On Any Weir & Creative Writing

So this past week I discovered Andy Weir exists. I know, where have I been? I devoured his debut novel "The Martian" after seeing the preview for the upcoming Matt Damon movie based on it. It is a pretty nerdy book. I would put it right up there with Arthur C. Clarke as more science than fiction. Anyway, in the internet age one can learn quite a lot about people. Andy Weir's rise to bestselling author is a fabulous tale. I'll start by showing you his website. Seriously. Go look at it. I'll wait.

Readers of this blog may notice a certain Spartan similarity of design. Andy Weir, like yours truly, also worked in a national lab where he no doubt encountered HTML being used as it was originally intended by the physicists who invented it. He is a few years older than I am. Although he never finished college, his dad was a physicist. He ended up a computer programmer, writing in his spare time. He originally wrote "The Martian" as a serial on his website. People found it and started asking him to make a Kindle version so they could read it more easily. Weir obliged and it became a best seller. At 99 cents. Then he was approached by a publisher and a film company. He ended up closing deals with both for "The Martian" the same week!

I too am a sometimes writer of fiction. I have started novels . . . but I have never finished one. So they remain unread, which is silly. So I too now have a creative writing page. To start with I put links to a few short stories which have appeared in this blog. Then I tried reworking Weir's short story The Egg, but mostly I just broke it. But I have bigger plans...

Back in 2003 when the twins were little we went on a trip to Disney World. To get them to fall asleep at night I told them stories about two dogs, Snorri & Rupret, who saved a little orphan named Ana. Their adventures would became favorites. A few years ago I tried to sit down and write up some of those stories into book form during the 2012 NaNoWriMo. I got a few rough chapters in and planned out the arc of the story in the first book, but time constraints squeezed it out of my schedule and I never got back to it.

I've posted the first bits of Snorri & Rupret. If you like it, subscribe above to hear about when I post more. I'll send you an email whenever I post some new writing. We'll see how often that is. Being a work in progress I also reserve the right to go back and change prior chapters as needed.