Interesting Week...

...one could say a very successful week, but only in certain ways.

I'm working on a fiction piece right now that's going very well. I hope to have it done by Tuesday. Or at least "done enough" to turn in to my fiction professor. Like many writers I know, my pieces rarely get finished. There's always something else I could find to fix and make better. Eventually, I just get to the point where I say, "Enough's enough. Time to let it fly free and exist on its own and work on something else."

I'm proud of the story idea and where it's going. The characters feel alive to me. I hope they come across that way on the page.

I also had a very good experience in my Poetry class. I submitted a poem for a class workshop and it was very well received. I also got many excellent suggestions on how to tighten up the couple stanzas that just didn't sing as well as the others. Talentless hacks! Get out of my choir! Heh.

Also, for about the last 12 years or so, I have been attempting to find a friend I had in the first and second grades. His family moved and we wrote to each other for a while, but that eventually fell by the wayside. Of course, we were only, what, 9 at the time? Go figure.

Anyway, every couple months or so, I would spend two hours trying to find him on the internet. It was a little difficult without any knowledge of where he had lived for certain. But I tried. And tried.

In my fiction class this week, my professor was talking about the core group of readers he used to get feedback on his stories. He mentioned each by name. With the last, he mentioned the guy was from Kanab, where I grew up. The name was the same as my friend's older brother. And I can't recall any other families with their surname in Kanab. It was an electrifying moment.

I asked my professor for his friend's contact info, and explained why I wanted it. I sent an email to his friend and got my friend's email address.

Then I took a couple days to think of how best to approach the email I was going to send. I didn't want to come off as some obsessed stalker.

I wrote a brief email, explaining how I had come by the address and gave a brief summary of the highlights of my life since he moved.

Yesterday I received a response. It was a lot of fun to read, and I hope it will be the beginning of a reconnection.

Now I kind of want to try and track down who I now realize was my first crush.