I'm a programmer by day so, technically, I'm already a professional writer. Writing for entertainment, of course, is very different.
As an introduction to story writing, I choose the screen play format for my first big story, Second Contact. Like programing, screen plays are rather structured so I was able to concentrate on story details rather than figuring out how to write in an entertaining style. Screen plays should also be entertaining to read, but this was an intermediate step for me. I'd be nice to see someone play Quita on the big screen. If I do develop a talent for story telling, I'll try to rewrite the screen play to give Quita her shot at Hollywood fame :)
I'm now working on converting Second Contact to a novel format.
Story details
The premise of my story is Love Develops Courage. It's about A Shy, risk adverse young man who meets a stranded alien and develops the courage to protect her. I'm trying to keep it scientifically plausible and only break one law of physics (faster than light travel) and one law of probability.
Tom is a geek. He loves science and technology, reads a lot, but is also rather shy. Tom doesn't have a girl friend. Quita is a young 'woman', who, along with four of her friends, decides to visit the solar system to checkout the rings of Saturn. Many large planets, and sometimes small ones as well, have rings, but Saturn's are quite spectacular.
Quita's vacation is cut short, however, soon after she arrives in the solar system. A meteorite pierces her ship and they must quickly hop over to Earth for repairs. Their species' first contact with humans several centuries ago, went rather poorly. They were impressed at how similar humans look liked them, but we were much too violent. The medieval peasants they meet weren't impressed either (and that's why mythical demons look the way they do).
Their ship was more badly damaged than they had hoped and broke up soon before they would have landed. Only Quita managed to escape and soon met Tom. She was quite concerned about being stranded on a planet full of hostile people with no hope of going home. She got along with Tom okay, though. He, of course, was quite excited to have an exotic, alien friend, but her request for him to hide her caused quite a bit of tension. Just how does one hide an alien after her space ship crashes into a nearby hill and causes far too much attention?
