Retrospective on "The Babysitter"

So, we're finished with "The Babysitter," and I have to say I'm kind of sad about that.  Since it is, at the time of this writing, my earliest surviving story (I'm still hoping to find some of my older ones, which even more fantastically awful), I thought it would be a good story to begin with, but now I'm sorry to be finished with it.  Despite its (many, many) flaws, the story holds a certain amount of nostalgia for me.

I began writing "The Babysitter" when I was in seventh grade.  As a young aspiring author, I'd been writing for many years, but due to what I've not self-diagnosed as juvenile arthritis (now it's pretty obvious that have arthritis, and it does run in my family, so I feel pretty confident that I had it) my hand often hurt too badly to write for a long stretch of time.  Though we'd had a computer for several years before seventh grade, I never used it with any kind frequency until the day we got a new computer.  Because I was so enthralled with the computer, I used it as often as I could, and one day I got the idea to start typing my stories on it.  It was a match made in Heaven, as my hands could withstand typing for much longer than when I physically wrote the stories, and I was bound by the amount of paper I had, either.  So, this was the beginning of my major writing phase.

Although "The Babysitter" was one of the earliest stories I ever typed, it was not the first.  Before that, I wrote a couple of sequels to "I Know What You Did Last Summer."  For some reason I decided it would be a good idea to delete the stories off the computer after I printed them, so these are sadly among the ones that are now lost.  However, by the time I started "The Babysitter" I had the common sense to keep the files on the computer.  Unfortunately, typing my stories on the computer is also the reason "The Babysitter" got messed up toward the end; I opened the file one day, and there was an error message...and then most of the ending was gone.  To this day I still don't know what happened, but thankfully this was the only story that happened with.

After I had finished "The Babysitter," I was so impressed with it that I showed everyone I could.  While most people just humored me and told me how "good" it was, my dad was the only one who actually told me the truth.  He said that it was good for my age, but that I couldn't get it published (I actually thought it was close to being publisher ready).  At the time I just thought he was wrong, but now I see he was trying to mentally prepare me for the day I realized that it would take a lot of work before I could become a published author.

After I had exhausted nearly every parent, sibling, and every other relative, I moved on to people from church.  I'm choosing to blame my youth on this, because back then I really had no qualms about showing the Baptist members of my church a story about a demon who, with the help of stolen souls, a sketchy cult, and child sacrifices, tried to summon Satan into the mortal world.  Yeah, I really thought they would find it amusing.  To be fair, I obviously wasn't writing stories of this nature because I hoped they happened or something; if I really was the freak that this story portrayed me to be (to the members or my church at least), I wouldn't have had Faith come out on top in the end.  However, these facts didn't sway the minds of the church members.  While they never said anything to my face, their faces as they read the story (especially when they got to the Lily-pinned-to-the-wall part) said it all:  in their eyes, I was seriously disturbed.  None of them complimented the story in any way other than to say, "It's not what I expected," which is actually not a compliment at all.

For a long time people at church probably wondered what sort of sinister thoughts were brewing underneath my non-sinister exterior, but eventually they forgot about it...or at least the pretended to.  No one ever mentioned the story again, and I never brought another to church.  If they disliked "The Babysitter," I knew they wouldn't like stories involving people being burned alive, hungry demons, and trios of homicidal maniacs (I've written stories on all of these subjects).  I think that I ultimately made the right decision.