An Origin Story

I started writing my first novel in 1996. I was 15 years old. This was before the massive popularity of computers (at least in my household... I mean, my dad had one... with dial up... and AOL (AOL was so new that I did not even know that it stood for America Online.) All I knew about the internet back then was that I was not allowed on it. AKA, I could never figure out his password, which is really surprising because he is a very simple man.

It began, it ALL began because of a music video that I saw on my little brother's television. (How was it fair that he, the younger sibling, not only got a television but he got the password to log onto whatever Direct TV satellite system we had... but I digress...) Either way, one day before he came home from middle school, I was watching MTV (for you youngin's, MTV used to play music videos).

I don't think there is a way to tell this where it isn't embarrassing, so I'm just going to spit it out. The music video that caught my attention was 'Quit Playing Games (With My Heart)' by the Backstreet Boys.



How I got my neighbor involved with this boy band, I do not fully recall. She lived next door, and it didn't take long for our youthful obsession to take root.

Aside from writing lines when I was seven or eight after getting caught playing in rain puddles (it was Oregon after all) without my rain gear on, I don't remember writing a lot outside of school; however, I knew that I loved it and it was something that I wanted to continue.

As a teenager, the very first thing I remember writing was with her. It was in a five subject spiral notebook, and it was fan fiction. To be fair, I didn't really learn what fan fiction was until recent years. We wrote by hand, on the front and back pages of this notebook, and we kept writing until it was full and we needed another. Any spare moment we had we had spent writing and creating this fantastical story that involved knowing the Backstreet Boys in real life.

Before long, we were breaking the household rules of teenagers. My neighbor would go to sleep at her place, and I would stay awake at mine until my drunk father passed out in the living room. The volume of the television there was on the high side, so it was quiet easy for me to stuff pillows under my blanket, turn off the light, and quietly sneak out of my room. As soon I was out of my room I would take a sharp left and walk through the laundry room to the door that opened up to our back deck. From there, I would sneak over with a flashlight to my neighbor's house where she would leave the front door open. She had both parents and three brothers in the house asleep and I would sneak from the front door to her bedroom to wake her up.

After we were ready to go, we snuck back out her front door with blankets and would walk the mile or so down to the river. We climbed down the boulders and settled beneath the bridge next to the water and would take turns writing by flashlight for hours. There was one time we went from there back to a tree house in her back yard and wrote until it began to get light again.

I can't recall how long it took, but we wrote well over 600 hand written pages. There was plenty of cheese, and the limited knowledge of romance that two young teens knew, throughout the book. Once finished, we had grown and matured and decided that we liked the core story, but we could do better. We grabbed a ridiculous amount of single subject spiral notebooks and started our first rewrite/edit. I didn't know that's what it was at the time. I just knew that I could write better, with less cheese. Seven notebooks later, we were done again and it felt good.

That story, at least some iteration of it has always stuck with me. Names have changed over the years, and there's no longer a band attached to the story in my heart, but I will probably carry it with me forever. I don't know if that's a sign that I need to write it again (I think I burned the original copies (one of the few things I completely regret in my youth) or if it is just meant to live in my heart forever.

I have grown so much over the past twenty plus years. I wrote and published a book of poetry, and I love writing poetry. I find it fun and a great way to work through my emotions (I used to be a bottler), but, I can feel it deep in my soul. A yearning to put the time and effort into writing a novel. Maybe not fan fiction. Maybe not the stories that I have started and stopped over the past decade, but the desire is still very much alive.