Yesterday I returned to the unpacking chore I set aside five months ago. Back then, I posted excerpts from musty, old notebooks I’d found — stories and essays I wrote when I was in junior high and high school. Well, I just found the motherlode. The following epic tale is the first story that appears in the lost classic “My Book of Stories by John Sellers,” written in the spring of 1979, when I was in the third grade. I wish I knew how to post the drawing that accompanies it. Imagine ten evil TIE Fighters trading volleys of red lasers with the good Battlestar Galactica and its plucky fighter ships.

“Battlestar Galactica War”

Battlestar Galactica won but only because they had more ships (including the Galactica). Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica are my favorite movie and show. Boomer, Sheba, Starbuck, Apollo and the Galactica did not get hit. Two of the Galactica’s laser beams got fired off by their same guys.

[AJS note: That’s it. That’s the first story I probably ever wrote. Okay, we all know it’s not very good. In fact, it blows. I’m not sure that at eight years of age I was very smart. Actually, that’s not accurate. I excelled at math. In the first grade, I’d made Meredith Hurley cry while demonstrating my prowess at flash-card multiplication races; I also was way ahead of the long-division curve because my dad had taught me how to figure out the averages of Detroit Tigers players when I was seven. But “Battlestar Galactica War” indicates that, editorially, I wasn’t fully formed. Tune in to see the slow, sad development.]

WHY I’M ANGRY TODAY

I still haven’t gotten paid for something I wrote in January.