Baby Steps is a journal entry by Jack Rusher, published here Monday, April 21, 2008. It is part of Journal.
An awkward wobble, arms akimbo.
“It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?”
— Charles Bukowski, Factotum, Black Sparrow Press, 1975
One of my new year’s resolutions for 2008 was to overcome my lack of ambition, perfectionism, or whatever it was that was holding me back, and start sending out stories and essays for publication at places other than this one, risking the wrath of editorial voices outside my own head.
How things were published when the author was a boy.
My first effort was a submission to a short-short story contest at Opium Magazine, to which — in a kind of full circle — I sent a re-working of the first thing I ever published here. I didn’t win the contest, but they wrote to ask if it would be okay for them to publish my story. Here’s Togetherness, my first non self-published short story.