An Old BookWriting is a great way to express our thoughts and feelings at a given moment in time, and it’s also the perfect way to record our stories for future generations.  But what happens when our stories are forgotten and lost in the sands of time?  Do they cease to exist?  Or do they enter a form of purgatory only to wait for the next reader to stumble onto the collection of words and phrases to paint a picture of what might have been?

A few days ago I was talking to some people at work about the first (and only) work of fiction I ever had published.  It was back in 1993 while I was in the 9th grade at South Lincoln High School.  My English teacher at the time, Mr. Robinson, had assigned a creative writing project with a 300 word requirement.  Most of the students moaned and groaned about this small number of words, but I wasn’t one of them.  This was during a time when my creative muscles were just starting to mature and my writing style was being hammered out.

That night, after finishing all of my chores and helping some siblings with homework, I got to work on my story.  It was nothing too complicated, and involved two very simple characters.  The story was called “The Box”, and seemed to write itself right from the first word.

What I really enjoyed about the story was its simplicity.  It was written only months before I was introduced to Japanese manga and their complex story lines, so the style was influenced heavily by the authors of dark and macabre stories.

Although initially written with pen and paper, it was typed out as a WordPerfect 5.1 (for DOS) file by a friend of mine (I couldn’t type very quickly in 1993) the following Monday and handed in for grading.  Two days later, I was awarded with a 98% grade and asked to stay behind after class.

Mr. Robinson asked me quite a few questions about my writing habits, as he had come to enjoy both the content and presentation.  After a few minutes of discussion he moved on to ask me if I had ever considered having my works published.  This came as a shock to me because, among other reasons, I was barely 14 years old.  We talked about some of my previous assignments and how they looked promising enough to consider submitting them to some publishers for review.  Mr. Robinson did all the leg work, and he asked nothing in return.

Two months after the conversation, he asked me to stay behind once again and presented me with a letter.  A quick glance at the letterhead told me it was from a publisher in Oregon.  To this day I’m still not sure if my heart stopped, or if it just quickened so much that I couldn’t feel it anymore … Mr. Robinson would never have asked me to stay behind to read a company’s rejection letter!

Suffice to say, the publisher was impressed enough with the work that they wanted to include it in a book with other young writers.  Happy times, indeed.  In this one moment I could actually start to plan a future around a marketable skill.  A few months later I received three copies of the book and distributed them to my parents, and gave one to my English teacher, who had opened the door for me to enter the realm of writing.

Little did I know that the future would have different plans for the cocky, young me.

So here it is, thirteen years later, and I haven’t had anything published since.  To add insult to injury, I didn’t even have a copy of “The Box” for twelve years.  The 3.5″ floppy disk, my only means of saving files back then, had gone corrupt after two years of heavy use.  Mr. Robinson was transferred to a school in St. Catherines, and my parents’ copies … well … I have no idea what happened to those.  The only way I could get a copy of it was to ask the original publisher if they still had the file available.  But, as usual, there was a problem.

They went out of business in 1999.

I hope my story didn’t have anything to do with it.

So after a little digging, I managed to find a very old GeoCities based site that looked like a test for whatever the publisher was going to do on a dot com.  There was an email address to one of the editors, and I decided to give it a try.  After three days, my lucked panned out and not only did I receive a copy of the file, but was given permission to host it on this site, too!

So, without further adieu, I’d like to present to you my earliest crowning achievement:  The Box.

Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email.  I’d be happy to hear what you think of the 14 year-old me’s writing :)