Blast From the Past: Looking Back at My First Novel Attempt

How do you make the Death Star even cooler and more evil? Simple, according to 11-year-old me. Make it destroy solar systems instead of planets. Oh, then make it horseshoe shaped and have it dramatically stretch out like its doing space calisthenics, then clamp together again with a very satisfying snapping noise when it fires. Call it the Snapper Zapper. Long before Tanin Stormrush ever came into being, even before I birthed other unpublished titles I’ve mentioned on this blog such as “The Legend of Griffinlar” as ideas, I made my first foray into long fiction. My first novel, written longhand in a spiral notebook, was pretty epic. Also, it may have been (definitely was) a slight (total) Star Wars ripoff. Hey, everybody does one at some point, right? This wasn’t just the movie of Star Wars, though. By this time I’d started listening to the audiobooks of the Rogue Squadron novels from my library, so there was quite the influence there as well. No Luke Skywalker in this version. While Jedi-like characters existed in this universe, my main hero was a rakish Han Solo-esque star captain whose best friend was a robot that loved hockey. He had another best friend who was a blonde alien that loved collecting alien seeds. There was also another best friend who thought sports were dumb but loved shooting stuff. All the makings of a great space crew, right? Plus, our story opened on our heroes touring a galactic zoo and crossing paths with an alien menace that had escaped from its pen. The creature resembled a giant sports water bottle the size of Godzilla. Defeating it and placing it back in its pen required shooting lasers down its throat to give it a tummy ache. The bumbling zoo curator was, for some reason, perfectly okay with this thing escaping and threatening the safety of the zoo visitors every few days because, hey, there’s always a guy with a laser nearby to subdue it. Why haven’t I shared any of this clearly amazing a fantastical space adventure with you? Well, maybe because none of the manuscript for it exists any longer. I had a rather unfortunate habit back in those days of deleting pieces of writing and starting over or starting something new. Now, I think it would be fun to go back and reread some of these old masterpieces, so I can giggle at my younger self. I can’t recall for the life of me the title of that story, but sometimes I like to think back on it fondly. What goofy projects from your youth do you like to think back on?