My first story was probably a half century ago, back in grade school. I was into the Black Beauty and Island Stallion books so I wrote my own horse story which for some reason took place in Argentina.
I did a lot of simple sci-fi and fantasy writing throughout the years. In high school I was really into Alister McLean spy/adventure novels and me and a friend got into writing our own spy novels. We wrote them in spiral note books, in long hand. I wrote four and my buddy wrote four or five. We used to put each other into our stories and used all the 'popular' hot girls in high school as the fem fatales for our stories. We'd show each other our latest chapters as we wrote them. Typical responses would be... "Oh yeah, well wait till you see what happens to you in my next chapter".
I wrote under the nom de plume of Hans Summ, and my buddy was Gus Zuntight. I still have those notebooks. The best parts about them were the 'About this book' and cover blurbs we'd add to them.
After that my writing fell off for a time, until I discovered the L&C archives. I did write a story... "Faith, Hope, and more Hope" which was sent directly to the archives. Then I discovered Zoom's message boards and I think my first story there was "A Chat with Lois" (but I can't be sure, and I'm too lazy to go back and check).
So, there you have it. Much, much more than anyone would ever want to know about the writing misadventures of Tank.
Tank (who remembers trying to get into a college creative writing course being taugh by Thomas Disch by using those old spy novella notebooks, and received a terse 'certainly not!' reply with the return of my notebooks)
