wellswriting

About What I Write August 19, 2011

If you haven’t explored my stories or website yet, I’ll save you the mystery.  I write science fiction stories. Like any red-blooded American boy, I loved rockets and astronauts from the start.  I was only seven or eight when I remember seeing the last Apollo mission to the moon.  In 1976, Star Wars fever gripped the United States. I didn’t get to go see the movie until it made it to the little local one screen theater in my small home-town.  I read the book first, and I was fully hooked. I  read books that I didn’t realize were classics then like Stranger in a Strange Land, Ringworld, and more books that I remember the stories from vividly even though I’ve long forgotten their titles.

In junior highschool I started handwriting my first story about Mars.  I never finished it and twenty years later my mother gave me the manuscript.  With six children, it was a rarity for her to save something like that, but now I have it for myself. My first non-science fiction story was written in highschool as a class assignment.  The teacher had declared that she would never read a horror story, and my rebellious streak came out when I wrote one such story just to make her read one (I think I got a B).

I have some other stories that have been started with outlines which are not science fiction, but for now I am writing what I love to write while trying to break into the published category.  There’s something about the possibilities of the future, not only for settings that can be whatever your imagination conjures up, but also in the way this genre allows you to write into the future a reflection of present or past events and trends.