Remember the question,
"What do you want to be when you grow up?" And remember the suburban answers? -- Fireman, Ball Player,
Rock Star, or "an Engineer, like my Daddy!" (In that my father was an Optical Engineer, rather than of
the "Choo Choo" variety, that wasn't exactly my personal goal.) For myself, I wanted to be a Lumberjack, and
not for any great love of the Big Outdoors - I just liked chopping things.
Later, somewhere around age 9, I latched onto a real goal, in as much
as a 9 year old can have career ambitions. Lumberjack be damned, I wanted to
be a writer! More to the point, I wanted to be a novelist.
It all started with Edgar Rice Burroughs, and his 1914 novel,
"A Princess of Mars", which moved me to tears. (Remember, I was nine.)
After that, Robert E. Heinlein's "Have Space Suit, Will Travel."
Over the next few years, I devoured most every novel each of those
respective authors had written; which is saying quite a bit given the
90 or so novels that Burroughs wrote. After branching out to other
authors, I remember, at the age of 10, giving a book report on the
complete "Lord of the Rings" trilogy.
Simply put, books were cool. Science Fiction & Fantasy... well, that was
beyond cool.
When I was 12, my parents brought home an electric typewriter. It was
intended for my older sister, Barb, but I was the one completely fascinated
by it. Suddenly I could lay down on paper something that looked quite a bit
like the books I was reading. And so, with my sister's Typing-Tutor manual
in hand, I taught myself how to touch-type.
At first all my "stories" were stream-of-thought dumps, with little if
any punctuation. Eventually, they started to take form, and I began writing
all kinds of short stories, mostly of the SF and Fantasy variety. I started
my first novel when I was 14, but bailed after 100 pages or so. I started and
completed my second novel when I was 16, followed up with another uncompleted
novel. Believe me, I was quite fixated on the idea of becoming a writer. By
my 18th birthday I'd accumulated a whole drawer full of rejection slips from
various publishing companies, turning down countless short story submissions.
Although not indicative of any success, it does show how hard I tried.
Sadly, I published not a single piece of fiction. Not one thing my
entire life. Other than software, the only thing of mine that ever made
it to "production" was a letter to the editor of Cars Illustrated Magazine.
(And they called me "Eraserhead", for some reason I choose to forget.)
Enter the 1990's and the World Wide Web, where I "publish" my website.
OK, I'm playing way loose with the terminology, but here on my website I
can "publish" anything I want to. Therefore, here are a couple of my old
short stories. One is titled "Slow Motion" - it was written in 1991, and is
a somewhat complicated & depressing little story about a temporal distortion
drug. The other I wrote as a teenager; titled "Divine Interface", it's a very
light story about 2 kids and an old computer.
So go ahead, give them a read and enjoy!
"Slow Motion", 1991
"Divine Interface", 1982