Welcome to the trunk of unsold stories. Every writer has them and I am no exception. Rather than let these stories waste away unread I have decided to publish them here so that at least a few people will get to read them.
It should be noted that these stories didn’t sell for a reason. Most of them are simply not good enough for professional publication. I’m still happy to have them here though even with their warts and fault exposed to the world. I have a couple of reasons for this.
one, an unread story is a sad thing. Stories, even bad ones are meant to be read. Two, I think it is an interesting experiment to document my change and hopefully growth as a writer though the archiving of these earlier attempts. And Finally I think some of the ideas I explored in the stories are worth looking at and discussing.
Have fun, but remember these are the lost children of my writing, don’t judge them too harshly.
Science-Fiction Short Stories
Her First Time This is a story about Minu Shippen and her first command as a pirate. It’s set in my Nationalized Space Universe where Nationalism has not died out and mankind has expanded into the universe while retaining many of the nation/states we know today.
Eye Opener This is a piece I took to a workshop at a Baycon in 2006. It was well received, but I admit that I was very nervous about workshopping this story, It deals with sexual abuse and rape and frankly I was not sure how I or the story would be received. Please do not read if such subject might offend or upset you.
Wizards Of The Mojave This is a story about alien invasion, but along a totally different line that of The War Of The Worlds. The Wizards in the title are the aliens and there are an alien race I plan to do further work with. I am considering a novel about the original invasion, but that is a project far in the future.
Shades Of Newton (first version) This was the first story I ever took to an in person workshop. This time it was at a World Science Fiction Convention. I will have another version of the story linked here in the Trunk as well. The second version is my attempt based on the feedback from the workshop. I’ll leave it to you which is better.
Shades of Newton And here is the post workshop version.
Regret, I am Allowed This story was the second story I entered in The Writers Of The Future contest to be placed as a semi-finalist. It also deals with machine intelligence as in Shades Of Newton but from a different perspective.
The Kings Coin I am not a fan of conspiracy stories. That said I wanted to try my hand at a conspiracy story and I wanted to try my hand as a story that would have a fairly strong liberal political bias. This was the result.
Apostle To Truth One way I come up with stories is by asking myself if a certain meme or idea is really the way it would work. This story started when I heard someone pronounce that if aliens landed the christians would go nuts because of what it would do to their world view.
Assuming Command This is the first story I ever wrote set in my Nationalized Space universe. It was written in the early 90’s or maybe even in the late 80’s so it is one of the oldest stories here in The Trunk. Strangely enough in a very twisted way it started
life as a Star Trek: The Next Generation story focused in Troi.
Any One You Can Walk Away From A familiar theme for me to explore is one of machine based intelligence. I am fascinated by it and I think in general most of the approaches used have been wrong. I do not think A.I. will be humans in boxes, but something much more alien.
Lurkers This story is really based on the old New Yorker cartoon, ‘On the Internet no one knows you’re a dog.’ It also stands to reason that on the internet no one can know if you are an alien or not. I imagine if aliens wanted to observe and interact with us before contact the internet would provide a perfect vehicle for them, but what might they learn?
Dopplegangers of Titan This story represents my most strenuous effort at a hard Science-fiction story. That is a story where I tried to get all the bolts and details of the science correct.
Horror Short Stories
I do not write as much horror as I do science-fiction so this section of The Trunk is not a well packed as the sci-fi section. I do have several horror short stories out there right now looking for homes, and if they fail to find them then those stories will join the two here.
A Divine Light This is a version of a story that I first wrote back in the early 1980’s. I wish I still had that story to include here in the trunk if for no other reason than simply archival. That story the first I had ever written on a word process — an Apple IIe with 64k of memory — and proved to me that I never wanted another typewriter again.
Tuesday Night With Grandma When I wrote this story I had no idea that horror editors were constantly flooded with scary old people stories. That must say something out about current culture. Still, here’s the story and the title is a subtle reference to Buffy The Vampire Slayer
Science-Fiction Novels
Only one novel is listed here currently. It was my first attempt to write a novel since the unmitigated disaster that I inflicted on friends and family in high school. John Scalzi is right about teenage writing – it does suck, but it’s okay to suck when you are seventeen.
The Mark Of Cain This novel is at its heart about freedom and that if you believe in freedom it means more than just giving freedom to little girls and puppies. Race and racism are elements of this story and as such offensive language is used.
Television and Film Scripts
In addition to short stories and novels I have a deep interest in film and TV scripts. In some ways script writing comes more naturally to me than prose writing. Some of my earliest memories are of watching movies from the back of the family car at the local drive-in theater.
The scripts which are for television programs should be considered copyrighted to the respective copyright holders. These unsold Babylon 5 and Star Trek: The Next Generation scripts should be considered nothing more now than elaborate fan fiction.
H.G. Wells’ War Of The Worlds My friend and writing partner and I tackled this project as practice in adapting a novel to a screenplay. The novel is in the public domain, but this script is copyrighted to the two of us. Given that Hollywood has done a big budget adaptation recently it is unlikely any producer or studio would be interested in this project for at least another ten years. Still, I thin this is a fine screenplay and a fun read.
Journey Home Journey Home is my oldest surviving story. It is a teleplay for an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation set during the first season way back in 1987. I wrote the scene outline for the episode as my final project in my television and film writing class, then completed the entire script as a spec project to be submitted to the production company. Unfortunately the WGA writer’s strike went down and when the dust had cleared the central character to the episode, Tasha Yar, had been killed out. Aside from the possibility of a tie-novel down the way this script has no possibility of a home. I tried to achieve a couple of things with this story. One, tell an interesting story about Tasha Yar. Two, explore what I though could be an interesting relationship between Tasha and Wesley — while still trying to write Wesley as an intelligent teenager. Three, rehabilitate the Ferengi into a bad guy race like they were meant to be instead of a comic relief race. I’ll leave to you to judge the success of my attempt.
The Experiment This is an unfinished script but it’s amusing and has an interested story behind it. My script writing partner and I had seen the film, Street Fighter and despite some truly amusing performance by the supporting cast we found the film truly awful. Our normal writing systems for script is to cook up a plot, write up a synopsis, then a scene outline, and then after all the characters and plot points have been worked out write the script itself. As a gag we decided to write a script without any preparation at all. I wrote the first ten pages and then handed it over to Brain. He wrote the next ten and I took it back. We didn’t pre-plan anything and we didn’t tell each other a word about where we thought the story was going. We thought even with this approach we could still write a better script than Street Fighter. What you see here is the incomplete script, abandoned in process. Now it has 35 pages, but really it was only thirty, the pagination was messed up going from word-processor to word-processor on my various computers.
Fan Fiction
I don’t generally write fan fiction. Mind you I have nothing against and I have good friends who write a lot of it. Personally I think there is no such a thing as wasted writing. Whenever you string words together you grow as a writer. For me and fan fiction I just rarely get an idea that is well suited to a fan fiction format. Either it’d be bettered served as a script or a novel. That said here is my one and only piece of Fan Fiction.
Running With The Devil This is a story set in the Blake’s 7 universe. It is set after the series finale. The story best works if you have seen the entire series including the bloody series finale. Unlike many fan fiction writers I didn’t try to pull any rabbits out of any hats to save characters from the tragic ending of the show. That didn’t leave many characters to work with, but I managed it.