Letting go, but allowing myself to remember, some of the writing I lost so long ago.
Novels
– The Adventures of Elmo Zagwaf
– Mighty Hank, Godling Among Men
– Bowl Chime
Short Stories/Novellas
– Scorpion House
– Rocketship Eden
– I Love Beans
– S.H. Puttgrass Learns to Vote
– Interstate
– Defender of the Realm
– Mighty Hank Arm Wrestles Death
– An Endless Thursday of Fish
– Hovercraft
– God is Dreaming
– Dust Planet
– The Crimson Avenger of Kansas
Plays
– Wolf School
– Death Goes Bowling
– The Moon and The Macho Man
– Dead Heat Photo
– Hamlet and The Pirates (aka the good parts of the lost Quatro 3, Professor G. Smallfinch (ibid))
This isn’t everything I wrote between 1983 to 2002, but it’s the stuff I still think of fondly and do remember if I think about those days. I’m grateful I got to write these stories, and put so much work into them. It was good work.
I talked a lot about Bowl Chime, and how much losing that hurt. But Hamlet and the Pirates was also ready for a reading around the same time. I was sleeping maybe 3 hours a night those days, and I just wrote all the time. I started Hamlet and the Pirates in 1997, and worked on it for six years. It started as a kind of imaginary ‘less glum’ sequel to ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead’ and was very Tom Stoppardy. I used to do that sometimes, sort of write like another writer.
Like, the novel I wrote in middle school (The Adventures of Elmo Zagwaf) was me writing like Douglas Adams. S.H. Puttgrass Learns to Vote was me writing like Garrison Keillor in middle school. Rocketship Eden was me imagining I was Ray Bradbury and Rod Serling.
Hamlet and the Pirates changed a lot over those years. It’s the only one of these where I can still remember the first line of dialogue from the last version. Hamlet is standing on the prow of the pirate ship ‘Penzance’, looking grim at the horizon, holding a skull. The Pirate King swings into the scene, lands next to Hamlet, slaps him on the back and says, “Hey Chum, Why So Glum?” The skull was a friend of the Pirate Kings, Hamlet drops it in the water and says something like, “Alas, I did not know him.” The Pirate King thinks Hamlet is being creepy and weird, and says if he’s not careful he’ll end up moping around a graveyard talking to skulls. Which then led into a song about being bold and taking action – and I can’t remember any of it.
But still, to this day, I think the Pirate King had a point.
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443 words.