As per my goal at the beginning of the year, I have just submitted an entry to the Jane Austen Made Me Do It Short Story Contest.

I’ve had quite a struggle with it.  I’ll talk more on that later in a post which I plan to entitle “Trusting Your Gut Instinct.”  I’ve redrafted the story from different points of view and deleted entire scenes and restructured it.  The story has always been the one I wanted to tell.  It was just the manner of telling it that complicated matters.

One thing’s for sure.  I combed that manuscript multiple times for all manner of typo and yet, only after it was submitted did I see one missed return, one use of double word, and a seriously messed up set of commas (due to the fact that I’d deleted words from a sentence but forgotten to rearrange the commas).  This experience has taught me a lot in microcosm of how it will doubtless be on a larger work of fiction (only magnified that much more).

The inspiration for the story is The Letter (you know the one).  It is about a young man who receives a page torn from a novel mailed anoymously to him and the chain of events that result from it.

The first line reads:  I never expected to pull a mystery out of a self-addressed stamped envelope.

To read the rest, click the link: The Love Letter.  If you like it, feel free to vote for it!

As of this writing, there are over 60 Jane Austen-inspired stories to read and enjoy.   I’ve read almost all of them and noticed that there is a huge variety of both genre, style and influence.  The creativity is truly amazing!

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