The First Submission of the Year

 Yesterday I sent out my first submission of the year. It's the short story inspired by both powdered donuts and Dorothy Parker. It was a general submission and not a contest submission, so I haven't been able to check off any milestones on my professional goals so far. However, I did run into an interesting problem. 

I'm a sucker for the inside story, the path to that leads to final version. I love listening to The Beatles Anthology because I like knowing how it started. I devoured the restored edition of Sylvia Plath's Ariel because you can see the thought process that went into writing and ordering each piece for the collection. In my infinite wisdom, I wanted to someday belong to this type of story-behind-the-story. 

Ever since I first wrote the draft of this short story, I had problems with the ending. The last paragraph, sometimes just the last line, never really fit. Since that first draft, I have rewritten the ending four times. I never wrote it out by hand, so in order to preserve my process for future generations, I kept four different Word files, each with a different ending. As I was trying to submit the story yesterday, I couldn't figure out which ending I had finally settled on. I read and reread all of them, and it just didn't sound right. I knew I had one I finally liked, but I wasn't seeing it. So I tried to write a fifth version of the ending. Once I saved it on one of the files, I reopened it (because I wasn't sure which file I was working on--they all had similar file names), and like magic, appearing right under the ending I had just written, was the last one I had written just before its previous submission. I swear it was not there when I first opened it. 

Thankfully, a quick edit to get rid of the rushed new ending I wrote, I was able to submit it successfully. Does it have a shot? Maybe. I submitted it to a publication that's only on it's second issue, so we will see what happens. 

And now I have to go back and get some more work prepped to be sent out. Is 2021 my year? Probably.