I wrote my first novel,
A Year of Tuesdays, right after I finished my MFA in 2001. The last thing I heard before leaving the University of Arizona was, “Good luck! Write a novel! Nobody buys short stories!”
“What?” I yelled. “That’s all you taught me to write!”
“Oh, well! Bye-bye!”
Bye-bye, indeed. I reasoned with myself that if I wrote twenty short stories with a consistent narrator (i.e., “chapters”) I’d have a novel. And it worked! The resulting manuscript was good enough to get an agent’s attention, but not good enough for publication. Apparently, it lacked a “plot.”
But I could do that! Hell, I could draft the plot to end all plots, incorporating the gossip industry, a Roman Catholic splinter group, and Post-Olympic Depression Syndrome. All these pieces were cobbled together in a novel called
These Conceits Aloud...