I'll post again in a few days when it's actually live!

Looks more like a Ramos Gin Fizz! (Except it's not a bottle of gin in the final frame)

It was originally from Serial Box (now called Realm) but I always felt it kinda got lost in the shuffle and never found its audience.

Related to my earlier thread.... if you want to see my leftover trauma from "day job in publishing" this is a much more palatable version of it than that grad school story I was talking about. (While dealing with publishing industry job stress, my character goes out and discovers her kinky side.)

Oooohhhh!!!???? Olivia, I'm starting to think you write every one of your books FOR MEEEEEE

You can do it! <3

Meanwhile, did I find the story I was actually looking for? Nooooo..... sigh.

(This story was definitely one of those where we had been told to "write what you know" in a fiction workshop and I decided the despair of an administrative assistant trapped by her own internal moral code of loyalty was what I knew...? I was soooooo young.)

Definitely not! It's sooooooooo bad. 😝

Trunk trunk trunk trunk

Oh gosh, I just found another copy that makes it clear I wrote this in my MFA program in grad school in 1993. When I was still in the throes of having left that job. My boss was a pretty terrific boss, actually, and the company was really great, but I really needed to be doing my own writing!

(In other words... it was me writing about my day job in book publishing.) Yeah no, this one is going in the trunk forever.

And oh my god it's an entire 4500 word literary short story about a young woman trapped in a weirdly subservient work relationship with her female boss (the weird subservience is mostly in her own head) and how she's trying to work it out by writing this very gory samurai fiction on the bus to work.

(My brain is like "you wrote that down so we wouldnt have to remember it! so I didn't remember it!) I just found one that has been kicking around a very long time just called "winter story". No idea, so i clicked on it to see what it was.

pages or scenes, sometimes with notes on my thoughts, but mostly without. And then the doc gets named something like "such and such story" which always seems useful at the time. But later I look back and the title gives me no clue what idea it was.

So I got sucked into sorting out documents from my Documents folder, which hasn't really been organized since... oh, 2016. (Which feels like the year my brain really got knocked offline.) I often start writing a story to lay down an idea, sometimes just a paragraph or two, sometimes whole

I'm almost surprised this book doesn't already exist...?

okay but that actually sounds kind of lit