Tag Archives: #amwriting

Why I Wrote My First Children’s Story for My Grandson

reading

Image: boomerhighway.org

I published The Day a Dragon Came to Live with Us yesterday but not any sort of explanation about where the story came from or why I wrote it (except on Facebook and Google+).

I consider it one of my best efforts but it doesn’t seem to be getting a lot of love so far. Probably one of the reasons is that it’s over 5700 words long, basically a short story or a book chapter. Who’s got the time, right?

This story is different. It’s personally important to me. I’ve invested a lot of emotion in it. I wrote it for my seven-year-old grandson.

He’s really imaginative and every time I see him, he wants to play our “game”. Our game is a talking game. He assigns us both roles and then we make up an adventure. In our current game, I am “Grandpa” (no surprise there) and he is my pet “Honey Dragon”.

Actually, the term “pet” is a bit of a misnomer since the dragon is supposed to be thousands of years old and know all kinds of arcane magical spells.

Our game scenarios are highly derivative. He pulls a lot of his ideas from “Harry Potter” and I pull mine from all kinds of comic books, science fiction stories, TV shows, and films.

I’ve tried to write a story for him before, but I couldn’t get the hang of it. However, our current series of adventures spawned an idea, a story about a boy and his dragon.

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I’m Going To Be Published on “Theme of Absence”

infinity

Image: numbersleuth.org/

Have a look at the site Theme of Absence. As it says on the main page, it’s an “Online Magazine of Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction (the lack of an Oxford comma just kills me).

Anyway, the site administrator is Jason Bougger, and along with Betty Rocksteady, and Tim Bougger, they accept previously unpublished submissions of flash fiction and short stories. Here’s a link to their Submission Guidelines.

The reason I bring all this up is that one of my submissions has been accepted and will be published on Friday, September 23rd.

I’ve been published quite a few times before, but those were all technical books, self-study guides, and textbooks.

On September 23rd, one of my fiction pieces will be published online for the very first time (apart from my own blog, of course).

I’m pretty excited.

Jason also offered to do an author interview with me and I said “yes,” so that’ll appear on Theme of Absence the same day as my flash fiction (just a hair under 1,000 words) story.

It’s nothing that I’ve published on my site, so you don’t get a preview.

You don’t have to wait a whole month. Visit Theme of Absence right now and read some of the other stories they’ve published. Maybe you’ll find a new favorite author.

Another Update on My Proposed SciFi Novel

questor

Mike Ferrell as Jerry Robinson on the set of Gene Roddenberry’s “The Questor Tapes” (1974)

They are still in various stages of drafts, but I’ve got eight out of twelve chapters in Word docs. They still need a lot of work, but the basic story is there. I had to add what I thought of as an “experimental” short story as a chapter. I did it to add to the word count at first, but as it turns out, when I changed the chapter around a bit, it fits the flow of the rest of the book quite well, and introduces greater controversy regarding the relationship between human and synthetic beings.

I feel like I shouldn’t give away any more excerpts, at least for the present. I don’t want to publish so much of the novel here on my blog that there won’t be any interest in it when I finally get it published (boy, am I optimistic).

As I mentioned, there are twelve planned chapters plus an epilogue which either ties everything together or leaves one really big question unanswered…or both.

Remember, this is a novel that incorporates religious and spiritual imagery, it is not Christian or Jewish science fiction, so not all chapters will have the same emphasis on Biblical understanding from a synthetic intelligence’s viewpoint as the first few.

I do promise that the final chapter and epilogue do return to those issues in a very big way and the novel wouldn’t be complete without resolving them within my two synthetic prototypes as well as within their creator.

I’m having a lot of fun here, but so far it’s chapter by chapter, and as I add elements in later chapters, I’m going to have to go back and revise earlier ones for the sake of continuity. If this all comes together as I hope, I think it will be a very good story.

I can only hope that others will agree.

Writing a New Chapter for My Proposed Novel and Needing Advice

idea

Image: Clipart Panda

So far, all the work on this novel, which chronicles the emergence of a truly synthetic intelligence and its impact on the human race, has been on chapters I’ve already written and that need to be updated. Yesterday, I spent some time writing a completely new chapter.

It’s a first draft and it’s not finished yet. I found I had a general idea what I wanted to write about, but it was pretty ill-defined. I needed to create one new intelligence plus several new characters pretty much on the fly. Some old, familiar characters also make an appearance, tying events in the latest chapter back to earlier ones.

Once the chapter is complete, my word count for the whole book will be somewhere over 40,000. I’ve found out that 40,000 is the minimum word count for a novel (albeit a short one). But that’s only halfway through my proposed table of contents.

That means I have a decision to make. Do I keep on writing, creating a work that would end up being between 60,000 to 80,000 words (or more), or do I split my proposed novel in half?

If I do the latter, is my current ending chapter a good place to stop, or will I need to add more material to make it a “cliffhanger” and also a natural lead into the next novel? Another thing. If I do end it here, will the proposed first chapter of the second novel be a good place to start that story?

I do have to say that if I create two novels, I have two killer titles for them. If I keep it one novel, I’m still stuck for a title and sounds cool.

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The Sphere

NASA

Image: NASA, JPL-Caltech

Kahve Coffee in Boise, Idaho, Earth

“A Dyson Sphere? Are you out of your mind, Chris?”

Mike and Chris met every other Sunday afternoon at Boise’s only Turkish coffee and tea emporium for delicious caffeine and conversation. A wide variety of topics were bandied about between them, including the latest action and superhero movies, vintage comic books, and science fiction novels, as well as real science and technology news.

“Yeah, I know! But it fits the observations made of the dimming and flickering of Tabby’s Star.” Both friends were reasonably grounded and able to separate fact from fantasy, but of the two, Chris was far more speculative.

“Look at this.” Chris did some quick manipulating of his smart phone to pull up a webpage, and then turned the screen towards Mike. “Kepler’s been taking images of Tabby’s for four years now. Right here…” Chris quickly flipped the screen so he could see it, making sure he was pointing to the right part of the news story, and then flipped it back, “it says that not only does the star’s luminosity vary, sometimes by as much as 20 percent, but the total luminosity also has been reduced by nearly four percent.”

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Update on My First Novel

robot lawI spent the afternoon yesterday reworking chapter one of my novel about the emergence of an artificially intelligent humanoid. I’m tightening up how things are named to be consistent across chapters, as well clarifying the core directives hardcoded into each synthetic android’s core operating system. It’s more interesting when an autonomous synthetic intelligence can analyze and interpret its directives given changing circumstances rather than being forced into preprogrammed responses. That gives them a certain level of unpredictability right off the bat.

Of course, in chapter one, I throw a monkey wrench into the machine by suggesting that the directives programmed into the synthetic intelligence might be overwritten or at least modified by a higher set of directives, the directives God gave the Jewish people. Just how does an artificial intelligence created by human beings understand the nature of a God who created human beings?

Excerpt from “The Good Synthezoid”

the perfect woman

Image: shutterstock.com

The synthezoid was the first to feel it but even forewarned would barely react in time.

Miller had just pressed the ‘up’ button for the private elevator that would return him, Quinto, and Grace to the third-floor lab. Abramson was standing furthest from the group, nearest to the hallway exit to the lobby while Sophie was holding Grace’s hand and saying good-bye.

Although Grace detected the earthquake before any human being could, the shearing action along the Raymond fault line was abrupt and intense, so instead of a slow rumbling building to a maximum over several seconds, the quake was a sudden and severe jolt.

The overhead glass lighting fixtures shattered raining shards down into the hallway. Not even a second had passed, and if a human had been gifted with Grace’s perceptual schema, it would have looked as if everything was in slow motion.

The synthezoid swept Sophie up in her arms and immediately took her through the doorway to the stairwell just opposite the elevators. At the same time, the previously unknown flaw in the beam supporting the metal stairs leading upward bent radically. Grace rapidly drew the screaming child beneath her, using her android body as a shield as tons of steel stairs and beams collapsed on top of them.

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The Alien

ellie

The first issue of Scaffolding Magazine

Not another infection. I can’t stand it.

I know I asked for this. I know I volunteered. But the doctors didn’t say it would be this bad. I knew I’d be giving up my life with the first injection, but they didn’t say anything about this kind of suffering.

Even when the symptoms seem to have subsided for a while, the slightest warning sign, such as a sneeze or a mild sore throat, drives my anxiety to dangerous levels.

The doctors say I need to stay calm, that emotional aggravation could make me feel even worse and endanger the success of my treatment. How can I stay calm when they’re doing this to me?

OK, I understand. Take deep breaths. What an odd sensation.

Let me go back to the beginning. Maybe it will help you, whoever you are reading this (they won’t let me post videos for obvious reasons), understand what I’m going through and why.

We are on the verge of exploring and investigating a new planet. The planet is dominated by a sentient species, which is the problem. So far, all of our monitoring has been passive and remote, listening to their communications broadcasts, observing video transmissions. Last year (their year based on a single, complete revolution of their planet around their star), we sent a shielded drone into orbit, undetectable through the specific bands of the EM spectrum they typically monitor.

But you can only learn so much that way.

This is the first part of my story published in the first issue of the new scifi and fantasy publication Scaffolding Magazine. To read the rest, click the link and purchase a copy. I promise, you won’t be sorry.

Writing for My Grandson

reading

Image: boomerhighway.org

Most of the stories (and proposed chapters for novels) I write for this blog aren’t really good reading for my seven-year-old grandson. That’s not to say that all have “adult” language or “adult” themes (i.e. sex), but just because the stories are too sophisticated to be interesting to a child, or some of the subject matter might be too violent.

However, when I was editing The Oppressed People: From the Chronicles of the Diluvian Kings, I thought about how a story about a dragon who loved children might be right up his alley.

Every other week, when my son has his kids, we have his kids, too. Every evening, my grandson needs to read one of us a book, and in turn, we read to him.

So I chose last Sunday evening to read him “The Oppressed People.” He liked it. He seemed captivated by the story. He couldn’t say he had a favorite part, though. But it was such a thrill to actually read him a story I wrote, something I created out of my own imagination, a story he couldn’t have accessed any place else.

The opportunity for me to read to him again occurred last night, so I chose the only other tale I thought would be appropriate: The Last Warrior. It’s another fantasy tale that again, is an allegory for modern social and political issues. Of course, he didn’t get the allegory (though his Dad would), but he still enjoyed the surface details.

I was a tad surprised when he said he liked it, because there’s really no “action” as such, at least the kind of action that I thought would be attractive to a seven-year-old. In fact, he was so interested, he asked if he could read my stories on his Kindle when he’s at his Mom’s. Maybe I can send him the links via email.

I briefly toyed with the idea of reading him Walking in Glass Slippers since it’s definitely a fairy tale (along with being another allegory commenting on social issues), but it has some suggestive language, including Ella’s “enchanted lingerie,” and I didn’t want to have to explain that part to him.

I try to write a short bit of fiction every day, and not everything I write is good content for children, but hopefully, now that I’ve had this experience, I can occasionally tailor some of what I produce for him, and as she gets older, his sister.

Anyone else out there have any experience writing for children?

The Perfect Woman

the perfect woman

Image: shutterstock.com

Max Schmidt felt a little uncomfortable holding Aika’s hand in public, but as they were strolling past the Botanical Garden in the park she leaned into him and he felt it was the right thing to do.

“Tell me you love me again.” He felt her body heat as she nuzzled against him and he had to stop walking momentarily to regain his balance.

“I love you,” he whispered in her ear, too shy to say it louder for fear people nearby might hear him. She turned to Max and hugged him. “I love you, too,” she murmured into his chest.

Her Japanese accent was only mildly noticeable and he felt it was one of her more charming attributes. English was the only language they had in common though, and he felt a bit embarrassed that his own German accent was so thick. But then, the 34-year-old software engineer often felt embarrassed about himself.

Aika took Max’s hand again and they resumed their walk. He hadn’t meant to go this far from his flat. When Aika suggested they go out together for a while, he was thinking maybe a walk around the block. But it was a beautiful summer evening in the city, and Max enjoyed the delight he could see in Aika’s face. Everything in the world was new to her. It was like watching a small child discover the universe in a field of flowers or by the seashore.

“I’m so glad we met, Max.” She leaned her head against his shoulder.

“Me, too.” His reply was a bit stiff but she didn’t seem to notice. As much as Max enjoyed Aika’s company, he couldn’t help but be bothered by all of the barriers between them, not the least of which was the legality of her being here with him, or for that matter, the legality of her existence.

“We’d better head back.” He looked down at her. Her hair was a beautiful jet black, soft, silky to the touch, and smelled just slightly of strawberries.

She looked up with those big, gorgeous brown eyes. He watched her blink, noticed her eyelashes, her small, pert nose, her large, luscious lips. “Whatever you say, Max,” she cooed.

He was already getting aroused.

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