About the Author 2: Crazy from the start

Long before writing novels or creating game worlds, let alone blogs, I still had that unfortunate kink of personality that requires me to make something, and worse, to direct my creation at someone and elicit a response. On many a show-and-tell day, the teacher had to turn off the lights so I could display a shoebox robot studded with glowing Lite-Brite pegs; Hallowe'en always meant another homemade, last second costume that required explanation at every door.

My poor younger brothers naturally qualified as the handiest captive audience. For our otherwise normal games running around the backyard or in the neighborhood, I had to make a book of rules and blueprints, secret hand signs, a logo, and a system of fireworks for emergency signaling. The middle brother, JT, lost his eyebrows to a slow-burning flare, his unenviable task being to alert the rest of us to dinnertime. He also had to drink water with batteries soaked in it, which I was sure would give us superpowers. Our father was not happy to find us adding that "secret formula" to the car's gas tank. Likewise when the water bucket trap on the door to the garage caught him instead of my brother; that was a mistake. Somehow I escaped most of the blame when I told JT that pickle juice would burn, gave him a huge glass jar of pickles and some matches, and was far away by the time he dropped the jar and covered the garage floor with pickles and shards.

The youngest brother was the real gift: a blank mind that I could manipulate at will. Together with a friend I built a table-sized UFO from scrap paneling, paint, a Battleship set and a flashlight. We told the five-year-old that we'd heard about UFO sightings on the radio, then together we "discovered" the glowing ship in the yard. I think he was truly awed. Many times we put him in a cardboard box "spaceship" which would take off (we shook the box and roared), fly to the moon, orbit, and return. Once, to better simulate takeoff, I decided to use fireworks. I taped a large "screamer" rocket to some BBQ tongs and lit the thing. As we were set up in the basement, the noise and smoke were considerable. JT ran away -- maybe he learned more than I did from the eyebrow incident.

I also figured out a way to turn sparklers into fireballs, but I don't want this to become a how-to for the risk-prone child of today.

Trash-can robots, "special reports" recorded on cassette and supposedly playing on the radio, secret doors cut through the drywall -- I suppose other kids were playing sports or learning to talk to the opposite sex, but for me every free day was a chance to weave a fantasy story out of the props of real life. With a pillow under my shirt, a giant PP logo taped on the front, a towel for a cape, and a wig and sunglasses, I became the Phantom Phatty, a superhero who swooped into view, posed and declaimed, then fled to keep his identity hidden from his little-kid fans.

I painted one wall of my bedroom with an eight-by-ten foot mural of the moon landing, complete with unlikely mountain peaks and metallic gold paint on the parts of the LEM that I knew to be covered in foil. I touched up the stars with glow-in-the-dark paint; soon the constellations spread to the plain walls and ceiling as well. When my parents had adult friends over, I'd offer to show them my room, then I'd prep the walls by shining a black light bulb directly on the stars for a few minutes. My poor mother would have to lead her friends in with their eyes closed; once I got the door shut and all the lights off, we had the big "reveal". Maybe they were just being nice, but I think it was actually impressive, if perhaps in an eccentric way.

JT got an undersea mural on his bedroom wall, so I nabbed some of the leftover paint to camouflage my "spy camera": a plastic box with a fake lens made from a model car's hubcap. I'd sneak in and stick that high on his wall with double-sided tape. He'd find it, yank it down, and throw it at me while I explained how we'd been monitoring his activities. Later I'd sneak it back into a new spot.

A friend and I wrote long sci-fi "radio shows" and recorded them; made comic books about computers and aliens; worked our way through the library. (Greatest short story title ever: "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones"!) I'd been writing poems and micro-stories since about age 5; in adolescence I expanded to short stories and started various longer works, all science fiction in imitation of what I read.

I got into model rockets, and quickly lost patience with the finicky balsawood fins, let alone paint and decals. Instead I experimented with ways to ignite the little gunpowder engines, then inserted them into any number of inappropriate objects that, who knows, might possibly fly. My favorite trick was to put an engine in the socket of a flex-neck lamp, which could then be aimed with some precision; I'd launch by flipping on a wall switch, and the missile flew in a very satisfying arc of smoke into our much-abused yard. Attaching engines to a big styrofoam glider met with less success, as did tying a small rocket to a spool of thread so we could be sure to find it later. That one went up a good ten feet before the thread got snagged, whereupon the still-firing rocket whipped around on its tether like the tentacle of a dying sea-monster.

The old neighborhood spy games evolved into a nightly ritual: a neighbor kid and I had to take a particular path through various yards and cut-throughs, up to the elementary school flagpole and back, all without being seen. Crouched in the bushes we observed, or imagined, peculiar patterns in the traffic, and inferred the existence of some kind of neighborhood watch patrol. If there was one, it probably started because people saw our shadowy forms darting through the undergrowth at night.