Not much to report on the furlough front, so I thought I'd tell you the origin of the name "Liquid Etchings." It's the name of a poem I wrote over eight years ago, when I was still in high school. I wrote it in a way that exalted Kim (yeah, that Kim) but at the same time it expressed my desire to exercise caution, as if to recognize that love is good only because the chase is difficult, but if the chase makes love unattainable, then what good is that love in the first place?

My father, incidentally, has an expression whenever my brother or I ask him for a favor. He'll respond, in as many words, "Oh, sure, let me just write out that contract in the sinkwater."

In high school, at the time I wrote Liquid Etchings, I thought I was in love. Hell, we've all been there. I know better now, and I find it kind of ridiculous to listen to young people who haven't been through enough heartbreak to recognize heartbreak's opposite. (In the same vein, rash-thinking Democrats lose the election, and they want to move to Canada? Really?)

But I'm amazed at the lucidity in my naivete. So whatever it was that I thought was love, it was enough to inspire me to question the process, even if I didn't fully comprehend the results. Years later, I would write the sequel, in which the boy takes heed Arthur Miller's advice from The Crucible.

"Give them no tear! Tears pleasure them! Show honor now, show a stony heart, and sink them with it!" - Act 4, Scene 4

Perseus Triumphant came during a period when the majority of my "writing" was for the blues/ska/cover band in which I was fortunate enough to be the lead "singer." I was at home for winter break in Oceanside, and I was thinking of a certain nameless Darb that would inspire two short stories. I remember thinking at the time, again, that I wasn't too comfortable in my own skin, and that here was a girl that I liked, and I wasn't sure what to do about it. I felt like I hadn't grown up at all, because the "songs" I "wrote" for the band were very simplistic in its bitterness. I felt like I was still stuck on that Grecian Urn, and actually didn't move for six years. Perseus Triumphant, along with the short stories about the Darb, marked a new direction in not only my writing style but also my personal outlook.

Anyway, the reason I mention all this is because Aimee Bender is the one that taught the magical realism writing class at Tech, the class for which I one of those short stories. This is the author whose website I mentioned in yesterday's comments. I stumbled across the website and began to think back at my writing and thought that it would be kind of fun to go a little further in the timeline.