The Urbane Urbanite

I've been having the same nightmare once a week for several months straight. The nocturnal reverie always stars a teenage me in the tail end of my senior year in high school. The dream typically begins with me strolling the school halls with textbooks in my hands, chatting up my fellow classmates. And usually ends with me groveling at the feet of a teacher whose class I've cut the entire school year, begging her not to fail me. And then, just like that, I wake up sweaty, out of breath and clutching my neck where I imagine pearls to be. I hate this dream. Hate it. Mostly because it feels so real and always leaves me in bed trying to remember if I actually graduated high school or not. Yep, the dream feels that real. For the longest, I've been trying to figure out the reasoning behind this recurring dream. Is someone trying to tell me something? Should I retake the Praxis test I failed two years ago and succumb to my urges to become a teacher? And then last week, ou...

I've known for a while now that my short story "The Ballerina" had been selected as the fourth runner-up (fifth place) in Pen Tales ' inaugural short story contest. But I decided to wait until they made an official announcement before I blasted it all over my blog, mostly because I couldn't believe it. I am a very insecure writer. Very. I write with great confidence but I am terribly insecure about how others will perceive my work. If that makes sense. That being said, I had no intentions of winning anything when I entered the contest. At all. Whatsoever. Seriously, I wrote the story just for the sake of writing. I had reached a serious roadblock with my novel writing , which still exists today (more on that sadness in another post), and welcomed the opportunity to work on something else. Here's how I stumbled upon the contest.