In June 2021, I took part in Jami Attenberg’s 1,000 Words of Summer. I wrote at least 1,000 words per day for two weeks, and those pieces included all nine flash stories that eventually ended up in Green Light: A Gatsby Cycle. (The first few days of writing were something else entirely… but we won’t go there.)
Janet had already found her poems. In fact, her idea of using the first page of each chapter is why I used a sentence from the first page of each chapter to start a flash story. But we didn’t collaborate. It wasn’t until later that we put it all together and realized… hey, this works!
We sent Green Light out into the world—to nine publishers total! The last submission was to Alien Buddha Press. Red loved the book but had never worked with two authors on one project before, so he encouraged us to each submit our own books instead. And we did! (Janet published ghosts passing through and I published Won’t Be By Your Side.)
However, as the 100th anniversary of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby grew closer, we knew we needed to get this book out in the world. With all the excitement celebrating that centennial, it would be perfect timing! So we reached out to Alien Buddha Press once more, hoping that Red would be willing to work with us as a duo since he’d worked with us individually. And he agreed! We streamlined things for him (I hope!) and marketed the hell out of the book for six weeks leading up to its publication date of April 10, 2025 – 100 years after the original Gatsby!
Just for fun, here are photos of my original handwritten drafts of the flash in Green Light.
And for even more fun, here are the word counts – then and now:
Chapter 1: 1057, now 738
Chapter 2: 1008, now 729
Chapter 3: 1064, now 694
Chapter 4: 1013, now 700
Chapter 5: 1126, now 732
Chapter 6: 1023, now 714
Chapter 7: 1002, now 705
Chapter 8: 1117, now 712
Chapter 9: 1074, now 668
Allison Renner Writes 