Wherewhatwherehowwhere?

Like many fanciful people, I once imagined I had talent as a writer.  Here's a fun fact: last year someone asked to read something I had written.  I sent this person a short story I wrote like twenty-five years ago & they never spoke to me again.  That's some terrible writing right there!

Boy I sure liked to pretend though.  In ninth grade I had a small group of friends - Scott, Mike, & Robert were their names - I was closest with Scott, I was friendly with Mike, & Robert did not like me & just wanted to hang with Scott - but to make them laugh I wrote a series of stories - chapters, really, in a novel I would never finish - in which we were superspies in a James Bond-like world.  The "novel" was full of inside jokes, & people we knew in school - people who probably had no idea I existed - were cast as foils or villains or such things.  I remember that Mike's older sister was some kind of sinister malefactor I called "Ms Death."

It's crazy I can recall even that - I have the pages, written in pencil so probably illegible, saved somewhere, but I have no idea what it was really about.  I do remember why I stopped writing it: Mike burst my bubble.  He told me it was terrible & it would never be published.

There was certainly a part of me that knew it would never be published, in the same way I knew the silly tapes I made with friends pretending to be doing radio shows would never actually become comic albums or whatever, but part of the thrill was the pretending.  I was trying to write this fantasy where all my friends were something else, I was writing it for them, I was hoping to charm & amuse them.  Mike didn't possess a fanciful bone, however, & when I mused about publication, he didn't mind raining on my parade.  He actually laughed out loud at my folly.

It was at that point that I just lost interest.  & it was fine that he made me realize that actually making a book was hard work, he didn't have to tell me it was terrible.

No worries!  It didn't deter me then from pursuing a writing career.  It would take me, realizing later that in fact my writing was pretty awful, to leave that path.

Still.  Wow, I didn't know until this past year that my writing was so bad it would make someone stop talking to me.  Seriously - that's some fucking terrible writing there!