Notes About "Near Enough to Home"

As I've mentioned previously, this week's posts include Extras relating to Dixie's Land. Beginning tomorrow I'm publishing "Near Enough to Home," the story that started it all. (Originally I was going to publish the story on Wednesday, but it is sufficiently long that I am publishing it in three parts: tomorrow, Wednesday and Thursday.) So I thought I would provide a bit of background to the story.

"Near Enough to Home" is grounded in an extensive alternate-history timeline I began working on in the early to mid-1990s. I call it the Firebird Timeline, because a novel of that name was the first project I began (that novel remains unfinished to this day, but I continue to entertain hopes). Then, in 1997, Mark Shainblum and John Dupuis announced they would be editing an anthology of alternate-history stories about Canada, to be called Arrowdreams. And I realized my timeline contained a healthy niche into which I could put a story that would simultaneously be an adventure tale and a commentary on this country's relationship with the United States (and with itself).

So I started writing, filling in bits of my Firebird Timeline (FTL) as the plot and characters demanded, and when the story was finished I had a pretty clear sense of how my alternate US Civil War would play out.

I also had what has been my most successful story to date. Mark and John bought "Near Enough to Home" for Arrowdreams, and two years later Glenn Grant and David G. Hartwell included it in their anthology Northern Suns. And then Hartwell placed it in his fourth "Year's Best SF" anthology, which to be honest surprised the hell out of me.

Rereading the story as I typed it up (for some reason I don't seem to have transferred my digital copies onto the current computers) was a bit of a humbling experience. For one thing, I was appalled at the number of times I used the word that in a fashion both unnecessary and disruptive. (I don't think I do this sort of thing anymore.) And for another, I found several instances where the story has since been placed into contradiction with the FTL as it has existed for the past decade or so.

Some authors take advantage of the digital realm to constantly update stories they've written. I don't subscribe to this approach; I prefer to think of a story as being a fixed thing once it has been published. (This rule doesn't apply to something like Dixie's Land, which I continued to edit as I was serializing it—though it certainly applies now that the serialization is complete.)

So as you read the story over, think of it as being as much a time-capsule as it is a part of the world of Dixie's Land.