The First “Real” Story
I think I’ve mentioned a couple times here on this blog that I’ve always been a writer. It’s true. I decided to write this post based on a prompt from another writer on Twitter.
The first stories I can recall writing were school assignments; I believe I was in second grade, which would have put me at seven years old. Since they were school projects, I never considered them to be “real” stories. I wrote about my brother, about one of my cousins, about family pets, and once about a vampire (it was around Halloween). About that time, I started keeping a spiral notebook and wrote short stories for fun. There was one in that notebook about the adventures of a paper airplane, but I can’t recall anything else. I don’t think that notebook exists any more. (Some of the school assignments are still somewhere. I know my mom has a file of things from both my brother and I that she’s kept).
Anyway, the first “real” story, and the first that I finished to completion was a goofy tale I called “The Adventures of Brad and Kris”. I wrote it when I was twelve, during summer break in 1995. At the time, I had read a lot of Goosebumps and Fear Street books by R.L. Stine, and was just beginning to branch out to more adult novels (I recall reading Delores Claiborne by Stephen King around that time, as well as Jurassic Park and Sphere, by Michael Crichton. I was always an avid reader, and always reading well above my “grade level”.) I was also very much into watching The X-Files. Many of those influences appear in that first “real” story.
The Adventures of Brad and Kris was the story of two best friends (who happened to be the same age I was at the time). A “crazy plague” happened to hit the world, but somehow the pair were unaffected by it. The disease caused rapid insanity, followed by sudden death (I wasn’t aware of the term “pandemic” back then, but that’s what it ultimately was). I will admit it’s a bit dark for a twelve-year-old, and I’m not entirely sure where that part of the story came from (I didn’t read The Stand until a few years later, I didn’t read The Andromeda Strain until I was in college, and I don’t believe The X-Files had progressed to the alien virus stage of the show by that time.)
The story then took a turn toward the weird, when I decided to add a UFO crash-landing in the boys’ neighborhood. They encountered a few aliens with some decidedly ridiculous names (Cee Meerun, for instance) and then went along with them on an adventure after helping to repair their crashed ship. Since most of the human race was dead or infected by the “crazy plague”, it seemed a natural progression to have them go off into space with the visitors.
Somewhere along the journey, they ended up in a bizarre funhouse inhabited by monsters (there was a major Goosebumps influence to this part of the story, though I can’t recall which book it was that featured the funhouse.) The story devolved into one bizarre situation after another, with no real plot, but in the end, they returned to Earth only to find that all of the people they believed had died were only in a suspended state. The world had returned to normal, and no one remembered the “crazy plague”.
I’ll never publish The Adventures of Brad and Kris as it is, but I’ve kept the draft in my cabinet. Sometimes it’s entertaining to look back and laugh at myself. But it’s also interesting to see how far I’ve come as a writer in the intervening years.