My Writing 'Career' - The First Big wave - 1986 to 1989 (or so)

Midway through sixth grade, my class was assigned to write some 'themes'. These turned out to be short stories so I'm not sure why we weren't just assigned to write some short stories. It may be that we had to write to different themes in each one or it could just have been the style at the time.

I still have all four of these works so the genesis of this period can be reviewed and investigated. A major influence, yet not at the same time, is clearly Mad Magazine, as from the titles these are all meant to be parodies of existing works. Since only one of them tries to be funny, it was as if I was also introducing myself to the concept of fan fiction, writing ones own version of an existing work for your own amusement.

'Sherluck Phones' was a two parter, an attempt at a Sherlock Holmes type story. It's even written by his 'Watson' character. The first part is mostly dialogue. I believe my teacher either directed me to get to the point or one of our 'themes' was dialogue as none of the other stories feature much, if any, dialogue, especially the second part of the story. It is not good but I was twelve.

The moderately amusing story is 'Superflab', the tale of a grossly overweight super-hero in the 'Superman' style. I was working from the 50's 'Adventures of Superman' tv show model as I was just starting to read comic books about this time and I bought mostly Marvel Comics, not DC. Superflab repels an alien invasion with his stomach. I think it shows the Mad Magazine vibe I was reaching for with these stories.

And then there was 'Dr. What'.

Immediately explained as one of five Time Lord brothers (Drs Who, What, Where, Why, and How), Dr. What and his Time Lady companion Romana face the Dalkens on a spacecraft disguised as a field and create green slime as a toy for earth children to scare off the Daleks, er, Dalkens as that is what they look like inside their casings. It's pretty dumb. And shows I'd seen 'Destiny of the Daleks' recently or I just remembered it very clearly.

Dumb maybe, inspiring, yes. The interest in doing my own comics and prose magazines for my 'audience' (aka my brothers) came from this assignment. More 'Dr. What' stories followed and in the very next story we met adult versions of my friends from middle school, including myself. By the end of the story, Romana stays behind to be with my friend Richard and I sneak onto the ship to be the new companion. Both of these concepts would return in later works.

I wrote other things as well: the Pac-Man/Lego related comics I mentioned recently, an adaptation of the original Godzilla movie written before I'd seen the movie, and some other stuff I apparently no longer have access to and don't really remember. There was a 'newspaper' with a buddy of mine that had access to a computer but that ran to one whole issue. That we actually tried to distribute to our friends (I think it was a brief fad during 7th grade, still the early days of home computing, desktop publishing, and printers) but beyond that, I don't think I pushed my work on anyone apart from my family and the teachers that had to read my assignments.

The momentum faded out during my freshman year of high school. My brothers and I weren't really playing 'store' any more, which is where I'd 'sell' my comics to them. I also had an epiphany while writing 'Dr. What'. Apparently I managed to delude myself into thinking I was writing parodies this whole time. Once I realized I was just trying to write 'Dr. Who' and doing a very poor job of it at that, I stopped, right in the middle of a Dalkens sequel which also saw the return of old companion Jamie.

The first wave was over because, let's face it, I was no good. Suddenly that was as important as the fun I had doing it.

Apart from being as creative as possible in my school assignments, that was about it for a couple years. Then school kicked up the ashes of the fire again.