Recycling
Recycling a story is not unusual, it can be very satisfying revisiting a story written years ago, picking it apart, revamping it, even polishing it up to submit to a current writing competition. You might marvel as you go through your files and acknowledge how much you’ve actually written over the years or see how your writing has developed and changed with time.
One story I found myself returning to was inspired by a journey I took in 2011 with three good friends. The four of us had recently retired from demanding jobs and decided to team up for an adventure. Leaving our partners at home, we flew to Los Angeles, hired an SUV, and drove up the West Coast of California, exploring as we went. We called our trip ‘On the Road’ and when we reached San Francisco, we visited the fabulous Beat Museum to learn more about Jack Kerouac and his friends.
From San Francisco we took an Amtrak train across America to Chicago before moving on to meet a friend in New York. We were due to take the California Zephyr but as I recall this was rerouted because of floods and we ended up on the Southwest Chief to Chicago. This part of our adventure we called ‘Girl Guides on a Train’ because it felt like a camping trip at the time. On the Chicago to New York train we travelled alongside survivors and relatives affected by the awful Twin Tower attacks of Sept 2001. They were on their way to memorial events, honouring the 10 year anniversary and we stayed up all night listening to their tales, almost too harrowing to write about.
It's the ‘On the Road’ section of our trip that's been at the heart of various pieces of writing ever since. The journey crops up in my novel ‘How They Met Themselves’ when two young men travel to California after their graduation. They take the Pacific Coast Highway and meet some extraordinary young women along the way. Both men later make appearances in ‘Lawn House Blues’ and one of them even plays a small part in ‘To Be Frank’. I became so fond of my characters I couldn’t leave them behind.
It wasn't easy to let go of the Californian journey, so as well as a travel journal of my memories, I wrote a short story based on it for one of my writing groups. The story has been adapted and edited a number of times since and submitted to various competitions. At the fourth submission attempt, and now called ‘Crossings’, it was finally accepted for Robert Fear’s 2023 Anthology ‘15 Fascination Fictional Tales’, which is now available to purchase from Amazon. www.fd81.net. Perseverance got there in the end.
I suspect my memories of travelling through California have had their day now and it’s time I pull apart another old story or maybe take some new journeys.
