I cannot remember a time before I had decided that I wanted to write a book. Thinking back I find this funny because until I was eleven, I could not
read a book. I couldn't read one but I surely wanted to write one. I wrote my own books before I could read other people. I wrote a story for my dad that I titled "Stunk the Skunk" because the hero was a skunk and being a skunk he stunk. I wrote a story for my mom about a bunny. I think It was called buttercup. Both these illustrated works of fiction are still around as far as I know. They are most likely to be found somewhere in my parents attic.
It's funny. Even now. Every once in a while my dyslexic days come back to haunt me and I experience a moment of terror. I will be confronted by a game such as pictionary where you have to
read a word on a card. Also certain kinds of scan-tron forms will bring on a moment of panic before I remember that those days are more than half my lifetime ago, and I can in fact read my test.
Being unable to read sucked. My family was not much into TV at that time. In fact from when I was seven until I was ten, the TV lived in the basement. We could watch it if we wanted but the basement was dark and scary and full of creepy boxes that hid spider webs and possibly monsters. It was also cold.
The house was full of books. They taunted me with their inaccessible stories. My dad spent a lot of time reading aloud to us. He read bible stories onto casset tapes. Remember those? Ruth who is five years older than me read 101 Dalmatians to me. She also read some stories from Grandma's Attic. Sarah who is two years younger than me taught herself to read. She read everything in site. Oh that infuriated me! I got books on tape from the library. The selection was rather limited. I listened to a lot of Janet Oak (christian novelist) because the stories were set in the old west.
There were what seemed like an eternity of traumatic reading lessons where Mom would get frustrated and yell at me because she thought I was being stubborn.I was a stubborn kid and I did hate stupid Peter who never did anything interesting. Why do they make children's readers so boring? Before too long she figured out that there was actually something wrong with me. We went to one eye doctor and then another. Did weird exercises where you try to focus on a pencil and go cross eyed (except I couldn't). Eventually an expert told my parents, I had some kind of brain eye focus issue that I would grow out of and I got subscription to books on tape for the blind and reading impaired.
They sent a special tape recorder that played four sided cassets and Mom ordered books that I would like. I think sometimes they just sent them too (based on my age.) The book on tape came in the mail in a little green box. After I was finished with it, we packed it up and sent it back in the mail.
That was that.... until I was eleven and decided I wanted to try to read again. Now I read just fine, but I like to blame my terrible spelling on my early reading problems.
Anyway, the thing that got me thinking about reading issues is that the story I am writing which I want to make into a novel has just reached 20,000 words. That's about 1/5 of a novel.
-t