Moyamedia :: Writing Portfolio

Fitting In
Everybody has to write a screenplay sometime. This is mine. The main character and salient plot points actually began life as most of my stories do, about a girl I thought I was in love with, but when my chances with her died, so did the story. When I had some distance, I realized I had a decent story and revived it for a college screen writing class.

Ace of Diamonds
My first experience with a college-level creative writing class was a good one -- even though the course was mostly filled with people who wanted an easy elective to graduate, the instructor knew what she was talking about and gave strong, constructive feedback on my far-fetched tale of espionage. It wasn't until I was done with the course that I realized this was the story I'd actually wanted to write.

Truth or Dare
One of the nuisances about being an author is that your significant other will eventually ask when you're going to write a story about her. I was in creative writing classes not long after I started dating Sed, so I started this story as an assignment for the course. When my instructor commented on how I didn't seem to have much invested in it, I gave up, but revived it for a Valentine's Day gift the following year. Judging by the reaction I got, I didn't malign her too badly.

PK
I suppose this could qualify as a short-short story ... it's really just a brief moment in time jotted down when I wasn't able to actually perform the actions described. This has the dubious distinction of making almost every girl who's read it cry. But at least it's short.

Venus
If an artist is judged by the bulk of his work, I'm a romance writer. I've done a few espionage, mystery and sports stories, and even a dash of fantasy here and there, but this story was the first of what has been a basically unending run of romances. Even my sports stories have an important romance element. This is the most revised of all my stories -- I've rewritten it three or four times so far.

Offsides
As a middle-school student with a new-found infatuation for hockey, I dreamed of becoming an NHL star. Of course, as a kid in the desert with working-class parents, I never made it past the pining stages of playing competitively. When I broke my knee in-line skating some years later, the fantasy was cemented as just that -- but I figured at least I could still let others live vicariously in my dream.

2 Lamentations: The Fall of Albuquerque
My college Bible As Literature instructor gave us our choice of topics for a paper, and one of them was rewriting the Book of Lamentations, which describes the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians. I couldn't resist telling the demise of my own home city, in my own trademark tongue-in-cheek way. The paper got an A, which should be some consolation while I'm burning in Hell.

Living in Miragia
The tenet is "write what you know," and the summer I wrote this one was full of crazy dreams that all related to this one girl I was thinking about a lot. My goal with the story was twofold: to successfully integrate fantastic dream sequences into narrative, and to get the madness out of my head at nights.

Change of Heart
The only reason this one's up is because it was my first story told from a female perspective. Otherwise, nothing new here, really.

The Wicked Dragon
Notable for its short turnaround time, this story only took three days to get from my head to this product. It's fun, wacky and random, partly by intent but mostly as a side effect of being slapdash.

Whodunit Detective Agency #2
In elementary school, purely by accident I happened upon a series called The Protectors, by Zachary Blue. It was totally trying to ride the resurgent wave of young adult detective/spy novels created by new Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew stories coming out at the time -- and I loved it. Most of my early efforts to shoot the literary curl, therefore, followed the formula of four or five kids picked by an agency to protect the sanctity of American life. This one is my favorite -- unlike the others ,it doesn't try to think quite so big, and thereby is more successful at telling the tale.

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