2021 Oct 1 What If?

What If?

Sebastian Pettibon
Sebastian Aleksander Toussaint-Charron Pettibon

He lives in a world in which magical items and religious artifacts exist. How does he know? His grandfather - Aleksander Sobolewski - and great-grandfather - Andrzej Sobolewski - wrote about their trials, tribulations, and experiences with such objects as the Iscariot Silver, the Rings of the Magi, and Aurthurian weapons. He lives in a world where people can have the ability to manipulate aspects of life and nature. He was gifted with the ability to take away emotional and physical pain from those who need it - found by accident as a teenager - and to manipulate the affections of those who find him attractive and sexually engaging, something he did not know he was doing until well into college.

At 16 he inherited 100s of journals from a great-uncle, a man who was supposed to be his Confirmation sponsor. He received an envelope with the boxes of journals explaining why he was receiving them now. “They have been yours since the day you were born,” Wadsworth Sobolewski began. “But everyone involved decided to wait until you were old enough to understand the gravity of what was written. I wanted to wait until your Confirmation, but now that it’s impossible for me to hand them over personally, here the are. Do with them what you want, and that does include using them as the basis for your writing.

“We knew, your parents and I, that you want to be a writer, author ghost stories and mysteries. Where do you think your earlier stories went? To me, that’s where. I trust that you’ll be careful and use pseudonyms in the bylines.”

It was signed Wadzy, the diminutive name his siblings used.

A month later, Wright Alexander submitted a 22K word novella to “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” magazine, and a month after that he was notified that the story had been accepted with publication coming in three months.