MIMES!!!

As I've said in the past, I have no shame.  I started writing in 2001, and that same year I got my first pro publication.  It was a short story called MIMES, and it was published in The Rectangle, which is the literary journal of the International English Honor Society.  The funny thing?  It was only the second time I'd ever even attempted to write a story.  I'll explain.

I needed a college credit, and the only class I could find that sounded remotely interesting, and that fit my schedule, was a writing workshop class.  I didn't want to be a writer at that point, I just wanted the college credit.  So I enrolled, did my best, and the first story I wrote was about a guy who woke up in the middle of the night to find out his family had been butchered.  I turned my story in, confident that it was crap.  The next class period, no one wanted to sit next to me.  I wish I were joking. I liked the reaction, so I wrote a second story, which became MIMES.  My classmates compared me to Rod Sterling, which made my little nerdy heart tingle.  I submitted it to the journal as a goof, thinking there was no way my off-the-wall mime story would ever get picked.  But it did.  And I've been writing ever since.

Why do I bring it up?  Because, while going through my backup files, I found a copy of it, and I thought I'd share.  It's imperfect, and I've grown a lot as a writer since I wrote it, but I stand by it.  I'm proud of it, and figured I'd throw it out there for the world to read, again or for the first time.   So here it is, in the "downloads" section of my website, in PDF format.  Enjoy.

As an added bonus, and I can't believe I'm doing this, here's another little treat.  After it was published, the film club at my college adapted it to a short movie, which won the "Golden Crackpipe Award" (I wish I could make that up) at the Flea Market Film Festival.  Below, embedded, is that short movie.  Enjoy the bad acting and weirdness.