My Writing 'Career' - The Wilderness Years - 1997 to 2003

When a cycle ends, such as my 'Teen Doctor' series, it's generally easy to mark that date. The last story is written, you think 'this is the end of this series', and you move on. There wasn't an official end to the 'Season' series so, in theory, I was still working on it while I picked up other projects. I say 'in theory' because I'd look at the notebooks and go 'I need to get back to those stories soon', put them down and not think about them for months. It never occurred to me that I wasn't getting anywhere and the project was done for some years. I had Jack update the website and it became official and a little sad.

As hinted at, I never stopped writing or being creative. The problem was that the writing wasn't getting to completion fast enough and the other creative things didn't take off like I hoped. When you're doing things for fun, the doing needs to be fun, boost you up by doing it. I had some of that, but not enough. At the time there wasn't a lot of payoff, little completion, so it didn't feel like I was getting anywhere. At times I wondered if this hobby of mine that I thought would turn into something was coming to an end.

The novel I'd started with the intent of writing a page a day would sit fallow for weeks at a crack. I was trying to write it linearly and without my hand written first drafts, something new. This hampered my progress and the book took years to write. Eventually I discarded the limitations I'd set on myself and got a draft done, but it needs work and sits waiting for that work to happen on it. It needs ... something and I'm yet to determine what that is.

I became involved with the 'Trenchcoat' series of Doctor Who fan fiction, a group that had influenced my 'Season' series to some degree. I ended up writing two stories for that series and sparked a last burst of energy for the project in general, a fact in which I do take some pride. Some good things came of this. I learned how to not write linearly (starting at the beginning of the story and writing it to the end), but write the scenes I had already in my head and work out the rest later, rather than getting stuck because I didn't know what should be next. I had gotten used to writing complete stories out of order during the 'Teen Doctor' series so this was just a new application of that concept. I also got to be edited for the first time in years and the give and take of the process was more enjoyable than I expected. The downside to this was that the stories weren't released until 2004 so there wasn't that immediate feeling of completion. On the plus side, when they were released it was in a large hardcover book and that felt really nice.

My involvement with that group also led to me writing a 'Season Doctor' story for the 'Enlightment' fan fiction magazine (something I'd forgotten about yesterday). This was the first time I was published in any way (outside of the high school newspaper which didn't really feel like being published) outside my own doing. I think I tend to forget about the story because I pushed an idea through my head and I don't think it turned out very well.

This is also the period where I got to be a wrestling 'booker'. In some ways, this was the height of the time period because I got to develop plans, tell people what to do, and they'd do it. That was different. On the other hand, we didn't perform as often as I'd like and our grand dreams of actually running a real show never materialized. Still, I have video of myself acting like a fool while wearing a wrestling mask and that is always fun.

Lots of stopping and starting. Projects that didn't see the light of day right away. Messing around in George's garage. It was a step back from releasing an episode of 'Doctor Who' fan fiction to the Internet every week and having the chance that a 'bunch' of people would see it.

I needed a spark to get things moving again. The spark turned out to be a big one, an overseas sort of thing.