Growing up, my family watched a lot of sci-fi shows. Star Trek (TNG, DS9 and Voyager), Babylon 5, Stargate SG-1, Sliders, Seaquest (he did finally get a bigger boat!), were all regularly on the viewing docket. At some point along the line, my love for other people’s stories turned into a desire to tell my own and I started making up stories in my own sci-fi universe. It was generally just a way to interact with the other sci-fi universes I loved, so the stories were almost always about the Galactic Union in my universe doing things with other universes. Thus the Galactic Union had run-ins with the Goa’uld, their ships were attacked by Shadow Ships, and they had contact with the Klingons. They had ships that looked reminiscent of Romulan ships, had border disputes with the Centauri, and they encountered the Dominion. The stories were mostly just ways to busy my mind if I was doing something monotonous, and I never wrote any of them down.
The only time the stories did come out my own imagination is when I told some of them to my brothers. However, those sessions turned out to be less about the story I had come up with and more about us taking turns making up reasons why our preferred galactic nation would win (“You have stronger phasers than us? Well we have Veeter shields!”). It was still fun, even if it tended not to be about my stories.
As we all got older, the storytelling eventually stopped being a thing we did together, but the stories themselves never really stopped for me. For a long time, they weren’t something I told to others or tried to write down, and they were mostly just snippets. Eventually, I did try to put pen to paper and write some of them out, but the few times I did, it never really lasted very long.
Until October 2022. For some reason, this time when I started writing, I didn’t stop. In fact, by the end of the year, I had written almost 75K words and had something with a beginning, a middle and an end. I was hooked.
Those first 75K words were, unfortunately, an unworkable mess. So I started again, this time writing through most of 2023 and hitting 220K words. The new story still had significant issues, but it felt close enough to the real thing that I started considering that maybe I wanted this to be more than just a hobby.
Which leads to the point of why I’m resurrecting my blog. First, I want to try out a different type of writing. Writing about my own thoughts and actions will hopefully help me get better at writing about the thoughts and actions of my characters. Second, I’m planning on self-publishing when I get to that point and being a complete unknown doesn’t seem like a good way to be successful at that. Maybe someday I’ll feel up to starting a Youtube channel, but for now, I’m just going to start blogging on a regular basis.
The other thing that I plan on doing on the “marketing” front is publishing short stories from time to time here. My hope is that small windows into the universe I’ve created will generate interest for the novels when they hopefully/eventually are ready.
So far, writing has been immensely enjoyable, and I’m hoping the next few years of trying to get to the point where I publish continue that trend. One of my mother’s favorite saying is, “you either have a good time or a good story,” but in my case, I’m hoping to have both. No matter what happens though, I’ll be blogging about it here.