One Short Story’s Journey From Idea to Publication

Hopefully there’s at least one lesson here.

I’m thrilled to have a story in the newest edition of Dark Moon Digest. Here’s how it got there, and the lessons I may have learned along the way.

Let’s start fifteen years ago.

That’s when I first had the idea — based on a friend’s post-med school experience — for a character who excels in medical school but fails to match to a hospital, which means all her time, energy, and six-figure student loan is down the drain.

Unlike my friend (I hope??), the main character, Jay, is drawn into the world of black market organ sales, gets in over her head, and discovers there’s no such thing as a clean break.

It was first going to be a screenplay in the vein of Fargo, where the main character jumps into a dangerous new world, enjoys its spoils, realizes the true cost, and then…

It never really moved beyond the idea stage. I worked briefly with a writing partner on it (Hi, Walt!), but we only had a few interesting scenes spread out on a weak skeleton. Only one idea from that time — med students playing Operation as a drinking game — survived.

I left it behind for about ten years and took a another stab at a screenplay version in 2015 that went nowhere. It was flat. Boring. Derivative. I had a sense for some interesting visuals and contradictory tones, but there was no story (and really no full character there at all). I had no idea who she was.

I thought the story would spring forth fully formed because the hook was really interesting, but it refused to write itself until I understood who the character was and what she’d go through to “succeed.”

I was also slightly obsessed with how realistic the black market would be, and that meant a lot of quality research that slipped into procrastination cleverly disguised as work. So, so clever, the procrastination.

By the time I contacted a medical research firm to ask how big the chunks of pig meat they crafted for lab testing were, I started to wonder if maybe I was a little toooo into the minutiae. Weirdly, I never included exactly how big the slabs were in the story. That might be because the research firm told me, “not to contact [them] again.”

After that misfire, and after reading the pilots for Breaking Bad and Mad Men, I thought about turning the concept into a pilot pitch and teleplay. Another dead end. (Although I still think it would work best as a filmed series filled with moral ambiguity, cliffhangers, and probably a small object from season 1 that plays a cosmically massive role in the season 28 finale.)

The black market organ idea was still on a far back burner last April when I joined Richard Thomas’ Short Story Mechanics class (which was at LitReactor at the time).

We had to write several one-sentence hooks for one exercise. I was double plus bad at it. As Hemingway never used to say, “Why use ten words when you can use ten trillion?”

The silver lining was that we also had to write a paragraph-long hook, and mine was a hit. It became the opening lines of the story.

If one of my other hooks had been a winner, I’m sure I would have made it the focus of the course, but they were all really, really bad.

Here’s the hook that worked:

You get two shots at becoming a doctor after med school. If you match with a hospital straight off, bully for you, great job, give mom and dad a hug. If you don’t, you need to wait a year holding your breath while chopping off pig hooves for science even though you’re vegan. Then you pray you match the second time around. If you don’t, that’s it. You spent a quarter of a million dollars to disappoint your parents.

That’s how I ended up taking a business card with only a phone number printed on it from a slick Wall Street-looking asshole with a bad cough while rounding my third shot of tequila. That’s also how I ended up covered in someone else’s blood in a knock-off Sesame Street bouncy castle, crushed by a murderer’s guilt and wondering if I’d survive to sunrise.

All I ever wanted was to help people.

So, I’d riffed on this old idea, and it worked, and I kept going. I was slowly unearthing the character from that narration. Momentum came partially from having such a positive response from a mentor figure, but the biggest element that kept me going was even simpler.

I had to turn something in.

If I didn’t turn in something ready for a real critique, I would have wasted the entire course and the money. That’s jet fuel for a non-self-starter.

Having a deadline and a real, living human to hand the story into at the end of the course was a big motivator, as were the other assignments in the course prodding me to focus on this one story’s themes, characters, and plot.

Also, Richard is great and strikes that wonderful balance between encouragement and eyebrow-raising. He’s honest about the bad and the wonderful.

By the end, when I had to turn in a completed short story, I was working with a toolbox filled with character motivations, plot movements, and themes — not just the airy concept of subtext but specific objects, dialogue, and actions I would insert to build it.

I went front an idea languishing for almost two decades to a short story draft in about two months. But that’s what was keeping me from writing it, right? It was just an idea, and short stories have to be dozens and dozens of good ideas piled on top of each other. One good ideas isn’t enough.

The plot was always going to be the plot: needing to payback a gigantic student loan, agreeing to do something heinous, agreeing to do the next heinous thing, and reaching a limit. It wasn’t until I learned that Jay also needed to feel like a doctor during all of this that her motivations (and, then, her actions) clicked in. Without that, this would still be an entry in a list of concepts I keep on my phone.

The other big puzzle piece was how to write about people doing bad things without hating them. The solution came from my research, where I encountered several viewpoints which felt the overall system of getting organs to people is the real villain. Now, I had multiple characters working inside a flawed system with motivations ranging from noble to greedy. Those complications made it feel real.

Now, for the boring part: the writing.

I took Richard’s feedback and made a new draft, which I sent to three first readers, and then took their feedback to refine the piece into something that worked. Mostly that meant cutting indulgent elements and sequences that didn’t help this story.

I’d written two different endings for the course, and stuck with one of them, but it never really worked. I rewrote the ending 6 times before combining both of my original, disparate endings into something that clicked and felt like closure. One was a dark ending, and the other was relatively happy, and it turned out that they were both the right ending together.

That was the most surprising discovery.

Big and small, I made 10 revisions that fell mainly along the lines of asking 1) why would she do that there? and 2) can you be arrested for putting that many adjectives in one sentence?

(I used Scrivener and Word. It’s also the last short story I’ve written without 4thewords, which turns writing into a game where you defeat monsters and get points and coins and googahs. It’s been the antidote for my plague of needing external motivation.)

I’ve wanted a story in Dark Moon Digest for a while, but I haven’t had something that was a good fit. I wrote something specifically for their Lost Films anthology, but it wasn’t accepted.

It was the only place I submitted As Well As The Infirm to, in late 2019, I had an acceptance a few months later, and I celebrated by removing a stranger’s kidney and leaving them in a motel bathtub filled with warm water.

That’s this story’s journey from idea to publication. Depending on how you look at it, it either took a year or 15 from writing to the finish line. For now, I’m happy to have this out of my head and onto paper.

Now is a great time to support indie publishing! You can read my full story in the current issue of Dark Moon Digest and maybe pick up a subscription. I recognize that it’s a weird time, and there aren’t a lot of loose coins to spare, but if you’ve got them, please help out a good publisher and inventive horror writing.