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Posts Tagged ‘story’

I have wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember, but it took a while for me to realize just how much. I gave in to it one night while I was still living with my parents. I was probably around 20. I hadn’t decided what I wanted to do with my life and I was between jobs. The entire block went dark around 8 o’clock at night. After all of our neighbors went outside to investigate and spent an hour or so discussing power outages, everyone retreated to their dark, silent homes to wait for the lights, and more importantly, for their TVs to come back on.  When that didn’t happen, everyone gave up and went to bed.

I stayed up, restless, vigilant. The silence was incredible. It’s amazing how much noise a little suburban house can make when the electricity is on. You never realize the hums that we live with and that blend into the backgrounds of our awareness. I was fascinated by that and since the power outage lasted so long, the silence kept calling to me. So I decided not to waste it, this silence I knew I would probably not hear again for a long time. Flashlight in hand, I looked around and found a book. I have no idea where it came from or who it belonged to. It was sitting in a bookshelf in the TV room. So I sat there in the silence with my flashlight and started to read.

I didn’t stop until well after it was light and the batteries of the flashlight were running low. The light came in through the front window as dawn broke. The power was still out. I had shifted positions on the couch at least thirty times and I had read a book cover to cover for 8 hours. During that, my first real read, I remember how much my body craved sleep, but not my mind. The story had taken hold of me and I couldn’t stop until it was over.

The lights came back on right about the time my parents were getting ready for work. Completely exhausted, but somehow renewed, I fell into bed with the knowledge that I had finally found what I loved–the written word and a really good story.

What book did I read? You will be surprised to know that it wasn’t what I would consider great literature. It was a story about what would happen to the U.S. if a comet hit the earth. As it turns out, it’s become quite a cult classic among early science fiction disaster stories.  The name of the book is Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.