Disturbing and Disgusting

There...I wrote something.

People keep telling me to write something.  It started with my mom.  I wrote a pretty decent children’s book called “The King and the Oatmeal” when I was a kid - I never got it published mind you but it really was pretty good.  My mom still has it somewhere.  I think she’s keeping it in the hopes that one day I’ll win the Nobel Prize and she can then say she owns the sole copy of my first manuscript because those maternal bragging rights have some serious street cred.
Then in my freshman year of high school, we were supposed to write a continuation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Cask of Amontillado” for Halloween.  My short story came back from the teacher with the following comment in red: “Macabre and disturbing.  And somewhat disgusting.  Have you ever considered a career in writing?  Watch your margins next time.”  I kept that paper because “disturbing” and “disgusting” felt like very fine bits of literary criticism and I was extremely proud of them.
College and grad school completely soured me on writing because that’s all I did.  Not of the disturbing and disgusting sort but of the boring academic sort.  Although I did slip in a nifty bit of prose about aliens attacking the Garden of Eden into an essay I did on “Paradise Lost” when I suspected my professor wasn’t reading our papers.  I got an A+ on it.
I wrote fanfiction for awhile.  Actually I wrote smut but I told polite geek society that it was just fanfiction.  It got great reviews and the words “disturbing and disgusting” were replaced with “filthy” and “hawt”  which again felt like very fine literary criticism for the niche I was catering to.
When I got married my husband suggested I should write a book about some of the events that shaped my life after he read a short story I had written that really could go back to the disturbing and disgusting label.  I started on it, and then had a nightmare that it was published and recommended for Oprah’s book club amid a series of libel lawsuits.  I stopped writing again.

Then I was looking at Despair.com for Christmas gifts to remind the people I work with just how under-appreciated and devalued we are, and I saw their poster for blogging.  “Never before have so many people with so little to say said so much to so few.”  I liked that.  And I decided if I couldn’t inflict my stories on the published world or even an eBook, that I could certainly make the Internet suffer.