When I began writing The Surrogates, my thought was to make the future world of the story as much like the present as possible. I wanted only one thing to be different from the here and now: the existence of surrogate technology. By changing a single thing and keeping everything else the same, I figured it would allow me to zero in on the effect that a single change would have on society at large—on personal relationships, public health, race and gender relations, etc. I didn’t want to introduce flying cars and teleportation and interstellar travel for fear that surrogates would get lost amidst all of the other sci-fi noise. So the cars in the story are pretty much still cars, and transportation hasn’t evolved much beyond an elaborate conveyor-belt system in the skywalks above the streets (Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta has a similar system, though it’s at ground level). Maybe I’m as tidy on the page as I am in life, and I was worried about dealing with too much narrative clutter. Whatever the reason, the one-note approach seems to serve The Surrogates well.

Then I read something like Fluorescent Black by MF Wilson and Nathan Fox, and I wonder what I was so afraid of.

Set in the year 2085, Fluorescent Black is about a future where genetic engineering has been taken to the extreme. When I say everything in the future setting of the story is different from the present, I mean everything: the people (there are two separate species of human), the places, the culture . . . heck, even the plants and mosquitoes are different. Still no teleportation or interstellar travel, but pretty much everything else is changed. It’s handled so expertly by Wilson and Fox, however, that the cacophony of sci-fi bells and whistles I was worried about when writing The Surrogates never comes to pass. Instead, the book is like an orchestra of speculative storytelling. Which is to say that none of the elements feel out of place. At no time did I encounter something different and think that it was changed merely for shock value or solely because the creators thought it would be cool. I can’t recommend it enough (though it’s pretty graphic, so it’s not for kiddies).

Do I have a Fluorescent Black in my future? It’s hard to say. After all, as a kid I once washed my basketball in the tub because I didn’t want it to be dirty, so to say that I like things orderly is an understatement. Maybe that’s what I enjoyed Fluorescent Black so much, because I see something in it that I find lacking in my own writing.

Let’s just say I’m a persistent (some might say pathological) reviser.  For me, the most agonizing experience is when a book arrives fresh from the printer, I sit down to read it for the first time in completed form . . . and I notice a new crop of things about the story that I’d like to change.  I’m not alone in this writer’s hell: In his essay “Tennessee Williams: Someone to Laugh at the Squares With,” Gore Vidal recalls seeing Williams revise a story that had already seen print.  When Vidal asked why he was continuing to polish a published piece, Williams replied, “Well, obviously it’s not finished.”  Tennessee, I feel your pain.

The Surrogates was well into production (the third issue was in print, and the fourth was going to the printer) when it occurred to me that I wanted to rewrite the dialogue in one of the book’s pivotal scenes.  In the original draft of the script, SteepleJack’s motive for wanting to reboot society never sat well with me.  Here’s how the dialogue to Page 108, Panels 3-6 read at the time:

Panel 3.                            

HARVEY:  A SURROGATE WORLD?

WELCH:  THAT’S RIGHT.  AT VSI, OUR COMMITMENT HAS ALWAYS BEEN TO PROVIDE A SEAMLESS LIVING EXPERIENCE FOR EVERYONE.

Panel 4.

WELCH:  TO THAT END, WE’VE DEVELOPED A NEW SYSTEM OF MANUFACTURING THAT WILL NOT ONLY REDUCE THE PRODUCTION TIME PER UNIT, BUT MINIMIZE COSTS AS WELL.

Panel 5.

WELCH:  VSI ALREADY HAS A FOOTHOLD IN OTHER AFFLUENT COUNTRIES, BUT MORE AFFORDABLE MODELS AND THE CAPACITY TO MEET WITH INCREASED DEMAND WILL ALLOW US TO PENETRATE NEARLY ALL OF THE OVERSEAS MARKETS.

Panel 6.

WELCH:  THE NECESSARY OVERHAUL OF OUR PRODUCTION FACILITIES WILL BE COMPLETED IN TWO MONTHS.  INTERNATIONAL ORDERS ARE ALREADY POURING IN.

*yawn*  Besides being boring, there wasn’t enough was at stake—if nearly every adult in America is already operating a surrogate, then why would the sudden use of the technology in some faraway land push SteepleJack over the edge?

I was having dinner with my brother one night, telling him that I was feeling more than a little dejected that this key element of the book’s plot wasn’t pulling its narrative weight.  I’ve no idea how or where it came from, but suddenly it dawned on me that a much stronger motive would be the impending release of a line of surrogate units targeted specifically at kids.  I’d already laid the foundation for the change in the mock journalism article at the end of Chapter 3, which mentioned the murder of a homeless man by three surrogate-using teens. 

I emailed Brett Weldele a list of edits, and the changes were made just a few days before we sent the book to the printer:

With the addition of a few minor adjustments to the dialogue in Chapter 5, the fix was in.  The eleventh-hour revising ultimately led to the driving force behind Flesh and Bone and crystallized the overarching theme of the entire Surrogates trilogy: the impact of our technological choices on future generations.  Small number of words, big difference.

(“Tennessee Williams: Someone to Laugh at the Squares With” and countless other essays can be found in Vidal’s United States: Essays 1952-1992.  I highly recommend it.)

Having spent seven years studying English and Creative Writing at the university level, I’m familiar with what scholars and professors refer to as “literary criticism,” the process of analyzing literary works to discern what the writer was “really trying to say.”  It’s a common assignment, particularly in graduate school: Examine [insert novel, short story, play, etc. here] and write a [insert page requirement here] paper about [insert topic of the professor’s (or, if you’re lucky, your own) choosing here].  The idea isn’t without merit, as all of that reading and analyzing forces you to think about a story beyond its plot.

I know of at least three colleges that have taught The Surrogates in their classes, so surely a paper or two has been written about it.  I wonder if anyone studying the text has picked up on the name of the company that manufactures surrogates, Virtual Self, Inc., and how the acronym (VSI) alludes to the concept of surrogate technology putting users at war with their identity (VSI = versus I = versus the self).  It’s a logical assumption to make, that while creating a story billed as “a commentary on identity,” the writer would employ such a clever technique.

It’s also a complete coincidence.  It was only a few months ago that I realized the correlation, and I couldn’t help but laugh.  Looking back on my past attempts at criticism, I wonder in how many instances I attributed a nuance of language to James Fennimore Cooper’s (or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, or Ernest Hemingway’s . . .) clear intent to [insert bold statement here], when really no such intent existed.  Sometimes the name of a fictional company is merely the result of the writer not really being good at naming things, so he took an adjective and a noun that summed up the company’s product, slapped “Inc.” on the end of it, and got on with his life (imagine Henry Ford naming his company Consumer Automobiles, Inc., and you’ve got the general idea).       

Years ago I saw a show on Book TV, during which historian Stephen E. Ambrose moderated a discussion between Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut.  During the Q&A segment, a woman from the audience stepped to the microphone and asked Vonnegut if a particular character from one his novels (I believe it was Bluebeard) was meant as a commentary on feminism, and figuring the answer to be foregone, praised him for his remarkable insight (or something to that effect—the actual inquiry was quite long and detailed, the sort of thing that I imagine took the woman some time to come up with, and I don’t remember it all). 

Vonnegut replied tersely that he had no memory of the character in question.

The supplemental material that ends each chapter of The Surrogates is a key part of the book (at some point, I’ll get around to explaining how they came to be).  I’d always wanted to write an editorial page where fictional columnists of different viewpoints would debate each other on the surrogate question, so when it came time to script Flesh and Bone, I made use of the opportunity.  As with the other supplements, I intended to handle all of the writing, but no editorial page—present or future—would be complete without an editorial cartoon.  To say I’m inept at drawing is an understatement, so what was I to do?

Since The Surrogates is set in a future version of Atlanta, I decided on a whim to email Mike Luckovich, the editorial cartoonist on staff at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with Mike, he’s a multiple Pulitzer Prize winner, and his cartoons are syndicated in over 150 newspapers.  He’s also the creator of “The Statue of Liberty Weeps,” one of the most recognizable post-9/11 images.  In other words, I had no business emailing this guy (whom I’d never met) and asking him to put ink to paper for my silly little sci-fi story.    

To my complete dismay, Mike answered my email and agreed to take me up on the offer.  I’d already thought of a concept (Husband and Wife stand over the family dog, lounging in his doggie bed.  The dog wears a headset, the wires connected to a robo-doggie, which stands alertly beside him.  Husband says to Wife, “Now he can take himself for a walk.”), but I wanted to give Mike the freedom to come up with his own if he chose to do so.  I sent him a copy of The Surrogates, and he responded with the cartoon that now appears on Page 33 of Flesh and Bone.  To date, Mike’s are the only words in the history of The Surrogates books that I didn’t write myself.  He was great to work with, and I’ll always be humbled that he took the time.  He’s an Atlanta institution, so to have him appear in the pages of Flesh and Bone makes the book feel like home.

(Note: The image at the top of this post is the set-up dialogue for Mike’s cartoon.  To read the punch line and see the full image, you’ll have to look in the printed book.  I’m not sure how Mike would feel about posting the whole thing online, and I don’t want to overstep.)

As part of the behind-the-scenes material at the end of the collected edition of The Surrogates, we included a deleted scene that shows Harvey attempting to negotiate a tryst with a futuristic lady of the night (Pages 186-189, for those following along at home).  For reasons I explain in those pages, the scene clearly wasn’t working in its original draft, but the basic idea—showing what the world’s oldest profession would look like in an age of surrogates—appealed to me.  Prostitutes are a staple of detective stories, and I wanted to put my own spin on the concept.    

Just because an idea isn’t working at the moment, that doesn’t mean it should be discarded completely.  Top Shelf editor Chris Staros has a useful analogy: abandoned ideas are like old, junk cars in the backyard that you can go to for spare parts when needed.  When it came time to write Flesh and Bone, I needed a scene that would take Harvey from A to B, from the start of his investigation to his first big clue.  So I picked through the wrecks out back and found the right part for the job. 

It occurred to me that I could take the premise of the deleted scene and work it into the new book in a way that was more consistent with Harvey as a character (the evolved version appears on Pages 50-55).  Now, instead of him visiting the prostitute in search of companionship, he questions her at her place of business, the fictional brothel Gandy Land, and comes away with a key piece of information to keep the plot moving forward.  Same effect—giving the reader a glimpse at the seedier side of surrogacy—but used in a way that serves the story.    

I’ve only been writing comics since 2002, but there’s already quite a collection of junkers cluttering the lawn.  No telling how many will offer up roadworthy parts, or how many will rust away to nothing . . . 

(Side Note: While Page 50 of Flesh and Bone shows the neon sign hanging outside Gandy Land, the logo and tagline at the top of this post never appear in the book.  They were created for a limited run of t-shirts I gave away to friends.  Thanks to J Chris Campbell for the design and Rob Ullman for the silhouette.  Nobody draws the ladies like Ullman.)

I’m often asked about the writing process and what goes into the creation of a book.  As the third of four recurring features on this website, (un)scripted will shed light on what happens during gestation, all of the little incidents and surprises that coax a story into being.  The story behind the story, so to speak.                                                   

All stories have a beginning, and The Surrogates was no different.  Here’s the test page submitted by Brett Weldele back in 2003, the first page of art ever drawn from one of my scripts (with a pair of Brett’s early coloring schemes at the bottom):

From all the pages of story (the entire script was finished before Top Shelf began searching for an artist), Brett selected this to be his audition.  At first glance it may seem an odd choice for a sci-fi/detective story—why not draw an action sequence, or at least a page that features SteepleJack, the story’s most visually striking character?  Those would’ve been more obvious submissions, but I was thrilled to see this, a subtler moment that reveals something about the relationship between two characters.  He had no way of knowing it at the time, but Brett had picked one of my favorite scenes in the book.  Coincidence?

During the course of my creative writing education in college and grad school, the difference between “genre” and “literary” fiction was often cited as being that the former is plot-centered, while the latter is character-centered.  Oversimplified definitions to be sure, but not completely valueless in the sense that strong characters are what make for a good story.  When you get down to it, there are a finite number of plots out there in the ether (war, romance, heist, etc.), but there are an infinite number of character possibilities.  Whether I succeed or fail is for others to judge, but I always try to ground my stories in character.

So for Brett to pick this page (Page 24 of the collected edition, for those following along at home) as his first to draw suggested something greater than coincidence was at work—it signaled that he had the same affinity for character that I do.  It’s one of the reasons (his unique talent being another, his ability to establish mood through color being yet another . . . ) that I believed from the start he was the perfect artist for the book.  And he has proved himself to be every step of the way.