In ten short days, I’m submitting this week’s Branches story (#5) to the Glimmer Train Very Short Fiction Contest. I just started it tonight, (Note: tardy as usual. Man, beginning anything is terrifying. Before you know it — perhaps in a matter of minutes, seconds! — it could become something riddled with faults, and faulty creations beg complete, occasionally enraged attention. This tends to make me entirely unpleasant to be around. I never understood some writers’ aversion to the delete key. Oh sweetest relief, purest salvation! It’s all those other keys that have me worried.) but it can’t be posted here until October 31st when winners are announced.

I’ve found that this whole “requiring first publishing rights” concept goes violently against the instincts I’ve honed over the developing years. My first desire when I really like something I’ve done, or if I’m not sure if I really like something I’ve done, is to smear it all over the internet. See what strangers have to say. Instant gratification! Hello, world! “Not cool!” say respectable publishers.

But seriously, I don’t know how I’ll handle that. So how about this: want me to email you a short story? You’d be free to email me back with comments, or say nothing at all. It will be just like a blog post (note to potential publishers: this will not be like a blog post at all): in your inbox. Baby steps. I’d feel so much better just knowing you saw it.

Email me or comment if you’re interested.

Today is around the time I’d hope to crank out another story in the Branches series, but since I devoted last week to writing a fictional piece for Love & Radio around a series of voice mails (that, unfortunately, over the weekend became an internet sensation and thus useless to us), today is finding me ill-prepared in the schedule department. So I thought that, instead, I’d answer a question that potentially needs answering.

What the hell are you doing?

Yeah, seriously! What the hell am I doing? Fiction? Plots? Imaginary . . . characters? What? And this was supposed to be fun and easy! Short and “flash” fiction have always been my favorite formats to read, and what I assumed I’d write, if I only had the time.

And now I have the time! Rejoice, rejoice, Emmaaaaaanuel.

Here’s what I initially hadn’t figured on, and what I promptly figured out a mere few hours after awakening that first blissful, sunny morning of freedom: writing takes practice . . . and I haven’t written any fiction in seven years. Seven years may not sound like so long to the more wizened of us out there, so here’s some perspective: seven years ago is equal, for me, to two life phases ago. That’s pre-post-college working life, pre-college hilarity life, all the way back to mid-high-school omgwtfbbq life when — oh, why pad the truth — I wrote about mermaids.

And cats! The culmination of my fiction-writing career thus far, my epoch, was at the tender age of fourteen, when I realized I could write a story about . . . mercats.