Awkwardness and Redemption In Junior High (Part 9 of 10)

I had been working on a science fiction story in my mind for a long time. I used this as the basis for many of my writing assignments. Then in February of 1976, Mrs. Mecham gave us a short story assignment that had to be at least five pages long. We had the weekend to work on it and turn it in on Monday. I again used my science fiction story ideas to write this assignment. I figured I’d write it that night as we watched the Olympics on TV. By the end of the evening I had six pages and wasn’t anywhere near being done with the story. I worked on it all day on Saturday and I finally finished it late Saturday night. It was 25 pages long. It was called The Assesena Crew 915. It was about a star ship that was 12 kilometers long.
I turned in my story on Monday morning. It took two months for Mrs. Mecham to correct it! And then she asked me to re-write it. Her suggestion: to make it longer! And type it.
Re-writing it was the easy part. I developed the characters better and I re-worked the ending and made other plot adjustments. It was 36 handwritten pages long. We had a Smith-Corona typewriter at home. On this I began the monumental task of typing it. We had a big box of teletype paper rolls in our basement. Each roll was yellow paper with carbon paper included in the roll. It was actually already set up to make three copies. I cut the rolls into 8½ inch by 11 inch sheets and put them in the typewriter so I’d have three copies. If I made a mistake in typing, which I did a lot, I couldn’t go back and correct it. It had to stand as it was. Since this was a science fiction story I worked in a disclaimer about the mistakes. I said at the beginning of the piece that this story had undergone many translations (the Judakatrupian language for one) and that as a result, it had a few spelling mistakes. “Please just pretend that they aren’t even there.” I spent days and days typing. The typewriter was set up on a table in the laundry room. Mom had seen my work go on and on and she knew I had to get it done by the end of the school year. She agreed to type the last several pages for me. When it was done, I bound the three copies all together like a book. It even had photographs and drawings in it. I proudly turned it in to Mrs. Mecham and she said she’d read it with the greatest attention.
A few days later was the school yearbook signing day. I had Mrs. Mecham sign mine. She wrote, “Someday I will look on my shelf and find a book written by Billy Loveless and all the words will be spelled correctly.”