Alright, welcome to the first full length episode. If you listened to the intro episode, you'll know that I spoke about having written the first draft of my novel. However, that's not the first book I've ever attempted to write. I did successfully write one back when I was in high school, and it was completed over the course of two typing classes, Typing 101 and Typing 102. It was only 200 pages in length, which technically makes it a novella, but for the purposes of this, we'll call it a book.
When I initially took the first typing class my sophomore year, it was not to write a book. It was to learn how to type. Your grade was determined by the amount of pages you turned in, as well as how accurate your typing was. Now this is going to date me, but I don't really care. The class was using electric typewriters called IBM Selectric, and they had these books that you looked at and you were supposed to type without looking at the keys. These were basically things like professional correspondence, invoices, and other business related documents, and I really didn't want to do this very boring work, but I knew that it was gonna be an easy A, which was another reason for taking the classes.
So one day, I came into class and decided I would write a story instead of the usual work we were doing. The entire raison d'etre of the project was simply to get the work done, get my A, and not be bored to death. That was it. There was no intention of turning it into a book, no goal of it being 200 pages. I simply decided to sit down, write the story, turn in the pages, and hope for the best. As it would turn out, doing this would net me A's in both typing classes, though I have no idea how the teacher was grading. I handed in plenty of pages, enough to net an A if that was the only criteria, but I've never been sure of the accuracy part, since what I was typing and handing in didn't match what was in the textbook.
In my head canon, I imagined this poor teacher felt weighted down by the drudgery of having to grade the same thing over and over, the boredom threatening to bury them beneath the mountain of typed pages that had been submitted, before unearthing the mass of pages that was my story. This would stand out like a beacon in the darkness, which in turn made their day a bit brighter. They would come to welcome grading these typed pages because they knew that somewhere in that stack would be the one thing that gave their dull life some excitement. Maybe they would search for my pages first, or maybe they would save them for last, as a sort of reward for having shifted through the dull monotony of invoices and letters. The reality was likely that they really didn't care, and they probably found my story and figured it to be whatever, just give the grade and move on.
Anyway, there was nothing in those books for typing up a story, so that was all on me. I do remember that at the end of the first year of this typing class, when I got back the last pages that I had turned in, I checked them to make sure they were in order. I found a note written at the top of one of the pages where the teacher had written that they really enjoyed my story and looked forward to reading the rest of it next year. So I guess they figured out I was going to be taking Typing 102, which was obvious because it as an easy A and I needed to finish my story. As it would turn out, Typing 102 had the exact same grading requirements as Typing 101, only what you had to type was harder versions of what you had to type in Typing 101. So I did for Typing 102 exactly what I did for Typing 101.
At some point while I was writing this story to avoid doing boring work, word got around about what I was doing. People thought it was cool, and I was never hassled for it, or given any grief. Though I didn't know it at the time, this was because of one of the teacher's aides in Typing 101, who would become a fellow student in my choir class in my Junior year, was telling her friends about it. For simplicity's sake for this story, we'll call her "Teacher's Aide", because I can't for the life of me remember her name. Because she helped the teacher grade papers, she had seen some of it already, though I didn't know that at the time. She didn't resume being a teacher's aide for Typing 102, but when she found out that I was in that class and working on my story, she did ask to read it once it was done. I said, Sure, since she already had seen part of it and wanted to finish it. I finished the story by mid year, which left me writing random stories for the rest of it, because I sure as hell wasn't going to go back to doing the boring assignments.
Once completed, I took the finished manuscript to Teacher's Aide. I was very nervous in doing so, because up to this point, the only people who had seen my story was me, my typing teacher, and her for part of it. The latter two were unavoidable, since my grand plan required them to grade these papers. Otherwise, no one else had laid eyes on it. I didn't show my friends, I didn't show my siblings, and my parents never saw it either. Basically, I just kept it to myself. I think the only real reason I gave it to her was because she had read the first half and may as well finish it.
Before I continue, I need to impart some important information. Teacher's Aide had a best friend named Tina, and both of them were Seniors, while I was a Junior. I had a huge crush on Tina, and it's weird that I can remember her name, but not Teacher's Aide's name. But I digress. I bring Tina's name up because unbeknownst to me, she ends up reading it after Teacher's Aide gives it to her. I would occasionally check in with Teacher's Aide to see if she had finished reading it and what she thought of it, and each time, she would tell me she's still reading it, she's just been busy with school and work, but she is trying to read it every chance she could get. I would basically say something like "okay, cool, let me know when you're done". As time went by though, and there were more excuses, I began to wonder if there was something wrong. Did she lose it? Did she throw it away? Did someone steal it? Was she really taking that long because she was busy or was she buying time? I began to worry, because I had given her the original, and hadn't thought to make a copy.
I would eventually find out what happened to it when one of the popular jocks walked by me in the hallway one day, and said, "Hey, I really dig your story." I said something like "thanks", because I didn't know what to say, but it made me wonder how he knew about my story. So I go back to Teacher's Aide and tell her about what happened, and wanted to know how they found out. Teacher's Aide said "I gave it to Tina, and she much have given it to them". Outwardly, I was calm, but inside, I was freaking out! My crush had read my novel! I didn't know how to feel, but I remember feeling both elated and super embarrassed. These days, if a crush read something I wrote, it would be no big deal, but as a hormone addled teen going through puberty, it was the end of the world.
Several more people would end up telling me that they enjoyed my story before I got it back. It made me feel good to see that people were responding well to it. Part of me felt like I maybe I had a future as a writer, though as it would turn out, I did not have a future as a writer, at least not right away, as my life ended up going in a decidedly different direction. It would turn out that not only had a good portion of the seniors read it, but some of my own Junior classmates as well. Because of this, I would end up being included in my senior yearbook in a section about what we would be doing in the future. In this section, I would go on to write a bestselling science fiction novel about our graduating class in the future.
So now that I've spoken about my first attempt at a novel, you might be wondering what it was about and whether I'll ever publish it. I'll answer the latter first, and the answer is sadly no. The manuscript itself no longer exists. I was told it was lost in a flood, but I believe it was actually tossed in the garbage for reasons I won't go into. As for the story itself, it's mostly lost to the mists of time and I only remember a few bits here and there, certainly nothing that I could use to reconstruct it. The basic gist of the story is that the main character was a member of a race of humanoid snake people, who were being subjugated by a race of humanoid dinosaurs, and he was the Chosen One of prophecy who would lead his people to freedom, sort of like a snake headed Moses. He and his bodyguard, who was from a race of humanoid cat people, would set out into the stars and start a rebellion against the evil Dino empire.
"That sounds pretty familiar," I hear you say.
Well, there's an adage for writers that says "write what you know", and what you know as a kid is very small. Even if you're involved in things like debate, or you're really into history or whatever, a lot of the things you know and understand are very limited, even as a teenager. That's not to say that there hasn't been teenage writers who saw some success. It's just not that common, at least back then. I will tell you that at that point, what I knew was things like Star Wars, Robotech, and the Terminator, and they all made it into that story in some fashion. They weren't blatant rip offs, like the main character flying an X-Wing or TIE fighter. The story was basically an amalgamation of Star Wars and the Old Testament story of Moses. But a lot of the stuff in it would most definitely have been a copyright lawyer's lottery ticket if it had been published as it was.
To give you an example, the anime series Robotech featured something called a Cyclone, which could switch between being a motorcycle and being a set of armor that you can wear. My story didn't have Cyclones in them by name and vehicle type, but there was definitely a form of armor that could turn into a hoverbike or something like that. There was also a type of Terminator. It wasn't a metal robot covered in flesh that traveled back in time to kill. It was completely organic, but it functioned very much like the Terminator from the movie does, though it was called something completely different.
At that time, I was heavily into reading Fangoria and Starlog magazines. Fangoria was a magazine that centered around horror films, while Starlog centered around science fiction, and both magazines would often have behind the scenes articles and ads for related things you could buy. In Fangoria, there was an ad for purchasing horror themed Don Post masks, like zombies, cyclops, and the like. One of those masks was for a fanged Cobra head named Sargoth. This mask became the basis of the main character in both look and name. And to top it off, the main villain, basically a Darth Vader/Emperor Palpatine hybrid, was a humanoid dinosaur that looked like a Tyrannosaurus Rex with the oh so original name of Lord Tyrranus, because I needed an evil villain and I loved dinosaurs. It was really just incorporating things that I thought were cool at the time. I'm not even sure where the cat people thing came from, but given that time in my life, I probably based it on Thundercats or something. All I know is that if I had that story right now, it would take an amazing amount of rewriting to remove all the copyright infringement.
So that's the story of my first attempt at writing a book. If you can learn anything from this, aside from staying away from copyright infringement, then it would simply be this: Don't be afraid to start somewhere. Your first attempts may not be anything that you can or will publish, but it's definitely a first step. Also, be open to getting inspiration from the weirdest and most unlikely places. You'll never know when that bit of inspiration turns into the next Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter series. I hope you found this entertaining, and maybe inspiring.
Stay classy, and keep writing those stories!
This has been an episode of Empty Pages. If you enjoyed what you heard and want more of it, you can follow me at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts from. Please leave me a review, as that really helps me out, and if you do, you might find your review featured in a future episode. You can find me at ianmactire.com, as well as on Twitter and Instagram as @ianmactire. Until next time, I'm Ian, and this is Empty Pages. Stay classy and write those stories!