I was doing what I often did with my short stories, which is trying to figure out how I could tell essentially a quite mundane story through this weird prism of being under the sea and something strange going on. I was also thinking about a novel by Lauren Groff called The Monsters of Templeton, which is about going back to your hometown, but also there’s a monster in the lake, and just the way those two extremely realistic, extremely not-real things rub up against each other. I think there’s a lot of that - like, Céline Sciamma in novels I’ve noticed recently. It was an idea which came predominantly from wanting to write about the sea, which I always want to do, being very aware of this sort of crossover with queer women’s fiction and the sea. And then I came to this, which had essentially been a short story idea I wanted to write as my treat for finishing a novel. Unsurprisingly enough, that was not the novel I actually ended up writing and publishing. That won’t mean much to you, but that was not a very long train. Most of the time when you sell a short story collection, which I did in 2018, will be like, “That’s cute, but do you have a novel?” So what originally happened, of course, was I did not have a novel, but I was like, “Sure, yes.” And then I wrote a pitch for a novel on a train between Clapham Junction and Balham.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |