Fantasm

Sometimes I have a whole novel planned out—all the intricacies of plot and character development swirling away in my brain—I just have to put it down on paper. But as I write, the words boil away and a novel of 70,000 – 90,000 words concentrate into a mere 5,000 words.

This is what happened to my story "Fantasm". The novel that was Fantasm slowly distilled into a short story—at least a short story in terms of word count. I still think it's a novel, a novel reduced into a tiny perfume bottle.

It's not an easy story to appreciate, the distillation having swirled conventions. That's why I felt very lucky that Fantasm was accepted by Atticus Review and was featured there in last week's issue.

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