No great American novel here!

Only in the interest of "full disclosure" so that you may appreciate my early interest in writing, as well as to demonstrate that I suffer from little shame 48 years later, I place before you the actual first page of six of a short story titled "The Intensity of Blue," along with my very first, well deserved pink slips.

It was October 1957, the year of the Soviet Sputnik, which must have been beaming down dumb rays at me in Germany.

The only training underlying this strained juvenile labor consisted of three years of high school English at New Mexico Military Institute, Roswell, New Mexico, 1951-1954. I probably was also inspired by something I had read somewhere in a Writer's Guide.

In case you're having to squint to read the above reproduction, let me assist. It opens:

Stumbling down the pathway in the dark, Derreck felt as though his psyche was ripping itself loose. This time there was no doubt . . . it was inevitable. He knew he could not withstand the pressures this time. With a feeling of relief at this realization, he fell forward against the outline which he assumed must be a doorway. "Open this damned door! I know you hear me. Someone answer . . . now!" A pause and an eternity. Hallo . . . who?" The voice was faint but it was there.

ENOUGH ALREADY! NO ONE SHOULD HAVE TO ENDURE MORE THAN THIS. If the editors of Playboy and Redbook made it this far in my six-page submission, they should have sued me for wasting their time . . . instead of returning a polite rejection.

The strained style and unrevealed plot line are almost as bad as those of a fellow frosh's creative writing exercise I was asked to critique in an English course in 1959 (it was a bit like asking two village idiots to critique each other's essays). His literary jewel began, "Cruising lazily at the bottom of the Amazon River, a yellow submarine had no intention of surfacing until . . . . "

Now that short story was also an eye-opener, which explains why English teachers either get prematurely grey or acquire permanent, peculiar facial tics.