**LJ Idol Season 4 Week 1 Entry: My Favourite Childhood Memory**

While most children ride their bikes, play hopscotch, and play with their dogs; what was Lady Ozma doing?

I couldn’t always be lounging around blogging, after all. Entertaining you with my insanity. I needed to arrive to this awesome place of hotness to properly be able to amuse you.

So what was I like as a child? Surely, it was an awesome experience leading to the greatness that I am today, right?

I am sure you are anxiously awaiting some nostalgic tale of mud pies, roller skating, or watching of some great life altering movie.

Well, sure, I could do that. But, what would you learn? Not a whole lot. Those are not the sort of things I really remember from being Little Lady Ozma.

So what do I share with you? How I fell so in love with Superman at the age of three and decided that I would become a journalist like Lois Lane in the vain hope of meeting Kal-El? How about the fact that one of the last gifts my grandmother gave me before passing away was my first camera, giving me a hobby and passion that has stayed with me for the last 20 odd years?

I have struggled with this all week. I want to share something truly interesting. Something new. On the bright note, while working on my NaNoWriMo this week I found myself incorporating this topic into my novel. My main character remembered something from her childhood. It fleshes out the character more.

So how do I make myself stand out more? Debating between three topics, I come before you now with my decision. My childhood memory.

I never fit in well with the other kids in school. With not many children on my street to hang out with, I spent a lot of time alone. My grandfather, also a photographer as well as a painter and a million other things, read to me as a toddler the works of Shakespeare and Kipling. My best friends could be found within the pages of the books piled high in my bedroom.

A local artist invited us to a science fiction convention when I was in the fifth grade. I still attend, and now I take my own children.

I remember playing in the arcade in the local mall in late elementary school and junior high. Spy Hunter and Star Defender, Rampage and Pac-man. I still enjoy video games and once more, passed that on to my own children.

There comes a time though, that a little girl wants to ‘grow up’. For me, the transition was not real huge. I did not change many of my habits. I still read stacks of books each year. Filled my television viewing with science-fiction. Wrote short stories in my notebooks.

For me, you could see the change most in my bedroom decor. Out with the pink my mother hoisted upon me. In with the regal shades of purple. Sure, I left up a poster of a unicorn, but up went tear outs from Teen Beat of Wil Wheaton and Kirk Cameron. Movie posters from Dune, The Addams Family, and other such movies made their way to the walls of my room.

And then my mother decided to help me. She wanted a part in decorating my room. This idea panned out just about as good as it sounds. First came her scheme to hot glue such items to my walls. My father was against tape, putty, and thumbtacks. Supposedly the hot glue would come down with the ease of a hair dryer, leaving no traces it was ever there. Let me tell you now, did not turn out that way.

You would think, this would prove evidence enough to bar the door from all parental units when attempting to morph during those tweeny years. Alas, no. My mother decided to bless me with a poster. She claimed this man was handsome. A heartthrob. Oh he made my heart throb all right. Not in a good way though.

This poster was a classic. The man wore a dark suit. His hand held a cigarette with smoke curling up from the tip. As if that image was not foul enough, he leered from the shadows at me. His smoldering eyes followed me throughout the room. No where was safe. I rearranged the layout of my room, hoping to escape his creepy stare. Nothing worked. She put this poster on the inside of my door, so I could not escape him, without having to open the door wide.

What was I to do? This man haunted my dreams. He stared at me as I attempted to do my homework. I devised ways to get dressed under cover from his gaze. I even went as far as to attempt to hang a towel from the top of my door, to cover his face. That worked well until the season changed and my door swelled to a point of not fitting in the door frame well anymore.

I knew the actor in the poster was dead. So I dubbed him Dead Man Jones. Many a night with friends over, we’d stay up late making up tales of just why Dead Man Jones was standing there in the darkness. Once, two of my friends brought over a witchboard for us to attempt to contact his spirit.

How on earth does a creepy poster of a man that gave me the shivers turn into a good story from my childhood? Well, for the most part, I can look back on it and smile. For the second, it gives me something to harass my mother about to this day. It definitely gave me something interesting to think about, something that not most young girls have. And, I’m sure, it has most definitely contributed to the insanity that is Lady Ozma.

I loved that poster. I loved to hate that poster. It sparked many conversations, stories, and ideas. In it’s own way, it fit into the decorative scheme of my eclectic bedroom.

Dead Man Jones is long gone. In human form as well as poster. I have no clue where the poster is, or if it is tormenting some other young girl. I have nothing with Dead Man Jones in my new home, and as far as I am concerned it shall stay Dead Man Jones free.

If you are lucky, maybe you’ll have your own Dead Man Jones to spark your creativity. Oh, I just had a terrible thought. What if it is Dead Man Jones that has been my NaNo muse thus far? Or what if he was in that UFO I saw last night? Maybe he’s after me once more!

–Lady O