First Fiction Publication
The Story Behind the Story
It took a long time and an uncounted number of rejection slips, but Gray's short story, "The Rocket Seamstress" finally came out in print. It appeared in Issue 12 of Zahir, a literary journal of speculative fiction.
Gray wrote the first draft of this story when he was at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan back in December of 2002. He was inspired by watching a little white-haired lady stitch an insulating blanket around the adapter that would mate the Nimiq-2 satellite to the Proton rocket. He even sent an early draft to the corporate headquartes of International Launch Services so they could verify that the stitchery process wasn't proprietary to Khrunichev, the Russian company that made the rocket.
The history of the story after that was a little circuitous. Since he was still on active duty and had written it based on things he observed on the job, the Air Force had to approve the story for public release--which it did on February 11, 2003, under case number 03-0059. He sent the story out a few times and collected some rejection slips, but it turned out that wasn't the final version.
Gray sent the first page of the story in with his application to Orson Scott Card's 2003 Literary Boot Camp, but he wasn't accepted to the class. So he enrolled in the 2-day Writing Workshop, during which he learned quite a few things he'd done wrong in the story. As he tried to fix the problems, he wrote another story opening for Boot Camp and was accepted in 2004. During the week-long course, he learned even more about mistakes he'd made in the seamstress story. After Boot Camp was over, some of his fellow alumni helped him further refine the story and correct his errors. And after a few more rejections, finally the folks at Zahir found something in it they liked.
Here's the story opening:
Jelena Olenek looked up from embroidering flowers in the hem of her expected grandchild's christening gown. Outside the window of her tiny apartment, cleansing snow covered Kazakhstan's over-tracked, ice-hardened, sun-baked wastes. Hoarfrost coated the few bare, scrawny trees near the building. The scene looked almost magical.
But the magic was inside, not outside. It was in her body and her fingers: magic that made metal fly, kept wives and husbands faithful, gave children health. Magic she had already sewn into the christening gown. Magic she hated, only because of what it could have done: could have saved her Lev from fire and death, if not for her failure.
You may still be able to order a copy of Issue 12 from the Zahir web site. Another way to read the whole story is to include it in your made-to-order anthology produced through AnthologyBuilder.