Behind the Scenes: Death and Cecil Copperpot

My short story “Death and Cecil Copperpot” holds a special place in my heart. It was my first published short story. My first print publication. The first story I ever did a live reading for. Quite a bit of work went into the creation of this special story, and it is one of my favorite works to this day.

“Death and Cecil Copperpot” began as a college assignment for my Fiction Workshop back in 2015. Like most of my work, I can’t exactly say how I got the idea for “Death and Cecil Copperpot.” However, it was inspired by two very specific works of literature: Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” and Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series.

I was actually required to read “Rip Van Winkle” for that same Fiction Workshop class a few weeks prior to my drafting of “Death and Cecil Copperpot”, so it was fresh in my mind. What I liked most about “Rip Van Winkle” was its beginning:

This scene painted such a vivid picture in my mind of these great, sweeping landscapes, both beautiful and terrifying in their natural majesty, and then in came the idea for this tiny village nestled somewhere in there, quite overwhelmed by the scenery and ugly in comparison. Thus, Greymoor bloomed in my mind as the setting of “Death and Cecil Copperpot.”

Additionally, I liked the omniscient narrator that every now and then intrudes in the first person in “Rip Van Winkle.” I knew for my own story I wanted to have this same all-knowing, powerful presence, but I wanted it to be a character in the story; I wanted it to be Death. One of my favorite renditions of Death in literature is found across the Discworld series by Sir Terry Pratchett:

With Pratchett’s Death, there is no doubt of his awesome and terrifying power.  Even the small caps used for dialogue cue the readers that something momentous is happening every time Death is on scene. Despite that gravitas, Pratchett’s Death also embodies the same whimsy and satire that the rest of his characters do, making him very much at home in Discworld.

That’s what I wanted for my Death: a supernatural being that is both at home and kept apart from the world and people he serves. I quite shamelessly borrowed much of my inspiration for my Death from Pratchett and used it as a starting point to mold a Death that fit Greymoor and interacted with Cecil on a personal, less sarcastic, and more caring level.

With these two pieces of excellent literature in mind, and ideas flowing through my head about the meaning of life, “Death and Cecil Copperpot” was born, and, less than a month later, soundly rejected.

“Death and Cecil Copperpot” was rejected over 15 times for a period of 4 years. That’s actually a very low number of rejections for a story to face out there in the cruel literary world. During those years, I experimented on “Death and Cecil Copperpot” in a desperate hope to make it appealing to magazines. I had one draft written from Cecil’s point of view instead of Death’s. Another draft where I replaced the mirror of Time with a magical map. And at one point, I even tried to turn it into both a graphic short and a screenplay.

In the end, what won out was something quite close to the original 2015 draft, and I did absolutely nothing to bring about its publication.

In November of 2019, I received an email from the Santa Clara Review, quite out of the blue, asking after “Death and Cecil Copperpot.” I had submitted it to them a couple years prior, and they said, though it was rejected then, they had liked it and wondered if I had anything to submit to their upcoming issue.

I almost deleted the email, thinking it was spam. The idea that someone after all these years remembered my story, liked it, and reached out to me about it was beyond belief. Once I regained my senses, I immediately replied that “Death and Cecil Copperpot” was still available, and I was happy to resubmit it for consideration. I probably came off quite desperate, but the wonderful editors at Santa Clara Review graciously ignored my insanity and accepted my story.

I spent most of the month of November editing “Death and Cecil Copperpot” alongside Danna D’Esopo, the fiction editor. Together we completely rewrote the beginning of the story to be more streamlined and analyzed my diction to create the greatest impact in each sentence. By February 2020, 5 years after its creation, “Death and Cecil Copperpot” was published and out there for the entire literary world to read and, hopefully, enjoy.

Creating “Death and Cecil Copperpot” was a long, messy process, and it was only through divine intervention from God Himself that it ever saw the light of day, but I can honestly say that I enjoyed every second I worked on this story. I will always cherish it and look to it as my first great accomplishment as a writer.

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Check out “Death and Cecil Copperpot” HERE and HERE

Learn more about the Santa Clara Review HERE

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