In my parents' basement are a couple boxes filled with, it seems, every piece of paper on which my sister or I ever so much as scribbled. I decided to post a few here because I know I'd be thrilled to see the early childhood creations of my friends, and because I think it's funny how much you can tell about me now from what I did then. Fortunately, I am now a better speller.
My very first continuing character was a girl named Cutey Taffy. (I didn't know where names came from in the summer of '89, so I just picked what sounded like a realistic name to me.) Her first story was about a grape ice cream cone that grew to mammoth proportions after chemical tampering. She then starred in a stack of other books, mostly published on old computer printouts donated to the school as drawing paper by my dad, folded into booklets and stapled down the middle, filled with whatever amount of story would fit.
I was also the school's foremost expert on natural disasters. I read all the books the library had on tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, blizzards and volcanoes, which simultaneously fascinated and terrified me. I would scream and hide when I heard the beeping noise that announced that a severe weather alert was about to scroll across the bottom of the TV.
Naturally my characters got hit by disasters on a regular basis.
And so I present to you my masterwork. It was rewritten several times as the need arose, but this two-volume edition was written in spring 1990, when I was in the second grade.
Cutey and the Tornado: 1 • 2 • 3
And that's all I have to share of Cutey's adventures for now. I hope you got a laugh or two out of it. I think kids are fun people, and getting a glimpse of older friends as kids is especially fun.