Edification – Daydreams and eye-floaters
Edification – Newsletter #84 – August 22, 2021
Dear Reader,
Happy Sunday!
The ice has cracked on publications this week. I’m happy to share a short story, “A Place So Far Away It Was Already Tomorrow”, which won the honor of “First Commended” for the 2021 New Flash Fiction Prize in New Flash Fiction Review.
It’s short enough you can see a little of the architecture of my writing, I think – abstractions, concrete details, flyaway thoughts.
The story was based on a memory of my parents daydreaming about moving to Australia and living in an underground home in the Outback. Daydreaming was such an active component of my early life, for kids and adults alike; we were always halfway somewhere else. Life was happening in our peripheral visions.
To be honest, I had given up on that story after submitting it to multiple places and receiving form rejections. It wasn’t the piece I felt most confident about among the three I submitted to New Flash Fiction Review – the contest allowed up to three entries, and it was sitting there in the folder, hands in its lap...
Just goes to show that sticking a landing does sometimes come down to that final foot placement. Audience is everything.
This week I also had two related creative nonfiction pieces published in the always amazing Twin Pies Literary, “Mary” and “On Account of the Wind.”
Content warning for those: Both are about my mother-in-law (to be) of my first marriage, who killed herself after my fiancé and I told her we were getting married in the spring of 2000.
Her suicide remains one of the worst events of my life, let alone my ex-husband’s. It was important for me to finally begin writing about that period. There are other related nonfiction pieces I’ve been working on this summer, but I’m not sure when, or in what form, they will finally emerge.
Deep breath.
In other news, another novel idea is floating in my eye. Eye floaters – that’s how a lot of my ideas feel once I finally try to focus on them. Has that spot always been there?
The main character of my new novel is a middle-aged social worker with a rebellious teenager, and she feels like home.
I’m excited to spend time with her, even as I push back against the thought that nobody wants to read a story about a middle-aged woman. I’m so tired of battling invisibility.
But maybe this, too, is a matter of finding the right audience. And maybe finding my audience begins with a battle against the invisibility I impose on myself.
Talk soon,
Edie
Connect with me.