If you're new around these parts, I just want to say how much I appreciate your dropping by! Oh, and you may want to subscribe to my feed. Thanks, and a tip o' the hat to ya!

Joanna Young is running her very first group writing project (way to go, Joanna!) based on the theme, your love affair with writing. I had no idea it would be so hard to write my entry, but at last it’s finally here. I must warn you though; it’s a bit of a long journey.

To tell you the truth, I wouldn’t have put it quite that way, although I truly do love to write. What’s weird is that I didn’t even know it until 2006, when I accidentally stumbled into the Middle Zone, never to return.

Then, in the spring of 2007, I threw caution to the winds and admitted the truth to the world - Hey, I’m a writer! And now - well, now that beast has been released, it’s pretty much something I have to do.

But here I’d like to take a bit of liberty and travel perhaps a slightly different path. (Hope it’s OK, Joanna!) The thing is, this whole writing thing was actually born of my lifelong love of reading.

Home Sweet Home

Did I ever tell you about the time I discovered gold?

Yep; I was still a young’un at the time, I guess about 8 years old, and we were living in my grandmother’s house. It was a big old two-story Victorian house nestled on about an acre of land in the Heights area of Houston.

It was a wonderful, adventurous place. There were lots of big trees on the property, including an absolutely huge sycamore tree (we used to call it a “gumball” tree because of the spiky balls that grew on it). I also remember a couple of cottonwood trees, several pear trees and three or four big pecan trees (grandma was always making pear preserves and pecan pies).

There was also a bayou nearby, for when I felt like taking a journey to the Center of the Earth (it was basically a big, overgrown ditch, but lots of fun to explore). Oh yeah - and a really friendly German Shepherd dog next door named Butch (a somewhat, er, lousy guard dog, but he could probably kill you with his wagging tail!)

What more could a kid want?

Like I said, it was my grandparent’s house, although for a time it was pretty crowded. One of my uncles and his wife lived in the upstairs bedroom (it was up a long, creaky stairway) while my mother, sister and I lived in three separate rooms downstairs. And for a year or so, my aunt lived with us, too. Yep, we were one big happy family!

Being a kid, I naturally explored that house literally from top to bottom. It was built on blocks with a crawlspace beneath, so of course I knew every inch of the underside (sometimes, when the wooden floorboards were dryer than usual, they shrank slightly. It was just enough that you could actually see up into some of the rooms! Very sneaky.)

Although I did make a couple of test digs in more than a few places around the foundations, alas, I never found gold there. No, the gold I found was in a completely unexpected place.

The Door

One boring summer afternoon, I was wandering around the house when I sorta, well, noticed something interesting in that stairway up to my uncle’s room. Now, I’d been up and down those stairs at least a hundred times, but this time I noticed a sortof bump in the wallpaper in one particular spot.

What could it be? Were the walls about to come apart? Was the house about to collapse in a big pile of dust and rubble? Would any of us survive? (I also had something of an imagination. But more about that later.)

Anyway, after examining it closely, I discovered the bump was actually a door that had been wallpapered over! Now that got my attention!

I imagined all sorts of wonderful things hidden behind that door; stuff that had been forgotten for a hundred years or more (although the house wasn’t nearly that old - but let’s not let facts cloud the issue). Hey - what if there was an actual skeleton in there - or even a treasure trove of gold and jewels! My excitement grew.

The next day, I secured an old razor blade from my grandfather’s bathroom, and made my way up the stairs. It took a while, but I carefully cut a slit in the wallpaper, slowly revealing the door’s outline; about three feet wide and four feet tall. That fact alone gave me pause. What would I find back there - a family of midgets? A herd of tiny elephants? About a billion bats?

Despite the admittedly weird images, I borrowed my grandpa’s flashlight and prepared to be amazed. It took nearly all my strength to push it open, creaking and scraping horrendously - it was a tight-fitting door - but finally, an entire new world was revealed, just for me alone!

The revealed space was rather large (at least, to little ol’ me). The walls were actually the roof’s framing, and there was a single window overlooking the back yard; I could see one of our pear trees’ branches through the dirty glass.

After climbing inside, I found myself surrounded by about twenty or thirty old cardboard boxes - some of them stacked up three and four deep, and covered by years of accumulated dust. There was that peculiar musty smell you find in long-closed spaces: partly mold, partly dust; mostly time. I could hear a few muffled sounds from outside, but inside the air was still, and quiet enough to hear my own heartbeat.

An Unexpected Treasure

I cautiously pulled open one of the boxes near me. Books - well, magazines to be exact. Small ones, about the size of the Reader’s Digest we always had on our living room coffee table. Alas, no gold. I tried another one, only to find more magazines. Then another, and another - and finally the truth dawned on me like a big, wet blanket: this was just old stuff!

I’m tellin’ ya; it’s almost impossible to describe the crushing sense of disappointment I felt. What a letdown! After all that, to find nothing but a bunch of old magazines. Phooey!

But then something… happened. Honestly, I didn’t recognize the significance at the time, but in truth, what I did next changed my life, well, pretty much forever.

See, all I did was pick up a magazine and look at the cover (sound of an epiphany).

There was some sort of, well, space ship on it. I looked again. Yep, that’s what it was all right. I pulled out a few more, and found an amazing collection of fantastic scenes depicting aliens landscapes, space explorers, and assorted strange beings. What the heck was this?

What happened was this. I encountered the amazing, mind-expanding phenomenon of science fiction, and just like that, I had struck gold!

For the rest of that summer I spent as much time as possible up in that attic.

The first thing I did was open every single box and get all the magazines out where I could see them. When I realized they were dated (they were serials - monthly magazines - from the ‘40s and ‘50s), I spent several days getting them into correct order. Then, and only then, could I pick up the oldest one and begin.

I read every one, cover to cover.

Back to the Future

The fact is, that day literally changed my life.

After that, I began reading voraciously. I particularly liked science fiction, because it exercised my imagination in ways very few other genres could. I realized that speculating about what was beyond my experience was something to be cherished and valued.

Along the way, I also discovered the interesting principle that visualizing the future was a good way to actually make something happen!

It’s also positively influenced my life in other ways, too. Among other things, I became a great speller, build up an innate sense of grammar (admittedly, I depart from it a time or two here at the Zone, but at least I know it!), and developed a true love of story-telling. With practice, I expect to become a great one someday.

Eventually, all those years of continuously taking stories in - began to sortof come out. Oh, sure; it was touch and go for quite a long while, there. But finally, I took a full-blast, headlong dive right into the Middle Zone, and the rest, as they say, is history.

So anyway, like I said; it was a long and somewhat tortuous journey (about 1,500 words - almost a new record!) - but I make no apologies. Ya might as well expect the unexpected here in the Zone.

But that’s why I absolutely love to write. All my life, I’ve seen what others can do; now it’s time to see what’s hiding way down there inside me.

(photo of door: Into, by Dreamer7112)

You know, it would just be absolutely finer than a frogs hair if you would subscribe to my RSS feed!