It's a bit funny now that I hemmed and hawed so much about submitting this story to Prizm. Why write it if you don't want it published, right? Well, at the time I wrote it, it was for personal reasons, and it seemed too dark to publish. The truth is that many adults absolutely fail the teens in their lives, and that may be dark, but that's the way it is. Someone needs to stop pretending that if you're obedient and perky that everything will turn out wonderful. But I also wanted to talk about how you can look to yourself for help when the adults around you fail you.
I'm kicking around the idea of another story now, tentatively titled 500 Days. The MC (main character) will be a boy whose father has just returned from serving 500 days of duty in Iraq. Both of them have changed a lot during those 500 days, and they have to figure out how to live with each other now. (You can tell that being a military kid had a huge impact on my life - some good, some bad. But it all adds up to who I am now, and even if I'd grown up in one place, bad stuff would have happened, so I'm kind of at peace with it now. But it took years for me to get to that place.)
