The Great Jet Rescue

It was a sunny day in November of 1994. I only know this because we lived in southern California and everyday was sunny. In my room was a computer that my dad had built in a class, that had been stuffed with games, like the original Duke Nukem and Woldenstein 3D. Thre was also this little word prossessor called the Children's publisher or somthing like that. It was a simple program that allowed you to write and put clip art into your documents. Clip art was all the rage in th early 90's. i also remember that it had a four page limit for how long your documents could be.

Well it was a nice day, and I wasn't outside playing for some reason that I can't remember 16 years later but I was inside, and this would be the first time that the need to write somthing gripped me and was spit out onto a computer.

The Great Jet Rescue (Nov 20, 1994)

The plot was simple an experimental jet goes haywire and flies towards the sun, and NASA scrambles a shuttle to rescue the pilot. Being ten and LD the words that flowed didn't make that much sense. I had forgotten a few important things such as giving my characters names, denoting when people talked or used any kind of punctuation at all. Clearly I was a young Faulkner.

After finishing my brilliant story I went to my mom to get her to read it. she didn't understand what was going on in my wall of text, and so we started piecing it toghter and creating somthing that was an actual readable story. all of the characters had color names, and after a lot of cryptography all the dialogue got quotation marks and paragraphs were laid out. add a little clip the title and BAM I had a short story written before noon.

I should have written more and sold them at school like people did with little comic strips. Oh well missed opertunity.  Full text of The Great Jet Rescue

Prologue

As far as introductions go I’ll get the basic stuff out of the way. My name is Sean I’m in my mid 20’s live in Virginia, and I’m a writer. Not a published one yet, more a hobbyist with my eye on the prize if you will. I’m just some guy with a computer and an overactive imagination that writes because I can't draw to save my life, that and I find it very relaxing. That is what this blog will be about.  I want to trace my steps as a writer how I got here and where I am going in the future towards publication, wither that be with a self-published eBook or though the more traditional style. So this will be the story of my life told kind of Memento style with this being the middle.

I have been coming up with stories for as long as I can remember, and there is a box in my parents’ house as proof that is filled with little story books. Just a few bound pages of louse leaf paper. On those pages is my bad handwriting and equally bad pictures  

 Racetrack of the Underworld (1994-5)

Let’s just say that my decision to transfer to pros instead of sticking with illustrations was probably a good idea. Most of them were about pirates and space men, the fantasies of a child that I have never gotten away from, not that pirates and space men are bad things at all.

Later on I would move on to drawing space ships on my spelling tests and those space ships would lead to hundreds of hand written pages stuffed into my middle school binders telling the epic story of a civil war and alien invasion. It’s an epic story that I would come back to in High school and again this year. It is the recurring dream that I keep having, even though I know I’m not quite ready yet to see it all the way though. 

 The Conflict within (1998 draft)

People used to look at me funny when I would open my binders in 8^th grade and pull out the novel I was working on, and set upon it like a starving child, filling the pages with my horrific handwriting.  In between all of that I dipped my toe in Star Wars fanfic, mostly to impress a girl but also because I’m a massive Star Wars geek. And in ’99 we as a culture still didn’t know just how damning the Phantom Menace was going to be to the saga that we all loved so dearly.

Then in High School I found my second love, screenplays. It started as an exercise in trying to write a video game movie that didn’t suck, and resulted in my first script The Lord of Terror which was based on Diablo. Looking back it wasn’t a great script, but it did show me that scripts write so much faster then prose, that I ditched the 50,000 completed words and 200 page outline that was the age of chaos to embark on making movies. 

 Fellowship of the Slacker (2003)

Eventually the movie well would dry up, mostly killed by my imagination being too big for my budgets, and World of Warcraft. Eventually on a lark I would return to pros in late 2009, while doing prewriting work on a Dragon Age mod that I never made. But those ten pages of prose to get my mind turning and the resulting outline turned into my first finished novel, The Long Night, and it has been forward down the writing path ever since. 

 The Long Night (2010 3ed draft)

I didn’t fully feel the desire to self publish till I got a Nook last year and dove into the world of eBooks, and realized that most of the ones out there by real people aren’t bad at all. It was a revelation to me as a writer because my last experience with people putting up their stuff outside the imposing gates of a publisher was fanfic and most of that is overblown at best and just Han Luke slash at worst.

As now as I write this I’m sitting on two books out with people to be torn apart in a hail of red ink, looking at one as my toe in the water for self publishing and the other as a toe in real publishing. I’ve got a third that I’m working on, and a whole slew of outlines ideas and characters banging on the walls of my brain ready to live a second life on paper. So hold on to your hats as I take you for a ride down memory lane and forward into what I’m doing right now. I hope you enjoy.