Releasing a Short Story Collection Can Be Nerve Wracking: A Guest Post by Eliza Clark
Paperback $17.99
She's Always Hungry: Stories
She's Always Hungry: Stories
By Eliza Clark
In Stock Online
Paperback $17.99
Taut and surreal, Eliza Clark is back with eleven stories of womanhood, want and wonder.
Taut and surreal, Eliza Clark is back with eleven stories of womanhood, want and wonder.
The stories that make up She’s Always Hungry were completed over a six-year period. The three oldest stories in the collection (Build a Body Like Mine, Shake Well and Hollow Bones) were initially completed in 2018 and have been given several major re-edits over the years. The Problem Solver, Little Chitaly and Nightstalkers were completed before the collection was sold to my UK publisher in early 2021 where Extinction Event and She’s Always Hungry (the title story) were written after, in mid-late 2021. These two stories ended up replacing older stories which I decided to cut from the collection. Company Man was written and added in late 2022 and The King, the newest story, was completed at the start of 2024 and snuck in right before final edits.
The collection has a pretty broad range of genres, settings and subjects – which I think is inevitable given the long period of time the stories were written over. Each story feels like a very individual piece of work to me, each with its own world and set of inspirations. I have worried that the collection might feel a little lacking in cohesion due to the way it was assembled – but I do think the individual stories have benefitted greatly from the amount of time I had to work on them.
The collection was pushed back a couple of times due to quirks in the publishing calendar, and I’ve been very grateful to have had the opportunity to go over and re-edit the stories several times – particularly the older ones, which have benefitted a lot from time and distance. The stories from 2018 were all given big, structural re-edits at the beginning of the year – and I think Hollow Bones in particular went from being over-long and over-ambitious to the best story in the collection on a technical level. I have often said I prefer editing to drafting, and it was a thrill to return to a six-year-old story and to be able to make global improvements to it.
Releasing a short story collection can be a bit nerve wracking, as it does feel like you’re opening yourself up to mixed reviews (not everyone is going to like every story – a reader may only enjoy one or two, or none at all) but it’s also been exciting to see readers dig into stories I’ve had in the bag for such a long time!
