I know it as Night Magic. Jess calls it Sleep Drunk. Perhaps it's more widely known as the Witching Hour. No matter what you call it, everything looks different late at night/early in the morning. You problems look worse. You pine for your significant other with more obsession. The scenery looks strange -- almost foreign. I definitely experienced the foreign scenery last night. You see, I had the grand idea to leave off a project until nearly 11 p.m. At about midnight I realized what a bad idea it really was. I finished work on it at 2 a.m. I got the final draft all printed out to my liking at about 3 a.m. and I left the journalism lab shortly after (I had to use Adobe InDesign and Photoshop to make it as nice as I wanted it to be). As I was walking back across campus to my room in the -10 degree weather, I noticed how erie the campus looked. You know how the cloudy night sky is always lighter when there is snow on the ground? Well last night it was pitch black, which made the lamposts seem even brighter. As my eyes trailed the line of smoke billowing from the building ahead of me, I realized how alone I was. I pulled my coat tighter around my neck and quickened my pace. That was when Night Magic was in full effect. Perhaps mind was playing tricks on me because of the late hour, or maybe it was the extreme cold, but I began to look at the campus in a different way: my own playground. It was mine to create. It was mine to destroy. And then I entered my suite and went to bed.

In other news, I got an email from the editor of The Castle (Wartburg's Literary Magazine) saying my poem "Judgement Day" made it into the Fall Term edition. Whoopee...I knew it would make it in. It's the best poem I've ever written. The bigger news, though, was that my short story did NOT make it in. The reason she gave me was that "The misogyny was just too significant for the story." In other words I was hating on women too much. Uh. Ok.

Let me give you a brief synopsis of the story: It's entirely first person of a guy who is clearly disturbed. He's obsessing over past events where people didn't appreciate him enough, or didn't like him enough, or (most importantly) his girlfriend said no to his marriage proposal. In short, he plans her murder and then carries it out....or so you think. Right before you think he's going to get caught, it transitions to a nurse saying that it's time for his medication. The previous scenes were entirely inside his mind, for he's in a psych ward. The cool part of it all was that I never said that he was insane. I never used the words gun, bullet, kill, shoot, trigger, blood, murder, marriage, fiance, girl, etc. I implied the entire story. It's entitled "Two Pieces of Brass."

She didn't like it because of the part where the main character says "She deserved the brass." Oh yeah, and did I mention this editor is a feminist? She never forgave me for one of my stories that made it into The Castle last year that ended with the main character leaving his apartment carrying his girlfriend's severed head in a bowling bag. She said that was anti-woman as well. I mean, I value her opinion especially because she edits a lot of my work for me, but seriously....

On a side note, I realize that those two stories may seem a smidge messed up, but it's so much fun to watch people's reactions to stories like that. Especially when it comes from me. Plus, The Castle is comprised of college students' works. That means everything is about relationships and heartbreak. It kinds pretty monotonous. I read the submissions and none of them had the shock value mine had. ARGH! It pisses me off so much because I worked hard on that and she rejected it because it offended her feminist values. PUH-LEASE!