My first anniversary as a member of this site came and went without any fanfare, but the fact I'd reached that milestone with still no stories posted caused me to wonder: is it unusual for someone here to be part of the site for as long as I have, and yet contribute no stories at all?

Not that I'm lacking for ideas--I have almost too many. Observe below, at these plot synopses taken directly from my notes:

1. To Walk A Mile....

As a class assignment, the boys and the girls of a suburban middle school class switch genders for the school year. The class sessions will be filmed, and the students will be encouraged to keep a video diary of their daily experiences, emotions, frustrations. The resulting video footage will be included in a nationally broadcast reality-documentary series. Parents initially are outraged, but are won around with the promise of scholarships to the school of the student's choice for those who stick it out the entire year. It would prove a revelation for most of the kids, and the salvation of one boy (who inside was anything but).

2. Poster Child (Alternate Title: "We Are Walking, We Are Talking"):

3. Untitled Story Inspired By "Future Tense" Challenge: In a dystopian future some 150 years from today, genetic engineering (using a specially coded virus) is the primary tool of the judicial system. Instead of being incarcerated in an overcrowded prison, if the court feels the person can be rehabilitated, he or she is regressed/progressed to a different age, assigned a new gender, or both. How far back the person is regressed, or progressed, depends on how harmful he (or she) is perceived to be. If he's hopelessly criminal (serial killer, say) he is progressed in age to a point at which he's too feeble to do harm, or regressed until he is too tiny to do so. One man, wrongly regressed and turned female, works to uncover clues that the genetic manipulation is likely being put to more nefarious purposes than originally intended.

So there you have it--several potential stories. But as the saying goes, "Potential means you ain't done it yet." They haven't been written, and likely won't be.

Why, you ask? I don't know if there's such a word as "graphophobia", but if there isn't, it should be shoehorned into the Oxford English Dictionary solely to describe me. Not mere writer's block, but several orders of magnitude beyond--a fear of, a terror of, writing.

Granted, this did not apply to anything non-fiction, or this ragtime gal's blog would be as nonexistent as her fashion sense: I wrote reams of letters as a child, a habit born of necessity as an Army brat in Germany. If I wanted to contact relatives in that pre-internet age, letters were it. It helped that I had a mania for writing implements--typewriters, stencils, labelmakers, as well as colored pens and pencils. Anything that made letters, really.

But in school, the words that made my blood run colder than liquid nitrogen were, "Write a 250-word story about...." In other words, fiction. Something I had to make up. Something that required my imagination, that was a reflection of my intelligence. That I had to somehow pick out of the literally millions upon millions of possible ideas floating in the ether and make coalesce on paper.

Something that gave clues about an inner self I was terrified for anyone to know about.

I did the assignment, but only after a good deal of tears and threats of a failing grade if I failed to do it, or had to be dismissed from the room. But I would sooner have endured half a days' paddling non-stop than that.

I have certain educated guesses (for lack of a better term) as to why or how that phobia developed--perhaps the feeling that I had to continually prove how intelligent I was, and therefore hated doing anything out of my comfort zone, anything that had the potential to make me look stupid. The disability played into it, too, I think. So many books portrayed us as having a hidden brilliance, obscured by the disability and brought out only by a caring individual. The numerous ones about Helen Keller, for instance. Or Louis Braille. Or FDR. I devoured books about them, and their message was loud and clear: if you're disabled, you'd damn well better have a compensatory intelligence or creative talent (or better yet, both.)

Or else. And you don't want to know the "or else."

Regardless of the reason, to this day I have an internal voice that guards against writing anything that will make me seem less than intelligent. My "this will make you look stupid!" voice kicked in with the ferocity of a tiger while writing every one of the story outlines written above.

All of them set off the "lack of plausibility" alarm. If it's not likely to happen, if there's any kind of problem with the logic of the story, I will abandon it, even if I loved it for all eternity the moment before.

In the case of the first story, I doubted that a teacher would be allowed to do such a thing--even though classroom experiments every bit as radical as that have been tried at various times. For instance, the movie, "The Wave", in which a teacher tries to show how Germans allowed the atrocities of the Nazis to happen by creating a fascist-type classroom organization. (Based on a real 1967 experiment in California). Switching gender roles would seem like a walk in the park by comparison.

Still, to have students actually switch gender for a year seems to be the sort of story that would have eyes reflexively rolling from the first sentence onward. Sure, people have written stories that are even less likely here, but plausibility is vitally important to me.

The case of the second was even more problematic, given the era and the convoluted setup. Using real people (such as Dennis James) as characters could prove troublesome, so I'd probably have to fictionalize it a great deal more. A lot of unlikely things have to happen for it to work--what Roger Ebert calls an "idiot plot." They likely could have gotten help without having to resort to something so crazy. I also had no idea how to believably end the thing.

I might as well tell you where the idea came from. I knew a fellow with CP who had been one of the kids in that telethon, walking in a circle with other CP kids to the tune "We are walking, we are talking, though we've never walked and talked before...." He remembered being mortified by the whole experience. I neither witnessed it nor--thank every deity imaginable-- participated in it. Just the description, however, seemed so cringingly exploitative and maudlin to me, that it begged for someone like my main character to make those responsible for such condescension look like fools.

But the historical research is beyond me, and I don't want to be seen as insulting a well-intentioned, if flawed, effort to help people.

Next....

The last seems the easiest to complete, though it too would require a head-spinning amount of research.

I've tried the "go with the flow" method, and not worry about story structure, only to write myself into a corner and can't work my way out of. Or write a howlingly bad line of dialogue. Or leave a Euro-tunnel sized plot hole. In the trash it goes. I've tried to write an outline, only to discover I have no clue how to write an outline.

So if you've been wondering why I've never written anything here save for this blog, you can now be grateful this blog is the only thing I write.