Inventing Lightning

...there was a boy that wanted to be real. He believed that almost everything was real. He believed in magic and ghosts and monsters and mysteries.

But he didn't believe in himself.

The people around told him that he was real, but for years and years he wasn't able to find proof what they were saying was true. He waited for a sign. Something would happen and prove he was real.

Perhaps lightning would strike him and he'd come to life.

He'd look out the window, waiting for sky to darken. But day after day and year after year the skies were maddingly clear.

He grew up and became an adult and did adult things. But still he believed in almost everything, including vampires and werewolves and aliens and goodness. Every day, he looked out the window and waited and waited. Blue, blue skies. Hard to complain about that. And he realized that he was a little afraid of the lightning. What if it hit him and he found out he wasn't real after all?

Finally he couldn't stand it any longer. He had to know. If the lightning wasn't going to come, he'd build a lightning machine and make some of his own. He had no idea how to build one, but that wasn't about to stop him. He tied a key to a kite, then dug up some potatoes and pounded nails into them.

Out in his backyard, crucified potatoes in the pockets of his fleece robe, he sent the kite into the clear sky. He held the key tight and rubbed his slippered feet together and thought: There's no place like Orb.

The skies turned his favorite shade of gray and thunder rumbled, but no lightning came.

Every day he did this for hours and while a storm threatened, it never broke.

Until it did. Until one day the sky went black and the thunder rumbled to a pause. The lighting ripped the sky in two and it came for him. He caught it like a fish on his kite string and it baked the potatoes in his pockets in a flash. It surged through him, sending shocks from the ends of his hair to the tips of his toes. He felt the goosebumps all over and he knew he was real. He was as real as winged horses and mermaids and a competent president.

And he learned something. He had learned that lightning doesn't just come out of the blue. You have to build a lightning machine and you have to make it yourself.

And that, kids, is how I wrote my first book.