All the Horrible Girliness

I have been giddy the last two weeks. I chalked it up to it being short fiction time in my class. I'm ready to nail it. I'm ready to get better. I'm ready to work my ass off. And I have been writing. Not the poetry stuff, which I think I do well because I have a great ear (this is why my piano teachers gave up on me - I refused to read the music), but fiction again. Fiction, especially short fiction, taps into seedy little wells of junk in my psyche, pumps it out, spills it everywhere. I wrote a story last week that I meant to be gory gobbletigoo, just fun, just horror. Today, though, while scrubbing the tub, I was startled to realize that the story has solid themes and metaphor, stuff I've been writing about and working through for years. I love it when my brains work without me.

It all came to a climax today - I don't use the C word lightly, here; I was a mess - when I read the first few pages of this month's Esquire.

If you've known me for five minutes, you know I love Esquire. Love isn't quite the word, actually. Esquire is my dream, my goal, often my inspiration. A few months ago, for the first time in many months, they published fiction, a tale about a Katrina survivor. They've decided, since, to start publishing fiction regularly again, and they're pushing the envelope: they're commissioning stories, giving writers assignments and titles and letting them run with it.

Fiction has meant so much to me, since I was a little girl, that the last few years of nonfiction craze has been hard. I have been waiting for a rebirth, for someone to come along and push fiction into a new age, and I believe this is it.

They're asking for their slush pile to grow to the ceiling, and I will be in it. And if my story isn't enough, I will work harder, and it may be the next time. Or the next.

It's all happening!

posted by Samus @ 4:02 PM