Two from the kid

  I'm in packing-fury mode this weekend, but I had to stop and post these, because they made me laugh out loud.
  Right about the time I entered the second grade, I decided I wanted to write books. Mostly it was just an excuse to do a lot of drawings, and put them into some kind of narrative. You couldn't stop me from drawing when I was a kid. So, naturally, I made a lot of books. I would take a few sheets of paper, fold them over, staple the edge, and start hacking away. The first thing to make, of course, was the cover.
  It had to be catchy, right? Grab the potential reader's eye? You bet. Well, I found a bunch of my covers today, and I wanted to share two that I thought were particularly brilliant in my eight-year-old mind.
  The first is my masterpiece, "haunted houses ghosts and skeloton bones plus + pirates." How could you not want to read that? So much scary in one book, PLUS it has pirates! Awesome! It's so scary that I misspelled "skeleton" and added the plus symbol after the word "plus" to really hammer it home.


  Included at the bottom was an illustration of what you might find inside. A ghost, in typical ghost fashion, is exclaiming "Oooooo!" and there is some sort of Jacob's Ladder atop the titular haunted house. It's coursing with electricity and the sound effect "zzzzz!" lets you know it means business. Below the house, what I can only explain as a horribly disfigured cat is adding his two cents with a giant "raaar!" because that's what horribly disfigured cats say.

  Next up is my epic tome "ghosts and other spokey things." I figured that I'd stick with the horror theme, as it had helped me to become a bestselling author.


  I must admit, I don't remember what I considered "spokey" back in the second grade. Bicycle wheels, perhaps. Women from Spokane, maybe. It's best to not delve too deeply into the creative mind. It is what it is. I will tell you this, though; judging by the copyright AND registered trademark symbols after the title, I was serious and career minded, and I'd be damned if anybody was going to steal my ideas. Incidentally, that character who made the cover is Lon Chaney's Wolfman. He's not a ghost, but I suppose he still qualifies as spokey.