Thirty Years In The Making

It was in fifth grade that I first thought I wanted to be an author. We were assigned to write a short story for class. I wrote a disorganized account of a detective hiking through the jungle to watch some natives involved in a mysterious religious ritual. I never finished, but I think it was supposed to have eventually been found out to be part of a cyborg plot to invade Earth.

In sixth grade I met my friend Ryan at the bus stop. We acted out scenes from Star Trek mostly. Soon, I was at his house six days a week coming up with and playing out ideas for a television series we called Dan And Ryan’s Adventures. The characters were based loosely on us. Unlike other children who wanted to be Ghostbusters or Ninja Turtles, I always wanted to be me – except with superpowers. I knew that before we could ever worry about acting, directing, props, sets, or camera angles, I first needed to write the scripts, but writing was much more tedious than playing. Instead, I made longer and longer lists of our ideas without writing any of them out. As I grew older and learned more speculative science, the ideas became ever more sophisticated and we strived to be groundbreaking.

By the time I had graduated high school, Ryan had moved away and I had fallen in love with the written word. There is just something magically satisfying about capturing in mere words the action and images of a scene. I enjoyed repeatedly going over my rough drafts and refining them into perfection. It was all I wanted to do. I gave up on the television series idea and decided to write a series of novels. I had settled on calling it The Way Out Series. It had a triple meaning. It dealt with events “way out” in deep space where there was often only one “way out” from danger and my characters were “way out” of their minds. I was unaware at the time that there had already been a Way Out science fiction series in the sixties. I made my first real effort to write in 2000. The first episode was to have been called Inside Metha. It would cover how the two main characters, Dan and Ryan, first met.

Unfortunately, I could not finish. Between work and school I did not have much time. I was mentally exhausted and could not focus. I kept having writers’ block and I did not trust that I could think my characters out of situations that I put them in. I needed to put them in danger, but also have them survive in a way that didn’t seem too unrealistic. I kept trying to plan everything out ahead and outline in too much detail, becoming frustrated when things didn’t work out.

As the years passed, I continued having new story ideas until I had hundreds. How was I ever to finish writing the entire series in a natural lifetime? I kept changing my mind which episode I should start the series with and what should be backstory. Dan needed a way to survive danger and so I invented a form of reincarnation, allowing him to change his species over the course of his long lifetime. He was an eagle, a tiger, and a dinosaur. I had numerous ideas for Dan that took place before and after his adventures with Ryan, making Ryan less important, and the character Dan was becoming less and less like me anyways. Eventually Dan became Nate.

In the meantime, I developed other interests, such as art, travel, psychology, and politics. I wrote a blog on memetics and cultural evolution. I tried starting a business. It failed. I had depression. I had anxiety. It was only in 2012 that I made a breakthrough with my science fiction. I don’t fully understand what happened myself, but part of it was that I gave up trying to run my life and trusted God to lead me wherever, including what to write. I started writing The Spider, The Witch, And The Spaceship. It covered Nate’s childhood (then called Nathaniel) via frame story as he tells what he remembers to an interviewer. It also introduced the concept of fifth-dimensional shift, explaining how it was that the entire genre of Nate’s life changed from childlike space travel cartoon to serious spy thriller with time travel paradoxes. The idea of history and physics being different in parallel universes features much in Nate’s later life, so it was only natural to think that his childhood was spent in a universe seen through the eyes of a child, without sex or evolution, with only one language and one religion. It’s all based on my life experiences and the games I used to play as a kid, after all. I published in 2014.

I immediately began to think of what to do with all my extra ideas to make them marketable, but life threw me some setbacks. I was fired from two jobs. I was unemployed and sleeping on my parents’ couch. I started another business and failed again. I took care of my aging grandfather. I got distracted and wrote a blog on alien biology. I wrote a blog on politics. I wrote a book on moral philosophy. I eventually hit upon the idea to turn Nate’s adventures into short stories. By 2022, I had the overall plot arc of Nate’s life figured out and started writing. I now plan on writing 42 stories every year for 30 years. This will be the most epic series of all spacetime!

Season One, starting on January tenth, picks up where The Spider, The Witch, And The Spaceship left off, escaping from his parent(s) and takes him through his time in the war, his maturation of character, his gaining of special powers, and his first time machine. If you like it, please leave a review wherever you buy your books. It would mean a lot to me.