“Welcome to Dawn Treader Station” - by Sarah Salcedo, first published in Collective Realms Magazine #006
My latest story is out today in Collective Realms Magazine along with artwork I created. UPDATE: The editor-in-chief of the magazine shut down the website without warning in June. There is no online home for the story just now.
This is the first story that I’ve had published from my Fairy Tale Prodigal Project (more about that later). I wrote the first few lines to it in December 2016, “Once upon a time, in a decommissioned space station orbiting a nebula in a remote quadrant of space, there lived a boy named Caspian. He lived alone and unloved, with nothing and no one but new stars to talk to as his station spun through the dark of space. In his heart, Caspian burned as bright as the lights within the nebula. He was an answer to a problem no one had asked him to solve, and his loneliness was a problem with no answer.”
I wouldn’t write the rest of the story until 2018. I knew the beginning, the heart of the story, but I didn’t know the plot. The character roamed the halls of my subconscious for the next year and half before I had a breakthrough, and the story was revised well into 2019. A little less than two years and nineteen rejections later, Caspian is finally ready for the world.
This is story about loneliness, the power of stories to create meaning and purpose, and the strain that parental agendas put on children. Most of all, it’s a story about hope despite darkness. All my stories are, in one way or another.
Thank you to my husband Vasant for reading every draft and being unflaggingly supportive over the last three years. No one in the world supports my writing like Vasant does and it’s a blessing that he isn’t driven crazy by me hovering over him as he reads asking him what part he’s on now over and over and over.
Thanks to Ken Workman for reading this with an engineer’s eye for language that I used to describe certain elements of the story, and to my sister Claire for reading and editing the earliest drafts of this. Thank you to all the other friends and family who read it and begged to get it out there. Caspian is one of my most beloved characters yet and when the publishing road was difficult (one top tier magazine held it on their editorial board’s desk for 322 days before kindly passing with a request to see more from me), it was the fact that my friends and family loved Caspian like I did that convinced me not to be broken by the rejections but to push on.
I hope you enjoy this story.