Love In The Lunchroom and beyond!

 I miss creative writing.  I don't know if I was ever really good at it, but I so enjoyed doing it.  Growing up, anytime there was a creative writing assignment in school, I just gravitated to it with so much enthusiasm. I need to find that enthusiasm again.  

The first thing I really remember writing creatively about was gnomes.  In our AG class (academically gifted...I'm not sure it's PC to use that term today), Mrs. Goebel introduced us to the world of gnomes.  There was a very large coffee table book that had come out around that time concerning gnomes and, of course, Tom Clark gnomes were starting to really take off.  We had to do a project on gnomes.  We had to create a society of gnomes and detail their every day lives.  I did mine on Hawaiian gnomes.  Like many kids that age, I did not do as well as I could have, but I did pretty good. And I thoroughly enjoyed creating this world.  This project also started my lifelong collection of gnomes...but that's for another blog.

Later that year, I started writing my own serial/soap opera.  Back in the day, passing notes was a big thing.  And one day I thought to myself, what if this person passed a note to that person...what would they say?  "Love In The Lunchroom" was born from that.  I took that first story to my AG teacher and she ended up reading to the class.  Everyone loved it.  I knew the art of the cliffhanger, so making my fellow students want to hear the next episode was not that hard for me.  Of course, being 10 years old, my knowledge of the facts of life were limited and people got pregnant very quickly...and gave birth even quicker LOL  Still, it was fun.  I wrote that for 2 years.  

I loved most of my creative writing assignments in school.  Poetry, not so much.  Not because I dislike poetry, but because I was not very good at it.  I remember in 10th grade that we had to write a poem and the art class was going to create a piece of artwork based on the poem.  Now, this is a wonderful idea but I was not confident in my poetry skills at the time and asked that mine not be used.  I have always kind of regretted that.  Ah, well.  I also wrote a radio drama in 12th grade.  Our honors English class was studying Oedipus and we were to give a presentation on it.  I wrote a radio show called "As The Greek Urns" to tell the story.  We turned out the lights, stood at the microphones and presented the radio drama.  We even had old fashioned sound effects.  I got an A on that one.

I would often write stories as a teenager that sometimes I let people read and sometimes not.  Being a gay kid in a small town, there were many things that I could not out right express.  But, I could put it into writing.  I could disguise it.  Sometimes it was a story based on someone I had a crush on.  I just put them in a different situation, but I was in control.  Sometimes it was a story based on what I wish I had been able to do if I weren't gay.  Disguised as someone else, but still in control.  Honestly, it really did help me cope with a lot of things at that time.  

I do not have many of these writings anymore.  Some I just threw out.  Some just disappeared over time.  I still have "LITL"...all 2 seasons, somewhere in a box.  I need to find them and read them again.  No, they're not good unless you're 10 years old.  Still, I would enjoy revisiting them.  Maybe it will inspire me to write more.  Only time will tell.

That is all