Snowbird Gothic Stories - "Losing Altitude"

Because I’ve been asked a few times (and because I have a compulsive need to talk about my own work), I’m going to start posting a bit about the various stories in SNOWBIRD GOTHIC - where they came from, where they appeared originally, what inspired them and so forth. (I'm also going to refrain from posting endlessly about how it's now #485 on the Amazon rankings list for Short Fiction Collections With Trees On the Cover, which I figure is a win for everyone.)The first one I’d like to talk about dates back to 2010. It’s called “Losing Altitude”, and it was published in a one-off magazine called Stranded.

Stranded, for those of you who didn’t see it, was a gorgeous production put together by Andrew Losowsky in the wake of the Icelandic volcanic eruption that disrupted travel across Europe for an extended period of time. And by “disrupted”, I mean “shot down every airport in Europe, to the point where the British navy was sending ships to the Continent to bring people home”

For my part, I was in Newcastle, working with the fine folks from Ubisoft Reflections on Driver: San Francisco when Eyjafjallajökull blew its top. As the cloud drifted eastward and predictions of travel delays got more dire, I found myself in an interesting spot. While I’d been in England, the trade paperback edition of Firefly Rain had been released, and my wife Melinda and I had made plans around my return. Specifically, the idea was for me to fly home on the Friday that ended my trip, get picked up at the airport by the missus, and then drive down to Wilmington, NC, for a vacation weekend cum book signing

Once the airports closed, that wasn’t going to happen.

I did try to make it out. Newcastle airport closed before London’s did, meaning that my flight home was still theoretically active even though the puddlejumper to it wasn’t. So I bolted for the train, rode down to London, and arrived at King’s Cross just in time to hear the news on the BBC that all airports were being closed indefinitely. This necessitated a conversation with American Airlines, which started with “When do you think you’re going to get me out of here”, escalated to “The airports are too closed, I don’t care what your computer says”, to finally “IT’S A VOLCANO. TURN ON THE GODDAMN NEWS. I SWEAR I’M NOT MAKING THIS UP!” Then I got a hotel room, split the next week or so between furiously pounding away on dialog edits for Driver and wandering London alone or in the company of esteemed and marvelous friends like Adam and Dr. Lorna Tinworth, Rhianna Pratchett, and Andrew Walsh

So as far as getting stranded went, it could have been a lot worse. The folks at both the bed & breakfast and the bookstore were both very understanding once Melinda explained that no, I really was in London trapped by a volcanic ash cloud, and yes, we did intend to get down there as soon as possible after I got back. Meanwhile, I relocated to a mostly empty business hotel out by Heathrow - mostly empty because all the business travelers who’d normally stay there had taken advantage of company funds, hopped the Chunnel Train to Paris, and flown out of there before the ash cloud borked them

I also spent a lot of time in deep conversation with our company travel agent, who kept re-booking me on flights that were then canceled as the airports stayed closed, and otherwise reading  up on what exactly ash clouds do when planes fly into them. Hint: It’s not pretty. The ash is really extruded volcanic silica, which is to say “glass”. When it hits a nice hot jet engine, the glass melts and sticks. The glass then tends to accumulate, resulting in a jet engine that has been turned into a very large paperweight, not at all suitable for propelling a giant metal cylinder through the sky. Also, there’s the whole issue of “flying through a cloud of tiny shards of glass at high velocity”, which tends to do bad things to sensitive instruments.

And while I was doing this, word was passed to me that Losowsky was looking to put together a magazine created by folks whose travel plans had been disrupted by the eruption. I wrote to him, expressing interest, and he wrote back almost immediately

Excellent. Then I shall give you two options:

Write a proposal for a console game or an RPG based on trying to find ways to get home via alternative modes of transport, trying to beat everyone else to the last few tickets. Make it as entertaining as possible, outlining increasingly outrageous obstacles in the player's way. You could also write it as a narrative from the POV of a player, or as a dialogue between players, if you prefer.

Set a (not too gory please) horror story inside either the volcano or the ash cloud

My head full of glass-coated jet engines, I picked the latter. It came out in a rush, largely in one sitting, and I can honestly say I’ve never written anything like it before or since. It’s all dialog, with two characters who are never named or described but whose “desperate” scramble to escape the ash cloud turns into something very different.

Stranded came out in September of 2010 and ultimately raised almost $1500 for charity. It was a gorgeous magazine, a hodgepodge of everything from volcano-themed cocktails to people sharing pictures of their volcano-emergency beds, to my elegantly illustrated story. A year on from the eruption, Losowsky posted a follow-up note, mentioning the moneys raised for charity and the various places the magazine had been mentioned, and that was that

Fast forward to February, 2013. Snowbird Gothic comes out on Monday, February 4th as I fly to Toronto for work. As the week ends, Winter Storm Nemo sweeps in and blots out air travel in the eastern US and Canada. I find myself stranded in Toronto, though just for one night this time, and the nice lady at American Airlines works with me to get me out via Dallas instead of trying to connect through snow-plagued New York.

But for a minute, I think back to the last time I had a book come out, and the story that came out of that particular travail, and I have to smile.