Forum: Author Hangout

I was inspired mainly by Dance of a Lifetime by Don Lockwood. I didn't use it to create my story, but it gave me the inspiration to use my own life as the basis for a story.

Edited to correct Don's name.

how did you get your start?

I wanted to learn HTML and about the internet so I created a website. I was into the erotic story site White Shadows at the time so that inspired me to create a free erotic story site. Once the site was developed, I needed material until authors found it and submitted their own. So I wrote stories for the site.

I was always a storyteller, and as a kid would spin yarns to entertain other kids — some pure fiction, others based on existing stories such as Greek myths. I also told myself long serial adventures, sometimes spinning them out for over a year. As a teen, I started trying to write things down, and quickly learned I probably wanted to learn what a novel is and how it worked.

My first intentional novel was Tolkien with serial numbers stripped off, which I never finished, though I did complete a short story in the same world when I was 16. My second was Earthsea with serial numbers stripped off, also never finished. My third was a more original high fantasy, worked at off and on through university. Grad school killed that. During a break from grad school, I wrote a handful of short stories, mostly fantasy, and sold three of them to pro markets, and never looked back.

I wrote an amazingly bad story in middle school as a class assignment. It bugged me for years and actually made me thing I probably shouldn't ever try to be a writer.

However one day in 2002 or 2003 I think I had a dream about someone finding a robot girl in an attic and bringing her to life, then going on the journey as she learned to be real.

I started writing it down. Then I had to post it somewhere, so I put it up on asstr or the last remnants of Usenet or both - can't really remember exactly.

I'd been reading asstr for a little while at that point, starting with a story called 'Jane Carter of Mars' that was basically 'Jane' as a woman landing naked on a world of nude Martians and having a decent number of sex scenes. The author of that story pulled most of it offline shortly after I found it though...

AI Girl did very well, so I started reading more erotica and eventually wrote a few more stories.

My wife (she wasn't at the time) had been injured in a training accident. She likes bodice ripper romances. I started telling her little stories to pass the time, as she recovered. My duties didn't allow me to sit at her bedside, so I started writing them down, on 8 1/2 X 14 legal pads... She saved them all.

I discovered, as Heinlein and Anthony have pointed out, that once I started writing, I couldn't stop. It was R.A.H., who not so famously said, "Writing is a lot like masturbation. It hurts no one, but wash your hands when you're done."

Freshman in High School, I wrote a Star Trek fan fiction. Then some more. While I was in college, I took a class in Creative Writing and wrote some for that. Had a few non-fiction pieces I wrote then as well, which were published in local magazines. (The Sunday inserts in newspapers.)

Real life got in the way for many years, but then I found myself with both the opportunity and the time to start up again. Been cranking things out ever since.

When I was a young paratrooper, based at Fort Bragg, I read a book: The Only War We Had (A Platoon Leader's Guide To Vietnam) the author kept a journal during his deployment to Vietnam. He also kept many of the letters written to him. Some 20 years later, as he prepared to retire from the US Army, he dug them out of an old footlocker.

It turned out his wife, parents, and older brother also kept all of the letters he sent them from Vietnam. (They expected him to be killed in combat, and feared each letter would be the last.) Much of what he wrote about resonates with me to this day. Numerous individuals he wrote about were senior officers on Fort Bragg, and I knew them. It was a fascinating perspective.

I can tell good stories, but I wasn't much of a writer in my teens and twenties. Attending college courses, and my duties required that I get better at writing. I also met several published authors, and performed some research for them. I was encouraged to write by them...

September 11th 2001, I got back in the armed forces. Before I deployed to combat, I decided to try to keep a journal. With mixed success. I wrote some, mostly I kept copies of records, and I have made some use of official transcripts. My own story is, for the most part, not that exciting. Although I do have some humorous anecdotes. I want to write about others I served alongside of.

Unfortunately, there have been difficulties obtaining needed verification and permissions.

So, I started writing military fiction and military science fiction. I am telling much of the stories I want to tell, but fictional characters and such.

I hope to eventually publish the stories of the fine men I served with. Until then, I am developing my abilities to write, via fictional stories.

For me, I'd been wanting to write for a long, long time, but never actually started anything (which isn't true; I have two long-dormant Chapter 1's of other stories gathering dust).

I finally got annoyed with myself, pulled together a coherent take on an idea I'd wanted to write for many years, and wrote the first chapter.

After that, an entirely different idea lept into my head and I pretty much dashed off what worked out to be the first draft of the first eight chapters of Variation On A Theme.

Prior to that: lots of reading, lots of technical writing (not a technical writer, but I was always the guy on the team who was delegated to work with the technical writers, or the one everyone called on for proofreading). Creating writing many years ago, but aside from helping my kids with a few papers, nothing for a long time.

However: I'd played D&D long, LONG ago and played some online role playing games (paying attention to the RP elements, which many people don't), and that gave me a lot of background on thinking about characterization and such, which certainly helped.

When I was a kid my parents would swap paperback erotic novels with other couples (as they explained to me) The current reads would be on their nightstand but the library was stacks on the steps to the attic which I'd pass all the time, so no later than the time I hit puberty I was also regularly reading them. I noticed lots of incest, including mother/son, along with the fact that I was an only child, but nothing ever happened despite hundreds of wank sessions fantasizing about it.

Other than that I read very little fiction outside of Star Trek novels and certainly couldn't write any. I just didn't seem to have the imagination

Once I moved out of the house and got married the erotica faded away until about 20 years later (around 2005 or so) when I read a biography of a person getting an award in my field and she publicly acknowledged writing erotic fiction. It could my attention and I started googling, finding several antiquated sites with bad stories and I decided to try a few of my own, mostly incest fantasies. Time went on and I discovered other sites including sexstories, aff and sol. Occasionally had the top-rated story at sexstories but got kicked off for under 18 violations (even though they had a search category of 'young' which was among their largest collection) Lots of my stories are inspired by real life and I give it the Law & Order treatment, filling in if their would've been sex instead of just temptation. As I've gotten older it's become easier and easier for my imagination to conjure up stories.

Q: How did I start writing fiction???

A: I began reading PAW fiction on a site named "Frugal Squirrel's Homepage for Patriots and Survivalists" back in the 1990's.
The stories were pretty good, but none fit my imagined scenarios for life in a PAW.
So I wrote some shorts.
Later, I worked with others on collectively writing some rather well known PAW fiction books that went to print, and was the primary and sole proofreader of one.

Q: How do I write fiction ??

A: I think of real life people and situations… then I remove all reason, accountability, probability, and consequences.
Kind of a "what if I could do this and there wasn't any blowback for my actions" kind of thing.

An overactive imagination, and knowledge of the world around us, is a MUST for anyone who wants to write fiction.