How you're feeling right now.
The story is called "The Marvellous Mr. Marble", and I originally wrote it for a creative writing class assignment in my fourth year of university. At the time, I had just read an article about the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa - for those of you with an irrational fear of hyperlinks, a random workman spotted the painting at the Louvre, thought to himself 'hmmm, that looks like a nice painting' - or whatever the equivalent phrase is in French - slipped it into into his cloak and walked out with it, at which point he managed to successfully evade police for two full years. I wanted to fit this into a story somehow, so I ended up writing a 4,000 word comedy story about a middle-aged man who lies about stealing the Mona Lisa to impress his old classmates at a high school reunion.
I don't even like this painting.
The story actually won a creative writing award at my university that year; it came with a scholarship to a week-long writing workshop at the Banff Centre of the Arts, which you can read all about in this blog post right here. Despite the success I'd gotten with the story, I was far too anxious to think about submitting it to literary journals until after I'd graduated from university and been catapulted head-first into the adult world. The first handful of submissions came back with rejections - or 'sorry-this-was-so-close-to-making-it-but-not-quite' letters - until I checked my email a few weeks ago and found my first acceptance letter.
Awww, yeah.
The story is live on Jenny Magazine's website, and you can read it for free by clicking here. Or you can find it in the "short stories" tab at the top of this page. I can't tell you how to lead your life.
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