Dylan's Writing Stuff

Getting a Good Start When writing a short story, the hardest part is usually starting off. Many authors do well once they put the pen to the paper, but getting started can be hard. A good example of this in one of my works in progress, Colony Patrol. When I started writing this, I set it on a fictional location so I didn't have to worry about having to research to accurately portray a place. I decided to set it on Vestus 7, a planet in deep space, and have it take place at one of the colonies there. It follows Sergeant Allen Hayes, a member of Colony Security colloquial known as C-Sec, assigned to patrol and enforcement at Habitat 6, one of several urban areas in the original colony, Foundation. It follows him as he and a senior officer respond to a riot nearby Clara Barton Hospital. When they get there, they discover that the riots are actually caused by a virus that was being transported on the cargo freighter Arcos , that crashed just outside of Habitat 6. It will follow ...

I recently looked over some stuff I had written a few years ago. It was called Earth War, and I had planned to make it the first in a trilogy, Conflict: Earth was the working title for the series. It was to follow the perspective of two individual characters and one group. The two individuals were Sergeant John Armstrong of the New York National Guard and Lieutenant John Aron of the New York Air National Guard. The group were patrol officers Andy Harris and Michael Warren of the New York Police Department. Each party’s actions would affect each other and drive the story along. Even if it didn’t seem like it, eventually all the threads would be revealed. I thought it was an interesting concept, and I got pretty far, all things considered. I even wrote supplementary material to flesh out latter parts of the trilogy. I decided to look back on them, to see what I needed to change, and would I could let be. To say reading through made me cringe would be an understatement. It was terribl...