Falling Up By The Numbers

I've always been a pulp writer at heart, so it was inevitable that I write an honset-to-gosh pulp story. “The Sky Falls Up,” published in the Creature Feature anthology from Raconteur press, goes heavy on the tropes.

It's a hollow earth science-fantasy romance, about a psychic dinosaur civil war and the intrepid movie crew that vows to film it. It is an homage to King Kong and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and it is fair to say it sprang to life the last time I had a hankering to read ERB ... but instead decided to write a tale in that style myself.

I carried the first lines around in my head for months:

“His name was Toma-Rex, and he was raised by psychic dinosaurs at the earth’s core. His friends called him Tom. His driver called him Mr. Rex.”

From there, I stood up an outline in December of 2024, and began work in March of 2025.

My notes don’t contain too many of the usual complaints. Usually I hate my work as I write it, even though it results in stories that get published and that people enjoy. Readers will have to determine if a story I enjoyed writing proves as entertaining for the audience.

The story took a bit more than 45 hours over 28 sessions to complete, which is a lot compared to my crime writing. Part of this is due to length -- at 7400 words, “The Sky Falls Up” is half-again as long as any short story I've written to date. There was quite a bit of world-building, which took some time. I lingered over the text, enjoying the work. And the story was written through some headwinds, from frustrations and rejections in my other writing work, and the contemporaneous death of a pet.

My methodology was the same as my recent work — outline, followed by a “machinegun” first draft with minimal edits, then a clean-sheet rewrite for the second draft. Unusual for me, the story grew 1300 words during the second draft, largely from adding detail to the world.

“The Sky Falls Up” was written for pure love of the genre. I had no intent other than to entertain myself and hopefully my readers, knowing the market for a 7400-word psychic dinosaur romance would be thin! It took 163 days to sell, with ten rejections before I found the delightful Raconteur Press. They had an open call for Ray Harryhausen-style creature stories and if that wasn’t a bolt of fateful lightning, then I don’t know what is.

Raconteur was impressively efficient, sticking to an aggressive schedule that saw them solicit, select, edit, and publish this story collection over a period of just a few months. Sometimes my stories sit in queues for a year or more before being read, so I appreciated their startling speed. The jury is out on whether I'll make much off of this tale, but I didn't strap on my pith helmet and venture into the dinosaur-infested depths of the earth in search of riches. Sometimes a guy just has to write a dinosaur story.

Some notes below:

2/26

Clawed my way to 1K words. What better time to be writing a ridiculous science fantasy pulp adventure short story?

2/27

First draft complete at 6100 words, and I hate it and etc etc … and maybe this one really is worth hating, the last two days struck me as facile and rough … but I will let it sit and then see.

3/7

Took the second draft from the top and revised the first 513 words. They’re good. They were also the best words in the first draft, but it’s better that they’re better.

3/11

Taking it slow (and I don’t mind), nearly to the end of Babs at her mansion, the scene still needs more conflict. A bit shy of 2K words.

3/12

Revisions have taken us into the inner world. I was wise to linger on Babs’ scene because that’s where I understood she is smarter than Toma and an equal partner to this story.

3/13

Still going slow, because for a rare time I am enjoying this process, and liking the story enough I want to keep reading it to myself. Finished the dinosaur attack on the film camp, better delivering the promise of the premise by including dinosaurs in my dinosaur story. I’m sure it is purple prose. Now at 3300 words.

3/29

Got unstuck, started in on the throne room scene. It helped to go back to my outline, and understand this scene needed more conflict. I put Toma and his friends in chains and made the Queen more menacing. Can probably get to the end of this scene now, but it is telling me it needs to end with the Queen commanding Toma to select which of his friends will die, and I don’t know how to get out of that one. A problem for next week.

3/31

A dying dog and this is impossible.

4/2

Trying to get back to something like normal. Soldiered on through the queen’s audience. I might need to treat the rest of this draft as a draft 1.5, go fast, not try to be so perfect while I work out the details of my shifting plot. 4300 words. The story breaks here almost exactly in the middle for a cliffhanger, which would be appropriate if this were a serial, but it also works as genre service.

4/4

A few revisions and incorporating of scattered notes that had suggested themselves overnight. I saw the way to the end at last.

4/5

Vaulted to the end. I’m sure it’s rough and it’s 800 words over my 7.5K target but the story finally exists end-to-end. All blocking and tackling from here.

4/7

Long session to finish it. This is my most “constructed” story but that’s appropriate for a pulp. And now it is out of my system.

The story is available in Creature Feature, in print and electronic form -- and I get a royalty on this one, so please pick up a copy! And if your tastes don't run to dinosaur romance, check out the dozens of clever themes served by Raconteur in their many anthologies ... I can safely say they have something for everyone, however exotic your interests!