Intricate Mirrors

Author’s Afterword:

Author’s Afterword:This story took me only one evening to write, at least the first version.

In the spring of 1974, I found a magazine ad for the Clarion Writer’s Workshop and wrote for information. When it arrived, I learned that in order to apply by the deadline, I would have to mail my application the next day. In addition, they wanted a six-page story sample of my writing enclosed with it.

I didn’t have anything that I felt showed my current level of ability, so I decided to write something new. Also, in order to show that I could write a complete story, I decided to write a complete story in six pages. In those pre-computer days, I started scribbling in long-hand. A friend, knowing I was pressed for time, volunteered to type the pages that I handed her, on my electric typewriter.

I don’t recommend this. Every time she finished a page, I felt locked into that much of the story. I was afraid if I wrote anything that required changes in the finished copy, she might quit on me. Meanwhile, every time the story started to become too long, I threw away the expanding plot before I gave it to her and rewrote it toward a briefer resolution. I finished it, though without the current ending, and sent it in by the deadline.

At Clarion, several of the instructors were editing original anthologies. All of them told me I would have no trouble selling this, though they didn’t happen to want it. Well, neither did anyone else editing a professional publication in the decade of the nineteen-seventies. I tried a few more endings, including the final one, to no avail. Finally, I sold it in 1978 to an anthology that was to be privately published, for thirty-four dollars, eighteen dollars paid on acceptance and the rest to be paid on publication. Some years passed and the publisher wasn’t able to get the book out, while new markets and editors appeared elsewhere. So I paid back my eighteen dollars to have the rights returned and in 1984, a mere decade after I wrote the first version, I sold it to Omni Magazine, on its sixteenth submission, for roughly thirty-three times as much money, not to mention the great exposure.

It appeared in 1985, when the cyberpunk movement was at its height. A year later, the story was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula Awards. It also became the basis for my novel, Hong on the Range.

The long prepublication history of this story, and its reception by the public, make it special to me.

This story first appeared in Omni, Exec. Ed. Kathy Keeton, Fiction ed. Ellen Datlow. 7:6 (March 1985).