Meeting My Goal

Sometime in January of this year, I resolved that, in order to further my interest in writing, I would  submit a short piece of fiction to the annual Prairie Fire magazine writing competition.  The deadline for submission:  November 30, 2009.  Thus, in spring, I wrote a partial first draft of a story which I intended to complete, edit and have ready to go in plenty of time.  Unfortunately, long before I finished the first draft, I became disillusioned with the whole thing and gave up on it.  I decided that I could always enter the competition another year.

And there the matter stayed, throughout the remainder of spring, all of summer and most of fall...

...until a month ago, when I realized that it was really bothering me that November 30th was fast approaching and I hadn't even tried to finish my story.  It had been haunting me so much that I finally decided to give it a last ditch effort.  So, for the past few weeks, I have stolen a few hours here and there to sneak off to the millenium library or to a nearby Starbucks to work on it (with my old, decrepit computer!).  At first, the story kept growing so much that I thought that I was never going to make the deadline...or the word count maximum of 10,000 words.  At its largest, the story was over 20,000 words long (about 50-60 pages).  At that point, panicking a little, I realized that if I wanted any shot at submitting something, I needed to start chopping and refining.  That was a surprisingly painful process, as I had to cut out many large sections that I'd actually felt pretty good about.  But it was necessary, and the end result was better anyway.

I finished my story (using my new computer!) on Wednesday, and hand-delivered it to Prairie Fire on Thursday.  When I handed it in, I felt like a character in a movie, holding grimly onto the envelope while someone attempted to take it away from me.  I felt very vulnerable handing over a piece of myself and opening myself up to the eventuality of someone deciding that it isn't good enough.

The final story was just under 9,000 words (29-30 pages double-spaced) and is called Quickening.  It's a story geared primarily towards a young adult audience, and is about a young woman who finds herself falling in love for the first time with her brother's best friend - it is set in the Long Beach area of Vancouver Island.  I have no illusions about the grandeur of the story or the writing - I am not going to win this competition, or even come in second or third.  For me, this was about finishing something and about doing something that I had decided was important to me.  I am proud of myself!