When I was young, around ten years old, I experienced a brief burst of writing inspiration. Accompanied by a spark of ambition, I began to write profusely. My topics were normally the events of the day or week. I would recount them as if in a diary entry, but I would embellish the facts to a point that reached fiction. The entries were not laden with gifted phrasing or notable alliteration. They were simply the events of the day as I would have liked to have had them happen.

I recall one entry that depicted a fight between my cousin Lloyd and me, which had occurred one afternoon as I was walking home from school. Lloyd had simply asked if I wanted to fight. I had no ill will for Lloyd, I simply figured we would fight. It was then that I discovered that I didn't know the first thing about fighting. I blocked with my nose and led with my chin until our scrap had been reduced to a wrestling match.

What I remember most about the fight was that everyone was cheering for Lloyd. It seemed that the closest person to me whom I could have called a friend was busy rearranging my face.

When it was over, which I mark as the moment my other cousin, Barbara, began kicking me and telling me and my vertical opponent that we were to get out of her yard, I trudged off alone to my home.

My parents were not home yet. My dad worked at Buick and my mother taught school in another town. The comfort that greeted me was to be three of my older siblings, Albert, Robert, and Muriel. I don't know how other brothers and sisters interact, but in my family, the sight of a disheveled boy, beaten black and blue and bleeding from the nose was cause for another beating. Albert pushed me around and laughed at me. He was two years older than me and I looked like his twin. He seemed to consider that a slight against him. Robert, enamored with himself and his reputation as king stud of the village, looked upon my defeat as evidence of genetic fade. Muriel, at that time the pending high school graduate, looked down on me as I imagine one looks at a wounded animal, pondering the worth of a mercy bullet. Their sympathy was not forthcoming.

Feelin very alone I withdrew to my area, behind the big chair, in the den where no one could see me, and I began writing the recap of the day's events. I would begin writing about my day at school.

[ Mrs. Ide liked my work today. She had said that I was her brightest student. Everyone in class enjoyed my paper showing the parts of speech correctly diagrammed and using the names of key students within the sentence. The lunch hall served a belt-straining, culinary feast that probably cost the chefs a night's sleep preparing. Both Rose Mary and Susie are in love with me and it's all I can do to keep Debbie from following me all the way home. At recess today I kicked the red ball over the backstop of the ball diamond. On the way home from school I got in a fight with Lloydy-toidy. I thrashed him to within an inch of his life. I was triumphantly greeted by my parents, as well as my brothers and sister, when I returned home. No homework tonight.]

These revisualized accounts actually helped me deal with problems that I felt I had all through my youth. I never wanted to recount my troubles or the negative aspects of my life. I wanted to escape to a world where I was important and admired, or just--thought about.

It was during this time that I discovered the excellent writing being done in comic books. I would tend to emulate it for writing assignments. This got me into writing dialog and learning all the rules that come with that.

Not to be too consumed with fantasy, I also began reading true-to-life stories about kids in other parts of the U.S. and the world. The Hardy Boys got me deep into fiction at my age level.

Today I take the stories of my life and spin them for general consumption. The flat out lies have been replaced with allusion to truth, and a sense of inferiority finds a home only in characters of fiction.