March 4, 2022

I cannot believe it has already been a year since “Echo” was first published with After Dinner Conversation. Time sure does fly! Like all my work, “Echo” was born from a special set of circumstances—some good, some bad, some silly, and some just plain coincidences. I wrote about some of those things in Fun Fact tweets leading up to the publication of “Echo.” Being tweets, I couldn’t go into much detail, but today, on the one year anniversary of “Echo” being out in the world, let’s take a behind the scenes look at three of those fun facts.

“Echo” Fun Fact #1: It was first inspired by Season 4 of Agents of SHIELD

This is my favorite fun fact about “Echo.” If you know me, then you know that I have been a huge fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe since the first Iron Man. One of my favorite iterations of the MCU was the television series Agents of SHIELD that followed Phil Coulson and his team of SHIELD agents as they battled old enemies and new threats. My favorite season was season 4 where the team is up against a rogue Life Model Decoy (LMD) named Aida. Aida starts creating other LMDs of real people, trapping their minds in an artificial world called the Framework while she works to create a true and powerful body and life for herself. Cool, right! 

If you’ve read “Echo” (and I sure hope you have), you can probably guess what exactly inspired me: Aida. All the LMDs really. Here were these androids who were programmed so well, inhabiting bodies so lifelike, that nobody could tell they weren’t “real.” Not even they knew this about themselves. In the show, it becomes clear quickly that these LMDs are the bad guys, but it got me thinking: what if they weren’t a threat? What if some of them were just…normal? The tension between acting human and being human, between what you know about yourself and what society perceives you to be, the nobody androids, that’s what “Echo” ended up being about.

“Echo” Fun Fact #2: Most of the plotting was done in the hospital

And this is my least favorite fact about “Echo.” Several years back I was in the hospital with a collapsed lung. Not fun. Having a collapsed lung surgically repaired is not a quick and easy process, and in the end it involved me sitting in a hospital bed for 5 days with 2 tubes sticking out of my chest. It left me with a lot of time to think about my situation. There I was, waking up in a hospital room, with artificial bits and bobs sticking out of my body keeping me alive. For 5 days…I was a cyborg. 

Would’ve been cool if it wasn’t so painful and, you know, life threatening, but sitting there in the hospital, my mind was just marinating in science fiction. My brain was taking the horrific things that were happening to me and transforming them into a story. The scene where Martha wakes up in a hospital and realizes she is an android, that came from my time waking up in the hospital to tubes and wires. When Martha stabs herself to see the metal beneath her skin, the horror of that moment came from the sudden disconnect I felt with my own body, how it was suddenly my enemy just like Martha’s new body was once her enemy. 

I will never look back on my time in the hospital with fondness, but it gave me Martha, it gave me “Echo”, and that is one good thing I can and did take away.

“Echo” Fun Fact #3: 3 years, 12,000+ words

I wrote “Echo” as a series of vignettes. I had a Scrivener project for the story and wrote dozens of scenes. Some long, some short, some funny, some sad, some that were key to the plot, some that had absolutely nothing to do with the plot. Then, because it’s me and I’m an overwriter, I also wrote out dozens and dozens of conversations Martha had with her therapist. They talked about anything and everything under the sun. I had oodles of scenes that I puzzled together into some semblance of a story arc. When I finally felt that I had something good, it was sitting at 12,000+ words, the longest short story I had ever written (well, novelette, but you get it). I was so excited. I couldn’t wait for it to be published. I sent it out to some of my favorite magazines…and it was soundly rejected by every single one. 

Novelettes are longer than most magazine limits and a risky chance for someone to take on a no-name writer like me. If I wanted “Echo” published, I’d have to edit it down. So, I did. For 3 long years I worked on this story, cutting scenes, combining scenes, rewriting over and over and over again. My editor, Corrine, was a huge help to me during this time. I don’t even know how many versions she ended up reading. I eventually got it down to under 7,500 words, the cap for most short story magazines. I sent it out again…and it was rejected again. 

I was devastated. I thought I’d have to shelve this story, chalk it up to more “experience”, and let it go unread. My most ambitious project, resulting in nothing. Then, my brother introduced me to After Dinner Conversation. I hadn’t planned on sending “Echo” to them. I thought the magazine was interesting, and I enjoyed reading it. My brother encouraged me to submit anyway, so I did, and in October of 2020, 3 years after it first entered my brain, “Echo” had found a home. 

“Echo” went on to be published in the March 2021 issue of After Dinner Conversation, the Season 4 Anthology of After Dinner Conversation, and podcasted for discussion by the ADC team. And I’m not done with it yet. I am so proud of the work I did on “Echo”, how much I had to overcome while I wrote and edited, and I want to share this story with as many people as possible. I hope to see “Echo” reprinted in other magazines for new readers to engage with and discuss. 

In “Echo”, Martha dies and lives on as an android. I want “Echo” to live on, too.

Get access to read “Echo” HERE