This story is why I listen to
my editors. It originally came from a dream I had in which someone
put a baby in the water, and the baby swam away like a fish. When I
woke up I went back and tried to rationalize the image, trying to
figure out why someone would make a baby able to breathe
water. I wanted to keep the story on Earth – there are plenty of
live-on-a-watery-planet stories already – so I thought about who,
throughout history, has had to leave their homes most often, and the
story unrolled fairly easily.
Except that when I sent the story to
Pete Butler, for the Triangulation: Taking Flight anthology,
he said that he liked the story but it was missing something, an
added dimension or complication to give it more depth. I thought
about that for a while and came up with the idea of the “ghost”
of Yonah’s son confronting him as the story went on. Suddenly there
was conflict in the story – between tradition and necessity, purity
and survival – and Pete bought it, saying I'd managed to make the
story read faster by adding word count. (There were two more quick
rounds of edits to make the opening punchier, as well, but that
change is basically what made the story work.)
So that’s why I listen to my
editors: they make my stories better.
