Plan A

I remember Mr. Siedleman's office as a collection of barely contained clutter. The desk had piles of paper, student files and glossy college brochures. The walls were surrounded by dark, wooden, shallow bookshelves, the contents f which seemed to all be placed in a rush with no item to return to straighten them. A handful of books would be upright, although not all upside right and beside them would be books stacked face down, but so you could see the bindings, then you would have a trinket or knickknack. You could see index cards and sticky notes peaking out from the chaotic array. The over all impression was a wall of mystery in which you thought you could find anything, but you dared not touch it, lest the whole thing collapse on top of you.

I wasn't in the student chair in his office for no reason, I was here to talk about college. The white shirted, tie wearing and be-speckled man, who you might have suspected inherited this office of a hippy, sat on the other side of the piled desk looking at a few of the brochures which he thought would suit me. "What do you want to do?" He had asked. He didn't mean now, or for lunch, he was asking what I would like to do with my life.

I thought of the work Eric and I had been working on, a piece of fiction we had passed back and forth called Haunch-Dozer. It was the story of a man wrongly imprisoned in a world where convicts serve their time in giant mechanical suits, so they can be used for heavy labor, or in some cases forced to fight in a kind of gladiatorial arena. It was a challenge, but fun to figure out how to make the character compelling, how to write a break that didn't feel contrived, to make the villain hated, but not easily killed.

This really was just an extension of the kind of thing we already enjoyed. Fr the last few years, the two of us had taken turns being players in each other's games. He would play the character in my campaign who would allow his companions to fight the green dragon who has been harassing the community, only to kill his weaken comrades so he alone could take the dragon's treasure. I would play the fireball throwing character from the TORG version of England as the Darklord worked to have us killed. I loved telling the stories and even as a player writing the storyline as much as I could. The collective imagination was my favorite playground.

The ideas, often derived from other storytellers, were everywhere. In the mornings I would watch tapes of Star Trek I had borrowed from James, a collection of his favorites. Great stories. I would read fantasy from Piers Anthony or Margret Weiss or Tracy Hickman, then I would move to horror from Stephen King. These would get periodically mixed with Sci-Fi or mystery. They were stories I could see myself telling, ideas that could be twisted just enough, to surprise my audience.

I was going to write, because I couldn't imagine not writing. Really, it wasn't the writing, it was the storytelling, When a story had impressed itself on me, I had to figure out how to present it.

"I want to write." I told the out of place high school councilor. He looked like he wasn't sure what I meant. "Stories. I want to write stories, maybe a novel."