In May 2008, Black Static in the UK published a short story of mine titled "Washer Woman," about isolated soldiers trying to maintain their sanity during an unnamed war.
The story began with a request from artist Dave Senecal. He sent me a painting and asked me to write a myth for it. Here's his request:
So, I was approached awhile ago to do a book of monsters. As in, take legends and illustrate them. As is typical I got about 3 of them done and then realized, dude, this is going to take all year. Plus, it sounds cool but I like making up my own stuff. So, I wanted to take that idea and find people to write stories about the weird shit I made. Like, what is a Promethean? A warrior race of women who stole fire or something? Who knows. There is something that happens when I make the work.. a germ of a concept but it's like hearing snippets of someone else's conversation. Would be nice to hear the whole thing, so what do you think of assembling something from what is already there... take my own creatures and put small histories to them, like a bestiary of sorts? I have one that I have not publsihed anywhere... it is Washer Woman, originally done for the book... but never sent them the high res and I let the deal evaporate.
It is a banshee type, who washes the blood from the armor of the warriors who have or are destine to die in battle the next day. Anyway attached is a smaller version if you think you might want to put some words to it. The moon in it is crap, but I would fix it later. It would be nice to find more artists to contribute to the bestiary too so we would have more variety and a better chance of getting it out.
Sounds great, liked the idea, but I didn't want to write a myth. It sounded all fantasy-like, which was not my thing. I wanted something more than that. I sat on the request for a couple months, occasionally looking at this painting, but not really doing much about it. Of course, the problem was with my own imagination.
That is, until one day when I received the Spring '08 issue of ZYZZYVA in the mail. For some inexplicable reason the cover image kicked everything into gear.
The idea for a story struck me: a soldier in an unnamed war, stuck with other paranoid soldiers, including one, Minks, who is obsessed with this old Celtic myth of the "washer woman." The more war pressed on them, Minks conflates a local village woman into this myth in his head. People start dying off. The narrator's sense of belief is stretched. War's a bitch, especially when let loose on imaginations. I liked it. That was a real story, with a myth embedded that I could make up, but which was peripheral to a larger conflict and more complicated characters.
I wrote the main heart of a draft on the train. Not a complete draft, but the voice, characters, setting, and much of the language.
Here are images of my notebook at the time.
As you can tell, I was working on more than one story simultaneously, which is common.
Then came needing to make sense of the draft, asking some hard questions, fleshing out some character details from looks to quirks to motivation. I wanted to explain the Washer Woman’s myth through her song, which presented the challenge of writing some lyrics and when in the story to reveal them. This became a bit of an obsession, despite that they would be a very small portion of the text. These notes can be found here:
And here are even more notes on the lyrics to the Washer Woman’s song. Since Minks is the focal character, but not the narrator, the lyrics needed to serve as a window into what Minks thinks of this village woman, the one he thinks is the Washer Woman. The last two notes entries finally contain drafts of the lyrics themselves, instead of just notes about them. They were real clunky until the end, but alas, that's editing.
Once I finished a real draft, I sent it to a few friends for feedback, and if you're curious, you can see PDFs of each of their edits below:
Feedback from Marisa Egerstrom
Feedback from Kevin Lottes
Feedback from Eric Myers
This feedback sparked more edits. These focused on revealing the fear of the characters through little scenes, and then shortening the piece up. I killed a superfluous character (Parker), and trimmed the scenes from three deaths to only two. My last little bit of handwritten notes are here:
The final version of the story was accepted for publication by Black Static. Before publication, I sent the story and news to Dave Senecal again, and he created a different version of his original image so that the magazine could print it in black & white with the story, which they did in their May 2008 issue.
And that's that. I tried to capture about as much of the thought process as is possible to capture.
You can read the final publication here via Scribd.com:
Washer Woman
Another talented artist, Tyler Landry also read this story and opted to do his own version, flattering me so. Unfortunately, this is the first time I've had an opportunity to link it to the story itself. Unfortunate because he's a damn fine artist, and in many ways I think he captured the feel of the story even better with this small sketch. Here it is:
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