Flashback Friday (2)

So I’m revisiting my high school past with another edition of Flashback Friday. This time it’s a diary entry:

Dear Diary:


Hi! I just got finished taking my senior portraits! It doesn’t seem like I’m a senior does it? I’ve been keeping a diary since fifth grade! I would like to update some things for you.


I still have this thing going with stories from last year. I have finished one and I think it may be pretty good. That’s what Tracy said when she read it. Mariel, Jennifer, Kathy and some other girls read it this summer. Tracy is on newspaper staff with me so I trust her judgment better. She says I should let Mrs. Hobson read it. But it has a lot of curse words and bad things in it so I don’t think that’s a good idea. I want to graduate. Not be expelled.


The story was called “Love is A Four Lettered Word” but Tracy said that title was corny, so I changed it to “When Love is Around.”

After Tracy kept badgering me, I took out the curse words and one “bad” thing from the first chapter and gave it to Mrs. Hobson, our newspaper staff advisor and my English teacher. To my surprise, she suggested that I put it in the school newspaper as a short story. Later that year, during the Georgia High School Newspaper awards, that story won 3rd place for fiction.

That award gave me the spark to believe that I could write novels.

After college, I would choose a new title for my box of pages: “True Image.”

It would be several more years before I would decide to try writing fiction again. And this novel has always been special for me because it was the first project I completed and shared with others.

It is still one of the novels that I want to revise one day.