I don't know how much material I will want to add to these pages, but I do wish to share my first story with you. Let me tell you a story. Sometimes that's what I do best. When I was in sixth grade attending elementary school, I remember carrying around my Pac-Man spiral copybook in the schoolyard one afternoon during lunch. I had started writing my first story entitled "The Mission." A few minutes into lunch my friends came over and they wanted me to read my story to them. They gathered around and I stood up and started to read my story. I remember thinking that this was the coolest thing--people actually wanted to hear what I had written. I kept reading to them and I lost track of time until all of a sudden I noticed one of the nuns came over to me and asked, "What's that you're reading?" Somehow I knew that she thought I had some sort of dirty magazine that I was showing my friends. I looked her in the eye and said, "My story." She held her hand out waiting, "Hand it over." I gave my copybook to her and smiled inwardly when her eyes opened wide with the realization that she hadn't caught us doing something wrong, but instead found that I had written an original story and was simply reading it to my friends. She handed the copybook back to me, told me to carry on, and walked away.
Hand drawn illustration from when I was 11 are some of the wonderful treasures found in this first story of mine back from the 1980s.
Vindication! I felt this sense of awe descend over me in that I had the power even to shock and amaze the teachers--that my writing wasn't anything "wrong" and that I could continue doing it and share it with my friends. You have to understand that going to a Catholic elementary school was a bit more stressful than attending a public school. Back in the '80s, you didn't want to mess around with certain nuns. They would still pull you by the ear and drag you out of your seat. Well, I opened up my copybook back up and continued reading my story to my friends. This piece of writing is the earliest record I have of my attempting to write a story. What I find fascinating is that I not only wrote the story, but I even used crayon to draw some of the villain/characters in the story. In re-reading parts of "The Mission," I can reflect back and see how this story is a mix between an episode of Batman with the "Pow!" and "Zonks!" effects and highly inspired by my playing Dungeons & Dragons and watching the Doctor Who television show. With that all said, take a moment and laugh with me (rather than at me) as we take a retrospective look back at my first story entitled "The Mission."
What I find most interesting is my use of double exlamation points (I guess one wasn't good enough!) and my handwriting. I never handwrite any longer. Being left-handed, I find it easier to print everything. But this is so early in my development, that I still was following what I had been taught in school. You'll also notice that I had no idea how to structure dialogue with quotation marks and to separate thoughts by using paragraphs. This is about as raw as it gets. Below is a screenshot of the first page. To see the other 20 pages, checkout the photogallery I put together (very quickly).