VIDEO: Continued dive into The Writing Tub
The Story Behind the Story Part 1 (From the Dr. Mac Author Blog)
Well, here we are again. I’m filling in space this week because this has now become a ten episode Season. I'm also rambling a bit before I wrap this 1985 thing up.
Some folks will get that italicized word. Just like the folks who’ve already heard this story. If you checked out the video and the link above, then this is more or less old news.
As a kid, I had my head in the clouds a lot. But I was pretty good at hiding it. Or maybe being a bubble-brain living in the dreamworld in my head was squashed down because of this terrible sense of duty and responsibility I was inherently born with.
(Ever take the MBTI Personality Test? One of these days you might, Younglings. The fake version, the free internet version, AND the pricey real one, that I had to take when I went through the state leadership program. ISTJ every single time. It hasn’t changed AT ALL in almost 20 some-odd years. If you know, you know. Here I’m always thinking I’m pretty hip, but nooo….I’m basically a Vulcan. And I totally married Captain Kirk. Go figure.)
Anyway…
Whenever I found life boring or uninteresting or unadventurous, as it usually is, especially growing up where I did, I would write stories. Where I had cool friends and wore awesome clothes and lived in exotic locations and rode horses and solved mysteries and made movies and starred on TV and modeled and went to the Olympics and won Wimbledon and won roller boogie contests and won lots of money in Vegas and played Madison Square Garden and drove a Porsche and traveled to outer space and had superhuman powers and saved the universe…
I read The Secret Life of Walter Middy in the second grade and could totally relate. There’s a lot of 💩 going on inside this head. There still is. And with all that “metal” floating around in there in June of 1985, I needed to write it down.
As I mentioned in the above Dr. Mac Author Blog post, it started as a short story. I had already had some stories in the Ebony Rose, MHS’s literary magazine (of which I, and Mike French, God rest his sweet soul, were editors our senior year), and I, of course, wanted to write more. You could also win prizes for specific genres so, duh.
The story got longer…and longer…and longer, until it filled all those notebooks. And beyond. (And then, 21 years later, it was finished.) Needless to say, in the beginning, it didn’t make the cut as an Ebony Rose entry, but my one-act play, based on a band having their worst gig ever, won the prize for Best One-Act Play. Only because it was the only one-act play submitted. I don’t remember if it was even really published in 1986’s issue. And right now, it’s too hot to climb up into the attic to look, in another tub filled with more of my stuff.
I called it The Opus for years because I didn’t know what to call it. Now, though, that I’ve mapped out the remainder of the series, I have each book already named, drawing on song titles. It’s funny how when I finished that first “volume” (which is now two separate books), I was sad, because I thought that was it: That Kookoo musical world, the characters I’d grown to love, and hate, that I’d created were gone, and I thought I couldn’t go back there.
Well…
The night I typed the last word, in that same room at 210 Gary Drive where I’d started it, a room that is completely empty now and will someday belong to someone else, that place inside my brain was suddenly flooded with more ideas. Those inspiring bands still play! They’re all over social media! They wrote memoirs! They’ve liked my comments on their Facebook posts! Mark Slaughter friended ME on MySpace! I shook Kip Winger’s hand in 2017!!!
