Tales of Long Ago

A post today at Emma Newman's blog got me remembering stuff. (Since she says her post was inspired by a post of my own, this is becoming strange and incestuous. Either that or it's what people used to call a 'conversation'.)

Emma recounts the amazing tale of the two times she nearly stopped writing. My own tale is rather different. I have never nearly stopped writing. (I've completely given up all hope of publication a couple of times.) I can't imagine a life where I don't write. It would be torture.

Since I was as young as I can remember, I have written stories. By the time I was ten, I'd focused down on sci-fi. Apart from reading, writing stories was all I did with my spare time as a child - and all I do with it now.

So when, at the age of 11 or 12, climbing my way up the slippery pole in my local scout troop... (All right, for those who know me, this might seem an unlikely thing for me to have done. In fact, I was in the scouts for a couple of years and became a troop leader. It was great and I really enjoyed it.) Where was I? Ah yes. Getting on in the scouts meant earning badges. Badges were great and I had an armful of them. For one such badge, I had to provide evidence of a hobby I had pursued diligently for at least a year. The only thing I did that fit the bill was writing. So I brought in a (very) thick sheaf of sci-fi stories I had written and handed them to 'Skip'. He looked at them in dismay and said he'd have to think about it.

Next time I saw him, he was very concerned. He wanted to know if I had really written the stories and not some grown up I knew. I was hurt and flattered at the same time. I discussed the stories with him at length until he was completely convinced they were my own work. It didn't seem to cheer him up though. Writing stories, I eventually concluded from his tactful reticence to accept them, wasn't really a scout-like thing to do. It wasn't really in the spirit of it. In the end, when I had promised I had no other hobby and it was this or nothing, he decided he must send the stories up the chain of command to get a ruling from his superiors.

It took weeks but, finally, the word came back down the line that I could have my badge. As far as Skip knew, I was the only scout ever to get the badge on the basis of this particular hobby (although it seems unlikely to me). If so, I may be the only sci-fi writer who has won a scouting badge for his work. (Who needs a Nebula or a Hugo with an achievement like that?)

At the time, I was merely relieved I'd got through ordeal and earned the badge. Now I tend to think how well this reflects on the scouting movement. Yes, they tend to emphasise a lot of healthy, outdoorsy, quasi-military activities but, when it came to it, they were flexible enough to allow the definition of a scout also to include more intellectual pursuits.

Maybe someone else will be inspired by this recollection to add their own childhood writing story. We could get a chain going.