Booking It

(July 2014)

As July began, Dipper decided his moment had come. Time for the big step. Not as big as getting engaged to Wendy, sure, but a big one.

Time to begin . . . his first novel.

His heart pounded every time he thought about writing something and sending it off to a publisher. Who would probably laugh at it and send it right back. But still—it might be a way of making some money over the next couple of years. And sometimes, sometimes, lightning did strike.

The lucky kind of lightning that would make this person a successful writer, or that one a singing sensation, or another one maybe a famous cartoonist. But you couldn't get hit by lightning if you didn't go and play in the thunderstorms.

He'd spent time reading up on the writing process online. "Write what you know." "Draw on your own experiences." "Write to please yourself before you try to please others."

"Many writers choose to write under pseudonyms if their real names are unpleasing or if they want to preserve their anonymity."

"There is no one age for a person to write a novel. Novels have been successfully written by children as young as four and by adults in their nineties."

"The only way to begin is to begin."

Good advice, he'd decided. Good advice.

He had jotted down some notes, and in the late twilight of a lazy summer day, up in his attic room in the Mystery Shack, he sat down at his laptop, took a deep, deep breath, and began:

Bride of the Zombie

By Stan Mason

If you're like most kids, you look forward to summer. No school! A time to kick back and relax! Cookouts! Swimming! Nonstop fun!

Unless you're me. My name is Tripper Pins. I'm twelve years old, and I want to tell you about one particular day. Picture me frantically driving a golf cart through the piny-scented, cool-shaded Northwest woods, being chased by a tidal wave of unimaginable horror. The girl sitting beside me and trying not to puke is my twin sister, Alexa.

I suppose you're wondering what we're doing here. Rest assured, there is a simple explanation. It'll just take a while to get to it.

Let's rewind.

When school ended a few days ago, my sister and I just wanted a normal summer in our home town of Mount Pied, California. I planned to read stories and watch TV shows about the paranormal. Alexa would knit, paint, and explore the wonderful world of eating non-food substances.

But our parents worried about us not enjoying enough fresh air and sunshine, so they handed us our luggage, slapped heavy backpacks on us, slathered greasy sunscreen on our noses, and shoved us out the door. We were going to spend the summer with a relative in the Great Outdoors.

Yeah. We wound up taking an eighteen-hour bus ride to Granite Falls, Oregon.

Our great-uncle Manford Pins (or Grunkle Manny, as Alexa immediately called him) met the bus. He is in his sixties, and he's a famous scientist. No, really. Even though he only shaves once a week, and he spends most of his time wearing a fez, floppy bedroom slippers, a sleeveless undershirt, and boxer shorts, he's supposed to be a famous scientist.

Who has turned his house into the Mysterious Mansion—it's really a ramshackle log cabin—and has also made it into a tourist trap. I mean, it's stuffed with things like the monkfish, a monkey's butt sewed onto the front half of a tuna, and the Sasquirt, which is a cross between a bigfoot and a skunk (taxidermied), and actual photographs of invisible ghosts—you get the idea. Junk. All fake.

Working in the Mansion for Grunkle Manny are Hoss—that's short for, believe it or not, José—who is twenty-one years old, shaped like a six-foot-tall buck-toothed pear, and is a handyman and general helper; and Mindy Velveteen, a slender, tall, beautiful fifteen-year-old girl with the longest and most gorgeous red hair I have ever seen, who is the cashier in the gift shop. More about them later.

On our first day in Granite Falls, we mostly slept because, let's face it, on a bus trip like that the best you can do is grab a ten-minute cat nap now and then.

Then the second day we went outside, mostly to get away from Grunkle Manny, who had decided we were going to be his indentured servants for the summer. My sister discovered grass. She's so easy to please.

Me? Well, Grunkle Manny gave me a boring job in spooky surroundings. I'm talking the deep woods, with a dismal wind howling in the treetops and little skittering sounds as unseen creatures ran through the undergrowth around my feet.

Then while I was slogging along, nailing signs along a hiking trail in the woods to direct any random hikers to the Mysterious Mansion, I discovered a very unusual tree. It was made of metal, not wood, for one thing. When I tried to drive a nail in it, it clanged.

For another, I discovered it had a secret door, and when I accidentally found and opened it, I also unearthed something that was going to change our lives forever.

The Diary!

Dipper stopped keyboarding and sat there staring at the screen and sweating. Was this cheating? Was it too close to the real thing?

"I'll have to ask someone to read it," he muttered. Maybe Grunkle Ford—but he'd be too easy, encouraging Dipper regardless of how bad it might be. Not Mabel. Much as he loved her as a sister, he feared her as a critic. And she'd be sure to take over.

Soos wrote fanfiction, but then Soos was . . . Soos. And Grunkle Stan? "Eh, this is OK, but how ya gonna make a buck from it?" Last resort.

Maybe . . . Wendy? She'd be honest with him, because she knew he could hold her hand and get a sense of whether she was giving him truthful feedback or not.

But—not yet. Dipper groaned. "If I do two pages a day like this, it'll take me all summer. Let's see: One chapter every week, fourteen or fifteen pages. Ten chapters in all. Ten weeks. July, August, and part of September. I'll have to e-mail it to Wendy."

His heart sank. Without personal contact, he wouldn't know if she were encouraging him, teasing him, or letting him down easy.

OK, maybe four pages a day. That way he'd be done in the middle of August. But he'd have to write four pages every single day. And even then it would be just first draft.

However—I'm in it for the long haul, he thought grimly. The first draft is the hardest part.

He started to tap the keys again.

He'd begun. Now all he had to do was put down one letter at a time until he had a word, then a space, then another word, and then two more, and a sentence, and a paragraph . . . Dipper smiled to himself when he remembered another piece of advice he'd read online:

"There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit at the keyboard and bleed."

The End