My father wasn't a fiction writer. He was a chemical engineer that worked in the plastics industry. But he was a storyteller. Some of my fondest early childhood memories were of the family sitting around our brick fireplace, snuggled in blankets on a cold winter day, listening to him tell us stories about a family that could use these magical spheres to travel to distant places and have adventures. They were pretty original at the time (this was the early 1980s) and I was fascinated by them. Other times he would tell each of me and my siblings bedtime stories as he tucked us into bed. So from an early age, my head was filled with stories.
I am not sure whether or not I am weird, but for most of my life I have fallen asleep by telling myself a story, often involving me going on a magical journey. Some of these were original, but admittedly they often feature characters ripped from the pages and screens of pop culture. And I am okay with that. Those stories are for me as the only audience, and hey, I can do whatever I want if I'm the only one involved. I guess it is more like fanfiction, you could say. But the point I am making is that I have always been a storyteller in my head.
When I was young, I wanted to put some of those stories to paper and have others read them, and I got that chance for the first time in third grade. When I was 9-years-old, my family moved from a small town in western North Carolina, USA to Newark, Delaware, USA, a college town on the outskirts of the much larger city of Wilmington, Delaware. I was pretty new to moving to a new place (I would eventually move A LOT in my life). So I had to navigate the process of getting used to a new location, making new friends, and getting the lay of the social landscape. And embarrassingly, I did the wrong read on my new classmates.
I don't remember exactly what it was called, but my class did some sort of lesson on microeconomics. My current children's schools call it something like "business town." We invented a flag and what our money would be called (I think it was called "clam bucks"). We were given the assignment to make products that we could sell at a business day in the near future.
I thought this was my chance to become an author and sell some books (for fake money, but to a third-grader this was good enough for me). I got stacks of paper and wrote and illustrated copy after copy of three different books. I don't remember what two of them were about. I think one was fantasy and the other one was horror (to a 9-year-old). But I know the third was called "The Lamborghini of Time." Looking back, I must have seen "Back to the Future" sometime around then, because it was a complete ripoff of that story, just replacing the Delorean with a Lamborghini because, hey, the doors open upwards the same. I was also very obsessed with Lamborghinis at the time, poster on the bedroom wall and all. But if felt original to me.
On the business day, I proudly set up my stand at my desk in the classroom and arranged stacks of my three books. I looked around at my classmates' stands and saw very different products than mine. They all clearly knew something that I didn't. Someone was selling little airplanes made from a tube of Life Savers, sticks of gum (for wings), and Fruit Loop wheels. Another person had made toys out of a disc of painted wood with strings threaded through it that you could wind up the strings and pull on them, making the colorful discs spin. Someone else sold cookies. Everywhere I looked, I saw sweets and toys, and I realized that I had grossly miscalculated the third-grade market.
Everyone was given a certain amount of clam bucks to spend, and we took turns going around and buying from each other. My pride in my product quickly diminished as student after student would pass by my desk with an idle glance and then go and buy candy airplanes and wooden discs. I know that I bought one of the disc toys, as I kept it for many years. My teacher, taking pity on me, gave me some clam bucks for a book.
Then the real kicker was that we had a prize day where someone had donated a ton of toys and games and other things to the class, and we got to use our accumulated wealth to bid on and purchase real life auctioned prizes. Naturally, the kid who made the toy discs and the airplane guy raked in the most rewards. My teacher slipped me some more clam bucks so that I could get a small LEGO set that I had my eye on, but had no chance of winning otherwise. I am forever grateful for that teacher's loving kindness for a student.
In the end, the lesson I learned from that was that I was not a good fiction writer and books don't sell all that well. With hindsight, that was clearly not the right conclusion to make. It was that I didn't understand the market in a third-grade class that prized immediate gratification, and a poorly illustrated short story couldn't measure up to the books they had back home. But as one of those core memories that a child forms, I abandoned by plans to become a fiction author for my other love of science and exploration. I had a competing dream of becoming an aeronautical engineer one day, and I shifted my focus to more scientific pursuits.
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