[Enter litbrit.]
Greetings, everyone! I'd like to thank Ezra for his very kind invitation and the contributors for their support; it's truly an honor--and an honour, and a pleasure--to be here.
"Full strength in No. 3 turret!" shouted the Commander. "Full strengthin No. 3 turret!" The crew, bending to their various tasks in the huge,hurtling eight-engined Navy hydroplane, looked at each other andgrinned. "The old man will get us through" they said to one another."The Old Man ain't afraid of Hell!" . . .
"Not so fast! You're driving too fast!" said Mrs. Mitty. "What are you driving so fast for?"
"Hmm?" said Walter Mitty. He looked at his wife, in the seat besidehim, with shocked astonishment. She seemed grossly unfamiliar, like astrange woman who had yelled at him in a crowd. "You were up tofifty-five," she said. "You know I don't like to go more than forty.You were up to fifty-five." Walter Mitty drove on toward Waterbury insilence, the roaring of the SN202 through the worst storm in twentyyears of Navy flying fading in the remote, intimate airways of his mind.
From The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty, by James Thurber.
Fiction is where I go to escape. And because this mode of mind-transport iswildly affordable, considering the distance it sometimes takes you, I'll gladly hop on board a short story or novella given the slightest excuse; when time permits, which is far less often than I'd like,I'll set our for the longer journeys offered by novels and epics andseries. Long or short, though, if the story is going to succeed intransporting me from the chaos and vicissitudes of a given day to athoroughly engrossing parallel narrative, the visuals and voiceovers ofwhich I'll be supplying myself, it absolutely has to be more interesting anddynamic--or, at least, more elegantly scripted and suffused with enlightenment--than any real-life drama unfolding aroundme.
