first writing

I am afraid I might need to stretch the rules a little bit here, as the first book I ever created didn't technically make it into the real world. It happened when I was about 9 years old, so a first book is quite good for that age. It also took five minutes to create.

It began just before a week long half term holiday. The teacher set us homework of reading any book and then writing a review of the book. When we were to come back to school some could read out their reviews to the class. I didn't mind reading and had a few choices, but for reasons I cant quite remember nothing peaked my interest.

I had a few books from birthdays and the results of a few book tokens. I had time as we as a family didn't got very far on week long holidays. In fact my parents were teachers and so were exhausted from teaching people like me.

So as time went on I had a problem, I needed to review a book I hadnt actually read. I thought of reviewing one already written but it was risky if I forgot any important details. There was no internet to find outlines of books or even someone else review to pinch.

There fore at age nine I decided on the obvious solution, make a book up and review that instead. So at age nine I created a book in five minutes. For some reason it was called "Blood for cash", not your average child's reading matter. I also created a plausible sounding author, plausible but not well enough known to be recognised.

The lack of internet helped again , if the teacher decided he didn't trust me his searches for the book would be limited. I reviewed it as I made up the story. In fact in some parts the review may have come before the story . It involved a hitman , hence the title. I seem to recall it was a James Bond type tale , the British good guy deals with the naughty non British person.

I commented on the writing style, the length of the book and my over all enjoyment of the book. I believe I enjoyed it and not suprisingly I was very complimentary of the author. I was also supposed to list other stories this author had written and others I had read by the scribe. Deciding to not take any more risks this book became a recently released debut novel.

The few hundred word review was handed in at the start of the new term, along with everyone else's possibly more honest versions. The teacher marked the home work a few days later and returned it to us. I believe the comments were about a good review of a very intersting book. Luckily there was no request to read the review out in front of the class, even luckier there were no questions or requests to bring the book in to school.

The reviews that were read out followed the way mine did, although as far as I can remeber there reviews were of real books. Now 47 years later I am still working on that difficult second book, maybe I can try and get a book deal by inventing the story on the spot.

Hopefully there will be a second book, this one with real words on real paper. The book that can be reviewed by more then one person and one that more then one person can read. Maybe my second book can be one about inventing books to fool a teacher because the pupil was too lazy to read a real book.