Fiction: Biting the Snake’s Tail
My sci-fi noir story with a Mexico City touch “Biting the Snake’s Tail” is up at Futurismic. It was two years in the making. I wrote the first half of it after dreaming two parts of it: the detective walking through the rainy streets with the dog and the murder. In the original, the murder took place at a public bath house and the victim was a gay man.
When I was a kid and there was no water (yep, this was a problem in Mexico City even years ago) for the day, we sometimes went to the public bath house in Santa Julia. This meant paying a few pesos and you got a bit of soap, some shampoo and access to a shower area. I remember we took our own towels, but towels might have been supplied at a cost. Last year, when I was in Mexico City, water issue were pretty bad. About 5 million people (a quarter of the city) was suffering from a drought and predictions for 2010 were that even the ritzy neighbourhoods would be affected. Think a third of the city without water this year, taps running dry for many days at times.
The dog in the story is a real dog. Arkasaha was a dog that belonged to some friends’ of my husband. It was a pretty big animal.
Anyway, I had half a story: a detective with a dog, a murder and a bathhouse. I couldn’t finish the story so I tossed it away. It languished on the computer until last year, when I was writing a totally different story, this one based on the femicides in Ciudad Juarez. Female homicides in Ciudad Juarez, again, are not a new problem. Estimates of women killed vary widely. It was more than 300 in 2003. I’ve lost count by now. Ciudad Juarez, of course, has turned in the past few years into an even more and more violent town. The question is not whether someone will get killed that day, but how many people.
My story was about a maquila worker and involved some murders of women. I couldn’t get it to gel either, but I did remember I had been trying to write a future-noir story. I pulled out the old story, scraped that bathouse and moved with the female victim angle.
I was aiming for something that evoked the Mexican novela negra. Simply put, a novella negra is a thriller. Inspired by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, but taking a uniquely Hispanic style. The novela negra is … well, you’ve got to read one. It’s just what it is. A product of its geographical and political climate. Paco Ignacio Taibo II has written a bunch of them, as have other Latin American and Spanish writers.
The problem is when you’ve got 5,000 words to do something that feels like a Dashiell thriller you are, well, screwed. I am fond of long stories, novelettes and novellas. But they are hard sells. I haven’t been able to sell my mammoth 9,000 word Aztec story and took it out of circulation last year. So, whenever I’m approaching the 5,000 word mark, I slap myself. If I can’t tell it in 5,000 words it’s better to drop it. I couldn’t see a way to keep this one short and sweet (or to even end it) until a month of thinking about it.
Then it went off to Futurismic, to see if it might fit the bill. I had previously sold “Maquech” and I know the market well, so I thought I’d try them. It sold. Hurray.
This solved one problem. It did not, however, solve the issue of some of the other stories rotting in the computer and the 30,000 word werewolf novel that will not die. Seriously. I need to finish that baby. I also need to revise my magic realist novel. And do a ton of other stuff. Stop hyperventilating about my grasp of the English language might be useful.
Anyway, I hope this look into my brain and where my ideas come from is fun. Most of it is from real life. In Mexico City, I think the future is already there. It’s today.