(Cross posted from my own blog yesterday) Monday, issue 23 of the Stonecoast Review went live, with a Zoom call to promote it. As my short story “Bleeding Blue” is part of the issue, I attended and gave a three-minute reading. Now it’s time to tell you how the story came about.
Almost a decade ago I read History in Three Keys about the Boxer Rebellion and later interpretations of it. Author Peter Cohen says the three keys are Experience (what people at the time think of what’s happening), Event (historians reconstructing how one experience led to another and how it all fit together) and the Myth with which later generations interpret events. None of which is relevant to my story but it’s an interesting book so I thought I’d mention it. The thing is, Cohen mentioned that along with believing they had bulletproof magic, the Boxers had a string of explanations why it didn’t work. One of them was that the presence of menstruating women canceled their magic.
Hmm, I thought … what if menstruating women did cancel out magic?
This floated around in the back of my mind for a long while, with lurid images of women simply smearing menstrual blood on things to dispel enchantments. Which is something some writers could have pulled off, perhaps, but not me. When I finally set down to write it, my concept was a little less in-your-face: women having their period neutralize magic by touch. That’s all it took. No blood splatters.
The original vague concept of a career cop protagonist (like the one on the cove above, drawn by John F. Rosenberger) faded in favor of a POV character who’s not career law enforcement, she’s a draftee. As I worked it out, pre-menopausal woman go through a draft lottery every month. Those who get a low number spend the three days of your period (I know periods aren’t always three days but the law says otherwise) working with cops, firefighters or the National Guard. Magic, I decided, began working again when the millennium turned. As it spread, society discovered menstruating women could neutralize it. The initial response — let’s make them all isolate themselves when they’re bleeding! — got shot down in a wave of protests and multiple misogynist politicians losing their position. Then came the idea of putting their power to use.
I soon conceived my protagonist, Janice, a zookeeper who works with raptors. I got the supporting cast: Moxon, the misogynist giving her orders and two female cops currently on “shield duty.” Esquivel is a Latina who normally works cybercrime; Drummond’s on a SWAT team.
Then all that remained was the easy task of writing it (peals of derisive laughter, Bruce!). I wanted Janice to handle several different cases but I had to figure out how exactly the police would use her, what might go wrong and what kind of case would provide the climax. That took writing, rewriting, and then rewriting some more. The individual cases had to be interesting, there had to be a logical reason why a shield was on the job, and I wanted to explore the draft system. I could hand-wave some details by making it a big kluge. Nobody wants to spend money training women who might not get called up for years; when they are called up, there’s no time to train them. That seemed plausible, and it justified Janice being clueless. And yes, it has led to bad outcomes, though not in this story. 
Finally I finished it. Then I shopped it around, getting rejection after rejection. Finally I sent it to Stonecoast and got the green light. My editor had a couple of changes she wanted me to make for clarity, such as giving a better sense of the magic rules up front. Happily the changes were simple to make and didn’t turn into info-dumps, so yay!
You can order a copy from the magazine’s website, though this issue isn’t up there yet. Gotham Central cover by Michael Lark.
