I shot an arrow in the air...

...it landed in my underwear! Etc., etc.

So today, I've prepared five of my short stories for mailing out to various literary mags across the country. I sent another one out two weeks ago. Who knows... maybe this time I'll get somewhere.

This has been prompted by a few things. Of course, the most recent motivation is Jody's death. You can't watch a 26-year-old die without becoming acutely aware that we, each of us, has only so much time. Nearly as long as I knew Jody, he wanted to create a game called "Slipstream". He talked about it a lot, but in spite of all his gaming experience and his wizardry at programming, he never did finally get around to actually creating it. I'll never know for sure, but judging from Jody's creativity, I'd guess the world really missed out on something good.

The other reason is this kind of nagging biological clock thing. But instead of feeling obliged to give your parents grandkids (that's a guilty feeling for another day, thought the bachelor), mine is about a professor I had in university. I was in his creative writing class in third year, along with maybe one-and-half-dozen other people or so, of all ages. It was the professor's retirement year. At the end of the academic year, I had a course-end interview with him in which he told me I was probably the most promising student he had in twenty years of teaching there. Now I don't know what he told everyone else... maybe he said that to every student to encourage him or her; God knows. But the point is, he did say it to me. This was a man who was once short-listed for the Nobel Prize for Literature. So you can imagine... I pretty much floated out of his office. I was 22, I guess; only just, if that. I was going to beat eggs with big word processing sticks. I was accepted by another professor for one-on-one creative writing studies the following year.

Then... nothing. I left university wondering what I was going to do with an English degree, so I went to college to learn animation. I still wrote, but only occasionally, and just hobby stuff. Nothing IMPORTANT. Nothing with A BIG THEME. I'm being facetious here, of course, but underneath it all, there's still this sense of having something to say to the world, offer some kind of insight, or give it something of value. Nearly fifteen years have gone by since the Professor paid me one of the highest compliments of my life (being asked by Jody's mother to create the images for his headstone sort of edges it out), and I've done nothing.

The Professor is either 80 now, or about to turn 80. God knows, I don't mean to jinx the man, but generally speaking, when you hear someone's 80, you start thinking about the finish line. I want to do something to reaffirm to this man that he was right, that there was something worthwhile in what he saw and justify the faith he showed in me by saying what he said. This has become very important to me. Maybe I don't have the chops to get published in something literary, but I have to try. Deep down, I knew if I didn't try, then I wasn't putting my pride on the line. I've spent over a decade not trying, and I've gotten the predictable results. Well, like that 98-pound weakling in the Charles Atlas ad, it's time for me to gamble a stamp. Or two. Or a hundred.

Here goes nothing... and everything.