Keith P. Graham's Stories
As a Child...
I have been writing stories for most of my life. My first story was Gungar, way back in elementary school. Gungar was a large transparent monster created by an evil scientist who ran the creature from a control panel in the head. Gungar was about 50 feet high. I was 10 or 11 when I started writing Gungar. I used stop action photography to create the scene where the evil scientist gets the huge heart to beat. The 8MM film still exists and I'd like to send it out to convert it to DVD. Larry has been unable to find it.
About the same time, I wrote most of a story called "The Blight Stricken" about a scientist who enhances his body with plant genes so that his body can use photosynthesis to make energy instead of eating. This makes him susceptible to plant diseases and he gets a "blight" which turns him into a moldy black monster who must be burned so that the new disease does not infect humans.
I wrote a dozen or so SF and Fantasy stories in High School. They are in a box somewhere in the attic, but I can't find the box. I wrote several longer stories in spiral notebooks. They were ideas about atmospheric moods and did not have endings. The first long story that I finished was an H.P. Lovecraft style story that is about 120 handwritten pages of a spiral notebook. It has a bad ending (I wrote until I ran out of ideas and it did not end well, although the middle is pretty good). I will try to transcribe it someday, although mediocre Lovecraft stuff is damn hard to sell.
Real Stories, the first 30 years
I wrote a story in college, and typed it up in my apartment at East 11th street in NY's Alphabet City. I mailed it in to Ed Ferman at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. A few weeks later I got it back with a form rejection. The name of the story was West Coast Tentacles and it was just a joke, really, only about 1,000 words. Clearly I was not ready for prime time and gave up writing. My idea of becoming a writer like Ray Bradbury was mostly scorned by my friends and family.
I wrote a fan fiction story about a TV show from the 80's, that I enjoyed. It was like the first chapter to a novel and I wanted to finish the novel, but I knew that I did not own the rights to the characters and I would never be able to sell it. It was fun, though.
In the late 1980s, I had many ideas for stories, some of which I eventually wrote. I was not yet in the habit of writing my ideas down in a list, so many of these ideas are lost. I have no doubt that some, at least, would have made good stories. Around 1987 I read Neuromancer by Gibson and it changed my life. I went on to read other Cyberpunk writers and I decided that I had found my calling. I wrote a story around 1989. It was about 6,000 words long and I had it on backup CDs for several years and then it was lost in a disk crash. I was pissed. I don't remember the name, but it involved Virtual Reality, and it was not very good. At the same time I wrote a story about a Psychologist that uses Virtual Reality to communicate with a catatonic patient. A friend used the same premise (with my permission) and wrote a story with a completely different approach. He submitted the story several times and was informed by editors that cyberspace stories were already passé. This story was lost also about the time that I left IBM. The only story that have from this time is a short joke story called The Hand of Zorgo. I found this on a backup disk five years later, cleaned it up and sold it.
2003 - I sell a story
After I left IBM, I spent a year commuting to Wall Street in a very intense job. I worked from 9 to 5 coding with very little self actualization. It took two hours to get to work and two hours to get home. When the project ended, I took a more local job that was the exact opposite. I was given very simple projects with too much time to do them. I found that I could spend a couple of hours a week writing, so I did.
The first dozen stories that I wrote were ideas that I had been kicking around. I would think of stories while watching TV or commuting, but I never wrote them down. I had some ideas, but I will never know how many good ideas that I have forgotten. Always write down a story idea as soon as you can, or you will regret it.
I had some fun and plublished a couple of flash stories in the contest at AnotheRealm.
The first story that I wrote was "Flare Bound" about a family on a space station that must huddle together in the dark without TV, or video games or phone. The family has to tell stories and become reacquainted as the a solar flare rages. This is an idea based on the poem Snowbound by John Greenleaf Whittier. It was the first story that based on a Whittier Poem, the other being The Telling based on Telling the Bees.
I wrote another story based on the fairytale, The Elves and the Shoemaker. It is a story about magic that I wrote once as the story of a medieval stained glass artist and then rewrote as the story of an Appalachian Pottery Maker and his daughter. I called it as The Perfect Gold. Structurally, both of these stories are awkward, but both of them work well enough and they sold after a few tries.
After selling a story, I was hooked and I eventually published about 40 stories.
Here is the publication list.
| Pigs are People, Too | 7/1/2003 | AnotheRealm Flash |
| A Place to Hide | 8/1/2003 | AnotheRealm Flash |
| Flare Bound | 11/1/2003 | Martian Wave |
| Through the Stone Gate | 1/16/2004 | High Fantasy |
| Perfect Gold | 2/3/2004 | Atsoise |
| The Break Out (Everything but the Oink) | 2/26/2004 | High Adventure Online |
| Scarce Words | 3/15/2004 | Aoife's Kiss |
| Le Choix Des Armes | 3/24/2004 | Amazing Heroes |
| Random Seed | 3/25/2004 | Aoife's Kiss |
| The Thing in the Doghouse | 5/4/2004 | Fifth Di... |
| The Third Law | 7/7/2004 | PlanetMag.com |
| The Field of the Beasts | 8/18/2004 | Atsoise |
| Frogs in Aspic | 9/1/2004 | Kidvisions |
| Please Wash Your Hands | 10/7/2004 | AnotheRealm Flash |
| Striking Pay Dirt | 10/20/2004 | Adventure Fiction Online |
| The Last Big Herd | 12/8/2004 | Hadrosaur tales |
| The Hand of Zorgo | 12/8/2004 | Aoife's Kiss |
| Gremlins Over Normandy | 12/27/2004 | The Harrow |
| Elements of Surprise | 6/1/2005 | Cybertales |
| Well Met in Scarce | 8/1/2005 | Amazing Heroes III |
| Feed The Cat | 10/1/2005 | Christmas Cats Anthology |
| Familiar Christmas | 10/1/2005 | Christmas Cats Anthology |
| God in a Bottle (Fate in a Box) | 11/9/2005 | Fifth Di... |
| Note to Self | 1/5/2006 | Static Movement |
| Losing Touch | 1/31/2006 | Astounding Tales |
| Grow Fins | 2/14/2006 | Static Movement |
| Unplugged | 8/18/2006 | Martian Wave |
| The Telling | 9/3/2006 | Martian Wave |
| A Nest of Flames | 7/1/2007 | Tales of the Talisman |
| Head Call | 7/3/2007 | Aoife's Kiss |
| Zombies? I Hate Zombies! | 9/13/2007 | Southern Fried Weirdness |
| Street Call | 8/6/2007 | SamsDot Between Kisses |
| Girl with the Error message Eyes | 4/23/2008 | AtomJack |
| Repfix | 1/2/2009 | Electric Spec |
| Farewell Tour | 6/5/2009 | Freezine |
| Stones of Green and Gold | 6/25/2009 | Heroic Fantasy Quarterly |
| You Can't Think About It | 7/8/2009 | Aoife's Kiss |
| Please Follow Calculated Route | 7/14/2009 | AnotheRealm Flash |
| Nigerian Soul | 8/13/2009 | AtomJack |
| Reefs of Jupiter | 11/10/2009 | Martian Wave |
| Carnival of Blood | 4/20/2010 | Aoife's Kiss |
| Note - since 1/1/2010 I have only submitted to pro markets. This does not mean that I stopped writing. |
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Error Message Eyes
In November 2010, I collected 15 stories that involve Math, Programming or Artificial Intelligence and self published a book on CreateSpace and Kindle called Error Message Eyes.
Non-Fiction
I have published a couple of books on playing the harmonica on Kindle, and a very long time ago contributed to a book on programming. I published several technical articles in the 1980s concerning programming problems.
Unpublished
Starting in 2010, I have only submitted to PRO markets. Several of the stories below are making the rounds of the pro markets, which can take a couple of years.
These are stories waiting in submission queues, or are in need of a rewrite or a rethink. I put a couple of the better ones in my short story collection.
If Wishes . . . - Story of a child with Downs Syndrome and her relationship with an AI.
La Soer Sans Merci - Short piece about an elderly woman in a nursing home fighting for her life.
Rescue Boat - waiting for rescue during hurricane Katrina.
Remember This - A space traveler suffering from replication errors.
The Shunned Well - Lovecraftian story set in New Orleans.
The Fat Lady Funeral - A circus fat lady comes back as a zombie.
The Duke's Left Eye - a witch puts a spell on an arrow so that it finds its mark.
The Thoat - A prospector on Mars is lost.
On Ben Klibreck - Ghosts on a Scottish Mountain.
Speed Trap -(Error Message Eyes) My favorite story, about a car alarm that is very very good, never sold.
The Window Washer Murder - (Error Message Eyes) Study in an AI that is more human than the people around him.
Please Leave a Message - Phone line to the dead
At the Submarine Races - Aliens on Prom Night
The Dinosaur Dance Floor - A Time Machine that watches Dinosaurs
Performance Evaluation - Evaluating an AI's Job Performance
Future Plans
I have 50 or so stories that are partially written and many of them deserve to be completed. I work on them occasionally, when I get a chance.
I have three novels outlines and may write one, someday, but probably not.
There ain't no money in this and damn little glory, so I don't expect to write more than a couple of stories a year. The urgency has diminished since 2003.