"Idle Essence" Tales of Marvin -a collection of short stories

 Many people may not know that way before I wrote comedy murder mystery plays, I wrote stories.  It began when I was very young, I had an overactive imagination that had time to ferment since I was an only child and spent quite a lot of time alone. I read a lot and created my own stories. While the world took a health break in 2020, and live theatre had to stop, I looked back at my simple stories and decided to turn my attention there.

 

I took a few early memories and started writing them down as short stories. The memories reflected what it was like growing up in the Midwest in the  1960s and on into the early 1970s.   The first thing I did was move the first-person perspective away from myself and toss it over to the third person. I felt this would free up any personal attachments to the stories, plus it would allow fictional enhancements to weave into the thin ribbon of truth.  I wasn't interested in writing a memoir--a true-to-life portrait--but more something akin to an impression of a memory.  Not an actual picture of waterlilies but Monet's waterlilies, if you get my meaning.   I created the character of Marvin Milstead to represent a  mirror of myself, in much the same way Mark Twain echoed himself in Tom Sawyer. As  I wrote it was as if a portal opened,  one story reminded me of something else and that begat more memories which lead to more stories and so forth and so on.   Each story explores a different point, event, and time period in Marvin's life from the first day of kindergarten with Kitties In The Garden through the divorce of his parents and being raised by grandparents and a single mother in the stories For A Change.   I finally decided to collect them all into a book and see what would happen.  Idle Essence is the result.