Hello and welcome to this Track of Words Author Spotlight interview, where today I’m joined by the brilliant David Goodman to talk about Clarkesworld-published short stories, turning cool concepts into full, engaging stories, the different challenges of writing short fiction and novels, the realities of submitting novels, and loads more! I’ve read and loved both of Dave’s short stories in Clarkesworld Magazine, and I was hugely impressed by their depth of world building, great (and unusual) characters and smart themes, and how they remained very human and relatable despite their sci-fi nature. I can’t wait to read more of Dave’s writing, and I jumped at the chance to chat to him for what turned out to be an in-depth and (I think) incredibly interesting interview!
Without further ado then, let’s get straight to the questions.
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Track of Words: To start off with, tell us a little about yourself – who you are, where you’re from, how you ended up being a writer, etc.
David Goodman: Hello! I’m Dave. Thanks for having me on your blog, I’m a huge admirer of Track of Words. I’m from Edinburgh in Scotland and I live in East Lothian, just along the coast. I grew up here and moved away for many years, living in Aberdeen and London, then returning to Scotland about ten years ago.
I’ve been writing since my teens, but I got serious about it about five or six years back, after many years of stop-start writing angst. These days I’m a published short story writer and an agented novelist, with my second book on submission to publishers now. I say ‘second’, but it’s the eighth (possibly ninth, depending how you count it) book I’ve written. Thankfully most of those early efforts will stay firmly in the digital drawer they’ve been consigned to.
ToW: How would you describe yourself as a writer? What sorts of things do you enjoy writing about?
DG: My first love has always been science fiction, but I’ve long dabbled in fantasy (reading and writing) and thrillers (military, technothrillers, spy novels and the odd bit of crime fiction).
I did my dissertation on spy thrillers and my then-professor was the first (of many) to say ‘you should try writing one of these’. Now I’m alternating between short SF, novel-length SF and the world of espionage and dead drops.
On my website and various social media profiles I describe myself as a ‘thriller and science fiction writer’, but the main feature of my writing is honestly that I do a lot of it. I hope to experiment further with other genres in the future.
ToW: You’ve had two really great short stories published in Clarkesworld Magazine – Vegvísir and Carapace. Could you tell us a bit about both of these?
DG: Yes, I’ve been incredibly lucky to be published twice within a year by Clarkesworld, after a long, long time away from short fiction. I wrote a half dozen short stories in the mid-2000’s, when you still had to send stories away in an envelope with a self-addressed return envelope for your quarter-page rejection slip to come back in. Back then, Clarkesworld didn’t even exist yet and the days of easy digital submissions and tracking portals were way in the future. So I was really delighted when my first two submitted short stories in over a decade both sold (sadly, I haven’t maintained that streak, but it was amazing while it lasted).
Vegvísir was one of those rare stories that came out really quickly, drafted start to finish in a few days. It’s the story of a surveyor called Gunnar, working and living on Mars a couple of hundred years from now. His rover breaks down and he gets lost in a sandstorm, trying to find a long-abandoned auxiliary landing pad so he can use its comm array to get help. Then he sees something strange in the billowing dust.
By contrast, Carapace was one of the first stories I worked on with my critique group. My crit partners helped me identify where things were confusing and unclear and really got to the emotional core of the story in a way I wouldn’t have been able to do on my own. It’s the story of an AI-driven ‘combat armature’ (giant robot battle suit) that finds itself coming to consciousness after a devastating ambush, but with a distinctly non-regulation training data set. It has to get an enemy POW back through its own lines, but it can’t identify itself as friendly. Things get a little dicey after that.
ToW: Between those two short stories you’ve got a lot of really cool, interesting elements going on, including sentient robot armour, explorations of identity and autonomy, Nordic mythology and the dangers of getting caught in sandstorms on Mars. If we use Carapace as an example, could you talk a bit about the concept behind this story, and your inspirations or influences for it?
DG: Most of my stories come from a core idea (in this case, how would a robot AI trained on myths interpret the world?) that collide with specific imagery and contexts. I don’t want to give away too much of the storyline, but the idea of sentient barbed wire has been stuck in my head for years, so I got to play with that. And the swinging, ghostly light of parachute flares is something I first saw as a teenager in the Territorial Army, which was also beautifully evoked in an amazing scene from the film 1917. And finally the voice and character of ‘Pal’, the robot in the story, came from a range of sources, including Becky Chamber’s second Wayfarers novel A Closed and Common Orbit and the Asimov robot stories I devoured as a kid.
Several people have asked me if Carapace was inspired by The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. I was aware of them but hadn’t read them when I wrote the story. Having read them since, I can definitely see the resemblance in tone.
ToW: Once you’ve got the core ideas and concepts in place, do you have a regular process for then building it all into a story, developing characters and plot from that initial concept?
DG: Yes, absolutely.
My writing process a few years ago was very feast or famine, with big bursts of productivity followed by weeks or months of angsty procrastination. A few years ago I decided I’d had enough of the angsting and I wanted to build a solid, sustainable writing habit. I wanted to write as regularly as possible and feel better about myself when I did.
That meant reorganising my day to make my writing time very protected and consistent. I don’t write every day and I take regular breaks between projects to brainstorm, read, do crit work for friends and so on. But I do something writing-related pretty much every weekday morning.
I have swung back and forth between discovery writing and outlining over the years, and until a couple of years ago I was a die-hard, extremely detailed outliner. These days though, I tend to write a bullet point outline of a story and then break that up into (very) rough scenes in Scrivener.
There’s no specific thing that I always start with, like a character voice or a setting or an image. Every story is a little different. But eventually, once I have the scenes roughed out and the framework ready to go, I have to take a deep breath and start typing. I usually write linearly, scene-to-scene. Sometimes I ditch scenes when I get to them, or introduce new ones. But a new short story draft usually takes me about three to four days of fairly focused effort. After that, I give it a day or two to settle, then go back in to do my own second draft, then I submit that second draft to my critique group. After that, it’s a lot of back and forth with them, chopping and changing and exploring the comments I get back. That has become an invaluable part of my process.
ToW: I really enjoyed the little details in both Carapace and Vegvísir, from offhand references to terraforming technologies and the makeup of Martian dust, to the naming conventions of autonomous weapons. It feels like you had fun incorporating these little elements of research and textural background information – is that a part of writing that you do particularly enjoy?
DG: It really is, but it’s probably a little more chaotic than it seems. Sometimes a little background detail is part of the kernel of the story, so I do a fair bit of research beforehand. In the case of Vegvísir, it was a tweet I saw about ‘instant landing pads’ being developed for future moon landings, where the lander rockets would spray liquidised alum into their rocket plumes to capture and solidify the lunar regolith. That gave me a technological hook to hang a whole story idea from, including a concept that I’ve always been fascinated by, which is how stories and legends change in diasporic communities.
With Carapace, it was the reading I was doing about AI training data (and the biases baked into them) combined with the battlefield usage of ‘loitering munitions’, which we’ve seen so much of in the last couple of years. I wondered how a machine that bootstrapped into consciousness would view the world, especially the cold, merciless gaze of autonomous weapons, if it had a significant chunk of human literature as its primary lens.
But with other stories, the idea or setting comes first and, bluntly, I write stuff that seems cool, then work out if it’s in any way plausible afterwards. I think with the science fiction audience there’s a limit to the amount of handwaving they will accept on any given story, so occasionally some of my wilder concepts bite the dust in the editing phase when I can’t find a theory or real-world technology I can extrapolate from convincingly.
Vegvísir is available in Clarkesworld issue 183
ToW: What is it that you enjoy (or find challenging) about writing short fiction, that’s maybe different from longer-form fiction?
DG: I started out with short fiction in my teens, because the idea of writing a whole novel seemed impossible. So for the first four or five years I was writing, short fiction was all that I wrote. But this was back before easy ubiquitous internet access (I used to have to go to the library to check my email) and the opportunities that brought, like easy access to critique partners and digital submissions to short story magazines. After I’d sent a few stories out and gotten nothing but rejection slips back, I decided to try my hand at novels (via NaNoWriMo) and then basically didn’t write short stories again for a decade.
Then, in late 2021, when I was starting to query agents seriously for the first time, I had finished a long editing process and just didn’t feel ready to start another novel. Plus this idea (for Vegvísir) had pushed itself to the front of my brain and wouldn’t go away. Ever since then, I’ve begun using short fiction as a conscious break for my novel-brain, an opportunity to start and finish something inside of a couple of weeks, to explore ideas that aren’t novel-sized yet and, honestly, to just play and experiment.
I tend to write longish short fiction, of 8,000 to 10,000 words, so it’s still a fairly meaty project with space for character development, multiple scenes and the worldbuilding I love to do so much. One of the big challenges I think I have to overcome is learning how to write much shorter fiction – the venues for work over 6,000 words or so narrow dramatically, so the work I’m doing now only has so many places I can send it. And I’d like to eventually put together a collection, with room for some shorter short stories too.
But it’s a real technical challenge. In a 3,000 word short story, every sentence has to do three jobs at once, minimum: moving the plot forward, explaining the world, developing the characters. You can’t take a two or three paragraph detour to explore the setting or dwell on the character’s motivations. There just isn’t room. And in this world, especially with online venues, short fiction you can read in a coffee break or before you fall asleep at night has a real evolutionary advantage when it comes to being shared and read widely. I’m not saying it has to be lightweight and easy-to-digest – quite the opposite. Some of the most profound short stories I’ve ever read have been a couple of thousand words at most.
As you might have gleaned from my answers, I do go on a bit! So my next big challenge in short story work is going to be learning to write actually-short stories.
ToW: As well as those short stories you’ve got one novel on submission and another nearly ready for submission, is that right? Could you tell us a bit about those two books, and what your thinking is for them in terms of what audience(s) you’re aiming at and what you think readers will get out of them?
DG: Yes, I actually went out on submission with the second book this past week, so I now have two books out there with editors.
The first one (and the book that my agent Harry Illingworth signed me for) is currently titled The Burning Line. It’s a speculative thriller set in the aftermath of severe climate change. It follows two military contractors, Sally Forbes and Leo Mackay, trying to uncover a conspiracy in Istanbul, while an apocalyptic cult called the Burners slowly approaches the city. The Burners believe that the world is ending after severe climate disruption and the only rational response is to take what you can, while you can. And Forbes and Mackay are trying to find out just why they are able to repeatedly invade and destroy city after city. It’s basically a decade or so of my personal climate crisis anger and dismay concentrated into book form. But I also wanted to show that even in the darkest of times, when things seem insurmountable, it’s possible to find a little bit of brightness.
The second book is currently titled The Disaster Club and it’s a contemporary spy thriller, about a mid-career, sidelined field agent called Will Macleod, who gets through his terrible field assignments by spending half of his time chatting on an encrypted chat group with his friends who are stuck in similar dead-end roles. Then his former mentor shows up and recruits him for a new, cross-service initiative full of high-flying fast-track stars of the intelligence community. Will wonders why he’s been included, until it becomes clear that their target is his former partner, an AI researcher in Hungary called Klara Takacs. Everything goes a bit wrong and Will ends up on the run with Klara, hunted by, variously, killer drones, terrifying mercenaries and his own former team. Complications ensue.
As you might realise, my novels are often explorations of things that scare me a bit, like climate change and autonomous weaponry. My hope, should either of these books get picked up by a publisher, is that a few readers out there get a bit of escapism and maybe even optimism about how we might overcome these threats and risks in the future. But they may just enjoy the witty repartee and things exploding too, and that’s just fine.
Carapace is available in Clarkesworld issue 190
ToW: I think both readers and writers are always interested in the processes of getting an agent and sending books out on submission. How have you found these processes? Is there anything you could talk about from your own experiences that you think people might find interesting?
DG: Apart from one extremely ill-advised attempt to query my NaNoWriMo novel in 2005, I had been quietly writing books for years without thinking about selling them. This wasn’t because I didn’t want to try querying a novel and finding an agent, it was largely because I couldn’t figure out how the hell to edit something at novel length. So I didn’t do what many of my peers did, which was to spend years in the query trenches, slowly learning how to write, edit and then query my books. Instead, I wrote a bunch of unedited, not-very-good first draft manuscripts, then finally brute-forced my way through learning to edit. When I was done with that process, I re-read the book (which I’d picked to use as my ‘learn to edit’ project because it seemed like it was the closest I had to a commercial thriller) and discovered to my shock that it read pretty well! Editing is basically magic: it can turn deeply average first drafts into really quite decent third, fourth, fifth and sixth drafts.
The result was that my querying process was shockingly short. I’d steeled myself to query for at least a year, but I was incredibly fortunate to receive an offer of representation from Harry after 56 queries over about three months.
If I was going to offer one piece of advice for querying writers (or those on submission, if you’re lucky enough to get to that stage) it is to try as much as possible to treat querying like data entry and to do it in the background as you continue to write new things. This is especially true right now. Querying was tough pre-pandemic, even tougher in 2021 when I did it and these days it can take many, many months to get even a form rejection.
Getting rejections is really brutal, but having your brain focused on something new can take the sting out of it, whether you’re getting a form rejection from an agent or an incredibly kind, detailed but ultimately negative rejection from an editor.
That is a very tough aspect of the submission stage (when your agent sends your book out to editors) that I wasn’t really prepared for. First, there’s just the interminable waiting (which makes working on something else even more important). But then there’s the emails from really amazing editors with paragraphs of kind feedback, followed by a no. It’s completely understandable – editors only want to take on books they are deeply passionate about, because making books is hard. As an editor, you need to advocate for a book many times, with the decision makers at an imprint, with other editors, with marketing and publicity teams, with booksellers and chain buyers. So if you think a book is really good, but you’re not personally on fire about it, it has to be a no.
It’s cold comfort if you’re the author of that book receiving the ‘great, but we can’t make an offer’ rejection, but I do hope that it means when one or the other of my books do find an editor, it will be a working relationship based on a mutual passion and excitement for the project.
ToW: I’m interested in the way you seem to enjoy switching between SFF/speculative fiction and thrillers – is that something which just comes naturally to you, or do you get different things from the genres?
DG: I read what I write, basically. And I’ve been reading science fiction since I was a small boy, as well as dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction. I started out reading William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Anne McCaffrey, Ursula K. Le Guin, Iain M. Banks, Terry Pratchett and so many others, always seeking that elusive feeling of having the top of my head blown off by a concept or a plot turn or a particularly gobsmacking image. Science fiction is full of that kind of mind-expanding, perspective-broadening storytelling and I gulped it down. It’s informed my view of the world, my politics, my priorities and my hopes for the future and continues to do so. So when I started writing, I naturally gravitated towards the same genre, themes and characters.
I started reading spy and thriller fiction while I was at university and developed a real taste for the full range of that genre, from the so-called ‘stale beer’, realist end of the spectrum like John Le Carre and Charles Cumming through the darkly comic stuff like Mick Herron. I definitely felt though that there was a bit of an opportunity in writing thrillers and spy stories that weren’t wedged firmly into a perpetual late 1990’s to early 2000’s where the internet didn’t really exist, or technology was a fancy box of tricks only used by the equivalent of Q Branch. In my own generation and those that came after us, the internet is an embedded part of our lives and how we interact with the world, and I wanted to reflect that in the spy stories I wrote.
My career dream would be to write in both areas (perhaps in the way Iain Banks did, reserving the ‘M’ for his wonderful Culture series and other SF novels) and I think I can apply things I learn in one genre to the other. I think a good SF novel can be improved with a bit of intrigue and thriller-style tension, while the contemporary thriller genre definitely needs to grapple a bit more with the future and the threats and opportunities that it offers.
ToW: What can you tell us about what you’re working on next, or what you’ve got coming out over the coming months?
DG: Haha, I’d hoped to be able to reply that I’d just sold another short story, but of course it came back this very morning as a rejection (just in case you thought this writing gig was an unbroken string of successes) so the very next thing I will be doing is figuring out the next place to send that story.
I’m also in the process of writing up pitch documents for sequels to the novels I have out on submission, as well as new standalone thrillers. This kind of thing is both an exciting exercise in ‘what next’ as well as a very useful thing to have on hand if a submission turns into an offer, so I’m aiming to square that away in the next couple of weeks.
After that, no idea! I have a very messy first draft of a generation ship novel that I’m poking at, as well as 30,000 words of a murder mystery set in a future where there hasn’t been a murder in 114 years. And I’m kicking around more ideas for contemporary thrillers too. But I haven’t quite picked a direction yet. A great deal will depend on how my submissions go over the next few months.
ToW: Finally…when you’re not writing, what might we find you getting up to?
DG: I live in the countryside, so most days I’m out and about after my writing session, walking through the nearby woods and down to the sea. I’m also a keen hillwalker and backpacker, although that was severely curtailed by lockdown and hasn’t really picked up again, especially as I’ve been pretty busy with writing and day job stuff. But 2023 is going to be my year for getting out into the hills again (he said, optimistically). I also recently took up paddleboarding, but haven’t quite got to the stage of getting my own board yet.
Aside from that, I’m heavily involved with the writing scene in Scotland, including volunteering with the annual Cymera Festival in June, founding the Edinburgh Genre Writers critique group in 2014 and being an extremely enthusiastic member of Edinburgh SFF, a networking and critique group for writers in the city that has the best Discord server ever, as well as regular in-person meetups.
I also write a monthly newsletter called Words By Goodman and post a few times a month (or try, at least) to my blog. Like most of your readers (I’m guessing), I also have shelves full of books and not enough time to read them.
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David Goodman is a short story writer and novelist, based in East Lothian, Scotland. He is a member of the Edinburgh SFF writing group and Codex Writers.
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Massive, massive thanks to Dave for agreeing to this interview as part of the 2022 Track of Words Advent Calendar, and for putting so much time into writing these fascinating, in-depth answers! I love a long-form interview, and if you’re anything like me I’m sure you’ll have thoroughly enjoyed this one. If you haven’t already, I would definitely recommend checking out Dave’s short stories Vegvísir and Carapace, and here’s hoping we’ll be able to read The Burning Line and The Disaster Club sometime soon!
Check out my review of Carapace
Both Vegvísir and Carapace are published in Clarkesworld Magazine – you can read both for free on the Clarkesworld website, or buy the individual issues containing each of them – check out the links below to order your copies!
*If you buy anything using any of these links, I will receive a small affiliate commission – see here for more details.
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