Origins of Skullrider
Yesterday I read through some old stories I wrote while growing up, all stashed deep in our bedroom bookshelf. I wanted to be an author for the longest time, filling up spiral notebooks as a kid and taking every possible creative writing class in high school and college. Here are some of the highlights:
Skullrider: My third grade teacher set up a "Writer's Center" in the corner of the classroom. After you finished a story, a parent volunteer would type the pages up on a newfangled machine called a computer and spiral-bind them together. I thought this was the coolest thing ever and ended up writing about 15 books...but Skullrider was the best. It was about a skateboarding kid whose skin melts off when a bat bites him. So he goes to school normally as a skateboarding skeleton ("the girls thought he was gross but the boys thought he was totally cool"), but soon realizes that he misses his normal self. So he enters a warp zone and kills some monster (with his skateboard) to return to normal (but gets to keep a purple demon dog he finds in the warp zone).
Mac And Cam: Volumes 1-3: Mac and Cam (short for Macintosh and Camcorder) were our answer to the Hardy boys, and in elementary school I ended up writing three 30-page spiral notebook stories about their adventures. In Never A Doubt, the brothers are looking for a thief in the Mayan ruins. The sequel, Caribbean Catastrophe, involves a kidnapping on a cruise ship, and Secret of the Jewel was about treasure hunting in Egypt. Andrew and I still call each other Mac and Cam every once in a while.
The World of Exnax: Exnax was a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story about a fantasy world heavily influenced by Zelda 3 on the Super Nintendo and a series of books called Lone Wolf. There were 27 different endings (26 of them bad), and the story was divided into a light world and dark world.
Gemstorm: Filling up 180 handwritten pages in a composition book, it's the longest story I ever wrote (so far...). Taking heavy influence from Zelda again, the plot is about a boy named Wes, destined to fulfill some prophecy by destroying an enormous gem. He's got a dragon, hangs out with a princess, and fights a bad guy who raises up dead soldiers. The end battle is cool: when Wes shatters the gem, a floating skull with bloody tentacles bursts out, and the epic final duel begins.
Gemfire: Unfortunately I never finished this one, the sequel to Gemstorm. At 80 typed pages on our Smith Corona word processor, it was set hundreds of years after the original story and involved a new kid and new gem-shattering prophecy. The bad guy here had black eyes with white pupils that could shoot out fire, and Wes often appears to the main character as a ghost (a la Star Wars). Things were blowing up and it was just starting to get good too...
Crimson Isle: Written for my 11th grade creative writing class, this pirate story took up 150 looseleaf pages. A good pirate is killed while hiding and protecting his treasure on Crimson Isle, and his rising spirit hits a red parrot, causing him to possess its body. So this parrot flies around carrying his old human skull, continuing to guard the island and set traps. Eventually a new pirate named Captain Daniels sails into the picture and tries to steal the gold for himself, but two stowaway boys help the parrot protect the treasure (which is hidden in the middle of a lava lake inside a volcano, of course). This ending is cool too: one of the boys kills Daniels on a ship and his body falls into the ocean, where his spirit ends up possessing an enormous black shark. The boys try to shoot it with cannonballs to no avail, but finally skewer him with the ship's anchor.
It was entertaining to read back through these stories and see somewhat of a natural progression (but all of them had overdone fight scenes with highly elaborate deaths). Maybe one day I'll transcribe some and archive them up here since the paper and pencil are starting to deteriorate.
Thanks to the recent mentions and links from friends 3jorn, Carbonfour and Caleb Wills. All three of these guys are insanely talented and have inspired me in some way or another.
Wednesday, June 15 at 11:54 AM
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