| Author | Message | ||
     Rhysaurus (Rhysaurus) Username: Rhysaurus Registered: 01-2010 Posted From: 212.219.233.223 |
Recently I have been getting nostalgic about the very first short-story I ever wrote. It was 30 years ago (though I wasn't published for another 11 years after that). Anyway I wrote a blog about it. Here it is... http://rhysaurus.blogspot.com/ So what about you? Care to share your memories of the very first short-story you ever wrote? I don't mean your first published story, but the first complete story you ever wrote... Regards! R! | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 82.26.155.181 |
I can't remember what it was. I did put together a collection of really bad horror stories as a 19 year-old and photocopied editions for friends and family. One of the tales was an early version of my story 'Inside Out', which appeared in my first collection. It was perhaps the only tale worth rescuing from the pack, however. I wrote a whole episode of Blackadder when I was 15. | ||
| Mbfg (Mbfg) Username: Mbfg Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 92.4.172.248 |
My first serious attempt was back in 1982, (just before I got married for the first time, I read "The Stand" that summer as well and only bought it because it was big and had a great cover. I'd never heard of Stephen King!) It was a science fiction story called "Atonement for Kamis" and it as inspired by the garish fornt cover art on an ancient paperback issue of Simak's "Way Station". Still proud of that tale and one day I might rework it and send it out. Going bck to childhood my absolute first short story was "Lost on Octiburn" written at school when I was about 9 or maybe 10. It was a complete sf story told in about 500 words and included an interstller space flight, a crash landing on an alien palnet filled with hostile natives and monsters, a cataclysmic volcano or comet strike or something, repair and escape. Now that is economy of words! I wrote a lot more such yarns between then and 16, all lost but never forgotten. Cheers Terry | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 178.118.77.121 |
My very first attempts included a Cthulhu Mythos yarn with all the Derlethian claptrap - a forbidden book, a problematical ancestor, occult formulae in a forgotten language etc. I was 15 or 16. I barely recognize the handwriting as my own now. The finished story (if it can be called that) owes a lot to Derleth's The Lurker at the Threshold. It must have made an impression at the time. | ||
| Matthew Fryer (Matthew_fryer) Username: Matthew_fryer Registered: 08-2009 Posted From: 90.195.182.194 |
 Prehistoric thriller "Me and the Dinosaurs" was fully illustrated throughout, in colour, had a print run of 1, and was bound with a bit of pink string. | ||
| Mbfg (Mbfg) Username: Mbfg Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 92.4.172.248 |
Is it still available Matthew? I've tried Abe Books and Amazon but no luck. Cheers Terry | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 82.26.155.181 |
Don't throw it away, Matthew! Behold . . . http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-14152092 | ||
| Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey) Username: Ramsey Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 92.9.253.123 |
I've a PDF of my first tale. If someone can tell me how to reproduce it here, heaven help you all... | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 82.26.155.181 |
If you send it to me, I'll see what I can do, Ramsey. | ||
| Huw (Huw) Username: Huw Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 61.216.200.4 |
Beware the 'afore-mentioned skeleton'  | ||
| Rosswarren (Rosswarren) Username: Rosswarren Registered: 11-2009 Posted From: 81.157.138.157 |
I wrote a story called 'The Woman in White' when I was 11. Can't recall a thing about it save that it was inspired by my first reading of Dracula. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 2.24.39.213 |
I wrote a booklet of supernatural stories when I was about nine. Never typed them or anything. Then there were a few stories written for homework or for the school magazine, for which I wrote hapless pastiches of Bradbury, Lovecraft and Howard. They were truly bad. I feel about as much nostalgia for them as I feel for the rest of my teenage life: this life just isn't long enough for me to get far enough away from all that. I don't mean Bradbury, Lovecraft and Howard, I mean those pastiches and the sick scrawny obsessive who penned them. | ||
| Carolinec (Carolinec) Username: Carolinec Registered: 06-2009 Posted From: 92.232.199.129 |
Matt - that little book of yours looks so cute. I think I want to buy a copy! The first story I wrote, and can actually remember being quite proud of, was a true-life story of the day a goat escaped from a field near our house and my dad and the neighbour caught it and took it back to where it lived. It was a wild West Country neighbourhood we lived in back then! The reason I was proud, by the way, was because my story was considered so good it was one of several chosen to be pinned on the school noticeboard on parents' day.  But if we're talking genre, then my attempts - with my best friend - to write a Star Trek (original series) story so that we could send it off, be famous and actually get to meet Leonard Nimoy in person, was definitely my first. | ||
| John Forth (John) Username: John Registered: 05-2008 Posted From: 82.24.1.217 |
For most of my childhood I fancied myself as a bit of a comics creator, and filled up jotter after jotter with sequels to Jaws (which basically consisted of thinking up new and outlandish ways to off the shark at the end) and Alien rip-offs. I'm sure some of them are still in a box in my mum's attic back in Scotland. The highlight had to be the 10 part magnum opus Death Valley, which I did when I was twelve, which started as a cabin in the woods story and quickly grew as I threw in every character from every movie that I loved at the time (and I do mean every one - Ash from the Evil Dead, the Cenobites, The Dark Judges from Judge Dredd, a zombie ripped-off from an illustration on the side of an arcade cabinet, Batman, and so on...). If memory serves, it ended with the sublime Death Valley in Space. In terms of written fiction (I'm loathe to call it prose) I churned out a Clive Barker-inspired apocalypse tale a few years afterwards. Absolute garbage, but it filled up a lot of jotter-space. Jesus, I must have gotten through a christ-load of school jotters now that I think about it... | ||
| Allybird (Allybird) Username: Allybird Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 49.227.181.131 |
My first story was written when my mother was dying in a nursing home. The story was set there. My desperation led me to writing. | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 178.118.77.121 |
One of the more original stories penned in school during a tedious mass in chapel (yep, that kind of school) involved minuscule invaders stranded in a church and trying to rebuild the big cross above the altar into some kind of rescue spaceship. Of course they succeed, right after the priest has been urging the churchgoers to "look for a sign". The cross takes off spectacularly through the roof, leaving the congregation aghast. This story might have been influenced by Wyndham's "Meteor". At the time I was very much under the spell of the collections The Seeds of Time and Consider Her Ways. I can't have been much older than thirteen when I wrote this. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
The first story I wrote I was happy with I no longer have—all for the best, I'm sure. It was called "Domestic Problem." It involved a curmudgeonly old man who was trying to kill these pesky, persistent, unstoppable ants that had invaded his backyard. These three young kids came by, and taunted him in an ominous way, and he chased them off. Long story short (too late), he tracked the trail of ants back to its source: the corpse of a neighbor woman, who had fallen dead in her backyard some time back, and from every pore of which the ants were pouring like black streams. There was something about a finger being found, and the kids worshipping this decaying body as their evil idol. Um... why did I say I was happy with it again?... | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.253.77 |
I wish I could remember the first story I ever wrote. | ||
| Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey) Username: Ramsey Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 92.9.248.78 |
I remember loving The Seeds of Time, Hubert! | ||
| Thomasb (Thomasb) Username: Thomasb Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 75.25.141.120 |
The first story I ever attempted was a rewrite of the "House of Dracula" movie when I was around 8 or 9. I made the mistake of showing it to a resentful, very angry older brother who bellowed (and believe me he could bellow) that I was "stealing another man's story!!!" Continuing My Life in Crime, I wrote my first complete short story for the college paper in Oshkosh, WI: "Deus Ex Machina", a Pynchonesque-Beckettian thing about a guy trying to prevent a suicide, who then winds up joining the suicide:"Life is empty, let's all die while singing corny show tunes." Don't remember much about it beyond that. I would likely shrivel with embarrassment if I read it now. | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 178.118.77.121 |
A seminal collection, isn't it, Ramsey? "Survival" haunts me to this day. |