Time to Share!

This week is the last week of my fiction workshop with Southern New Hampshire University.
I have learned so much from this class. Having to work on one short story for the past seven weeks has really been beneficial to me. I loved to read the stories the other students in my group had written and critiquing them.
I totally hate reading critiques on my work, but this workshop forced me to read them. I had to because if I wanted to pass the class I had to acknowledge their thoughts and see how to incorporate it into my story.
Guess what? I wasn't scared to read any critiques by the end of the session and I was actually looking forward to it! Which was something that I didn't expect to happen, at all.
The requirement of the short story was that it had to be loosely based off of some life event true to the author.
I am not going to lie - I had no clue what I wanted to write about. I could write about so many different things!
I just sat down one evening with my laptop while my daughter was watching Jessie and just started typing. I ended up writing about Australia.
I went there for three weeks when I was sixteen.
For me, the trip couldn't have come at a better time since my Dad and Grandma had both just passed away.
Going there, with no family or friends (I went with People to People, so I got to know the students in my delegation, of course) really helped me find myself. I mean, who knows who they are when they are sixteen and just lost two important family members? Ummm...no one?
But, for me it was a time to reflect, let go, and just be a teenager and truly enjoy life! And I completely did!
So I took that experience of feeling whole for the first time, just from experiencing life some place new and poured it into this short story.
I don't know my grade yet, hopefully it'll be posted in the next few days. I'll update when it is!
But I decided to upload both my rough draft and my final draft to just show (and remind myself) how much work changes and evolves with great critique, some editing, and lots of thought.

Missing Pieces
Rough Draft
Final Draft