author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

In case I ever get this thing published, I want to point out right here for the record that it's not autobiographical. I mean, just because I mentally set it in the neighborhood where I grew up, just because it sprouted from memories of one of my childhood friends and and her mother's mysterious reactions to some of our totally innocent games, that doesn't mean the plot ever actually happened. Not to me, anyway.

Erm. So there.

Anyway, woke up yesterday morning from a dream about reading a book. The first chapter had an illustration of a little girl in a pink dress, and it was entitled "The Kissing Room." So that image became the short story's narrator, and that title became the short story title. The girls in the book in the dream played at kissing to imitate what they saw on TV; in the story I ended up writing, that was the original reason the narrator was aware of, too, but other reasons come to light as the story progresses.

The story progressed, from beginning to end, over a pot of Kennilworth Ceylon tea and several hours at The Tea Spot. It's ten single-spaced pages long in WordPerfect 5.1, and if it were printed out there would probably be blood-and-sweat stains on it or something. It was that exhausting.

I am currently in that post-story state of "I can't believe I wrote that, it sucks, it's self-indulgent, I should be ashamed of it, there's no way I'm even going to go back and edit it, I should have worked on my novel instead, but that sucks too." You know how that goes.

But I wrote it. It didn't exist that morning, and by that afternoon, it existed. That's really cool.

Days like that remind me why I chose to be a writer.