Yay, my first McSweeney's web contribution is up! Yippee-Ki-Yay!

Except there's one problem: I am, apparently, two people. I have a lot of initials, okay? Five, to be precise. That seemed to be too much to attribute to one person, so they assumed two people wrote it. I sent them a sort of amusing letter asking them to correct it.

But you can read it anyway, here. It's the second one down right now, "Chocolate-Covered Sunflower Seeds". So it's a really tiny and gimmicky piece, okay, but I'm still really proud of it, and proud that I have a public piece of writing out there. I'm particularly happy about it because I wrote it in my own voice, you know? No pretensions, it came out pretty quickly, and I'm just plain happy with it, and I'm happy that they're happy with it.

I wrote another piece that they accepted, longer, and my style and voice come through more. I'll let you know when it's up.

Big smile, sense of achievement, self-fulfillment in that I kept writing**, etc. Thank you, thank you.

Writers don't get applause, they get acceptance notices.

11:39 a.m. 2003-10-29�