Welcome!
My name is Stephen G. Parks. You’ve probably never met me and that’s fine. It’s a big world and you haven’t met most of its inhabitants.
I’ve lived an unusual life, on four continents and in communities both well-off and under-developed.
One common thread throughout my life is that I’ve been a storyteller: I drew my own comic books as a youth; I wrote fiction as a teen; I was a journalist in university and beyond; later, I defined information flows as an information designer; I communicated language as an ESL teacher; and I’ve shone a light on some very deserving people as a communications specialist and fundraiser for educational charities in Africa.
Now it’s time to focus on my stories. And I’ve got a number to tell.
Stories that need to be told
Most of my work that’s been published thus far has been short stories, not counting my output as a journalist, a fundraiser, and that one play I wrote and directed in university.
I had already written two full novels before I started writing short stories, at the suggestion of the late Janet Reid, a literary agent from New York. Short stories are a great way to learn your craft and are a large part of why I haven’t tried to publish my novels yet. Writing short stories taught me lessons that I want to apply to my longer works.
I’ve written in many genres although you’ll notice that this list – which is only of novel- or novella-length stories that I’m developing, is dominated by science fiction. Don’t typecast me!
So, here’s a list of novels and novellas, chronologically from their inception dates:
Hryka is my oldest story, one that I started writing while I was still in high school, and one that’s continued to evolve – as has Tau Ceti, which I started writing in university.
Tau Ceti and Sol are a matched pair, yin and yang in a series that I’m thinking of calling Quantum Traverse. I’m really excited at the prospects of writing Sol once I’ve completed Tau Ceti. There’s a third story here too, possibly called Laniakea, but I’m not sure I want to write it and the story, or elements of it, might just fold nicely into Sol. If that happens, I might use the name Laniakea for the series instead of Quantum Traverse. I don’t know why trilogies are so highly prized in the publishing industry. I blame Tolkien.
Tau Ceti has evolved to an obscene degree. I swear, I could write an essay just about that story’s journey and what it’s taught me about the creative process.
I stumbled onto writing YA Science Fiction when I started re-working a short story idea into a longer-form novella. The Winds of Zephyr is that story, and it is also one of the very few times that I’ve written in the first person. I’ve always been against first-person narrative, as it takes an element of suspense from a story – specifically, will the protagonist live? Well, the narrator certainly will. It was only after re-reading S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders as an adult that I realized that first-person narrative could be compelling and that I wanted to rise to that challenge.
The Deacon Carver Chronicles is a 5-story series that I’m working on. Deacon first appeared in the short story Dee, For the Win, available to be read for free on Kindle Unlimited. I’ve posted parts of this story on my website, notably, a profile of Deacon, a profile of Rikaine, a scene I may be deleting,
I started A Godless Man for NaNoWriMo 2018, wrote about twenty thousand words then put it down for three years. It’s almost ready for the light of day. You can read an excerpt here on my blog.
Pilot is a story that has been sitting in my mind for a long time, almost as long as Hryka. It’s more in the style of James Blish’s Cities in Flight series that anything else. It also has hooks that tie into the Deacon Carver stories, if one wants to see them.
There are other stories in this brain of mine, among them, Lost Tales of the Hryka, a short story collection that fleshes out the mythology of Hryka; s horror story a-la Stephen King that I’m currently labeling Lovecraftian Sesame Street; A story about humans failing to co-exist with telepathic dragons; an intergalactic chase between humans and others who see us as zombies; and a body-horror story involving alien nanites.
So much to look forward to completing.
~SGP