I've been trying to tell stories since before I had any words to tell them with. When I was barely able to talk I drew countless picture books; wordless full-page crayon and colored pencil illustrations stapled together, depicting brave space heroes piloting their starfighters across the void, deep into enemy systems. All would seem lost until he gathered enough energy to fire his Super Weapon; the enemy ships would crash in flames whilst wailing "AAAAAAAAAA" and the hero would return to base, usually to receive a medal from such and such Princess or President, just like Luke Skywalker in Star Wars.
I wrote my first real story in the second grade, about a crew of cats whose spaceship was stranded on an inhospitable alien world. No single cat was strong enough to turn the ship's stuck ignition key on his own. Only by working together, by applying their combined strength on the key, could they escape Certain Doom.
One of the many other stories written around this same time involved The Rocketeer (spelled "Rockteer" in my uncertain five-year-old's handwriting) flying around, running out of rocket fuel, falling, then getting stuck in the chimney of a house that belonged to a stranger. He worked himself down and out through the fireplace. The punchline of the story was this: "The man said 'What? Christmas already?'"
In the fourth grade I wrote my own version of Robin Hood that ended at the archery contest. I couldn't remember what came after the titular hero winning the contest, so I had him wake up in his bed, resorting to the "it was all a dream!" ending. In my defense, I was only nine years old.
In the fifth grade I began an ambitious project to write a story that bridged the gap between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. I got probably twenty hand-written pages in when I discovered there was already a story that did that, called Shadows of the Empire. I read the published novel and ended up scrapping mine.
My next project involved a story about two boys who built a massive tree house then had to defend it from bullies. The story's title was The Tree Mansion, but the title of the Word Perfect file that contained it was "publish-hope.wpd."
With the triumph of The Tree Mansion I began writing almost constantly, beginning countless stories and finishing few. One that did get finished was titled The Jet, about a group of boys who designed and assembled a technologically impressive supersonic airplane, then used it to fight off bullies. The Jet eventually got a sequel, although I don't remember for the life of me what it was about.
Around the 6th and 7th grades I began writing stories about a boy scientist named RJ Thompson. The young Mr. Thompson had many adventures. At one point he built a rocket that traveled to Mars, collected some dirt, and returned to the Earth. The alien soil samples contained a hyper-virulent virus that quickly spread across RJ's home town of Fallon, Nevada, and it was up to him to stop the epidemic.
Another time RJ built a time machine, then used it to transport himself and his friend Linda several decades into the future, where the Earth had been decimated by a hostile alien species. RJ learned that he had, in this future's past (and his future), been some kind of resistance hero amongst Earth's defense forces, and it had been his inopportune death that resulted in the majority of Earth's population being wiped out. His return was hailed as if it were almost like the second coming of Christ, that it had been his plan all along to send a copy of himself along after his death. RJ battled with himself to become the hero that humanity needed him to be, that he apparently would have grown into. He eventually discovered the hero within him and defeated the alien invaders.
That story was titled The Time Machine, and was of no relation to the H.G. Wells classic; it was eight single-spaced pages long and illustrated with clumsy MSPAINT line art.
I didn't do much writing of that caliber throughout high school; every once in a while I'd get inspiration for something and try to write it, never getting more than a few pages.
In college I decided I wanted to write a story about zombies. This was before zombies were the incredible craze they are today, everyone still liked them then and no one was sick of them yet. My story starred RJ Thompson, Boy Scientist, as RJ Thompson, College Student Slacker. His friend Linda had become his girlfriend Linda, and she was addicted to drugs, although RJ didn't know. They were driving back from school one foggy evening and accidentally hit someone on the road. They pulled over and discovered that the man they struck was actually a zombie. I felt it was a decently strong first chapter, all things considered, and I knew what I wanted to do for chapter two. I would switch to Linda's point of view, and the reader would learn about her drug addiction and her other issues that she'd been hiding from RJ, in addition to the impending zombie apocalypse.
I wasn't sure what it was about that second chapter, but for some reason I just couldn't get it started. I'd write a half a page, hate it, and put it away for months. Then I'd come back and do the same thing. So the "RJ Thompson Versus Zombies" project got shelved.
My next idea for a decently sized story came from my girlfriend, who is now my wife. She suggested we each take the same idea and write a story about it, then we'd share our results. I found a random story idea generator on the internet and it resulted in something along the lines of "A traveler who befriends a cat on an ice world."
I imagined something that I still feel would make a pretty good fantasy epic: a world once lush with life and magic, somehow cursed and robbed of its power. The world became a barren, frozen wasteland, and the people forgot about their past. The only one who still knew was a legendary bard who traveled the land, telling stories and trying to keep the memories alive.
I imagined a novel about this storyteller presented as a series of short stories, poems, and novellas all arranged in a non-chronological order, as if the reader were in the storyteller's audience during once of his performances, there late at night in an inn somewhere, a single point of warmth nestled amongst the freezing wastelands. It even would have had narrative interludes describing the bard tuning his instrument or taking a break between sets while the tavern's other patrons discussed the stories they'd heard.
I carried a little notebook with "BARD'S STORY" written on the cover around with me for months, writing down any thoughts whenever they came to me. I never actually put the proverbial pen to paper to begin writing this work, and it eventually got forgotten as well.
I entered the professional world as an IT guy at a major regional hospital, and after some months I became a Systems Administrator. As a sysadmin I was busy beyond reason; the writer in me went dormant, and didn't do anything creative for several years.
One late evening I was working on a project involving the deployment of over a hundred clinical tablet computers to the nursing floors. I had written an incredibly complex script to do all the technical stuff needed to prepare the tablet for deployment, and the final step involved the person doing the deployment launching a program to name the tablet.
Due to the imaging process and the strange hardware I was at my desk working on this for well over eighteen hours. It was hellish. To curb my slow descent into madness I wrote a little story to accompany the naming script. Due to this being recent, I still have the story. Here is how it started:
You stand in a dark room, the smell of something damp wafts through your nostrils, and you are stricken with a chill that penetrates right to your bones. You shiver uncontrollably. The fear is palpable.
"Hello, mortal," you hear a whisper that seems to be emanating from directly behind you say. When you look with a start over your shoulder, you continue to see nothing but blackness. The disorienting darkness is suddenly pierced by a rectangular spot of brilliant light. Around its perimeter are symbols - symbols that, in some long lost life, you think you might have been able to read as a language.
"Panasonic CF-H1" says one.
"TOUGHBOOK" says the other.
The whisper comes again. "You wish to seize this glorious tablet's power as your own, do you?"
You try to speak, but your voice catches in your throat. You nod hesitantly.
"Good..." the voice, barely audible, says in your ear. "There are things that must be done first. You must appease the spirit of the Toughbook. Only then will you know its power."
It was a little story about the reader (the person setting up the tablet, model name Panasonic Toughbook CF-H1) conversing with a shadowy voice whose owner's intentions were unknown. In order to seize the machine's power the reader had to appease the spirit of the tablet, meaning he or she essentially had to type in the tablet's new name. Then the voice summoned a demon (the application that named the tablet) that did its bidding, the computer rebooted with the words "By command of the Oracle, the machine will sleep" and the script was done.
The script went into production use and I got a few comments from my colleagues; everyone claimed to either have not read it or to have read it and thought it was really funny.
I was glad some of them thought it was funny. That was the whole idea.
One guy was different, however. He praised the script, he said it was one of the most interesting and intriguing things he'd ever read. He said I should write a book.
The idea was astounding. On that day something changed fundamentally in my mind.
Later on, in Autumn of 2011, my wife decided she wanted to go back to school, to get her Bachelor's of the Arts in Fashion Design and Marketing, to follow her dream of working in the fashion industry. I decided around that time that I, too, would follow my dream. I began getting up every day at 6:00 AM and writing until I had to get ready for my day job.
In the time between then and now I've written and rewritten thousands of words worth of short stories, one of which was recently submitted for publishing at an online market. I've also produced over 300 pages worth of manuscript for my first novel.
My name is Eugene Tower, and I am a writer.
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