From Dunn To Done

Being a literal child of the 60's (born 1962) I was not inundated with electronic mediums of entertainment as are today's children. My mother was a stay at home mom, my father a soldier. Mom taught me to read before I ever started kindergarten, for which fact I am eternally grateful. I was a very small child who, at age five, was about the size of most three year olds. Neighbors and friends would wonder and exclaim over this tiny little boy sitting on his mother's lap reading a novel out loud to her. My most shining memory of kindergarten was in the first few days of school when I wrote a paper that my teacher was so enamored of that she had me take it to other classes to read aloud. I was so proud I could burst.

Having now completed 60 decades of a life lived as a die hard bibliophile, I grew up with the Boxcar Children, and the Happy Hollisters. From there I moved on to Danny Dunn and all his wonderful gadgetry. Pippi Longstocking was a fascinating character. As I entered into adolescence, I moved on to those wonderful action sci fi books in the lines of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars books, the Richard Blade series by Jeffrey Lord, and - every teenage boy of the time's guilty pleasure - the Gor series by John Norman. Of course there were also comic books. Superheroes in capes and large breasted, skimpily clothed heroines and villains. Yes, I have been a book lover my entire life, enjoying the works of the greats and the newbies. Heinlein, Asimov, Chalker, Anthony. Yet, nothing compares to creating your own.

While my reading matter is more varied these days, in my earlier years my tastes leaned to sci fi and fantasy: thus it was only natural that, when my young imagination turned to creating my own stories, sci fi was the natural route. Having recently been on a time travel schtick I decided, at the ripe old age of eleven years to try my hand. Yellow Number 2 pencil and legal pad in hand I embarked on a journey into my own imagination. Being also a lover of Aesop's Fables and their life lessons, I wanted to write a time travel story that would point out human fallacy and hopefully teach a lesson while being entertaining. I actually wrote two stories that day.

My first story was kind of a take off on the same idea as the Butterfly Effect, of which I had never heard at that time of course. My tale was about a man who invented a time machine and went back to the age of dinosaurs. A time before humanity itself existed. In my story this man found himself being chased by a slavering tyrannosaurus rex and, in his panicked run, splashing into a puddle. At that point, the protagonist simply "poofed" out of existence. Zoom in on the puddle of water wherein there lies an amoeba, it's minute life snuffed out. There the story ended, leaving us to assume that this time traveler had inadvertently wiped out the future existence of the entire human race. Cue the Twilight Zone music.

My second attempt, as my feverish imagination raced on, my small eleven year old hands gripping the pencil for all I was worth, was about a man who traveled to the future with a backpack full of gold, intent upon being a wealthy, powerful man. Upon landing in the future our time traveler found himself in a trackless desert beneath a blazing sun. As he trekked across the sands, dying of thirst and imminent heat stroke, our intrepid character refused to leave behind the heavy pack. At the end of the little tale his remains are found by two travelers who wondered why in the world anyone would drag a bag of worthless gold across the desert when gold was no longer worth anything in "todays" economy.

Was I proud of those little stories? Absolutely. I still am. To my eleven year old psyche they were an achievement to rival War and Peace. My parents exclaimed over them and my English teacher loved them - or at least said she did in her efforts to stroke the ego and praise the efforts of a young mind.

Would I write similar stories today? Absolutely. I still like to write stories that have a lesson at their heart while entertaining and stimulating the mind. I have now written an untold number of short stories, two and a half novels (adventure/thrillers) and a huge number of poems. But, I hearken back to that little child gripping his pencil, heart beating, feverishly placing words on paper in the hope that others would read them. Of course, my tales these days are much more in depth with description, character development, and such; however, that budding little author remains in the back of my mind exclaiming at the wonders of the written word and bringing light to the dark parts of my adult endeavors. May his delight in literature continue to lead the way.