I've Always Wanted To Be A Writer

My wife and I spent Thanksgiving night at my parent's house. Since we were in my old bedroom, I decided to spend a little time weeding through the endless piles of old books in my closet.

I found an old notebook (circa '92-ish), hidden in between some shelves. I opened it up, and... well...

When I was a kid, I read a lot. I figured that if it was easy to read a book, it couldn't be much harder to write one. So, sometime around high school / early in college, I tried to write a book. That "novel" was part of what I found.

It was 50 pages or so of a quaint little disaster I called "Treasure Hunt". It was never completed. You can all begin thanking me now.

Where to begin? For "plot", I just took elements of all the stuff I'd read and pieced them together. I was horrible at creating names for my characters, so I had a bad guy named "Sam Nefarous", and a random nobody named "Edwin Putz". There was a short Mexican guy who was, as far I could tell / recall, an near-exact replica of "Tattoo" from Fantasy Island. My dialog featured such gems as "Meester Rex!" (from the little Mexican) and "Ow! I am hurt!" (from a character who had just been shot).

But the novel wasn't all I found! It gets (*ahem*) better. I shall briefly digress...

I read once that Abraham Lincoln used to write angry letters when he was mad, but he'd never send them. He'd throw the letters away the next day, saying it always made him feel better.

Following his example, I wrote some horribly mean and bitter letters to girls I knew in college. They had, at one time or other, broken my heart. Hey, I was pretty pathetic - it didn't take much.

Naturally, it was one of these letters that my wife reached for. "Hey, what's all this old stuff?" My heart nearly stopped. I did not want my wife to read my whiny old "Wah!-I-love-you-why-don't-you-love-me-?" letters. Heck, there was one to a girl whose name I don't even recognize now.

Finally, there was a ton of stuff from the brief period where I was involved with RPG's (Role Playing Games). "The Call Of Cthulhu" was apparently my favorite, although I don't remember actually playing it much. I did find papers outlining a game that I led based on my "Treasure Hunt" epic.

There was a reference in those papers to some magic spell called "Flaming Telepathy". The name amused me. I was certainly a flaming *something* during that time.

I put all the stuff in the notebook and told my wife that we were bringing it home with us. "Why?", she asked.

"Because it's important to me that no one ever read this stuff," I replied. "At home, we have a cross-cut shredder."

Goodbye, "Treasure Hunt." :)