Banner Photo by Pierpaolo Lanfrancotti on Unsplash
Ladies, and gentlemen, join me in welcoming our guest blogger/poster Derek E. Miller, one of the four writers from the upcoming anthology Beyond the Door. Derek agreed to write a guest post as a way of introducing himself to you in case you haven’t read any of his Espresso Shorts, The Attic Diary, Kamikaze Diary, Ghost Army Diary, or The Military Contractor’s Handbook.
…and had no money for Christmas presents. Luckily in my big family it truly is the thought or funny gift that counts. So I got the idea to take the old handwritten stories my grandmother had written about our family and her life and type them out. I stayed up all day and night typing on an old large desktop computer that sounded like a jet engine staring into that green screen. It was around 1986!
It was kind of hard reading that old yet beautiful cursive writing. But as the sun came up I finally hit print on that dot matrix printer. Then spent the next few hours printing out multiple copies and ripping off the sides that fed the paper through the printer. Young hooligans reading this will have no clue what I’m talking about.
I three hole punched those copies and stuck them in three ring vinyl binders and that was the gift I gave from grandma and me. One copy to each family. Yeah it was a hit and cherished to this day. Grammar errors and all.
Flash forward about twenty five years. I’m lying on my stomach in a containerized living quarter in the middle of Kabul, Afghanistan on a Friday. I have a tiny headset on speaking with my semi-famous author mother on skype and my hands on a keyboard of tiny computer. Color screen this time. I am so frustrated.
I want to have a meaningful gift for my daughter’s upcoming fifteenth birthday like I gave everyone that one Christmas so long ago. I wanted to create a historical fictional story for my daughter that she is the star of to put in a three ring vinyl binder and give it to her on one of my upcoming short trips back to the states.
I have had a story in my head and have been painfully slowing typing it. I’m frustrated because I’m trying to internet research about real underground tunnels in my hometown plus slave underground railroads. I’m trying to do this research over internet connections as slow as AOL dial up in the early 90’s while in a war zone. I’m about to give up.
Then it happens. Then the beast is released.
My mom says, “Derek, you are not writing a college research text book, you are writing fiction. Make it up for goodness sakes and have fun with it.”
I think I disconnected thirty seconds after that and my keyboard sounded like a machine gun going off in Kabul.
It was one of the greatest and most productive writing days of my life.
A few days later I hit send of the digital file to my mom to proof read it for me. No dot matrix paper this time! The first book I ever wrote. My heart, soul, and blood was in that book. I was ready to hear the cackle from across the ocean and through Europe as my professional semi famous author mom read it and laughed at it.
But still it would go into a vinyl three ring vinyl binder for my daughter for her birthday no matter how bad it was. Or so I thought.
The cackle did not come. The story did not end up in a three ring vinyl binder. Where did the story end up? That is a story for another day.
But remember this. The stories we write are our gift to you the reader. Sometimes they are perfect and what you need at that moment.
Sometimes they are not. Sometimes they are socks! But no matter what they are our heart, soul and blood.
Derek E. Miller
Stay well! And remember: it is 4 weeks until the release of Beyond The Door Volume 1 on October 31. If you pre-order it, send me an email and I’ll send you a link to a free bonus story that can’t be found anywhere else!
A.B. Alvarez
