It's all fun and games until your father finds out you're an avid slasher.

This is amusing now. It wasn't when I fled in dire panic and made that frantic phone call, huddled in the restaurant bathroom, to Miranda.

"You said you liked to read short stories. What kind of stories? What happens in them, what do you like to read about?"

And no, the operative answers don't even reside in the same geographic hemisphere to the truth when it's your father asking the questions.