Author Info: Usman T. Malik (Patreon)

Usman T. Malik is a Pakistani writer who divides his life between Orlando and Lahore. His short fiction has been reprinted in several Best of the Year anthologies including the Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy series and has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award and the Nebula. In 2016 he became the first South Asian to win both the Bram Stoker as well as the British Fantasy awards. You can find him on Twitter @usmantm 

Link to buy my stories: https://www.serialbox.com/serials?q=malik

We are the Story: A Commentary

By Usman T. Malik

Early 2002: I was twenty and in second year of medical school in Karachi. Sick of neuroanatomy and physiology texts, I consistently escaped online to devour horror fiction (I remember reading most of Lovecraft in a weekend). During one such escapade I stumbled onto Deep Magic, a labor-of-love E-zine of fantasy and science fiction that ran from 2002-2006. I liked some of the stories in it and wrote to one of the founders Jeff Wheeler, asking if I could ‘intern’ with them. 

Jeff agreed. 

At the time I had read very little fantasy and SF. Enid Blyton, C.S. Lewis, Piers Anthony, Christopher Pike, Terry Brooks, perhaps a few others; and now I was slush-reading stories about dwarves and fairies, rockets and spaceships. Somewhere along the way either Jeff or Jeremy Whitted suggested I try my hand at writing fantasy. 

Until then I had never taken a writing class or been critiqued by ‘real writers’. I was a middle class kid from a Muslim country attending college in a post-9/11 world. We didn’t have cons or writing workshops in Pakistan. I had zero chances at instruction in a non-medical field. Whatever I knew was self-taught.

So, in the way of most newbie writers, I cobbled together a ‘fusion’ mythology, threw in what I thought was an intriguing plot, and added staple fantasy characters.

The result? The overwritten weird fantasy novella “The Well That Never Ended”.  

Despite its obvious flaws (and grammar problems), my co-editors liked it enough to take it. They even reprinted it in Deeper Magic, a print anthology of what they deemed the best stories of that year. 

Deep Magic wasn’t a professional market. I didn’t get paid for the story. But Jeff and Jeremy prided themselves on quality. All the issues were gorgeous-looking (they are continuing that tradition with a recent professional reboot of the magazine), and it was my second publication in English. It meant a lot to me. Gave me confidence to try my hand at a couple more stories, one of which, too, was published in Deep Magic.

Soon medical school was over and I had a few weeks’ respite followed by frantic efforts to get into a medicine residency in the US.

I wouldn’t write another word of fiction for more than eight years. 

The novella would vanish into a digital folder on my laptop for a good 17 years -- until this call by Jo Walton for The New Decameron Project.

“The Well That Never Ended” is exemplary for its inconsistent, bad writing, stereotypes, and tropes, but it also shows the earliest glimmers of the writer I would become. There is value in that; or so I hope.

While re-reading and cleaning up the story I had a revelation: At its core “The Well That Never Ended” is a story about depression.

In 2002 I had just gone through a dreadful breakup that crushed me. I lost the girl, my sense of self-worth, and a very close friend. This last was someone I admired. That casualty of the breakup stings even now.

Noni, my story’s protagonist, loses someone too at the hands of a woman. 

In that sense the story is revenge porn.

I don’t think I put two-and-two together until I began writing this commentary. I continue to be discomfited by this story, by what it says about me. 

Integrity demands that this story be put up as it was published back then. Therefore, besides cleaning up grammar and minor syntax issues, and removing usage of a few offensive terms I have left it as it was. 

Perhaps some readers will find pleasure in it, as a few others did many years ago.