This item on the list is a late addition. I mentioned in my last month wrap-up post that there were a few items on the list that were looking less and less likely to be finished and I was considering swapping a few out. Around the same time I received an email from Univ. of Madison sent to all workshop participants requesting submissions for the Midwest Prairie Review’s second issue. It’s a journal focused on Midwestern writers, poets, visual artists or folks just wanting to celebrate topics related to the Midwest. Here was my chance to send something in!
I combed through stories or bits of stories that I’d already written and tried to rework a few to be ready to send in. I had an idea about another story having to do with coming home when you’ve already chosen another place to be ‘home’, but I just couldn’t quite make any of it work.
About 5 days before the submission deadline I remembered a conversation I had with a friend about Lake Michigan on his first visit. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard someone compare the Lake to an ocean, but he’d been the hardest to convince that you could not see across. He was adamant that ‘that line there…that’s is land.” to convince him all he was seeing was the horizon line was a challenge. So I wrote a story that grew from that conversation. And I sent it in.
And now I wait til maybe February to see if they’d like to include it. I don’t know if it was polished enough or well developed enough for publication. But really, I kind of can’t believe I even did it.
I tend to be one of those people who think A LOT about the things I’d like to do in life and act on them far less. That was one of the purposes of this list in the first place - to convince me ‘to act’.
Now on to #8….finishing that novel. We all have one in us, you know.
