Confession: Part I

Since my audience here is probably less than a hundred (that’s funny, it’s probably less than six), I feel comfortable with this confession: I once authored a mystery-romance novel.

I thought of this recently when I was thumbing through the pages of Southern Homespun a book by a family friend. Occasionally I look it up on Amazon to see if anyone is selling copies. Thinking about her book made me think of my own.

Mine was never published of course, but as a junior in High School, I believed I could emulate the style of mystery-romance novels written by Phyllis A. Whitney, someone I’d been reading for a few years because mom liked her.

(At 37, it doesn’t escape me that had my passion been boys, the hard sciences or computing, my life might be much different today. History not so much – because who gets a job with a history degree? I love history now, but I think my 16 year old self did me a favor on that front at least. I’m a bit chapped with her about the other ones though; I bet I would have been good at computers. She could have put a little more shoulder into it. She was convinced she was going to be a foreign correspondent).

She, well I, was also convinced I could write a mystery-romance novel following Whitney’s time tested formula. She was at thirty books by the time I began copying her. And she lived to 104, so that alone is impressive. Anyway, her formula is basically this:

1. Girl discovers mystery is afoot.
2. Mystery tries to kill/maim/injure girl.
3. Girl is perky and sets about to solve mystery.
4. Boy shows up and Girl is irritated yet strangely attracted to Boy. Note: they need to be forced together by chance. This Girl is independent, like Nancy Drew with the titian blonde hair.
5. Boy and Girl fall in love. Kissing ensues.
6. Dramatic tension: Something suggests the Boy isn’t who he says he is and may want to kill Girl!
7. Climactic Moment: Girl tested by extreme danger, mystery killer is revealed and Boy is cleared.
8. Tie up all loose ends of mystery. Kiss Boy. Plan future. The End.

So during one class each day (Yearbook), I wrote my version of this story in a mead spiral notebook. I had won it in a contest that year, along with a box of mead paper products. I still do most of my writing in longhand and struggle to do any real thinking while I’m typing. I’m not sure why.

When I had finished the novel, I typed up the story, using my parent’s typewriter. It was an iron beast with its own black hard plastic carrying case. I stored the entire manuscript in a shirt box.

At some point not long after that I got my first computer. It was a Leading Edge, Model D. and I wanted to be different, so I got the amber CRT monochrome monitor. It had two floppy drives. I don’t remember it running windows, and it is the sole reason I know any DOS commands. I was going to use it in college. I was on the crest of the personal computer age, so of course the novel was meant to go on my new computer and saved on a disk.

Plan's First Fatal Flaw: I destroyed the typewritten pages as I input the story.
Plan's Second Fatal Flaw: I didn’t make copies of the disk.

To cut to the chase, the disk corrupted one day and I lost all but about 50 pages of the end of the book.

--Laura