How did “A Sojourn in the Fifth City” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

In the broadest sense, this story is a version of the science-fantasy novel that I started writing when I was fourteen years old, wrote and rewrote many times over high school and early college, but never managed to turn into a satisfactory narrative or reach my planned ending. It was typical of adolescent novels, I think, in that I kept adding on complex setting and thematic elements and didn’t have a strong grasp on characterization, plot, or voice.

It was the story that I learned to write from. I got stuck many times, and every time my approach was to try to rewrite it and re-imagine it from the beginning, adding more complexity to confusion to the text every time. Eventually, the whole project collapsed under its own weight and I moved on (after a period of frustration, depression, tears—all the usual consequences of abandoning a decade of creative work).

A few years ago, it occurred to me that I could go back to the setting and the narrative and write only the ending I had planned and never reached, that all of that setting complexity could be tucked into the side and I could focus on the core emotional landscape of an apprentice at the end of her pilgrimage. When I was a teenager, I didn’t have the focus or skill to pare the story down that far, but now I did.

So I tried to write it, initially in the context of a online “writing contest” (not for money, just a group of people writing to deadline together). I got, I don’t know, about a third of the way in and stalled out. Then I got some well-intentioned but ill-conceived feedback and that kind of killed my desire to work on it. So I left it behind, as I leave a lot of my work, as a half-finished text file in a corner of my hard drive.

About a year after that, Kelly Link asked Twitter to write her a ghost story for her birthday, and I immediately thought of this story (despite it not having any ghosts per se), which of course had been rattling around in the back of my head the whole time. I sat down to finish it and got about halfway (or so) before I stalled out again. This time, the stall wasn’t because of feedback. It was purely internal—I didn’t have the skill necessary to keep the narrative engaging all the way to the end with only one character.

A year and change after that failed attempt, I was at the very end of the Clarion West workshop. Because of scheduling reasons, I ended up with nine days at the end of the workshop where I wasn’t required to write anything other than feedback for my classmates. At least for me, the sort of intensive work environment in this kind of workshop leaves me unable to do much but keep writing, and I was at a peak of my writing ability, so I decided to go back to the half-finished draft and finish it up. Luckily, I now had skills learned from the workshop and also from a novel I had just finished with a very strong character voice, so this time the attempt actually “took” and I was able to finish the story.

In a very real way, this is a story that took me almost my entire life to write. Sometimes the only thing to do is recognize that you’re not up to finishing a story now, and set it aside to wait until you’re a better writer in the future.

Where are you in this story?

Dead, hopefully. It’s set very far into the future.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

I’m working a novel in the setting of the Great Sweet Sea stories. I have another novel (the one mentioned above, a science fiction love story) on submission. Really, it’s just raining novels over here. I hope at some point to be able to share them with you all.

A list of my published fiction can be found at my website: p-h-lee.com.