The Story That Wouldn't Die.

I've never stopped writing. In fact, the past five years have seen me write more often, and more words, than at any previous point in my life. Most of those words, however, were never intended for anyone else's eyes.

Four years ago, I revisited a story that had come close at a couple of markets but ultimately been rejected. I metaphorically dusted it down, performed some minor surgery, and sent it back out into the wild. The Leviathan Awakens was published in The Martian Wave in March 2023.

Since then, though, I've written very little fiction.

Earlier this year, my wife bought me A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders. She had heard it mentioned on a radio programme and thought it sounded like something I would enjoy. A month later, she gave it to me as an anniversary present.

Of course, in my world, simply being given a book is never enough. There has to be more than a touch of the weird to make things truly memorable.

The very next day, one of my magazine subscriptions arrived. Inside was an interview with George Saunders. A few days later, my wife mentioned a fascinating interview with a writer she had heard on a podcast. "His name wasn't George Saunders, was it?" I asked after she mentioned a detail that sounded familiar. It was. Then, not long afterwards, someone mentioned Lincoln in the Bardo, a Saunders novel, in an entirely unrelated conversation.

With so many convergences appearing in the space of little more than a week, I felt I had no choice.

I had to read the book. And so I started, and I was blown away. Truly.

Saunders is a Professor of Creative Writing at Syracuse University, but this isn't a book about writing in the usual sense. It's a book about reading. More specifically, it's a book about paying attention. Through a series of his favourite Russian short stories, Saunders dissects how fiction works, not as a formal exercise, but as a living thing. He asks why one sentence works and another doesn't. Why one detail matters and another can be removed. Why a story continues to pull us forward. I was immediately inspired. I sat down with an idea that had been floating around in my head for a decade and started writing. Over the next few days I snatched time whenever I could and produced six hundred words. Good words. I loved how naturally they arrived, how easily they fit together. It felt like the beginning of a really good story. And then, a couple of days after that, I sat to continue and the story had gone. Somehow, and I still don't know how, I had accidentally deleted it. I tried everything to recover it, all to no avail. I was gripped with fear. I was worried I wouldn't be able to write words as good as those, that I wouldn't find the same rhythm and narrative that had emerged so easily. So I did nothing.

I kept reading Saunders' brilliant book. I still loved it and was still inspired, but not enough to overcome my inertia.

About a month ago, I realised I was being silly. Not completely silly, mind you. I still wasn't ready to dive back into that story. But I was brave enough to dig out another trunked manuscript.

This was a story I had written around twelve years ago. I loved it then, and I shared it with some friends at a retreat back in the day. They quickly identified the structural and narrative problems which, deep down, I already knew it had. At the time, however, I lacked the experience and skills to fix them. I tried. I tinkered. I tore it apart and reassembled it. None of that worked.

Now, when I read it for the first time in more than a decade, I knew what to do. I knew how to fix it. And nobody would get hurt.

It was five thousand words at that point. A couple of weeks later, I had added another seven thousand that the story desperately needed. Then I pulled out the flensing blade and went to work, stripping away every trace of fat until it settled at a comfortable ten thousand words. And then, before I started tinkering, I sent it back out again.

There are no assurances, but I have hopes. Maybe they'll love it as much as I do. Maybe they'll think it's too quirky. Maybe they just don't have any taste.

Whatever happens next, the story is no longer sitting in a folder, somewhere in the digital depths of a hard drive.

And George, if you're out there, this story is alive again because of you. And, of course, my wife's recommendation. Thank you.