Back when I was in high school I did quite a bit of writing as my school had Creative Writing classes, but I rebelled against the overriding trend among my classmates. I grew up in a prairie city and therefore everyone was expected to write "prairie fiction" which I rather mean-spiritedly nicknamed "Dead Grandmother Fiction" because it seemed like everyone was preoccupied about writing about their dead relatives or life on the farm or whatever. I hated that stuff, so whenever I could, I'd write little SF or fantasy style stories, which my teacher (and classmates) tended to look down upon as "Twilight Zone stuff" because they tended to be short pieces with a twist at the end.
Today of course I'd take that as a high compliment and the interesting thing was back in high school I wasn't that familiar with TZ. I'd seen a few episodes, and was quite fond of the Gold Key comic books. But that was about it back in the early 80s.
Looking back at it some of the stuff was crap, but it was still fun. One item I wrote (and remember I was in high school so we could get away with this sort of thing) was actually a mashup of Modesty Blaise and, of all things, Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. (I didn't plagerize - I took the characters of Modesty Blaise and Willie Garvin and borrowed the concept of Ice-Nine from Vonnegut and created a new story.) My big high school work was a mutli-chapter novella running a good 50 pages (huge for high school) about a group of intergalactic mercenaries. I can't remember the plot anymore, but it was the farthest thing from Dead Grandmother Stories that I could get.
After university I made an attempt to start a novel about a famous historical figure from centuries ago and her adventures in the 20th century. I spent a good year researching the woman in question but I never got around to writing it (I still have the notes so maybe someday -- which is why I'm not giving any more details!).
The last thing I actually completed was, of all things, a script for DS9 that I wrote and submitted back in the day when they'd accept spec scripts (and after being told - in one case literally - to f-off by literary agents). I got a very nice rejection letter from the legendary Lolita Fatjo. And no, nothing from my story "coincidentally" appeared in a later episode -- EXCEPT that my script had Major Kira becoming a reluctant parent, though the circumstances were completely different than what transpired and didn't involve her getting pregnant!
I turned 40 this year and as a fellow writer friend of mine says, I'd better get my ass in gear if I ever want to actually get published. But the fact is I write for a living -- I'm a journalist and I also edit non-fiction books -- so the pressure to achieve "immortality" through print has been satisfied. But I'd still love to get my name out there on something cool, whether an original story or even something for Doctor Who (sadly just as I was considering putting a story together for Big Finish's Short Trips books, they went and cancelled them!
)
Alex
Joke
