Bfth Embarrasses Herself: The Early Writings


 Our house in the Poconos has a lot more space and storage than our 100+ year old house in New Jersey.  So we've dragged a lot of "junk" from there to here.  For me this includes plastic containers that sat in the basement for years filled with notebooks.  And I mean a LOT of notebooks.  Some filled.  Others have writings and are mostly blank.

So what are these notebooks?  Well, they are "diaries" as well as attempts at stories/fiction.  (And let me be perfectly clear, these attempts are mostly "fan fiction" rip off that just might constitute plagiarism.) 

I dug through some of them today. I read things that made me cringe and realize that while in some ways I may have been a mature kid, as a "young" adult (take that as you will), I was pretty darned immature and downright idiotic.  When did I actually "grow up?"  I'm not sure I ever actually did, but I'd like to think I've matured and gotten (a little) wiser.

I dug around until I found the first notebook I started. I was "inspired" by Harriet Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy.  Or so I thought.  I didn't always date my entries and when I did, sometimes the year is lacking, but it looks to me like this first notebook is almost 50 (!) years old.  Which makes ME feel old.

Though several pages from the beginning of the notebook (one of those black and white "Schooltime Composition" books which I had colored in, which contains 84 leaves [!?!] and comes from the Roaring Spring Blank Book Co, in Roaring Spring, PA 16673) were torn out, I give you my first entry which was written in purple marker.  (Because my 3rd grade teacher used them and as "challenging" as she could be, I loved her.  She also read aloud to the class some afternoons.   One of the books she read to us was The Long Hot Summer which was kind of a sequel to Harriet the Spy.  Maybe she is to "blame" for this?)  I will admit that I am using initials and/or abbreviations of names that I wrote all those years ago.  While I most certainly will embarrass myself, I'm not dragging anyone else into it.  Please note that typos and errors are intentional, as this is what was written:

    no body will evey look in this book.

    Hopefully.

    C loves CP. DM loves CP too.  Poor CP.  He hates them both.

    I hope C quites flute!

    ME smells.  K is a good kid! I plan to give him some baseball cards. Mr. B likes me best of all his begining flutes.

    It has been very stormy lately. I don't like this weather. It will get sunny then it will rain. a couple of days ago it was 30 F and it's May!  In april it was 105 F in the sun!

With an incredible start like that, how did I not become a professional writer?

Sadly, the notebook ends about a year and half later.  (Obviously I wasn't writing every day...nor was I always writing, there are plenty of doodles as well.  Which, I must say are just as "high quality" as my "writing.)  The final entry is from right before Christmas in 1977.  (How did that get to be so long ago?)  My final lines?

    Good bye.  I will miss you. I do have a new notebook. Hey It's almost ten o'clock.

The question remains, what do I do with these containers of notebooks full of horrid scribblings?  Toss them?  Burn them?  Keep them for posterity?  And if the latter, do I do some HEAVY editing?  (There are a lot of notebooks, so it would take a LONG time to do that.)  It's something I've been thinking about for a long time and I still have no answers.

The one thing I DO know is that while I may never be a renowned author/writer, I've definitely improved over the past 40+ years.  I have, right?  (Don’t answer that!  I don’t think I want to know!)



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