At least five years ago, I typed out the first draft of a story in which nearly all moveable life on earth had died. It was too long and when I tried to cut it back to below five thousand words… it got longer. Then it became a novella with over twenty thousand words. I managed to shave a couple of thousand words. The next draft, completed during National Novel Writing Month in November 2021 (whoops, during 2018!), was a full length novel. (NaNo requires 50k but I wrote over 75k.)

Terrible things are happening. I am not unaware, but today, only the wonderful-in-a-good-way news. I have reasons to feel amazed at my good fortune.

I first submitted the 7k-word short story “Butterfly Fontanel” and later the better 19k-novella version (several times) of “All the Daughters Sing” and no one seemed overly impressed. (It was originally titled “Butterfly Fontanel”; Molly Gloss did not like that title.)

Then I committed butchery on the novella. I had to go long to cut to short. Is that irony or something else?

“All the Daughters Sing” is the short story I was first aiming for that will be published on 3 March 2023 in Metaphorosis. [updated with link, and again to the beginning of the story—although a response is very much appreciate!] I am very grateful to the editor, B. Morris Allen for having faith in my story and for his editorial process that made it better. And thanks to podcast editor Matt Gomez for his patience and expertise in helping create the audio version—I used to know technology but I am sadly out of date. I made a lot of work for him, deleting and repairing my errors. I might have sworn once during the process when I made mistakes four or five times reading one paragraph. [I will provide a link to the text and audio versions of “All the Daughters Sing” the day after tomorrow!]

Years ago my friend and once writing partner Becky observed that my stories always have birds. The process of writing “All the Daughters Sing” began with a simple question: What would happen if all the birds were gone? It turns out that we know the answer. Introduced rats killed all the birds on an island on the other side of the world. Some plants require birds to pollinate, and many animals eat birds, including human beings. I went further. If birds died, how would closely-related reptiles survive? And amphibians seem fragile compared to reptiles, so they’d all die, wouldn’t they? And that’s only the coldblooded species. Birds are warm-blooded like mammals. So kill off all the mammals too. That means people would all be gone. What if all animals died, leaving insects and a single woman left alive?

Before Covid, I wrote that first draft about Gina who wakes up from illness to find every person she’s ever known is dead.

I asked other questions: was parthenogenesis a reasonable alternative to bisexual reproduction? A geneticist writing in TNYT argued it is. What happens to sex? What, without war and sexual tension, money and technology, drives us? Without something to play the villain or monster, what drives the story? If everything about humanity is in doubt, what essential aspects of our species might remain? That’s why I wrote a novel. I had to find the experiences that might matter if life continued differently. However, it is the very short version of my story, the instigating version condensed to short story that is being published.

The publication of that story is not all my good news. A new roof is a mixed bag, mostly good. (The crew roofed right over three roof vents, including the one over the shower, and even though they came out to repair their errors right away… I’ll post about what the electrician discovers when he comes out to figure out why the shower fan still doesn’t vent outside.) The roof no longer leaks. That alone is a relief.

The editor of Oregon English Journal emailed me yesterday to let me know they loved my submission “Changing Minds” about teaching the essay to high school students. I am grateful to Kimberly Campbell for a wonderful acceptance email. It was not expected. I do love teaching even though I rarely get to do it anymore, but I hope I will always be capable of changing my own mind.

This year, CALYX Journal will publish my review of a story collection by Wendy Wimmer.

And most astonishing of all, my short story “The Promised Hour” is also forthcoming from CALYX. I wrote that story almost twenty years ago because I needed a 15-20-page story to submit with my application to Pacific University’s MFA program. I didn’t have one that long. The story I wrote, my brief application essay, and a two-page review of a novel got me into the program in 2005. “The Promised Hour” was the first story I critiqued at my first residency, which could have gone better. One student said she wouldn’t have finished reading it if she hadn’t been required to and the workshop leader pronounced the story “annoying” because of information withheld until the end. I had work to do.

I rewrote that story at least fifty or sixty times. Many of those drafts still clutter up my laptop. Eventually, I made the short story the opening chapter of an entire novel (72k words thanks to NaNo again). The short story was rejected, under various titles, sixty-two times. (Yep, 62 rejections!) I persisted because it was important to me—a key scene is from my life and the ending felt vivid and necessary. It is important to me for other reasons too—all those rejections. All those revisions. I am grateful to Managing Editor Beth Russell for encouraging me to submit a story to CALYX and to Senior Editor Brenna Crotty for her kind acceptance letter, and the editor for excellent suggestions.

My short story “The Scar Map” published in Raven Chronicles in 2003, is now included in their second anthology, This Light Called Darkness, A Raven Chronicles Anthology edited by Kathleen Alcalá, Phoebe Bosché, Paul Hunter & Anna Odessa Linzer. It was, in fact, so long ago that I’d lost track of the version they published and I thank Managing Editor Phoebe Bosché for using a revised version and for tracking my “new” email down through Bracken. So thank you to Bracken too!

I also thank Molly Gloss, Felicity Shoulders, Rebecca Olson, Bette Husted, and my husband for cheering me along and for useful input. Thank you to the people I should have thanked and have forgotten.

And it snowed in February and the snow did not melt on contact. Then it happened again. We found many pieces of sea glass on the shore, though we frosted fingers and toes doing it. I baked many loaves of bread. I ran only some of my miles. We saw a river otter.

And there are still novels to contemplate… voices in my head.