offer.”
“As you wish.” He named a figure.
Drag named a different one. The number went back and forth until the edges fell off.
“Settled,” the grax said. “If they send me your head, what would you like me to do with it?”
“What did you do with hers?”
“I ate it.”
“Give me the name and address.”
The station was old by any ilf’s standards. Drag’s ancestors had maybe learned to brew beer reliably the year the second addition was bolted on. It had been important once. The grax’s mission took him to a better-smelling neighborhood with a view of the rubble of the planet the station orbited. Drag watched it awhile. Even mined into gravel it was in better shape than Earth, the planet he’d fled as a child. Earth had been important once, too, if only to the people who lived there and the raiders who wanted its resources.
The bar was called The Space Chaser, according to Drag’s translator, which had been around long enough to grok puns. It was the kind of place that stationed a bouncer outside, a big ilf with vestigial feathers and an artful scar across their face.
“You’re human,” they said.
Drag smirked. “Mostly.”
“Don’t see a lot of your kind around here.”
“You don’t see a lot of us anywhere. Last big war took care of that.”
The ilf’s feathers stood up, making it seen even bigger until it got the reaction under control.
“You serve?” Drag said.
“Not on your side.”
“Is that going to be a problem? I just want a drink.”
The ilf looked down their beak nose at him. “Are you armed?”
“A little.”
“Show me.”
Drag pulled the loaner out by the butt and put it on the tray of the scanner. The ilf laughed. “You’d do more damage with that if you threw it. It’s a kid’s toy.”
“You must have grown up in some rough playgrounds. Can I take it in?”
“No. You might hurt someone’s feelings with it.” The tray slid into the wall. “You can reclaim it on the way out. Is that all you got?”
“You’ve scanned me three times already. You know it is.”
“Had to see what you’d say. Policy.” The ilf jerked their head. “Go ahead.”
The door slid aside, and Drag limped in. Nice place. Well-tended air filtration, variable lighting, adaptable seating. “Beer,” he told the bartender. “Cheapest you got.”
The bartender’s nasal cilia twitched with disdain.
“I think I’m looking for your boss.” Drag offered the name. “Owns this place, right?”
The bartender held the beer box a foot above the coppertop and dropped it. Drag caught it on the bounce. “Can I get one of those little umbrellas? I love those things.”
The bartender turned away. Drag sucked experimentally on the built-in straw. “Not bad. What about your boss?”
The bartender moved a little further away, their horny feet making clicking noises on the tile behind the bar.
Drag cleared his throat. “I’d usually put my gun on the bar now to get your attention, but the kid outside took it.”
More clicking.
“I don’t have enough on me for a bribe, so my options are a little limited here.” He held up his claw hand. “This doesn’t look like much, and admittedly it isn’t.” He lowered the metal hand and put up the meat one instead. “This one, though … I was special forces in the war. Got all kinds of add-ons and enhancements.” He gripped the edge of the bar and squeezed. The rail cracked loudly and the coppertop dimpled under the pressure of his thumb. “That could be your neck, nestling. I’m threatening you. Maybe you should tell your boss about me. The name is Drag Coefficient. Don’t ask me to spell it.”
The ilf sniffed and picked up the phone and said some words into it, hung it up. “They’ll be out in a minute”
“Thanks.” Drag took a longer sip of beer and mostly failed to ignore the painful cramping in his hand. “I’ll wait.”
The box was nearly empty by the time the escort arrived, more out of Drag’s need for pain mitigation than the escort’s tardiness. Another big ilf, same species as the one at the door. Their clothes were better though, and if Drag had to guess, he’d say they were the other one’s older sibling. “The beer’s shit,” he said, “but I’ll buy you one.”
“You got the boss’s attention already,” the ilf said, “no need to be funny.”
Drag rocked off the barstool. The escort put a hand on his chest and pushed. Drag slid three feet on his ass before slowing to a stop.
“Impressive.” He held up the beer box. “You think that’s why everybody stopped serving these in glasses? Less to clean up when ilves like you needed to show off?” He sucked the last of the beer out of the box and tossed it to the bartender. “Hand up? I’m not as spry as I was a couple of hours ago.”
When no help was offered, he clambered to his feet, cursing the immobility of the peg leg and the weakness of the arm. “Let me know if you want to show off again. I’ll just fall over and make you look good.”
“This way,” the ilf said.
“I like your nestmate better. They can take a joke.”
“They are a joke. That’s why they’re at the door.”
Drag struggled to keep up as the ilf led the way down a short hallway to the foot of a steep staircase. “Don’t suppose you’ve got an elevator.”
“Not for you.”
“I truly hope we continue to get along so well.” Drag gripped the banister with his aching meat hand. “After you.”
Fourteen steps and another hallway later, he was in the presence of the boss. Same species as Growpa, maybe a generation younger. S/his office was comfortable but plain.
“I’ve heard of you. You did some work for my parent,” s/he said.
“I wondered if that was you. I saw your nursery once.”
“You’re not as impressive as the stories suggest.”
“Always seems to work that way. Mind if I sit?”
The boss waved him to a chair. It didn’t quite match the other furniture in the office.
“Got something I can put my leg up on? It hurts like hell after those stairs.”
“Get him a crate from the back,” s/he told the flunky. “Drink?”
“Wouldn’t mind,” Drag said.
S/he poured and distributed while the flunky dropped a crate unceremoniously in front of Drag and took up guard position near the desk. Drag maneuvered his peg leg atop the crate with some difficulty and care. “Better,” he said. “My gratitude.”
“To decent manners,” s/he lifted a glass. “My parent would have insisted on them for s/his former associate.”
Drag lifted his own glass. “To manners.”
They drank.
“’Would have.’ Past tense,” Drag said. “The old ilf died, I take it.”
“Assassinated.”
“I bet all your siblings are gone, too. Nice and neat.”
“Business is business.”
“Six kits in a litter.” He drained the glass. “You put the money where it needs to go, the bar not your office. Solid security above and below. You’re good at this.
“Thank you.”
“So why are you borrowing from a disgraced grax?”
S/his glass froze halfway to s/his mouth. “Is that why you’re here?”
“Like you said, business is business.”
“I assumed you were looking for work.” The glass returned to the desktop.
“I am, and I’m open to it once I fulfill this contract.”
“Did the grax tell you what happened to its last emissary?”
“I’m hoping for a different outcome.”
S/he laughed. “I expected the audacity but not the foolishness. Do you know how your predecessor died?”
“I assume the big ilf over there had something to do with it. The nestmate took the collector’s weapons, they came up here, demanded you pay up, and died right here.” He smiled at the bodyguard. “Do it like that again, your boss is going to need another new chair.”
“It came out of their salary,” the boss said. “I’m sure they’ll be more careful this time.”
Drag fluttered his kegels and let some of the charge in his pegleg out of the business end. The corner of the desk disappeared in an explosion of splinters and light. The big ilf hit the floor, bleeding from a dozen shrapnel wounds.
“It’s on a deadman.” He adjusted his peg on the crate. “Next one goes into you whether I make it or not.”
“Inventive.” S/his cheeks were inflated, the poison spikes within ready to fire. “How many shots do you have in that trick leg, I wonder.”
“I forget. That one was about a ‘two’ on the scale.”
The guard ilf moaned softly.
“I hit anything important?” Drag asked them. “I’d hate to break up a family.”
Another moan. A ‘no.’ probably. The feathered ilfs were not as tough as they looked. Bird-boned. The ones Drag had fought in the war had been armored. Their vital organs were buried deep, though, so they’d probably be all right.
“Your flunky’s getting blood on the floor,” Drag said. “Be a pity to add to it.”
S/his cheeks deflated. “How do you see this working out? I give you the money and watch you slide out of here on your ass with your leg pointed at me? Or will you just shoot me in the face?”
“I’d have shot your parent in a heartbeat. You, I’m not sure about, yet.”
“Whatever I am, the grax is worse. Your new friend is not someone you should dock a ship with.”
“I guessed that.” There was one, maybe two shots left in the pegleg. “You don’t see them in that kind of shape too often.”
“An exile. You have to wonder what it did to become a pariah.”
“I bet it wasn’t easy. The grax don’t hold much sacred.”
“Money.” The boss tented s/his long fingers on the table. “That’s about it.”
Drag shook his head. “Money’s just a way of keeping score. The grax care about debt. Makes me wonder why you thought you could get away with stiffing one.”
“It owes more to someone else.”