There’s something that happens every time I do a book signing, or some other author event that causes me to brave the outside world and meet the reading public face-to-face; they stand there in front of my table and stare in amazement at the twelve stacks of original work I’ve had published over the last decade or so. That look of amazement grows even brighter when they inspect the books closely and realize that I’ve written a book in nearly every genre – science fiction, literary, poetry, short story, children’s picture book, a humorous memoir, horror, mystery and thriller. I secretly love when this happens, it validates the time, sweat, tears, frustration and work I spent writing them.

I love it even more when I begin a conversation with said reader and tell them that I always have at least half a dozen other manuscripts in the hopper waiting to be published – that look of amazement swiftly turns to utter disbelief. You should see it, it’s truly a joy to witness! But I don’t stop there, oh no, I go on to tell them what I’m working on at the present time then I tell them about how I start a new novel every year during the week of my birthday in late-November but in the summer I write primarily short stories (this is because life in the summertime, especially if you have a big family, can intrude on a writer’s time, concentration and energy). At this point the said reader’s head explodes and I end up spending the rest of the day cleaning up the mess with a mop and a bucket...just kidding!

Seriously, though, at a recent book signing I actually had another local author come, stare at my stacks of work and then, instead of displaying that familiar look of amazement, he shook his head and confessed to me that I had just thoroughly sent him into a severe bout of depression. I was taken aback by this revelation. He clarified his comment by telling me that he’s a middle-aged author who’d only had one book published and that seeing all those books on the table made him feel like a slacker.

Well, that certainly wasn’t my intention. I would rather be known as a writer who inspires other writers to write. I can’t help the fact that I’m prolific and I don’t feel the need to apologize for it. Then I thought about exactly what he’d said and realized he was, in his own way, just giving me a compliment. We have since grown to become friends who respect each other’s work and he’s even published a second book!

But I digress...After the said reader’s head metaphorically explodes, the inevitable question always follows: Where do you get your ideas? It’s the dreaded question every published writer is asked at some point in his/her career and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it but bite your tongue and answer it as best as you can. I know this sounds rude but there are two things a reader must understand; the first is that any writer worth his salt lives in a constant state of creativity - the writer is immersed in it, breathes it, eats it, drinks it, showers in it and yes, even sleeps in it. It’s in everything the writer sees, smells, hears, tastes and touches. It’s in the way someone phrases a memorable statement, it’s in the way someone looks at you, the way someone walks, acts or believes. It’s in the smallest and biggest of things, like the way a flower can be carnivorous or the specific scent a breeze carries with it on a summer night. It’s in the way a cloud catches a ray of light or the way a giant 747 lands on the tarmac or the way a tornado breathes itself full of life. To a writer, creative possibilities are everywhere and never ending.

The second thing a reader must understand about a writer is that a writer assumes everyone is living in this same, unending creative world he/she is living in. It being such a huge, normal part of the writer’s everyday life, it actually comes as a surprise when he/she meets someone with little or no creativity or imagination. When this poor person’s malady does finally sink in, we pity him/her for a mini-micro-second, readjust our thinking then realize that’s it’s all right, because our job is to fill those sadly empty, foreign imaginations with people and sounds and pictures and possibilities. Humanity can easily be split into two groups of people, those who read and those who write (There is a third group, people who don’t read, but writers don’t acknowledge them because they’re truly lazy, lost souls).

So here’s what I’m going to do...I’m going to try to answer that dreaded question: Where do you get your ideas? as specifically and truthfully as possible, just remember that I’m only speaking for myself. I leave other writers to their own devices...

The most important thing a writer must do is have his/her mind constantly open and receptive for the possibility of an idea. A bank vault can’t be filled with cash unless the door is open. Here’s an example: A few years ago my son became a firefighter for the City of Fox Lake, Illinois, it was an absolute surprise to me as my son had never expressed any interest in such a vocation before. Needless to say, I was proud as a prize-winning heifer at the Lake County Fair as my son sat me down and told me the story of how it all came about. I listened with an open, receptive mind, filing away every important detail for later use. For a month, my subconscious mind chewed on this information, fueled on by endorphins of pride, then it happened...I had a dream about what it would be like to be a firefighter in the year 2070. When I woke up the next morning I had the main plot and the subplots fully realized, I had the main and secondary characters worked out and named, I had the antagonist and his reasons for being so, completely developed, I had the various action scenes fully visualized. It was like a miracle. All I had to do was sit down and write the book. I quickly filled pages and pages of my journal (which I keep by my bedside for such an emergency) with the elements of everything I’d dreamt – the book later became “Firefighter 2070: Flashover Point” and it was published by Champagne Books in 2012.

This doesn’t just happen, a writer has to train his mind to be open and receptive and only then will such breakthroughs occur, if you’re truly skilled at it, on a semi-regular basis. I’ve had this experience many times.

Another thing a writer does to foster ideas is to talk less but look and listen more. Whenever I’m in a crowd of people, I sit back and watch...I observe people with the concentration of an eagle seeking its prey. Every person is different, unique, every person has their own style of doing everything and I love witnessing this whenever I can. On many occasions I’ve been accused of being anti-social when in reality, it’s completely the opposite. I can’t tell you the number of people I‘ve observed or known that have made it into one of my stories (my wife once bought me a T-shirt with the warning: “Be Careful, You Might End Up In My Novel” splashed in bold black letters on the front). Sometimes I even bring my journal to the mall, find a bench and watch people for hours. The material a writer gets from doing something like this is priceless but be careful not to look suspicious, apparently, in a little turn of irony, I was being observed by mall security video police and a security guard actually came up to me once and asked me what I was doing.

Something I’ve found very easy and effective for creating new ideas is the What If? technique. I asked myself, What if a man could fly tornadoes? The answer was my 2004 novel, “The Funnel Flyer.” I asked myself, What if the Second Coming is actually an attack by an alien strike force? The answer was my 2015 novel, “Second Coming.” The What If? technique can be used for any genre of writing. Try it yourself when you’ve run out of ideas, it’ll work beautifully.

I’ve culled ideas from reading books, watching a science documentary or from listening to a particularly good song (sometimes even the title of a song sets my imagination off). Just be careful you don’t steal the main idea, main characters or any lines of text from any of these motivators, this amounts to plagiarism and that isn’t a good thing. The idea is to absorb and develop your own original ideas. “Growing Young,” a story in my first collection of sci-fi short stories, “Till Heaven and Earth Pass,” is about a ship of human colonists and their families who stumble across a white hole in deep space. A white hole is the opposite of a black hole and the crew soon learns that time is going in reverse because of this. How they deal with this conundrum is the crux of the story. “Growing Young” was the result of watching a documentary about the strange wonders of the universe; one of the strange wonders of the universe was a white hole. I took it from there.

A person you can steal from is yourself. A common tool many writers use is to take situations and characters from their own lives. But I strongly encourage you to expand and exaggerate on these ideas, let your mind fly, have as much fun with them as you want or make them as sad as you want – writers should never put self-imposed limits on their imaginations. That crushes the burst of creativity, it’s one of the reasons I’ve never had writer’s block. Once, my wife’s son, who was very young at the time, was playing with his Tinker Toy set on his bedroom floor and he came up with this fantastic robot creature. My mind exploded with possibilities when I saw it, the story that resulted, “Ryna,” was about an Earth traveler who comes across an enslaved alien robot on some far off, terrible planet ruled by these weird spider-like creatures. Ryna, the robot, and Kerkstra, the earth explorer, become friends and at the end, Kerkstra finally sets Ryna free. It’s one of my most favorite short stories but has yet to be published...maybe someday!

Looking back on this article, I guess the theme here is that the most important tool a writer has to develop is to observe and record. If you’re not doing these things, you’re not going to come up with any creative, original ideas. Remember, inspiration is everywhere, the responsibility a writer has is to recognize it as such, pull them out of their brain and slap them down on the page.

A few years back I was contacted through email by an old friend. He was approaching the ripe old age of fifty and expressed a deep desire to write a memoir about his life. He wanted some tips on how to accomplish this Herculean task but I suspect what he really wanted was for me to do the actual work for him (If I did this for everyone who asked me, I’d never get around to my own work until I was on my deathbed).

He sounded sincere enough in wanting to get certain aspects of his life down on paper, but it’s been my experience that most people, though sincere about wanting to write their memoir, truly aren’t serious about it when they realize the massive amount of work and time the project will demand.

“Here’s what I’ll do,” I told him. “I’ll put together a simple, easy to understand, abbreviated list of tips for you to follow to get you started, that way it will be completely up to you on whether your project gets off the ground or not. Contact me when you get a second or third draft finished and I’ll take a quick look at it.”

He liked the idea. The following is what I came up with, maybe you can use some of this advice for your own memoir (should you choose to accept the mission)...

First, read some memoirs about subjects you like (politicians, actors, poets, writers, rock band groupies, rock bands, rock stars, etc.), pay close attention to how they structured and organized their memoir. It’s okay to copy how they did this, just don’t copy what they wrote.

Keep a journal by your side all the time, especially at your bedside as ideas often pop into an author’s head during sleep. Keeping a journal will help you organize your ideas later on and you’ll find it easier not having to keep all that information in your head. Keep in mind that we’ve forgotten twice as what we remember. And sometimes writing in a journal will spark another memory and another. Break your journal up into sections like “Memories”, “Dreams”, “Interesting Dialogue You’ve Heard”, “Smells”, “Tastes”, “Similes”, “Story Ideas”, etc, it all depends on your needs. For the untrained author, a journal will help you avoid brain overload, which leads to chaos, which always kills the writing process.

I’ve never met a single person who appreciated reading one of my stories in longhand. I strongly suggest you get yourself a laptop with a word processing program like “Word”, or borrow one from somebody. Publishers will definitely not read a story in longhand. Laptops are cheap nowadays and you’ll find it much easier when you have to go back in and reorganize elements or punctuation in a story. If you’re scared of using one, don’t be, they’re made so that a first grader can use them.

As you’re writing the first draft of your manuscript, don’t worry about spelling, punctuation, characterization, metaphors, story turns, etc. The first draft is all about getting it down on the page, nothing more. Your second and third drafts are all about polishing the story so that it’s readable to people. Sometimes fourth, fifth and sixth drafts are needed. The truth about writing is that the real act of writing happens during the editing process.

Don’t worry about organizing your stories yet. When I wrote my humorous memoir, “Thirty Three Terrific Tales of Lake County, Illinois,” what I did was write whatever story interested me at the time and then when I was finished writing them all, I went back and arranged them in an order that was entertaining for me and the reader. This was a very fun process. You can organize your stories by date, place, event, etc., you’ll figure this out after you’ve finished writing all your stories.

Another thing a writer does to foster ideas is to talk less but look and listen more. Whenever I’m in a crowd of people, I sit back and watch...I observe people with the concentration of an eagle seeking its prey. Every person is different, unique, every person has their own style of doing everything and I love witnessing this whenever I can. On many occasions I’ve been accused of being anti-social when in reality, it’s completely the opposite. I can’t tell you the number of people I‘ve observed or known that have made it into one of my stories (my wife once bought me a T-shirt with the warning: “Be Careful, You Might End Up In My Novel” splashed in bold black letters on the front). Sometimes I even bring my journal to the mall, find a bench and watch people for hours. The material a writer gets from doing something like this is priceless but be careful not to look suspicious, apparently, in a little turn of irony, I was being observed by mall security video police and a security guard actually came up to me once and asked me what I was doing.

As I wrote my stories, I gave each one a manila folder, titled the folder whatever the story was titled and moved all the information I had in my journal concerning that story to the folder, that way I had easy access to it, no searching around in pages and pages of the journal. Writing a story is hard enough, make it easier on yourself and you’ll find it a smoother process. Remember to put a line through whatever you used from the journal so that you don’t use it again.

Find someone who will read your stories with a critical eye (your mother is out, unless she’s a writer herself she will not give you the critique a serious writer needs - I know this from experience). What a writer needs most is someone who is honest. And don’t take the criticisms personally, if you do then you shouldn’t be writing in the first place. A critique is all about making your story the best it can be.

To this day I don’t know if my friend even started the process, I haven’t heard from him. Perhaps he wasn’t serious after all.

I will never write another poem as long as I’m alive. I know that sounds harsh but I’ve got good reason to make such a statement – you see, I’ve learned my lesson.

In 2006, I performed a minor miracle (though, at the time, I was too naive to realize it)...I got a book of poetry published. I titled it GC Rosenquist’s Super Elastic Traveling Sound Circus because part of the purpose of the book was to have fun with the sounds of words. I even designed a fun cover (see my website for proof) with plenty of purple on it because it was a tribute to the publisher, Purple Sky Publishing.

I experimented with poetry beginning in high school, and as the years passed I got married, raised a son, I got divorced, which resulted in a waterfall of word catharsis which probably saved my life at the time. Later on, when my life settled down, I had a moment to take inventory of all those poems I’d backlogged; I found I had over one hundred of them written. Some were good, some were bad, some needed more work, some were perfect. At the same time I realized if I edited the collection down to the best fifty poems, I might have a book worth publishing. People all over the world would benefit from my experience and wisdom. I would win awards and receive grants, my future would be assured.

I went to work, edited, re-edited, arranged, re-arranged until I had something publishable. Then I sent a query letter to Purple Sky Publishing, the owner jumped on the bandwagon immediately, truly liking what I’d come up with. To make the poems even more accessible to non-poetry readers, I added a brief, one or two line preamble before each poem, giving the reader an insight to the true meaning of the particular work – they could make their own interpretation from there.

My publisher went all out, sending the book to China to be published; it came back as a nice four-color glossy softcover, the paper inside heavy and of high quality. When I received my author copies, I was proud of what I held in my hand. Here was a document of my most personal feelings, full of failure and victory, pain and survival. There was metaphorical blood on almost every page and the thing I’m most proud of is that every poem in the book is honest. I took no shortcuts, I left it all on the page, warts and all.

Immediately, my publisher sent a bunch of copies out to reviewers and I was met with primarily positive reviews except for a Christian reviewer who made it the point of her article to show that I had misquoted the chapter and verse of a certain book from the Bible in one of my poems. It was a simple typing error. My bad. Oh, well, you can’t please everyone, right?

So, I began my own marketing onslaught, hitting up my Facebook friends, advertising it on my website, making flyers, holding book signings.

That was when the weekly calls from my publisher started coming in. We weren’t selling enough of the book to pay for its initial investment. I needed to step up my marketing plan. I approached coffee houses to see if they’d be willing to stock some copies of the books for sale – NO. I contacted local newspapers and magazines, see if they’d be interested in doing an interview feature – NO. I contacted an English professor at the College of Lake County to see if he could read it and help me stock it in the college’s book store – I never heard from him.

I joined a handful of poetry groups, trying to get my name out there. I even entered a dozen or so poetry contests on my own dime because winning any kind of award is something a publisher can brag about on his end – I never even made runner-up. It seems that the same two or three poets win all the awards every year, no way I was going to crack through that barrier. But this part is what really disappointed me – there was practically no support from other poets in the genre. Sure, I could ask them about this type of poetry or using a particular word, but to promote another poet’s book, well, I could just forget about that. The air was silent. I even subscribed to a monthly poetry newsletter concerning the Chicago area and in bold black letters, on the front page of the newsletter was a warning that poets should stop sending notices about their new collections being published, there just wasn’t any room for such mish-mash. But there was plenty of room to talk about the creative eating habits of a certain poet’s dog or a new poetry wing going up in whatever library. Maybe I’m out of line here, but shouldn’t the primary purpose of a poetry newsletter be to expose the new work of new poets?

The calls from my publisher kept coming, I did what I could but I had hit a brick wall surrounded by razor wire and bordered by a mote of flaming, boiling oil. The fact of the matter is that Sound Circus was doomed from the beginning. I’d never attended any notable schools with an in-depth poetry program, so I hadn’t made the right university connections. Essentially, I was dirt under their feet. I was an unknown who’d produced a good book of poetry. I had no right writing poems.

The last call my publisher made to me was to tell me he was closing down Purple Sky Publishing. It appeared that the cost of my book sent him out of business. It’s a shame because the book is really, really good and was worth more attention than it received. To this day I feel guilty about what I did to Purple Sky Publishing. I know I did my best but that’s little comfort to me now, and to Purple Sky Publishing.

First of all, let me tell you that I am unashamedly, proudly in love with Ray Bradbury.

I live in a sleepy town just fifteen minutes to the west of Waukegan, Illinois, Mr. Bradbury’s legendary, mythical Green Town. For me, Mr. Bradbury is the absolute pinnacle of American fiction writing, edging out Hemingway and Mark Twain and the reasons are many, some of which I’ll explore below.

As a science fiction writer, he has been one of my greatest influences. There was a childlike joy in his writing, and passion for the craft – lots of passion, even at the end, while well into his nineties. This passion is what I cherish about him the most.

For seven decades, Mr. Bradbury had unselfishly given to the world so many priceless, memorable moments, so many amazing images. Who can forget the heart-hammering moment when Montag sets his captain on fire in Fahrenheit 451? Or the wonderfully ironic moment at the end of the Martian Chronicles when a father shows his children real Martians – their own reflections in the waters of a great Martian canal? Or how about the blind witch marking the tops of houses with paint as she hangs from the basket of an air balloon at midnight in Something Wicked This Way Comes? I could go on and on but if you’d read even one Bradbury story, you get the picture.

And his uniquely Bradburian way with words is and shall always remain unparalleled. Here are some shining examples from Something Wicked This Way Comes...

“Somewhere, not so far back, vast lightnings stomped the earth. Somewhere, a storm like a great beast with terrible teeth could not be denied.”

“...and looked at the salesman with a single eye open, bright and clear as a drop of summer rain.”

“Going away, away, the calliope pipes shimmered with star explosions...”

“...and Will further back, gasping, shotgun blasts of fatigue in his feet, his head, his heart.”

“Will’s father noted the muscles cord along the arms, roping and unroping themselves with a writhe like the puff adders and sidewinders doubtless inked and venomous there.”

It’s like this on every page of that amazing book. Where does writing of such quality and beauty come from? Thank God we’ll never know because if we did, everyone could write like that and that would be a terrible thing; Mr. Bradbury would seem a little less special.

The great Mr. Bradbury passed away in June of 2012 and I was crushed emotionally, not only from grief at his passing but by the fact that I’d never had the opportunity to meet the man himself. I wish I had. I can only hope he was the great, warm, kind man I’ve always envisioned him to be. I’ve visited the actual “Green Town” ravine (in Waukegan), I’ve driven past the house Mr. Bradbury lived in, I’ve even seen the library he wrote about so eloquently in Something Wicked This Way Comes, the very place where Mr. Bradbury spent countless hours and became the man, the writer, he was destined to become.

So, how does a writer (me) in love with a writer (Mr. Bradbury) who has passed on after giving the world so much of himself for so long, properly thank him?

The answer is that he returns the favor. He writes a book for him.

I first read Mr. Bradbury’s 1957 novel, Dandelion Wine, when I was in high school and it’s been influencing me ever since. I even wrote a book of my own titled 33 Terrific Tales of Lake County, Illinois (published in 2008) that’s very much in the vein of Dandelion Wine, though I didn’t realize it at the time I wrote it.

And when I found out in 2006 that Mr. Bradbury was releasing a long awaited sequel, Farewell Summer, forty-nine years after the original, my blood ran with electricity. I loved that new chapter of Douglas Spaulding’s life so much I bought a copy for my son, a firefighter in Fox Lake, Illinois, hoping he would see the amazing things in it I had. He did.And I remember the deep sadness I felt as I read that last page of Farewell Summer, realizing I would never see Douglas continue to mature, become a man. I would never see new adventures in Green Town, meet new people that lived there. I always felt that there was more to be told about Douglas’ year of self-realization and self-discovery so, after Mr. Bradbury passed away, I immediately began jotting down ideas for a sequel to Farewell Summer. This novel would take place in autumn, Halloween and Thanksgiving specifically, and the metaphorical implications were countless. The result was a 57,000 word novel - October Wings, Autumn Breathings (from a line in Mr. Bradbury’s wonderful book, From the Dust Returned).

Just to be clear, I didn’t write this novel because I think I’m as good a writer as Mr. Bradbury or to make a buck. I could live and write a thousand years and never touch his greatness. And poverty? Well, I’m pretty much used to it by now. I understand I’m not Mr. Bradbury and will never be. No, I wrote this novel for two simple reasons, the first is that it’s a tribute to a true literary master who made my life better through his writing; a personal thank you to him to offset the deep grief I felt at his passing. The second is that I love Douglas Spaulding, his family and friends and I love his Green Town of 1928. I missed them and dearly wanted to visit them again.

It’s ironic, I think, that the book Dandelion Wine has, for me, become like a bottle of dandelion wine is for Douglas – an encapsulated way to relive the summers of my own youth. All I have to do is open the pages and read.

Style-wise and structure-wise, October Wings, Autumn Breathings resembles more Dandelion Wine than Farewell Summer. I even re-visit some of the same secondary characters, trying to finish their stories. For example, I’ve always wondered how Miss Lavinia Nebb dealt with what had happened in her living room that night when she returned home alone from a late movie at the Elite and found the Lonely One standing there ready to kill her. And how did Bill Forrester move on with his life after ninety-five year old Helen Loomis passed away? He clearly had deep feelings for her, and she for him, but both knew they’d each been born at the wrong time and it just couldn’t be. I thought that, perhaps, Bill Forrester and Miss Lavinia Nebb deserved some sort of lasting happiness in their lives, could it be found with each other? And what ever became of the Tarot Witch or Douglas’ Cream-Sponge Para Litefoot sneakers? All of this is answered in October Wings, Autumn Breathings.

I also introduce some new characters to the mythical Green Town rolls, such as the dreaded Neil Hagen, whom turns out not to be so dreaded after all. And Grandpa Spaulding’s younger brother, Harland, a man who looks like Moses but acts like Bugs Bunny. A man that brings with him all the way from California, a wild turkey little Tom Spaulding names Sophie Jr. Sophie Jr. turns out to have such a short temper that she eventually escapes and turns downtown Green Town into a federal disaster area on Thanksgiving morning. But more importantly, I reverently focus on Douglas Spaulding’s resistance to growing up and how he finally comes to terms with it.

After two long years nipping and tucking and performing metaphorical brain surgery on the manuscript, I finally sewed the final draft together. Then I sent a query letter about it to Michael Condon, Mr. Bradbury’s agent and now executor of the Bradbury Literary Estate, to see what his impression of the book might be. Though, he was sympathetic with the two years of my life I spent devoted to the project, he couldn’t see how any publisher would be interested in October Wings, Autumn Breathings. He went on to say that a sequel to Farewell Summer, would negatively affect the prospects of any movies being produced concerning the Dandelion Wine series (though, he didn’t say exactly how). A brief reminder about the copyright infringement of using the Green Town characters followed and that was that.

Believe me when I say that I understand copyright law (I’ve had a dozen books previously published), and I meant no disrespect to Mr. Bradbury in writing October Wings, Autumn Breathings. It was written with the deepest respect and love for him and his family in Green Town. It’s a celebration of his life and legacy. My only wish now is that I can get the manuscript into the hands of one or all of Mr. Bradbury’s children, as a gift to them, but finding any contact information for any of them has proved very difficult.

If I ever do manage to send them the manuscript, I hope they’ll find at least a little of that childlike joy and passion that their father never lost, in its pages. And who knows? Perhaps I’ll visit Douglas Spaulding in the winter – see what he learns there. And the spring?

Look, as a writer, I’m all for the long suffering author selling his/her work through as many outlets as possible, whether it be hard cover, soft cover, digital Kindle, audio, stone tablets, Morse Code, whatever. I’m appreciative that all these options are open to today’s authors, allowing them any kind of measurable success.

But, as a reader, I’m notoriously biased. It’s strictly traditionally published books for me the whole way, and will be forever. There’s something about feeling the weight of the book in my hands, the feel of the pages on my fingertips, the sound of the page turning, the ease in which I can enjoy the cover art. And the smell! Oh, that wonderful freshly printed book smell! My wife laughs at me whenever I purchase a new book because the first thing I do when I open it is smell the ink, the paper and the glue.

And it’s not just a quick sniff, no...it’s a long, hissing inhalation of pure joy! I imagine the countless hours of love the writer spent stitching his tale together, the grueling process of editing, I imagine the book flitting through the printing press a page at a time, then getting assembled at the end and glued together after the cover has been added. Holding that finished copy in my hand is one of the few pleasures in my life that I truly treasure.

I don’t think the same can be said about books in a digital format. I’m so glad I was born when I was, back when traditional publishing was at its peak. I often wonder, do people of today sniff their digital readers or their iPads before they turn them on and begin to read? Does holding their digital readers bring them the same joy I feel when I hold a book? Or is the whole process so mechanical, so coldly unfeeling now that reading a book on a digital reader is similar to watching a stale re-run on TV?

Sure, digital books have their pro’s - it’s much cheaper to download a book than to buy a hard copy; you can adjust the size of the text on the screen to make it more legible; and you can store hundreds of books in a digital reader the size of a single book.

But they also have their con’s – they each possess a rechargeable battery that dies at a speed that depends on how high you have the brightness programmed on the screen; if you drop the digital reader on a hard surface, chances are it will break; people will steal a digital reader quicker than they’ll steal a book (trust me on this – I’ve seen it); and I’m not sure, but I assume the useful life of a digital reader is far less than that of a book.

And yes, books have their con’s – they wear out after many readings and fall apart if you don’t treat them with care; they take up a lot of space (in my case, I have an entire wall of shelving devoted to books I love and wish to visit again).

It’s encouraging to me to see in a recent article that there has been an uptick in traditional book publishing sales and that brick and mortar book stores are making a humble comeback. That same article also detailed the fact that digital books are down in sales by 26%. And so the pendulum swings! What really shocked me was that sales of audiobooks are through the roof. The article didn’t mention why this is happening – could it be that we are so busy in our daily lives that we are too tired when we get home to read for ourselves and now prefer to have someone read to us in the car or train while commuting?

Me? I have a relatively busy life but I always make time in bed before I go to sleep for reading. I enjoy thinking about what I’ve read as I turn the light off and close my eyes. I must confess, though, that I do possess one audio book on cassette tape but it’s not for the reason you think. It’s Asimov’s classic science fiction story, “The Ugly Little Boy,” and I purchased it only because I wanted to hear Asimov’s voice as he read something he’d written – and I wasn’t disappointed. There’s a part at the end where Asimov is so into the story and the sad situation he’s reading about, that his voice cracks. That moment is priceless to me.

I would love to hear Hemingway reading his “Old Man and the Sea,” masterpiece, or Shakespeare reading his sonnets, or Arthur Conan Doyle reading the moment he’d killed Sherlock Holmes over the Reichenbach falls in “The Final Problem,” how relieved he must have been!

What about you? What particular literary method do you prefer?

I came into my love for writing at an exciting time. Let me explain.

Back in 1980, when I was a freshman in high school, I began to write my first novel (The Yuletide Spirit – as yet, still unpublished). At that time PC’s were still pretty much unheard of by regular folk and I didn’t have access to a typewriter, so the best option for me was to fill in the blank pages of a blue-covered, 8-1/2” x 5-1/2”, college-lined notebook with a #2 pencil, both, of which, I found in the junk drawer in our kitchen. (I wasn’t confident enough yet to brandish a pen).

It was an arduous process. Not familiar with using an outline to plot chapters and such, I often had to carefully tear pages out and place them back in the notebook where they rightly belonged in the story. Then there was the problem of keeping the size of my writing consistent because when my hand and fingers got tired, my neat handwriting became almost illegible, oversized, undersized and sometimes it even unconsciously changed to cursive writing. Some nights I would look back at what I’d written after a day of sweat and wordsmithing and need a translator to help me decipher it. And often, I’d erase and rewrite a certain paragraph so many times I would rip through the paper with the eraser. More than once I’d get so into what I was writing that I broke the tip of the pencil. Add to that the weird, fleshy, painful growth that always appeared on the third knuckle of my middle finger when I wrote too much (it’s called the “Writer’s Bump”), and you have the perfect antidote to writing a novel. All of this is not good for the peaceful flow of writing a story and if the writer isn’t careful, it shows up on the page. But I stumbled along despite these setbacks, day after day, and finally finished the first draft of the story a year later.

Then, one day in 1982, a neighbor threw out his old Smith-Corona manual typewriter. I saw it in the garbage can lying on top of bags of trash and yard waste (this was back when you could combine the two). It shone like a giant gray, smoothed water stone in the morning sunshine; all of its corners rounded, the case aerodynamically retro. From the aged, scratched and dented look of it I guessed it was an old relic from the 1960’s, probably from before I was born. It seemed as if the miles and years had conspired against it – and won. But I didn’t care. Without hesitation, I salvaged it from the uncaring grips and bleak fate of the garbage men and ran it inside to my basement office. As I sat at my desk, in front of that used and abused, ugly beast, I felt like a real, honest-to-God writer. All the great writers of the twentieth century used typewriters, didn’t they? Well, here I was, the latest in a long line of Fitzgeralds, Hemingways and Asimovs – finally! I was ready to claim my author birthright!

Turns out there was a reason my neighbor threw the typewriter out. It didn’t take me long to figure out that the typebars for the “Period” and the letter “K” were missing, so I had to physically write them in with a black-inked pen afterwards. The “Comma” typebar was permanently adjusted so that it fell in the middle, vertically, of a line instead of at the bottom. The button that reversed the ribbon spool was broken so I had to take my fingertip, press down on the left-side spool and turn it counterclockwise, thereby rewinding an ink ribbon that probably left its last strong impressions on the page during the Johnson administration - sometimes letters decided to appear, sometimes they were mere, faded ghosts of themselves. And don’t even get me started on the fricking feed roller!

Anyway, I fiddled with that machine until 1986 when my wife at the time, in a wonderfully selfless act of love and pity, secretly got all my friends together to chip in for an electric typewriter on my twentieth birthday. It was an Olivetti and it was a beautiful thing. The color of desert sand, it hummed like a vibrator when I turned it on and had all these extra options on it, most of which I never used (kind of like my GMC Envoy). As long as it had all its typebars and a full ribbon of ink, I was in Heaven!

Then, in 1990, my best friend, Larry, bought himself a Commodore 64 for the insanely low price of $199. I saw this thing and nearly dropped a stink brick in my underwear. Believe it or not, Commodore 64 was the best-selling PC in the 1980’s, selling over 17 million units starting in 1982, and I could see why. It had a keyboard, a Taxan monitor and a 5-1/4” floppy disk drive (remember those?) where, if I remember correctly, the 64 bit hard drive resided. Not a lot of memory, I grant you, but the best part was that it came with a neat and simple little piece of software called “Word Writer.” This revolutionized the quality and quantity of my stories exponentially! I could edit a line of text on the screen, I could copy and paste and move entire paragraphs to different pages, insert line breaks or whole chapters, anything I wanted to do to a story I could do in seconds with no stress whatsoever. Then I could print the story out on one of those inexpensive, primitive but effective dot matrix printers. Saving the story to a floppy disk was a life-altering (for a writer) event. Instead of having to make photocopies of the original story on the school library photocopier at 5 cents a copy, I could simply access the floppy disk, open the Word Writer document up and print it again. Amazing!

Some time in the late 1990’s, I purchased my first Macintosh and discovered “Microsoft Word,” to me, the end-all and be-all of all word processing programs. This software could do everything the Commodore 64 could do – and more! It could spellcheck, it could change fonts to bold face, italicize; it could color fonts, underline and resize them to any size. It could adjust page and gutter sizes and on and on. What a miracle!

And what does the future have in store for writers? Well, we’ve already seen the advent of a handful of programs that can take what you say “aloud” and transfer it to the page. Though this may be a neat novelty for some, to me, nothing can replace the intimacy and the feeling of satisfaction I get as I physically type down my thoughts and massage them into life. And where could we go from there? Machines capable of reading your thoughts and putting them down on paper? Or machines completely kicking the middleman out and writing stories on their own? No. Not for me.

I often wonder if, say, Hemingway were alive today...would all this technology have improved his writing? Probably not, but it sure as hell would have made everything easier for him and maybe the world could have squeezed a few extra short stories or novels out of him.

Think about that!

My apologies to you in advance, Dear Reader, for the copious amount of statistics sewn into the fabric of the following WebEssay. If there was another way to make my point, I would have taken that route.

Compared to a hundred years ago, writers today are at a huge disadvantage. Sure, a hundred years ago 20% of the U.S. population couldn’t read or write – an alarming number when you think about it. But those who did read back then had far less distraction than what we have today.

For the modern writer, it’s a long, tortuous, uphill battle even before a single word is written. Let’s say you’re a writer writing a book today (the following schedule is based on my own personal experience and is used for generalization only), you’re going to spend a significant amount of time creating the characters, assembling elements of the story, outlining then tweaking the story, then doing whatever research you need to do to make the story believable - let’s go with 3-6 months. The actual writing of the first draft will take somewhere from 6-12 months. You put the first draft away for 3-6 months so you can come at it again with fresh eyes. The second draft takes you 1 month. If a third draft is necessary, add on another month. Adding up the time it takes to get to a final draft that you’re comfortable sending out to publishers, comes out to approximately two years, two months.

Now that the manuscript is at the publisher, the wait for a positive or negative response (for the purpose of this WebEssay, let’s stick with a positive response throughout this procedure) could take anywhere from 1-3 months. If you’ve noticed, I don’t even mention the time it takes to search for an agent because it’s a complete waste of time – but that’s a subject for another WebEssay. OK, now that the publisher has bought your novel, the real fun begins – the actual professional editing of the manuscript. If you stay on it, it shouldn’t take you more than 3 months. Once that’s done, a book cover is created then approved – 1 month. A publishing date is set – 3-6 months. Now the marketing begins, calls and emails to newspapers and other media outlets, interviews, etc. – 1-3 months. Once the book is published, book signings and other personal appearances – 1 month.

So, in total, if you’re lucky and work hard, from beginning to end the process of getting a novel into the public’s hands takes approximately 3 years, 7 months (which is the reason why it’s a good idea to start writing another novel during this time). And what does the writer have to face after all this time and hard work?

Total percentage of the U.S. population that has a specific reading disorder? 15%

Total percentage of U.S. adults who are unable to read an 8th grade level book? 50%

Total percentage of U.S. high school students who will never read a book after high school? 33%

Total percentage of U.S. college students who will never read a book after graduation? 42%

Total percentage of U.S. families who did not buy a book this year? 80%

Total percentage of U.S. adults who have not been in a book store in the past 5 years? 70%

Total percentage of books that aren’t read to completion? 57%

I found these grim statistics on a website called statisticbrain.com years ago...so I assume these numbers are true. From my own experience, they sure ring true. But, wait – there’s more!

Writers also have to compete with outside distractions such as video games, movies, 300 channel cable TV systems, sports events, cell phone apps, partying, listening to music and dancing in clubs, exercising, laziness, eating, sleeping, having sex, showering, work, school, walking the dog, mowing the lawn plus other assorted yard chores, shopping and finally, breathing.

This is why I’m so honored and grateful when someone buys one of my books and actually reads it, even if it’s just a single amazing, intelligent and willing reader. It somehow makes all the time and work I spent creating memorable characters and awesome worlds worthwhile; it wasn’t for nothing. The truth is, real writers will write even if there’s no market for it and no one to read it, because it’s in him/her and it just has to come out. I’ve had books nag at me for years to be written and, in the end, I always listen to that mind voice. That’s the difference between someone who wants to write a book and someone who actually does.

Believe it or not, there was a time in the 1700’s when novels became more prominent and society grew increasingly concerned that young people spent way too much time reading books. Whaaaat? They went so far as naming this malady: “Reading Rage,” “Reading Fever,” “Reading Mania,” or “Reading Lust!” What a wonderful problem to have! I can imagine dark and smoky reading dens in the bad part of town where teenagers gathered in circles, reading aloud their favorite passages, enjoying the buzz that came afterwards, never realizing that they’re hopelessly addicted to the written word. I can imagine Reading Rehab Hospitals sprouting up everywhere populated with doctors and nurses who try to wane those hopelessly addicted teenage readers off of books by teaching them how to smoke or break into houses! Ha! I can only hope that maybe someday this Reading Rage will happen again (there I go, the eternal optimist).

Anyway, trust me on this, having someone read what I’ve written is the icing on the cake. Having someone enjoy what you’ve written is the flavor of that icing on the cake and I never get tired of tasting it.

Where are you, Dear Readers?

I admit it proudly; I’m an ignorant, stupid American who resists change. I’m a purist. I’m an artist. I’m a troglodyte science fiction writer who still clings to his God, guns and the U.S. Standard System of Measurement.

“Seriously?” you ask?

“Yes, seriously,” I reply.

Consider this...how would the repeating refrain from the classic Who song, “I Can See For Miles,” sound if Roger Daltrey pulled out his handy Metric converter and changed it to “I can see for kilometers and kilometers and kilometers...?” It might just be me, but I don’t think it has the same memorable or syntactic ring as “Miles.” Or let’s change the title of Ray Bradbury’s 1953 masterwork, “Fahrenheit 451” to “Celsius 232.7778.” Which one do you prefer? Be honest now.

Being a science fiction writer, I obviously read a lot of science fiction novels and stories which means I have to suffer through this manic, obsessive, compulsive, metric sickness constantly. This is mainly because many of the science fiction writers of today and the recent past are physicists whom, for whatever reasons, have converted over to the author lifestyle and feel this innate need to sound smarter than the rest of us supposedly uneducated jacklegs. Honestly, I physically cringe when I come across a Metric reference in a story because the pretentiousness is so glaringly obvious.

Arthur C. Clarke, graduated with a First-Class Degree in Mathematics and Physics from King’s College in 1946, and he sure made this fact known in a book he wrote titled, “Hammer of the God,” which is about a giant asteroid heading for Earth. There’s a chapter in the book where he gives the reader, in goobly-gook metric-speak, pages and pages of description about how many spins the asteroid is making, how fast it’s traveling, the preposterous weight of the object, details on its orbital path around the sun and even the projected width and depth of the crater it would make in the Earth’s surface. By the end of the chapter my eyes were bleeding, my ears were melting and I didn’t know what planet I was on. For the record, Arthur C. Clarke is one of my favorite authors of all time but I would have been happy just to know that a giant rock is headed for earth and it’s traveling really, really fast – now get on with the story!

The argument these physicist/science fiction writers counter with is that the details of the Laws of Physics have to be explained carefully and correctly or the fiction just isn’t believable. Bullhockey! Bradbury never dealt with the complexities of metricism (Hey - I just made that word up!), no, he was more concerned with the quality of the actual words he was writing and the metaphorical implications of his story. You see, Bradbury wrote for the regular person, the common man, the reader who enjoys the process of reading, not the elitist scientists or scientist-wannabees who still haven’t figured out what ignited the Big Bang or what resides in the singularity of a black hole (I have a feeling the two are related but that’s fodder for another blog). That sums my own literary philosophy up perfectly.

In a scientific manual, article, report, essay or journal, sure, go for it – use all the metricism you want, that’s where it belongs. It doesn’t belong in fiction unless you want to turn people into blocks of unconscious stone.

Anton Chekhov, one of Russia’s greatest writers, once said that “Clarity of expression is of utmost importance.” He was absolutely correct. Here’s one of the problems a writer has to deal with when someone reads his story; he/she has to put pictures in the reader’s mind clearly and simply or the meaning of what the reader is reading is not comprehended by them. I ask any of you out there, can you picture in your mind how long a kilometer is? How about a mile? Again, be honest. Of course, picturing a mile is much easier than picturing a kilometer, which is 1.609 of a mile. How do you picture 1.609 of a mile in your head? You can’t, but it sure sounds smart and important, doesn’t it?.

I’ve talked to some of the finest products our U.S. university system is squeezing out through the grinder and when I have this conversation with them they look at me as if I’m The Who’s “Deaf, Dumb and Blind Kid.” The Metric system is easy! they protest in their snobby, stuffy, professor-like voices. Does this seem easy to you...

• 1 inch is about 25 millimeters or 2.54 centimeters
• 1 pound is about 454 grams or 0.436 kilograms
• 10 degrees Fahrenheit is minus 12.22 degrees Celsius
• 1 cup is 0.2365 liters
• 1 square mile is 2.590 km²
• And one stat I read about the other day is that converting to the Metric system will somehow magically increase the total surface area of the solar system by 42%. WHAT???

Yeah, I thought so. No wonder the United States is one of only three countries left in the world still using the Standard system (Myanmar and Liberia are the other two)! The fact of the matter is that the Metric system is only different from the Standard system because it’s the Metric system. Both are accurate forms of measurement, both can be broken down into smaller and smaller parts for even more accuracy. And not many people realize that we landed on the Moon in 1969 using mainly the Standard system. Seems to me that if we could do it then, we could do it today, why make things more complicated?

In the interest of truth and justice, I must confess to you that I have used a Metric reference in one or two of my stories, but that’s because the editor forced me to do it. And that’s the only reason I will use it in the future.

Thank you for your time.

The other day I was eating a bowl of cereal for breakfast at the kitchen table and as often is the case while doing anything mundane, I became really bored. Luckily, my wife had recently purchased a book of word seek puzzles for a plane trip she was going to take and had conveniently left it on the table. I found a pen, grabbed the book, opened it up and searched for a subject I was sure my wife wouldn’t be interested in. Way, way in the back, past subjects such as “Cooking Utensils” and “Wallpaper Patterns,” I finally found “Science Fiction.”

Oh! This will be perfect! I thought. Searching for names like “Asimov,” “Clarke” and “Bradbury” or the titles of famous sci-fi books like “Dune,” “Ender’s Game” or “Ringworld” will be fun! Yay!.

I read the list at the bottom of the page to familiarize myself with what I was supposed to find in the mish-mash of letters above and that’s when I nearly thrust the pen into my ear - repeatedly. Included in the list were characters from Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and Michael Moorcock’s famous Elric series. What the hell? How could any of these offerings be considered science fiction in any way, shape or form? I mean, where’s the science in casting a spell in some exotic garbly-gook language? Where’s the science in waving a magic wand while you’re flitting thru the sky on a broomstick, or using a demonic sword to suck out the souls of your enemies? The answer: There is none. The proper genre these books should be found in is FANTASY.

And what’s worse, every bookstore I’ve ever been in makes the same mistake, mixing fantasy in with real science fiction. It’s quite maddening to a sci-fi purist.

And before any of you start protesting to me that magic and sorcery is a science – BULL-HOCKEY! You see, in science fiction, the writer deals with futuristic technologies or situations that could possibly, one day, happen, because it’s based on actual SCIENCE. In many cases this has already happened, sci-fi writers have actually predicted the future (Arthur C. Clarke’s prediction of the orbiting communications satellite is one example. Orwell’s frightening 1949 novel, “1984,” is coming true as you read this!).

But, there will never be a time where a person chants a line of incomprehensible mumble-bumble and a Big Mac suddenly appears in front of you out of thin air. No one will ever be riding on broomsticks and there will never be swords that suck the souls out of people like a soda straw – unless a science-based technology is behind it.

That Dear Reader, is the difference between science fiction and fantasy.

There are, however, a few rare examples that blur the line between the two genres and combine them quite elegantly. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “John Carter of Mars” stories can’t be strictly called sci-fi stories even though some element of technology is used in them throughout (the grand flying solar-powered vehicles and the massive oxygen machines are two examples). And then there’s “Star Wars,” with its mixture of laser technology, space ships that travel faster than light and that mystical, mysterious religion called “The Force” (the Jedi Knights, on many levels, always remind me of the Crusader Knights – but that’s a subject for another future WebEssay).

By the way, I never started the puzzle. I just ate my cereal real fast then went to my office to write a sci-fi story.

Thanks for your time.

For those of you who haven’t read my essay titled, “A Question of Creativity,” which dealt with the number one most dreaded question writers get asked (Where do you get your ideas?), go back and read it then hurry back here, because there’s a second most dreaded question out there that I aim to answer for all of eternity in this essay.

Dreaded Question #2: How long have you been writing?

Yes, that’s the question. I usually just give an offhanded, general answer of “Fifth grade,” because that was when I first started to get serious about writing. But there are layers and shades attached to the whole subject for me and fortunately, I have the time and space to answer it in detail here..

From the beginning I always felt this natural affinity for the written word. I can recall clearly how, in the third grade, I preferred to have stayed at my desk in my homeroom classroom during recess to write little UFO stories and draw illustrations to go along with them (I was deeply entranced by the subject back then!), but, of course, teachers couldn’t leave a child alone in a classroom to his own devices, he may burn the school down.

In fourth grade, I wrote this impressive short story about how I saved our neighborhood from the destruction of a tornado by shooting a bullet into its belly as it rampaged through my backyard, thereby dispersing it safely to the four winds. How a single bullet could accomplish such a task was still beyond my imaginative reasoning, but the point at that time was to write the story – nothing more. The illustration I drew for it was quite dramatic, I can still picture it in my mind.

But it was in fifth grade, when I was ten years old, when I came across this fantastically large, two-foot by one-and-a-half foot sized, full color comic book by Marvel Comics on a sales rack in the local A&P. The cover was indescribably over-the-top, full of action, laser blasts, exploding spaceships and the most awesome shiny, black robot bad guy I’d ever seen. He was holding a red laser sword over the entire scene – I was sucked in immediately. The giant comic cost me a whole dollar but it and the movie it was based on, Star Wars, have influenced my writing ever since, probably more than anything else in my life.

I read the comic in one night then went to see the movie a few weeks later...head blown, brains everywhere! As soon as I got home from the movie, I pulled out a yellow pad of notebook paper and began writing a completely “original” story based on Luke Skywalker’s adventure, in long hand. Of course, it was a deliberate act of pure plagiarism, but I didn’t care, I wanted to write stories like that the rest of my life. I wanted to blow people’s head apart, leave pieces of their brains on the floor, walls and ceiling!

I got about two and half note pads into this act of thievery when it finally dawned on me that, even though I had learned much on how to plot a story and develop characters, I would never damage people’s heads by stealing other people’s work. I had to write my own stories.

There was a short time in fifth grade where I experimented with a newspaper type format. I found a stack of 11”x17” blue construction paper and drew out an entire newspaper I named “The Blue News.” I secured it together with pink yarn then laid out articles, all with a blue theme. I remember one of the stories was something about Neil Diamond’s “Song Sung Blue,” though I don’t remember the details. I drew pictures for each article in black ink so, I couldn’t make any errors. I always wonder what happened to it.

In high school, my best friend and I wrote original sci-fi stories using friends we knew in real life. We even protected ourselves by making our friends sign official, legally binding, permission slips – thereby allowing us to use their names and likenesses without threat of legal repercussion. We typed the stories out on an old typewriter with an ever-dying ink ribbon, had his mother edit the grammar, re-typed the changes, then sent the originals out in a two-pocket folder with his dad where he would make ten copies on the photocopier at his place of work. When we got them back, I colored the photo-copies of the cover I’d drawn with color marker then glued them to the outside of 8-1/5” x 11” folders that had three adjustable metal tabs inside. My best friend punched holes in the copied manuscripts then assembled them on to the three tabs and viola! a book was created. It was all great fun but the best part of the process was the look on our friend’s faces when they received their free copy – I will never forget that!

Most of them still have their copies.

I took what I learned from that experience and wrote a completely original, true novel called “The Yuletide Spirit” on the pages of a small notebook that had a blue cover. It was about an angel that comes down on a group of kids one winter in Meddybemps, Maine (It’s a real place, I found it on an atlas!). Again, I used friends and family members as characters in the book but this time I changed all their names except mine. It was the first time I drew up a map of an entire town; using this map I could plot out where a certain adventure or important scene took place, I could see where all the characters lived and amazingly, using this map created new adventures and scenes I hadn’t thought of before. When I let my friends read “The Yuletide Spirit,” it was the first time I realized I could make readers cry. Someday, when I decide to revisit it again, maybe I’ll send it out for publication, but for right now it’s a little too personal for me to let go into the hands of strangers and editors. There’s an innocence and charm about the book that will get lost should I let it be edited by someone who doesn’t fully understand the story or its origin – I don’t want that yet, even if it’s not technically well-written.

As the years passed, I self-published a couple sci-fi short story collections and then finally, in 2001, my first officially published novel, “The Opening and Closing of the Moon,” was published. I haven’t looked back since.

Thanks for your time.

The writer’s office is his “Fortress of Solitude,” it’s his personal “Holy of Holies,” it’s a writer’s most sacred space, the only place where he has full control over the universe and he will do almost anything to protect it and be in it.

When the door is locked, it means fabulous and magical things are happening – with a stroke of a pen or the tap-tappity-tap on a keyboard, entire lives are breathed into being, whole worlds are brought into existence, adventures are begun and fates are decided on a mythological chess board of the imagination. Love is requited, lost, then requited again –perhaps? Mysteries and crimes are revealed, investigated then solved, evil is faced down, wrongs are righted, heroes are born, basic human truths are made evident and lies are turned into truth. The patently unbelievable is made wholly believable here in a writer’s office, if the writer is on his game.

Some writers don’t need an office to properly perform their magic, they can take their laptops for a ride on a roller coaster during a thunderstorm and write a decent line of prose. I respect these writers, but I learned at a very young age that I wasn’t one of them. I need the warm, private, quiet walls and the locked door of an insulating womb to protect me from the distractions of a very noisy and intrusive outside world.

So it was for me in the summer of 1981 when my friend, Larry, also an aspiring writer at the time, and I decided we needed our own “Fortress of Solitude” to practice our craft. We were two fourteen year-olds possessing young, nuclear-powered minds pregnant with incredible worlds, fantastic characters and amazing stories and these minds needed an outlet. But where would this “Fortress of Solitude” reside?

My basement in the house on Woodbine Drive in Round Lake Beach, Illinois, of course!

There was a section of linoleum-tiled floor against the back, west wall of my basement that had remained untouched since the day my father paneled the walls with the strangest dark blue wooden paneling back in 1973. In the middle of this wall was a single, small window that gave a worm’s eye-view of my backyard. This was the perfect space for our office. It was well away from the living area of the basement that had a giant 26” console TV, and it would offer the perfect amount of privacy once the inner wall went up. I told our plans to my dad and he gave us permission to build, as long as we did it ourselves. He didn’t want to be bothered with it. The game was on!

With the youthful energy of kids that desired something desperately, Larry and I tore down that awful, early 70’s blue paneling, painted the drywall underneath white, framed out the window, hung a wooden blind, built the skeletal frame of the opposing wall, ran electric (with the help of Larry’s dad), nailed drywall over the frame, painted that white then hung a door with a lock in the knob. It was a simple 10’x10’ room and took about two weeks to complete.

Our parents gave us a pair of cheap, crappy desks and we placed them against the north and south walls so that they faced the door. Our parents also gave us cheap, crappy office chairs on rollers (mine was missing a roller so I had to learn how to balance while sitting in it). There was an overhead light that you could turn on with a switch by the door but someone gave us novelty lamps for each of our desks, mine was made out of a 7-Up can, Larry’s was made out of a Budweiser can (to this day I don’t know why those were given to us because we didn’t drink either beverage). Larry’s dad built us a small, waist-high bookcase to store our comic books. We needed music to serve as mood inducers as we wrote, so I brought in a boom box, put it on top of the bookcase and tuned the FM radio to 97.9 The Loop, but it wasn’t long before hundreds of cassette tapes littered the top of the bookcase like discarded cigarette packs – John Mellencamp (when he was known as John Cougar), every Led Zeppelin album, 38 Special, ZZ Top, Rush, AC/DC, The Police and more!

We hung posters on the walls. Larry had a confederate flag hanging on the wall behind him because his family was from the south and he was proud of his heritage. I have a feeling if he tried that today he’d be tarred and feathered on CNN and his house burned down. I hung pieces of art I produced (yes, I was an artist, too! I drew and colored all the covers of the many books Larry and I wrote in that little room). Larry and I were so proud of ourselves. The day we finished moving in, we sat at our desks and realized we had to name the office something other than “The Office.” We came up with “Adventure Stories, Inc.” and even authored a silly constitution of laws to govern our time in there. One of the laws was that only rock and blues music was allowed to be played in the office. I still have this constitution in a desk drawer in my present office.

In this office, I learned the writing habits I still cherish to this day. In this office, I transported myself to countless planets in many different times with too many characters to name. In this office, I wrote poetry, sword and sorcery, fantasy, science fiction. I drew book covers and comic books - there were no barriers, no borders on my creativity back then. In this office, the outside world ceased to exist as soon as I closed and locked the door and put a cassette tape in the boom box.

On Friday or Saturday nights, Larry would sleep over and we’d spend the entire night at our desks drinking huge glasses of hot tea while we wrote and jammed. We’d discuss our current stories and ones we’d like to start. We’d talk about girls, music or what happened in school the previous week. On our birthdays, we’d have parties in the office with our friends. It was the best time ever, I can’t remember ever feeling so creative.

But as is often the case, Life happens, gets in the way and things change. Girls, cars and work became Larry’s interests, then he joined the Air Force and our partnership in “Adventure Stories, Inc.” officially ceased to be.

I’ve had five offices since then, all bigger and nicer, but if I had a time machine, the first place I would go would be back to that first office on Woodbine Drive in Round lake beach, Illinois, just to spend one more night there jamming and writing silly sci-fi stories no one will ever read.

Thanks for your time.

As I look back to my writing’s earliest days I realize that, even then, I had an inexplicably curious preference for science fiction. I was at my best and most comfortable when writing little stories about UFO’s or shooting bullets into backyard tornadoes to make them disappear. But, why?

Why wasn’t I prone to writing war stories, spy stories, sword and sorcery stories or westerns? I had nothing personally against those other genres but I just couldn’t force myself to pick up a pencil and write about any of them.

I think it had to do with what genre I’d been exposed to first as a child. I remember, down in the basement of my house on Woodbine Drive in Round Lake Beach, Illinois, in the early 1970’s, my dad, being an avid science fiction fan, hung a huge book case and filled it with books written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke (and many more). I recall, before I could read, spending hours and hours pulling books from the book case and staring at all those exciting and colorful covers – silver, gleaming rocket ships blasting away from exploding planets; giant robots invading the Earth, swatting down mile-high skyscrapers like they were made of balsa wood; strange alien beings with a hundred eyes and wormlike bodies drinking the blood of poor, weak, pitiful, horrified humans. Did things like that really happen? Could it really happen? Oh, my God! My imagination went wild with the possibilities!

Among my favorites were the Edgar Rice Burroughs book covers, painted by the master, Frank Frazetta. They often depicted overly-muscled men carrying scantily-clad women as they shot laser guns while riding strange, six-legged beasts over exotic volcanic wastelands. I mean, who’d want to write westerns when all they offered were six-shot revolvers and four-legged horses? BORING! I couldn’t get enough of these fantastic interpretations of what was on the pages inside these books. As soon as I could read, my dad lent me Heinlein’s “The Rolling Stones,” and I was hooked on science fiction forever.

I often wonder if my dad had stocked that book case full of Zane Grey westerns, would I be writing westerns instead of science fiction? I’m eternally glad I’ll never know the true answer to that. All of this is fine and dandy, but why hasn’t my interest in science fiction waned at all as I advance ever further towards the cobwebs of adulthood? Why haven’t I grown up to write the next great American novel of fine literature?

All of this is fine and dandy, but why hasn’t my interest in science fiction waned at all as I advance ever further towards the cobwebs of adulthood? Why haven’t I grown up to write the next great American novel of fine literature?

The great Ray Bradbury spoke often and eloquently on the subject of science fiction. One of the quotes that I feel pertains to me most personally is this one: “When you grow up in science fiction you grow up in everything! It's the greatest and only field worth growing up in. It's the total field.”

What I think he means is that science fiction is the only genre open to every other genre in literature. Science fiction can absorb the western, the war story, the spy story, the sword and sorcery story and yes, even the romance story and it will still remain a science fiction story. That’s the thing I love most about science fiction, there are no barriers to it. It’s free and open and welcoming and for that reason it will never stagnate, and that means I, as a writer, will never stagnate.

Bradbury also once wrote that we are all living in the future. He’s absolutely right about that. Every second that ticks off the clock propels us into an uncertain future and science fiction is the only genre that offers solutions, through science, to the many problems we all face in that future.

So, have some fun. Consider yourself a time traveler in your own first person-narrated book of science fiction, even while you’re at work, sitting down at the table eating dinner or sleeping in bed dreaming of flying to a better place.

In closing, since I don’t think I can do it as well as Mr. Bradbury, below are a handful of quotes where he talks about science fiction, its meaning and importance to our present day culture...

“Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction.”

“Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it's the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. ...science fiction is central to everything we've ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don't know what they're talking about.”

“In science fiction, we dream. In order to colonize in space, to rebuild our cities, which are so far out of whack, to tackle any number of problems, we must imagine the future, including the new technologies that are required.”

“Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn't exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.”

“A science fiction story is just an attempt to solve a problem that exists in the world, sometimes a moral problem, sometimes a physical or social or theological problem.”

“The history of science fiction started in the caves 20,000 years ago. The ideas on the walls of the cave were problems to be solved. It’s problem solving. Primitive scientific knowledge, primitive dreams, primitive blueprinting: to solve problems.”

Thanks for your time.

“Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today- but the core of science fiction, its essence, the concept about which it revolves, has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.” – Isaac Asimov.

Yes, the great Mr. Asimov is correct, science fiction and its authors have a long history of sustaining black eyes from literary critics, even today some still don’t take the genre seriously, considering it juvenile fantasies for the juvenile. Mr. Ray Bradbury, one of the true giants in the science fiction field, often spoke of parties he’d go to where elitist literary snobs would spend the entire evening ridiculing science fiction. Apparently, to them, science fiction is unable to tackle the deep, heavy and important human themes their precious and pretentious literary fiction claims to have a monopoly on. As Mr. Bradbury countered famously in an essay many years ago – “They don’t know what they’re talking about!”

I’ve had first-hand experience with this. I used to go to a creative writing night class at our local college, we were allowed to hand in three short stories for workshopping by the other writers in the class. I would always sneak in a science fiction themed story just to see what the reaction would be and it was as predictable as the sun coming up in the morning – a few condescending comments here, a few patronizing jabs there. One man in the class was so put-out with having to say anything about my story that he talked about the gray paper I used to print the copies of the story on rather than deal with the actual text (I’d run out of white paper to use – all I had at the time was a ream of gray paper).

Look, I understand, good science fiction is hard to find but it’s just like any other genre, when it’s good, it addresses the human condition honestly and without fear. Sure, I put gadgets, aliens and exotic worlds in my stories, but they are rarely ever about just those things. For example, I wrote a story called “Moontide” that was published in “The Martian Wave – 2012.” It concerned an aging pilot who’d captained a space shuttle (the Moontide) that ran between the Earth and Moon for twenty years and he was being replaced by a younger pilot with a faster, larger, more beautiful ship. But the story wasn’t about space ships or moon colonies or space travel, it was about a man’s relationship with the ship he’d had the misfortune to grow old with - it was about mortality.

But, as long as there are gadgets, aliens and exotic worlds in my work, I’ll never get the respect a writer of straight literary fiction will get.

So, this got me wondering if there were any established writers of literary fiction who’d ever dabbled in science fiction. The list of ten authors below is what I found and many of them genuinely surprised me. Have a look...

Don Dellilo (1936 - ) – An American novelist and playwright who has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, won the PEN/Faulkner award for a book called Mau II in 1992, and won the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction in 2013, wrote a book called Ratner’s Star (1976), about a child genius who is called upon by eccentric scientists to decipher an alien communication.

Vladimir Nabokov (1899 – 1977) – The great Russian/American novelist wrote a science fiction novel titled, Ada or Ardor – A Family Chronicle, and is about two incestuous lovers set in an alternate timeline where the Americas were settled by Russia and the planet Earth is known as Antiterra.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896 – 1940) – One of the original 1920’s “Lost Generation” writers and Hemingway’s BF, Scott wasn’t above dirtying his hands in the science fiction genre with his 1921 short story “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” a satirical story about a man who is born old and gets younger as he lives his life of adventure.

H.P. Lovecraft (1890 – 1937) – Known for his atmospheric, mesmerizing short stories of horror in New England, many don’t realize he was equally adept at science fiction. Many of his horror stories involve alien beings or extinct alien civilizations. One of my favorites is “In the Walls of Eryx,” which takes place on the jungle planet, Venus. Two other stories, “From Beyond” and “Cool Air” also detail scientific inventions.

Virginia Woolf (1882 - 1941) – One of the great female English authors of the 20th Century, Woolf experimented with stream of conscious writing in her classic novels To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway. But, few people know she used a pen name to sell her science fiction stories, E.V. Odle! One of her most influential works as E.V. Odle, was a 1923 novel titled The Clockwork Man and is widely considered the first instance of a cyborg in fiction.

Rudyard Kipling (1865 – 1936) – The first English writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and author of The Jungle Book and Gunga Din, Kipling wrote ten science fiction short stories that dealt with time travel, sentient machines and alternate history. Recently, these ten stories have been collected into one volume as The Science Fiction Stories of Rudyard Kipling.

Mark Twain (1835 – 1910) – Author of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer and inventor of the great American novel, Twain was fascinated with machines and technology his whole life. His literary dabbling into science fiction includes works such as “Captain Stormfield’s Visit To Heaven,” “The Mysterious Stranger” and “The Great Dark.” A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is widely recognized as a pioneering time travel story.

There you have it! I implore you to read the above referenced works when you get a chance so you can see how far ahead of their times these authors were. Then, if you should run across one of those snot-nosed literary critics making themselves look smarter by demeaning an entire genre, remind him/her of these authors and see what they say.

On a closing note, try to imagine what a science fiction work from Shakespeare or Hemingway would sound like. The possibility makes me drool!

Thanks for your time.