I’ve just turned in the story that will become TDP’s next long work for sale, so I thought it might be fun to go back through some of the steps I took getting here. (Good luck trying to replicate them, though! The process of story inspiration is anything but linear, at least if you’re like me.)
A few years before the pandemic, I was generating story ideas by looking at calls for submission from themed short-story anthologies. How those work is that an editor and a publisher collaborate to come up with a theme, often they’ll tap a few better-known authors to headline the anthology, and then they’ll put out a call to fill the rest of the slots.
I wrote and submitted a few stories that way. More often, I wrote lots of notes about potential stories, but they needed more time to percolate, so they didn’t get finished in time for the anthology deadlines. That’s okay because most anthology themes aren’t so specific that the story would work only there and nowhere else (and if they are that specific, I don’t write for them, for exactly that reason).
This story was one of those that needed to percolate. As often happens, I had an image in my head and a nameless feeling that came with it, but no plot, no character, nothing I could dig into to make it a story.
Then the pandemonium arrived and, well, not much writing happened for a while.
In the meantime, the anthology that sparked it went on to be published in 2020 as Trouble the Waters: Tales from the Deep Blue, edited by Sheree Renée Thomas, Pan Morigan, and Troy L. Wiggins.
Last year, I was poking around in what I call my “story kernels” folder and came across the notes for the story (all digital these days). Something in the back of my brain went “ooh!” I pulled out my notes and wrote some more, connecting a few dots, expanding some of the ideas. But it still didn’t want to be written yet, so back it went.
I wandered off and worked on something else for NaNoWriMo 2021 (another multi-year story that you all might see one day), wrote some poetry, wrote some other stuff.
This summer, it was finally ready to be written.
I started the first draft on August 1st and finished on October 30, 2022. (It turned out to be too long for the anthology anyway.) In another way, I started it years earlier.
In yet another way, it’s not finished. I’ve revised it once, but it will go through several more rounds of edits before it’s done and ready to be shared.
Look for it right here on TDP next spring.