Writesville

I’m not exactly sure if it’s the genesis point, but the earliest speculative fiction I remember reading was the Conan stories by Robert E. Howard.

We had gone on a field trip to the planetarium — I put myself at around 12 or so — and the science teacher had a bookcase full of paperback books. Among them were some of the Ace editions of the Conan stories with the Frank Frazetta (RIP) covers. I remember pulling one out and being captivated by the muscular warrior with a dagger attacking an ape (Conan). I asked the teacher if I could borrow the book, and he said yes. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Speculative fiction in all its forms became a very powerful escape for me. The late 70s and early 80s saw a revival of sorts, brought on by the surge in popularity of Tokein’s Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit and by Star Wars in 1977 (before it was A New Hope). Sword of Shanara came out in that time frame, as did the Chronicles of Thomas Covenent, the Unbeliever and Rosenburg’s Guardian of the Flame series. I discovered Lloyd Alexander, The Eternal Champion, delved into the The Book of the New Sun, followed the adventures of Bink. Bladerunner was released, and Heavy Metal, Excaliber and Arnold as Conan. It was all heady stuff for a teenager bored near to coma by the drudgery of uninteresting and uninspiring school work.

Personal computers had just arrived on the scene. I wasted untold hours playing Zork in our school’s ‘computer lab’, which consisted of a single TRS-80 with a tape drive. I was a member of the Dungeons and Dragons club; the DM was one of the school’s science teachers. My painted minatures were the envy of all. We met after school and sometimes in the library on weekends.

My friends and I would run through the woods and beat on each other with wooden swords we carved ourselves out of saplings. I had a shield made from a piece of plywood, shaped and painted to look like a skull. My friends and I found out about a group called Dagorhir, which staged medievel battles in costume. Interesting to note that Dagorhir actually started in Maryland. We were members of that very first group and battled with them for our last two years of high school, 1981 – 1983. It has since spread all over the country, even to some foreign locations.

We made our own weapons; 2-inch dow rods wrapped in foam and stuffed into a pants leg for swords, arrows with the tips cut off, a quarter taped on, and covered in foam and a sock, 1-inch dow rod daggers, nerf basket-balls on string as a morning star….. I even made my own ’scale mail’ by cutting out, drilling holes in, and tying together little squares of galvanized aluminum.

After high school, my interest remained. Speculative fiction was pretty much all I read. College saw Dennis McKiernan, Glen Cook’s Black Company, The Mallorean. I secured a Commodore 64 and experienced the explosion of computer role playing games; Pirates, Bard’s Tale, Might and Magic 1, Autoduel, Hillsfar….

Computer games continued for me when I replaced the C64 with an Amiga and then a PC. Ultima Underworld, the SSI gold box, Civilization…. I read Deathlands, The Wheel of Time, A Song of Ice and Fire, Memory, Sorrow and Thorn…. It was also during this time I began to experiment with writing my own stories.

My first story was The Howling Hills, written on a PC using WordPad. It was in the early 90’s while I was stationed in Japan that I began actually submitting my work to magazines and began gathering rejection letters.

In 1997, I got a call from the Writers of the Future. My story Troder had been selected as the third place winner for the first quarter of that year’s contest. The week long workshop and awards ceremony was a great experience.

Troder was followed by a few more small press and semi-pro publications in print and online, including a win in the Chiaroscuro Short Story contest in 1999 with Dead Bird, an appearence in the Nueromance ethology.

Writing and reading speculative fiction was pretty much my hobby, squeezed in around family and work. When I left actve duty in late 1999 and began employment in the civilian sector, I got a laptop. I used to take it to my job with me to work on stories during my lunch hour.

I wrote, submitted, and mostly got rejected. The web, which up to that point had been pretty mysterious to me, began to capture my interest. I taught myself ASP programming by building SFReader, a book review site (still kicking, though recenty migrated from my custom site to a vBulletin install): New SFReader, Old SFReader

Except for a few special requests from associates I met through SFReader (The King’s General for Lords of Swords, Last Words for Sages and Swords), my writing pretty much tapered off.

Writing fiction takes a long time and a lot of effort, and, for me, the investment began to overshadow the gain. I know a lot of people say they write for themselves, but I wrote because I had stories to tell. After a decade of telling them with very few people hearing, my interest waned.

And now I find myself here, with more years likely behind me than in front, stouter of middle, thinner of hair, and still not a sword-swinging hero of old. I read much less and write not at all. I have just over a decade’s worth of original fiction, some of it published, but the vast majority unseen by human eyes (other than by the editors who rejected it or the friends who critiqued it).

Here you’ll find me perched on the proverbial story-teller’s stool, hunched close to the fire’s warmth, spinning my yarns. Gather around for a tale or two. I hope some of my stories might make you think a bit, or fire your imagination and take you away, if only for a little while, from the mundane.