I had no idea this thread existed!
Well... not exactly sure if allowed, but...
My
bona fides are admittedly thin. I wrote a spec script for VOY and was invited to pitch by the writers, and talked every month or so to Raf Green. My pitches never quite reached (either "already doing one like that" or "not a direction we want to go") but they did like what they saw/heard, and always encouraged me. I diverted down a different road, writing specs for original TV series and movies, with some script rewrites for directors along the way. Received positive noises for my film script
The Sea Tigers, but no nibbles yet. Didn't realise it was so hard to get things made!
Then I got cancer, and the recovery has been slow. I was paid for a short
noir script,
Deadline, chosen from several, and a director in LA rewrote it into a full length movie, which he produced. I took one of the discarded scripts and turned it into a short story,
A Fragment of Damnation, which I sold to an online magazine, Trigger Warning.
https://www.triggerwarningshortfiction.com/a-fragment-of-damnation/
I realised I had a lot of story ideas sitting round not doing much, like me, because the cancer treatment was so tiring. Couldn't concentrate for long periods, so I wrote up a bunch of them as a short story collection. Nearly all publishers want novels, not short story collections, so I got it onto Amazon. No idea how to properly promote it (plus the concentration thing), so it's been there a little over two years, and it's called
Catching Light.
I've been trying to finish the second collection,
Gravity Has Consequences, since then, but the lockdowns haven't done my mental health any good (cancer, separation, grandtwins, oh, it's been a busy time!). An interesting thing has been
finding that I'd finish a story, then, later, speculating on the characters or worlds in them, thought, "say, a second story of that would be cool!" much as you would with a TV series, another episode. So across the two books are multiple stories with the same characters (a robot civilisation, a soldier seeking to avert a catastrophic war, a fantasy hero, a fantasy medieval city holding firm against the forces of darkness), which may turn into their own thing later, I'm not sure. Both books will be a
sampler of ideas.
I don't know when it became a bad idea that a first book was made of short stories. Individual stories could be lifted out to promote the finished collection. Most author of the Golden and Silver Ages began with their magazine work collected. But that might just be me.
So there you have it.
Catching Light available now,
Gravity Has Consequences coming soon!
