I have exciting news today! My short story “Impossibly Back” is now live on Youth Imagination, and it is free to read.
In this story, when a horseback ride goes wrong, a girl must try to save her best friend’s life, and their endangered relationship.
This story has an interesting origin, so I thought I’d fill you in on where it came from.
This summer, I took Kate Angelella‘s fiction writing class via my company Sounding Sea. In class, Kate asked us to write about someone who needs a drink of water. I cast my mind about for the right situation, and remembered a particularly harrowing horseback ride that could have ended horribly. The line “I’m gonna die” in the story comes directly from my thoughts during that ride! Luckily, I lived to turn that real life story into this fictional one.
I like to use minor characters from other stories as protagonists in new stories, so I imagined the little sister from my story “Pie,” and launched into the beginning of this story.
Well, in our ten-minute class writing session, I never got around to the part about needing a drink of water. I did find characters and a situation that I wanted to explore. I wrote the full story, and brought it in for workshop in Kate’s class later that summer. I revised, and workshopped it again in my thesis class with Jane Delury, at the University of Baltimore, where I am almost finished getting my Masters of Fine Arts. I revised again (and again), and started sending the story out.
I was thrilled when Youth Imagination let me know they loved it and wanted to publish it, and I am happy to share it with you today! I am so grateful to Kate, Jane, and all of my classmates who helped me develop this tale.
Leave a Reply