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Writing has fascinated me ever since I learned that I, too, could put down stuff on paper, albeit many times poor imitations of what I had read. This eventually led to me being a scribe, secretary, note taker, historian and photographer wherever I've been. It seems as if I have been born with the notion that something should be preserved for posterity.
I believe that I was assisted by my mother, one of those people who saved everything. And my sister, who gathered up Mom when she was in her 70s and put her 'treasures' in storage. Once a month my sister would get a box, or bag, out of storage and let Mom go thru it. As a result, scattered over a five-or-so year period, I got old toys, undeveloped rolls of black and white film, and stories I had written in grammar and high school.
I didn't really read any sci-fi or become an aficionado until 1952, when my friend and reading and hiking buddy, Gordon, asked me if I had ever read any. "Whazzat?" I asked. We had been reading boys' outdoors adventures, such as those by Stephen Meader, and Joseph A. Altsheler's and his Young Trailer Series, and Lassie - of course! - and others whose names I no longer recall. When Gordon connected me to sci-fi it wasn't the end of other reading, but I certainly took a sharp turn in the road. And, as Yogi Berra says, "When you come to a fork in the road, take it." As a matter of fact, I still have mine:
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So I cut my reading eyes on sci-fi, and went on to live a sci-fi reader's dream come true; in University science projects, high-tech spinoff (now called startup) companies and - leave the best till last - four separate jobs with different aspects of the SETI Institute - yes, that's the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. And they are still looking - no one has found much intelligence here on earth!
It was while working in this high-tech world that I got most of my "this is it" sci-fi story notions. Even tho' I only submitted two, I kept having little "flashes" of either story themes, or "action shots" and I certainly got carried away with a concept that grew into an eight-book series, which also grew incredibly complex and overwhelmed my sense of "too many moving parts."
Of course I would be leaving out something if I didn't say just how neat it is to take a piece I wrote some 40 years ago and add hyperlinks to it!
Rejection Slips
Even tho' I never had anything published, I did work my way up from "Your material does not meet our current editorial requirements", read: "you're not even close!", to two nice, supportive letters from the editors of Analog. But did I pay attention to them? Not hardly. I had already worked the stories up and reviewed and re-wrote them a couple of times over a year each and sweated to get those double-spaced, wide-margined pages clean and in the mail - well before word processors. Fortunately the carbon copies are now readable with even cheap OCR software and so there they are, with just a few inconsistencies and spelling and grammar errors changed. The original date info is at the top of each story.
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| He Walks with The Gods | Silver Goose |
Pursuit |
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Copyright (C) Jardine Electronic Services 2008
Last update: May, 2008
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