Now I’m really out of stories, etc. to send to publications. I sent one to my professor this morning about my runaway experience for a nonfiction contest. He asked all of us MFA students to send in our best work and he would choose one nonfiction, one fiction, and three poems to send into the contest. SO I won’t know anything about whether I’m even in that group until after December 1.
I did have a great idea last night–I tried to write a novel years before I started freelance writing. I started on it after the Lewinsky scandal. It was a political novel about a newspaper reporter covering politics for a major metropolitan newspaper and the presidential campaign he covered.
Well, I got 150 pages into it and gave up. But I laid in bed last night and thought, why don’t I take the story of the campaign and write it as fiction short story AS IF IT ACTUALLY HAPPENED. Set the election in 2024 and have the story itself told from the point of view of the reporter looking back on his life and talking about this incredible political campaign. Write a fiction story as if it were a nonfiction memoir. I think ti would likely be novella length but oh so good.
A lot that I had happen in the story has happened in the intervening years–elements of the Bush Vs. Gore court case in the 2000 election , the events of 9/11, election of the first black president, etc. SO I will have to update and explain the story a little bit. But I found my original notes for the novel, a synopsis I had written, and the first 150 pages this morning after searching my desk. SO I’m excited about the possibilities.
Hope everyone has a great weekend! Bob is going off on his trip Friday; please pray that it will go well for him and that me and the girls can make it fine on our end.