Game Winning Goal

This may come as little surprise to those of you have read my 116 posts thus far, but I like to write. Term papers and research projects in school, reports and memos at work, founding documents and think pieces in my startups, I’ve always had a knack for stringing words together.

What may come as a surprise to some of you, though, is that my “talents” also have included fiction.

My first attempt that I can recall is an interesting tale with a prologue. I remember coming home late on night in May of 1980, and I found Tom sitting on the couch engrossed in a hockey game. Not just any hockey game, though – it was his beloved Islanders in their first-ever Stanley Cup Championship series. I sat on the couch beside him, to awake to hit the sack and marginally aware of how hockey worked. Tom patiently answered my questions, and the game was exciting. When the Islanders scored the game winning goal in overtime (the first time that had ever happened in Stanley Cup play) I was hooked.

So was Tom – he made me sit next to him for the rest of the series. And what an exciting series that was, culminating in the second ever Stanley Cup overtime goal to win it for the Islanders.

Editor’s Note: Enough with the sports report, when does the writing come into play?

Settle down… So after the game was over, it was late but I was very wide awake. So for some reason I can’t fathom or recall I went to my room, pulled out my battered Royal manual typewriter, and wrote a story.

In those days, I had an odd nighttime TV habit. I would regularly watch the Odd Couple at 11pm, followed by the Honeymooners, and then a Star Trek original series episode. Most nights I’d follow that up with a Twilight Zone or two, which pushed my actual bedtime to after 2am. I eventually grew out of that habit, but at that point I was a big Richard Matheson fan – he wrote some amazing Twilight Zones such as “Little Girl Lost” and “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.”

I wrote my own Matheson tribute called Invaders that very night on the Royal. (I didn’t know at the time, but Matheson had written another episode titled “The Invaders” that I hadn’t yet seen. Our stories have nothing in common, except perhaps a bit of his style of storytelling.)

I still have an original typewritten copy of that story. Maybe I’ll reprint it here.

I bring this up because I decided to write a fiction book. I’ve already read one chapter at our local Writer’s Group, and passed it to a couple of people who seemed to like what I had so far. It’s a bit daunting, the idea of writing 90,000 words completely made up by me, but that’s the goal I’ve set for myself.

I don’t know if it will be great, or good, or even ok. But I do know it will be completed. Wish me luck!