Circling back to the working title candidates I sent out a few weeks ago, I received a number of responses and reactions to the titles and logline. People seemed to love the premise. And a consensus arose around a few of the proposed titles.

The most popular working titles were:

In the Hearts of Men / In the Heart of a Man
I Know You Are But What Am I?
A Man Falls In the Woods

A few people didn’t like any of the titles. I appreciate that kind of honesty. I may not have a good one yet. But this exercise has helped me focus the story nonetheless.

Thank you to everyone who responded with feedback, thoughts, and reflections. I am grateful to have so many engaged readers already.

A word about a few of the title candidates:

“The Odor of the Flesh”

People didn’t love this one. But I have some affection toward it because it’s pulled from a quote that inspired and summarizes the major theme of this novel.

“But when it suddenly dawns on us, or is forced to our attention, that everything we think or do is necessarily tainted with the odor of the flesh, then, not uncommonly, there is experienced a moment of revulsion: life, the acts of life, the organs of life, woman in particular as the great symbol of life, become intolerable to the pure, the pure, pure soul.”
— Joseph Campbell

It describes to some extent my protagonist’s journey. People were energized by that idea when I was workshopping it at The Gotham Writers novel workshop in New York City back in 2015. Anyway, we’ll come back to the kernel in that quote a few times in the Cave…

“The Jealousy Release Ritual”

This is pulled from a scene in the last half of the novel, which is based on a real practice that I learned in Thy Neighbor’s Wife (still my all-time favorite work of non-fiction), where swingers at John Williamson’s Southern California sex compound fifty years ago would force jealous partners to overcome their jealousy by having them witness sex with their spouse and a third person. More on that in a future post.

Today I want to talk about a short story version of the novel that I eventually did put together to send to a few publications.1

The Short Story Version

We’re going to be jumping around a bit on the novel-writing timeline in this newsletter. Today, we jump ahead to 2016 / 2017 when I finally did send something out for publication.

Even though I had initially eschewed a short-story stage of this story in favor of a novel-length version because “I had too much to say,” I eventually desired the reassurance of getting something, anything published, so that I could confirm whether I had what it takes as a writer. So in 2016 I gathered a few scenes from my then-current draft of the novel and turned them into a short story to send around to some publications, which I did over the course of months, extending into 2017.

As I think about sharing this short-story draft with you I am a little embarrassed. It’s a vulnerable thing. I would like to rewrite it first. But that would be dishonest. I want to share this journey with you in all its hairy imperfection, to show the cracks and the laziness and the vulnerable places. Having said that, rereading that short story version now leaves me feeling the same way I felt rereading the full draft: it needs a lot of work but there is potential there. I just needed to keep writing.

This is the draft I submitted to several publications in 2016–2017, including American Short Fiction and LitMag. I don’t recall whether I ever submitted to Playboy after all. I don’t think I felt confident enough. American Short Fiction was kind enough to compliment the submission and only turned it down because it wasn’t right for their audience. Perhaps it was too edgy.

As you can see, I had gone with “The Reluctant Secondary” as the title for this short story.

This short version is basically three scenes:

An early scene where Wyatt wants Myranda to spend the night but that would violate her polyamory agreement with her primary Noah
A scene where Wyatt meets Noah, Myranda’s “primary,” at a showing of his art at a bar in North Beach
A scene where Wyatt is trying to assert some control by proposing an overly-lawyered, written poly agreement between Myranda and himself

The Innermost Cave

The Short Story Version

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