Autobibliography

I’m in no huge hurry to get there, but I do eventually plan to post about some of the writing projects I’ve thought up but have been unable to do thanks to my writer’s block.  But before I get there though, I thought it might be good to take a look at what I actually have written prior to writer’s block taking up residence in my brain. 

Most of the early stuff I talk about here is pretty much lost to time.  I’d say pretty much everything prior to “Legend of the V’Thashi” no longer exists. 

My list of written works isn’t all that long.  One of the reasons for that is because I’ve always seemed to be uncompelled to write without a deadline in place.  I could have the greatest story idea in the world burning a hole in my brain, and without a deadline I would just sit there twiddling my thumbs. 

And besides that, I was still (relatively) young.  So what was the rush?  I mean, I had all the time in the world, right?  (Never think that.  Not ever.)  

Early Works

When I was in the second grade, I got a bunch of little plastic spacemen over the course of Advent.  These small pieces of plastic would go on to become my first set of characters.  I named them all, gave them personalities and backstories, and then started making up stories about them. 

I can clearly remember I had a pad of sketch paper that I used to chronicle their various exploits.  I would make detailed drawings (okay, really crude sketches) of the figures, and then handwrite my stories in pencil next to the pictures I’d drawn. 

I filled at least one sketchpad with these stories.  Whether or not there were more stories written down outside of that sketchpad, I couldn’t tell you.  But that was the beginning of my journey through life as a writer. 

I eventually developed characters outside of toys and (verbally) told stories about them, but I can’t think of a (completed) written work after that until about 6 years later. 

Towards the end of the 8^th grade, my school decided that it needed a newspaper.  (Think photocopied newsletter with delusions of grandeur.)  The teacher in charge of the thing recruited me to contribute a story. 

I wrote “Handu’s Mission”, a two-part story featuring what had to be a very generic science-fiction/space opera mercenary.  It was handwritten on binder paper, and one of the teachers typed it up before it went to print.  Honestly, the only thing I remember about the story other than its length and title was that the teacher who typed it misspelled one of my made-up words, which pissed me off unreasonably.  

The Eighth Day

In my junior year of high school, my English teacher handed me a flyer for a writing competition one day and told me, “You’re entering this.”  Okay. 

I went home and finished writing a piece I’d been tinkering around with called “The Eighth Day”, about Father Paul Kenner, a spacefaring Catholic missionary teaching the word of God to aliens. 

The aliens in question accepted Father Kenner’s teachings, as a lot of it either lined up with their own mythology or answered questions that they’d had.  But after teaching the story of creation, the aliens started connecting dots that Father Kenner hadn’t intended to leave.  If God created the Earth in six days and then rested on the seventh ending the story, then who created them?  The only other power player they knew of was Satan, so they ‘realized’ that they were created by him, and the village committed mass suicide rather than go on.  When he returned home, Father Kenner instituted a slight change in the story of creation for missionaries, adding an eighth day where God started on a new world, and leaving the story open-ended. 

The competition in question was for both fiction and poetry, with the twelve winners (six from each category) going to the Oregon Arts Commission’s weeklong Young Writer’s Seminar at the University of Oregon that summer.  And I was one of those six winners for fiction. 

The seminar leader for fiction was sci-fi author Kate Wilhelm, who took me aside at the end of the week and gave me her mailing address, offering to mentor me.  A few months later I got sick (with what would five years later finally be diagnosed as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) and never got the chance to take her up on her offer.  One of the great regrets of my life. 

The other notable result of the seminar was that the poetry leader (whose name I can’t for the life of me remember right now) derailed me from fiction writing for a time, having inspired me to try my hand at poetry. 

Fan Fiction

Upon discovering the sheer length and breadth of fandom, I began writing fan fiction.  It started with a serialized story in the pages of the local Doctor Who fan club newsletter.  After writing Doctor Who stuff, I moved on to write several stories in the Real Ghostbusters fandom, as well as some stories for Max Headroom.  

Legend of the V’Thashi

“Legend of the V’Thashi” was still fan fiction, but on a slightly bigger scale, thus it’s separate entry here.  My friend Ed was putting together a zine of time travel stories, and asked if I could write something for it.  I penned a piece of Doctor Who fan fiction (probably my longest story to date). 

I remember very little about it, and my only copy is somewhere in my brother’s basement at the moment.  It was a 5^th Doctor story, and he and his companions were fighting the alien V’Thashi.  The Doctor thought it was his first encounter with them, but later discovered that his 3^rd incarnation had fought them and had his memory of the event erased.  The only other thing I really remember is that I brought companion Adric back from the dead as a kind of electronic ghost.  

Driftwood

As a follow-up to his time travel zine, Ed decided to do a zine of space travel stories, and once again asked me to contribute.  I told him I had a short story in mind, and that I’d get right on it. 

I called him about a month later and told him that there was a problem with the story.  He groaned, and said, “Not you too?”  I asked not me too what, and he told me that almost everyone who promised him a story had pulled out of the project.  I told him I had the opposite problem.  I was still very interested in contributing, but I was at about the halfway point of the story, and it was already 40,000 words long.  He told me to keep writing. 

When I finished writing, “Driftwood” was over 79,000 words long, making it novel-length.  Yep.  I had accidently written my first novel. 

“Driftwood” is a story about a spaceship that gets caught in an explosion during a battle with another ship using experimental weapons, and gets flung across the universe into completely uncharted space, and their efforts to find their way back home again.   

Years later, when the two-hour series premiere of “Star Trek—Voyager” finished airing, my phone rang.  It was my friend Chad asking, “Did you watch that?  It’s just a cheap rip-off of ‘Driftwood’!”  

Cry Uncle 

Speaking of Star Trek… 

Sometime in the early 90s (1992, maybe?), my mom and I attended a Star Trek convention with her coworker Joanna (who was roughly my age).  Over the course of the two-day event, Joanna and I got it into our heads that we should write a Star Trek – The Next Generation script to submit to Paramount. 

To be perfectly honest, I was completely smitten with Joanna, and the thought of spending time in the same room with her as we collaborated on a writing project suited me just fine. 

Our scriptwriting efforts produced “Cry Uncle”, a story that had Data’s brother Lore return to steal the body of Data’s daughter Lal from the Daystrom Institute in an effort to resurrect her. 

The script was rejected by Paramount, after which I was rejected by Joanna.  Sad.  

Pure Evolution

I wrote “Pure Evolution” as a birthday gift for my friend Chad.  My original character Charli was his favorite out of all my unwritten-about characters, so that’s who I wrote.  The story was a science-fiction police procedural staring futuristic badass female detective Charli and her psychic partner Somebody-or-Another.  (Can’t remember his name, and once again, my copy of this is somewhere in my brother’s basement.) 

Some time after Chad’s death I self-published a small print run of this as a zine. 

The Return of Captain Buffalo

My next project was another script, but this time for the first issue of an original comic book series.  “The Return of Captain Buffalo” was the story of a superhero who contracted Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, quit the superhero life, and then got dragged back into it during a crisis.  

 

It was about as semi-autobiographical as a story about superheroes and supervillains can be.  My plan was to write scripts for the following three issues, and submit the whole thing to Dark Horse Comics, but it never got that far.  

Conversation Piece

The last story I completed prior to writer’s block was a work of experimental fiction entitled “Conversation Piece”.  The story was about a group of friends dealing with the disappearance of one of their number.  The entire story was told in dialogue.  Just dialogue.  No quotation marks, no he saids or she saids, just the actual words they spoke.  I used eight different fonts to differentiate speaking characters.  And far from being just a boring ‘talking heads’ story, the work included both a car chase and a gunfight.  

Other Miscellaneous Stuff

I spent about three and a half years or so writing and publishing a zine entitled 93.5 that sometimes included the odd piece of short fiction.  93.5 ran to a little over half a million words by time I stopped producing it.  Notable among the stories were “The 5-DSV Transfer Packet” about fictional characters moving from one abandoned story to another, and the first story in an intended series about a pair of troubleshooters-for-hire with the unlikely names of Shorp & Lep.  (I had such grand plans for Shorp & Lep, but only managed the one short story.) 

And that’s about it.  My sum total of my writing career thus far.  A long time paused, but hopefully not fully stopped for all time.