p.s. -

I sent out my first three manuscripts on Tuesday morning. I didn't think a trip to the post office could be such an emotional affair, but it was. Then again, it's not often you get to mail out a short story submission (or three of them, for that matter) to a publisher for the very first time!

Meanwhile, "High Tide" has crossed the 10k mark and shows no sign of ending anytime soon. I'm just enjoying it - as it's the first story I've set in my native South Jersey, it's become a kind of imaginary return home. With sharks. I'm beginning to see the value of not having written all that much during my twenties, as all of the angst, regret, and unresolvedness of one's youth need some time to marinate before the written word can do them any justice.

I've always wondered how prodigy authors do it. When I was a kid, I'd steer clear of characters and focus on plot, as I didn't really know how other human being behaved (let alone myself!), but it seems some gifted writers have an innate capacity for imagining the human condition long before the illumination of actual first-hand experience. Now I find myself too in love with my characters to grind them up in the machinery of the plot as quickly and ruthlessly as I did all those years ago. This isn't to say that I've abandoned plot entirely - not at all. Only now I tend to feel a pang of guilt when things inevitably go south and my protagonists, deuteragonists, and tritagonists have to get hurt - either physically or emotionally!

But that's the writer's burden. We build these marvelous edifices in our imaginations explicitly so that they may be knocked down and smashed to pieces. Like when I make a sand castle with my daughter Andriana. I create it so that she may destroy it - it's that simple. If she didn't get it, the incoming tide would anyway; and the ocean does not delight nearly so much in the act of annihilation as a small child.