Just for fun, here is the first book I ever "published," verbatim, all spelling errors included and sans art, since I don't feel up to scanning it all. Third grade. Guess what movie I just saw. This may make a lot of sense in many ways to some people.
SUPER MOUSE the MOVIE
Written and Illustrated by Lysa Opfer
1979 All rights reserved.
First Edition. First Printing.
Printed in the U.S.A.
Dedicated to my best friends, Denys and Cheri
-----
Far off on a distant planet called Mousetonee, there lived a whole group of mice. They called themselfs the Mousetonees. And they all lived in a mouse-ship. It looked like a big mouse.
One day, the Mousetonee's leader's wife had a baby boy. It was just like all the other mice.
One day a comet hit the mouse-ship.
It had death-rays in it. So the leader sent the baby mouse in a mini-mouse-ship hoping that it would land on a different planet far away. The planet of Mousetonee exploded.
Thousands of mice all over the planet died, but the baby boy did not die because he was sent out into space.
He only traveled for 3,000,000,654 miles. He was learning how to control the ship and the ways of space. And soon, his mouse-ship crashed on Mouse.
His mouse-ship was dented badly. He got out of the ship and crawled very fast all the way over to Mostate.
The mini-mouse-ship exploded when he crawled to safety just in the nick of time.
For the next few years Supermouse lived in Mostate taking care of himself.
Supermouse grew to be five years old and then he went to school. When he finished with college he went on a trip to Hawaii. He loved it so much, he decided to stay.
The first person he met was Denys. Otherwise known as the greatest hawaiian dancer of Hawaii.
And then, he had to go back to Mostate so that he could earn money. There was a sworm of tornadoes in Mostate. Supermouse saved thousands of lives by land, sea and air. People's homes got wrecked. Some people survived the death of their lives.
So he went back to Hawaii. There he found Denys. She was dead! So was everybody else! How could this happen? Then he stared at a volcano. There was lava all over the place.
Then with a twinkle of his toes, and a twinkle of his fingers, he pushed all the lava without getting burned, back into the volcano.
He snapped his fingers and woke everybody up. And they thanked him as much as possible. Some of them said, "What happened? Where am I?"
The next day, a plane flew over Hawaii, and he saw two people get out. The first person he saw getting out of the plane was Miss Mouse.
She was very pretty. She thought he was very handsome, so they got married. And they lived happily ever after. As for Denys, she got married too.
THE END
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Monday, June 16, 2008
Notebook disease.
I'm here! I promise I'm not dead, contrary to what anyone may say. Admittedly, I was never very good at keeping journals, and isn't this, in some way, a journal? Why, yes. Yes it is.
In a former life I was an English major. This may seem slightly improbable, given my lack of actual English skills, but there it is. I remember one grueling year in particular in which I carried 21 and 18 credits in two semesters, many of those credits being English classes. Medieval English, Creative Writing, Poetry, Shakespeare, you-name-it. In said courses, there seemed to be a conspiracy: without fail, my instructors would issue an assignment that would be carried through the duration of the semester.
Now, this is mandatory and will count for one quarter of your grade. You are to start a journal and write in it every week. One hour minimum. Don't even try to fake it. I can tell when my students sit in the Student Center a half hour before class and scrawl thoughts over hurried lunches.
I am, of course, paraphrasing.
Now, one journal is quite acceptable. But three or four at a time is, well, distracting. I had quite a time organizing notebooks on top of notebooks, leaves of paper stapled to one another, sometimes completely disjointed as one thought straggled into other classes' journals and polluted otherwise pristine bodies of work. I failed everything. Of course, I attribute my failing to the fact that I worked the overnight shift at the campus 7-11. But that is quite another story altogether.
This, more than anything else, infected a sense of loathing for journal-keeping. Until then, journals were something I kept when I felt inspired to do so. I'd start so many of them, in spiral bound notebooks (college-ruled of course), in uniquely bound hardcovers whenever I could get my hands on them, in Day-Runners, on scraps of napkin. And all of these things, after a few pages, were left unfinished. Random starts and middles of stories, erratic thoughts, things unsaid to people, lists of things to do, outlines for whatever great fiction I'd dreamed up, were left to die within the first 20 pages or so of every book I bought to write in.
I suppose it's because I have some kind of fetish for clean notebooks. I love notebooks. I love buying them. I have a dozen or so sitting on my shelf right now. Some stained with ink, some waiting for pen to first press into that stiff pillow of paper. I have notebooks of all sizes. I am currently obsessed with smaller notebooks; ones that could very easily be stuffed into one's purse for writing in later. And even though I have these thoughts of writing, more often than not, I let them sit in wait. In many of them, I've written a few pages' worth, only to justify my having them, but it makes no sense. I know this.
And here I am, staring at yet another unopened mystery on my desk. Green leather with a matching band to keep it closed, off-white paper. Sealed in plastic. For now.
In a former life I was an English major. This may seem slightly improbable, given my lack of actual English skills, but there it is. I remember one grueling year in particular in which I carried 21 and 18 credits in two semesters, many of those credits being English classes. Medieval English, Creative Writing, Poetry, Shakespeare, you-name-it. In said courses, there seemed to be a conspiracy: without fail, my instructors would issue an assignment that would be carried through the duration of the semester.
Now, this is mandatory and will count for one quarter of your grade. You are to start a journal and write in it every week. One hour minimum. Don't even try to fake it. I can tell when my students sit in the Student Center a half hour before class and scrawl thoughts over hurried lunches.
I am, of course, paraphrasing.
Now, one journal is quite acceptable. But three or four at a time is, well, distracting. I had quite a time organizing notebooks on top of notebooks, leaves of paper stapled to one another, sometimes completely disjointed as one thought straggled into other classes' journals and polluted otherwise pristine bodies of work. I failed everything. Of course, I attribute my failing to the fact that I worked the overnight shift at the campus 7-11. But that is quite another story altogether.
This, more than anything else, infected a sense of loathing for journal-keeping. Until then, journals were something I kept when I felt inspired to do so. I'd start so many of them, in spiral bound notebooks (college-ruled of course), in uniquely bound hardcovers whenever I could get my hands on them, in Day-Runners, on scraps of napkin. And all of these things, after a few pages, were left unfinished. Random starts and middles of stories, erratic thoughts, things unsaid to people, lists of things to do, outlines for whatever great fiction I'd dreamed up, were left to die within the first 20 pages or so of every book I bought to write in.
I suppose it's because I have some kind of fetish for clean notebooks. I love notebooks. I love buying them. I have a dozen or so sitting on my shelf right now. Some stained with ink, some waiting for pen to first press into that stiff pillow of paper. I have notebooks of all sizes. I am currently obsessed with smaller notebooks; ones that could very easily be stuffed into one's purse for writing in later. And even though I have these thoughts of writing, more often than not, I let them sit in wait. In many of them, I've written a few pages' worth, only to justify my having them, but it makes no sense. I know this.
And here I am, staring at yet another unopened mystery on my desk. Green leather with a matching band to keep it closed, off-white paper. Sealed in plastic. For now.
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