Buster By The Numbers

“Shamus & Buster” is my third story for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, though I never imagined it would find a home there. It was written in the Fall of 2023 for a pair of open calls for stories around familiars or magical pets, but didn't sell to either market. Because this story had a slight fantasy element, I tried some markets on the science fiction and fantasy side where I normally do not submit, also without success.

Turns out my home was at EQMM, and it was an emotional homecoming. Janet Hutchings told me she was buying the story when I visited New York for the Edgars and the Dell Magazines reception, and looking back at the timeline, this may have been one of the final stories she bought before her well-earned retirement after 33 years helming Queen. And the story was a homecoming for me, too, finding the first print home for characters I've known for years, and a cat I've missed for decades.

My success has been in short stories, but I aspire to be a novelist, and since 2017 (and beginning in earnest in 2022), I've wrestled with my first book. Gumshoe Frankenstein is a 69K-word 1950s Hollywood detective noir, where the P.I. is a Frankenstein monster. The manuscript earned a completion grant from the Speculative Literature Foundation in 2024, and fingers-crossed-don't-jinx-it I hope to have positive news about this book before the end of the year.

I write short stories during breaks on my novel, and “Shamus & Buster” sprang from one of those gaps. It was October of 2023 and I'd just come off of eighty hours of copy editing on Gumshoe. I needed a change of pace and most of all I needed to write something instead of grinding down existing text for the hundreth time. But I had Gumshoe on the brain, and just a few hours into “Shamus & Buster” I understood that the cops in my 1950s noir cat detective story had wandered in from my 1950s noir Frankenstein story.

Seems natural, but it was a surprise to me, and a welcome one. Seeing Stubbs and Spokane was like beloved actors popping up on the movie screen, a nod to studio system days when guys like William Bendix and Allan Ladd would get whistled up out of central casting. They were supporting characters in the novel, but they still made me feel at home in this new short story, as I already understood their psychologies and drives. I couldn't have made my tight deadline without those guys.

And I couldn't have made it without the cats, either.

I've had cats all my life, but not while writing this story. Mourning the recent loss of one of them, an all-timer, drove the depiction of Buster's grief. He's lost his human and can't bear to go through it again with someone else -- he's done, and so was I. The story is about cops and thugs and dames and jewel thieves, but it's really about loss and I was feeling it when I wrote this story. Still am.

Living with cats and observing them all my life gave me plenty to put on the page. This isn't a talking cat story. Buster thinks, and he reasons, but mostly he feels things and acts like a cat -- distractable, at war with his nature, mystified by the human world, clinging to his privacy and dignity in undignified situations. But Buster is also soulful and tough, characteristics of a one-eyed stray that came to us thirty years ago and stayed with us for ten before a kingly death, at home and on his own terms, surrounded by the family that loved him. Haven't gotten over him, either. Never will.

So when Janet bought this story, it was special for me -- a homecoming. Those lost cats had a home. Characters from this novel that's kicked my ass for years would be in print at last.

Meant everything to me.

The story took 21.5 hours across ten days to complete -- fast for me, in terms of days if not hours. Some of my production notes:

10/7

Got my outline, character sketches, realized that Spokane and Stubbs were in this story. 675 words. Will have to do this fast if I am going to make the deadline.

10/8

Trying to get a sloppy but complete first draft done by tomorrow, then if anything is there I can spend a day shaping it. 3K words and it is probably crap but keep going. Target is 5K, firm.

10/10

Utter shit.

10/11

Got to the end of a first draft, without revising and god help us but the last couple thousand words are crap. Now to read and revise as I go and see if I’ve wasted my last ten hours on this thing.

10/12

Started revision, first eight pages. Touch and go for deadline.

10/13

Late start but got on a roll. Might make it tomorrow. Maybe.

10/14

Made it. Four days from utter shit to something I like. Feel like I got some of my mojo back from the latest Gumshoe Frankenstein edit request. Tomorrow I take off.

Looking back over these I see two trends, one old, and one new.

The old trend -- deciding mid-story that it was utter shit. This always happens.

The new trend -- the deadline pushed me to quickly complete an end-to-end draft, before going back to revise. I used to poke along, measuring time and not word rate, revising as I went and taking a long time to get anywhere. With this story I had to embrace a sloppy first draft, where the story told me what it was going to be, before I could do the shaping I used to do as I went. This method has helped me substantially improve my output, to the point where I was able to write a 100K+ word first draft of a new novel in 87 days, a volume that was unthinkable when I was getting started.

That's one more thing I owe to the magic of cats. Thanks, Buster!

(And thanks for reading).