ablestmage

Former newspaper journalist who studies descriptive linguistics and Judeochristian canon. Writes short stories of a wide variety from sword-sorcery fantasy, modern age people discovering their super powers, fan fics, "twisty" fiction that takes unexpected directions.

I've got maybe 20+ so far, mostly written from back in my 20s during a particularly good frenzy of story-cranking, but I think I've still got several still jumbling around upstairs to hammer out sometime =) 

I plan to post about one per week, if memory serves. Most of them are not edited with a fine-tooth comb yet, and I thought I would start out with my strongest offering of Tiny Elephants which easily in my top five of the collection. In elementary school, we were tasked with and greatly assisted with the project of writing and illustrating our own story books, and Max the Scientist was the first.

In junior high (c.1991) I wrote a 60-something page (handwritten, before we had a home computer) fan-fic about Final Fantasy for the NES titled True Warriors and encompassing the entire main story.

In high school (c.1994) I wrote a 117-page (also handwritten) unfinished vampire novella fan-fic about a older vampire's pursuit of an ever-elusive ideal woman to partake from, who turned out to have been recruited by the succubi (rivals of vampires in his universe) before he nervously dared to make his move despite having utmost confidence with all other partaken. I had become so obssessed with the story that I decided that it had taken over my life too much that I burned it and buried it in a backyard vegetable garden. 

For about the last 20 years I've been working on a full-length novel that I have broken down into individual scene structure, but have started and restarted easily a dozen times and just can't make it very far in before I think of something "ooh that would make a better plot device" and have to go change it and restart.  I have reasoned to myself that I could technically write each scene in any order since I have such a detailed breakdown, but re-reading the beginnings is, to me, so exciting of a world that I love, that I can scarcely tear myself away to write any others, but keep getting bogged down. Perhaps I'll may post several of the false-starts here. I am tempted to just find an agent who might be able to find a ghost writer that could craft it for me, because truly, my passion is the short story. I thought even of making them a series of episodic short stories, which is still a promising propspect.

I did turn one of the false starts (the most recent one) into a YouTube video called Lotte Engelshali (which turned the main character into female, an idea I would not be entirely opposed to, since I do love a strong female lead in general), as an attempt to bring stories in text to video form via subtitle-like timing that I called Subtales, but each episode was so much work that it fell to the wayside. 

I have since come up with several other novel-length concepts including a newer vampire character with a deep Judeochristian angle and a highly controversial worldview (aside from the vampire persona) who is a healer and has the ability to influence world politics, but that's only half the story.

Another is a person who is pulled from the rubble of Aleppo airstrikes in Syria who can't speak, but others around him can hear his responses in the form of a whisper in their mind's ear, saying things like, "he says that you should look to the west" as if the narrator is interpreting for him, and has an uncanny knack for locating innocents under crumbled structures toppled by wartime blasts. It is a kind of fantasy-twist fan-fic of the Netflix series White Helmets..