Following my early masterpiece The Hundreds of Ghosts in one Honted House!, I wrote two more stories when I hit third grade. One, The Giant Cat, is sadly lost to history, but featured a giant cat and a robot mouse. That’s about all I remember about it, except for the fact that I think it was written on lined paper and stapled together. Lesson learned: always get a good bookbinder.

The other book I wrote that year actually went on display at the school library. Yeah, I was a celebrity back then. I’d walk onto the playground and pick whichever swing I wanted, bullies would duck out of sight when they saw me coming, and teachers lauded me with praise. That book, The Game, survived the years unscathed. To hear it narrated by my wife Sarah, click below. To read the special annotated edition, read on.

Read more: Old Shame: The Game

I eschewed the use of a pen name here, opting instead for my birth name of Charles Martin. Note that I have not one but two talented illustrators here. Despite that, I specifically remember drawing some of these pages myself. I guess I’m just too modest to take credit for my brilliant talent.

I have a confession to make: I did not know anything about baseball when writing this. The only thing I knew baseball from was Peanuts strips, which exaggerates the scores for humor. Therefore, I thought that 123 to 111 was a realistic baseball score. I also thought that baseball teams had seven people each, apparently. I blame my shoddy editor for not catching these errors.

Also, note the copyright at the bottom of the page. Even when I was 8, I meant business.

I initially planned on making this book very long. I had complained to my illustrator Matthew that book chapters were always too short. When he caught me in my hypocrisy and called me on using only one-page chapters, I told him that I go where the story takes me. Yes, that’s how pretentious I was as a third-grader.

At this point in the story I forgot that baseballs used innings, not quarters. Whatever. American football is the better game anyway.

Ah yes…the Montreal Expose. Maybe if they actually wore uniforms, they could have posed a challenge.

Even I have to admit, this book wasn’t exactly a thrilling piece of prose. It reads more like a warped sports almanac than something with a plot.

Who knew I was into postmodernism at such a young age? Truly, I must have been a prodigy.

I guess it was a strike-shortened series, since there were only 21 games until the World Series.

I kept messing up on the team name. It’s supposed to be the White Sox, which was my favorite baseball team. Why did I like the White Sox? Because I had a Cabbage Patch kid with a White Sox uniform. I pretty much picked all my favorite sports teams based on the merchandise I coincidentally acquired…except for the football Giants, whom my dad brainwashed me to like.

“And 3 ties.” Best closing line since, “This looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” Am I right?

Sorry…double page spreads don’t work out terribly well in the format I’ve chosen.

After such a great story, don’t we need an appendix?

I’m pretty sure this is the part I wrote, added in after the book had already been printed (hence the lack of dot-matrix letters). Apparently, my friend Matthew was a sentient weregorilla, judging by the toes.

Truly, I was a man of many talents. Apparently, I also had the beginnings of a mustache going on.

Again, I didn’t know anything about baseball. That’s why I had to add in “hitter” to the positions. I didn’t know what a batter was.

Poor Geoffrey. He was the only kid in school less cool than I was. I wrote him into the story when we were getting along, then apparently edited in the “bad” descriptor when we were either fighting or when I wanted to gain some cred with the cool kids by making an unmotivated personal attack on the poor boy.

Um…I think this was maybe an aborted title page that got shunted to the back of the book instead? Maybe I was getting paid by the page?

This blurb is so full of blatant lies. I obviously knew nothing about baseball. I also didn’t know anything about basketball or hockey. And at that point in my life, I had never played Nintendo. I just mentioned it because in 1989 everybody was into Super Mario Bros. and they talked about it endlessly in class. I said I liked it to blend in. I also lied during show and tell one day and said I had beaten Super Mario Bros. and had 99 lives at the end of it.

I did play Action Max. You folks probably never heard of Action Max on account of it sucking. It was a video game system I won in a raffle that required the use of a VCR and a light gun. I had one game, and I think there might have been three games total made for the machine. On the bright side, my winning it was the reason my family got a VCR: my dad had stated that if I won, he’d buy a VCR so I could use it, never actually suspecting that I could actually win.

And so that’s The Game. I don’t mind saying that it’s probably my worst novel. It has no description for the characters, no drama, and I had a few critical research failures. However, it does play with your expectations very well; you probably came in here expecting something decent or at least mildly entertaining, and then I bored you to tears with my fanciful tale of gibberish and high numbers. That’s what a good writer does: he plays with your expectations. So even in my worst moment, I still had it, baby!

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.

Continue reading “Old Shame: The Hundreds of Ghosts in One Honted House!” →