Starting in the mid ‘nineties, I seemed to reboot my writing career (such as it was) about once a year. I would wait for all stories out at magazines to return (as they usually did), then I put my stories in a pile, swearing to review/edit/reprint them and start afresh.
On New Year’s Day 2000, I looked at all my shelves of books. I must have been part-way through sixty or seventy of them, and I hated picking up one halfway done, knowing I’d lost the thread of the narrative. I decided to re-boot my reading. I pretended I had never read a thing in my life, and that all the books were fresh.
This worked quite well for several years, but unfortunately 2000 onward was the beginning of the crappiest period of my life.
Which brought me to one more major reboot. I invented a younger version of myself and decided that everything he saw, heard, read, and experienced was as new to him as to a newborn infant. Oh, he could read, write, talk, and otherwise function, but all media and life had been forgotten, like a total amnesiac.
I thought of him just as “the little dude” for a long time, but he developed a personality of his own (as characters are supposed to do for novelists) and decided his name was Cubby. Obviously there’s the idea of a baby animal, but a “cub” is also defined as “a young and inexperience person.” So Cubby he was.
Of course, being a figment of my imagination, he takes after me, and the books, TV shows, music, and stories he encounters are from my own collection, thus reflecting my tastes. At first I was just hoping to experience things afresh, but now my hope is that Cubby will rekindle the freshness in my life and work that fizzled out over the last decade.
I started the Cubby project on January 1 of 2008, twice in 2009, and twice in 2010. Each time personal crises shook up my life so much, I abandoned the mental exercise after a few weeks.
However . . . Cubby sort of reappears in my head of his own accord once in a while. He wants to know about the world and his place in it. He’s decided to begin his education again, despite raging allergies with cold-like symptoms and headaches on my part. Perhaps the sixth time is the charm, especially since the Cubster initiated the project himself rather than let me launch it artificially.
An aside: I have reviewed every bibliography, scoured AbeBooks and Amazon, and I have listed nearly every book that I don’t have that I’d like to have. If I collected them all, I would own about 4800 books altogether – all I could conceivably need. So Cubby has a ways to go to read them all. He’ll keep a count and a comparison.
So: On to Cubby’s awakening into the world.
