In November of 2013, I decided to try playing around with pace. Most of what I’d written up to then had a fairly fast pace, and my editing was all about making things more efficient, that is to say, even faster. So I thought it would be interesting to write something slow. What kind of narrator would have a slow perspective? Well, how about a statue? And so I wrote this story about a statue and the person who’s making him.

I finished the first draft in January 2014, and it was the best thing I’d written at that time. It’s slow, yeah—but I think it’s worth slowing down sometimes, paying attention to perspective, to details and sensations. We create things slowly, or at least I do. While we often try to make the end product look easy, sometimes it is good to be aware of that long and painstaking work and how much of ourselves we give to it.

Big thanks to Sigrid Ellis, Jason Sizemore, and Lesley Connor at Apex Magazine for accepting and publishing my story. Thanks, also, to my 9-year-old self for her deep obsession with the D’Aulaires’ book of Greek myths.

So: here is a story about a statue. Titled “Slow.”