Think Kindergarten Cop meets 28 Days Later. Think The Goonies meets Evil Dead.
About 4 years ago I had an interesting nightmare about children with the Evil Eye. The nightmare inspired a short horror story entitled Prisoner Of War. On Critters, the story collected about 20 rave reviews (great on the ego, useless as critiques). My wife loved it and wanted a novelization. In fact, I was rather pleased with the story myself. Then I started submitting it to professional and semi-professional markets.
It was first rejected for the Agog! Ripping Reads anthology, whose editor preferred Queen of Diamonds (she later rejected that story as well, but agonized over the decision for a long time, and is generally wonderful, so that’s okay). Then came the SFWA qualifying markets. Dark Wisdom took a (very) extended nibble before finally deciding not to take it. F&SF and Asimov’s declined. So did the non-qualifiers Weird Tales and Interzone.
By then I began to have doubts about the viability of this story. So at the second Villa Diodati workshop, I took the issue (but not the story itself) to the afternoon brainstorming session.
“Listen,” I said, “I have this apocalyptic horror story about a global war between adults and children. It revolves around a group of American soldiers based in Holland, who have retreated to a medieval castle that is basically under siege by mad, raging kids. D’you think this story could be commercially viable?”
“What’s the explanation for the children’s rage?”
“Er… haven’t got one.”
After a couple more sharp questions by my writer friends, and ignorant answers from me, it became clear to me that nothing short of a complete overhaul could rescue the story. So I rashly decided to retire it.
Returning home from the third Villa Diodati Workshop, I came across the file in an obscure corner of my folders, and re-read it on a whim. And it suddenly pained me to see this retired story sit at a window overlooking a fetid pond, drooling and wetting its diapers, with hardly any visitors, and no brain activity of any consequence. So I dropped it in Villa Diodati’s critique folder and asked my co-conspirators if any of them would care to critique it for me.
To make a long story short, fellow workshopper Deanna Carlyle came back with a long critique full of excellent improvement points of pacing, rhythm, and character motivation, but also full of little comments on all the good bits in the story. The reaction of another fellow workshopper, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, was quite unambiguously positive.
So now Prisoner of War has returned from retirement. I have a greatly improved version 2 based on Deanna’s comments, and am planning on including Rochita’s feedback in version 3. Then it’s off again into the world to collect a second round of rejections!
