A Historic Outing (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780997977905)

One day, in a creative writing class in an Idaho middle school, a project was assigned: to write a short story of around five hundred words. One young student turned in an unfinished work, a science fiction tale - that was over twice as long as the assignment required. For this he got full credit, which he thought was pretty cool. Later in the same class, a second short story was required. The student promptly turned in exactly the same story a second time - now over four times as long as the assignment required. And once again he got full credit. And thus did Bill Egbert get a taste for the writing of fiction.

The young Bill Egbert finished that novella off at 20000 words and continued writing, promptly beginning work on a sequel - which included time travel, magic, robots, psychics, elves, ghosts, a retired space marine - it wasn't *entirely* incoherent, but it certainly wasn't restrained in its subject matter and didn't care one whit for genre limitations. Bill worked on this story all through high school, eventually completing it at 180000 words: a full-sized novel, and that's not even counting the uncompleted side stories, all set in the same sprawling universe. All in all the recreational writing of fiction was a large part of the teenage Bill's life, along with his other hobbies of playing computer games, dabbling in computer programming, and voraciously reading fiction.

Then Bill grew up and went to college. College is a busy time, but he tried to keep writing - the same characters, but a new story. Because he'd come to realize that his teenage writings needed work. A lot of it. The characters were good (though overpowered), but the plots were garbage. And so began many, many false starts, all eventually abandoned due to plot problems or other flaws. Until the pressures of school became too much and he put it all aside.

After college Bill became a computer programmer, and though he was doing pretty well for himself at it, never forgot his fond memories of the characters he'd written in his teenage years. And so he decided to try yet again, to come up with a story for them that actually worked. And after some years of work, he succeeded! Or at least he thinks he did: A Historic Outing became the first book to resurrect his old characters in a new story. But he wasn't done, he had more crazy teen-made characters to revisit, to somehow fix up and make to fit into coherent, well-written stories. And so he continues to write...