Back in the day Jim Falk and I used to write books, magazines and comics together.  Nowadays he is a super sweet artist.  You can see his artwork on his myspace profile http://www.myspace.com/jimbo17x.  I scanned one of the comics that we did.  It was called "From the Dark Comics".  We were big into comic books and horror movies.  We enjoyed watching "Tales From the Crypt" together.  This comic book is so gory.  It's kind of disturbing that I did it when I was a kid.  But hey, I turned out OK and so did Jim.

I remember when Shemp was younger, I used to look forward to letting him go outside through the front door in the winter. I enjoyed tossing up snowballs into the air and having Shemp fetch them. He would always catch them like they were a treat or something even though when he bit down, the snow would dissolve in his mouth. I remember that Shemp would chase us around in the snow and get pretty rowdy. He would actually chase and attack you if you ran and provoked him. I would wear gloves though so he wouldn't bite my hand. Those were fun times when it was dark and quiet outside and you would just hear the snow falling. The other night I took Shemp out because he sounded like he was going to throw up or something. I didn't have any gloves on but I picked up some snow and tossed it. He caught it.

I remember in band class I used to sit next to a trombonist named Jeff Smith. I must have been in last chair or something at the time to be sitting next to the trombones. Anyway, Jeff offered to sell me a Super Nintendo game called "Final Fantasy II". I can't remember why I actually bought it from him. I don't think I had heard of it before. I never played a role playing game before that except Zelda. I believe I bought it from him for $20.

Anyway, I immediately fell in love with it. I loved that you could name the characters. I also liked that it was the first video game that I played that had a real story with characters with different personalities that you actually cared about. I think I had started to write "The End of the World" already and so I was kind of in that fantasy zone already. Also, the graphics and music were unmatched at the time. I couldn't believe that there was actually a musical score with synthesized . . . Read More..

When I was in fifth grade I started writing these books called "The Adventures of Rover Robot". Rover Robot was this character I created who was from Uranus. He came to Earth on his spaceship which crash landed. It was inspired by "E.T.", "Batteries Not Included" and "Short Circuit". I was really into science fiction as a kid.

Throughout the series other characters were introduced such as "Redrina Robot", Rover's sister as well as a robot pet dog. I think that Austin and my brother and my cousins all made appearances in the books as did "Johnny 5" from the Short Circuit movie.

Rover Robot was what really got me into writing. The stories would usually be half a page of writing and an illustration at the bottom. This format continued on through "The End of the World" book series.

Rover also . . . Read More..

The Super Bowl is always a blast. The Stalker's and Renne's always get together and drink, eat, gamble, and celebrate Shemp's birthday. We were never sure the exact date of his b-day but we figured Super Bowl Sunday was a good day. On this particular day our front lawn was a sheet of ice(I totally don't even know what that looks like anymore). We had this trick where we threw a treat down the lawn for Shemp to get. Our front lawn is a slight hill, mind you. So Shemp would run after it only to slide down the lawn, it was funny. My dad decided to show the trick off to everyone who was over for the party. This time Shemp slide all the way down to the street as a car was coming. This car had to of been going about 40 mph and missed Shemp by inches. The dude was probally drunk and didn't even see Shemp since he's a black dog and it was dark outside. Needless to say we never did that trick again and Shemp survived another b-day.