For Love Of Nature - Chrissy's Story

Foreword This story is written in two roughly similar versions, the other being “For Love Of Nature - Kelly’s Story” Both stories are similar in that they share the same general plot and a little of the same text in the beginning. What makes them different is the way the characters arrive at the ending. I have used different names for the characters (except Uncle Bob, of course), but if you read both stories you’ll see the similarities immediately, especially in the beginning.

Before you yell at me for telling the same story twice, though, here’s what happened. I wrote Chrissy’s story and then lost all of it except the beginning. After months of fruitless searching, I re-wrote it as Kelly’s story, relying on memory to recreate it. As luck would have it, after Kelly’s story was done, I found Chrissy’s story again on an old backup disk I’d left in my car and forgotten about. So I’m posting them both. It’s an example of how a story idea can develop differently as time passes during the writing. It’s also interesting that the second time I wrote it ... it was more than twice as long.