Waiting for Edward
12:59 p.m.
In time for the holidays every year, the writing group I belong to puts out a small chapbook of pieces we wrote in the group during the year. I submitted three such, one of which is a poem of which I am extremely proud (which was inspired by a deer skull Janice found in the woods and brought in for show and tell), another was a brief prose piece about hanging laundry, and then the short story which is causing me so much anguish right now.
The group had to come up with a place (hotel lobby), a time (mid-afternoon), we each pulled a slip of paper out of a hat with a character on it (mine was a woman with a migraine) and we were given an opening phrase: “I opened the door and walked into the lobby...” and then continued writing for 20 or 30 minutes. I really liked the story I came up with, but Janice was concerned because it was a little long, spilling over by a line or two onto the next page. I told her to play with the paragraphs, and she did, and everything was fine EXCEPT that when I got the publication (I dropped into the bookstore on Christmas Eve and picked up my copies) and reread my own stories, I saw that she had also used her editorial discretion and “corrected” some things, in the process rendering them incorrect.
She changed a “me” to an “I” when it was an object, not a subject, and she respelled “all right” twice as “alright”, which is technically speaking wrong, even though my built-in spell-checker doesn’t seem to think so, and in the case of this story and the way it is used, it makes perfect sense to be two words.
But I have kept you in suspense long enough. The link to the story is right here. Read it and tell me what you think I should do.
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