People are surprised when I tell them I didn't start out publishing short stories before "graduating" to novels. I wrote stories all through grade school and into college, but I never tried to publish anything. It was fun; it was good practice. And truth be told, the prospect of submitting a short story to a literary journal or magazine scared the pants off me.Crazy, right? How could writing and submitting a novel be LESS scary than submitting a short story? I have no answer for that. I just know that I dove into
my practice novel in early 2002, and gave no thought to short stories for a long time afterward. Then during the M.A. my fiction prof,
Mike McCormack, would often compare short story writing to keyhole surgery. (Writing a novel, on the other hand, was like getting dusty and exhausted down deep in a stone quarry.) Mike
encouraged me as I wrote
Mary Modern, and that went swimmingly of course, but in the background a dark little thought took shape.
Sure, you're a storyteller, but you don't have a surgeon's hand. Maybe you aren't meant to write short stories.The ideas kept coming though, and in early 2007 (a few months before
Mary Modern came out) I decided to write a few. I showed the drafts to my agent. "Write another novel," she said.
That does it, I thought.
I really can't write short fiction.For five years I held onto that limiting belief
. Then Danel Olson, editor of the
Exotic Gothic anthology series, emailed to say he'd enjoyed my novels and wondered if I'd like to contribute a story to volume 5, which is coming out in 2013.I was so tired of thinking I couldn't write short stories. I was ready to let go of all that! So I said I'd be delighted even though it scared me. I finished a story I'd started at
Yaddo in 2010, and sent it to Danel—and what do you know, he accepted it!I couldn't have asked for a better first-publication story. I was
invited to submit (when does that ever happen?!), I'm getting paid a nice sum, and I get to see my work in a beautifully produced anthology. (I borrowed the header above from
PS Publishing. Insanely gorgeous cover art! I can't wait to see what they come up with for EG5. By the way, you can pick up a copy of
Exotic Gothic 4 here.)Plus, Danel is so much kinder, funnier, and more accessible than I thought any magazine or anthology editor could be. Our email exchanges have been an absolute joy. I'm so grateful to him for helping me get over my hangup (even if I didn't actually tell him about all that 'til after he'd accepted the story. Hey, I'm a professional.)As for the story itself, it's called "The Coroner's Bride" and it's set in Philadelphia in the 1870s. It's an old-fashioned ghost story with a strong heroine, and I'm quite proud of it.I'll write more about
Exotic Gothic 5 as we approach the publication date, but for now I just wanted to tell you about how I finally got rid of a limiting belief, and how amazing it feels!(Oh, and I have a second piece of awesome news to share, but I'll save it for next time.)