The very first thing I ever wrote in story form was a novelized version of the first solo campaign I ever ran in D & D. At the time, I thought it was great. Reading it now, it’s horrible. It is easily the worst thing I’ve ever written. The dialogue is boring. The characters are basic and/or carbon copies of other characters that I had read before. For example, one character was a half-elf named Roderigo (named after a Seven Mary Three song) who was nothing more than a mixture of the characters Tanis Half-Elven and Raistlin Majere from the DragonLance novels.

After that, I started writing my Dead Set series. I wasn’t really worried about the writing on this one as I was originally intending it to be turned into a comic book. Therefore, none of my grammatical errors mattered because they wouldn’t exist in an image of the action my words were depicting. It was great. I just wrote whatever came to me. Then, when it became evident that they would never actually be turned into comic books, I stopped writing it.

That didn’t stop me from writing comic book stories, however.

I came up with some characters of my own and drew the books out in my horrible stick figure-ish style, where they were only viewed by my closest friends (Before you ask, none of them still exist, so don’t ask me to post them). There were a couple of others that I wrote out in the same style as Dead Set too. One was called Haunted Angel, which addressed what happened to Father Michaels after he left Dead Set (though he wasn’t the main character of the book).

Another one was the very first fan fiction I ever wrote. It was an X-Men story. Although, thinking back on it now, while it may have been a story that had the X-Men in it, it was mostly a way to introduce three original characters of my own.

The basic premise was that there was a standoff at an army base between the troops and mutants. Professor X uses Cerebro to determine that there are two mutants there and dispatches Cyclops, Storm, Gambit, Nightcrawler, Chamber, and Wolverine to diffuse the situation. When they get there, they find that the two mutants are brothers and that they’re joined by their other brother, who was a soldier at the base.

The soldier brother was discharged from the army after a blood test determined that he was also a mutant. He was trying to talk to his superior officers to ask for a new test, because he had never shown any mutant abilities, when things predictably got out of hand. His brothers, who were there to drive him home from the base, stepped in to defend him and it ended up in a standoff.

There was no big X-Men villain, like Magneto or Apocalypse, in the story. The main bad guy was an anti-mutant army officer who tried to kill them all instead of following his orders to de-escalate the situation.

As much as I would like to post this story for you all to read, I can’t. When I originally wrote the story, I started it in one notebook, but ended up finishing it in another when the original notebook (which also had other things I had written in it) became full. Over the course of the many, many moves I’ve been forced to endure since I wrote the story, I’ve lost the original notebook. All I can find is the notebook with the final two chapters in it.

And, I’d like to tell you all about the brothers from the story, but I might end up repurposing them for one of the dozen or so story ideas I have kicking around my head at the moment.

I guess you’ll just have to trust me when I tell you that I think you’d like it.