Despite what Mom suspected when I was three, I didn’t know I was going to be a writer until I was eleven. That was the year my best friend Aura made up B.J. Hip, a hippie wanna-be outcast with a wild hairdo and some pot-smoking friends. In her story, B.J. and his girlfriend, Belladonna, find a time machine hidden in a VW bus that takes them back to the seventies. Once there, they meet rock idols Led Zeppelin and take the band even further back in time where Jimmy Page almost gets eaten by a Tyrannasauras Rex.
I know, right???
I went straight home, got out an old school notebook, and started writing. I mean, who knew you could actually write that shit?
My first several short stories were ridiculous. Total rip-offs of books I was reading. Loaded with cliches and plenty of pre-teen drama and wish-fulfillment. I even started a novel based on a novel I had just finished. I never finished writing that one. It just kept going, and going, and going . . . so I started another one. And another one. And another one. I think I wrote hundreds of pages in unfinished novels in my teen years. I couldn’t even tell you how many I started and never finished. Six, minimum. Oh, wait, I just remembered another one.
Not that Aura’s story about B.J. Hip ever did anything else, either. She just kept adding chapters and showing them to me, while I did the same with my novels-in-progress.
Regardless, that was the year I knew I wanted to be an author. I had read many books by then, even liked them, was wowed by them, but those were real books, by real authors. That was something you had to be, not something I could become. It never even occurred to me as an option. When I was four or five, I told people I wanted to tame wild mustangs and ride them in the circus when I grew up. At eleven, I had moved past telling people that, but I hadn’t yet replaced the circus and mustangs with anything real. When my friend showed me the bizarre crap in her head written down in words on paper, it was a fucking revelation.
I could be an author.
