Sometimes you have to pull a hard left turn…
In my new quiet horror story, Only So Far In The Woods, a forager is invited into the muck and magic of the deep Canadian bush—only to discover that some legends are predatory. You can pre-order the ebook right now.
The creation of this story followed a familiar arc for me, one I think many writers will recognize. It started with a submission call, an open invitation from an editor for stories fitting a specific theme. In this case, Book Worms Zine wanted cryptids. They wanted monsters.
Having grown up around the spring-fed damp pine places of Northern Ontario, I wondered, like many Canadians, what was actually lurking in our own backyards. There are animals that have enjoyed rediscovery here in the last few years like wolverines and a species of snail. We hear rumors of the black panther of Tweed, rare cougar sightings, or even a narwhal found far south of its range in 1995. As a kid, I always figured there was at least one coelacanth lurking in the deep trenches of Trout Lake…
I had an idea for a creature thought long gone, but more importantly, I had a human character too: a forager.
Foraging is about looking closer at the ground than anyone else does. This comes naturally to some people. But what happens when you’re looking too closely at the muck and magic of the forest floor is that you miss the predator watching you from the treeline.
It took a few years. I told it once off-the-cuff to my friend Jason while on a summer day hike through a sugar bush. It was without an ending, I’d not written that part yet, and he dug it all the same.
This is one part of the familiar cycle this story took; having told myself a story over and over before actually writing it down. The second part is having had an idea sparked by a submission call and taking way too long to write it.
I missed the submission window entirely: the so-called ‘slush pile’ of stories awaiting an editor’s nod never saw it. Eventually, it might have ended up in another submission call and rewritten into something new. But therein lies the rub, and the hard left: I didn’t want to rewrite this to fit someone else’s theme. I wanted this story to remain the eerie and untoward tale I first told myself.
So now, I get to tell the story to you. To me, that means more than winning the battle royale of the publishing game. We don’t have to wait for my story to be discovered in the underbrush among a hundred other leaves. It means inviting you into the same mean-spirited nature that has haunted my own backyard for years.
Come into the woods today: Pre-order Only So Far In The Woods
