No Regrets

NOTE: This post is actually not about EBP's upcoming anthology, Winter Regrets, which is due out on 2/28, details forthcoming.

I don't follow everyone who follows me, nor do I automatically track commenters back to their own blogs to comment on their posts. "Follow me, I'll follow you" is a song title (bastardized, I'll admit), not a practice. If that makes me a bad person, so be it. The simple truth is, there are too many blogs, too many people, and not enough hours in the day for all of it.

I do, however, explore the blog's follower list from time-to-time. I check out profiles and blogs. Sometimes I'll follow those blogs, sometimes I pop in on a regular basis without following, sometimes I comment, sometimes I don't.

On Monday, having the day off, I had some extra time and poked around the list, where I found what was then a roughly week-old post from B.A. Wilson, the most recent follower of this blog (except maybe for that anonymous guy, you know who you are). This particular post really resonated with me. It mirrored in many ways my own journey. B.A. writes, 

This is where writing begins, which leaves me wondering about the twenty-seven year gap that grew between my initial desire to write and tell stories and the time at which I let myself write. Yes, I said let myself write, because I wanted to write a novel for many, many years before I actually sat down and typed my first words.

A long time ago, I wrote about the first time I knew I wanted to write. I was on fire the rest of that year and part of the next, and was even partnering up with a friend of mine. We were going to write books for the ages! We had notebooks! And then....it sort of faded away, lost, I guess, in whatever kids get lost in in middle school.

 

Later, B.A. adds, 

"I've floated through degrees and career paths. Every single step of the way, I always asked myself: What's next? What do you really want to do with your life? Every single time, I answered, "I want to write." Then I quickly shoved that idea down as being ridiculous and irrational, and I dug around for something that might work out as second best."

And again, I found myself nodding along. While I haven't exactly floated through many career paths, several times I found myself unhappy with where I was and facing a decision—stay with this job, or look for a new one? And asking myself if I was happy. Writing was the thing that nibbled away at my brain. Writing was one of those things I always enjoyed, whether it was press releases, curriculum guides, brochure copy. Like B.A., however, I never really gave in to those urges.

But something else she said struck me: "I wish I could rewind now and start sooner. I can only imagine what I would have learned, in the last ten years alone, that would have helped me be a much stronger writer today."

Regret is a powerful, and destructive emotion (is it really an emotion, by the way? I'm not sure). If we give in to regret, it can be as paralyzing as the fears that often keep us from acting in the first place. There is no room for regret. On occasion, I think this way, too. "What if I had started writing in college? What if I had started sooner? What if I had spent those hours on the train writing instead of reading or sleeping? What if I hadn't played so much Grand Theft Auto or World of Warcraft, or spent less time at the bar, or, or, or…?"

But it's too late for any of that. I'm here, now, with stories in my head and some degree of writing ability. This is what I have. And I also believe that the years spent not writing is just as valuable as anything. During the *cough*thirty-odd*cough* years between that first explosion of "I want to write!" and when I sat down and started seriously writing, I've had experiences. These experiences have shaped who I am and how I think.  

There is no room for regret--I've got another book to write.

Child's Play

Yesterday morning a post turned up in my Facebook feed from my friend, Lisa Regan, and I consider myself lucky to have seen it, because it's Facebook, and things get shuffled, ordered and reordered, with no rhyme or reason, kind of like Amazon rankings. At any rate, this was close enough to the top of the feed Sunday morning that I saw it. Tomorrow, it may be lost seemingly forever, only to show up again next December, even if no one comments or likes it. Who can say?

Anyway, Lisa relayed how she sat in her car with her 5-year-old daughter, waiting for her husband to come out of the store. The daughter is playing with a My Little Pony figure and invites Lisa to play along.

"Sorry, hon, I don't have a pony."

"Do you have a pen?"

Lisa hands a pen to her daughter, who takes the pen, grabs Lisa's hand, and draws a smiley face on her fingertip.

"Now you've got one," she says. "Let's play."

That picture of Lisa's smiling fingertip and her story made my day. It's so typical of kids to think this way. They have not been trained by the world to look for the faults first; instead, they see possibility and potential, and they're typically not afraid to try out their solutions and have them fail. Kids are unabashed imaginators and problem solvers.

Lisa's story also triggered a thought process about what got me back into writing fiction. I had never really considered the possibility that my kids played any role in resurrecting my long-buried desire to write fiction, but maybe there's something there.

When the Magpie and the Catbird were little, my wife and I made sure we read to them every day. We read to them at bedtime, we read to them while we were feeding them, we read to them as we were putting them down for naps. We read board books and Boynton, Dr. Seuss and the Berenstain Bears. When they got older, it was Junie B. Jones and the Magic Treehouse, Harry Potter, Where The Red Fern Grows. When they were old enough to read on their own, they read to us. And in addition to reading, we played. And we played, and we played, and we played. We played board games and card games, and we built with legos and blocks, but probably the most popular game were variations on games with ponies. The girls had horses. Lots of horses. And we played with them all the time.

I never got to be Wonder Pony.

For an adult, kid play can sometimes be remarkably frustrating, especially when the kid dictates everything. "OK, he's going to do this…" says the kid, and you have to make him do THIS or it all falls apart. But it's also amazing and creative and limitless. I spent hours with the girls, bending to their will while trying to maintain some degree of autonomy, while horses flew and ran and escaped the clutches of the bad guys who were trying to kidnap them. As frustrating as it could be at time, I admit I had a lot of fun. It was the sort of play that I hadn't really experienced since before I was a teenager.

Eventually, of course, that sort of play tapered, then stopped. In all honesty, it was partly relief and partly sad. The girls both became more solitary (or, perhaps more accurately, their social activities were directed in different ways), more mature in their pursuits. It's a natural progression, one that I had gone through, and my parents too, and their parents, on and on for millennia. Some day, their children will do the same. It's the natural order of things.

But where does the writing come in? The desire to write really seemed to kick in again around the time the Catbird, being younger, moved out of that "let's play" phase of life. There were other factors involved, too, but Lisa's post made me rethink the connection between my kids and my writing. Playing with my kids as much as I did, I think, tapped some well of imagination that had been largely covered over. Once they stopped needing me for that kind of play, the connection, fortunately, remained open, but it needed an outlet. Perhaps if I had studied music more seriously as a kid, I'd be playing piano or guitar now, or maybe I'd be painting or joining the local theater company. But I've always gravitated toward the written word, so it's natural that the creativity would leak out and be satisfied in that direction. I'm glad it did because, as frustrating as writing can sometimes be, it's satisfying and fun. Thanks, kids!

World of Warcraft: An Origins Story

Earlier this week, Blizzard Entertainment released the fourth expansion for their hugely-popular World of Warcraft game. Mists of Pandaria adds new levels of gameplay, new race (Panda people!?), a new class, and all kind of other nifty new features. It also marks the first expansion I will not be playing since joining shortly after the release of expansion 1, The Burning Crusade, in 2007.

There are a lot of reasons why I'm no longer playing World of Warcraft, but I come to praise WoW, not to bury it: World of Warcraft played a role in turning me into a writer.

It's a strange thing to say, in some ways. Video games are not often thought of as being something that would encourage anything other than sitting in front of a computer, mashing buttons. After all, the image we have of gamers is either of pimple-faced teenage boys shut up in their room, taking advantage of internet anonymity to be all kinds of rude, or of forty-something year-old men, shut up in their parents' basement, pretending that the shapely, scantily-clad elf girl their driving around the screen is a real girl (and knowing, of course, that's as close as their getting to a real girl). The closest thing to writing we expect from these guys is something in game chat like this, "Ur a n00b lolololol."

But the truth is quite different. Gamers cut across the spectrum of humanity, and while there is a grain of truth in the two gamer stereotypes mentioned above (and I've known both types), the reality is gamers are middle-aged men with families and small businesses; they're college students; they're mothers, young and old; they're 60+ year-old retired Navy MPs. In short, they're a little bit of everything. And they are surprisingly literary-minded.

I found this out quite by accident. At some point in my WoW playing, I started scouring the web for advice on playing my Paladin. I learned to avoid Blizzard's official forums: that was the haven of the aforementioned stereotypical teens. They turned the place into a cesspool of blatant trolling or petulant whining, where serious answers to serious questions were as rare as the Time-Lost Proto Drake.

But the searches led me to World of Warcraft bloggers, and here I found a very different world: a world of intelligent people who were passionate and knowledgeable about the game, and enjoyed sharing their knowledge with others. They examined the game in detail, dissected it, and wrote posts that were informative and entertaining. It helped me a lot, and inspired me, too: eventually, my own passion for the game led me to being a very active participant on a forum created specifically for those who play healers in game. I wrote a two-part guest post on Holy Paladins for one of the better-known WoW bloggers around, and even created my own blog (now defunct for a year). I was writing, and I liked it.

WoW blogs led me to NaNoWriMo. In November of 2009, several of the bloggers I followed were talking about it, usually in this vein: "Sorry I haven't been posting as much. My NaNo is eating my brain." I'd scratch my head and think, What the Hell is this NaNo thing? Eventually I got curious enough to look it up. The idea intrigued me, but by the time I found out, it was too late to participate. And I wasn't ready. Yet.

But I was almost ready. In December, 2009, Blizzard prepared to release the last big content patch of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion (and another thing: Lich King was brilliant storytelling, but that may be the subject of another post, no promises): the final assault on Icecrown Citadel, home of the biggest badass in the game at the time, Arthas, aka The Lich King. The world of the World of Warcraft was abuzz with what it would be like, and a funny thing happened to me (and here's my inner geek, laid open for all to see): my imagination was fired in a way I couldn't explain. While doing other things (driving, dishes, whatever), I'd 'see' in my head a story unfolding, with my paladin at the center of it, preparing to take Icecrown by storm. I saw and heard conversations in my head, imagined how it would go, how he would react…in other words, I was writing a story.

I didn't commit any of this to paper, but it circled my brain up until the raid was released, I was too busy getting smashed into tiny pixel bits by bosses to dwell on it any further. But the pump was primed. I was blogging regularly, and I was thinking. Stuff was happening in the Back Room. In March I had one of those first 'Aha!' moments when sometihng popped out of the Back Room. I didn't get far with it, but it was a step.

Perhaps it's not a coincidence, but in early August (yes, 9 months after the first chunk of Icecrown Citadel was released) of 2010, my guild finally defeated Arthas (we also got our first kill of a new raid-boss released the previous month, who was more related to the upcoming Cataclysm expansion than the winding-down Lich King one). The pressure was off, we had four or so months until Cataclysm. I spent less time in the game world. Is it a coincidence that I began writing fiction in earnest right after that? By then I had false-started two novels in the spring. In September, ideas seemed to grow like weeds. A couple of short stories shoved their way out. A few more ideas kicked around. And then NaNo hit, and I decided, why not? While writing my NaNo, the idea for Parallel Lives appeared, and when my NaNo was done I immersed myself in that.

I didn't know it then, but it sounded the death knell for World of Warcraft. Ironic, in a way, that the game that helped kick-start my creativity was at least partly killed by it. Maybe it was a coincidence. Maybe I would have found my way back to writing anyway, eventually. I enjoyed my time in WoW, and I do miss it sometimes, but I'd rather be writing.

A Random Act

As you undoubtedly know, the wonderful Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi of The Bookshelf Muse have been hosting a week-long event to celebrate the release of The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer's Guide to Character Expression. They've been running giveaways all week, including a companion guide to the thesaurus, available as a free download. Best of all, they're encouraging RAOK (sounds like something a crow would say, doesn't it?), Random Acts of Kindness. The idea behind the RAOK Blitz is to celebrate the people who help us as writers – be they critique partners, industry insiders, readers, blog visitors, etc., etc.

Now, I believe I should be BLITZING a writerly-type of person, and there are indeed many people I could do this for, but if you've been hanging around my little corner of the Blogoverse at all, you know I play fast and loose with te rules when it comes to memes and fests and tags and whatnot. I'll catch up to you deserving folks another time, just know that, if you've helped me in any way at all, I do appreciate it, and I am thinking of you. The person I'm going to BLITZ is not an industry insider, fellow writer or blogger. She's not really a critique partner, either, though she has read my work and cheered me on. But she's the most important person in my life, and that would be The Wife.

The Wife has been supportive and encouraging. She believes in me. The hardest thing I ever did was turn over my manuscript to her (how hard? I gave it to her as she was about to leave home for a week to go help her brother and his wife with their newly-arrived triplets). I guess I was afraid she would read it, look at me, and say, "That's what you've been wasting your time with all year?" or something like that. Actually, I knew she wouldn't say that, but I was afraid she might think it. I have grown a lot in confidence since then, in no small part to her (and others who could easily be recognized here today). She has encouraged me, she talks me up more as a writer than I do, she's been a rock. So, to The Wife, I say, "Thank you." As for what the Random Act of Kindness will be—well, we'll keep that between us.

On another note. Two weeks ago, I did a second 'Origins' story of sorts. I mentioned the game B-17 and how the stories I wrote about my fictional crewmen seemed to lead to Something Bad happening in the game, generally involving fatal wounds to the men, or the entire plane getting shot down. Well, maybe that streak is still alive. Last week's post about being stuck in the middle with no end in sight? Or, rather, with the end in sight but no sense of actual movement? I had a nice little exchange with Donna K. Weaver. She asked me a couple of questions, I gave her a couple of answers. Lo and behold, the problem soon went away. I sat down on Monday and actually thought about possible endings. "This can happen, or this can happen, or maybe that can happen." It was actually sort of like--gasp--outlining! I picked one and started writing. By the end of my writing day I had 'the climax', the final confrontation, and it looked tenable. On Tuesday I cranked out a ridiculous 5,551 words—I kid you not; I'm not sure how I did it, because it didn't feel like I wrote any longer than normal—and realized I had done it. The tail of the book is perhaps a little long, but it is, basically, done. Not ready for public (or beta) consumption yet--I did a scan of it yesterday, resequenced scenes and made notes on what needs filling out, but the story is there, a complete story, and it even has a title (not ready to share that one yet, either. It reminds me too much of an old Star Trek episode, and it's really not right, but it works for now). So, thank you, Donna, because you must have given me just enough of a push to get things going.

And thank all of you. The First Loves Blogfest was fun, it brought a lot of visitors here, and I've been struggling to visit as many sites as I can. RAOK has been enjoyable, and now there are even more blogs to catch. At least I can take a day from the manuscript and catch up a bit. Have a great weekend!

B-17: An Origins Story

I've already told you about my illustrious start in writing back in the fall during the Origins blogfest, how my sixth grade teacher gave us an assignment that just set me on fire. I believe I've also said, in an early post that I can't find (or maybe it was in Origins, also), how I don't remember writing anything 'creative'* for nearly thirty years after that. By the time seventh grade was halfway through, I wasn't writing anything that wasn't for a school assignment.

courtesy Boadgamegeek.com

Yet writing always remained an interest of mine. I wrote for my jobs, did it well, and enjoyed it. But the seed of fiction writing was still there, dormant in my mind. It started to germinate when I was in my mid-thirties, watered and warmed from an unlikely source: B-17, Queen of theSkies. From the box:

"B-17: Queen of the Skies" is a strategy game which re-creates the early bombing missions and aerial combat of the B-17 (F Model) bombers of the US Eighth Air Force over Europe between October 1942 and May 1943. "

(Note how the game company calls it a 'strategy game'. These games are also frequently called 'historical conflict simulations', though most players (mostly middle-aged men) just call them 'wargames.') I grew up with an interest in World War II, probably fueled by my father, who was old enough to remember the feeling of it, if not the substance (he was five when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor). Dad used to watch The World At War on PBS, which was the Gold Standard for war documentaries for a long time. I picked up that interest, too, and discovered board wargames through my older brother, though I have no idea where he got his first game from.

HISTORICAL NOTE: The B-17 was a heavy bomber used by the US Army Airforce in WWII. It carried 10 crew members, a goodly number of bombs, bristled with machine guns, and was notorious for its ability to take a pounding. B-17s regularly returned from missions with one engine running, missing entire tail sections, or with giant holes blown in the fuselage or cockpit area. The game works pretty well as a simulation because, when flying in formation, about the only decision in the hands of the crew is which enemy fighters do you shoot at. You had to fly in formation to and from the target. The game randomizes everything that is out of the crew's control.

Now, here's secret about wargames: though they're designed for two or more players, most of these games are played solitaire. A lot of these games are very large, with a lot of pieces, and very complicated rules. War, after all, is a complicated business. They also take a lot of time to play, and opponents are hard to find. I was fortunate. I only played once or twice with my brother, but I had a friend down the block who also liked to play.

Anyway, like my writing, my interest in wargames waned when I was in my roaring twenties, though I always kept tabs on it. In the late 90's I rediscovered this hobby, dug my games out of my parents' basement, and even bought one or two new ones. It was fun, but there's frustration in playing against yourself: there's no fog of war. There are no surprise attacks. When one side launches an attack, the other side knows if it's a feint or the real thing. It's fun, but not quite as satisfying.

Enter B-17. This was one of the first games that was designed to be played solitaire. And it had little set-up time and didn't take long to play. My friend down the block had it, and I remember he enjoyed it. I also came across some nostalgia tales about the game on a wargames forum I was on. So I bought a used copy and found it quite compelling. It's a simple game with a high replay value and, like a good book, has a lot of tension.

Now for some irony: I bought a used copy to play solitaire, and ended up playing in a group. And this is where my fiction writing started to regrow.

To make the game more interesting, the designer included crew roster sheets. You're encouraged to create fictional characters to populate your ten man crew (Yes, you could put yourself in there, but that's kind of creepy if you take shrapnel to the head or a bullet in the chest, isn't it?). It sounds a little strange, I know, but it adds to the game more than if you just went with Pilot, Copilot, Bombardier, Port Waist Gunner, etc. And once you open that door, to putting names down, it encourages the imagination.

I joined an online group that was playing the game together. It worked like this: the game manager would post a mission on his website. We, the players, had two weeks to fly the mission and post an After Action Report (AAR). The AAR was like the post-mission briefings crews had. Did you reach the target? Did you drop bombs on the target? Did you hit the target? Did you shoot down enemy aircraft? What damage did your craft take? Casualties? Etc. The form included a space for describing the mission, and this is where things got interesting, and where people got creative, describing weary flight crews, cold, hungry and tired, describing the horrors of their missions. And I soon found the creativity extended beyond the AARs: some of the game participants were writing little vignettes about their crews on the ground. Some of them were quite good, too. They riffed off of each other, too, so it became a work of independent, but semi-collaborative fiction. And it opened up something inside of me, and led to a burst of creativity I hadn't had in quite some time.

I wrote some interesting pieces as part of that game. One of the more bizarre ones involved the paranoid dream of the navigator on my second aircraft (the first crashed in an emergency landing), where he dreamed his crewmates threw him out of the plane because he wasn't 'one of them' (he was from Brooklyn, they were almost all from the south). On the next mission, he got killed, and I half-jokingly offered my writing services to the group. "Got a crew member you want dead?" I asked. "Let me know, I'll write about them."

Playing at war is kind of … sick, I know. But I can't deny that participating in this game definitely started the process of writing for me again. The bits I wrote as part of this online group primed the pump. I still focused on non-fiction: in the next couple of years, I actually started outlining two non-fiction books, submitted an essay for one of the thousands of Chicken Soup for the Soul books, and sent in something  for Highlights magazine. But B-17 renewed my thirst for fiction writing. It only took about another four years for me to really get going.

* In my view, ALL writing is creative, but I think you know what I mean here

Origins!

One day Allen Foster and his friends Billy Jorgenson, Laura Cummings, and Mary Sandoff were driving to Centerpoint when Billy said, “We’re almost out of gas.” “Oh, great!” Allen said with a look of disgust on his face. “We’ll be stuck out here in the middle of nowhere! The next town is nearly 15 miles from here!” “Well we’ll just have to hoof it,” said Mary. “I’m not walking 15 miles,” retored Allen. “Stop the car Billy I’m going to see if there’s any gasoline in the trunk.”

 Oh, dear God, I don’t think I can do it. I don’t want to write it, you don’t want to read it.

Okay, that’s a lie on both counts. We’re writers. We’re maybe not as egomaniacal as some of the performers who strutted before the cameras at last night’s Grammy Awards, but we do love to talk about ourselves, and we also love to hear how others got started. So, while there is some truly cringeworthy stuff ahead of you, I’ll plow on, and so will you, because today is the OriginsBlogfest, so here is my Origins Blogfest tale. 

 

Edit because I'm an idiot: I forgot to say that Origins is co-hosted by DL Hammons, Katie Mills, Matthew MacNish, and Alex J. Cavanaugh. Thank you for hosting this great event, it's been great fun to read so many stories!

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you know I’ve talked about this before. But since I don’t tag my posts (idiot that I am) I don’t have an easy way to go and find where I’ve  referenced this before. So here it comes again. The words quoted at the top of this post are mine. They are the opening lines to my Epic Story, “The House of Evil.”

I wrote this story in 6^th grade, and it’s the first piece I remember writing. I’m sure I wrote stories before that, but it’s the first notable one – it’s also the earliest example of my writing that has been preserved for posteriority. I found it while sorting through my parents’ possessions, shook my head at the thought that they saved it, and probably did a bit of laughing and crying over that fact.

Kids – especially kids who love to read, and I was one of them – love to create stories, so I’m sure I wrote noteworthy stories before committing The House of Evil to paper, but Brady Bunch scripts written with my sister and comics poking fun at a chinless kid who lived down the block that my brother and I did don't really count. I'm sure I wrote some actual stories, but I don’t remember any of them at all until October 22, 1976. That was the day Mrs. Fucile, my favorite teacher, ever, posted a picture on the blackboard and told us to write a short story. The picture was of an old Victorian house. In my words:

The house was a large one about 3 stories with a small cupola at the top. It was very old. You could by the fact that the shutters swung on rusty hinges and the shingles were broken or chipped. All the trees were bare and ready for winter. The lawn looked like a garden of weeds.

Okay, maybe that’s not so bad. I like the ‘garden of weeds,’ actually. I’m not sure, but I might have actually used that recently. I’m plagiarizing myself.

The story is an interesting mix of ‘sensibilities’, I guess you’d say. There’s definitely the little kid-like, Scooby-doo feel to the piece: Four friends who, in my mind, were of college age driving in a car, stumble into trouble. But unlike Scooby-doo, there’s no solving this mystery. Unlike Scooby-doo, people really get hurt. Unlike Scooby-doo, there is no happy ending. There’s a bit of Stephen King-horror (and, interestingly in my mind, the ‘monsters’ in this story are human – there is no Lovecraftian, tentacled thing from the depths of hell here – the evil in question comes from humans. For all the horror King penned, the worst stuff in his stories was always what people did to other people) here. This story, I think, represents some of the earliest steps of my mind into the adult world.

There’s all kinds of influences evident in the story. Aside from the horror elements I was a huge fan of science fiction stories and B-movies. I had read Salem’s Lot earlier in the year – a good deal of my thoughts on this house came, no doubt, from the Marsten House in that book. I loved loved loved all things The Phantom of the Opera, hence the kids find a massive pipe organ in this apparently-abandoned house.

“So what’s so strange about a pipe organ?” asked Billy. “You mean you didn’t notice? Take a look around the rest of the room. Everything else is covered in dust except for this! It looks as though someone has been playing it.”

Hmm, I was at times strangely good about not using dialogue tags for every line, but I sure as heck didn't know to put each new speaker on a new line. Good to see I've learned something.

Alas, for our heroes, the sound of the organ “found it’s way to the sub-basement where a doctor unknown to them was working.” This would be the obligatory hidden basement laboratory of Evil Scientist Dr. McKinley and his assistant (hunchbacked, no doubt), Adrian (I may have read or watched Rosemary's Baby sometime that year, now that I think about it). Hearing the organ, the doc dials up a monitor and sees the four ‘kids’ in the house:

“I can’t continue my experiments with these people here,” he said angrily. “Wait a minute,” he said suddenly. “The one on the left would be good for my experiment. I want him and him only.” “What should I do with the others?” Asked Adrian. “I have no need for the others, you shall have to kill them. Now let’s get ready for the trip, I want shovels and flashlights.”

The mishmash continues. There’s grave robbing, and a set of experiments not unlike Doctor Frankenstein’s – only in this case, Doc McKinley is trying to paste a living mind into a dead body, which he will then reanimate. There’s booby-traps, a shovel to the head of the cop who could have stopped it all, remote-controlled suits of armor. In many ways, the story resembles the teen slasher flicks (minus the sex and drugs) that were still a couple of years off. Kids split up? One of them dies. Potential savior who can stop everything? He gets poleaxed with a shovel. I was ahead of my time, I guess.

I was also ahead of the class. I don’t remember any other stories coming close to mine in either length or content. It apparently wowed most everybody when it was read aloud, though I spent those 20 minutes or so inspecting every inch of the surface of my desk, afraid to look up. Afterwards, however, there seemed to be a definite change in tone of the short stories we continued to write. I’m sure it would have happened anyway, as we were all growing up and entering a new phase of our lives, but mine came first, so I’ll claim some significance. It seemed to loosen something up in the class, and that future stories – and we did a number of them that year – of my classmates were longer, and darker, too. In all honesty it probably would have happened anyway. I’m not going to overinflate my importance in this, kids of a certain age start to deal with the morbid. I was just the first in my class to have it so out there. I’d like to think it served as a good example, even if it was bad writing.

In hindsight, it wasn’t the best story I wrote that year. In addition to predating the teen slasher flick, I also wrote Toy Story (oh, heck, people have been writing about toys that come to life forever, who am I kidding?), and that one, I think, was better than this one (unfortunately, it does not survive). What The House of Evil did for me, though, was make me want to write. I’d never considered it as a possibility before. That picture, that house, just lit something up inside me.

Thank you for reading, see you on Friday.