Dear All You Child Writer Geniuses

Soon, preciouses, the Rejectionist will want to know about your earliest writerly humiliations. Dig out the journals, the old poetry, etc. HOW MUCH DOTH LE R ASSUME.

Let me explain. When all the rest of you little brainiacs were penning novels and illustrating them yourselves and making your parents clasp their hands to their bosoms in pride at having produced such a creative genius, I was running around making mud pies out of every available inch of our backyard and putting Barbie and Ken together -- in clothes! Little RS was naive as well as uncreative! -- and making them make kissy noises. I also was busy cutting the hair off all my dolls and coloring their heads with green marker. And sometimes, I was hanging from tree branches, and not because I was a little monkey but because I'd climbed up there and then lost my grip and was now clinging for life, two feet above the ground with skinned shins and a mad cry like that of a loon being eaten by a fox.

It has always seemed to me that wherever writers gather, there is bitching about other writers relating of one's earliest writerly memories. And people say things like, "I knew I wanted to be a writer when I was six and wrote in very tiny print all over a My Little Pony, a memoir in which there were aliens and my sister had two heads." And someone else will say they read Jane Austen for the first time when they were four, which inspired them to write a dramatic play about their two Pekinese and then present it to the neighborhood. With costumes.

Me? There is a picture of me on my training potty when I was two, a picture book held upside down. I am engrossed. Later, I colored within the lines of my coloring books with my grandma. I liked the ones with animals. Picking which one you'd color was a Big Deal, friends! I took this endeavor seriously! While you were penning science fiction romances and annotating them, I was coloring. A lot. Sometimes cutting them out, carefully, to hang on the fridge. Many of them were all black. Every bit of them. I frickin' loved that black crayon! Until my snotty cousin Jenny told me that black was the absence of all color and white was the presence of all color and I could clearly see that she was wrong, because if you mashed all the crayons together, WHAT COLOR WOULD THEY BE? HUH?!?!?! BLACK! This resulted in an argument which resulted in me throwing black crayons at her, which I later regretted because Grammy took them away and made me sit on the couch. By myself. While everyone else played Bingo. Later on still, there was the famous flying squirrel argument, in which I clearly defended my position that it was a made-up animal and she was again a liar by ripping the picture out of the coloring book and throwing it at her, which not only got me sat on the couch by myself again, but also had the added bonus of the threat of my grandfather's belt. Which hung on a nail by the backdoor.

For the record, that belt stayed there, unmoving, for a long time. But I'd give it a sideways glance whenever I went in and out. A, "You just stay right there, mister!" kind of glance.

So to sum up: I will not be posting my early childhood writings, despite desperately wanting to join in Le R's uncontest because all the cool kids will be doing it. I did consider -- because at heart, I am nothing but a thief and a liar myself -- making something up and writing on paper in childish handwriting. But then I said, "Hey, do you think could be honest and unscheming for ONE DAY? HUH? DO YOU?" And so, no, no fake writing. But I encourage you all to do it. Just don't throw your early geniosity in my face, because dudes, while I may not have been a very creative child, I was obviously a violent and uncoordinated one. And some things, well... Some things never change.