Ephemeral City is the end of a long journey for most of the stories within. The original version of Coda was published 22 years ago in a cool little street press magazine called Syntax, created by Romy Ash. The story has been through countless revisions since.

Coda was revised and republished in 2007 as the first in a series of standalone “Mini Shots” published by Lisa Dempster. Nice to know the completely re-written story has come full circle and is again published as a standalone booklet.

When I started to recast these stories into what would become Ephemeral City, Coda as it was then didn’t fit at all. I couldn’t drop it though because for me, Coda is a kind of centrepiece to the collection, the one that makes sense of everything around it. So I scrapped the entire text and re-wrote the story again from scratch.

When Coda was first published, its main character Martin was older than me. He had a son and a daughter while I had no kids. When I returned to the story for Ephemeral City, I was now older than Martin and my own son and daughter had a good decade on his kids. I had grown up and he had stayed exactly where he was. Not sure what that means but I’d like to think it took me twenty years just to finally get this story right.

#books #shortstories #writing #publishing #growingup