A letter to Dale and Danita

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I haven’t seen my friend Dale since we were in middle school. He’s married now, to Danita, and I get a Christmas card from them every year. It just arrived today.

Danita included their e-mail address so I decided to write them a long, long note. This is what I wrote:

Dear Dale and Danita,

As you’ve probably figured out I’m a crappy correspondent. I guess typing at work all day discourages me from coming home and typing all night. Still, I should have done a better job of keeping in touch.

Let’s see, Dale, I think it was 1969 or 1970 that I last saw you – a lot of catching up to do. And Danita, we’ve never met so this will all be new and probably boring as hell. I’ll try to keep the last 40 years as short as possible.

When we moved across town to the “roach shack” as Dad called it I was forced to switch from Pryor Junior High to Meigs. I hated that place. I didn’t know anybody there and the school was run-down … but then so was Pryor. But it was a run-down I was familiar with. Luckily I moved to Choctawhatchee High School the next year, which seemed like heaven compared to Meigs. Choctaw was air-conditioned and had working equipment. Plus, I renewed friendships with some of my pals from Pryor. I took three years of ROTC at Choctaw – not a fun time to be seen marching in uniform as the Vietnam War was in full, hellish swing and everybody hated the military. I can’t count the number of times I was cussed and spit at. But my grades improved dramatically at Choctaw and I even came in second for a scholarship. While I didn’t have a car I got to do some fun things – for instance, a group of us traveled to Cape Canaveral to watch the Apollo 17 moon mission blast off.

I graduated from Choctaw in 1973 and went to OWCC for two years. I majored in playing spades, and minored in smoking cigarettes. My grades were pretty terrible but I wasn’t too worried – I was paying for it, having worked summer jobs on an assembly line at Texas Instruments, washing dishes at a restaurant or delivering newspapers. The latter two jobs were nightmares but the TI job was actually quite good. I paid for almost all of my expenses at OWCC with the money I made that summer.

I then attended the University of West Florida for two years. I majored in communication arts with a minor in English education. I was really into writing by then and wanted some kind of job that would allow me to write, though newspapers weren’t on my radar. My plan was to get a teaching job and write novels at night. UWF was hard because I had to commute from Fort Walton Beach every day. That meant a constant scramble for car pools, or borrowing Dad’s truck. I had run out of money by then so Mom and Dad floated my tuition. Later, when I tried to pay them back, they refused. I sure felt guilty at the time.

During my last quarter at UWF I did my student teaching, and you’ll never guess at what school: Pryor. It was strange because some of my old teachers during the seventh and eighth grades were still there. It was weird sitting in the teachers’ lounge with them. I became the master of the mimeograph machine and soon everybody wanted me to run off their copies for them. But I was less successful in the classroom – I couldn’t control the kids, who looked at me and treated me as though I were a slightly older version of themselves. I guess that was true. They were all 14 and 15 – I was 20. Needless to say I received a terrible evaluation from my supervising teacher and spent the next two years substitute teaching and fruitlessly searching for a teacher’s job.

Finally in 1979, with only a few bucks in the bank, I was offered a job at the Playground Daily News. I had become involved with the Fort Walton Beach Tennis Club and wrote their weekly column. I dropped it off each week at the Daily News. They had an opening for a police reporter. I wasn’t interested in that and turned it down, but later they offered me a job as a copy editor and I accepted it. I planned to stay only through the summer.

Something weird happened, however. I got used to having a regular paycheck. Dad insisted I buy my own vehicle – I was still borrowing his truck! – and my sister sold me her old Pontiac Astre. Now I had car payments. So I stayed.

My job required that I design pages, and I quickly discovered I had a knack for that. The job actually started to be fun. After my first three months the chief of the copy desk departed and I moved up to second in command. I began laying out the front page and the local leadoff page, in addition to inside news pages. I also trained others who came to work on the copy desk. Life became a comfortable routine of going to work Sunday through Thursday from 2 p.m. to midnight, and playing tennis Friday and Saturday. I got to be a pretty good tennis player and before it was all said and done I had won about 50 or 60 tournaments, and at one point had a state ranking. Bear in mind this was strictly at the club B-level. John McEnroe had nothing to fear from me.

Three years into my job I was promoted to design editor and had four other people working for me. I remained in that position for a long time, though I forget exactly how long. We won several awards for page design. In 1987 I redesigned the Daily News and we kept that design until 2006, an unusually long run for a design concept. It worked well.

It was during that time I had my only real relationship, with my girlfriend Sandee. We dated about three years and it seemed inevitable we would get married, but things didn’t work out and I didn’t seriously date anyone after that.

Throughout all this I maintained an interest in writing fiction. I had begun to write short stories when we moved to the “roach shack” in 1969. I sold my first story professionally in 1987, then a poem, to “Amazing Stories,” in 1989. But it wasn’t until 1993 that my writing career really took off. I sold a script to Marvel Comics for their “Hellraiser” series of books based on the Clive Barker movie, and a short story to Bantam Books’ “Full Spectrum” anthology. Afterwards I sold a number of short stories and comic book scripts to publishers like Pocket Books, DAW, Donald I. Fine, Barnes & Noble, Penthouse Comix and Penguin-Putnam, to name a few. My first novel, “Dead Heat,” was published in 1995 and won the International Horror Guild Award for best first novel. It was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. I’ve also had stories in anthologies that won the Stoker and the World Fantasy Award, and just this year was a finalist for the British Fantasy Award. I published two more books, “The Uninvited” in 2000 and just last year, “Black Tide.” I just sold the movie rights to that book and while it hasn’t been greenlighted for a film, I continue to hope that will happen.

Meanwhile at work, I was promoted to assistant managing editor in 1993. The newsroom was restructured in the early 2000s and I became the features editor, then in February of this year I graduated to online editor. I was recently named the assistant editor of the newsroom.

That all sounds very lofty but the truth is changes in the industry have not been kind to newspapers. Our staff has been cut dramatically and while I still have a job, we have fewer reporters than we did when I started at the Daily News in 1979. By the way, the name of the paper has been changed to the Northwest Florida Daily News. Our website continues to experience good growth. When I started as online editor the site recorded a monthly page-view average of just over 2 million; now it is closer to 3 million, and sometimes over that.

Life for me has become fairly quiet. In my 20s and 30s I was a bit of a partier and Del’s house was always Ground Zero for whoever wanted to go out and have a good time. Now, I am content to come home, get some work done, have a few beers and kick back.

Back in the early ’90s I had the big idea of adopting a couple of cats from the local animal shelter. Those cats were with me a long time. Maggie died of renal failure in 2005, and Pavlov is suffering from the same condition right now. After he goes I doublt I’ll be getting any more pets – the sadness of watching them go through this is too much!

I have two more novels in the works and I’m hopeful the day will come when I can write full time. I’m not sure there’ll be a market for them but it’s something I enjoy doing and I can’t think of a better way to spend my retirement – grubbing around in the dirt and writing.

My dad died in 1998 but Mom is still going strong. In fact, she just bought a new car – a Nissan Versa – which should serve her well as gas prices start to inch back upward. I have a clunky old Nissan Pathfinder which I can’t bear to part with, and a 2006 Scion tC.

My sister Pat lives in Crestview with her husband, George. She has three kids: Christopher, a recording studio technician, and Michael, who’s in the Air Force Reserve and is married. He has three kids. Pat’s oldest is Liz, who lives in Utah and has a son. My other sister, Sandie, lives in Ohio with her husband, Frank. They have one daughter, Susan, who’s a doctor and married to Dan. They have two boys.

And that’s it! Quite a mouthful, huh? You should drop me a line and let me know how life has been treating you the past 40 years.

OK, time to go. There’s something in the fridge with my name on it.

Take care,

Del

About the author:

Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”

Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.

As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.

Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .