serizawa3000

(Just noting it down YET AGAIN as I have done in my notebooks as if I need reminding...)

Over thirty years ago, I wrote an odd little story that was inspired somewhat by some of the odd things I remembered from a dream... and I added dinosaurs. Like the ones in those photo collages by David Peters. It went down like a lead balloon in Creative Writing Class, but about a year later I went at it from a different angle. I was thinking, funnily enough, of trying to write something that could become an episode of HBO's Tales from the Crypt: some weird goings-on, scary stuff, a plot twist near the end... it was shaping up to be a story about two girls--sisters, no less, possibly twins--who performed a summoning and didn't have a specific, er, spirit in mind, so... they ALL showed up. In the backyard of the girls' house. i decided to tell the story from the POV of the boyfriend of one of the girls. Since this was before the internet was really A Thing, I went to the library to look up occult books. My friend Walter had a HUGE book comprising a certain magical system, which he let me look at, but after a weekend I returned it to him because just having it in the house was bothering me despite having barely looked at it, even if the walls didn't ooze or whatever. I kept doing research and writing stuff down, wondering if I could find this Kabbalah that Walter had mentioned, and then The X-Files episode "Die Hand die Verletzt" made its debut and some of the wind went out of my sails. I kept writing, putting the occult focus on the back burner as I thought about the characters and the relationships between them, and I was thinking about how my story's narrator and his girlfriend became an item, and so while still muddling about the story of "two girls accidentally summon all the demons", I started writing a story that initially started out as that of an amateur theater group working on a play, but eventually that went by the wayside in favor of... a bunch of stuff. A river port town started taking shape, with quirky, artsy characters, a park full of monster statues... thousands of words, but in the end, nothing has really come of it. Sometimes I'll open the files to look at them, and wonder if there's anything what could be salvaged from it. Some of the people in the writer's group liked what they heard of it...

And then I wrote a novel about a battle of the bands, published it online on a website, but no one bothered to read it so I took it down.

...

All because of the delusion that I'm good at this sort of thing...