The Ten Year Short Story by Julie Angeli

I recently had a serialized short story published in Cricket Magazine. A short story shouldn’t take long to write. Right? Mine took ten years.

It started out late one night while watching a bad movie that featured competitive free divers – individuals who dive ridiculously deep without a scuba tank, using a weighted sled to take them down and a buoyancy bag that shoots them to the surface before they run out of air – assuming it works.

I’m a scuba diver, snorkeler, mermaid enthusiast, and general ocean geek, so this was something I had to check out. While gathering information, I discovered an equally impressive group, the Ama divers of Japan. They are women who dive for shellfish, reaching depths of up to 60 feet on a single breath of air. No sleds for these ladies, they don’t do this for the thrill. They do it for survival.

I thought of them as “Real Mermaids” and decided to write a super short non-fiction piece for young readers. I became obsessed and pored through anything I could find on the internet, magazine articles, a book written in 1962 (the only book I could find about the Ama), a photo essay and pictures of ancient woodblock prints.

My short article morphed into a MG novel, then a YA novel, then back to MG. I started out with a mermaid/underwater theme, but found myself wondering about Japanese culture.

At one point I determined that I shouldn’t be writing this. I don’t have a lick of Japanese blood running through my veins. Surely, someone who is Japanese would do a better job, so I put it away. For years.

No one wrote about it.

I picked it up again.

By this point, both of my kids had decided to study Japanese in school. During conferences with their teachers I brought up the Ama. The teachers would nod their heads, but had little input. This culture keeps to themselves, and little is known about them even in Japan.

I kept plugging away. It seemed too long for a short story, but too short for a novel – a story without a home. I was still nervous about writing something based on a culture that wasn’t mine. But still, I couldn’t let it go.

A writer friend of mine who is Japanese helped me with the details about Japan and encouraged me to keep going. My fate was sealed when I was given the opportunity to travel to Japan with my daughter’s Japanese class. I simply had to finish that story.

The length of my story was still an issue, so I cut my too-short MG novel down to a 6,000 word serialized short story – a painful process, but I had to admit, the shorter version was better. I went to Japan with my daughter’s class and paid attention to how people interacted, how they dressed, what the houses and gardens looked like, and the color of the ocean. Finally, I verified a few last details with our Japanese tour guide.

When I got home, I put the finishing touches on the story, held my breath and submitted. More than ten years after my late-night movie inspiration, part one of THE PEARL INSIDE was published in the May/June 2018 issue of Cricket Magazine, with parts two and three to follow. I’ve learned a great deal over the last several years that never would have made it into that original story. This is the story that was meant to be published, even if it did take ten years. Sometimes even when you give up, the story doesn’t.

Julie Angeli’s first career was as a packaging engineer for IBM where she spent a lot of time dropping printers and copiers to see if they would break. When there was nothing left to break, she moved on to children’s writing. Her short stories have appeared in SPIDER and CRICKET magazines. She has also co-authored two picture books for local Michigan clients. She lives in Bloomfield Township with one husband, two kids, and three cats.