Today, Amanda Cherry talks about how going back to the beginning of what you love can push you and your career forward in the best way possible.
Oops, I tripped and dropped a short story collection…
Sometimes the thing to get you out of a funk is to get back to your roots. And sometimes what comes out of that is everything you never knew you needed.
Or at least that’s what happened to me.
I didn’t set out to write Afoul & Affairs. Much like many of my other projects over the years of my career (See: the Femmes Fatale series), this collection was an accident. All of my deadlines were met, and I didn’t feel ready to dive into writing another novel. But I wasn’t happy with the notion of professional inertia setting in the way I know it will when I let myself spend too long away from my office. I knew I needed to be writing, but I didn’t know what to work on. I was annoyed with myself. And then it hit me.
Do what you used to do when writing was just for fun.
I started out my [adult] writing life in fanfiction. And my bread and butter was always missing moments. As a teen, I would type up pages of could-have-plausibly-been-cut-scenes from the X-Files on my Panasonic typewriter for my high school best friend to input on her home computer and send into the MSR mailing list on Yahoo.
In college, it was Star Trek: The Next Generation and the occasional Josh/Donna vignette from The West Wing. Then there were the years I spent in that British magic school—especially in the era when I worked in a related exhibit at the Pacific Science Center. And always, peppered within these fan works, were the stories of Han & Leia from the Star Wars films and the novels we now call Legends.
Missing moment fic is my wheelhouse—my area of, if not expertise, then certainly ample experience. It’s what I’ve always done best and a thing that has forever brought me joy.
When I started writing novels, one of the most difficult things to wrap my brain around was what to leave off the page. Suddenly I was not the one to fill in the missing moments, but rather the person charged with supplying missing moments to be filled by fanfic writers in the future.
That. Was. Weird.
With my debut, it took a lot of help from my editor (shout out to Dawn at DefCon One!) to tighten up the book’s pacing. The work I did left, in its wake, many missing moments, and I had to be okay with friends and fans making up their own scenarios to fill those in. It was definitely an adjustment.
Fast forward to 2024 and the 20th anniversary of Cobalt City. This year is chocked full of releases from half a dozen authors working in and adjacent to the Cobalt City IP. That got my wheels spinning. All these books are connected, and the way we all work together means characters are moving in and out of different authors’ custody. And since not everything being released this year is in chronological order, we’re all having to take into account things that have happened that readers won’t know about yet. It’s absolute IP/Crossover/Collaborative heaven, but it also left room for more missing moments than I could possibly let lie.
The decision as to where to end Time & Again was tough, as there was so much more I wanted to make happen between these characters. But the book was already a chonky 120,000 words and ending it with the bad guy defeated, the team disbanded, and the lovers happy for now made all the practical sense in the world.
Sea Change came first, giving Ruby and Angel the time they needed to begin forging the bond that’s going to carry them through some tough times another author has coming down the pike. Then I wrote Sidekick Business, because I wanted to play with the idea. Finding Out actually takes place before Time & Again and I mostly wrote it to tell myself what went on between those two characters. I’d been poking at the idea for Goals for a while, because I found the whole scenario delightful and Settling the Score was mostly the result of having season tickets to the Seattle Kraken.
And this being an election year, I couldn’t help myself but to spend some time playing with Ruby and co.’s plan to foul the plans of a fascist President seeking re-election. In The Arena emerged as the longest piece in the collection and I’m particularly proud of the new heroes I was able to introduce in hopes of future fans picking them up for fic of their own.
One of the most amazing things about writing in a small press IP is how encouraging and supportive everyone is. The idea that these stories, which had come into existence over different timelines and for different reasons, should be collected and published was never in question to anyone but me, apparently.
To my surprise and delight, the 45,000+ words in this collection also put the Ruby Killingsworth series in Best Series contention for the 2025 Hugo Awards, part of Seattle Worldcon, for which I was already excited as a local to the area. My desire to add the words “Hugo Nominated” to my bio and to attend the storied Hugo Losers Party in Seattle are things I’ve never made a secret of, and I find it so very fitting that this collection is the thing that could make that happen.
Writing these stories, these missing scenes, these tight exchanges and moments of instant but important growth for my characters and their relationships, felt like home. And it was just the thing to get me in the chair and writing again after all my novel deadlines had been met and starting another novel felt like too much. These are the kinds of stories I’ve always written, the kinds of stories I’m perpetually drawn to. Giving myself permission to return to the art of writing short fiction and to playing with the possible has been a joy and a delight and I am so excited to be sharing that joy with readers.
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Amanda Cherry is a Seattle-area queer, disabled nerd who still can’t believe people pay her to write stories. She is the author of five published novels as well as TTRPGs, screenplays, and short fiction, and a cast member with the Dungeon Scrawlers on Twitch. Her nonfiction writing has been featured on ToscheStation.net, ElevenThirtyEight.com, and StarTrek.com. Amanda is a member of SAG-AFTRA, SFWA, & Broad Universe. Follow Amanda’s geekery on Twitter, BlueSky & TikTok @MandaTheGinger or visit www.thegingervillain.com
