I have always wanted to be a write, but I have not always been good at writing. But my mother saved as much of my old projects as she could, which is how I still have a copy of one of my first “books,” which I wrote in first grade. The book, The Hundreds of Ghosts in One Honted House! is aptly read by my wife Sarah in the video below. And, if you want my author’s commentary on this seminal work, read on.

Not only did I provide all the words for this seminal piece of work, but I provided the art. That means a lot of black marker on green construction paper. Buckle up.

In the “about the author,” I misspelled my last name. For some reason, I always had trouble remembering to include all the “Rs.” Maybe it has something to do with the fact that my parents didn’t let me watch rated R movies…which would be an issue for my first-grade brain as I tried to bluff my way through the rest of the book.

Ah, childhood…when a “Dracula” is not a specific vampire but a generic term for all vampires. Sort of like how the Frankenstein monster is just “A Frankenstein.”

I dig my artistic decision to have no background whatsoever in this picture except for a circular yellow moon.

In my old age, I really like Freddy. I’m so very fascinated by the kid logic where you just keep adding powers to a character. It’s not enough that Freddy is a ghost; he also must have a steel form.

The truth is that Freddy is supposed to resemble Freddy Kreuger from the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. For some reason, a ton of my 1st-grade friends has seen those movies. I tried to pretend that I had as well, but as you can see my impression is pretty poor. Years later I would watch at least one of the Nightmare on Elm Street films, and…it turns out that I don’t really like them all that much.

You’ll notice that Freddy is in a mirrored position here when compared to the first page. I believe this was because I didn’t realize that the black marker would seep through the paper, and I had to do something with the inky ghost on the other side.

Werewolves are something I did know. While I was banned from Friday the 13th, I was absolutely obsessed with classic Universal monster movies, including The Wolfman. I have no idea now how the monster dog is like Freddy, though.

This is my most blatant lie. I wanted people to think I had watched the Friday the 13th series. But I have two clear tells here. One, Jason Voorhees should never have a smiley face. Two, he’s not called Friday the 13th anymore than Freddy Kreuger is called Nightmare on Elm Street.

I’m really glad I wasn’t allowed to watch R rated movies as a young kid, though. First, I had terrible nightmares and would have been unable to sleep if I saw the stuff in the Friday the 13th films. Second, I like my kid version of ghost-inhabited Freddy and smiley Jason much more than the guys who showed up in their respective films.

Okay, I’ll admit…my first book is pretty thin on plot. There were monsters, they all got blown away by a huge (green?) tornado. It is elegant in its simplicity, but maybe it was too elegant?

I am most ashamed of the misleading title of this book. It promised hundreds of ghosts. It presented four, then destroyed everyone else before they were even properly introduced.

This is my young understanding of houses. Beneath every house is a big pit of tar that keeps it stuck to the ground, right? Otherwise, the house would just fly away whenever the wind blew.

It’s ironic that I ended the story by saying that nobody ever forgot about the ghosts, because I totally forgot that I had written this story until I found it in a folder my mother gave me. That’s the most embarrassing thing I can say about this story: I forgot that it existed.

This has to have been an early experience with page counts and deadlines. I must have wanted to do a roster for all the hundreds of ghosts, but ran out of time and paper. So instead Freddy gets top billing and everyone else gets lumped in with “the hundreds of ghosts.”

Although I had forgotten about this story, I really like it as a relic of my youth. It’s not really much of anything, but I do love my enthusiasm in talking about Freddy. I wish I had expanded it more and had a whole serious of overly-enthusiastic descriptions for various monsters. But, alas, time is a cruel mistress.