Sit back, settle in, and prepare yourself for this long story about how a short story has found it’s way to the light.

OK, not really found footage, like the Blair Witch Project up there, but found wordage? Yeah, we’ll go with that. This found wordage had been lost for around 39 years. I say had, because it has been found! Found by me! When I was around 17 years old, I fancied myself as the next Stephen King and decided I should try out my skills by writing a short story in the vein of Sai King. So, I parked myself in front of my Commodore 64, stuck in a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk labeled Bank Street Writer, and waited the several minutes it took to load. I wasn’t annoyed by that, in 1985 one was lucky to have a disk drive at all. Most of my Commodore 64 equipped friends were still loading their programs via cassette tape, which for a word processor of this size, could take a better part of an hour. No, I was just fine waiting the few minutes it took to load it off my 1541 disk drive. Turns out, I could have waited for it to load off tape, because as I stared at the blinking cursor waiting for inspiration to strike, much more time passed. I finally decided it was too hard and Stephen must have cheated some how. I selected another disk and loaded a game called Jumpman instead.

You know what wasn’t hard in the 80’s? Stealing HBO. If you had even a rudimentary level of electronics knowledge, which I did, and already had basic cable, which we did, you could just saunter up to the cable box on your block, which just happened to be behind my house, open that sucker up, and pull off the coax filter that was inline with the cable running to your house. With that filter removed, all that movie magic was free to flow right to your TV. Ha, my parents didn’t even know we had HBO, they never bothered to go to the channel that was usually all fuzzied out but no longer due to my thievery. Nobody, but me and my friends knew we had free HBO. Too bad it was before the days of SkinaMax, or we would have been in for a real treat. As it was, I still got to see some boobies, such as the ones that Susan Dey displayed in the movie Looker. Damn, my friends and I got to see Lori Partridge’s boobs! Totally worth becoming a criminal.

But I digress. Back in the day, HBO didn’t have enough content to constantly have something showing between movies, so they filled the time with these things they called Shorts. While viewing my ill begot entertainment I saw one of these really weird shorts and just like that, inspiration struck! Before we get to what bore fruit from that inspiration, let’s take a look at the source material below. Yes, it’s eight minute long, but what else are you going to do? I bet you have already watched that Hawk Tuah video at least that long! Watch it!

Weird, right? But right up my Stephen King influenced alley. Up it so much that it gave me an idea for a short story. So back to the C64 I went and this time the keys clacked as I busted it out over the next several days. When I was done, I thought it wasn’t half bad. I saved it on one of those ancient floppy disks and then printed it out on my dot matrix printer. What did I do then? Nothing. You mean you thought I might actually let someone read it? Hells, no! This 17 year old had social anxiety, although it was only known as being weird back then. No way in hell he was going to let someone read it. What if they didn’t like it? What if they thought I was no good? You know, like George McFly explained to Marty in Back to the Future?

So, all kinds of nope on this story ever seeing the light of day. The disk went into the back of the plastic case and the printout got thrown in some drawer. Several years later, when I was on my own and had my own brand spanking new Hewlett Packard IBM style computer, I decided to copy everything from my C64 disks onto this awesome new tech known as a 3.5 floppy disk that could hold up to a whopping 1.4 MB. When I found that old disk with the short story on it, I read it again and got a kick out of it. I was able to convert it over to a Word format and then save it on a new disk where I labeled it, Reel to Real. Still wasn’t going to let anyone read it, though. Right into the back it went in a new plastic case designed for those new disks.

Then, many many years later, I overcame my social anxiety through the use of something called a Blog. Yup, when I started this blog it was because I figured I could show case some of my writing and if people didn’t like it I could just turn off my computer and forget it even happened, without having to face you in the school lunchroom or the work water cooler the next day. Turns out, some of you actually liked what I posted and that would lead me to writing more. I got the thought that maybe I would bust out that first short story I ever wrote and post in on the blog. Just one problem.

I had no fracking idea where that old ass plastic case with those old ass disks were, or even if I still had them. I ascended into the attic of my house where all things old were kept and made a search. Success! I found the box of old disks. Even better, there was that disk labeled Reel to Real snuggled right in the back. The label was a little yellowed and peeling off on one corner but surely the magnetically saved words contained within were still there, right? Nope. Try as I might, with my old computer that I also brought down from the attic that still had a floppy disk reader in it, I couldn’t get it to read the disk. I popped another disk in there and it read it fine, but I wasn’t looking to review my tax records from 1996 in Quicken, I wanted my story! I tried and tried all kinds of tools to repair the disk, all to no avail. My first short story was lost to all of mankind. Fade to black.

Fade back in to just a few weekends ago and you will see us rummaging through the last remaining tubs of shit we left in Virginia Beach when we went full-time RV life four years ago. The neighbor who had been keeping it in her garage wanted it out and we didn’t blame her. Since we were currently landed back in Virginia, we took a weekend and made a trip to the beach to get a bunch of stuff done, the recovery of this shit, one of them. While we sat around the pool of our good friends Matt and Chuck who had graciously agreed to host us so we wouldn’t have to bring the rig on a three hour drive just for the weekend, we went through all that shit to get rid of anything we didn’t need, because, as you can imagine, space is at a premium in a 30 foot RV.

As I was rummaging through a box of old papers, and laughing at some of the freaking notes that my friends passed back in forth in high school that I had saved, I saw it. There it was! The original print out of the short story! It was wrinkled, faded, and even had some stains on it, but it was legible! The story lived! I would be able to type it up and then share it with the world, and if they say it sucked, oh well, I wrote that when I was 17. I got 8 published books now. I think I am doing OK.

However, the story of this short story is not quite over yet. I took great care to store those faded pages in a cardboard box that went inside a plastic tub that would be going with us back to the rig. Since we had the dogs with us, I had to put that tub on the top of the Jeep and strap it down with bungee cords. I took great care to make sure that sucker was strapped down tight but on the trip back, about an hour in, a car pulled up next to us and the passenger was frantically gesturing to the top of the Jeep. I looked in the rear view mirror to see a paper trail extending back to the horizon behind us. I quickly pulled over and saw that although the tub itself was firmly in place, the wind had managed to pry up a corner of the lid on the tub and all kinds of paper had escaped! No! Please, please, no! Yup, when I looked inside the tub my fears were confirmed. Fully half of the cardboard box’s contents were gone, including the printout of the short story. I cried a bit, I cursed a lot, I ended up taking the whole tub down and shoving it in the back with the dogs. I wasn’t really in the mood to care about their comfort at the moment.

When we got back to the campsite, I just threw the tub down next to the RV and forgot about it for the next few days. When we finally got around to finding a place to put it for an eventual trip to Texas to be stored in my parents barn (Hey parents, if you are reading this then yeah, I need to put some more stuff in your barn) I decided to look inside one last time, just in case. Then, I saw it! Crumpled up in a corner were some papers that had evidently escaped the cardboard box but had not made it out of the tub. Yup! The short story print out was among those papers! The day is saved!

So, with no further ado’, I present to you the first short story I ever wrote, Reel to Real. OK, a little more ado’, you have to click that title link to go read it on my author’s website. Adieu!

P.S. Even more ado’. The story is mostly presented in its original form except for some grammatical errors I corrected and one other notable section. I reworked the sex scene a bit. Yes, there is a sex scene. Come on! What hot blooded 17 year old boy wouldn’t include a sex scene in his debut story? However, it came off as if a very inexperienced 17 year old boy wrote it, which he did. I cringed too much at some of the prose I used back then and I had to rewrite it. Not a lot. Just a little. Felt I needed to come clean about that.

Share this shit y'all!