In 2005, I wrote a story called Girl-in-the-Box and submitted it to magazines, collecting seven rejections in all, till I received a handwritten one from Eric Heideman of Tales of the Unanticipated. He set forth in detail what he liked about the piece, and also explained that, at 14,000 words, it was too long for his magazine. He noted I could cut it down, but he added I might consider expanding it into a novel instead (and he enumerated several reasons why I might choose to do so). I took his note to heart and wrote the novel.

Oh that novel. It took so long to write, and revise and revise again. I shopped a version of it to agents in 2011 and 2012, then revised it yet again and shopped it anew in 2018. Lo and behold, I landed an agent, who worked hard; they sent my novel everywhere, but no one took it. The reasons the various houses gave started to repeat. The agent and I went our separate ways.

Then one day I found myself walking to lunch with an editor, who spoke to me at length about my novel that he’d rejected. I was amazed because it was easily a year since he’d had it under consideration, and yet he remembered it in detail. This editor ended his comments by mentioning he’d really liked chapter one, and suggested I “put something with it” (his exact words) to make a short story. I followed his advice, and sold the resulting novelette, Conversations with Callie, or The Synthesis of Disdain and Love to Analog. It’ll come out in the July/August issue.

Here’s the important point: the novelette, clocking in at 8,500 words, is miles better than the novel. I can honestly say that finally, after a decade, I learned how to tell this story.

Then comes the question. Why didn't I just abandon this thing? The year 2005, when I wrote the original tale, was well before my first novel (now out-of-print) came out in small press in 2008. It was before I made my first pro sale (in 2013) and started to regularly sell short stories to Apex, Analog, Clarkesworld and Tordotcom. The key idea of Girl-in-the-Box—uploading one’s consciousness into a computer instead of dying—had appeared in better-told stories I’d sold over the years.

Yet a little girl hadn’t been uploaded in those other stories. Parents hadn’t had to make a wrenching decision. In the end, Conversations with Callie is a grief story.

I wrote Conversations with Callie when my spouse, John, was still alive. Analog accepted it four months before John died. I received the galleys for review just short of the one year anniversary of John's death. When I read the story then, I was struck by a single thought: I couldn’t have written a better grief story for John if I’d tried.

Yes, science fiction is steeped in idea, and Conversations with Callie is loaded with it. Also, literature has a capacity to give us a safe place to work through things in ourselves that we may not have fully integrated. It’s why we cry at the movies, or cherish a certain book we’d read at a certain point in our lives. Callie turned out to be that, for me.