Jourangadons

I am glad that McVey has been introduced so early in these blog posts. This befits someone that told me I needed to read to Catcher in the Rye. You would think that he made the suggestion during our junior year of highschool, but it didn't happen that way. I didn't read it until about two years after college. How do you get a liberal arts degree without reading Catcher in the Rye? McVey also got me into writing. My first efforts at short stories and a screenplay were all read by him first.

Also, McVey was blogging before it was cool. Unlike my current efforts at blogging many years after blogging became popular. In the days of geocities web sites, McVey introduced the net to Walton Walker's Shoebox. The idea was based upon a basement apartment he lived in around the turn of the millenium. This place was a typical apartment, except for the fact that I would not have even been able to sleep there. One of the doors in his bedroom led to nowhere.

Check that, nowhere would have been preferable. As it was, one of his doors opened to this large open area that was basically a crawlspace. Except that most crawlspaces have a clearance of about 2 and a half feet. This crawlspace was about six feet tall. So imagine a 500 square foot crawl space with mounds of dirt about five feet tall preventing you from seeing more than two or three feet ahead of you except for the ground floor window entry you could see about 75 feet away.

Somewhere in this underworld that was also his water heater closet, McVey concocted a shoebox which contained the greatest memories and stories of Walton Walker. This was not the general in the Patton's Third Army who couldn't find a way across a river and namesake of a Dallas thruway, but a slacker turned young executive that had lived there before he did. They were basically blog posts. Stories about concerts, work, and the like filled his web page.

Around this time, he wrote one of the best children's stories I have ever read. It was about a jourangadong that lived in the forest outside of a town filled with characters. I find writing for children very difficult. This does not come as a surprise to those that know me well, because I have great difficulty communicating with children on any level, much less the written word. I tried. I read all of Daniel Pinkwater's stuff I could get my hands on. It makes sense that his work I enjoyed most consisted of essays he did for Smithsonian magazine.

I have always seen this as my next challenge. Can I write a good children's story? Unfortunately, there are about a dozen other types of writing and subjects that get in the way. Someday, though, my first effort will be on these pages.