The Fold-O-Rama Wars at the Blue Moon Roach Hotel and Other Colorful Tales of Transformation and Tattoos. A. R. Morlan

      There’s a certain degree of disconnect between me and this story: some of the circumstances behind the publication were emotionally difficult for me, with the 9/11 attack being the worst. This story was written pre-9/11, and was scheduled to appear in the early winter of 2002, but it was moved up a few months to appear shortly after 9/11 (due to the references to Muslim clothing/culture, I suppose) and I wasn’t able to do what I felt was a necessary re-write regarding the events of 9/11—basically, my argument for a rewrite was this: 9/11 was a watershed event (something quite apparent within hours of its occurrence), and thus, some brief mention of it needed to be made within the text of the story. The argument didn’t fly with my editor, the story ran as-is, and in protest I yanked it from Nebula consideration. Which needless to say didn’t sit well with the editor.

      What was I planning to add to the story? A brief passage during the scene when Gwynn speaks to the Muslim lady in Kansas City, which would have clarified why the woman might have been grateful for Gwynn treating her so civilly, considering how people still felt after 9/11. Which I still think was necessary in the story—I had toyed with the idea of inserting it after the fact, but too many people (I assume) already read the story as-is, so I decided, why bother after all this grief over it back when it first appeared? But that’s what I had in mind. No more than a sentence or two.

      A few years before the story was written, I had a Muslim student who took the writing school course I used to teach (which I was fired from three days before Christmas in 1997 because I wasn’t able to do lessons on a computer, but I refused to just hand over all my current students and quit on the spot, so I stayed on until 2000), and she and I had discussed tattoos and the Muslim view of them—those written exchanges formed the core of the Kansas City scene in the story. I didn’t mention the student’s name because I felt she deserved her privacy, but I did enjoy working with the woman during my last few years teaching writing via correspondence course. And she did have an influence on the story, a positive one, I hope.

      There is one other thing I do want to address, mainly for the benefit of those readers who are familiar with the Holocaust. Most children under working age (their early teens or so) were automatically shunted off to the showers, or some other form of automatic death. Save for twins—under certain circumstances (namely, the appearance of identical twins arriving at a camp), very young children were allowed to enter the camps...and for them, being tattooed against their will was the most minor of violations visited upon them. And one child was often used as the control subject, thus giving him or her a slightly better chance of surviving until the liberation of his or her fellow inmates....