This is a continuation of my poetry page. If you haven't been there yet, you may want to check that page out first.
It was in my Creative Writing class in college that I finally was forced to write prose. Since I was so used to writing personal experiences in poetry, I gathered up three stories from my past (well, one from mine, and the other two from close friends) and put them together to form my first attempt at a story, Golden Apples. I still kinda like this story, even if I fell back on cute gimmicks. The first part, Atalanta, is written entirely in dialogue. Later I tried to make this into a scene for my directing class, and found I had to entirely invent all the physical stage action, as the only "action" in the story comes from the story the girls tell. The middle part, Medea, is perhaps my favorite. I wrote this in first person present tense; I intended it to make the reader feel as if they were the one waking up to this situation. The heroine of the final story, Daphne, is the most fragile. Written in second person, this is by far the most neurotic piece I've ever written.
That was it for fiction for several years. I continued to pour out my heart in poetry, but I also found myself keeping in a journal as well. Finally, in October of 1997, my friend Mary Anne mentioned she was accepting submissions for an anthology of erotica. I immediately printed out a slew of my erotic poems, only to have her tell me, in her kind way, "Sorry, but I don't think they're looking for or accepting any poetry. Maybe one or two, but . . . well, you have until January, why don't you write a story for me?
Not even a year out of college and here someone was assigning me work again! It was a command I understood, and one for which I will be eternally grateful. I dug out a character sketch I'd written for my Creative Writing class and began to write the story that surrounded it.
That story, Feeding Time at the Ego Zoo, was by far my most complex to date. The high I got from writing that story didn't peter out until after I'd cranked out two more (both considerably shorter), Statue of a Nymph and Virgin Verse.
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