In the Beginning

I started writing short stories when I was in junior high school.  They were all inspired by The Lord of the Rings.  I still have one, I think.  It's called "An Unwelcome Party."  In it, Gimli and a band of dwarves track an ancient spirit through Middle-earth.  Back then, I always played D&D with my little brother and a bunch of friends.  We pretended to be Tolkien characters.  I carried my D&D books in my backpack.  My parents never knew I didn't carry any school books around because I always got good grades.  We moved from NYC to Phoenix when I was 11, and the schools in AZ were a joke at the time.  Still are, I imagine.

My older brother's friend let me borrow a copy of Stephen King's Night Shift the summer before I started ninth grade.  That book changed my life.  I loved every story in that collection, but the one that really got me going was "Gray Matter."  I always loved The Blob and something about how the father transformed into a sludge-like monster scared the fuck out of me.  Of course, I'm a Daddy's boy through and through, so that just amplified my fear.

I wrote my first horror story called "A Blade Too Short" at that time.  It's about a little boy who gets off the school bus and is chased home by a gelatinous cube (yes, still playing D&D by then).  When he gets inside, he can't find anyone, so he runs upstairs and tries to get into the attic, but he's too short to reach the pull-down string.  The blob gets him, of course.  My mom, who helped edit all my stories then and I love her for it, also tried to publish that one for me.  She sent it out to a bunch of magazines.  Nobody picked it up.

Stephen King once said you get enough rejection slips to wallpaper your bathroom.  I believe everything he says and have never stopped listening to him.  Honestly, I love the guy.  I wish I could meet him one day.  I tried to hook up with him at an author's conference once but couldn't get tickets.  He jokingly sent me a Three Stooges postcard and suggested I try waiting tables.  How fucking cool.