What Lies Ahead
A pause in the '23kpc' routine
The End-of-Year Schedule Here
For starters: no new weekly installments of 23kpc until 2025. But we’re not leaving Guy, Missy, Matty, Durwood, and the ISS Tascheter behind, either. Instead, for the next three weeks, I’ll be sharing the “short” story whose writing led me to what became 23kpc. Some information about that story in a moment.
When January rolls around, I’m going to leave only the first four installments of 23kpc — through Chapter 7 — publicly available. All other installments, including future ones, will go behind the “paywall,” such as it is. Everything else here, for now, will continue to be open to all readers.
But if you want to continue reading 23kpc, you’ll have to become a paid subscriber:
Monthly subscriptions: $5
Annual subscriptions: $50
Lifetime subscriptions: $150
Group subscription discount (groups of 2 or more): 20%
My thinking: if you’ve been reading all along with 23kpc to date, then (a) THANK YOU OMG THANK YOU, but also (b) I must’ve by now established my good intentions and ability to deliver something worth reading. (And if I’ve fallen short, in the past or in what comes next, I hope you’ll let me know!)
For the time being, again, everything else here (like the #jesstorypix series and others) will still be freely available.
Furthermore, if you’re already a free subscriber as of January 1, 2025, I’ll automatically gift you a paid three-month subscription. Cool, huh?
Enough of the boring stuff. Here’s what actually follows, for the 23kpc-interested over the next few weeks.
About ‘Open and Shut’
I first started toying with the “private eye(s) in space” concept almost ten years ago. I’d been in a writing slump for a while, and in one of those “I have got to work on something” moments of frustration I just… started writing. I don’t know, but suspect, that it followed a rewatch, before the holidays1, of the old Thin Man movies starring William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles.
It almost certainly, though, followed my reading of a book about the film series: Thoughts on The Thin Man: Essays on The Delightful Detective Work of Nick & Nora Charles, by a handful of authors.
Among other things, the very first pages of that book offered me the news that The Thin Man was Dashiell Hammett’s last novel: all the subsequent films in the series were “based on the characters,” etc. I thought this gave me implicit permission, anyhow, to spin off my Nick-and-Nora-stand-ins to extraterrestrial settings.
So, first: I wanted to write a mystery, starring a sophisticated 1930s-Deco-style couple.
And, as has been true for most of my reading life, I’d been reading a lot of science fiction. I’m no deep-dive expert on the genre, but do probably read at least a half-dozen SF titles a year. So I am familiar with the tropes and themes — the tools of its trade — even if I’d written fairly little of it.
Well, whatever the precise sources, what I ended up writing was a long story called “Open and Shut.”
If you’ve been reading 23kpc, you’ll get much of the background of “Open and Shut.” Guy and Missy Landis are the protagonists (although their last names were different in the story2), and they’re sailing the cosmos aboard a one-time asteroid, now a cruise ship of sorts called the ISS Tacheter. Their best friend is a purser named Matty Torricelli (whose name managed to lose an “r” in the move to 23kpc), and he, Guy, and Missy all share a dorm cycle of extended hibernations. But there’s no Mercy Bacall, for instance. (Very loosely, in “Open and Shut” she was prefigured in a character named Yolanda.)
Finally, the mystery itself was completely different. Most notably, its writing was more or less un-researched; the longer book has a decent amount of “it’s too complicated to explain” hand-waving, to be sure, but “Open and Shut” was really — pretty much by intention — a seat-of-the-pants creation. I’d given no thought to the implications of asteroidal travel, for instance, especially at near light speed. (How would the ship be powered? What about gravity? At such speeds, what would be the consequences of collision with even a mere space rock? And so on.) A committed believer in the power of writerly momentum, I just wanted to get the thing written: if I could get to “The End,” then maybe the experience would carry me forward into something bigger and better.
So, for this weekend and the two that follow, instead of new chapters of 23kpc, that’s what’s queued up: Parts 1 through 3 of “Open and Shut.” Enjoy!
It’s hard for me to really look forward to the holidays without at least a glimpse of William Powell, in pajamas and slippers, shooting out Christmas-tree ornaments with a BB gun clenched between his feet.
Originally, Guy and Missy Williams instead of Landis. In pretty short order, luckily, I remembered the corny mid-20th-century science fiction TV series Lost in Space… whose main character was played by Guy Williams. Not at all an association I wanted readers to make! (Aside: Myrna Loy’s maiden name was Williams; in the 1936 After the Thin Man, Nora Charles has a wealthy cousin: Selma Landis. All coincidental!)