Welcome to the imagination of 15-year-old me. Initiation, written in 1973, is the first longform story I ever wrote. Full disclosure: It’s not very good. It demonstrates an adolescent love of adverbs and passive sentence construction. It also demonstrates penmanship that has devolved horribly over the years. The shift from cursive to the typewritten page marks the occasion of my 16th birthday when I received the used Smith-Corona manual typewriter that took me all the way through college.
I knew when I wrote Initiation that it was not publishable and I didn’t try, but the act of writing the story introduced me to the wonder of escaping into my imagination and playing with my imaginary friends. Twenty years passed before my career launched with the publication of Nathan’s Run. Observant readers who dare to slog through Initiation will find some familiar character names and turns of phrase that I cannibalized for future works. I finally recycled the plot for my short story, “All Revved Up And No Place to Go” in the anthology, Bat Out Of Hell, edited by Don Bruns.
If you’re new to my books, I promise that my writing has improved in the decades since Initiation.