Collected Stories
Youth, Teen Drama Offerings
Offered below are the Note from the Author, Table of Contents, and Anecdotal sections of the Collected Stories: Drama Youth, Teen. I refer to the book as Youth, Teen Drama, of course. It's one and the same. The title is actually turned around so the readers will know first off that it's a Collected Stories volume which will hopefully mean something to people one day. Secondly, I want the reader to know it's a Drama genre theme for this particular collection. After that, it's evident these dramas are designed for youth and teens.
At least, that's my intention.
I'm including these three bits from the Youth Drama collection because some of the stories are for teens, but youth may be reading them. The teen stories aren't too harsh, but they might be too mature for younger readers. Unfortunately, I'm not the best judge of that, so I offer you the reader an opportunity to read these three sections. From them, you'll get a good idea of what stories the collection offers, what maturity level exists there, and what content those stories involve.
After that, it's you're choice whether or not to purchase this collection for your child. If you are the youth who'd be reading this book, you can be your own judge deciding if these stories would interest you.
At least, that's my intention.
I'm including these three bits from the Youth Drama collection because some of the stories are for teens, but youth may be reading them. The teen stories aren't too harsh, but they might be too mature for younger readers. Unfortunately, I'm not the best judge of that, so I offer you the reader an opportunity to read these three sections. From them, you'll get a good idea of what stories the collection offers, what maturity level exists there, and what content those stories involve.
After that, it's you're choice whether or not to purchase this collection for your child. If you are the youth who'd be reading this book, you can be your own judge deciding if these stories would interest you.
A Note from the Author,
Hello, this collection of stories involves more than one sub-genre. As these stories are designed for different audiences, I suggest the reader pay heed to the table of contents before reading certain stories. In the table of contents, stories are listed by Page Number; Protagonist, Genre; Word Count, and Story Title. The Page Number and Story Title are self-explanatory. The Word Count is a drawback to writing classes and magazine submittal guidelines. In each case, stories are defined by how many words they possess, not how many pages they might involve.
What may of most importance is the individual Protagonist, Genre listing.
This is the gauge of how old the protagonist in the individual story is. Accordingly, this also works as a suggestion of the target audience for that same story - Child, Youth, or mixed. The genre is primarily that of the given volume, but a Drama-based story might also be a Mystery or a Horror as sub-genre.
The genre listing is an important part of the story make-up.
This collection is presented and designed to appeal to a wide audience. I was debating publishing this collection in three smaller bits: youth, teen, and mixed. They’d all be pretty small collections, so I discarded that thought, and I decided I could list the stories by age group within the greater Youth, Teen heading. Mixed is used for stories involving a child or teen protagonist dealing with more adult concerns. Drama is supposed to break boundaries. That’s what makes it drama. How do I know a teen won’t enjoy a youth story? Or a youth won’t like a teen story? I don’t. This way, the three different groups are open to each, and everyone can be challenged in one way or another.
I entreat you to explore and enjoy. I look forward to feedback. Let me know what think. There are some interesting anecdotes about the stories included before the stories begin. I’ve added these because in most cases, I feel they enrich the story.
To the reading.
________________________________________________________________________
Collected Stories
Drama - Youth, Teen
Youth
Page 9 Child/Youth, Drama 1575 Words Toast
Page 12 Youth/Adult, Drama 4847 Words Brothers
Page 21 Child/Youth, Fantasy 6716 Words Moon Spell
Page 32 Child/youth, Drama 2773 Words What was That?
Page 37 Youth, Drama 8153 Words For Jimmy
Page 51 Older Youth, Drama 6260 Words A Heavy Mind
Page 62 Child, Fantasy/Mystery 1991 Words Little Voices
Teen
Page 67 Teen, Drama 2567 Words A Little Cold
Page 72 Street Youth, Drama 3925 Words Coming of Age
Page 78 Teen, Drama 1795 Words Addictions
Page 81 Teen, Horror 18915 Words Veclanshire Pieces
Page 111 Teen, Drama 2501 Words Elevator 34B
Page 116 Teen, Drama 7225 Words Monday
Page 128 Teen, Drama 2862 Words Burdens
Page 134 Young Adult, Drama 4936 Words First Impressions
Mixed
Page 143 Youth/Adult, Drama 4589 Words A Fond Place
Page 151 Teen/Adult, Drama 6776 Words On the Line
Page 164 Child, Dark Drama 1548 Words Music Therapy
___________________________________________________________________________
Anecdotal:
I think I’d pick A Fond Place as my favourite in this collection. This story was written originally for a school assignment. I sought to convincingly confront how a person deals with death, their own or another’s. Of course, in A Fond Place, I also aimed to place a story in a set era. I selected Quebec, winter, mid-seventies. It was a bit of a challenge as I was still pretty young at that point in history myself, but I think I did alright. More pointedly, I tried to put in enough detail of that selected era without overdoing the effort. That was a bit harder than expected.
Toast came about because I didn’t have many stories that involved child protagonists. And simple stories are nice to write sometimes. There really wasn’t much of a challenge with this story all things said and done.
Brothers was inspired by a co-worker and is written for much the same ultimate purpose - a simple, inviting, entertaining story. The challenge in Brothers was to balance out two sets of protagonists: a pair of youth with their given dialogue and a pair of adults with their own selective speech, nothing too crude, but adult speech just the same. It still has me unsure whether to list this particular story as under the Youth or Young Adult genre. It might work to suggest Teen, but there aren’t any teenagers in the story. I'm pretty sure it ended up under Youth/Adult.
First Impressions was a school assignment. It essentially just kind of came to mind. It deals with society’s view of the homeless and the way some people gauge personal worth. I surprised myself a little with this story. When writing the support character’s dialogue, I found his rather unsupportive point of view quite clear, and through his voice, I found myself coming up with possibly quite workable solutions. I don’t think our politicians would agreed, but they’d actually likely work.
A little Cold is a neat story. It’s an old theme, I know, but with this story, I revisited writing a female protagonist. In this case, it was a teen protagonist, and I’d never written from a teen mind before. I didn’t actually add a final ending for this story. In truth, I came up with several, but then, I deleted them and found something more neutral. You’ll understand what I mean when you read it. There are many faiths, and I’m not going to preach what comes after death to anyone because I wouldn’t want anyone to preach their views at me.
Coming of Age, Addictions, and On the Line can be challenges to some readers. They deal with topics they might not be perfectly comfortably with. For example, not many stories I come across confront street youth facing the dilemma of what they’re willing to do to survive. In Coming of Age, I put the reader in the mind of a youth in that very situation. More to the point, it brings to light a dilemma of youth prostitution most people want to pretend doesn’t exist. That sort of thing doesn’t happen in my city. Well, guess again. It likely does.
In Addictions, I aim to present the mind of a person wanting to break free from drugs, but can he? No person is two dimensional, but the press and certain minds won’t consider an addict as anything more than a hollow stereotype, and that’s just not right. I wouldn’t trust an addict with my life, but I wouldn’t shun him either. When we stop being humane to one another, we give up our right to receive understanding in return.
On the Line involves gay protagonists and the issues and challenges living gay can present in our human society. Here’s hoping I don’t misrepresent. I tried to get this story published once before in a magazine. The magazine didn’t even reply, and I don’t blame them considering the state of the story at that time. It’s been rewritten and much improved many times since then.
Music Therapy was inspired by another. Completely sane protagonists can be boring sometimes, can’t they? The child in this story might not be someone you invite to your neighbourhood cook-over. This story has a young protagonist, but the child comes across almost unhinged which raises its age grouping in this collection a notch or two. Not many young children would understand what the story's about. At least, that’s my impression.
Veclanshire Pieces wasn’t my first attempt at a horror story. The other attempts have been buried, but I’ll let this one out. I place this story in Europe present day. I place in a backwards town, mind you, so it’s a bit of a modern clash of perspectives and ideals. I do skip the use of foreign languages in this story though I should be using Romanian or French, something like that. To make the plot easier to follow, I kept things English.
In my writing, I came across the habit of picking up ideas from toys I found or trinkets I came across. Well, I found a toy dwarf one time without a head. Moon Spell was the result. What magic could that little dwarf hold? The possibilities were endless. On a more literary note, is this story a drama or adventure? Like so many others in this collection, throughout the three volumes even, this story was hard to classify. I decided it was more drama than adventure, so here it sits. And yes, I still have that headless dwarf toy.
What was that? is my attempt at writing a simple, cheerful story. My writing has been known to darken at times. I don’t do this on purpose. Reality just sinks in between words when I least expect it. This story is a simple, easy-going drama, almost adventure, about two brothers on a campout. They’re even well-adjusted and from a happy, upper class family.
In an effort to further practise my writing of female protagonists, I wrote Elevator 34B. This story is simple again: teen angst, peer issues, world’s ending every second argument - the usual. And all pretty much in an elevator. Limited spacing makes the author really work on a tight, well-woven story. That is a challenge.
For Jimmy started out as a fun story where a group of youth tried to build a tree house. In their complete failure at building the tree house, they managed to make cool, improvised musical instruments, then, formed a band. The problem came when I was sitting down trying to figure out what kind of instruments they’d make and how that part of the story would work. I couldn’t find a way for it to work more to the point, so I let the story write itself. I just let ideas come to me, and in the end, I had a more sober, definitely drama-based story For Jimmy.
I like the water. I don’t really trust boats unless they’re kayaks, but I like the water. I like docks too. While walking along one, I found myself designing a story where a truth was revealed on a dock between two people, and it was a sad truth, but they came out stronger for the sharing. A Heavy Mind is where that concept ended up. Years later, I added the subplots that now are the main bulk of the story itself.
The challenge with A Heavy Mind is that part of the back story is unknown to the protagonist, and his brother, father, and mother have conceded to not tell him about those ugly family details the father and mother would rather not spoken about, so a lot is going unsaid. I try to present this back story without saying it because the brother is honouring his side of the deals that were made. I figure that’s real, so I try to work it well enough. The balance of giving the reader what they need is met. It might leave the reader wanting more, but that’s real too when you consider everyday life.
There are older stories I keep pulling out of archives and trying to rework. Monday is one of those older stories. This time, I was able to rework it well enough to keep it in this collection. I cast two other stories back yet again. In this tale, a teen’s day starts bad and gets worse, but it’s amazing how much strength a person can find in misery - especially when that person finds a way to learn from and come out on top in the long run.
Burdens is a new story for this collection. I had a hard time with this story. I didn’t want the reader to figure out what was going on. I wanted to leave the reader guessing at what the protagonist was worried about the whole story. The problem was how to present a story where the protagonist’s drive is main but not revealed. I decided to choose one conversation and shape the story around that one moment, that one elongated discussion. The interesting part of it all is that through the dialogue the mystery I was hoping to conceal comes out pretty quickly anyway. Irony is quite entertaining at times.
I had a hard time classifying this story. It’s somewhat science fiction, but science fiction suggests the content isn’t fact. I believe in extra sensory abilities, so the story isn’t fiction, but there isn’t a genre that fits science fact - especially since that’s just my opinion. As such, I just focused on the Drama heading. It’s drama true enough.
I was bored one day and wrote Little Voices. This story isn’t the most unique. It uses an old theme of little people in the walls of an old house. I do try and come up with a different plot for them, and it isn’t definitive if they are little people or some other small legendary creature. Or are they tiny aliens? Either way, Little Voices is generally a simple, little, enjoyable story. I like having simple stories in every collection. They’re a nice break from the more serious ones.
Hello, this collection of stories involves more than one sub-genre. As these stories are designed for different audiences, I suggest the reader pay heed to the table of contents before reading certain stories. In the table of contents, stories are listed by Page Number; Protagonist, Genre; Word Count, and Story Title. The Page Number and Story Title are self-explanatory. The Word Count is a drawback to writing classes and magazine submittal guidelines. In each case, stories are defined by how many words they possess, not how many pages they might involve.
What may of most importance is the individual Protagonist, Genre listing.
This is the gauge of how old the protagonist in the individual story is. Accordingly, this also works as a suggestion of the target audience for that same story - Child, Youth, or mixed. The genre is primarily that of the given volume, but a Drama-based story might also be a Mystery or a Horror as sub-genre.
The genre listing is an important part of the story make-up.
This collection is presented and designed to appeal to a wide audience. I was debating publishing this collection in three smaller bits: youth, teen, and mixed. They’d all be pretty small collections, so I discarded that thought, and I decided I could list the stories by age group within the greater Youth, Teen heading. Mixed is used for stories involving a child or teen protagonist dealing with more adult concerns. Drama is supposed to break boundaries. That’s what makes it drama. How do I know a teen won’t enjoy a youth story? Or a youth won’t like a teen story? I don’t. This way, the three different groups are open to each, and everyone can be challenged in one way or another.
I entreat you to explore and enjoy. I look forward to feedback. Let me know what think. There are some interesting anecdotes about the stories included before the stories begin. I’ve added these because in most cases, I feel they enrich the story.
To the reading.
________________________________________________________________________
Collected Stories
Drama - Youth, Teen
Youth
Page 9 Child/Youth, Drama 1575 Words Toast
Page 12 Youth/Adult, Drama 4847 Words Brothers
Page 21 Child/Youth, Fantasy 6716 Words Moon Spell
Page 32 Child/youth, Drama 2773 Words What was That?
Page 37 Youth, Drama 8153 Words For Jimmy
Page 51 Older Youth, Drama 6260 Words A Heavy Mind
Page 62 Child, Fantasy/Mystery 1991 Words Little Voices
Teen
Page 67 Teen, Drama 2567 Words A Little Cold
Page 72 Street Youth, Drama 3925 Words Coming of Age
Page 78 Teen, Drama 1795 Words Addictions
Page 81 Teen, Horror 18915 Words Veclanshire Pieces
Page 111 Teen, Drama 2501 Words Elevator 34B
Page 116 Teen, Drama 7225 Words Monday
Page 128 Teen, Drama 2862 Words Burdens
Page 134 Young Adult, Drama 4936 Words First Impressions
Mixed
Page 143 Youth/Adult, Drama 4589 Words A Fond Place
Page 151 Teen/Adult, Drama 6776 Words On the Line
Page 164 Child, Dark Drama 1548 Words Music Therapy
___________________________________________________________________________
Anecdotal:
I think I’d pick A Fond Place as my favourite in this collection. This story was written originally for a school assignment. I sought to convincingly confront how a person deals with death, their own or another’s. Of course, in A Fond Place, I also aimed to place a story in a set era. I selected Quebec, winter, mid-seventies. It was a bit of a challenge as I was still pretty young at that point in history myself, but I think I did alright. More pointedly, I tried to put in enough detail of that selected era without overdoing the effort. That was a bit harder than expected.
Toast came about because I didn’t have many stories that involved child protagonists. And simple stories are nice to write sometimes. There really wasn’t much of a challenge with this story all things said and done.
Brothers was inspired by a co-worker and is written for much the same ultimate purpose - a simple, inviting, entertaining story. The challenge in Brothers was to balance out two sets of protagonists: a pair of youth with their given dialogue and a pair of adults with their own selective speech, nothing too crude, but adult speech just the same. It still has me unsure whether to list this particular story as under the Youth or Young Adult genre. It might work to suggest Teen, but there aren’t any teenagers in the story. I'm pretty sure it ended up under Youth/Adult.
First Impressions was a school assignment. It essentially just kind of came to mind. It deals with society’s view of the homeless and the way some people gauge personal worth. I surprised myself a little with this story. When writing the support character’s dialogue, I found his rather unsupportive point of view quite clear, and through his voice, I found myself coming up with possibly quite workable solutions. I don’t think our politicians would agreed, but they’d actually likely work.
A little Cold is a neat story. It’s an old theme, I know, but with this story, I revisited writing a female protagonist. In this case, it was a teen protagonist, and I’d never written from a teen mind before. I didn’t actually add a final ending for this story. In truth, I came up with several, but then, I deleted them and found something more neutral. You’ll understand what I mean when you read it. There are many faiths, and I’m not going to preach what comes after death to anyone because I wouldn’t want anyone to preach their views at me.
Coming of Age, Addictions, and On the Line can be challenges to some readers. They deal with topics they might not be perfectly comfortably with. For example, not many stories I come across confront street youth facing the dilemma of what they’re willing to do to survive. In Coming of Age, I put the reader in the mind of a youth in that very situation. More to the point, it brings to light a dilemma of youth prostitution most people want to pretend doesn’t exist. That sort of thing doesn’t happen in my city. Well, guess again. It likely does.
In Addictions, I aim to present the mind of a person wanting to break free from drugs, but can he? No person is two dimensional, but the press and certain minds won’t consider an addict as anything more than a hollow stereotype, and that’s just not right. I wouldn’t trust an addict with my life, but I wouldn’t shun him either. When we stop being humane to one another, we give up our right to receive understanding in return.
On the Line involves gay protagonists and the issues and challenges living gay can present in our human society. Here’s hoping I don’t misrepresent. I tried to get this story published once before in a magazine. The magazine didn’t even reply, and I don’t blame them considering the state of the story at that time. It’s been rewritten and much improved many times since then.
Music Therapy was inspired by another. Completely sane protagonists can be boring sometimes, can’t they? The child in this story might not be someone you invite to your neighbourhood cook-over. This story has a young protagonist, but the child comes across almost unhinged which raises its age grouping in this collection a notch or two. Not many young children would understand what the story's about. At least, that’s my impression.
Veclanshire Pieces wasn’t my first attempt at a horror story. The other attempts have been buried, but I’ll let this one out. I place this story in Europe present day. I place in a backwards town, mind you, so it’s a bit of a modern clash of perspectives and ideals. I do skip the use of foreign languages in this story though I should be using Romanian or French, something like that. To make the plot easier to follow, I kept things English.
In my writing, I came across the habit of picking up ideas from toys I found or trinkets I came across. Well, I found a toy dwarf one time without a head. Moon Spell was the result. What magic could that little dwarf hold? The possibilities were endless. On a more literary note, is this story a drama or adventure? Like so many others in this collection, throughout the three volumes even, this story was hard to classify. I decided it was more drama than adventure, so here it sits. And yes, I still have that headless dwarf toy.
What was that? is my attempt at writing a simple, cheerful story. My writing has been known to darken at times. I don’t do this on purpose. Reality just sinks in between words when I least expect it. This story is a simple, easy-going drama, almost adventure, about two brothers on a campout. They’re even well-adjusted and from a happy, upper class family.
In an effort to further practise my writing of female protagonists, I wrote Elevator 34B. This story is simple again: teen angst, peer issues, world’s ending every second argument - the usual. And all pretty much in an elevator. Limited spacing makes the author really work on a tight, well-woven story. That is a challenge.
For Jimmy started out as a fun story where a group of youth tried to build a tree house. In their complete failure at building the tree house, they managed to make cool, improvised musical instruments, then, formed a band. The problem came when I was sitting down trying to figure out what kind of instruments they’d make and how that part of the story would work. I couldn’t find a way for it to work more to the point, so I let the story write itself. I just let ideas come to me, and in the end, I had a more sober, definitely drama-based story For Jimmy.
I like the water. I don’t really trust boats unless they’re kayaks, but I like the water. I like docks too. While walking along one, I found myself designing a story where a truth was revealed on a dock between two people, and it was a sad truth, but they came out stronger for the sharing. A Heavy Mind is where that concept ended up. Years later, I added the subplots that now are the main bulk of the story itself.
The challenge with A Heavy Mind is that part of the back story is unknown to the protagonist, and his brother, father, and mother have conceded to not tell him about those ugly family details the father and mother would rather not spoken about, so a lot is going unsaid. I try to present this back story without saying it because the brother is honouring his side of the deals that were made. I figure that’s real, so I try to work it well enough. The balance of giving the reader what they need is met. It might leave the reader wanting more, but that’s real too when you consider everyday life.
There are older stories I keep pulling out of archives and trying to rework. Monday is one of those older stories. This time, I was able to rework it well enough to keep it in this collection. I cast two other stories back yet again. In this tale, a teen’s day starts bad and gets worse, but it’s amazing how much strength a person can find in misery - especially when that person finds a way to learn from and come out on top in the long run.
Burdens is a new story for this collection. I had a hard time with this story. I didn’t want the reader to figure out what was going on. I wanted to leave the reader guessing at what the protagonist was worried about the whole story. The problem was how to present a story where the protagonist’s drive is main but not revealed. I decided to choose one conversation and shape the story around that one moment, that one elongated discussion. The interesting part of it all is that through the dialogue the mystery I was hoping to conceal comes out pretty quickly anyway. Irony is quite entertaining at times.
I had a hard time classifying this story. It’s somewhat science fiction, but science fiction suggests the content isn’t fact. I believe in extra sensory abilities, so the story isn’t fiction, but there isn’t a genre that fits science fact - especially since that’s just my opinion. As such, I just focused on the Drama heading. It’s drama true enough.
I was bored one day and wrote Little Voices. This story isn’t the most unique. It uses an old theme of little people in the walls of an old house. I do try and come up with a different plot for them, and it isn’t definitive if they are little people or some other small legendary creature. Or are they tiny aliens? Either way, Little Voices is generally a simple, little, enjoyable story. I like having simple stories in every collection. They’re a nice break from the more serious ones.