I shared earlier that my mom had cultivated in me an interest in creative self-investment. Little did I know at the time just now rapidly this would proliferate, or where it would ultimately lead.
The combination of creating things, my voracious appetite for books and my insatiable curiosity pushed me in a new direction: I started to experience ideas coming from within, and felt the urge to write them down. Still a pre-teen, I was becoming a writer.
I began to wonder if the things I was reading in Asimov and Ellison were possible. Could a robot truly pass for a man? Is it possible to build a computer that wipes out humanity? To communicate telepathically with a dog? To predict the future?
I started coming up with my own what-ifs and questions surrounding them. Writing them long-hand in a notebook, I filled page after page after page. Noticing this, my parents gave me a manual typewriter on Christmas, 1974.
And the following spring, my 8th-grade English teacher announced to the class that she was accepting original stories for an award given every year, the Florence Schultz Memorial Award. I didn’t need to be told twice; I started a story that very day, while still in school.
Suppose, I wondered, that there was a power source up on the moon, abandoned because we decided to have a war back on Earth; suppose, I wondered, that an artificial intelligence had been left behind on the moon to look after this power source; suppose, I wondered, that over time, the AI went crazy...
That night, I struggled to finish my long-hand draft of the story, before typing it up. I was sitting on the steps leading up to my bedroom, rather than in the bedroom itself. Mom noticed me and sat down beside me on the steps, asking what I was doing.
I was a bit hesitant, but I was kind of trapped there, so I handed the story to her and explained about the contest and award. She quickly read through the story, then shifted into Project mode, asking me a few clarifying questions. She accepted the premise of the story without blinking, which astonished me; I’m confident she’s never read a shred of science fiction in her life.34 She immediately understood what I was shooting for, and made several useful suggestions that helped me improve the story’s tone and flow – especially the ending, which I intended as a shock.
I won the Florence Schultz Memorial Award. It’s upstairs on the wall in my music room.
And if I could do that...
Alongside Trek and Heinlein and Asimov and the New Wavers, I was taken with a paperback series imported by Ace Books from Germany – the Perry Rhodan novels. Shepherded in the US by sci-fi superfan Forrest J. Ackerman, the series doled out the adventures of Major Perry Rhodan of the US Space Force (I kid you not), who discovers a marooned alien ship on the moon and proceeds to exploit its technology to unite Earth and carve out a niche for humanity out in the universe.
The thing is, these books were based on stories in a German magazine35, and were novellas at best; Ackerman needed to pad the books out to get the page count up to what Ace Books expected in a paperback. So Ackerman solicited original fiction from Perry’s fans.
I answered the call. I wrote a short short – a story of less than 1,000 words – called “If Man Were Meant to Fly”, and I sent it to Forry Ackerman. Mom didn’t have to sit down next to me this time; I sought her out and ran the story past her, and together we did an edit to improve it.
I was 14 when I wrote the story. I was 15 when Ackerman accepted it; I received his letter in a red envelope, that said on the front, “A Red Letter Day for” just above my name and address. He changed the title of the story to “Wings of Immortality”. I didn’t care.
I was 16 when it was finally published in Perry Rhodan #102, Spoor of the Antis.36 I showed it to Mr. Schenk, who read it to my sophomore AP English class. By way of congratulations, he arranged for a special award to be presented to me on Awards Day at the end of the year, two years after I’d received the other award in Indiana.
With Mom’s support, I’d done the near-impossible. Published at 14. I was off and running, and of course my life would never be the same. My muse was calling...
...calling me further and further away from home.
[Postscript: Thirty years later, I was strolling the very Bohemian Bardstown Road in Louisville with Mary, and we happened upon a used bookstore. Neither of us could ever resist a bookstore, so we walked in and browsed. There was a sci-fi paperback section, and I struck gold: Perry Rhodan paperbacks!!! And not one, not two, but three copies of #102, with my story. In one of the proudest moments of my life as a writer, I called Mary over and showed her my first-ever published story. I bought all three copies.]
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