chipotle | A first, long step...

Yesterday I finished transcribing and rewriting "The Fence," the last of the dozen stories I'm expecting to put in Why Coyotes Howl, my short story collection for Sofawolf.

It took much longer to get through these than I expected, and certainly much longer than it should have. All of them have been rewritten to some degree, occasionally extensively.

But it's been interesting revisiting them. While I think I'm a better writer now than I was when most of these were written--while the title story's only a couple years old, the earliest piece goes back to 1997--I think I was willing to push things a little more in style then. Call it edgier, or call it a little more pretentious. They're both probably accurate. Some of it--particularly that last one--was also surprisingly wrenching, bringing back memories of putting myself through the wringer the first time through. (That story received what's perversely one of my favorite comments: when tacit read through the first draft, he handed it back to me and said, "Thank you for pissing on my day.")

For the morbidly curious, the stories in the collection are:

Beast
Daughter of Shadows
Dreams Are For Vixens
The Fence
The Fox Maiden
The Moon in Water
Only With Thine Eyes
Still Life, with Espresso
Travelling Music
Vertical Blanking
Why Coyotes Howl
Without Evidence

Together there's about 78,000 words (in classic publisher's count, which estimates words rather than actually counting them, but we won't go there). I don't think any of those stories are still in print; some of them haven't been in print at all before, and none of them have been in print in these revisions. ("Vertical Blanking" is another one tacit would recognize as "Recondite Directives," a story I had in Xero #1. It's another cryptic title, but one I think I like more with respect to the story than the first.)

Now comes bundling 'em all up and shipping 'em out... and worrying about the actual production.