my story

Oh, I know you.  You think I don’t, but I’m in your head this very instant.

 

You think that if you are a character in your own story, and I am here at this fire with you, then that means that I am a character in your tale as well?

 

I cannot argue that.  Not effectively, at any rate.

 

Fine.

 

This storyteller has been writing since sometime prehistory.  You think this is more fiction?  I speak the truth!  Or rather, a form of it—forgive me for using a writer’s language, if you will.  Everything is story.  And “prehistory” refers to that time in our past that precedes written history.

 

Later in life, I stole a degree in History from a semi-prestigious university.  But before I can even remember, I was writing books.

 

Not stories.

 

I have no proof, only a lovely witness.

 

Before the kindergarten age, according to my mother, I began writing my own books.  I folded paper over and over, cut it into shapes, and created volumes of forgotten lore.  I have no memory of them, and no proof that I wrote anything in any form of chicken scratch or Linear A of my own device.

 

Therefore, I have no memory of becoming a storyteller.  I was always a writer.

 

I do have evidence of a mass-produced novel that I wrote in the third grade.  The tale had come out a year or two prior, on the big screen, with the title Star Wars.  I had, in essence, written a form of private scripture: having seen the vision, larger than life, I wrote my own version—with a title that I thieved from my wonderful twin sister.

 

Oh yes, I have a twin.  Her eyes are not sewn shut.  We were born eleven months apart and regularly considered twins by strangers.  She writes music, I write words.

 

I wrote Creature Cartoons through elementary school, and sold it for a quarter an issue up and down the sweltering streets of Las Vegas.  In junior high, I piled comic books of my own design right alongside the mystery novels that I wrote for students who didn’t really want to listen to whatever it was the teacher had to say that day.  Teachers hated me.

In a Southern California high school, I wrote my first short stories.  I filled books, wrote even larger novels, and then dutifully aided my fellow students by writing stories for them when they needed creativity for their English classes.  Their teachers never knew.

 

By the beginning of my senior year, I seriously considered academia to be a hindrance to my writing career.  I went to school anyway, and the teachers took away my writings whenever they caught me casting magical spells over paper.  My mind overflowed with visions:

 

(You might not have known this but in the eighties, post-apocalyptic America gave rise to the Order of the Mantis—cold-blooded warriors, born of the need to survive in a poisoned and threatening world—who surprised themselves when they learned of their own humanity, even while on the verge of their extinction; Lance Straiton in the modern world began to engage powerful entities in a form of spiritual espionage; and the bestselling novel of the day had a way of twisting reality in on itself).

 

Writing alone carried me through school.  And not just the lies.  If there was a paper to write, I got an A on that paper—one of my science teachers pinched two of my papers, even after I said I wanted to keep them, and she went on to show them to classes in future semesters!

 

College was the same.  I majored in History, because history is just stories (a fabulous teacher taught me that, and thereby won my attention forever).  I took English courses like King Arthur for the love of tales, but the English professors mistook me for their “star” students and longed to mold me into educators like themselves.  It was the writing I loved—and I claim no perfection in the art; I claim only that I love writing.

 

When I came upn the Most Beautiful Woman in the World and she learned from others that I was a writer, I waited for the question I had grown accustomed to hearing: Will you let me see one of your stories?  Instead--no doubt because she found me smitten in her presence--she said, “Will you write a story for me?”

I wrote her a novel.  It was so romantic in the extreme, it brought tears to the eyes of everyone who received copies.  And for the first time in my life, my parents and grandparents stopped worrying about my future.  “You can do it!” said the grandfather who had always nudged me towards becoming a brain surgeon.  “You can do it!”

 

Of course, college takes a lot out of a person.  College demands focus, dedication, and more time than most humans experience in a day—yes, I said most: there’s a story there!  So … I married the Most Beautiful Woman in the World.  Marriage is a great motivator for those who wish to be successful in school.  I wrote seventy-five papers in three semesters, four collections of short stories, and seven novels—with all the necessary rewrites, of course.  And I graduated with cords over shoulders indicating honors given me by an international history honors society.

 

Then I entered the long and dreary plane of post-academic workplace.

 

That’s why I’ve built this fire, where we now sit and gab.

 

I ran a number of college campus bookstores, and then ended up teaching—go figure (I was the old wolf throwing myself into a strange pack to be devoured by the young).  I have also run two law firms, where I learned that reading about exciting legal exchanges is far better than actually living the nightmare.  From law, I retired to work in a library.

 

And is that all?  No.  But fiction is so much better than the truth isn’t it?  How can I explain that I also lived out of the country for years, that I’ve studied nine languages (ten if one counts this one), that I’ve completed all the work for a Master's of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, and tacked a Masters of Education on my ego wall among a patchwork scholarly documents, certificates, and awards?  I’m not as old as all this makes me sound—remember when I talked about high school in the eighties?  It was the late eighties.

 

In fact, most of my best friends are over sixty or awfully close.  I do have some who are pups like me.

 

I’m just too busy here at this fire.  Each coal I turn with this stick?  It’s a story.

 

Now you know a little of mine.

 

What of the Most Beautiful Woman in the World?  She is a wonderful writer’s wife, though I never could have known that she would become that when I saw her for the first time.  She is brilliant, and a fabulous mother.  Oh, yes, we have children!  Dreamers all ...