About ten years ago, after a couple of bad jobs and something of an emotional meltdown, I took a little more than a year off to work on my writing. The result was about a score of short stories of varying quality (a couple of them received honorable mention in their respective years of The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy) and a sprawling, dystopian novel called All We Ever Wanted (Was Everything).
All We Ever Wanted is thirty-three chapters long, 150,000 words, and rather heavy-handedly deals with themes of biology, destiny, and death-and-resurrection. It’s set in a world where the “genetically perfectable” live in fancy “Endowment Communities” and everyone else fends for themselves outside of them in an urban wasteland called the Unincorporated Zones. The main characters are Nina, a mercurial magic-using young woman who is the dead-and-resurrected god figure (she tries to retrieve her beloved friend Luna from the dead, Orpheus-style, gets stuck in the realm of the dead herself, and is resurrected some twenty-five years later); and Cat, a young woman from an Endowment community who has to run away to the Zones. But there are tons more characters, all with quirky names (Trout, Zoe, Gibson, Spark, Romero, Noah, a creepy guy called The Messiah). I finished it in 2001, when I was twenty-three years old.
Warner Books offered to publish it as an e-novel, but I turned them down. I thought I would find an agent, find a publisher, and be a critically-acclaimed young author by the age of twenty-five. I was wrong. The novel was rejected by agents and publishers alike. A few agents expressed interest, only to balk at the novel’s format when they received partials. It’s told in both third person and in several first-person voices, something I was not willing to change. After about a year of rejection, I trunked the novel and regarded it as an unpublishable exercise — an important part of my development as a writer, but ultimately not destined for public consumption.
I’ve been thinking about All We Ever Wanted lately. It started as just thinking about the characters and the world when I had insomnia, kind of inhabiting a place and spending time with people that I created. And then I started thinking that perhaps there was something I could make out of it after all. After almost ten years, the characters and world were intriguing to me again. Dystopian fiction is popular in young adult fiction now and I could perhaps make a three-volume series out of it.
It’ll be interesting to look at it and see what has changed and what remains of my writing style. The multiple points of view — that has stayed. I remember that the novel starts out fairly melodramatic and then mellows into the more quiet conflict that I write now. And it begins with horses — they remain as well. The most recent short story I wrote has horses in it.
