Top Secret Code Name of Current Project: An Army of Janes
Current Pitch: The opening act of Resident Evil: Afterlife . . . but with less zombies.

Number of Clones: 6
Number of Existential Crises: 3
Use of Profanity: Liberal

Song From Current Project Playlist: “Bodies” – Drowning Pool

Goal Met: Yes.

I’m about 1/3 of the way through re-writing an incredibly soft military SF story, which I’m pretty happy with so far. If I can keep up this pace–which, admittedly, is never a certainty with me–I should be able to finish a workable draft by the end of the Write-a-Thon. But I’ve jinxed myself before, so. We’ll see.

I wrote the first draft of this story back in 2012 while I was at a Clarion West, and it seemed to be the favorite of  the greater majority of my classmates, which was nice because I was deeply anxious about it at the time. It took me forever to write (I had to skip Connie Willis’s reading just to finish it, although at least I’d seen her a few weeks earlier at the Locus Awards) and had an awful tendency to just break down into whole solid pages of exposition. Not to mention that, depending on your point of view, the story is either a charming throwback to retro SF or a worthless sham of science fiction with a complete and utter disregard for how cloning technologies actually work. I figure it’s maybe a little bit of both?

I’ve always had a fondness for this story, but I’ve avoided going back to it for years, probably because I didn’t want to deal with all those mountains of exposition. But lately I’ve felt good about returning to it. I’ve been working on a lot of stories with multiple narrators lately, and while–thank Christ–this story only has one, I feel weirdly like I’m more prepared now to deal with it and its half dozen characters who all have enormously complicated relationships with one another. Maybe I’ve just grown as a writer, or something. One can hope, anyway.

In conclusion, your Random Line Of The Week:

Every Jane would become a dead Jane, in the end.