*May Contain Spoilers*
I am very excited to announce this weekend the publication of my first short story. While it was the second story to be accepted, it will be the first to go live. I want to express my gratitude for Spectrum London writing group who helped direct me to resources to inspire the slipstream direction I took with this story, and I appreciate very much the support and feedback from renowned slip stream author Andrew Hook. If you are interested in more examples of this writing style, you can visit his website here: https://andrew-hook.com
My vision for this story was to play with surrealism, so to decide on the direction, I did a lot of reading on that that could entail or look like. True surrealism plays with straight stream of consciousness writing, which is not always very readable, so I wanted to stay within the realm of narrative fiction and selected a few themes I felt would fit the goal.
You can read it here: https://martinmatthewswrites.com/ansible/erasure-sylvia-woodham
My stories are working toward a collection I will publish sometime in the future. The theme of this collection will be moving through this world as a woman and the obstacles faced in that experience. This story was about women and their contributions being made invisible, and the only real legitimate reason that would give an excuse for it would be for some act of god to create collective amnesia. It is also about the psychological damage it does to someone to look around and be treated like her contributions cease to exist.
The ending is intentionally ambiguous. I did want to have a similar effect to a Twilight Zone episode where we might not be entirely sure what has happened, and I also took some influence from the 2021 film Bliss, which leaves an ambiguous ending we are not sure who was real and which world was a chemical fabrication.
Claire North has a novel in which she achieves a similar effect at the beginning of "The Sudden Appearance of Hope." I have not read her books yet, and did not know about this book until after I had written this story, but I will hope to read it in the future.
People have not understood sometimes why I chose to end a story the way I do, and in this case, the first person narrator's experience was feeling crazy by the events happening, and she was able to get an answer that at least she was not, and she would have options in the industry in the future. I left other questions about what really happened open to interpretation purposefully, because there are many possibilities. I ask myself questions like "was the flash of light actually the nuclear blast?"
Someone asked me "who was responsible for the 'collective amnesia?" If you become more familiar with my writing, you will know that I never like to give my characters who do bad things excuses to hide behind or some other reason that could be responsible for the impact of their choices. This is another reason for the ambiguity that we really are not sure if the Mystic has just taken her on a drug trip or if the narration of things that happened bore some truth to it. The corporation chose to sideline the character, and it caused her to question reality. The only logical explanation for a group of people to behave this way would be collective amnesia, but I purposely left it up to the reader to ask the question whether that was actually responsible.
My stories are all about common themes, rather than common genres, and the collection of stories will be quite versatile from my creative side as a writer in the genres they may touch upon. While this collection is in process, it is not my priority. If I have occasion to build toward it, my stories may be for sale to interested buyers - I do send them out to markets which appear to be a good fit. At least two of them are now published, and a third has been submitted to contests. My goal is to have my writing out in the public space so that there is a body of work to understand my writing and pov when I finish the novel, so I appreciate those journals who have contributed to that goal.
Addendum: I have been discussing with the Extinction Revolution Creative arm if there is some way they would like to see some version of this story adapted to a focus which they could use, which reminds me I forgot to introduce the premise of the story.
If anyone is interested in the premise of this story, and where it started, the basic starting point was that the practice to erasing the contributions of women and men taking credit for their work needed to have drastic consequences. I started with the idea that the main character had to be a highly capable woman who literally saved the world every day through her contributions, and that the men who did this to her would cause drastic results by trying to remove her from the equation without understanding the solutions she presented as well as she did.
If anyone in the SFF realm is curious about the science behind it, the transition of nuclear reactors from Uranium to a more stable atomic particle in salt form is already underway in the industry. Generally, I am not a hard Sci-Fi writer, and in my writing you can expect me to write about things in our known universe rather than inventing fictional new technology.
