I’m kidding. There exists no comprehensive list of all the stories I’ve ever written. But hey, I’d love to tell you about some of them! It all started a long, long time ago…

(Harp music playing.)

I’ve been writing stories ever since I was about six, some of them in crayon. Tethered by Blood is the first to be published. Between the crayon stories and Tethered by Blood, there have been some fascinating tales of fantasy, adventure, and…lawn mowing. Of course, there’s a chance I might be biased on just how fascinating they were.

There was the story I wrote in the third grade about a new girl at school (shortly after I had also been the new girl at school when we moved states).  The highlight of the story, in my eyes, was when the girl placed her peanut butter and jelly sandwich on the seat next to her in the cafeteria, and her teacher sat on it without noticing and walked away with jelly smeared across her backside. I read it to my family and had them roaring with laughter.

Somewhere around the fifth or sixth grade I decided to try rewriting fairy tales. The Three Little Pigs, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel.  I kept the classic plot of the fairy tales, but I got creative with the details.  In The Three Little Pigs, I made the first little pig a former track star, and the second a heavyweight wrestling champion, while the third was attending Harvard.  Meanwhile, the wolf was a chain smoker. 

In Cinderella, her fairy godmother was actually a godfather and a long-haired hippy who, when he waved his magic wand, always uttered the magic words, “Be bop, de bow.”  Goldilocks had a bedwetting problem, Sleeping Beauty had halitosis, and Rapunzel had lice.  And on and on and on.  My stories entertained my siblings.  So I kept at it. 

In high school I took a creative writing class. One story I wrote was about two retired old men who took care of the grass at the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.  There was a lot of lawn mowing and lemon drop eating in that story. This may have been my first legitimate original idea. Unfortunately I had no idea how to end it, and on the advice of my teacher I concluded the story with, “And then he woke up.”

My next story was about a couple of guys out to have the best summer of their lives.  Really what they ended up doing was belly-flopping a lot in the local public pool, getting jobs flipping burgers, and joining the local community theater.  All of these were things that, strangely enough, I had recently read novels about.  My characters may have been semi-original, but the plot was all stolen.

And there are probably about a hundred more half-finished stories in my past! Just wait…you never know when one of these stories might pop up around here.

What do you think? Do any of these sound like something you’d like to read?