The Ultimate Ninjas

It wasn't until college that someone told me I wrote well. It was my English 1010 teacher. She read a couple of my assignments to the class because she thought they were so good. It was shocking to me. She even told me after class one time that she thought I should write for The Signpost, Weber States Student Newspaper. I was flattered, but I never pursued it.

It was always my older brother, Ryan, who was the writer in my family. He wrote short stories all the time and I always thought they were so awesome.

I would have been held back in several grades in Elementary School if it wasn't for the Junior Authors Fair. Most of my teachers offered extra credit to any student who submitted something to the Fair so I always did... just to ensure I could progress to the next grade.

I wrote several of these books when I was growing up. I wrote a book called Friday the 13th about my best friend, JB, and how we'd explore haunted houses during sleepovers. I wrote a sequel, conveniently titled Friday the 20th. I even wrote a Friday the 27th. I stopped there, though, cause I could never figure out what the title of the next book should be. It would depend on what month Friday the 27th fell in and it really wouldn't make very much sense... and I'd probably have to explain it to people so I just didn't bother. Instead, I abandoned the "Friday" series and moved on to The Ultimate Ninjas.

I remember when I turned this book in to the Jr Authors Fair I was excited that someone besides by best friend would be reading my book. When I got my book back and it had the gold, embossed sticker on the cover, I thought, "Awesome! A judge read my book and liked it enough to give me an award."

When I found this book in the garage the other day, I was still excited about that stupid gold sticker. I decided to read the book and try to take an impartial, neutral stance... much like the judge who read the book and gave me the golden award on the front cover.

As I started reading it, I started to blush a little bit. My story was grotesque. My friend, JB, and I were slaughtering our peers with our sweet ninja skills and blowing up schools and ripping our teachers to pieces. But that's not what made me sick to my stomach. It was the realization that the judge never read my story. There's absolutely no way any judge could have read my story and not expelled me from school.

Looking back, I wish the judge would have actually read my story... even if it ended up resulting in my expulsion. After all, this is a sweet tale of adventure, deception, and the ninjatastic relationship between two friends... written by a 12-year-old using an old school mixture of black pen, blue pen, and pencil as well as a creative blend of print and cursive... sometimes varying within the same word. All of this literary genius has been bound in an upscale brown folder provided by my dad, Brandt Daley. How could any judge not be completely enthralled before even opening the folder/book?

Whether you spell it "Ninja" or "Ninga" didn't matter to me then and it doesn't matter to me now. Here are the first six pages of The Ultimate Ninjas.