Mad Cooper: An Origin Story

Camp NaNo is over, and so now I'm going to take the opportunity to take you back in time. Way back. I recently found a story, or part of a story, written about twenty years ago. I couldn't tell you exactly how old I was, but I was young enough to have disappointing spelling skills. There are two other stories, written by my sister, about the same characters, which both have the same bizarre misspelling of "Jolene."

I'm going to give you this story exactly as it's written, spelling errors and all.

The Musterius House Guests

Written and illustraated by: [me]

Chapter 1 The Interductshun

There once was three kids, named, Joelne age eight, Jake age seven and Jason age six. Jason is the smartest and the youngest. They lived across the street from a old house that everybody thought was huntend.

Chapter 2 The robbers

"Look!" yelled Jake as they saw two robbers run into the house across the street.

The robbers are very dumb. One robber is very tall and skinny and the other is short and fat. The tall one was leading. "What are they doing in there," Joelne asked. "I don't know" Jason said. "We gotta solve this mystery," Jake said. Joelne started scaching her head.

Chapter 3 The Mystery begins

"Let's go over and check out the inside of that old house," Joelne said.

"Let's do what?!" Jake asked.

That's as far as the story goes, so I'm going to assume it didn't end well for them over there. As it stands, I have several questions.

1. Why can I spell "mystery" but not "mysterious"?
2. How did the kids know they were robbers just by looking at them?
3. Why are these chapters so short? (There's basically a new chapter every handwritten page)

Having read the story again, I'm going to assume that I was between the ages of six and eight, since it's kind of an automatic thing to make characters your own age. That's the age you can relate to. I still tend to do that. It's a hard habit to break.

I can also guarantee you that I was making up this story as I went. I had no idea where I was going with it. Actually planning things out and having an ending in mind is something I learned much later. I was all about the journey, never mind the destination.

So, readers, should I find any more baby Mad stories, would you like to read them as well? I find it much easier to share things that I wrote when I was much younger, because I can admit that they are bad, and I can blame it on my youth. I think I have the beginning of a story about an island populated by mammoths around here somewhere, if anyone is interested.

Oh, also, when I found this story, I also found a little book of hand-drawn characters with punny and ridiculous names. We had a bunch of these books. This one was Volume Four. The idea was that they were all students in a school. The points is, on the front is a picture of a school district sign. Under it is a sign that says:

No Snods

      Nerds

      Dirts

I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean, but I've been thinking about it for the past week and it keeps making me laugh.

Until Friday, readers, when, I don't know, something happens.