Inigo Press

Today is a day to give thanks. I am thankful for many things and many people, far too many to list. Most of my blessings revolve around family. To all my family I send thanks for all they do to make my life overflow with blessings.

Of more relevance to this blog, I am thankful that in the summer of 2016 I started writing fiction. My novel, now tentatively named Apostle to the Cats, has been percolating in my head for decades. Now it’s nearly finished and in search of a publisher. But the real blessing had been the outpouring of stories that seem to come from nowhere and fill my head. Some have been written down and posted here. Others are finished but I want to get them published elsewhere. Some are works in progress.  But I plan to continue posting them as fast as feasible so that others can read them.

Thank you for finding this and looking at my stories. Please feel free to leave comments.

Steve Fritz

During part of my checkered past I was a Naval Aviator specializing in hunting submarines. Our Air Group flew off USS Wasp which had a very early computerized ASW management system. No submarine on Earth could hide from us. The economics of dedicating a carrier task force to hunt a single submarine plus the end of the Cold War doomed the way we did it. A new wrinkle is arising from undersea drones. The extreme processing power available today could make ASW drones feasible. Here is my meditation on the coming technology.

Hunter

This little snippet arose out of a writing class I was taking at ed2go.com. We were given a plain vanilla description of  a sunset and asked to improve it. When I lived in Lawrence Kansas the sunsets were nonpareil.  A professor there told me that the gorgeous sunsets were the future of Kansas since they were caused by Aeolian dust in the atmosphere, blowing into other states. So I wanted a Kansas sunset.

Kansas isn’t the treeless plain that coastals seem to believe (when they can even locate Kansas on a map – Newsweek once published a map of the country with Kansas labelled Nebraska and Nebraska labelled Kansas!) but I wanted a forest. So I moved the setting a little east to the western edge of the Ozarks. Then I got carried away with the sentence and wrote a paragraph. Finally I expanded the piece to give a sense of context.

E voila! Banjo Music.

Inspiration to write must, I think, be tailored to each writer and their mind. For me, I find the best inspiration in real life stories I have lived. I watched the 1967 Arab Israeli war from a hospital bed with an Army intel officer for a roommate. The commentary was fascinating but a story he told me about his experiences led me to write Wash, the ex-Special Forces soldier turned intel officer involve in truce talks. On Mars. Just a little story.

Then I wrote down “Of all the asteroid bars in the Belt she had to walk into mine.” That got me going with a story based in part on my own personal experience in meeting a girl in college who ended up being my lab partner in a physics class. The ridiculous opening line disappeared but I ended up with 10,000 words about Jack and Ellen. In the process of fixing a ludicrous problem facing them and its laughable resolution I discovered the Revolt on Mars, which links Wash to Jack and Ellen.

Watch this space for what’s looking like a sci fi spy story.

Moby Dick is a classic of American fiction. In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex , on which Moby Dick is partly based, is a classic non-fiction book. I have always been fascinated by Moby Dick so I decided to do a take on it from the perspective of the white behemoth. Here, for your pleasure,

The Whale’s Tale

A long, long time ago, but in a universe right here, I was sitting in a survival class for Student Naval Aviators. A lot of it was boring but at one point they played a tape of a naval aviator who had been shot down and floated in his life raft for a couple of days before being picked up. He said he had hallucinated after a while and thought he was having a conversation with a seagull. For some reason that really stayed with me. Later I decided to use it as an exercise in a writing class. Finally I decided to put it on this blog. Enjoyl

Dialogue with a Seagull