Blast from the Past

Recently, my friend, Mrs. Sparrow, had issued a couple of blog posts regarding people and events from her past. Her way past – 30 years ago! It started me thinking about my own past 30 years ago – where was I, who did I hang out with, what were my hopes and dreams? As I was cleaning out my closet this week, and pondering these thoughts, I came across one of those dreams from so long ago. The dream, or desire, was to be a writer. I found a folder at the bottom of my closet that contained all kinds of handwritten and typed pages of story ideas and outlines, character descriptions, dialogues, and many pages of partial stories. After reading through all this, I was left wondering what ever gave me the idea that I would be a good writer? Well, it was written 30 years ago, and I was very young and had hardly experienced much of my life yet. My literary education up to that point had consisted of Nancy Drew mysteries, Harriet the Spy, The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweller, Archie comic books, required reading in high school, and Harlequin romance novels. So, although the stuff I came across wasn’t very good, I still found myself exhilarated reading it. Why? Because it brought back the excitement of conjuring up a story, experiencing the character’s lives as their story unfolds, and knowing you have the ability to tell the story in any time, place, situation with any personality, attributes or history you want. I realized that while I may not have been a very good writer, I still do have a desire to write. As I read through those long forgotten pages, I could feel myself getting excited about what I was gonna read on the next page and the next. I felt let down reading some of the only partially written stories because I found myself wanting to know what happened next. At the back of the folder I came across some typed pages merely titled “Chapter 1.” The story (well, actually only one chapter of a story) wasn’t that great, or even very original, and was so obviously written during my Harlequin Romance period, and yet I felt strangely proud of my attempt and even found myself wishing there was more to the story. I wanted to know what happened next. Maybe someday I’ll finish it. For now, I’m going to post that lonely little chapter for my own enjoyment at seeing it in print, or for the amusement of anyone who reads it.