Behind the Story: Golden Cuckoo

I have a collection of short stories, Attack on Boredom, coming out on April 18, 2025. As part of the lead-up to that, I'm posting about some of the stories in the collection. This article addresses the opening story of the collection: Golden Cuckoo.
 
Periodically in America, the subject of abortion comes to the fore. When the US Supreme Court shot down Roe vs. Wade, we were then bombarded by news stories of how each state was exercising its individual power to control access to reproductive health services. So, for the last several years, it's been difficult to avoid the topic.
 
Before I get into it, let me preface this by saying this started as a thought experiment with an eye to writing a story. I wasn't trying to advocate any position with this story; it's speculative fiction. Please don't assume you know my political or philosophical position on abortion based on this story. You don't. In fact, it's a little unconventional. All I'm willing to say publically is that no woman ever aborted any pregnancy that I provided gametes for.
 
One of the things that the anti-abortion crowd would bring up was: Why does the father have no say? Emotionally, my reaction was always along the lines of: Because he doesn't have to gestate it and bear it. He gets to have fun for a few minutes and that should give him the authority to force her to nine months of life-risking pregnancy followed by eighteen years of parental obligation? It felt lopsided to me. Yeah, if he's got resources and/or a good income, a woman can go after him for support, but I think there are plenty of women who will tell you the courts don't solve the problem for the mother.
 
But it raised a serious question.  So, if you were going to empower a man to force a woman to bear a child, what would you demand of that man? Men are famous for fathering a lot more children than they take responsibility for, so the basic human rights angle was out the window for a lot of people. The idea that a man has some rights in the matter isn't ridiculous, but to just force a woman to bear his child "because I say so" was weak to me. Since we were talking about bringing a child into the world and being responsible for raising it for at least eighteen years, empty words weren't enough for my speculating mind. I figured, if you're going to make such an enormous enforcement by law, you should demand an enormous commitment. Coming some years after "A Handmaiden's Tale" had its popular TV production, I was also determined not to go to the ludicrous extreme of that show wherein women lose all agency.
 
That mass of reproductive stuff was the seed of this story.
 
Since the source of a lot of terminated pregnancies starts with people having hookups in bars, that got me thinking about dating. How could the future improve the hookup? And I wanted it to be about a smart, empowered woman making a hookup. She would be responsible. She would want a few boxes ticked before jumping into bed with a man. But that's so awkward. There ought to be an app for that, right? So I invented CompatiApp. It would handle all those awkward questions that responsible people would be concerned about.
 
Excited, I wrote the opening CompatiApp scene. I didn't have any idea of what I would do with that scene, but I thought it was so cool that I got excited about the story. My vague musing was starting to get some traction.
 
I never actually defined exactly what the man would be on the hook for financially. Vaguely speaking, I'd imagined it was some kind of trust or annuity that would amount to money that very few people had. For the purposes of the story, the number didn't matter, just that it was so big that it would be out of reach for ninety-nine percent of men out there.
 
After the CompatiApp scene, that led me to the doctor's office scene. I needed the FMC to get pregnant to build a story around it, so I wondered how that interaction would look in the future. It was the perfect scene in that it made functional sense and it was a perfect way to drop in exposition about the law and the technology. Also, getting the FMC to the doctor gave me great characterization opportunities. I really got into her head while she was sitting there waiting for her pregnancy test.
 
So by this point, I thought I had a brewing murder mystery for which I had just laid the groundwork. I wrote the lawyer contact scene, but then I was sort of stuck. Not knowing where to go on the murder proper, I focused on Creches. While the FMC is in the doctor's waiting room, she hears an ad for CrecheCert which was simply more interesting to me than killing a rich guy, so I pursued it. What would that look like?
 
That led me to write a home-inspection scene which I later deleted. My thinking was that if you are going to have parental certifications, then that would include a home inspection. It was a useful exercise in running my brain through some scenarios, but for this story, I came to see that scene as unnecessary. Our empowered, single, pregnant female main character wouldn't be raising her child at home. She'd be relying on the childcare of the future which is essentially what I wrote the Creches to be.
 
At that point, I still only had pieces of the story. I started with law, went to CompatiApp, found Cheryl as a character, and put her in a bind. So there was tech, culture, and a character, but as for an actual story, I had a mess, a promising mess.
 
Since I was otherwise stuck and I knew I needed the baby born, I wrote the birthing scene. Imagining the near future, I thought that the episiotomy was a perfect application for nanites because it is a very simple application. It seemed like a nice half-step into the technological future, a plausible application of nanites. More importantly, those nanites inspired the murder weapon. That led me to write an ending murder scene.
 
At that point, I had a "story space" and a through line. You still wouldn't recognize it as the final story, but I had what's essentially a literary prototype of the story. The nice thing about prototypes is that even bad prototypes get good feedback. I needed intellectual and emotional engagement from my reader. Dry musings about future law and tech wouldn't ever cut it. People needed to feel for the characters and be interested in the story. Then I needed to layer those pieces to give the piece a sense of pace, of escalating to an exciting conclusion.
 
If I made Cheryl into the cliché of womanly competence--a corporate mega-bitch--it'd be hard to wring any pathos out of her. She needed to be sympathetic and likable. She needed to become the story because this thing became essentially a character study of her that just happened to be wrapped in a plot. Likewise, I didn't want to make this into a political screed. I didn't want to tip the scales in any political direction. I wanted her confusion and frustration to engender sympathy.
 
With all my stories, once I get to what I think is my best swipe at the story, I get some friends to critique it. That's always an eye-opener. No matter how long I've been writing, I can never anticipate where a reader will take the prose. I received a lot of notes on motivation and emotional reactions. It was pretty normal stuff. I was most excited about what I didn't receive: complaints from women critters about the pregnancy and birth aspects of the story. As a man writing about the most feminine of acts, I was very concerned about getting it wrong.
 
When I got around to submitting it, it got strong reactions. I got personal responses from two of the three of the sci-fi trimurty. Both were rejections, but my favorite editor told me that Cheryl was too much of a camera; she lacked agency. I mostly disagreed but did make some light revisions to address that. And for those of you wondering how I could be excited about rejections, it was that the rejections were personal responses directly from the editor. Those guys are slammed all day every day. They have to wade through thousands of stories a year. There is no time for them to take a few minutes out of their days to respond to each story. So when they take the time to do so, it's because they want to encourage the author. Considering how touchy abortion is in the US, I figured I was doing very well.
 
Eventually, ParSec in the UK bought the story. The only reason I submitted to them later than the others was money. I generally submit from highest-paying to lowest-paying. Does that sound too mercenary? Well, I spent a total of 57.8 hours producing that story. At 7,160 words, the SFWA pro-rate (eight cents a word…seriously) for that story would be $572.80 giving me an hourly rate of $9.91 for that story if I got the pro-rate. I didn't even get the pro rate. So, yeah, I submit according to payment. That's also why that story lives again in my collection. That's the only way I might hope to make proper money for my writing.
 
Anyway, that gives you an idea of how Golden Cuckoo was written. If you have any questions, comments, or complaints, my website has a contact form. I try to respond to everyone who is civil. The ebook version of the collection is available for pre-order from Amazon.com  until April 18th. After that, both the ebook and paperback will be available for purchase.