When everything had worked itself out, if either of us were going to start anything with her, it was him. I bowed out, as I always did, but that didn't exactly help matters. As it happens, that day at the mall I had gotten a copy of Matthew Sweet's Son of Altered Beast EP, which included a cover of Neil Young's "Don't Cry No Tears," which described a similar situation.
The first time I tried to write this, I trashed it. Then, after "Baptism By Fire" mysteriously became a writing sample, I was asked to submit an original piece. I wrote it out again, and with some fixing and expanding, it stretched out to over twenty pages -- easily the longest thing I had ever written, papers for class included. I submitted it, and waited.
This is the story that got me on a publishing company's mailing list. It didn't work out because the list messages started coming in after I had left school, and thus I didn't know about them until I had gotten net access again and telnetted back to WKU (about two months later or so). I had been dropped from the list, due to inactivity I suppose. I left a message with the new fiction developer, and never heard back. Then again, I didn't exactly push the issue, so it's not entirely their fault, and thus I shall not name them here, to avoid causing any leeriness of them.
Mark Kinney / alberich@iglou.com