| I'm
a storyteller. The first time I experienced the power of creating story,
I was in third grade, about eight years old, and enjoyed telling stories
to the other children in my neighborhood. I set the stories right there,
in our gloomy, sooty, steel-factory-town neighborhood, inventing a
brilliant world of fairies that came to life every night in our drab
back yards.
But my budding career as
a bard was cut short when the parents of the kids I told the tales to
complained to my parents: the other children believed my stories, and
were sneaking out at night, seeking to enter the world I had invented!
For a long time
thereafter I kept my stories to myself, filling notebooks with the tales
of my heart. About the time I was in junior high school, I learned that
it was possible for actual people like me to sell stories to magazines
and book publishers--and I began a long stint of collecting rejection
slips. I was writing from my heart, all right, but I didn't know there
were rules for storytelling beyond a beginning, a middle, and an end. I
just poured my ideas onto paper.
In college I found Star
Trek fandom, where the fannish stories I wrote were loved by uncritical
fans, but attracted the attention of professional writers. Marion Zimmer
Bradley and Jacqueline Lichtenberg became my mentors. They taught me how
to structure my stories--and I began to be published.
In the 1980's I sold
everything I wrote, and four of my books made the New York Times
best-seller list. But...during the 1990's, along with thousands of other
professional writers, I went from best-selling author to unpublishable,
due to corporate takeovers.
If you think Hollywood is
run by bean-counters, try publishing. The difference between the two
industries is that independent publishing is struggling and dying, while
not only the indie film industry is thriving, but so are webcasts,
podcasts, direct to DVD movies, and a constantly increasing number of
cable and satellite channels, all hungry for material.
Tired of feeling
strangled, unable to make our voices heard, my writing partners and I
decided to learn a new means of telling our stories: screenwriting. We
are not fools; we have spent three years taking screenwriting lessons,
writing scripts, and having those scripts vetted by professionals.
Finally, we have begun the long, hard process of marketing our scripts.
As of January, 2008, Lois
Wickstrom and I have four completed and vetted scripts ready to go. We
are seeking representation, and pitching our scripts everywhere we can.
We're determined to make it in a difficult profession--and we will,
because we made it in an equally difficult profession before.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
and I are also working on a script together, a Sime~Gen movie, but that
work is going slowly because of everything else we both have to do.
But I have no intention
of giving up storytelling--and to be a real storyteller I need an
audience. Watch this page and my Latest
News page for developments.
|
When
I was about three years old I discovered two winged creatures who
sometimes visited my back yard. When I told my mom about them, she
freaked. She consulted child experts who told her "imaginary
playmates are normal." I had no idea why she couldn’t see them.
And I was sure that I did not imagine them.
My family moved to a new
home when I was 8. My winged playmates told me that their home was in
the apple tree in my yard. They did not move with my family. The big
lesson they taught me was that my reality was not the same as everybody
else’s. They gave me the courage to indulge my daydreams, because they too were things only I could see. And wonder-of-wonders I could
manipulate my daydreams.
After that, I never
minded being sent to my room. I only resented the spanking that sent me
there. As far as I was concerned, I never deserved those spankings. I
didn’t break rules. I didn’t sneak around. All I did was manage to
upset my father by saying things he didn’t want to hear. I had no idea
what would upset him until he yelled, and then it was too late.
Time alone with my
imagination was the best present anybody could give me – even if it
was meant as a punishment. But because I was being punished unjustly,
the theme of justice and intention appears repeatedly in my stories. And
in my stories, misunderstandings are corrected, truth and justice
triumph - but not until after the protagonist has been on a wild ride in
which the outcome was uncertain.
The stories that pop into
my brain excite me, enthrall me, tantalize me. I have an uncontrollable
urge to share anything that I’m enthusiastic about. I’ve been
writing my stories down since age 9. My family’s move away from my
winged playmates showed me that my worlds don’t last forever. I can
never revisit the back yard of my childhood. But I can revisit any of my
imaginary worlds if I remember to write them down.
A few years ago, I felt
that the kinds of stories I love weren’t being published. I began my
own magazine, Pandora. The motto was "If Pandora hadn’t been
curious, there would be nothing to write about." Jean Lorrah sent
me a story that was exactly the sort of story I love. Then she bought
copies of all my back issues and sent me critiques of the stories in
previous issues. I immediately asked her to be my assistant editor and
then quickly promoted her to co-editor.
Since then we have
actually met each other, taken trips to look for the Loch Ness Monster
together, written award-winning books together, and learned to write
screenplays together. We share the passion of telling the world our
stories, sharing our imaginations first with each other and then with
our growing audience. |
