Trying

I suppose instead of writing a blog post about a short story that I’m struggling to edit, I could edit the damn story. It’ll be in the next PresenTense, but the PDFs are coming out tomorrow… that means I need to get the words done tonight.

But it isn’t working. I took a saccharine sweet daydream I’d had about my 30th birthday, turned it into a saccharine sweet story set in 1968 Jerusalem. Going off of a few photographs I found and my own fantasies of coupled life, I wrote the story.

I’m not in love with it, I’m not married to it. Honestly, I hardly want to be in a room with it anymore… I know that I’ll never have a perfect moment in the plaza of the Kotel, so why do I try and force a fictitious couple into a perfect moment.

Wanting to break up with my story doesn’t stop that fact that I owe an 800 word short story about Israel to the editors. I’m gonna see what I can do with it, I’ll let you know if I trade the saccharine for something a little more honest.

UPDATE: The world turns, things change and my short story will not be in the next issue of PresenTense. Through writing it I got to know two of my character better and realized that they are more than a little influenced by Lynn and Charles Schusterman. If you’ve ever heard Lynn speak, she always comes back to her first trip with her late husband to Israel. If you want to read it, here is something I wrote.