Lightning Strikes

This blog is supposed to be a chronicle of my writing progress, sort of, so I guess that means I should post some of the successes I've had. I wrote this story called "I Did it for You" way back when our first daughter (Victoria) was still in the womb and I had some free time. She's 15 now. I wrote it at the University of Oregon when my wife was doing her masters one summer and I had time to wander around the campus. We were there for a week and I cranked this thing out in their library. I sent it out to two magazines and got rejected and sort of lost faith in the thing and left it in a drawer. Fast forward to 2012.

My wife and I were celebrating our 22nd anniversary at Harrison Hot Springs, and on our way home, while passing through Mission, BC, we went to my favourite type of place, a used book store (Murdock Books, now defunct). I spotted this immaculate first edition of Morley Callaghan's That Summer in Paris. I wasn't paying $100 for this book, so I searched a copy online. That's how I stumbled across Exile Editions, the company printing a current version of the classic book. But what I noticed in all this is that Exile was holding a short fiction contest. Since the contest deadline was three days away, I hastily mailed my long-neglected story and within a month received notice that I'd made the contest long list. A week later I'd made the short list. This contest is special, because if you make the short list then you automatically qualify to be published in their anthology, so I was most pleased. As an added bonus, I also got to appear in their literary magazine ELQ - The Literary Quarterly. And I got a couple of cheques to boot. I also still had a shot at the $3000 first prize (which I didn't win) but I already felt like a winner just to have my story published.

They threw a gala party in Toronto for the event too, which I wanted to attend, but I just couldn't justify the expense. If I had gone I could have met many of the other authors, the publisher and the sponsor of the prize: Gloria Vanderbilt. But I stayed home and told myself the airfare was too expensive. I could have even participated in a bunch of readings and a book launch and schmoozed with the publishing world. On the plus side, if you like, I still have that airfare in my bank account.

Now I sit at home with four finished stories out at magazines, and I'm hoping that lighting will strike again.