Short Stories: Right Size, Right Price

Steampunk Santa is a story about how Santa got his first flying sleigh, after he decided to go global in his efforts to bring toys to good little children.  I came up with the idea after my publisher asked on Twitter for holiday stories, and Steampunk stories. I asked her if she wanted steampunk holiday stories and she was perfectly fine with that, if it could be done.  Needless to say, I had an idea for a story within just a few hours.

Also needless to say, the story that I had an idea for that night, is not the story you’re reading today.

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The original idea was very basic, two elves in a contest to see who could build a better sleigh for Santa. Everything the traditional sleigh could do, my hero could do just as well using the new technology. He loses, only because a fog rolls in and he doesn’t have anything that can compete with Rudolph’s nose. “Better luck next year!”

Clearly there are problems with this scenario, even though my wife thought it was pretty funny at the time. As I was writing it, however, those problems forced the story a little sideways as I thought of ways to avoid them. I even did the dreaded research, which also changed the story.

First of all, the scenario described above makes my hero lose the contest. This is bad. Even worse, it’s unavoidable, since we all know Santa doesn’t visit houses in a helicopter or anything like one. An outright win for my hero was out of the question, but did he have to lose?

I discovered, much to my surprise, that the hero didn’t even know about the contest, and that there were even worser villains in the workshop than the supposed villain. This is partly because of the dreaded research, in which I discovered some of the tropes of the genre and found ways to incorporate them into my story.

Some of them needed no research, dreaded or otherwise. I’m a big fan of Girl Genius, the online comic, so things going CLANK was already there. As a fan of badly made SF movies I was of course aware of electro-scans, and of course ether theory was still going strong.  A man I work with gave me a great idea for the propulsion system, which I was unable to work in but had in the back of my mind when writing the rest.

Second of all, I found that I liked my second elf, even though he was theoretically the villain. Almost immediately upon exit he wasn’t even that. As the story progressed, he became at first a fellow traveler, and then my hero’s first friend, as much at home in the world of traditional elfin magic as the hero was with tech.

Third, I started talking in the mellifluous tones of a classic Rankin-Bass narrator, such as Fred Astaire. This story is my first deliberate attempt to write in third-person omniscient, although not much.  I tried to keep the light-hearted spirit of those shows, mainly by talking in squeaky elf voice. It’s like trying to play a sad song on a banjo, it can’t be done. In the same way, you can’t do a dark story in squeaky elf voice.

By changing the contest I changed the ending. This was Santa’s first sleigh they were building. So the whole fog-Rudolph thing had to go. No loss, in my book, I despise the whole Rudolph story. This story, though, now that I think about it…Ahem, well, Rudolph and his nose had to go, which meant I needed a completely new ending.  Hey, maybe I can let the hero win! Sort of.

Stay tuned for the sequel, in which Tomparasil, my hero, finally builds Santa’s new workshop at the North Pole, and discovers all manner of fantastical treasures locked in the ice. Well, maybe not. I did have an idea for the Santa Corps, every elf jack of them striving to earn their whiskers. “You’re either a Santa, or you’re an elf!” I’ll do a story called Old Elf’s War. Well, maybe not.

I gotta say, though, the cover is just spot on.