Writing a Short Story for Seasons Eternal

Today I’m talking a little bit more about Seasons Eternal, the second SF&F anthology from Turtleduck Press. (The first one is here.) I’m the editor there, and I also publish short stories through them. When we put together an anthology, I get to do both at the same time.

For this year’s anthology, we chose a shared premise — what might happen to a world where the seasons stopped changing? Each side of the planet is frozen in a different season. A century later, various societies have evolved to cope, but they’re still struggling under the pressures of the change.

But you can’t write a story about a society. Stories are about people.

I’ve been having a love affair with steampunk lately, so I knew I wanted airships in my story. An idea about an airship crash had been bumping around in the back of my head for a while. What attracted me to it was the thought of the various classes of people on an airship, stranded together and forced to confront their assumptions about each other.

So there’s an upper-class female passenger and a lower-class crewman, and they’re the lone survivors of a crash in the middle of uninhabited…well, what used to be prairie. Farmland. Until the summer never ended and the water table dried up and all the farmers had to leave. (Yes, I was thinking of the Dust Bowl.)

Some of the farmers ended up in the cities, penniless. A hundred years later, some of their descendents are doing the jobs no-one else wanted. Like an airship crewman, who’s never seen the place his family came from…until now.

His female companion, the passenger, knows that if he starts questioning the way things are, she may never get back to the city. Her safety depends on keeping him in line.

Now we have a story.

The other three stories in Seasons Eternal are fantasy, science fantasy, and dystopian. You can read a sample at Smashwords, where you can also buy an ebook in the format of your choice. Or, if you prefer, buy from Amazon. We’ll also have a print version out soon. All the details are here.

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Quick housekeeping note:

I’m doing a blog tour to talk about different aspects of Seasons Eternal, so I’ll be putting up links here as my guest posts go up, as well as other relevant anthology news.

But this blog isn’t going to be all promo, all the time. We’ll be mostly back to your regularly scheduled programming as of Wednesday. Cheers!