Twelve crossings

I captain a ferry on the western Norwegian coast, out of Bergen, and the route I work crosses the same fjord twelve times a day, or thereabouts. People think this is repetitive. Twelve sailings across Byfjorden is twelve different water conditions, twelve different passenger compositions, twelve different qualities of light at whatever hour it happens to be. I have never had an identical crossing. The stories I write are about crossings in both the literal and the other sense. People in transit. The specific quality of a journey that ends somewhere different from where you started. I write on the boat between Bergen and Kleppestø, which takes about forty minutes each way, in a notebook I keep in the wheelhouse. The first story I finished was about a woman who takes the same ferry every day for three months and why. The ending surprised me when I found it. I live in Askøy and I have been writing since my late thirties, which is later than most writers I've read about. I'm not sure that matters. I have a specific thing to write about that took forty years to accumulate and I am writing it now. Two stories have been published in Norwegian literary journals and a third was rejected by three journals and I revised it and am revising it still.