Unsettling Futures - Patience Lake is being adapted!
Welcome to this All Self-Promotion Edition of Unsettling Futures!
So the big news is that there's an audio drama podcast coming out soon, and it's based on a story I wrote!
Broken Road, (which you can already subscribe to on your podcast app of choice, hint hint) is based on Patience Lake, a short story that appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction back in 2016, and the following year was picked by the late, great Gardner Dozois to be in The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection.
This is pretty special, because it's the first* professional adaptation of anything I've written.
I don't really know what it's going to be like – it sounds like there's some areas that line up very much with the plot and themes of Patience Lake, and I suspect there will be some significant differences from what I wrote, too.
And you know what? That's fine.
I kind of understand writers who treat their work like it's their baby, and they want to shepherd it through the adaptation process and make it true to their vision, and all of that.
But… I really don't worry about that at all. The story is the story, and it always will be. The adaptation will be its own animal, as adaptations must be. And that's interesting to me; I'm intrigued to see what someone else does with my idea, how they change it, and what they find in it, what they add to it.
So I'll be listening along as the episodes come out, discovering a new version of the story.
The only other thing I have to say is that Patience Lake is pretty special to me.
I sold a pair of stories, my first sales, back in the mid-aughts, to SciFiction. (Yeah, a long time ago, if you remember SciFiction.) And then I didn't sell anything for eleven years. For a couple of those years, I wasn't even writing – some of it was being distracted by other things in life, many of them worthwhile, but there was also a lot of inertia, laziness, general faffing about.
In 2013, I realized that I wouldn't be satisfied with myself if I didn't get back to writing, get back to trying to get published again. I had sold stories, I knew it was possible. So I buckled down, I worked on writing regularly. And Patience Lake wasn't the first short story to come out of that effort, but it was the best one, the one I knew had a good chance. Even so, when I got the acceptance from Sheila Williams at Asimov's, I darn near had to be pried off the ceiling. Same when I got an email from Gardner Dozois, right out of the blue, saying he was considering it for one of his anthologies. And from there, it found its way into the hands of the folks at Recursor who bought the option and made Broken Road.
And if you're curious, I'm including the story's opening below. I hope it grabs you, and I hope you like the adaptation, too.
Patience Lake
His right knee gave out thirty clicks outside of Saskatoon. He pitched forward onto the gravel shoulder of the Five, plastic pads on his hands sending flashes of PAIN-PAIN-PAIN while red SEEK REPAIR messages flared in the corners of his visual field. He’d been half-asleep, walking on auto, letting GPS and inertial guidance take him the last few dozen klicks, after the farm kids who’d let him ride in their pickup had turned north.
He pushed himself up, flexed the left knee, his elbows. None of the plastic casings around his limbs seemed to have cracked. He’d caught himself, woken up before faceplanting. He imagined scratching his eyes on the gravel, leaving permanent gouges in the plastic lenses, and shuddered.
He stood, balancing his weight on his left leg and swinging the right, gingerly. The knee made a grinding noise, and he felt metal scrape metal, right up through the bone-and-metal socket of his hip. The joint didn’t want to swing too far backward, just a couple of degrees. Forward was fine, but it was loose, something in there stripped and gone. He locked the knee and put some weight on it. It held.
That was something, he thought.
GPS said he was close. There’d be a shelter in the city, or at least a recyc bin full of cardboard, an abandoned car, maybe a squat where he could spend the night. If he could get there. He looked back over his shoulder down the road. It was after four, prairie sky blue and clear. He had hours of daylight left. His cooling fan hummed, setting his shirt front to fluttering.
He took a step, flinging his right leg out from his hip, jamming the heel of his battered boot into the gravel, taking a hopping step. Another. Another.
Slow, but he could do it. Get to town. Maybe even find someone who would fix his knee, for what amounted to no money. His disability check would come through in a couple of weeks. He just had to keep moving. One step at a time.
He stuck his thumb out every time he heard the rush of a truck, but nothing passed him with a human inside.
End Notes
*Technically, my first-ever story, The Anatomist's Apprentice, was adapted by some college kids into a short black and white silent film for their class. They sent me the DVD, it was cool!