Even during these lean times in my writing 'career', I was known as the writer to my friends. Since high school, I've been that guy. It's not the first thing I mention to people when I met them and sometimes it's something I don't like bringing up because so much of what I've written is fan fiction but it's something that does get mentioned eventually.
As a result, when Katy and Eric were heading to Japan for a year, Eric set up a website with a forum for family and friends to communicate together on. We could pretend we were together having conversations as a group. One of the default sections was 'Steve's Literary Corner'. Given a place to play, I felt I should. Some older stuff was uploaded to it and I started to play in the short story venue for the first time in years, just playing a little, doing some fun stuff.
Before they left, they also said 'You should come visit us while we're there.' I politely hemmed and hawed a little to which they noted 'How often are you going to know people in Japan?' It was a good point. I spent about a week there with them in late April/early May 2004. It was a brilliant time. I'm glad I went and look to return someday.
I wrote a diary of those days as 'Notes from Japan'. While walking around chatting with Eric, I noted that I had a line in head that had been stuck there since I got off the plane, something about checking the Godzilla detection system and seeing it at a low setting for my trip. I felt there was a story brewing. Eric agreed as he's generally filled with the enthusiasm for accomplishing things.
Not unlike high school, I was writing to a specific audience, writing a fictional tale based on the adventures of me and my friends. It was fun. Fun means more writing. I got fired up again.
It didn't take long for the Doctor to poke his head into this series of adventures. Rather than retread old territory, I pushed myself to do something a little different. To make up for the bad Tom Baker fan fiction that had been the 'Dr. What' series, I didn't bring my Doctors into the story, but rather the 4th Doctor, Romana, and K-9. I had to write to those characters, locking myself into a more specific style for them. It was more fun than I expected. I also wrote one part of the story in script form, something I hadn't done much of in the past. That was also fun. I was stretching my skills out and doing different things while doing the same thing. It helped me learn.
Upon their return from Japan, I continued the story in America, introducing a thread that would end up becoming a grand anniversary story, tying together threads from all the things I'd ever written, well, mostly everything. Unfortunately, by then the forum had gotten attacked by spammers and lies rotting in the Internet sun. The last few stories are the best things I've wrote that hardly anyone has read.
The forum and the trip had accomplished their goal. My creative brain was firing on all cylinders again. New story ideas that weren't directly based on something were populating in my head. There were places to go and people to meet.
The novel, the start of the Steveverse, had a draft completed and, as noted previously, needs 'something' in order to work properly. It sits waiting while other parts of the Steveverse get explored. It's primary goal, to start things off, was accomplished. Other things need their own attention now.
15 November 2008
14 November 2008
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.
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.
13 November 2008
My Writing 'Career' - Restart - 1994 to 1997
This is when picking dates for these things gets extra tricky. I'm trying to remember stuff and not go back and check dates. There's a really good chance I'm going to mess this up bad. Oh well, that should keep things interesting at least!
Moving on, apologies aside: The Internet.
The World Wide Web and all its visual glory was yet ahead of most of us. There was just the Internet, text on a screen. I had gotten used to text on a screen from people I saw in class all the time. We had email in school. I still had access to an alumni account and we'd used it for a round robin story that my enthusiasm messed up. I'd been working for a major manufacturing concern for a couple years by this point and I barely had email at work. My desk had a terminal on it to connect up to a mainframe. I think our work room had just gotten a PC in it, just one, around this time.
I had saved up my money and bought a computer of my own, a Macintosh like I'd gotten used to using at school. With it, and the pre-installed AOL software on it, I was on the Internet at home. At the time, I was really the only Doctor Who fan I knew. Sure I knew people that were familiar with the show, most of whom would rather read my stories than actually watch the programme, but there was no one else around that knew the show, read about the show, thought about the show, to the degree that I did. I knew there were other people in the area that did, I knew fan clubs existed in the area, but they had membership fees and such and I couldn't justify it to myself. (I was soon to find some non-fan club fans in Milwaukee but that's another story entirely.) With the Internet, there were newsgroups where people would go to discuss Doctor Who or post their Doctor Who fiction. For that matter, there was a group on AOL itself that did the same thing. If I really wanted to rewrite 'Alien Invasion: 1991' to show myself how my skills had advanced since then, I could post it here. I wouldn't need to print it out, make photocopies at Kinkos, and find people to want to read it; they could just download it and read it if they wanted. It would be fun.
It was fun. I know, you were probably expecting a twist at this point, the collapse of the project, the crushing of my ego, but that's not what happened. I set some standards for myself, kept the basic concepts of the original (set in Milwaukee, the alien name and design), wrote it and posted it up. Most people that bothered to react to it liked it. I remember getting some criticism on it from one individual, nothing too bad, and was delighted when other people, people I didn't know, largely agreed with me when I politely rebutted. There was even some constructive criticism. I enjoyed it, perhaps too much. Before I'd even finished the story, I'd mapped out a season. I was back in.
Now, to a degree, this was a problem. My original plan was to move on, do some stuff that I'd made up completely so that I could benefit financially from my work. On the other hand, I hadn't thought up anything of my own yet and writing more fan fiction was better than writing nothing, so I continued.
I decided that this new series would be different but similiar to the one I'd already written (some slightly edited versions of my original series would also be posted for download on AOL with pages of explanation for characters I didn't need to discribe in the story because, well, originally they were people everyone reading the stories already knew). Taking some cues from the structure of other available fan fiction, this new series was meant to be novelizations of the show, stories that didn't appear on television in our universe, but did elsewhere. The stories I were telling were from Season 31 of Doctor Who (the last aired series of the real run was 27). The production of the show had moved to America (as rumours were saying was going to happen in real life) and was being made by me and my friends (essentially) as Python Lord Productions.
Of course, I was the Doctor. The important difference being that this time I was an actor playing the Doctor, not some strange set of circumstances that meant I was actually the Doctor.
The goal was to tell stories that could be part of the actual series, as if I was charting the future of the programme. I still wanted to have fun and that's how I ended up blowing it. Here's the twist where it goes bad.
The fifth story in the series was a crossover with a popular (at the time at least) manga/anime series called 'Ranma 1/2'. This would never have happened in real life. The story was a good one but it didn't fit in Season 31. It should have been separate. While I was able to post it to a anime fan fiction newsgroup and get more readers, it just wasn't right in that context. Worse yet I'd once again had too much fun and envisioned a 13 part side story continuing the crossover of which I completed 5 parts and partly wrote another 5 parts. Again, these were not bad stories, they do a lot of good for the characters actually, but Doctor Who fan fiction had distracted me from my goal of original fiction and now Doctor Who/Ranma 1/2 fan fiction was distracting me from writing Doctor Who fan fiction.
At one point, I envisioned the 'Season' series to run for five or six years. I wrote all of 'Season 31', finished one story from 'Season 32' and half finished another. That's it. The 'Teen Doctor' series I wrote in high school has 20+ completed stories in its canon; the 'Season' Doctor has 9.
I had messed up my own project. There were other things yet ahead.
Moving on, apologies aside: The Internet.
The World Wide Web and all its visual glory was yet ahead of most of us. There was just the Internet, text on a screen. I had gotten used to text on a screen from people I saw in class all the time. We had email in school. I still had access to an alumni account and we'd used it for a round robin story that my enthusiasm messed up. I'd been working for a major manufacturing concern for a couple years by this point and I barely had email at work. My desk had a terminal on it to connect up to a mainframe. I think our work room had just gotten a PC in it, just one, around this time.
I had saved up my money and bought a computer of my own, a Macintosh like I'd gotten used to using at school. With it, and the pre-installed AOL software on it, I was on the Internet at home. At the time, I was really the only Doctor Who fan I knew. Sure I knew people that were familiar with the show, most of whom would rather read my stories than actually watch the programme, but there was no one else around that knew the show, read about the show, thought about the show, to the degree that I did. I knew there were other people in the area that did, I knew fan clubs existed in the area, but they had membership fees and such and I couldn't justify it to myself. (I was soon to find some non-fan club fans in Milwaukee but that's another story entirely.) With the Internet, there were newsgroups where people would go to discuss Doctor Who or post their Doctor Who fiction. For that matter, there was a group on AOL itself that did the same thing. If I really wanted to rewrite 'Alien Invasion: 1991' to show myself how my skills had advanced since then, I could post it here. I wouldn't need to print it out, make photocopies at Kinkos, and find people to want to read it; they could just download it and read it if they wanted. It would be fun.
It was fun. I know, you were probably expecting a twist at this point, the collapse of the project, the crushing of my ego, but that's not what happened. I set some standards for myself, kept the basic concepts of the original (set in Milwaukee, the alien name and design), wrote it and posted it up. Most people that bothered to react to it liked it. I remember getting some criticism on it from one individual, nothing too bad, and was delighted when other people, people I didn't know, largely agreed with me when I politely rebutted. There was even some constructive criticism. I enjoyed it, perhaps too much. Before I'd even finished the story, I'd mapped out a season. I was back in.
Now, to a degree, this was a problem. My original plan was to move on, do some stuff that I'd made up completely so that I could benefit financially from my work. On the other hand, I hadn't thought up anything of my own yet and writing more fan fiction was better than writing nothing, so I continued.
I decided that this new series would be different but similiar to the one I'd already written (some slightly edited versions of my original series would also be posted for download on AOL with pages of explanation for characters I didn't need to discribe in the story because, well, originally they were people everyone reading the stories already knew). Taking some cues from the structure of other available fan fiction, this new series was meant to be novelizations of the show, stories that didn't appear on television in our universe, but did elsewhere. The stories I were telling were from Season 31 of Doctor Who (the last aired series of the real run was 27). The production of the show had moved to America (as rumours were saying was going to happen in real life) and was being made by me and my friends (essentially) as Python Lord Productions.
Of course, I was the Doctor. The important difference being that this time I was an actor playing the Doctor, not some strange set of circumstances that meant I was actually the Doctor.
The goal was to tell stories that could be part of the actual series, as if I was charting the future of the programme. I still wanted to have fun and that's how I ended up blowing it. Here's the twist where it goes bad.
The fifth story in the series was a crossover with a popular (at the time at least) manga/anime series called 'Ranma 1/2'. This would never have happened in real life. The story was a good one but it didn't fit in Season 31. It should have been separate. While I was able to post it to a anime fan fiction newsgroup and get more readers, it just wasn't right in that context. Worse yet I'd once again had too much fun and envisioned a 13 part side story continuing the crossover of which I completed 5 parts and partly wrote another 5 parts. Again, these were not bad stories, they do a lot of good for the characters actually, but Doctor Who fan fiction had distracted me from my goal of original fiction and now Doctor Who/Ranma 1/2 fan fiction was distracting me from writing Doctor Who fan fiction.
At one point, I envisioned the 'Season' series to run for five or six years. I wrote all of 'Season 31', finished one story from 'Season 32' and half finished another. That's it. The 'Teen Doctor' series I wrote in high school has 20+ completed stories in its canon; the 'Season' Doctor has 9.
I had messed up my own project. There were other things yet ahead.
12 November 2008
My Writing 'Career' - An Audience Arrives - 1990 to 1994
Right away in my British Authors class, we discussed what makes a hero. Mrs. Branson wrote the characteristics on the chalkboard as we high school Juniors could think of them and call them out. This led to an assignment to write a short story, 1 or 2 pages, about a hero using the characteristics we'd decided on. Instinctively I knew the majority of the class, if not all of them, would hear 'hero' and put 'super' in front of it. I felt the need to be different. I went to study hall and eagerly started writing my first draft, telling the story of a young man and his girlfriend who try to do the right thing and end up in trouble.
It was also eleven pages long.
When you go to review something like that, it can get a little attention. We broke up into little groups to read each others works and mine obviously took a little longer. Mrs. Branson stated that she'd only asked for a page or two and therefore that's all of it that she'd read, which was fair enough. Hearing about what I'd done, other students asked to read it after it was complete. I saw no harm in that. The second draft was a little longer storywise but was shorter in page length, I think nine pages, due to better penmenship. I got an A as well as a note saying that she'd read the whole thing, despite her good-natured statement that she wouldn't in class. I typed the story up on the school's mainframe, printed a few out, and passed them out to whoever was curious.
People liked it. Could I do any more? As it turned out, yes I could.
I wrote a number of short stories. I returned to a Bill Gaines influence but, instead of MAD magazine, was referencing his EC (Entertaining Comics) led stuff, as I had just started getting reprints of that. As a result, there were a number of twist endings, people dying, or turning out to have never existed, things like that. They were all generally short and had no titles. Other assignments for British Authors would get released to the group as well. Things were going well, and I was learning to use the Macintosh computers in the lab for a better looking output.
It erked me a bit that everything was so short. Ten typed pages was a lengthy tale at that point. Something longer, more grand in its storytelling would feel more... skillful I guess, show that I had something to tell. A longer story had started at one point, but it wasn't working out and I'd stopped work on it. I rewrote what I had and started over. This time it seemed to work. It just needed a clever title...
'Alien Invasion: 1991'
Set about three months into the future when it was released, the story was set at our school, in our classes, with myself and my friends in it. When the aliens attack, the gray blobby Klack'tu, I come across as heroic, helping lead the charge against them, although everyone in the team gets to do something.
Near the end of what would probably have been the third act, I am seperated from my friends. The auditorium I love so much as part of Stage Crew has been used as a feeding and breeding ground for the aliens (they eat humans in order to asexually reproduce and have started feasting on the staff and students). At the moment, it is empty. The battle is far off, near the lunch room, but I am drawn here, to one of the pillars that holds up the balcony in the auditorium. Now that I'm looking for it, the keyhole set into it is obvious and I know the key that I've had all my life fits into it. I am right. A door opens and I walk inside, into an area that is bigger on the inside than the outside.
I am the Doctor.
It's all very complicated and somewhat stupid but I am the Eighth Doctor, taking over from McCoy. While I don't believe I knew it at the time, the original run of the show was already over and here I was seeking to continue it. The Doctor had been exiled to Earth again, caught in a Time Storm on the way, and regenerated as an infant which would grow up to be me. After learning all this, the Doctor saves the day. As if there was any doubt.
In part because my friends were in it, part because it was a long story, and part because I'd hand out stories before a history class that most students slept through, this was well received. I continued. (I also found that I could write during that history class while still paying enough attention to the teacher to interact with him, multitasking!) Slowly but surely the random short stories faded away and there was only Doctor Who for me to write.
My audience grew even further with the first story released in my senior year of high school: 'Psychotic Reaction'. A night setting up for a stage production goes horribly wrong as my buddy gets bonked on the head, goes crazy and starts killing the rest of us off. In the end, the Doctor shows up in this alternate universe to save the day. This got handed out to everyone in it, including the teacher that gets messily dismissed within the first few pages (Kids: Don't do this now. I was blowing off steam towards a teacher I didn't often get along with. If you do this today, you will go to counciling, maybe worse). The audience grew ever larger. It got reprinted a couple times and I was introduced to people, at least a couple times, as 'the guy who wrote THAT story'.
I considered ending the series with my graduation from high school but didn't as I had enough friends still there, my brother was attending the same school so he could pass stuff out, and I would stop in on my way home from work to use the computer lab because (1) they'd let me and (2) I didn't have a computer at home yet. I'm glad I didn't as the best stories in the run (my opinion) came after I'd graduated.
But in 1994, realizing this audience was going away, I regenerated the Doctor and returned his companion back to school in a rather abrupt fashion so that everything was 'back to normal'. Another reason to quit the series was that by this point I hated the first season of Doctor Who I'd written as a junior. The stories were clumsy and poorly told. I also didn't like the idea of me actually being the Doctor anymore as the mix between me and Doctor didn't always seem very ... Doctory.
I still wanted to write but wasn't quite sure what I would do next or for whom. I was really trying to find something fun to write that wouldn't be fan fiction that I could try to market, you know, for money. What and how and everything else eluded me.
Maybe to get the ball rolling I could rewrite 'Alien Invasion: 1991', you know, just for fun. And there's this whole Internet thing, there seem to be people on it that like Doctor Who.
Hmmm.....
It was also eleven pages long.
When you go to review something like that, it can get a little attention. We broke up into little groups to read each others works and mine obviously took a little longer. Mrs. Branson stated that she'd only asked for a page or two and therefore that's all of it that she'd read, which was fair enough. Hearing about what I'd done, other students asked to read it after it was complete. I saw no harm in that. The second draft was a little longer storywise but was shorter in page length, I think nine pages, due to better penmenship. I got an A as well as a note saying that she'd read the whole thing, despite her good-natured statement that she wouldn't in class. I typed the story up on the school's mainframe, printed a few out, and passed them out to whoever was curious.
People liked it. Could I do any more? As it turned out, yes I could.
I wrote a number of short stories. I returned to a Bill Gaines influence but, instead of MAD magazine, was referencing his EC (Entertaining Comics) led stuff, as I had just started getting reprints of that. As a result, there were a number of twist endings, people dying, or turning out to have never existed, things like that. They were all generally short and had no titles. Other assignments for British Authors would get released to the group as well. Things were going well, and I was learning to use the Macintosh computers in the lab for a better looking output.
It erked me a bit that everything was so short. Ten typed pages was a lengthy tale at that point. Something longer, more grand in its storytelling would feel more... skillful I guess, show that I had something to tell. A longer story had started at one point, but it wasn't working out and I'd stopped work on it. I rewrote what I had and started over. This time it seemed to work. It just needed a clever title...
'Alien Invasion: 1991'
Set about three months into the future when it was released, the story was set at our school, in our classes, with myself and my friends in it. When the aliens attack, the gray blobby Klack'tu, I come across as heroic, helping lead the charge against them, although everyone in the team gets to do something.
Near the end of what would probably have been the third act, I am seperated from my friends. The auditorium I love so much as part of Stage Crew has been used as a feeding and breeding ground for the aliens (they eat humans in order to asexually reproduce and have started feasting on the staff and students). At the moment, it is empty. The battle is far off, near the lunch room, but I am drawn here, to one of the pillars that holds up the balcony in the auditorium. Now that I'm looking for it, the keyhole set into it is obvious and I know the key that I've had all my life fits into it. I am right. A door opens and I walk inside, into an area that is bigger on the inside than the outside.
I am the Doctor.
It's all very complicated and somewhat stupid but I am the Eighth Doctor, taking over from McCoy. While I don't believe I knew it at the time, the original run of the show was already over and here I was seeking to continue it. The Doctor had been exiled to Earth again, caught in a Time Storm on the way, and regenerated as an infant which would grow up to be me. After learning all this, the Doctor saves the day. As if there was any doubt.
In part because my friends were in it, part because it was a long story, and part because I'd hand out stories before a history class that most students slept through, this was well received. I continued. (I also found that I could write during that history class while still paying enough attention to the teacher to interact with him, multitasking!) Slowly but surely the random short stories faded away and there was only Doctor Who for me to write.
My audience grew even further with the first story released in my senior year of high school: 'Psychotic Reaction'. A night setting up for a stage production goes horribly wrong as my buddy gets bonked on the head, goes crazy and starts killing the rest of us off. In the end, the Doctor shows up in this alternate universe to save the day. This got handed out to everyone in it, including the teacher that gets messily dismissed within the first few pages (Kids: Don't do this now. I was blowing off steam towards a teacher I didn't often get along with. If you do this today, you will go to counciling, maybe worse). The audience grew ever larger. It got reprinted a couple times and I was introduced to people, at least a couple times, as 'the guy who wrote THAT story'.
I considered ending the series with my graduation from high school but didn't as I had enough friends still there, my brother was attending the same school so he could pass stuff out, and I would stop in on my way home from work to use the computer lab because (1) they'd let me and (2) I didn't have a computer at home yet. I'm glad I didn't as the best stories in the run (my opinion) came after I'd graduated.
But in 1994, realizing this audience was going away, I regenerated the Doctor and returned his companion back to school in a rather abrupt fashion so that everything was 'back to normal'. Another reason to quit the series was that by this point I hated the first season of Doctor Who I'd written as a junior. The stories were clumsy and poorly told. I also didn't like the idea of me actually being the Doctor anymore as the mix between me and Doctor didn't always seem very ... Doctory.
I still wanted to write but wasn't quite sure what I would do next or for whom. I was really trying to find something fun to write that wouldn't be fan fiction that I could try to market, you know, for money. What and how and everything else eluded me.
Maybe to get the ball rolling I could rewrite 'Alien Invasion: 1991', you know, just for fun. And there's this whole Internet thing, there seem to be people on it that like Doctor Who.
Hmmm.....
11 November 2008
My Writing 'Career' - The First Big wave - 1986 to 1989 (or so)
Midway through sixth grade, my class was assigned to write some 'themes'. These turned out to be short stories so I'm not sure why we weren't just assigned to write some short stories. It may be that we had to write to different themes in each one or it could just have been the style at the time.
I still have all four of these works so the genesis of this period can be reviewed and investigated. A major influence, yet not at the same time, is clearly Mad Magazine, as from the titles these are all meant to be parodies of existing works. Since only one of them tries to be funny, it was as if I was also introducing myself to the concept of fan fiction, writing ones own version of an existing work for your own amusement.
'Sherluck Phones' was a two parter, an attempt at a Sherlock Holmes type story. It's even written by his 'Watson' character. The first part is mostly dialogue. I believe my teacher either directed me to get to the point or one of our 'themes' was dialogue as none of the other stories feature much, if any, dialogue, especially the second part of the story. It is not good but I was twelve.
The moderately amusing story is 'Superflab', the tale of a grossly overweight super-hero in the 'Superman' style. I was working from the 50's 'Adventures of Superman' tv show model as I was just starting to read comic books about this time and I bought mostly Marvel Comics, not DC. Superflab repels an alien invasion with his stomach. I think it shows the Mad Magazine vibe I was reaching for with these stories.
And then there was 'Dr. What'.
Immediately explained as one of five Time Lord brothers (Drs Who, What, Where, Why, and How), Dr. What and his Time Lady companion Romana face the Dalkens on a spacecraft disguised as a field and create green slime as a toy for earth children to scare off the Daleks, er, Dalkens as that is what they look like inside their casings. It's pretty dumb. And shows I'd seen 'Destiny of the Daleks' recently or I just remembered it very clearly.
Dumb maybe, inspiring, yes. The interest in doing my own comics and prose magazines for my 'audience' (aka my brothers) came from this assignment. More 'Dr. What' stories followed and in the very next story we met adult versions of my friends from middle school, including myself. By the end of the story, Romana stays behind to be with my friend Richard and I sneak onto the ship to be the new companion. Both of these concepts would return in later works.
I wrote other things as well: the Pac-Man/Lego related comics I mentioned recently, an adaptation of the original Godzilla movie written before I'd seen the movie, and some other stuff I apparently no longer have access to and don't really remember. There was a 'newspaper' with a buddy of mine that had access to a computer but that ran to one whole issue. That we actually tried to distribute to our friends (I think it was a brief fad during 7th grade, still the early days of home computing, desktop publishing, and printers) but beyond that, I don't think I pushed my work on anyone apart from my family and the teachers that had to read my assignments.
The momentum faded out during my freshman year of high school. My brothers and I weren't really playing 'store' any more, which is where I'd 'sell' my comics to them. I also had an epiphany while writing 'Dr. What'. Apparently I managed to delude myself into thinking I was writing parodies this whole time. Once I realized I was just trying to write 'Dr. Who' and doing a very poor job of it at that, I stopped, right in the middle of a Dalkens sequel which also saw the return of old companion Jamie.
The first wave was over because, let's face it, I was no good. Suddenly that was as important as the fun I had doing it.
Apart from being as creative as possible in my school assignments, that was about it for a couple years. Then school kicked up the ashes of the fire again.
I still have all four of these works so the genesis of this period can be reviewed and investigated. A major influence, yet not at the same time, is clearly Mad Magazine, as from the titles these are all meant to be parodies of existing works. Since only one of them tries to be funny, it was as if I was also introducing myself to the concept of fan fiction, writing ones own version of an existing work for your own amusement.
'Sherluck Phones' was a two parter, an attempt at a Sherlock Holmes type story. It's even written by his 'Watson' character. The first part is mostly dialogue. I believe my teacher either directed me to get to the point or one of our 'themes' was dialogue as none of the other stories feature much, if any, dialogue, especially the second part of the story. It is not good but I was twelve.
The moderately amusing story is 'Superflab', the tale of a grossly overweight super-hero in the 'Superman' style. I was working from the 50's 'Adventures of Superman' tv show model as I was just starting to read comic books about this time and I bought mostly Marvel Comics, not DC. Superflab repels an alien invasion with his stomach. I think it shows the Mad Magazine vibe I was reaching for with these stories.
And then there was 'Dr. What'.
Immediately explained as one of five Time Lord brothers (Drs Who, What, Where, Why, and How), Dr. What and his Time Lady companion Romana face the Dalkens on a spacecraft disguised as a field and create green slime as a toy for earth children to scare off the Daleks, er, Dalkens as that is what they look like inside their casings. It's pretty dumb. And shows I'd seen 'Destiny of the Daleks' recently or I just remembered it very clearly.
Dumb maybe, inspiring, yes. The interest in doing my own comics and prose magazines for my 'audience' (aka my brothers) came from this assignment. More 'Dr. What' stories followed and in the very next story we met adult versions of my friends from middle school, including myself. By the end of the story, Romana stays behind to be with my friend Richard and I sneak onto the ship to be the new companion. Both of these concepts would return in later works.
I wrote other things as well: the Pac-Man/Lego related comics I mentioned recently, an adaptation of the original Godzilla movie written before I'd seen the movie, and some other stuff I apparently no longer have access to and don't really remember. There was a 'newspaper' with a buddy of mine that had access to a computer but that ran to one whole issue. That we actually tried to distribute to our friends (I think it was a brief fad during 7th grade, still the early days of home computing, desktop publishing, and printers) but beyond that, I don't think I pushed my work on anyone apart from my family and the teachers that had to read my assignments.
The momentum faded out during my freshman year of high school. My brothers and I weren't really playing 'store' any more, which is where I'd 'sell' my comics to them. I also had an epiphany while writing 'Dr. What'. Apparently I managed to delude myself into thinking I was writing parodies this whole time. Once I realized I was just trying to write 'Dr. Who' and doing a very poor job of it at that, I stopped, right in the middle of a Dalkens sequel which also saw the return of old companion Jamie.
The first wave was over because, let's face it, I was no good. Suddenly that was as important as the fun I had doing it.
Apart from being as creative as possible in my school assignments, that was about it for a couple years. Then school kicked up the ashes of the fire again.
10 November 2008
My Writing 'Career' - The Early Years
When you are a child, no creative outlet is foreign to you. Art, music, performance, writing, whatever; you can do it all because you're just having fun. At this point, there's no pressure to be 'good'. Adults will look at, perhaps even praise, an odd scribble of yours.
I was really no different.
I drew acceptably but not well. Replicating cartoon art was within my skillset, but nothing very realistic. I never really played a musical instrument but I can whistle after a fashion and sorta of keep a beat so I'd tap out rhythms. I and my friends would lip sync to my Muppet records, each of us having assigned characters to 'perform' for the entertainment of the adults in the room. For that matter, I even did some acting in public, for a grade school talent show. I don't remember if I was good or not. Probably not.
It only made sense that I'd try to write as well. I did on occasion. In fact our little group of friends tried writing a collective story, each chapter written by another person, featuring us friends as the 'stars' of the story. I seem to remember finding my page and a half of uncompleted chapter at one point. Not sure if I still have it. What's important now is that I remember that it didn't seem weird that we would TRY to write something. It was natural. I didn't do that much with the feeling at the time but it was normal for me to want to write.
Then I went to middle school. Then it didn't just seem normal. It would actually happen.
I was really no different.
I drew acceptably but not well. Replicating cartoon art was within my skillset, but nothing very realistic. I never really played a musical instrument but I can whistle after a fashion and sorta of keep a beat so I'd tap out rhythms. I and my friends would lip sync to my Muppet records, each of us having assigned characters to 'perform' for the entertainment of the adults in the room. For that matter, I even did some acting in public, for a grade school talent show. I don't remember if I was good or not. Probably not.
It only made sense that I'd try to write as well. I did on occasion. In fact our little group of friends tried writing a collective story, each chapter written by another person, featuring us friends as the 'stars' of the story. I seem to remember finding my page and a half of uncompleted chapter at one point. Not sure if I still have it. What's important now is that I remember that it didn't seem weird that we would TRY to write something. It was natural. I didn't do that much with the feeling at the time but it was normal for me to want to write.
Then I went to middle school. Then it didn't just seem normal. It would actually happen.
09 November 2008
Cleaning up some earlier posts
The Paul Newman movie in my collection is 'Slap Shot', the hockey movie from the 70's with comedic elements. I even have the novelization!
The 'handfull of pills' line was not meant to refer to anyone in particular. Or was it? :) I just saw what seemed to be a ... trend and felt the need to comment on it.
As much as I liked the Sontaran story from this year's Doctor Who, Martha has a really stupid sounding line to say at the beginning of the story regarding her bringing the Doctor back to Earth. There was probably no good way to deliver the line and Freema doesn't deliver it in a way that makes it sound less silly. Unfortunately, they play the line in the preview for the first Sontaran episode, during the Sontaran episode, and during the reprise of the episode. Seeing it three times makes it that much more awkward sounding.
The 'handfull of pills' line was not meant to refer to anyone in particular. Or was it? :) I just saw what seemed to be a ... trend and felt the need to comment on it.
As much as I liked the Sontaran story from this year's Doctor Who, Martha has a really stupid sounding line to say at the beginning of the story regarding her bringing the Doctor back to Earth. There was probably no good way to deliver the line and Freema doesn't deliver it in a way that makes it sound less silly. Unfortunately, they play the line in the preview for the first Sontaran episode, during the Sontaran episode, and during the reprise of the episode. Seeing it three times makes it that much more awkward sounding.
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