Yo Joe!

When I was a child, I was obsessed with GI Joe.

It began with my father buying me the first issue of the comic book and reading it to me. That comic, more than anything else, made me want to be a writer. I wrote endless, at least a dozen, fan fiction stories based around tht comic.

I wish I still had those horrible pieces of work. I would treasure them like gold.

I remember waiting for the first episode to debut. It was shown in primetime on my local station, I think it was channel 50, and it blew my damn mind. The animation, the voice acting, and the subject matter were all things I’d never seen before on a children's television show.

It wasn’t long after the show premiered that my mom bought me my first action figure. It was Short Fuse, and he was the figure almost immediately stolen from me by a giant asshole named Dale. That figure, for the brief time I had him, bit the collecting bug in me harder than Star Wars ever did.

That all leads to this one little thing. And really, in the scheme of things, it is such a little thing. This is my convoluted way of saying that I'm doing something that's either very cool (in a nerdy way) or completely pointless.

I’m writing G.I. Joe.

Quite a few years ago, I want to say five, but it might be longer than that. I was working on a GI JOE book that was released in sections when Amazon Kindle Words was up and running. Two were published, but parts 3, 4, and 5 were still on the drawing board, so to speak, when Amazon pulled the plug without really giving the program a chance to thrive.

Big surprise, right?

A few weeks ago, I reread the finished sections of the book and reviewed the notes for the other three, and I liked what I saw. I was still a young writer when I started this project. But the bones are good, and I really like what I’ve done so far.

That was all a lead-in to say I have decided to finish the book and make it free to read on my website or via a free downloadable PDF. I know it won't make me any money, but maybe I'll send it out and see if I can work on the comic books by using it as an example of my writing and my grasp of the property.

Hey, a guy can dream, can't he?

- Josh (04/28/2024)