Theodora Goss

One of my stories is being reprinted.

It’s the first story of mine that was ever published, and it’s been reprinted a number of times. I’m pleased that it’s coming out again, and it’s in a particularly wonderful book: Happily Ever After, edited by John Klima. You can order it directly from Night Shade Books, or from Amazon.

Here are the gorgeous cover and incredible table of contents:

Bill Willingham, Introduction
Gregory Maguire, “The Seven Stage a Comeback”
Genevieve Valentine, “And In Their Glad Rags”
Howard Waldrop, “The Sawing Boys”
Michael Cadnum, “Bear It Away”
Susanna Clarke, “Mr. Simonelli or the Fairy Widower”
Karen Joy Fowler, “The Black Fairy’s Curse”
Charles de Lint, “My Life As A Bird”
Holly Black, “The Night Market”
Theodora Goss, “The Rose in Twelve Petals”
Jim C. Hines, “The Red Path”
Alethea Kontis, “Blood and Water”
Garth Nix, “Hansel’s Eyes”
Wil McCarthy, “He Died That Day, In Thirty Years”
Jane Yolen, “Snow In Summer”
Michelle West, “The Rose Garden”
Bruce Sterling, “The Little Magic Shop”
K. Tempest Bradford, “Black Feather”
Alan Rodgers, “Fifi’s Tail”
Kelly Link, “The Faery Handbag”
Peter Straub, “Ashputtle”
Leslie What, “The Emperor’s New (And Improved) Clothes”
Robert J. Howe, “Pinocchio’s Diary”
Wendy Wheeler, “Little Red”
Neil Gaiman, “The Troll Bridge”
Patricia Briggs, “The Price”
Paul Di Filippo, “Ailoura”
Jeff VanderMeer, “The Farmer’s Cat”
Gregory Frost, “The Root of The Matter”
Susan Wade, “Like a Red, Red Rose”
Josh Rountree, “Chasing America”
Nancy Kress, “Stalking Beans”
Esther Friesner, “Big Hair”
Robert Coover, “The Return of the Dark Children”

I’ve been so fortunate lately to have stories of mine reprinted in anthologies with some of my favorite authors. Susanna Clarke! I love Susanna Clarke.

But since “The Rose in Twelve Petals” was my first published story, I thought you might like to know how it was written. This is for all the writers out there who are at the same place I was at the time. Here’s how it happened.

In the summer of 2000, I went to the Odyssey Writing Workshop (where, by the way, I will be teaching this summer). Before going to Odyssey, I had never published anything, for the good and sufficient reason that nothing I wrote was publishable. At Odyssey, I learned how to write publishable stories. Several months later, I started writing “Rose.” I started writing it because I started thinking, what about all the other characters in the story? Don’t they have stories of their own? That’s something I’ve thought about quite a lot in general, and many of my stories are about that – what sorts of stories the other characters, the ones who are not main characters, have. I think their stories are just as interesting, in some ways more so.

“Rose,” as you’ll immediately realize if you read it, is a retelling of “Sleeping Beauty.” It’s told from the point of view of a number of characters, including the tower in which the princess is sleeping and the spinning wheel who does not want to kill her.

At first, I thought that was all I was going to do with the story. But as I wrote it, I started rewriting the history of Britain. I believe I rewrote it so that Bonny Prince Charlie won. I worried at the time about complicating the story like that, but I remembered something I had heard at Odyssey: that I should not be afraid to complicate. That complication was good. So I went with that idea, and I think it made the story stronger. At the time, I was not a particularly experienced writer, and it was difficult for me to handle a subtext. I revised the story quite a lot, getting that subtext in. Now when I write, I find that I write text and subtext at the same time. I weave it in automatically.

That’s one thing that changes as you get better. You learn to write on different levels at once. I can write dialog that also reveals character and advances the plot, in the first draft. I used to have to put that other stuff in later.

So then, the next summer, I went to the Clarion Writing Workshop, which at that time was in Michigan. At Clarion, I learned to how to write the sorts of stories that pose a challenge to the genre. That’s what Clarion, at least my year of Clarion, encouraged. I brought “Rose” with me, because I had just finished it and it still needed to be workshopped. Kelly Link workshopped it, and told me both what was working and what was not. I actually didn’t need to make many changes at that point, and I was happy about that. The guest editor for that summer was Shawna McCarthy, and her first day there, she told us that she had already seen a story in the pile that she wanted to buy. Later that day, she told me it was mine. I was stunned, of course. To have my story bought like that! And published in Realms of Fantasy!

I’ve written many stories since then, some better than others. But I learn from each one. And I think that “Rose” is still one of my best. I’m very proud that it keeps being reprinted.

That was ten years ago, and all day today I’ve been working on a story, thinking about how far I’ve come since then. Is it far? I don’t know, I still feel as though I’m just starting out, even though at this point I’ve published almost enough stories for two collections, plus essays and poems. And soon, I’m planning on starting a novel. I still struggle with writing problems, although they tend to be different problems now. But I don’t think I’ll ever feel as though I know what I’m doing, not fully. And I suppose that’s a good thing. After all, if this were easy, it wouldn’t be writing, would it?

Today, I went to the dentist.

I’ve always been proud of my teeth, silly as that sounds. They’ve always been straight, and I still have all of my wisdom teeth (which I suppose means I have a large mouth). I try to take good care of them.

But I do have one problem with them: I tend to clench my jaws in response to stress. Several years ago, I was so stressed that I actually chipped some enamel that way. (You can clench very hard when you’re asleep.) So the dentist made me a mouth guard. She took an impression of my upper teeth, and then a plastic device was made that fits over them perfect. And I have to wear it when I sleep. If you think of everything glamorous and romantic – well, this is the opposite of all that, isn’t it? But it keeps me from damaging my teeth.

Today, she looked at the mouth guard, which I always bring in, and told me that I’d been clenching very hard. Also, she told me that there was more chipping on the enamel. So clearly, I’m under too much stress.

The question is, what to do about it? It’s deadlines as far as the eye can see, although I’ve already asked for an extension on two of them. No, that’s not quite true. After May 15th, there are no deadlines. After that, it’s just summer and finishing the dissertation and writing a novel. No deadlines until September.

But still, what to do about the stress? Clearly, I need to do something.

Here, because I have no actual answer, I will go on a brief tangent. The dentist is in Brookline, so before my appointment, I went into Booksmith. I have what may be a bad habit in bookstores: I look to see if anything of mine is in there. You see, for a long time, when I was just starting out writing, I was intimidated by places like Booksmith. I would look around and think, so many books! What makes me think I can write one, can ever compete in this marketplace? (In a bookstore, it’s obvious that you’re competing in a marketplace.) But then I started seeing my stories in books on the shelves. Like these:

See? I’m in two of these books, Tails of Wonder and Imagination and The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2010. Pretty nice, hunh? And someday soon I’ll be there with a book. And then more books.

And then the dentist told me that I was doing an excellent job with my teeth (other than the clenching, of course), so I rewarded myself by going to Japonaise, the bakery and coffee shop, where I bought an azuki cream. Here’s what one looks like:

What you can’t see in this picture is the filling: whipped cream and red bean paste. It’s one of my favorite pastries in the world.

And now back to the subject of stress. The dentist suggested meditation, but I’m not sure that would help right now. I think I would stress about having to mediate. But I have to think of something. I know I’m pushing myself, not taking very good care of myself.

One day, and I hope it’s one day soon, I want a small cottage where I can create a calm, peaceful space. Where I can write, and garden, and do all the other things I like doing when I’m not so completely stressed. I’m working for that – that’s what the stress is all about, trying to get there. But I don’t especially want to kill myself on the way there, you know? That wouldn’t make sense.

So I’m going to have to think of something. Sleep and exercise, those are probably good ideas. Eating healthily. I’ll probably have to start there, with basics. I know all that, I do. It’s just implementation that’s difficult. Because I have so much to do, and I want to do it all – because I want that cottage, more than I can properly express.

I was thinking today about choices and their consequences. I had to make a choice recently – but I’ll talk about that in a moment.

In Drawing Out the Dragons: Meditations on Art, Destiny, and the Power of Choice, James Owen says the following:

“Everything we do in our lives has to do with the choices we’ve made, and those choices are cumulative. Every choice you make builds a foundation for every choice that follows. And the earlier you start realizing that you are always able to make choices, the earlier you’ll be able to build that foundation for everything you want to do with your life. And that’s important because in our lives, not many people realize that everything they do is a choice. That you get to choose the direction things go.

“Yes, our lives don’t always go the way we want them to. Bad things happen, obstacles arise, problems spring up to confound our well-laid plans. But how you deal with them is always in your power to do. It’s always in your power to choose your destiny. To choose how you respond to those things.”

I’ve gotten used to making choices in my life. At the end of his book, James provides three precepts of sorts, one of which is “Live deliberately. Decide: are you the kind of person things happen to, or the kind of person who makes things happen?” I’ve tried to be the sort of person who makes things happen, rather than the sort of person things happen to. What I find is that when I make things happen, things happen to me, but good things – things that move me closer to where I want to go.

The thing about choices is that after you make them, you have to take their consequences. So sometimes you have to think carefully about what you’re choosing. Sometimes you don’t have time to think carefully. And then, you just have to go on instinct. And if you’re the sort of person who is used to making choices, I think your instinct guides you. This is a story that Kendrick always reminds me of, when I’m talking about topics like this one. One day, we were driving into Harvard Square. We had not realized that it was the day of the Harvard-Yale game. The square was filled with students. As we were driving through, slowly and carefully, one of them came up to our car. He was waving a cell phone and shouting, “Run over my cell phone! Run over it!” And then he put the cell phone under the front tire of the car. Do I need to mention that he was very, very drunk? Without thinking, I got out of the car, picked up the cell phone, handed it back to him, told him that he was very, very drunk and that he needed to go home immediately and take care of himself. I realized, as I was saying it, that I was speaking in teacher voice. He was a student, and therefore he was my responsibility, one of my responsibilities. Students are, evidently, one of the responsibilities the universe has given me. I got back into the car and watched him stagger across the street into a vacant lot. Suddenly, a large man ran up to him and jumped on his back. Why? I have no idea. But he went down, and the man immediately turned and ran away. And he didn’t get up. There he was, lying on the gravel. So I got out of the car again, and this time Kendrick parked. When the student turned over – he was conscious, but barely – I saw that he had fallen on shards of glass. There was blood over half his face. So I called the police, then ran to a nearby convenience store, got paper napkins, and held them to his face until a policeman came by and the ambulance arrived. I don’t think I was thinking much during any of this. I was just going on instinct, and my instinct was that I was a teacher, and this was a student, and he was my responsibility until someone else came along who could take responsibility for him.

But the problem, as I’ve said, is that you have to take the consequences of your choices. The event I described above had no consequences for me: I don’t know what happened to that student. I hope he barely remembers what happened, and that he has no scars from it. Or that he’s learned from it, either way. The choice I made that had the most significant consequence was leaving the law for graduate school. Just before I left the law, I got a raise: to $100,000. The next year, I lived on a graduate student stipend of $10,000. I gave up the possibility of security, of a comfortable and lucrative life. (And I had no savings: all of my income from my three years practicing law, other than what I had needed to live, had gone to paying off my law school loans. So I could go to graduate school.) But because I made that decision, I have the head of H.P. Lovecraft sitting on my shelf, next to a sculpture of Elah Gal, from my story “Child-Empress of Mars.” As a lawyer, I could never have gone to Odyssey or Clarion, never have started the writing career I’m working on now. Never have won a World Fantasy Award.

It was the choice I had to make recently that started me thinking about all this. I had to make a choice quickly, on instinct. I don’t want to talk about it much. Suffice it to say that a friend asked me to make a choice for him. I refused. You can never, should never, make a choice for another person, especially not a choice that affects that person’s life in a fundamental way. You can make choices for people who are not capable of making choices for themselves: children, parents who can no longer choose because of age or a medical condition. Drunken students. But you cannot make choices, not those sorts of choices, for people who are free to chose for themselves. Who are responsible for making their own choices.

I made the right choice. I know that as surely as I know anything else. But the consequence was terrible, much worse than losing $90,000. It was losing a friend. By which I don’t mean what you probably think I mean: that he was angry, that he’s not speaking to me. No, I mean a real, genuine loss. As I said, I don’t want to talk about it much.

It made me wonder if one is punished for making what one knows are the right choices. But if you make choices, and if you are the sort of person who lives deliberately then you can’t avoid making choices, you have to take their consequences. That’s a sort of law of the universe, I think. And somewhere in the loss, the grief, there is a consolation: that if nothing else, you chose right.

Guess what I’m doing today? Taxes, of course. Yes, I should have done them earlier, but it’s been that sort of year.

I ask myself what sort of year I mean by that, and somewhere in my mind I hear these words: this is the year I’m saving my life. I don’t think anyone else can save your life for you. And I don’t mean that in the physical sense, of course. I’m in no danger of drowning, of going over a cliff in a car. I’m saving my life in the sense that I know there’s a life I’m meant to live, and I’m not living it yet, but I’m getting there, and going to get there. That’s the life I’m saving.

But I didn’t actually mean to write about that. What I meant to write about was that last year, I spent about $2000 on business expenses, mostly traveling to conventions. And I made considerably less than that from writing, only about $500. So was all that travel justified?

I had spent the previous couple of years not traveling very much, barely going anywhere. I didn’t have the money. Kendrick was finishing his PhD, and I was both teaching and taking care of Ophelia. And taking on any other work I could. I put my life, the life I’m in the process of saving, on hold. During that time, I did not write very much. Writing is an uncertain business, and if you want to make money, it’s easier to teach extra classes, grade writing assessments, take on the sort of work there always is around a university. I wrote only when I was asked to, when I knew I could make a sale.

Last year, I thought, this is it. Kendrick is finished with his PhD, Ophelia is in school. It’s saving my life time.

So I made a plan, although not a very elaborate one. I just knew that I needed to begin. I thought about where I should go, which conventions I always enjoyed. Where people were interested in my writing. I chose Wiscon, Readercon, World Fantasy, Boskone, ICFA. Readercon and Boskone were easy, because they were so close. No traveling or staying in a hotel required. I was also invited to the Sycamore Hill writing workshop, which I didn’t want to miss. So those were the places I went.

I also did several other things. Most importantly, I redesigned my website – instead of my old, out-of-date one, I created this site and started blogging every day. I was already on Facebook, but I also joined Twitter, although honestly, sometimes I’m still not sure what to tweet. But it’s a wonderful source of information and links. Through Facebook and Twitter, and through reading individual blogs, I feel as though I know what’s going on with the people who live in my world, which is the writing world. They are all people I care about very much, people I want to hear about. They’re doing such fascinating things!

So I spent both time and money.

And what was the result? Well, on the most practical level, this year I’ve already earned about as much from writing as I spent last year going to conventions. And I’m going to earn significantly more over the course of the year. So it’s already been a good financial investment. What it did was let people know that I was available again, that I was ready to work. And they sent me work.

I think the universe functions like that. If you do good work, and you let people know that you’re available to do it, they will sent it your way. And if you’re out there, talking to people at conventions, you will start to do what I’m starting to do now – think up projects of your own. Oh, I don’t have time to start them now. But I will this summer, and once my dissertation is finished, well – watch me! You have no idea what wonderful things I’m going to create.

I guess what I’m saying, ultimately, is that you have to invest in yourself. You have to do it wisely, of course. You have to make the investment pay. But really, what else are you going to invest in? The stock market? Better spend that money creating opportunities for yourself, so you can do the work you want and were meant to do. Saving your life, one convention, one blog post, one story at a time.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you may have noticed that I’ve been having a difficult month. The last two weeks have been particularly difficult because I’ve been so tired, and that affects my mood. Last weekend, all I wanted to do was crawl under the covers and sleep. But of course I had work to do.

But today, several wonderful things happened.

When I came home, I had two packages waiting for me. The first was a contract for a project I’m working on that I’ll tell you about soon. I think you’ll like it. The second was this:

It’s my plaque from Strange Horizons, sent to me because “The Mad Scientist’s Daughter” won the readers’ poll for best short story! That means a tremendous amount to me because it’s a readers’ poll, and what I do is for readers. If there were no readers, there would be no reason for me to write.

That’s why I write this blog, too. I write it partly for myself, because some days there are things I just need to say. But I write it partly for you, because you’re the one I want to say them to, and I’m so grateful that you read it, and come back to read more, and comment. (And I’m so sorry that I’m behind on commenting back. It’s this difficult month, and things will get better – right? I’m making that promise to myself, that things will get better. I believe that.)

And then I received several emails. One from an editor of a literary journal I respect very much, asking me to submit. One from a reader telling me how much he had liked my short story collection. That was a long email also telling me why, and especially nice to receive. And one from James A. Owen, sending me a copy of Drawing Out the Dragons: Meditations on Art, Destiny, and the Power of Choice, his book about – what is it about? How to make choices, and how to be brave, and how to really, truly live. I could call it inspirational, but I don’t think that would tell you very much about it. So I’ll just tell you that this morning, I sat down at my computer in my university office and opened up my email. I saw the email from James, opened the PDF he had sent me, and read about half of it before I had to meet with students. And it was exactly what I needed at that particular time. It was as though someone had sent me a letter that said, “I did this, so you can do what you were meant to do.” And tonight, I feel as though I can.

I think the most important words in the entire book are the following:

“If you really want to do something, no one can stop you. But if you really don’t want to do something, no one can help you.”

So often I see people who want to do something, but I think they must not really want to do it, because they don’t put in the effort. Anything really worth doing is worth all of your effort. I know I’m going to get into trouble for saying this, but when I see people not putting in all of their effort, I think, they must not really want whatever that is. They must want something else instead.

What I really want is to be the best writer I can possibly be, and to reach out to readers, to tell them my stories (which I’m fairly certain are only part mine, and part from somewhere beyond me), and to have those stories affect them, inform them, inspire them. That’s what I want. And I want to live a life that enables that ambition, which really is an overweening one, because I want to be a sort of cross between J.K. Rowling and Virginia Woolf, which is a truly ridiculous thing to want, isn’t it?

“If you really want to do something, no one can stop you.” I’m going to tell myself that seven times seven times a day.

I thought I would be ready to get back to my story today, but I’m not.

I’m feeling – well, I don’t know what I’m feeling exactly, but I’ll try to describe it.

I woke up this morning at 8:00 a.m., had breakfast, and immediately went back to sleep. I woke up at 1:00 p.m. I mentioned that I’ve been tired beyond tired, and of course I needed sleep. So that makes sense.

I woke up to a terrible sense of longing. I felt restless and had no idea what to do with myself. So I did something relatively silly, which was go shopping. I went to the Land’s End Canvas shop and ended up with some reasonably rational purchases. Two pairs of chinos (this is one of them, the other is a slightly darker khaki):

And a chambray dress:

They were all 60% off, which I mention just to say that I hadn’t completely lost my senses. But it’s fairly clear what was going on, wasn’t it? I mean, look at what I bought. Where would you wear clothes like that? At the seaside, of course. I didn’t really want new clothes, although I’m always happy to have them. I really wanted to go to the sea, walk on the beach with my chinos rolled up, go to a restaurant in that dress.

So I came home and had a couple of mild panic attacks, and thought of those lines from Moby Dick: “Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off – then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball.”

And then I went grocery shopping, and while at Whole Foods I did something I’ve never done before, which is put together a plate of antipasto and bring it home for dinner. And I am in the process of eating it now, with part of a baguette and a glass of Reisling, which you wouldn’t think would go with antipasto, but goes with it just fine. It all looked like this, before I started eating:

What is going on with me? The sense of panic seems to have subsided, but the sense of longing is still there – a terrible sense that there is something missing from my life, and that I have to find it. And that in order to do so, I have to change my life – not just a little, not by buying clothes or eating things I don’t usually, but by truly changing it. Completely.

I’ve felt like this before, although never to such a degree. When I do, I revert to the habit of childhood: I get on a plane and go. I can’t do that today, of course. But I’m already planning on going to Madison this summer, for Wiscon. And now I’m thinking that I should go to San Francisco for the Isabelle de Borchgrave exhibit, and a friend has suggested I visit Asheville. I guess it all depends on what I can afford, but I can’t get to Europe this summer, so maybe I should fly around, visit friends and family. Maybe that’s a short-term solution, and will keep me from knocking people’s hats off. Although what I really want is to go to the seashore. But I’d be going by myself, and what’s the point in that?

Longer term, I have to change my life, of course. But that’s in process and will take a while. And that terrible sense of longing . . . The one that makes me feel as though I have a hole in my side. What to do about that? I don’t know, I’ll have to figure it out.

I’m still tired, but I’m hoping to get back to the story tomorrow. I’m also hoping to get back to commenting (I’m terribly behind), and also to answering emails (there too, terribly behind). Sorry about that. It’s just – these two weeks have about done me in. Seriously.

So today I’m going to write about something I started thinking about after seeing a post on the Isabelle de Borchgrave exhibit at the Legion of Honor museum, in San Francisco. Here’s what I started thinking:

There are some artists whose work is genuinely unique. No one else does what they do.

Often their work is within an artistic tradition of some sort. But although you can see the connection with that tradition, the work has something of its own, something that makes it different from what anyone else does within that tradition. Edward Gorey comes to mind. No one else did what Gorey did – you can tell his work immediately.

I would put Isabelle de Borchgrave in that category. She’s an artist who, among other things, makes dresses out of paper. But what dresses! I’ll show you by including a video I found on YouTube:

Look at the details! And then realize that the dresses are all made of paper. Who would even think to make something like that?

I want to go see the exhibit in San Francisco, and I’m very lucky to have a brother who lives in San Francisco. (I’m lucky to have him, wherever he lives, because he’s about the coolest brother you can imagine, but it’s very lucky that he lives in San Francisco just now, when I want to go see an exhibit there . . .)

My second example is Patrick Dougherty, whom I’ve written about before. I’ve called his work fairy tales in wood. Here are some examples of Dougherty’s work:

I can see the connection with environmental artists like Andy Goldsworthy, whom I also happen to love, and who is also a true original. But what Dougherty does feels different. It feels like a sort of storytelling.

So the question for me is, what about my work? What in it is original? What in it looks different from what anyone else does? I believe strongly that you can’t set out to be original. You can’t say, I’m going to do something different now. The way to do it is to look within yourself, to figure out what you have in you. There are writers whose voices sound original to me, like Kelly Link. I know there are stories of mine that have not been particularly original, that have been derivative in one way or another. And that’s all right, that’s certainly not a terrible thing to be. Most art is influenced by other art. That’s how most art is made.

But what in me is different? What in me is me, rather than someone else? I think my most original stories are also my best: “Singing of Mount Abora,” for example.

I still have to find whatever that is, that voice. The problem is, that takes writing a lot, focusing on writing in a way that’s difficult for me to do right now, when I have so many other obligations. But I think I’m going to have to do it, if I want to become the writer I believe I can and should be. I just have to figure out how . . .

In the meantime, the podcast I did with Paul Park, Eileen Gunn, and Cecilia Holland, moderated by Karen Burnham, is now available online. Go listen!

(Note to the artists: I looked on the relevant sites for notices not to repost the video and pictures, and did not find any. However, if you would like me to delete them, I will of course do so on request.)