Seven Floors, Long Steps to Completion

My short story taking place in Hawaii has finally come out. In fact, two went live at the same time. It seems to be the trend for my writing year of 2019. "Seven Floors" and "Moon Dancer"; "Coffin Walker" and "The Cowboy Cabin"; "I See You" and "Kittylyn." There's a few more months left in the year, so let's see what happens.

"Seven Floors" is about a young Hawaiian woman who accidentally unleashes an ancient monster (one of my own making) in the building where she lives and works as a janitor. She has to get rid of it before it eats her.

My idea for the story was actually inspired by a movie called "The Raid." It's a cool martial arts foreign film about policemen who raid a tall building trying to capture a crime boss, so it's kind of like "Dredd."  A severely ill woman made a brief cameo and I fixated on her. What if her husband never came and she had to get out by herself with that war going on in the halls? She lives like on the 30th story.

"Seven Floors" has nothing to do with martial arts or crime. I thought of putting the story in Phoenix, but I was tired of writing about Arizona. I wanted to go somewhere else. All this time I'd been giving nods to my American Indian side. What about my mom's side? Let's put the story in Hawaii, in the city where she used to live.

The story spilled from my fingers and was finished in a couple of days. I drew out my monster on a piece of paper, because I didn't know what I wanted. Sometimes when I do that, creatures appear. They must lurk in my subconscious.

Now it was time to add in pigin English. While I can understand it, because my mom speaks it at home, I couldn't write it.

We called up my grandparents and they collaborated with me on the pigin English. Line by line, my mom and I transformed the dialogue from standard English to pigin. With a Hawaiian joke book on hand for the spelling, we listened to comedians from Hawaii to get my mom in the mood for pigin. Being on the mainland as long as my mom has can dampen the pigin English, but it never goes away. It just sleeps until it's called out.

At the time, my friend wrote a guest blog post on dialect. She made the point that if I write HOW it's spoken, and not necessarily how it SOUNDS, that people will hear it in their head, but can easily read it. After I read through the post, I stared at my MS in rising horror. I'd written the words how they sounded, and realized I had problems reading it. Read Scarlett's post here because it saved my life.

Now I had a new challenge: making proper spelling without destroying the pigin. Talk about pain and suffering. As the hours ticked away, I slowly turned pigin into a readable thing for those outside of Hawaii. I hope. I had a better time myself, anyway.

And after all that work, editor after editor said no. One even dissed on my pigin English. She wasn't from Hawaii, had never been there, and talked about the place like it was some savage mysterious land. Magazines screaming for ethnic variety shot my story down. Magazines in dire need of monsters told me to get lost.

I write down where I send my stories to. "Seven Floors" was on its third page. My internet was going at a snail pace and on top of it, internet rates went up. Agh!

I ran to the library, USB in hand. I had one hour before the computer kicked me off. Like mad, I sent off every story that remotely matched each magazine I pulled up. When Schlock! Magazine appeared, I stared at the stories ready to go and decided "Seven Floors." What do I have to lose?

Two weeks later I got an acceptance letter.

It was a long, tedious ride. Kind of like what Kaipo suffered as she made her way down the seven stories with the ravenous monster on her heels.

Read "Seven Floors" for free here.