Roughly a year ago, TriQuarterly asked me for a story, and so I went into my files for something unfinished that I could perhaps finish and send to them.
I found a story I’d written back when I was in graduate school, a story that I didn’t know what to do with then–it seemed too small, and yet too long to be flash fiction. It was eventually part of a longer manuscript of interconnected stories that was then going to be a very long, strange kind of novel–a novel that wouldn’t seem at all strange now, actually–back then, the only person who really did interconnected stories was Alice Munro.
That possible novel got me an agent, my first one, as for a while it looked as if William Morrow was going to do the book. When they didn’t, I then set it aside with the rest. I put it away with all of them. And then I didn’t look at it for a decade.
I wrote Edinburgh instead. I published it, and then began The Queen of the Night.
I remembered that when I did look at this story and its brothers again back all those years ago, I thought, oh, this is very good, and I was pleased with it, and… I put it away again. Now it was less than a decade since the last time I’d looked it over. Now it just seemed like a mistake that it had never been published. I gave it a light revision–the possibility something will be published makes it suddenly seem very different–and then I sent it on to them, and they loved it.
Which is to say, I have a new story, “Heaven”, up now at TriQuarterly.
Koreanish 