How Boring Yellow Spaceship changed my life
Lately I’ve upped my reading game.
I’ve always been a reader. Back in the early days, when I was doing homework with my dad, he once got on to me for sitting with the reading primer I’d brought home from school, silently scanning the pages.
“You need to read your school book, son,” he said.
“I’m reading to myself,” I replied,.
WIth a tolerant smile he said, “You have to read it out loud.”
I proceeded to read the text aloud without so much as a stumble, going through the book at a steady pace until I’d gotten to the end. Not one flaw. Not one pause to ask questions about vocabulary.
Dad never made me read aloud again. And I probably took all the wrong lessons from the whole encounter. Even then, I had a strong ego—something I’ve struggled with all my life, apparently.
Reading started becoming something more than schoolwork for me at around that time, I think. It’s hard to know—I didn’t exactly keep a journal yet, and nobody in my family kept up with things like “Kevin’s first novel reading.” Is it weird that I chastise myself for not keeping records at age four or whatever? Damn. your lack of foresight, young Kevin!
But I do know that at that age I was set to devour any book that came my way. Which was mostly short, fun little tomes like the books of Beverly Cleary and Judy Blume—two authors I was forever confusing for each other. But the books I now realize had the biggest impact on me, at that age, were those in Donald J. Sobol’s “Encyclopedia Brown” series.
I didn’t just devour these books—I savored them. I studied them. I returned to them over and over, re-reading before it was cool.
I’ve joked before, but I think there may be some kernel of truth to it—Dan Kotler is basically Encyclopedia Brown all grown up.
In fact, a few years ago when I was asked to contribute a middle-grade story for a promotion aimed at young readers, I wrote my own version of Encyclopedia Brown. Alex Kotler, boy detective, was the nephew of the famed Dan Kotler of my archaeological thrillers. He was smart, got into trouble a lot, and most importantly would solve any case for just a buck. Inflation has driven up the 25-cent rate from Encyclopedia’s days.
That story is more or less my homage to Sobol’s books. And it’s kind of a shame that I haven’t written any sequels to it. Maybe someday…
Later in my adolescence I would read a ton of interesting books that would become part of the inner pantheon of influences on my writing career. Some I can remember vividly as stories, but not as titles. Or I can vaguely remember the titles, but not close enough to go find the books. It’s frustrating.
For example, there’s a book that I think was titled “The Magician of 34th Street,” which frames the world as having recently rediscovered magic. The protagonist isn’t as proficient in magic as others, but in his childhood he was obsessed with street magicians. So he learned coin tricks, card tricks, and other illusions. I don’t recall what the plot of the book was, but this idea, and the character, stuck with me.
Another is a story of a young boy and a white dragon. I cannot for the life of me remember the name of this book, but the memory I have of it involves a scene: The dragon and the boy are in an immense, white desert, and the boy is being snow blinded. It was the first time I’d ever encountered the term or the concept, and again, it stuck with me.
If you happen to know about either of these books, I will be eternally grateful for leads. I’ve been hunting forever.
All through that era, I read things that inspired a sort of playfulness in me. They were books that encouraged me to mimic them, and I did. I wrote stories of my own, usually vaguely plagiarized tales where I replaced the names of the characters I loved with my own name, and the names of friends. But the stories themselves were original—sort of an early version of fan fiction, I’d guess. And lest you think that all my work was derivative at the time, I did also write original short stories of my own. I still have a lot of them, in fact. Maybe sometime soon I’ll dig them out, spruce them up, and see what has legs to release publicly. Could be fun.
But back to reading.
It was in ninth grade when reading became something more than just a passive, happy pastime, and instead morphed into something that would shape my life and destiny.
I was in the high school library with the rest of my ninth grade English class, milling about the aisles in search of a book to read during the testing period. That was our assignment—”Find something to read after you’ve finished your tests.” Standardized testing has always been an inefficient use of time, and so it’s been a time-honored tradition to give students something better to do than sleep with their faces planted on their desks.
Give them a book, to use as a pillow.
I was no book-sleeper, though. I loved reading. Except…
Reading on command was never my thing. I read books because I wanted to read books. But tell me to read a book, and I rebelled. That ego coming to the surface again.
So though I loved reading, I was being kind of a snot that day, in the library. I was goofing around rather than seriously scouring the shelves for something that might catch my attention. And it wasn’t going unnoticed.
The librarian knew her task. She was to usher each of us to something engaging, so that we would stay quiet and occupied between exams. So when she saw me goofing off, she cornered me, asking what I liked to read.
I had no idea how to describe what I liked to read. Genre wasn’t something I”d ever put much thought into. I liked stories about people, that was all I know. I liked stories with good characters, dealing with interesting scenarios, and coming out on top despite all odds.
I likely didn’t have that much articulation in mind, at the time. But that’s what I liked. It’s still what I like.
So, put on the spot, I uttered the only genre that I knew for sure was a genre. “I like science fiction.”
Her eyes lit up. She gestured, and I followed. And we arrived at a tall spinner rack crammed full of paperback novels.
She fished one out and handed it to me.
The first thing I remember noticing as the yellow spaceship.
I felt a sort of groan inside, but held the book, looking from it to her and back again.
Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card.
The exchange from there was mostly about how much I’d love the book, when I read it. And I nodded along, agreeing that it “looked interesting,” yellow spaceship and all. In reality, it looked like it was going to be boring, but by this time I was out of options. The period was ending, and we’d all be herded out. I needed something to read, and by this point in my life Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing was not going to cut it. So I checked out the boring, yellow spaceship book, and went on my way.
The next day was testing.
I have always been a fast test taker. Mostly because standardized tests are a joke that show nothing about the student, and waste tons of tax payers dollars. They shift the attention from actually teaching to just doing the thing that keeps money in the districts coffers, and all students get left behind.
But I digress…
I took my tests fast, and finished early. So I found myself with a couple of hours to kill.
Since I wasn’t going to be allowed to sleep, I took out Boring Yellow Spaceship and started reading.
I’m not going to give you much of a blow-by-blow with this, but let’s just say that over the next two hours, I was down one book.
Boring Yellow Spaceship suddenly became Ender’s Game. And not only did I now have to rush to the library to find more books by Mr. Card, I’d also discovered two new things about myself:
I was a fan of Orson Scott Card, and particularly of his Ender books.
I wanted to be a novelist!
That first realizing had a more immediate impact than the second, at first. I spent the next several years reading anything and everything Card wrote. I read everything he’d produced since Ender’s Game, and bought every new book the instant it came out. And I went looking for everything else I could find by him, including old magazine articles from his days in the gaming industry. I even read stuff that looked way more boring than Boring Yellow Spaceship. If Card wrote the recipe on the back of a soup can, I bought that soup can and read it multiple times.
I was obsessed. I was a fan. I still am.
But the second realization was the game changer.
I wanted to write stories the way Card wrote stories. And I started telling everyone who would listen that this was the work of my life.
I can be a little hard on myself sometimes. I have this sort of eye-rolling thing in my head, when I talk about my dreams and my career. No matter how successful I am at this stuff, there’s still that part of me that thinks, “Yeah, right. Poser.” I imagine that writing is something I “only recently started doing,” despite literally doing it my entire adult life, and much of my adolescent years.
The truth, when I can admit it, is that I was writing and telling people that I was going to be a writer as far back as ninth grade. And before that, I wrote “books” and short stories, dictated into tape recorders, and spun tall tales verbally my whole, tiny life.
I always wanted to be a writer. I always was a writer.
Ender’s Game made me want to be an author. It made me want to be a novelist. It made me want to write stories in longford, and share them with a willing and eager audience.
Which, over time, was exactly what happened.
My writing journey has been a little different than that of Card and other authors I admired. But it got me to here, this point in my life. It got me to who and what and where I am. I’m grateful.
It all started with reading.
So lately, I’ve amped up my reading. I’d gotten to a point where I was only reading dry, non-fiction books, and only in the early morning, part of getting ready for my day. It had gotten to the point where I’d picked up and. started hundreds of books without finishing them—something Young Kevin would never have tolerated. It would have driven him mad… MAD I TELL YOU.
I’d let the reading slip. And, I have to say, I was suffering for it.
Reading is inspiration. It’s also training. That adage that “writers are readers,” as much as I always seemed to hate it, is true. I rebelled against it because, like I said, I never liked being told that I had to read. But ego and arrogance aside, it’s true and good advice. Writers really are readers. And when we don’t read, the writing suffers.
But reading, like all aspects of my life, has changed a bit, since those early, halcyon days of Cleary and Blume. Not just what I read, but how I read has changed.
Kara and I have been in the van for months now. We’ve traveled the country, and we’ve enjoyed it. Loved it. There’s a lot to be said for travel—it truly is, as Mark Twain said, “fatal to prejudice.” But when you’re traveling full time in a space that’s smaller than most American master closets, carrying a lot of books is kind of not gonna happen.
Thank God for modern technology.
Thanks to ebooks, and devices like my Kindle, and apps on my smartphone, I can carry a vast library of books with me at all times. In fact, though I do sometimes yearn for a good paperback, my Kindle has become the top way I read books. I carry it with me everywhere. And when I don’t, I read from my phone.
I’ve made “constant reading” a part of my daily life.
Because it’s fuel. Because it’s training. Because reading, it turns out, rewires our brains and gives us more neural pathways to work with. Reading literally makes us smarter, better humans.
When 2021 started, I had 174 ebooks on my Kindle that I had either started and not finished, or had not read at all. That’s out of the thousands of books I have read, but it’s still a number too big to bear. I have felt a weight from those unread books. They have burdened me.
So I decided I would read them. All of them. This year.
And I’m off to a roaring start. As of today, I’ve read nine of those books, and have three more nearly complete. I read most of those in the first nine days of the month, so I’ve had some slippage since then. When we got back on the road, there were things that took up more of my time and mental bandwidth, so my reading slowed. But it never stopped.
Right now I’m reading a non-fiction book for an hour in the morning, listening to a book of any genre I want while I make coffee and whenever I take walks, and I read fiction for an hour or more each evening, to help me wind down. On days like yesterday, when we’re relaxing and taking a break, I’ll read for several hours, sometimes finishing a book in one sitting. I’ve only done that a couple of times since January 1st, but they’re good days.
All of this reading is having an impact, too. I’m finding my thinking is clearer, more highly structured. I’ve found my focus is improving. I’m able to stay on something longer without looking for distractions.
My dreams are becoming stranger but more pronounced and exciting. They’re becoming more detailed and ordered.
I’m starting to see certain aspects of the world from a different perspective, rather than falling back into the same mental potholes I’ve always had. That’s a good consequence of reading—you are literally letting someone else’s thoughts take up space in your head. You are getting insight from another mind. We could all use that, right now. Identifying with the “other.”
Just like way back in ninth grade, when Ender’s Game and Orson Scott Card ignited something within me, something that fired me up and changed how I thought, and altered the direction of my life, amping up my reading is giving me new purpose. It’s giving me new resources. It’s giving me a new life.
I’m not going to goad you to go and start reading more. You should, but I won’t push you. It’s a personal choice.
All I can say is that reading, and really focusing on reading widely and broadly, has change and improved my life. And I think it could do the same for you. And I want it to.
And of course… you could always read my books to start.
I’m not above shameless plugs.