I found the “masterpiece” I wrote at the ripe old age of eleven again today. I was actually looking for something else. I forget what it was I was trying to find because I’ve been laughing my ass off at this piece of trash. I kind of feel like I’m living that scene from Anne of the Island where Anne finds some of the old stories from the Story Club, including the ever-tragic “My Graves” and gets a good laugh out of it.
It was called Cassie and the Camp Wiggee-Hama Ghosts and though I was quite proud of it at the time, I look back and see a story riddled with one cliche after another, filled with the kind of things that seem incredibly cool when you’re eleven and told from the point of view of a character which I know now was nothing but a Mary-Sue of myself.
Opening lines?
“Oh, 99 bottles of beer on the wall….” chorused most of the bus.
“Ohhhhhh,” I moaned pitifully.
“The headache strikes again,” said my friend Helen sympathetically.
“If I hear that kid,” I said, pointing to a girl two rows ahead of me, “hit that wrong note again–”
“You’ll scream,” Helen filled in.
“No, I’ll calmly rip out her vocal chords and place them in formaldehyde.”
Out of the mouths of babes, I tell ya.
I wanna know how I learned to spell “formaldehyde” when I was 11 because I really don’t think I could spell it now if I weren’t looking at it.
Just be glad that the internet was still an experimental toy of DARPA and certain Universities, or a broader swath of people may have suffered exposure to this particular exercise in amateur writing.
