Once upon a time, I dreamed of evil burning sausages.

Some dark sorcerer had come in and poisoned the sausages being cooked for a party, and as a result, the sausages became deadly little monsters, crawling all over the place and burning every living thing in their path. I had to use my magic powers (1) to elevate my mother, who was sleeping on a futon on the floor; (2) to create a sausage-killing brew, which I poured into some water pistols and handed out to my cousins [so they could help me kill the evil meat products from their safe perches atop tall furniture]; and (3) to float above the ground as I moved from room to room, squirting my brew at the sausages all over the floor.

You know the sort of dream I mean, right? It was nothing out of the ordinary.

So when I woke up, I scribbled every detail down and wrote a short story based on the dream. I called it “The Night of the Sausage Invasion.”

I know. I was 12 years old, and I couldn’t help being a dork.

Seven years later, I dreamed about becoming a writer, and I learned about a new publishing company that claimed it would revolutionize the industry by bringing back the dime novel. Well, guess what. That company was looking for writers with novella-length stories.

So I rewrote “The Night of the Sausage Invasion,” changed it from first person point of view to third person point of view, and renamed it “Of Witches and Sausages.” The main characters became a red-headed, green-eyed witch named Jinx and her best friend Todd, who was rather ordinary.

Jinx tended to panic, so it took her a full 10 chapters to kill off the sausages, whereas it took me only minutes in my long ago dream. To her credit, however, the house was much bigger in size and there were more sausages to kill… but still, she couldn’t hold a candle to me.

There was also a secondary character, whose name I’ve forgotten; it was the overweight lady of the mansion who had thrown the ball that brought all the people and the catered sausages there. That lady had severe halitosis, which would be crucial to the end of the story. The halitosis, it turns out, is the main, most important ingredient of the witch’s brew that kills the sausages.

Don’t ask me where I got these ideas. I seriously thought at the time that I was being clever.

No black cats. No white owls. No vibrating broomsticks. Just a panicking near-incompetent witch harvesting the hostess’s extremely bad breath to create a brew with which she could fill water pistols, in order to kill evil burning sausages. This was all before Harry Potter was a twinkle in J.K. Rowling’s eye and all before I developed any sense of what’s good in fiction. I finished the novella and submitted it, and naturally, it came back with a rejection form letter.

This is why I no longer have pizza right before going to bed.

And this is why I don’t like sausages.

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