Rhea Thomas lives in Austin, Texas where she works as a program manager in the digital media world. Her short stories have been published in multiple publications, including, most recently, The Fictional Café, Toasted Cheese and Does It Have Pockets. She spends her free time hoarding books, walking her stubborn Labrador retriever, playing games with her sons, kayaking and swimming in rivers, searching for mysteries and writing short stories that explore magical moments in the mundane. Her first book, a collection of short stories, is due out in August 2025, and she’s currently working on a literary mystery novel.
WOW: First of all, congratulations on your short story collection. What inspired this collection?
Rhea: Thank you! Weirdly, work inspired this short story collection. I’ve worked in digital marketing for 15 years now, and about 8 years ago, I started writing short stories as a creative outlet and for stress relief. I had a lot of fun taking office situations from my daily life and then exaggerating those situations and throwing in some unexpected magic.
After I wrote a handful of stories all centered around one fictional digital marketing agency, my writing coach, Kathie Giorgio, said, you know, this could be a themed short story collection. At that point, I got a little more strategic as I wrote the rest and started focusing on how they could all work together as a whole. I had a lot of fun writing and ended up with a total of 15 stories.
They are all connected and contain some common themes, characters and easter eggs, and the final story kind of brings everything together. The collection has now been traditionally published and came out in August.
WOW: You did a wonderful job bringing it all together. I can't help but fall in love with this collection by the first page. It caught me right away! What was your process in putting this collection together to capture the reader?
Rhea: I decided to have each story from a different perspective, to make things interesting, but also to give myself a challenge to work from different perspectives with all the different characters. Could I write from a man’s perspective, a woman’s perspective, an intern, a CEO, a client, etc. I also had more freedom with settings with all the different characters.
I enjoyed focusing on the office environment, initially, but I also wanted to be able to write outside of it, such as one story being set in Santa Fe, another in Austria. I hoped the different locations and characters would be interesting to the writer … as well as the different magical situations they encountered. Surprisingly, the stories are laid out mostly in the order they were written.
WOW: You did a great job shifting perspectives! What was your revision process like? Did you rewrite any of your short stories after knowing they were going into a collected works?
Rhea: I mentioned before that I work with a writing coach/editor, Kathie Giorgio. She’s brilliant and working with her is fun, but also intense! There was a lot of revision from the get-go with each story. I had trouble nailing endings at first. I would think the story was complete, but Kathie would tell me, no, it’s not quite there yet, and I’d keep at it until we all agreed the ending was right. I am also in multiple writing groups, so I received all kinds of great feedback from many different perspectives. I can’t advocate enough for working with a coach and/or writing group. It’s made me a much better writer, and I continue to grow. You learn from the comments you receive from other writers, but you also learn from helping other writers with their work too.
Originally, the intent was to market each story separately, then, once I finished the last story, we had to go through and re-edit all the stories again as a cohesive collection and figure out the placement order. You must make sure that all details are tied together and make sense. Three of the stories were published independently before the entire collection was published as a book.
WOW: I love how you worked in that feedback. A lot of your stories are interconnected. Did you do that after you had already written the story or was that in the early planning stages?
Rhea: Some interconnectedness happened naturally, but most were deliberate, especially after I realized I wanted to make this a themed collection. My writing groups and coach seemed to enjoy finding connections as they read my works-in-progress, and I loved the surprise and fun they had reading and finding them. The last story was the most challenging to write, as I wanted to kind of tie everything together in that one, and for the longest time, I had no idea how to do that. Eventually it just kind of worked out. It’s so strange and satisfying when things come together.
WOW: It really makes you want to re-read the collection! I'm a short story writer myself, so I can't help but ask: why do you prefer writing short stories over novels?
Rhea: I took creative writing at UT where we focused on short stories. I was in online writing classes and ended up finding my writing coach. I joined her writing studio, AllWriters’, and ended up in several writing groups/workshops there. Short stories were what I knew. I figured if I could conquer the short story form, then, gradually, I could move on to a novel. I love taking moments in time, a feeling, a situation and resolving it quickly. Faster gratification. However, I’m working on a novel now, and holy moly, that’s a totally different beast! It’s harder for me, but I am enjoying diving deeper into the characters and plot. As me how I feel about novels and short stories again, when I’ve completed this novel. I may have a totally different answer!
WOW: I can only imagine! What draws you to writing magical realism stories?
Rhea: I wish I could say that I chose magical realism, because it happened regularly in my life, but that wouldn’t be true. My imagination loves to pretend, and I can’t tell you how many situations I’ve been in where I think, oh, imagine how weird it would be if THIS happened instead. One such example … I had something show up on a mammogram and had to have an ultrasound and biopsy, which ended up being kind of scary and sobering, so my brain decided to bring some levity with the idea of a short story where a woman’s breast ultrasound showed a bean growing in her breast. A bean that could be harvested to create superfood products. That short story is called Sprouting and is in the published collection. I let another character unknowingly brew hallucinogenic coffee in the workplace, and another character finds the free food samples at her local “CostClub” have very unusual side effects. I just love tying the real world into a pretty magical bow.
So, magical realism just happened naturally for me in that way. I didn’t want to create a whole new fantasy world, so I kept the world “real” but threw in a bit of shock-and-awe surprises to grab the readers’ attention. I don’t want readers to assume they know what will happen next. I really like the juxtaposition of real and magic in each story, because it accentuates the pop of magic when it occurs.
WOW: Ha, that's so great how your mind works naturally that way! What are you working on now that you can tell us about?
Rhea: I’m currently working on a literary mystery novel, an homage of sorts to Nancy Drew, and writing the occasional short story on the side when an idea hits me. I’m also working on a collection of NextDoor-like satirical posts that have been so much fun. I’d probably write the novel faster if I didn’t keep taking on side projects, but when creativity and a great idea hit, you just have to go with it.
WOW: I think whatever makes your creative side bloom is worth it. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me today. Enjoy your tour!
Visit Kaecey's blog for a guest post by Rhea Thomas on how to look for sparks of creativity during your day.
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