First Pub in F&SF Coming this July
Yesterday I submitted copyedits to Sheree Renée Thomas on a short story entitled “Whatever Happened to the Boy Who Fell into the Lake?” that will appear in the July/August issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. This is the fulfillment of a life-long dream for me. F&SF is among the most storied fiction publications out there, having published virtually every major writer in speculative fiction over the past seventy years. I couldn’t be more thrilled!
But even more satisfying for me is knowing how this particular short story came to be in the first place:
Those of you who’ve known me awhile know that I began my first novel inspired by Franny Billingsley’s THE FOLK KEEPER. It was intended to be a contemporary YA retelling of the Selkie myth, set in the Adirondacks, about a teenage girl named Fiona who receives a mysterious coat in the mail that she remembers her mother wearing the night she walked into the sea and drowned. With her best friend Toby, she travels to NYC and her childhood home on Rockaway Beach to track down the sender of the coat and to discover the truth of what really happened to her mother.
I spent quite a number of years working on that project. I did tons of research on Celtic mythology and went through dozens of revisions. I struggled mightily to finish what I thought was a solid draft, and when I shared the finished manuscript with my dear friend Anne Mazer, she did probably the bravest thing any friend could do in such a situation: She told me the unvarnished truth, which was that the book simply didn’t work.
The problem was that my secondary character, Toby, had long since taken over the story, so much so that it was no longer about Fiona at all, but about Toby’s coming of age as a genderqueer teen in a backwoods mountain town. Once Anne pointed this out, I realized almost immediately she was right. That’s why I’d been struggling with the book for so long. I couldn’t let go of Fiona, even though she was in the way and clearly no longer had a place in Toby’s story. Since there wasn’t any room for magic or Selkies either, I did what felt at the time like a radical but necessary thing and cut it all out, reconceiving the entire book as a contemporary realistic YA about Toby, the brother who raised him, and some very big mistakes Toby makes that nearly destroy them both.
Anne’s critique turned out to be the best writing advice I’ve ever received. In a matter of four months I completely rewrote a novel it had taken me six years of blood, sweat, and tears to write the first time. I found my agent Marie a week after I started querying. We’re on submission with it now, and it’s a book I love and am extremely proud of.
But I just couldn’t let go of all that hard work I’d invested in crafting Fiona’s story. So I spent some time playing with it, changed Fiona to a boy named Tick, changed some other important details about his life, added this and that, and voilà, a brand new story was born. In fact, I’ve gotten a handful of short stories out of the ashes of Fiona’s tale, but this is the first to be published, which is a great lesson in never throwing away anything you work that hard on. You never know what you might be able to do with it!
Anyway, this was a long and self-indulgent post, but I wanted to share. I’ll post when the full story is published this summer. If you made it this far, thanks for reading all of this!
