This is going to sound lame coming from someone with a blog with 500+ posts, but I am petrified to let people read what I write.  And all I have ever wanted to do was write.  The blog is very therapeutic for this strange syndrome, but mostly I am referring to the stories I come up with.  For a while I didn’t like to write anything that remotely resembled an opinion on something, but I am over that.  I figure if I can stick up for my ideas in real life, why can’t I do so if they are on paper?  (heh, “paper.”  What’s paper?) 

I think that there is a permanence in writing stuff down.  It’s what comes back to haunt politicians and celebrities and evangelical leaders in Colorado Springs.  It’s why presidential candidates are found hiding their third-grade diaries because if anyone ever found out they didn’t like a teacher in primary school forty years ago, they would be toast on the campaign trail. 

I can also pinpoint the event that made me say I Will Never Show Anyone What I Write.  I am over the event itself, but the effects still linger.

I was in the second or third grade.  It had been a bad day on the playground.  A really bad day.  I don’t remember the specific events, I just remember the feeling of something bad happening and that it was caused by a boy.  Or boys.  I went home later that day and did what I often did.  I got out a piece of construction paper, folded some typing paper inside of it, stapled it together and started Writing A Book.  (After I drew the cover first.  Drawing the cover was always the best part.)  This book would fix the bad day.  It would be my magnum opus.  I filled every page with story and illustrations about a world run by third-grade girls.  Boys no longer existed.  (Just to interject here, I do find this a terrifying proposition a few decades later.  The part where the world is run by third grade girls especially.) 

I was proud of my work.  It was sure to make me a young millionaire.  Sure it was only twenty pages or so, but the illustrations..the illustrations!  The girls roamed the earth foraging for food and building shelters and surviving internal conflicts…all without those pesky playground leeches…little boys!  I carefully touched up some of the drawings and brought my masterpiece downstairs to show my parents.

I remember my mom saying something like “That’s nice,” and returning to whatever else was going on.  Okay, “nice” is good, but where’s the Pulitzer?  I brought it to my dad who was always encouraging me to do everything unconventionally and made him stop what he was doing and read my epic.

He read it very carefully, lingering on the pages a long time.  He flipped back and forth.  Surely the greatest compliments imaginable were brewing in there. 

Finally he set down the book.  The yellow construction-paper cover started to absorb a small coffee spill.  Foreshadowing?

“I think you should start over,” he said.  “This would never happen.”

Huh?

“You could never have a world without boys,” he said.  The criticism kept going but I wasn’t listening.  I was devastated.  Devastated!  I cried and cried and grabbed my book and ran up to my room and ripped it into shreds.  I vowed never to let anyone read what I wrote again.  Ever.  Never. 

Looking back I see that my dad was trying to help.  He probably thought, in his Dad-like ways, that with a few tweaks the book might actually go somewhere, someday.  I’m sure he didn’t think that the pages were actually a form of playground therapy.  In either case, and as stupid as it sounds, this single event has taken over twenty years to “get over.”  My last major back surgery took three months to do basic recovery, and during that time I wrote a book.  It’s my “first manuscript” and in writing circles there’s a belief that your first work should go directly into the file cabinet and you should start on your second, which is what I am doing.  I have not sent the first arount to too many places, though I should, but I am going very slowly in throwing caution to the wind.

Anyway this whole post was leading up to an event that took place last night involving Screen Peeking, but I will tell you about that later.  I ran out of time.  I have to go to my day job now.