Inside Beer Mugs

This week's Sunday Scribblings was a bit harder for me. The theme was confessions. What does a Nice Jewish girl know about confessions? Us Jews, we have one day a year when we go to temple, refrain from eating food for 24 hours, and own up to our sins. We don't confess to anything; we own up. And we own up to very human things, things that every person does. Things that make us human: we lie, we're prideful, we covet our neighbor's ass (as the old language says).

The way I grew up, those things that we atone for every Yom Kippur are the very things that make us human. I'm not part of a community built on guilt. And to me, the idea of a confession is built on guilt. 

That made it hard to approach the prompt. Which had me turning to my blog queue, a folder full of fiction I've written but not posted on the blog or decided to send out as a short story. There's a ton in there, a ton of Lyric, a few Deadly Metal Hatchets, and, of course, the bulk of it is Mitchell and Trevor. Oddly, it's becoming mostly Mitchell. 

I winnowed it down to three, then went with my gut. It had been so much fun reading through all these outtakes that I was in a goofy, silly mood. Of my final three, only one was goofy and silly enough to match my mood. 

One thing I noticed as I read all of my stored-up fiction (and if you're wondering how much there is, it's more than two year's worth, to judge by Demo Tapes 1 and 2) is that  I don't spend a lot of time in Kerri's head. Most of it comes from the boys. This is problematic in that I've been told that one of the reasons I can't get Trevor's Song into print is because no one wants to read about men.

Well, I do. Guess being named Susan and not No One is a minus...

At any rate, if you're lost and confused by all this, head on over to the Meet and Greet at West of Mars to see Beer Mugs. Or better yet, pick up The Demo Tapes: Year 1 and really spend some time in my fictional world. I guarantee you'll be glad you did.