Number 9 Pack Rat

Story #9 has been published! I had my ninth story, “Threat of Rain,” published in Adelaide Literary Magazine, both on their website and in their December 2018 print issue. I’m really excited about this story being published for many reasons, but the one reason that is the most surprising is the theme of this post.

Pack rat is a term that applies, I think, to most writers. We keep everything. Bits of writing are no exception here. I have notebooks and folders dating back to the eighties, all filled with scraps of things I felt were important and relevant and, most importantly, good. I am not unique in this. Every now and then I’ll take out an old notebook or dig through a file on my Mac and peruse the old entries. Granted, most of the writing is the equivalent of writing practice, thank you Natalie Goldberg, but every now and then a real gem pops up.

That’s what happened with “Threat of Rain.” This story was a brief sketch, one of three connected vignettes I planned to put together to form a longer story. It never went anywhere, and two of the three stories are predictable and cliched. The third, after an extensive editing session, became the published story that is in Adelaide magazine. It underwent some serious retooling, too, to become a story that focuses on the relationship between the husband and wife, as opposed to the teenage daughter’s problems. It’s a tighter story. A better story. But that’s what editing is all about: reworking a draft, stripping it down to its bare essence if necessary. And all because the scraps of writing were still around.

So being a pack rat works for me. All of those little tidbits of prose are sitting there waiting for me to pluck them, a fertile bed of possible story pieces. I’ll keep looking at them. That’s where #9 came from, after all.