Writer’s Retreat

I have a writer’s retreat coming up, which means I have a decision to make. Eight thousand words.

That’s the maximum length of the piece I can submit for the workshop, and those words can come from any of my novels, drafts, stories, or works in progress.

You would think that having so many projects to choose from would make this easier. It does not.

My first concern actually wasn’t which story to submit. It was whether some of my stories might be too much.

I tend to write about difficult subjects. Even when there is mystery, folklore, horror, or something strange lurking beneath the surface, my stories often deal with very human things: violence, abuse, isolation, prejudice, grief, exploitation, control, and the ways people survive what other people do to them.

I wondered how much of that I wanted to bring into a workshop setting. So I did something sensible for once and reached out to my mentor. She reassured me that other members of my workshop group had submitted material dealing with similarly difficult subjects. That was a relief.

It also eliminated one of my excuses for not making a decision.

I already have an approximately 8,000-word section of The Shape Inside prepared. In many ways, it is the obvious choice. This is the novel I've spent so much time revising, questioning, cutting, rebuilding, and generally obsessing over. Bringing a substantial section of it into a workshop could be enormously useful.

And yet...I'm hesitating.

Not because I don't believe in The Shape Inside. I absolutely do.

The problem is that some of my newer writing is structured differently. I've become more conscious of premise, pacing, character objectives, and how quickly a reader can understand the world they're entering. Looking at newer projects has made me wonder whether one of them might make a stronger workshop piece.

What Walked the Boreen keeps tugging at me.

Its premise is clean and relatively easy to explain: an investigative journalist inherits a farmhouse in rural Ireland and becomes entangled in a mystery in which local folklore, an old death, and the things a community refuses to discuss begin to overlap in unsettling ways.

It also feels particularly suited to a retreat. We'll be in central New York in autumn. While upstate New York is certainly not the Dingle Peninsula, there is something about being surrounded by an atmospheric landscape that makes me want to bring an atmospheric story to life.

Then there are the troublemakers—the new stories.

I've recently been developing Chill in the Hallow. This Vermont mystery also features a folklore aspect centered on Harrow’s Bend’s colonial ghost story: a vengeful spirit that takes animal form to punish morally compromised people. Recent attacks lead a sheriff and forensic scientist toward a much stranger explanation involving an escaped experimental polar bear and the corporation desperate to recover her.

There's When the Snow Is Gone, another isolated-town mystery, this time involving three unexplained deaths, a washed-out bridge, a sheriff who increasingly realizes she may be part of the killer's plan, and a murderer who has unexpectedly broken his own pattern.

And then there is Cinder's Hollow, where five genetically identical puppies rescued by a Vermont farm family turn out to be part of a classified biological-weapons program. Their creators consider them property. The family considers them family. The dogs may have their own opinion.

All three are very new, which should probably disqualify them. Naturally, it has done the opposite.

There is an energy to new writing that can be difficult to ignore. You haven't had time to become overly familiar with it yet. You haven't reread every sentence twenty-seven times. The possibilities still feel enormous.

But workshop isn't necessarily about submitting the newest thing or even the most polished thing. It's about choosing the piece that will benefit most from having other writers sit with it, question it, challenge it, and tell you what they're seeing that you can no longer see yourself.

That changes the question. Instead of asking, "Which piece is best?" maybe I should be asking, "Which piece do I most need help seeing clearly?"

I've narrowed the possibilities down to two finalists. Sort of.

I'm deliberately not saying which two because apparently I enjoy making this more difficult for myself.

The submission isn't due until September, so I have a little time left to argue with myself, change my mind, confidently make a decision, immediately doubt that decision, choose something else, return to my original choice, and eventually press Submit.

And I thought writing the 8,000 words was supposed to be the hard part.

I'll let you know what I send.