god from the machine

I actually wrote down my occupation as writer once. This was in 1995 on a questionnaire for my high school reunion. I was a van driver at the time.
I started wrote short stories for assignments in elementary school and began stories in notebooks through intermediate school. Around 8th or 9th grade I completed a short science fiction story. It was about nine pages on notebook paper and had two spacemen flying to a hostile star system and successfully rescuing a passenger spaceship. I took a lot of liberties to insure my guys got the spaceship safely away and deus ex machina for them to get away from the bad guys.
I started several more stories over the next couple of years. Then my friend Danny Wilson gave me an idea for a science fiction story. I wrote and rewrote this until I had a completed 67 handwritten page story.
Character development was threadbare. The story was predictable. And the ending relied on deus ex machina for escape from the bad guys again. But I was proud of it and my friends liked it.
I wrote more stuff in college. Some stuff better, but not completed. I wrote a lot of abysmal poetry that is safely all in a composition book hidden away.
I’ve written a children’s story and started lots and lots more things that sit idly by like animate objects in search of a simile.
I have another completed story now. I’ll write about that tomorrow.