Not A Girl Detective

From Not A Girl Detective, by Susan Kandel, about an amateur sleuth who idolizes Nancy Drew:

"I'd been asked to give the keynote address at the annual Nancy Drew fan convention. Some persons in my life had found the very idea amusing. Like my daughter Annie and her husband Vincent, who about choked on their Komubucha mushroom tea when I told them...It was a paycheck, for god's sake. When you write biographies of dead mystery writers for a living, you need as many of those as you can get. And it would be great publicity for the new book, which was almost finished. But I was nervous. Those fans knew a hell of a lot, and they'd probably love to catch me in a mistake, like not knowing that the spine silhouette for number 24 was missing a scarf. Or that early printings of number 18, The Mystery of the Moss-Colored Mansion, made reference to the forthcoming volume as The Quest of the Telltale Map when it was actually printed as The Quest of the Missing Map.

Fan is short for fanatic."

Inner Fat Girl

From Robyn Anderson's essay "The Devil Inside," collected in Erin Shea's Tales from the Scale:

"I call her Tallulah, and she's a total drama queen, my inner Fat Girl...I don't know how long she's been there in my head, making my life miserable, but I'd hazard a guess that she was created when I was young and chubby, and as I got older and fatter she got stronger and louder Every time someone made a comment about my weight, every time some asshole drove by and mooed me, every time I thought that the only important thing about me was that number on the scale, every time I realized anew that I couldn't fit into the clothes from the "normal people" store, every time I caught a sidelong glance from a stranger and was immediately aware that I was seen as lazy and smelly and stupid because of my size, my inner Fat Girl grew and grew and grew. She took up more space in my brain, sounding more assured, as if every word she spoke were the truth, until I took every word she said as gospel.

And my inner Fat Girl is such a bitch."

Opening paragraph, 33, by Joe Donnelly

From the story 33 by Joe Donnelly, in the Feb 1st edition of L.A. Weekly:

"Thirty-three. It’s a tough one. A lot of all-time greats went down at 33. Jesus was 33 when they hung him up on that cross. So was Keith Relf of the Yardbirds when a high-voltage shock unplugged him forever. Rushton Moreve from Steppenwolf was born to be wild but not to see 34. He died at 33 in a car crash. Same thing happened to Rob Collins from the Charlatans UK. Don’t forget poor Lester Bangs, dead at 33 of “flu-like symptoms.” The great Sam Cooke got shot dead before he could sing himself a sweet, happy 34th. Remember Lee Morgan, the legendary jazz trumpeter? Murdered when he was 33. And, of course, there’s John Belushi, who was done in by a speedball at 33. Fifteen years later Belushi lover Chris Farley performed the sincerest form of flattery and did himself in the same way. At 33."