In The Beginning

The year was 2005. I had quit drinking after five years of flagrant alcoholism, dropped out of the University of Iowa, moved back in with my parents, and been savagely dumped by a girl I then thought to be the love of my life. In the midst of this emotional shitstorm, I decided to become a writer, mostly because it was the only thing I was any good at and I can't tie a noose.

This was an ambition I had nursed for some time. As early as the age of seven, I had been drawing pictures on steno pads and then stringing them together for my mother in a verbal narrative. Later on, I spent many a night pounding away at a bottle of Jim Beam and cackling over my keyboard, belting out ten or fifteen pages in a single night. I'd usually wake up in the morning, look it over, and realize it was complete crap. It was a lot of fun, though, and my super-secret desire was to actually do it for a living. This seemed beyond unlikely, but it was a fun thing to think about at the apex of a booze-soaked night, when my ungodly BAC made anything seem possible.

But when you're dry drunk, lovelorn, and trying to remember how to tie that damned noose, you'll grasp at any straw. So I decided, damn the torpedoes, I'm going to try and be a writer. I did not actually know what this would entail, or how to close the distance between my present predicament and the position of, say, Tom Wolfe. But I figured I'd write a lot, and if I sucked I'd get better through endless practice. So, step one: write a whole fucking lot.

This is precisely what I did. I grabbed myself a notebook and an array of pens, enrolled in a creative writing workshop at the local community college, and got down to it. My days blended together into a single, ongoing routine - get up at nine, go down to the coffeeshop I worked at, score a large Depth Charge, and write. Go to class at about one. Get out around two-thirty, and spend the remaining time before work at four editting manuscripts for workshop. Get out of work around nine-thirty, go over to my buddy's apartment, write some more there. Go home, fall into a fitful sleep, and get ready to do it all again tomorrow.

After a solid six months of dead ends, I finally came up with a little ditty called "Knight in Shining Tie-Dye," a 963-word fiction piece that I felt was pretty keen. It was then that a thought occurred to me, a thought terrifying in its enormity: I could publish this motherfucker.

I had trouble even accepting this notion at first. To me, publication was - and is - the line between a talented amatuer and a struggling professional. To send a piece out for publication was to step forward and claim the forbidden mantle of The Writer. It was a psychological gamble; if it turned out that editors didn't actually like my writing, my self image would be downgraded from Undiscovered Talent to Guy Who Couldn't Hack It.

Regardless, I tried to get down to the business of it. A friend of mine was also in the hunt for writing glory at the time, and had in his possession a copy of the 2005 Novel and Short Story Writer's Marketplace. I asked if I could borrow this bad boy for "just a day or so," and then proceeded to hang onto it for a period of two weeks. During this time, I hopped on the internet and looked up every magazine that seemed like it might, conceivably, like my writing.

Finally, at the conclusion of all this research, I settled upon AntiMuse.Com, an irreverent humor zine published by a chap named Michael Haislip. After reading through the archives and laughing my ass off, I figured Mr. Haislip might be a man amenable to my sense of humor. So I went back to the computer, pulled up "Knight in Shining Tie-Dye," and started in on my fourth round of edits. There would ultimately be five complete drafts before I finally sent the damn thing.

It was with some trepidation that I shared my plot with my comrades. To be perfectly honest, the other writers I knew were mostly writing confusing, "avant-garde" minimalist pieces, and so found my style of writing very nearly repulsive. Upon hearing that I was submitting to AntiMuse, my pal with the Writer's Marketplace decided that he, too, could try tossing something over Mr. Haislip's transom. After all, if they'd have any interest in my pedestrian scribblings, surely an experiment in extreme minimalism would score a spot, right?

So me and my pal both sent our pieces out to AntiMuse. The suggested response time was thirty days, which I have since learned is a snap of the fingers in the world of writing. My friend passed this month in studied nonchalance. "They'll probably reject us both," he said, "But at least we tried." I, on the other hand, checked my email three times a day the whole time, just in case the editor somehow responded early. I knew this to be unlikely, but I didn't particularly care. I just wanted to know whether I was in or not.

Finally, on Night 30 of the vigil, I clicked my inbox open to see an email from AntiMuse. I opened it, and my heart leapt. They liked the story, and they wanted to publish it in the November issue.

"Holy shit!" I bellowed. "The like my shit!"

At the time, my friend was across the room at his desktop computer. "What are you talking about?" he asked.

"Check your email, man. AntiMuse is buying my piece." Even as I said this, a feeling of dread washed over me. Really, what were the odds that they would have accepted both of our submissions? I mean, how hard-up for writing could they possibly be? And if they liked my shit, then they probably wouldn't like his.

My friend clicked on his email inbox, saw an email from AntiMuse, and opened it. His face went slack, and then clouded over.

"Well?" I asked meekly. "Did they take it?"

"Man, FUCK THIS!" he shouted. "I fucking QUIT!" At which point he stood up and marched out of the room.

One word: Awkward.