Just recently, I re-found the notebook that has my first completed story in it. So I was wondering, what was everyone's first completed story? How old were you? Did you ever turn the story into anything else?

My first story was.... me and my friend as vampire slayers. I was sixteen years old, which is now quite a while ago. The writing, to be frank, is quite terrible, but in a fun way. Even though I will never publish it, it still holds a special place in my heart... and spawned one or two sequels co-written with another friend (again, just for fun).

Just curious--Were you watching Buffy? When I first started "writing," my stories were pretty blatant ripoffs of whatever I'd been reading/watching.

First completed story worth the effort was creatively titled Duel. It's about, see, these two characters with a vendetta and they, uh, fight a duel. Very exciting. I think it was for the Sword and Sorceress anthology a couple years back.

I used to write a lot of fanfic stuff back in the dial-up BBS daze, circa 1990-1992.

In late 1992 I actually got to work on the home-grown community radio SF serial Searcher & Stallion, which some of the Utah hatrackers might recall. That was a lot of fun. I scripted 12 episodes that made it on air, and wrote a bunch more that did not.

But the first I made into a "book" of sorts was in first grade. My elementary school had an awesome creative writing system where the teacher's aides would type up your story into page-sized chunks and help you spiral-bind it. You drew your own pictures.

Unfortunately, the next Monday, the school board had determined that grammar skills were in a miserable state among the freshman class of the distict and ordered all English courses, elective or curriculum, converted over to intensive, focused grammar study. Among a small group of fellow, confident freshmen, that same Monday, barely two weeks into the school year, I took the year-end grammar exam in order to opt out of the curriculum. I was the sole pre-final exam student passing it in my freshman class. Less than half passed it at the end of the year.

The second story I wrote was for fifth or sixth grade, which was a mystery story about a bumbling detective. I thought it uproariously funny at the time--I could hardly write it for my laughter. Neither of these stories survives, so I have no idea how successful I was.

(I've got a good excuse: I woke up this morning with a fever of 102--but still tried to go to work. I did get to four pages for you, but I may have to re-think them.)

But I got serious about writing just under 2 years ago. It was a new year's resolution I made - stop thinking about it and try it. I found Hatrack around then and other writing sites.

I'm pleased to report that my first ever short story that I wrote in this phase of my life is now published! It's called Apples on the Moon and appears in the hot-off-the-presses Return to Luna anthology published by Hadley Rille Books. It's a thrill to be published at all, but published in a book with real pages and ink and everything is a part of the dream I never really let myself have when I started writing 2 years ago. I had a ton to learn at the time, still do for that matter. Thankfully I've had the opportunity to extensively workshop this piece (through critters here like Inarticulate Babbler and Arriki and others) and edited it again this spring to bring it up to snuff, enough up to snuff that it won a competition for the publication!

I've read SF since, well, let's just say a long time, and only recently started to write.

My first story was about time travel and taught me just how much I had to learn; it's patiently awaiting my confidence to rise to the level I believe I need to do it justice, which will probably be the first quarter of next year ...

A little backstory on that, though...I had written a few things out before that, some by hand, and most not completed.

But in March 1975 I got a typewriter---for my birthday; my brothers got bicycles but I asked for and got a typewriter---a typewriter I still have, actually.

March I got the typewrter. Shortly after I picked up a "touch typing in ten easy lessons" booklet. Things were delayed until I got out of school---I was fourteen---but in early June I started in on the lessons. I got through five of 'em, then just started typing up stories.

I never actually submitted that story anywhere. Somewhere along the way I had picked up a copy of The Writer, which had guidlines, and word lengths. As I recall, all the major markets, four or five of 'em, in those day, listed a minimum of twenty-five hundred words, and my story fell under that.

Pretty funny, a little boy talking all hard and crap with his only knowledge of police procedure coming from Starsky and Hutch, Police Woman, Charlie's Angels and what not.

Ahhhh, who said television doesn't have impact?

No one has actually done this yet, but I thought it would be neat to include the first 13 of my first attempt at fiction. I was about 13 at the time and had just recently finished reading The Hobbit and LOTR. I have edited it for punctuation only - everything else is exactly how I wrote it.

LITHIOUS

Screams were coming from every direction. Soldiers were running about, killing, and burning the village. This was the first sight as a young elf awoke to find everyone around him dead. His name was Stallis Denephorn, son of Luffis Denephorn, and for the first time in his life he found himself alone; for his mother and father were laying in the next room, burned and disfigured.
Stricken with fear, he started to venture out of his burning hut, but then, suddenly he remembered something his father once showed him. There was a passage leading under the village, and he was to hide there if they were ever attacked. Then something occurred to him. “Maybe some of the others have escaped into the tunnels!”

The "book" was put in the school library, along with the rest of the students' work and then mostly forgotten. Twenty years later, my wife and I visited the school, asked and were allowed to keep it. It now sits in a folder with other examples of my writing from days gone by.

We did an air band skit. The song choices were odd. Our stage presence was corney. The skit itself was even somewhat ridiculous. But, the five of us had a blast.

On the bus ride home, everyone else around me was asleep, so I started thinking about what it would be like had the five of us actually played real instruments for our youth group (none of the others played anything, and I didn't start taking piano lessons until about two years later). What if we had played real songs? What if we had been a musical hit as opposed to a comedic hit? What if we decided to see if we could extend our musical creativity and our fan support beyond just that one night show? The ideas started flooding into my mind.

For the rest of that summer, and even during most of my tenth grade year, I spent every spare moment I could expanding on my ideas. Not too long afterwards, I came up with a small collection of short stories based on a teenaged band that was attempting to break into the music world. I knew I would have to change the characters' names before I showed it to anyone, but I liked what I was coming up with.

I eventually put those stories aside to make way for homework, for marching band, for working for a living, for dating, and for playing in a real band. The stories sat on the shelf, unattended, for a year or so, then I pulled them back out, felt the original enthusiasm all over again, and expanded on what I did before.

This pattern continued---sort of---through my mid 30s.
By the time I changed professions, started raising a family, and discovered the joys of science fiction writing, my band was essentially shoved to the burner behind the back burner.

About two years ago, I was driving my kids out of state to see their grandfather, so I decided to pass the time by telling them some of the things that happened in these incomplete stories. The three youngest were entertained, but my teenaged daughter asked, "Did you write that?"

"Yep."

"What did you do with it?"

"It's still sitting on my shelf. Somewhere. I think."

"Why don't you finish it?"

That was all the motivation I required.

At this point in time, I am currently seeking agency representation for Metagerhund Empire.

And, yes, I did change all the names.

Stay tuned.

S!
S!...C!

My first story was written my sophomore year in high school. I wasn't worth much in school. I was one of those kids that the teachers were always so frustrated with. So much potential, and all that noise. I ended up failing Sophomore English twice and junior English once and ultimately had three English classes my senior year. That was fun.

I failed not because I couldn't handle the material but because the classes were always first or second period which I couldn't be bothered to attend most days.

But that is all back story. We'll call it the Prologue, meaning... skip it if you wanna.

All three years of high school I had Mrs. Jane Noe for one English class or another and man did I frustrate her. If I was present, I was asleep. If I wasn't asleep I was reading some pulp novel. I drove her nuts. One day she gave the class an assignment to write some short fiction. It didn't need to be a complete story but it had to be a certain length. I forget how long exactly. This would be judged and the winner from our grade would be published in the school literary magazine. (I went to the largest High School in Indiana at the time.)

For some reason I was excited at the prospect and I turned in a paper the very next day. It was a short story based in the Black Forest in Germany about some Wiccan druids who had awakened something unnatural that went about rampaging. I didn't get much further than what I would imagine would be chapter one of a novel but it was fun. But it won and was published.

But it didn't take. I didn't write again for fifteen years. Which brings us forward to this past summer when I started writing again.

I made a couple posts on my website about catching up with Mrs. Noe a few months ago. She had the original story archived and sent it to me. How exciting! It's published, with all it's original flaws, in the second post listed below.

http://www.anthonysullivan.net/?p=93
http://www.anthonysullivan.net/?p=95

Ah, memories...

I used every cliche' from the old serials of the 1930s and 1940s -- cars over cliffs, exploding buildings -- always the hero in peril... I kept that thing until 8th Grade and revised it for entry into a writing tournament. I placed Third.

...that actually sounds pretty interesting.

When I was maybe six years old, I attempted a story about a cheerful family sharing love and gifts on Christmas day. I stopped after the first paragraph. I wasn't sure whether the family woke, awakened, awaked, or stopped sleeping with another word, so I decided to quit instead of write a story that would prove I was stupid.

Later in elementary school I started various short fiction including "Queenie" (a rewrite of someone else's story about a princess with a coat of different animal furs) and an untitled story about two fairies named Ashleaf and Twinkle, as well as my unfinished Coloret books about magical color-ordered monarchies under threat by the evil Black queen.

An English language tutor in my twelfth year stated readers might consider my Coloret stories racist, so I abandoned them soon after. Also during middle school, I attempted to write a comedic puppet play called "Piganna" and a traditional play about people in a small-town restaurant. Maybe when I'm a mother I'll uncover the Piganna puppets and complete that play, because I still laugh when I recall its scenes.

The next few years were full of confusion, as my need to write, for class assignments and personal fulfillment, conflicted with a certainty that I did not deserve to write. As a consequence, I wrote poorly-planned scenes for multiple stories, mainly literary fiction and fantasy.

When I was seventeen, I swallowed pride long enough to modify a scene intended for a novel into a submission for a school district art show. I won first place, and the sub would have gone to the state-level competition, except I moved out-of-state before the next round of judging. As my earliest notebooks are buried in a storage closet, I'm providing the first 13 lines of that 2001 art show sub, titled "Strange Tools".

quote:

---

Her skin was the color of kherhal bark—slightly darker than the rest of the people around her. The hair that had fallen loose from her leather string rested on her shoulders, shifting as she moved her head like waves of a dark ocean. Her eyes screamed for attention—there was anger in those dual dusky orbs but no fear. She stood as if ready to pounce.

Keflin pointed, then leaned into his father to say quietly, "That one."

"No," Master Turniv responded sternly. "You've never handled a slave like that one before. It will take too much from you to break her." He paused, then added quietly to himself, "Nice to have her in the group, though."

"Father, you told me to choose any woman from the incoming

---

There are 27 words ending in "ly" in the 1,750-word sub. Ouch. I plan to rewrite or revise "Strange Tools" and similar pieces to complete the related novel.

*Edited to correct a spelling error.*

The first novel length work was in college and it is truly dreadful. Linear. Characters have no depth and apparently no lives because nothing happens to divert them from their "quest".

But I was quite proud of finishing a novel-length work. It was typed on an IBM selectric. (That will give you an idea how long ago this was.) I actually learned how to do book-binding so I could bind it. It's still on my bookshelf. Will I take it down and read it. Not on your life!

Funny enough, looking back, I could see my tendency to shoehorn more sophisticated sounding language into my writing even then. I used words like "shan't" and "indubitably." It's interesting to see how similar yet different a person's writing is over time.

I just found my first story while I was cleaning up our basement. I was shock when I reread it I couldn't spell I write horror fantasy and Scifi now but my first story was Pegesus and the Fairie.

Haha I was thinking along similar lines when I wrote the post. I should go find the story and examine my drawings for any Freudian insights.

Then I discovered my step-dad's old manual type writer collecting dust at home and started tinkering around on it. Naturally, my first story was about horses, and my MC's name was-- are you ready for this?--Crystal Stevens. So, now you know where my user name came from. Every time I played with my brothers and one cousin of ours I used that name and we would all have a make-believe horse of one kind or another.

It was somewhere along in here that I discovered super-hero comic books and couldn't believe how women were treated in them. Even those with phenomal powers were held back by their feminine ways. It about drove me crazy. This was about the time the original Star Trek TV series made its debute. I was in my freshman year of high school at the time when I decided that I could write something better than what was on TV or in books (I guess I should add that I was reading SciFi/Fantasy by then along with the horse related books), and started a story about a strong willed-take charge type young woman who ended up on another planet. That book has now developed into a trilogy that I call Julie's Quest for lack of something better. Of course now since I've started it all kinds of macho women types abound. Xena readily comes to mind among others.

I gave up on writing horse stories because my horses always ended up thinking like humans instead of horses. Bigger than life, if you know what I mean, and there are just too many stories of that type out there. So, that's when I left the horse stories behind and concentrated on SciFi/Fantasy.

So that's my background as a writer, and I've started several other stories since. And, yes, I know my novella is about horses that I wrote just this past year, but its focus is on my MC, Wyatt, and not aimed at any particular horse... though there are a few in the story. It also keeps horses exactly how they are in real life with the exception of Wyatt's Indian Spirit Guide, Black Rain, but she's much more than just a horse.