The Plan

The Plan

As plans go, it wasn’t the cleverest, and most would think it pretty ambitious for a kid from my background. It was definitely not the most thought through plan either, but what can I say, I was a kid and it was all I had.

I should revise that last statement actually; I did think about it, I thought about it a lot over the years. Which is NOT the same thing as thinking it through ENOUGH; highlighting the possible pitfalls might have been a good start.

Dreaming incessantly about the incredible possibilities, counting the yet not realized, limitless wealth, blinded me to any negativity for a long time. What can I say? Youthful exuberance, coupled with immature naiveté is an effective blinder and some of us take a little longer to grow up than others.

It was pretty early in my life that the first niggling thoughts started rumbling around in my head, I was probably twelve years old at the time and had just gotten my first real job, delivering papers for the town of Arlington, Oregon. When I say I delivered the papers for the town of Arlington, I mean exactly that, the entire town.

Arlington was not a particularly large town to be sure, the town census that year was nine hundred and six residents; approximately three hundred and eighty of those residents took delivery of newspapers five days a week and about four hundred and sixty took the Sunday edition. I was twelve years old and had a decent Schwinn bicycle that I had rebuilt. There isn’t much to say about my time delivering newspapers other than 5:30 AM is a terrible time for a twelve-year-old boy to wake up in the morning, eastern Oregon doesn’t have the mildest of winters and bicycles struggle in deep snow.

The time I spent rolling, banding and inserting flyers gave me a lot of time for reading headlines and the odd story, but more than that, it gave me thinking time; a lot of thinking time. So did pushing bicycles through deep snow, though frozen fingers did enter the discussion on occasion.

What did I think about you ask? Like most twelve-year-old boys, I was beginning to think a lot about sex, but a good deal of thought was spent on my future. I knew one thing; I wasn’t real fond of getting out of bed at 5:30AM and was trying to think up ways to not have to get my feet wet and my fingers frozen in any future endeavors.

Then one morning I read an article about Mickey Spillane, it didn’t go into a lot of detail, but I remember he said he did most of his work sitting at the kitchen table and most of the time he didn’t even bother to put on his pants until sometime in the afternoon. That can sound very attractive to a twelve-year-old boy.

I had read plenty of Mickey Spillane novels; they were quick reads, a bad guy did some stuff and a sexy woman asked Private Investigator Mike Hammer to help her get the dirty rat. There were plenty of fights and shooting off guns in the stories and somewhere in the middle, the hero either got to have sex with the woman, or she tried to kill him and he had to shoot her.

It all sounded pretty easy to me, but every time I sat down to write out something, it all just got too confusing and when I read them over they didn’t sound as exciting and clever as even the simplest Mike Hammer story at all.

I talked to my English teacher some and she told me that it took a lot of work and studying before a person could become a really good writer, they had to go to college and that even then, they often didn’t make a lot of money doing it.

I have to admit that whole explanation set me back some, it still sounded pretty darn good to work sitting around in your underwear, but I had figured someone like Mickey Spillane had to be pretty rich too or they wouldn’t have had an article about him in the newspaper. One day I read in one of the papers that when John Steinbeck won the Pulitzer Prize, they had given him a pile of money too.

I decided I would think about it some more and figure out how I could shorten the process. I wasn’t much for school work, I did okay in English classes and Physical Education, but Math and Science pretty much eluded me. This meant that I would daydream about it a lot over the years, racy nighttime dreams too.

Time has a way of passing by and dimming boyhood dreams and as the years build up, it starts passing quicker and quicker, even the lifetime of a twelve-year-old boy. Eventually the boy becomes a man, drifting from one dead end and dreary job to another and even quicker it seems, he reaches that final indignity; an elderly man with little education and too much time on his hands.

Dreams will pop up now and then, even when not thought about much more than the occasional daydream upon hearing that Stephen King just made another 300 million dollars. So, when I stumbled upon a website that advertised writing stories and novels, I was intrigued; the idea of interacting with other people doing the same? I was thrilled!

“Here's my chance,” I thought. “I can certainly write better drivel than some of the stuff I've read over the years.” After reading a few of the portfolios on the website, I KNEW I could do a better job of writing than some of them were showing off.

So, the PLAN was back in effect! I WOULD write some stories, whatever I didn’t know about writing, these people would show me or tell me. There were reviews and everything about writing on the site and some of the reviewers could certainly talk a LOT about writing. I was sure I would learn about writing and soon I would be a successful and hopefully, rich writer, in no time, no time at all.

I joined WritingDotCom in October 2005 and though I have written a LOT of stories and made many friends over the years, even joining a great writing group; I’m still waiting to become a rich and successful writer.

I got my renewal notice this week for another year on the site, maybe this will be the year. Maybe it will be the next writing prompt I see, maybe that long awaited Great American Novel is still deep down somewhere inside me, maybe this will be the year.


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