A Writer's Notebook, Two-Thousand-And-One-Hundred-And-Thirty-One

As I mentioned last night, I began working on some submissions for a journal that has a themed call out for stories involving the theme of flooding.  I wrote a piece last night that I like, but which I also know is pretty strange and might feel disjointed.  Tonight, though, I wound up doing something that feels a bit strange to me, because I was kind of writing a piece that I had already written years ago.  You see, earlier today I remembered a narrative poem I wrote when I was in college where the story ended with the character causing a gigantic flood.  The central concept felt really appropriate for this submission, but there was something a bit odd about going back to what feels like a used idea, or maybe it felt more like just stealing from my past self in some way, but the truth is that it was always my own idea, and I am a far better writer now than I was at that age, at least I like to believe that is true considering the amount of time and effort I've sunk into my work since then.  Even beyond that, the two pieces are extremely different, not only in that the original was a poem and the new one is in prose, but also in some other key respects that I think change it quite a bit.  I think the new piece is much more of a character study, whereas the original was kind of about parents and children.  I don't doubt that someone reading them side by side would see the connective tissue and recognizer the new piece as indebted to the first, but I think that even someone who was looking at them together would recognize that each had gone in a very different direction with how it handled the same material.