I Went To The Top Of Vesuvius

I'm Blessed In My Good Friends, And Some Of Them Happen To Be Writers, Though That's Almost Never What Our Friendships Are About. And Every Writer I've Ever Read, Living Or Dead, Has In One Way Or Another Helped And Inspired. I Have A Feeling It's Important Not To Mix The Two Up.

A Game One Of My Sisters Will Play With Me In My First Year Of Being Alive Is Called Good Baby, Bad Baby. This Consists Of Being Told I Am A Good Baby Until I Smile And Laugh, Then Being Told I Am A Bad Baby Until I Burst Into Tears. This Training Will Stand Me In Good Stead All Through My Life.

We're Well Past The End Of The Century When Time, For The First Time, Curved, Bent, Slipped, Flash Forwarded, And Flashed Back Yet Still Kept Rolling Along. We Know It All Now, With Our Thoughts Traveling At The Speed Of A Tweet, Our 140 Characters In Search Of A Paragraph. We're Post-history. We're Post-mystery.

The Proper Word For Me," Robin Goodman Says, "is Me.

Short Stories Consume You Faster. They're Connected To Brevity. With The Short Story, You Are Up Against Mortality. I Know How Tough They Are As A Form, But They're Also A Total Joy.