"Little Mother" from Toasted Cheese

Youth can have its advantages. Take the body, for example. At twenty, it can endure a night that lasts from seven p.m. until sunrise and still survive an eight hour work day before unconsciousness hits; usually in the shower ten minutes after a microwave dinner and a Simpson's repeat. Responsibilities are few. Kids are just screamers in the grocery store, marriage is years and a few bad break-ups away and outside of putting in enough hours at work to pay the cable bill, there isn't much holding you down. Flawless skin is possible. A two-seater V-8 is possible. Anything is possible.

Little Mother is about youth, or rather the loss of it, along with a couple of meals and the control of some hormones. Hormones can be hell when you're young and so can long car rides in the afternoon. So can mothers, for that matter, and so can conversations from the passenger seat. But silence is easy and sometimes necessary to hold on to youth a little longer. Childhood is fleeting. For the lucky, it dies slowly. For those who aren't, it ends suddenly and that's pretty much what it's all about; youth or the death thereof.

I'm pretty familiar with the subject. Four years ago, plus or minus a few months and credits, I finished high school. In those four years, like every twenty something in history, I've done quite a bit. Also typical for the age, most of it isn't important and the rest probably shouldn't be mentioned for civility's sake. But that doesn't matter. That's youth and it's littered with bad decisions. What does matter is that among the late night visits to tattoo shops, impromptu flights to Key West and two p.m. mornings, some good decisions are made. Sitting down and making a serious attempt at writing was my good decision and Little Mother was my first venture into online publishing, thanks to the editors at Toasted Cheese. It was my first real success at publishing period. Getting your work out there isn't easy. That's a given. Granted, it seems easy at first - crank out a short story or two and send them off to as many big name or smaller literary magazines as possible. Five or ten rejection letters later (or a few hundred, depending on your level of patience), the brick hits the head. Or the computer screen; depends on your level of patience.

The road to publication can be hard—very hard. Traditional print journals can be tougher to breach than a military installation. Rejection letters can be plentiful. Frustration can be unbelievable. That's where online publishing steps in to bridge the gap. It's an outlet for free expression, experimentation and it's the perfect place for young or simply new writers to get started. The whole world is going virtual. Everything and everybody have a place on the web and now literature does too. There's something out there for everybody, whether deep and insightful, lust and champagne or cross-bred aliens is your thing. The web allows literature to evolve in a way that hasn't been possible until now and it makes it accessible, which is even better. All in all, technology is a pretty awesome thing. Well, mostly. If I could just learn to work a fax machine without my fists, life would be good.