I was 13 when I created a fictional rural town that became Ridgewood, Pennsylvania. I was an eighth-grade high school student who owned a portable Remington typewriter. That instrument and my imagination allowed me to escape from the ordinary world. I’m not saying my life was boring or difficult, but like the child who turns to books, movies, and video games today, I enjoyed going to places the real world couldn’t take me.
So, I wrote stories and modeled them after my favorite books and television shows. And like most young writers, I wrote my stories from a first-person point of view. Pretending to be someone else was fun. But pretending to be me in a fictional world was both a new and refreshing way to write. My stories were like fictional diary entries where I interacted with my favorite books and television characters. We call this writing style “fan fiction” today, but when I was a teenager, nothing like it was on the market.
A year later, I created my own characters and locations. One such place was Myers Ridge near Alice Lake and on the outskirts of Ridgewood. I lived there with neighbors Dave and Amy Evans, twins. His name came from the popular US daytime gothic horror TV show, Dark Shadows. His first name came from the boy character, David Collins, and his surname came from the waitress, Maggie Evans.
The three of us rode the school bus together to Ridgewood High School where we were ninth-grade students. Dave and I played sports together for the school’s Fighting Eagles, and our football and baseball teams won the state championships that year. We also liked to draw and paint, so Dave and I won some awards at the nearby Alice Lake Art Fair that summer. His dad was an artist too and was the art teacher at the high school. He and his wife bought Dave a male golden retriever puppy for his birthday in July, which Dave named Rembrandt after the famous Dutch artist.
We were fifteen when two new families moved to our neighborhood on Myers Ridge. The first family gave us Lenny Stevens who was our age. The second family gave us Verawenda Erickson who stole Dave’s heart. She was also fifteen. She became Vree when I gave her the initials VRE (her middle name is Renee). I have blogged extensively about her at this blog, so I’ll keep information about her short.
She first appeared in a short story I wrote at school when I was fourteen. In it, her name was Vera Erikson, and she was a 9-year-old cousin to 14-year-old Dave and Amy. Later that year, I changed her name to Verawenda for another story I wrote at school. You can find that story “Ghost Love” at my blog. That story along with my love of supernatural books, movies, and television, prompted me to bring the paranormal element to Myers Ridge when I was fifteen.
Thanks for joining me today for this look back at the boy who created both fictional characters and a world I still write about.
Until my next post, peace and love.
Steve, 9/24/2024
This post “Ridgewood Beginnings” copyright © 2024 Steven Leo Campbell at stevecampbellcreations.com – All rights reserved.
Steve Campbell Creations 