How do you decide when a piece you’ve written is “finished” enough to publish?I think they tell you. I think all stories have their own souls, or flames, and sometimes they’re very fragile and apt to extinguish if you don’t work fast and ride their waves all the way to shore. I’ve even abandoned short stories during later revision stages because the energy that drove their initial writing has dissipated. There’s just nothing to be done then, no matter how you try and fix it—you can tell when a story has lost its soul and a writer keeps revising it over and over anyway. Thankfully, I’ve finished a lot of stories before their flame went out. But it is something I need to be aware of—that when the inspiration strikes, I’d better stop what I’m doing and start writing.
The two novellas in Could You Be With Her Now are like water and vinegar. One (“I Can Make It to California Before It’s Time for Dinner”) is the first-person point of view of a mentally challenged 14-year-old boy who accidentally kills someone. The other (“May-September”) is about a romance between a young woman and a much older widow. But, like all stories, they share common elements, like love and loss, risk and regret, and they germinated in somewhat-similar ways. Of course, I realize now I’ve finished writing this note, that it would have been easier to talk about my forthcoming novel, The Tide King (Black Lawrence Press, May 2013), which is filled with all sorts of stuff I knew nothing about before I wrote it (World War II, wild herbs, partition-era Poland, country music, and smoke jumpers). But I think the emotional landscape that the writer winds up mining — in imagery, half-remembered dreams and daydreams, the unexplainable collision of plot with the emotional beat of the narrative — is equally important, albeit not always as eloquent. In those gauzy spaces, the two novellas in this collection were formed.
