I Swear I Wrote This BEFORE I Saw "The Matrix"

Cover art where my baby dwells

As my part of my now-defunct thesis (let's just call a spade a spade- I don't give two shits about finishing that shit), I wrote a short-short, "On a Blue Day," about a girl and her penchant for uppers and downers who moves back home to attend a funeral. It was just a small experimental piece that was part of an assignment I had at FDU where I had to mimic the writing style of an author I can't remember right now.

But the gist of the assignment was repetition. There had to be an element of the story that kept repeating every few lines, if not every line. So there's a lot of mention of the red uppers and blue downers throughout the barely-two-thousand-word story.

On a deeper level, this story touches upon this girl's continuous habit of self-medication, which at the time was reflecting my own way of handling a crisis- that crisis, of course, being my grandmother's death, which was still painfully fresh in my mind in 2005.

Well this poor baby had been rejected from many a flash fiction contest. I would read it over and over and think What aren't people getting? This is a good fucking story! But alas, editors from here to LA didn't feel the same, until I met a young woman named Hannah Clayman who ran a zine for women in Brooklyn, You Should Be Here. She encouraged me to submit something and, with a few hours left until deadline, I sent off the story. I think she wrote me back the next day to say they "loved(!)" my story, and I was all FINALLY! SOMEONE GETS IT!

So now I can finally add another credit to my name: I've self-published a book on writing, I've been interviewed for a prominent Dominican news source online, and I've published two short stories--one online and one in print.

I say that deserves some fucking Shake Shack and Haagen Dazs this weekend!

*smooches...trying not to rest on my laurels*
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there's still so much I need to do, but I'm enjoying this journey so far.