Here are some selected stories and poems from my scrapbook, which unfortunately contains only a very small subset of the many odd or outright bizarre stories I wrote during my childhood and high school years; much of that other work is lost forever. Luckily, I had enough foresight as a kid to save some of my work, and here are a few of my favorite pieces.

Alfredo's Lost Cause

A rather grim and (as its title suggests) pointless narrative, written for an assignment in a high school creative writing class. The first paragraph had been provided by the teacher; the task was to evolve a story from it.

Metallium III

A logbook-style account of an emergency landing on a strange planet infested with mechanical creatures. I'm not sure exactly when I wrote this story, or whether I did it for fun or for an assignment. Could Metallium III be planet Earth, in a distant future where machines have outbid fleshy creatures in the game of evolution?

Eartians

A very short story I clacked out on my old manual Smith Corona typewriter on a cold winter night in Idaho. I went through a lot of ribbons on that typewriter; I wonder if my parents still have that ugly thing.

Five Thousand Forty

A story that is (intentionally) replete with contradictions; written for a creative writing assignment in the 8th grade. It takes place in the year 5040, in a world when everybody will presumably use big words and sound intellectual and robotic.

The Old Man Speaks of Wars

Another morbid, post-apocalyptic vision of an invasion on a planetary scale. This poem was a spinoff of a much more ambitious project that never materialized: a novel that explored humankind's destructive, expansionist, anthropocentric tendencies. Once we develop a method of interstellar travel and discover habitable planets in our vicinity, will we perpetuate our corrupt morality by trampling all over the indigenous species in our endless quest to expand and multiply, as we've been doing on Earth?

Time Warps, Showers, and Washing Machines

On a lighter side, here is one of a short series of articles that I wrote for my high school's newspaper. It explores the possibility of time travel (a topic of endless fascination for me) using common household appliances.

A Narrative of Kat

Sometimes it's fun to switch perspective and look at things from a slightly different angle. Here's a little piece about the world as seen through the intelligent eyes of the cat.

I may eventually publish more of my scrapbook online. And of course, although I have taken a very lengthy respite from pursuing my interests in writing fiction, I'm by no means done for good. I've got plenty of ideas that will eventually end up on paper.