Details

First Appeared: Saltwater Sorrows
Published: August 2, 2023
Byline: Paul A. Hamilton
Edited by: Rhonda Parrish
Permanent Link: rhondaparrish.com
Cost: $4.99
Content: Rated PG, Thematic Elements

Behind the Story

Shortly before I more or less abandoned the irreparably tainted Twitter site, I posted a sequence in late 2022 announcing I had a new publication credit. In that thread, I talked about how I had more or less quit writing in 2017. The timing tracked, since the last post on this site was from August of that year and somewhere in those tumultuous five years the site itself broke and was serving up nothing but error pages from who knows when until sometime in 2023 when I finally got around to fixing it.

You can get the full story for what happened that made me walk away for a while over here, but the long and the short is that after nearly seven years of devoting a ton of time and resources in to establishing myself as a legitimate author of fiction, I more or less walked away from the endeavor. For another five years I didn’t spend very much time writing fiction, not even for myself. Then in late 2018 I saw by chance a call for submissions for a new anthology by an editor and author I’d admired for a long time.

Rhonda Parrish and I were in talks to potentially work on a 200 CCs project together, before that publication became another casualty of my collapse of writing motivation. But I’d always enjoyed her writing and been inspired by her work as an editor, putting together fascinating themed anthologies of short fiction. When I spent time making such lists, I’d had on my writer’s to-do an aspiration to contribute to one of those collections.

So it certainly wasn’t the first time I’d seen a call from her for themed submissions. The prompt she sent on this particular occasion, though, caught my eye in a way others hadn’t. Here’s what she sent:

Deep, mysterious, beautiful, dangerous… women and the sea have a lot in common and have been tied together in myth and story from the beginning of time. Stories of women being drawn to the sea or being left on the shore, waiting for their men’s return, have been passed down through the ages. This anthology of stories about women and the sea will be filled with beautiful, atmospheric stories. I’m not primarily looking for fantastical creatures but rather setting, mood.

The mythic.

The gothic.

The tranquility of sunlight dancing upon placid waters and the deep moon energy of rising tides and waves slamming against rocks. I want lonely lighthouses on rocky outcroppings, wind-whipped hair and melancholia, transformation and exaltation. Salt and sorrow.

I read it a few times, highlighting the newsletter so I could go back and look it over again. The bit about atmospheric stories emphasizing setting and mood over fantasies really called to me and finally I felt I couldn’t bear it anymore. I sat down and cranked out 2,500 words without really thinking about it. Then I set it aside. Okay, got that out of my system. Right?

A day or so later I came back to it, found I still liked what I had written. That was fairly new, something I hadn’t expected and hadn’t really been my experience with any of my fiction for several years at that point. So I took the bold step of trying to revise it a little. I cleaned it up a bit, re-worked a middle bit that got lost along the way, and had something I thought was… decent. I set it aside again.

Somehow, though, I kept coming back to it. I read and re-read it, I looked back at the prompt for the submissions call and thought, “You know, I think this kind of fits with what she’s looking for.” I revised it a second time, and then a third, and then I took a step I hadn’t taken in years. I showed it to my wife.

My wife has been a massive supporter of me the entire time I’ve known her (which is over thirty years at this point!). She doesn’t always like my fiction, in part because the genres I traffic in most are among her least favorite, but she always likes my writing if that distinction can be made. But even with her enthusiastic support, I can generally tell when something I’ve written resonates with her and when she’s just evaluating it on technical merits because an aspect of the setting or underlying idea has put her off it, conceptually. This particular story resonated with her. She was practically insistent that I needed to dust off my old submission tools and get it out into the world. “Uh, I kind of wrote it for an anthology prompt,” I told her. “It already kind of has a place I’d send it.”

Predictably, she implored me to follow through. Even with that push, though, I almost didn’t. A lot of nagging doubts and insecurities reared up and came close to convincing me to just be happy I had written something. No need to get ahead of myself or anything. But the fact that I’d written it to this exact prompt eventually left me with no excuse but to just try.

Ms Parrish accepted the story after briefly shortlisting it, echoing one of my sentiments, “I’m very pleased we’re going to have a chance to work together after being connected for so long on Twitter.” She had very little in the way of structural edits, mostly some clean up of the rusty prose to tighten things up. And in the end, the story that appears in the final anthology is one I’m very proud of. It’s a strange, sad little story surrounded in the book by a lot of other sad stories (some equally strange, others less so but many of them far more affecting than this one) and I’m genuinely thrilled to have my story included in their company.