And a guilty pleasure genre from any of the three categories!
This will be short and sweet compared to my usual blogposts, since not a lot is required. And so, I shall list my four.
Movie: Science Fiction without a doubt
Star Wars: A New Hope made stories come to life and made it my dream to tell stories. And I’ve been hooked ever since. I love me some good escapism, frankly, and I love to imagine new and different worlds, places, and people. It’s why I love travel so much.
Music: Tough call, I’d say 80s pop/rock
I am an 80s kid, and Time/Life’s Sound Of The 80s is like a scrapbook of memories. I just love the stuff. And I think I was lucky to grow up in such a rich musical era.
Books: Science Fiction & Fantasy again with thrillers a close second
My reading tastes are diverse but SFF are certainly my first love. Luckily, there’s a lot of diversity within them and by hosting SFFWRTCHT and interviewing authors, I wind up reading many I might not have discovered on my own. Lately, even YA and Paranormal Romance have entered the mix. Guess I should do more horror but I’ve had a couple of those too.
Guilty Pleasure: Tough call because I have to admit it publicly…so here goes… Journey. I can’t get enough of it. I could air guitar to it until the sun goes down and rises again. Okay, not that embarrassing or uncommon, but alas, it’s true. I even love the Glee versions to sing along with.
So, there you have my Genre Guilty Pleasures. What are yours?
Bryan Thomas Schmidt is the author of the space opera novels The Worker Prince, a Barnes & Noble Book Clubs Year’s Best SF Releases of 2011 Honorable Mention, andThe Returning, the collection The North Star Serial, Part 1, and several short stories featured in anthologies and magazines. He edited the anthology Space Battles: Full Throttle Space Tales #6 for Flying Pen Press, headlined by Mike Resnick. A freelance editor, he’s edited novels and nonfiction and also hosts Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s Chatevery Wednesday at 9 pm EST on Twitter under the hashtag #sffwrtcht. A frequent contributor to Adventures In SF Publishing, Grasping For The Wind and SFSignal, he can be found online as @BryanThomasS on Twitter or via his website. Bryan is an affiliate member of the SFWA.
This post is part of the Origins Challenge Blog Series. Almost 200 blogs participating. Click here for the list. So the challenge is to blog about how we got started writing. This is an ironic date because writing about the origins of my writing on February 13th means I’m writing about origins on the day of my origin. Yes, February 13 is my birthday, so how’s that for interesting parallels?
I got started writing through play really. My mother says I never played with a toy the same way twice. I would get mad when the toys couldn’t do all the awesome things I imagined them doing in my mind. I’d get bored and move on.
On the playground at school, I organized elaborate make believe scenarios with my friends, from firefighters fighting fires to astronauts. I’d take charge and lay out the storyline and direct the actors. Amazingly they came back to bossy me for more.
In third grade, my friend Chris Marshall and I wrote our own stories for The Littles series of books about little mouse-like people living inside a human family’s house. We wrote book after book of them, so, as best I can remember, this was my official start to writing.
However, at the same time, I wrote my first song in kindergarten around the time I started piano lessons. So I’d been doing lyric writing and such for a while by the time Chris and I wrote those books. Which counts as the first? Chicken or egg, my friends.
Over time, my active imagination continued and I’d make up stories. My 3rd grade friend, Chris Marshall, and I got hooked on John Peterson and Roberta Carter Clark’s Littles children’s books and started writing our own sequels. That was my first dreams of being a professional writer and yes, despite my stand on fanfic, I did start there like so many.
As I watched TV shows, I’d make up stories and scripts for them: Emergency, Hill Street Blues, Miami Vice, L.A.Law, Life Goes On… This eventually led to spec scripts and film school, where I actually pursued a TV career. My most successful were scripts for L.A. Law and The Wonder Years.
The idea for my debut novel, The Worker Prince, came to me in high school while I wrote all those TV ideas. I even created my own TV show and wrote the first 13 scripts plus pilot for that and plotted out episodes for two whole seasons.
In college and grad school, I wrote three nonfiction books which never went anywhere, but then my devotionals started getting used a lot and I sold some of those. Eventually, I tried prose and The Worker Prince was the second novel I finished. So here I am. That’s the story of my origins as a writer.
I’m 43. This year will see publication of the second and third anthologies to feature short stories by me, one of which I edited, my second and third novels, and the first print magazine to feature one of my stories. So far the journey’s going well.
What’s yours?
Bryan Thomas Schmidt is the author of the space opera novelThe Worker Prince, a Barnes & Noble Best SF Releases of 2011 Honorable Mention, the collection The North Star Serial, Part 1, and has several short stories forthcoming in anthologies and magazines. His second novel, The Returning, is forthcoming from Diminished Media Group in 2012. He’s also the host of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s Chatevery Wednesday at 9 pm EST on Twitter, where he interviews people like Mike Resnick, AC Crispin, Kevin J. Anderson and Kristine Kathryn Rusch. A frequent contributor to Adventures In SF Publishing, Grasping For The Wind and SF Signal, he can be found online as @BryanThomasS on Twitter or via his website. Excerpts from The Worker Prince can be found on his blog. Bryan is an affiliate member of the SFWA.
Genre Favorites Blogfest, September 17, 2012
Bryan Thomas Schmidt is the author of the space opera novels The Worker Prince, a Barnes & Noble Book Clubs Year’s Best SF Releases of 2011 Honorable Mention, andThe Returning, the collection The North Star Serial, Part 1, and several short stories featured in anthologies and magazines. He edited the anthology Space Battles: Full Throttle Space Tales #6 for Flying Pen Press, headlined by Mike Resnick. A freelance editor, he’s edited novels and nonfiction and also hosts Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s Chat every Wednesday at 9 pm EST on Twitter under the hashtag #sffwrtcht. A frequent contributor to Adventures In SF Publishing, Grasping For The Wind and SFSignal, he can be found online as @BryanThomasS on Twitter or via his website. Bryan is an affiliate member of the SFWA.
