Hart & Boot & Other Stories (31 page)

Story Notes

Story notes are self-indulgent, I know, but I’ve always loved back-and-front matter, introductions and conclusions and author’s notes, so it’s an indulgence I allow myself. I hope you find some pleasure in them too.

Hart and Boot

I’ve always been fascinated by the Old West, especially the way it was mythologized even as it was happening—people were living in a real, dirty, dangerous, lawless frontier, and those same people were writing dime novels set in the Wild West, telling idealized stories about justice, heroism, villainy, and revenge! “Hart and Boot” is a magical secret history in that same spirit. Pearl Hart and John (or Joe) Boot were real stagecoach robbers, and they were captured and imprisoned much as the story describes. I didn’t intentionally violate any known facts about their history, though I did streamline things a bit and take some liberties with chronology—Pearl’s backstory, in particular, is rather more complex than the way I described it, and I encourage interested readers to research her further. The fact that there are conflicting histories about Pearl Hart made my work easier, because faced with two or three versions of the same story, I chose whichever best served the story’s needs. My version of John Boot is a tulpa—a being created from imagination and willpower—though that word never appears in the story, since it’s not a term Pearl would have been likely to know. This story was chosen to appear in
The Best American Short Stories: 2005
. I thank editor Michael Chabon for selecting the story (and significantly raising my writerly profile in the process).

***

Life in Stone

I have an acknowledged but conflicted fascination with badasses in literature. My friend Dawson (himself something of a badass) and I used to stage mental contests between our favorite literary, comic book, and cinematic badasses: Elric, Lan Mandragoran, Jules Winnfield, the Corinthian, Storm Shadow, Hap Collins & Leonard Pine, Hannibal Lecter... you get the idea. Not all heroes, not all villains, just “people with which you would not wish to fuck,” as we used to say. I’m frequently tempted to write about badasses of my own, but I try to be careful not to oversimplify, or to make them one-dimensional. Mr. Zealand is one such badass, and one of my own favorite characters. I like his weariness, his capability, his tragedy, his potential for redemption.

I wrote this story at the Hidden City writing workshop in Lake Tahoe, in 2004, a week-long retreat organized by the writers Susan Fry and Jae Brim. The first draft came out in a single afternoon, quite fast for me, which freed up the rest of the week for drinking, eating gourmet meals, hiking, and almost drowning after passing out in the hot tub. It is probably not necessary to note that I am, personally, not much of a badass.

***

Cup and Table

“Cup and Table” is one of those stories I thought about for years, though it was the characters, more than their journey, that I found most fascinating. Sigmund the addicted visionary; Carlsbad the reluctant monster; Carlotta and Ray, the despicable duo; and the enigmatic New Doctor. I always thought I would write a novel about those characters, or possibly a series of novels, but I could never get a handle on what the
story
should be, except that I knew it should be vast, and involve interlocking conspiracies, and secret societies, and physical and moral decay, and possibly my characters running through a booby-trapped temple full of poison arrows and flaming boulders. I wrote several scenes about them over the years, but none of them added up to anything substantial. When David Moles and Susan Marie Groppi put out the call for their
Twenty Epics
anthology—they wanted epic fantasy stories without the epic length—my thoughts immediately turned back to those characters. I realized that I
could
write a novel about them, and have it compressed into under 5,000 words, if I just left out most of the connective tissue. What I wound up with was an epic contemporary fantasy novel, smashed with a hammer, with only the brightest fragments picked up and made into a mosaic. I might return to these characters at greater length another time, though of necessity I’d have to set any stories about them
before
the events of “Cup and Table.” Because, since it’s an epic, at the end of the story the world is forever changed.

***

In a Glass Casket

I love writing about kids, and I try to do so without condescension, drawing as much as possible on my own memories of childhood. This story isn’t autobiographical in any literal sense, but it seems almost like autobiography in
spirit
—I see a lot of myself in Billy Cates, just trying to do the right thing, and afraid of everything going wrong.

***

Terrible Ones

I’m wary of writing about figures from Greek mythology—I wrote a
lot
of stories based on Greek myths when I was younger, and lately I’ve tried to diversify—but this story idea was irresistible, and the images of doddering old Furies and a Greek Chorus in bedsheet-togas were too tempting to pass up. Those ideas combined with some thoughts I was having about various permutations of the sex trade. My wife is a book buyer for an erotica catalogue, and San Francisco (just across the bay from where I live) has a boisterous and sprawling sex-positive and kinky community, so I’ve met various people in the business. There’s a certain kind of customer who has trouble ascertaining the dividing line between fantasy and reality, and that seemed like the sort of fatal flaw from which Greek tragedies are made. I tossed in a little
Medea
, stirred the pot, and out came “Terrible Ones.” My thanks to the members of the 2003 Rio Hondo Writers Workshop for their comments and critiques on this piece.

***

Romanticore

This is one of the stories I’m most proud of, and one of the most difficult to write. There are some stories where there’s so much to say that it’s better to say nothing at all, so I leave this one to speak for itself.

***

Living with the Harpy

Some people complain that the protagonist of this story is an idiot for choosing a mundane life over a magical one. I respectfully disagree. This story isn’t about the choice between the magical and the ordinary; it’s a story about being brave enough to let yourself get hurt in the pursuit of something potentially wonderful. But, mostly, it’s about how weird it would be to live with a harpy.

This story was one of my early experiments with telling a story solely through the use of connective tissue—showing the moments
between
dramatic scenes, rather than the dramatic scenes themselves, and letting the quiet interstitial moments resonate with things left unsaid. I used something of the same approach in “Cup and Table,” though in both instances there are
some
moments of real drama, because, at the end of the day, I love a good spectacle.

***

Komodo

I like tough female protagonists. I don’t know why; maybe because I was raised by tough women. The heroine of “Komodo” is probably too tough for her own good, though, and so this is a story about letting yourself be helped by your community. It’s also about Komodo dragons and guys who are cavalier assholes.

***

Bottom Feeding

I always liked those salmon of wisdom stories, but I grew up in the South, where the local fish of legend and story is the catfish (mudcats, channel cats, etc.). I thought how neat it would be to write a salmon of wisdom story wrapped in Southern trappings, sort of the way Howard Waldrop recast the story of Hercules as a Southern epic in
A Dozen Tough Jobs
. But the more I thought about it, the more I began to feel that catfish were fundamentally different from salmon—being bottom-feeders with bellies full of garbage, eating indiscriminately. So the story became something far stranger—and, I hope, far better—than a simple retelling of an Irish legend in a Georgia setting.

Like many of my stories, this one is about grief, and love, and how one can be the antidote for the other.

***

The Tyrant in Love

I think “The Tyrant in Love” is the oldest story in this collection. I wrote it in college, probably in 1997 or 1998, though it’s been revised since then, to clean up the clunky language. I won’t comment on the story, except to say that, shortly after it was written, I read it aloud to a woman who admired my writing, and whom I hoped to seduce. In retrospect, that was probably one of my stupider ideas.

***

Impossible Dreams

“Impossible Dreams” is my long-talked-about alternate-universe-video-store story. I’ve been gathering material for this for
years
. It’s light, and certainly a little silly, but it’s also sweet, which is exactly what it’s supposed to be. Sweet love stories are underrated. Romance makes me happy, and so do movies, and so does movie trivia, and all those things are present here. My thanks go to my friend Brian Auton for first telling me about much of the movie trivia I used here, and to the generous readers of my online journal, who contributed other tidbits. Most of the alternate-universe movies described are at least remotely plausible; at the very least they’re firmly rooted in specious Hollywood apocrypha.

***

Lachrymose and the Golden Egg

“Lachrymose and the Golden Egg” is another romance, almost a romantic comedy, except for the whole dying-of-a-terminal-illness thing. It is, despite the obvious fantasy trappings, arguably a pure science fiction story, which makes it a rarity for me. I wrote it because I wanted to do a Virtual Reality story without the goggles-and-gloves, sensory-deprivation-tank trappings of most VR stories, and because opium dreams are at
least
as interesting as immersive video games, and definitely have better graphics.

***

Dream Engine

I never, ever, ever start a story with nothing in mind but a title. Except this one time. I’d wanted to write something called “Dream Engine” for years (and I still expect to someday write a story called “Meme Engine”), but never found the story that belonged to the title. I finally put that title, and the weird steampunk imagery it conjured, together with an old idea about a man who becomes a murderer in his dreams. I’d also been thinking a lot about the structure of the Sherlock Holmes stories and similar tales, where the narrator is not the obvious protagonist of the story (Watson tells the stories, but Holmes is the hero)—it’s an odd structure, with both advantages and disadvantages, but at its best, it can serve to illuminate the character of both the narrator and his subject. Then, somehow, in one of those occasional gifts from the gods of story, I started scribbling, and out came Wisp’s voice, and his opening complaint about the city where he lives, at the center of all universes, and about his unreasonable partner/prisoner/whatever, Howlaa Moor. This story is dear to me, and it was a pleasure to write from start to finish, from setting to character to plot. The hardest thing about the story was keeping the pronouns straight when Howlaa constantly switched genders, so I finally decided to go with gender-neutral pronouns, which adds a nice touch of up-front weirdness to the tale. I think I’ll return to the city of royal orphans and their voracious snatch-engines another time. Wisp has other stories to tell about Howlaa. And there’s even a short novel about them, called
The Nex
, that I hope to publish one of these days in some form or another.

***

Publication details:

Hart & Boot & Other Stories
© 2007 by Tim Pratt

Cover art by Richard Marchand

Cover and design by Claudia Noble

“Hart and Boot” © 2004 by Tim Pratt; originally published in
Polyphony 4.

“Life in Stone” © 2004 by Tim Pratt; originally published in
Lenox Avenue.

“Cup and Table” © 2006 by Tim Pratt; originally published in
Twenty Epics.

“In a Glass Casket” © 2004 by Tim Pratt; originally published in
Realms of Fantasy,
October 2004.

“Terrible Ones” © 2004 by Tim Pratt; originally published in
The Third Alternative
, Spring 2004.

“Romanticore” © 2003 by Tim Pratt; originally published in
Realms of Fantasy,
December 2003.

“Living with the Harpy” © 2003 by Tim Pratt; originally published in
Strange Horizons
, October 2003.