Hi. I'm not really new here. I was a member for a long time a few years back, but who I was then is irrelevant. If I was the same person, I would use the same account, but I've changed so much that I barely recognize who I was then.

Review Two: give two reviews, get two reviews.

“An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way. -Charles Bukowski

What you should know about me:
-I'm a creative writing and history major at a small liberal arts college in New York City.
-I'm a vegetarian and animal lover.
-I'm an atheist/secular humanist. (This is often present in my work, so if you're just going to get annoyed about it, you don't need to bother reading it.)
-I'm a leftist/collectivist, politically.
-My IQ is 148, according to Free-IQTest.net (Of course, I went through the trouble of all those ads...so I can't be all that smart.)
-I think Review Game rocks.
-I don't typically write happy endings for my stories, because I prefer to let things happen in my stories without my hope for the plot interfering too much with how things work out. If a happy ending happens, it happens, but it usually doesn't.

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt." -Sylvia Plath

My favorite published writers are:
-David Sedaris
-Tim O'Brien
-Aaron Cometbus
-Jhumpa Lahiri
-Nica Lalli
-Gabriel García Márquez
-Kurt Vonnegut
-Chun Sue
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
-Sandra Cisneros
-Charles Bukowski
-Sylvia Plath
-Jeannette Walls

Constructive criticism is always welcome and appreciated, and I tend to read the work of my reviewers, so reviews with shameless self-promoting plugs are useless, since I'll be more likely to check you out if you're not obnoxious.

I don't generally write long fiction, so there probably won't be anything with multiple chapters. I'm definitely more into short stories, short memoir, and essays, and I occasionally write poetry. The only characters you can expect to see again are Tom ("Backfire") and Ryan ("A Reasonable Man"), because I don't feel that their stories are completely finished--check back to see if I make any changes.

I'm also here: http://pencilstubpeople.deviantart.com. Mostly the same stuff, but there's some more I'm not going to post here, in case you're so blown away by my stuff that you're craving more.
P.S. That was false arrogance.

I will be available as a beta next month, so if you need help (even before then, unofficially) I'm here for you!