My First Foray into Publishing Short Stories Online

First let me admit that I have a terrible memory. Because of my anxiety, my mind loves to focus on awkward and painful memories. The failures instead of the triumphs. How far back should I go? My elementary school scribbles were just glorified spelling and penmanship exercises. I mostly remember the short stories and essays I wrote for my advanced placement English class in the eleventh grade.

I was in the AP class because a lot of my friends were. I wanted a piece of the action. I considered myself a competent writer. That is, until I met Mrs. B. She was a hard ass. She would scrawl the word ‘trite’ in red pen across your precious story if she thought you could find a more creative metaphor. In fact, ‘trite’ was one of the vocabulary words I learned from her.

I was a slow reader. Not slow in the sense that I had difficulty reading the words, but my mind tends to wander while I’m doing it. Sometimes I get to the bottom of the page, and I realize that I didn’t take anything in. I’d have to start again at the top. I persevered through a few classics on Mrs. B’s reading list including The Handmaid’s Tale, The Catcher in the Rye, The Bell Jar, and 1984. All this sophisticated banned book reading gave me a sense of pride and made my writing less provincial (another Mrs. B vocabulary word).

We learned how to craft a proper thesis, tackle different styles, engage the reader from the first sentence, then pique their interest at the climax and provide a satisfying resolution - or not if you’re nasty 😉

Once I learned what good writing was, I felt inadequate, but somehow writing was still fun. That was a new feeling. Usually if I am ‘bad’ at something I pretend it doesn’t exist. I once had to withdraw from a piano class in college. It was the only way to stop myself from destroying the instrument with my bare hands or bad vibes so hot it might’ve spontaneously combusted.

Writing is not like that for me. I can play. I can write something dumb and still own it. It’s not math. There is no right answer.

I didn’t keep any of the stories I wrote in Mrs. B’s class, and I decided to coast through regular English for my senior year, but her crash course in quality writing gave me the skills I still use today. I wrote stand-up comedy for a few years and tried my hand at fan fiction. From there I began to explore short stories.

I found a challenge online with a top prize of $250. The prompt was that the story must end with the characters admiring the sun. I told my friend about it, and she asked me if I knew about Vocal’s Doomsday Diary Challenge with an exponentially higher prize. It felt like serendipity because the story I had written was already very dystopian. I only needed to include a heart shaped locket.

I must have revised my story a thousand times. I picked and pruned it weeks before the deadline. My closest friends beta read it. Winning the money was a long shot, but I had already won in a sense, because it had renewed my passion for storytelling.