Richard Houchin

Creative Writing:
Stories, Worlds, and Projects

I've created from the ground up two universes in which most of my creative writing takes place. There is the world of Timeless, a steampunk action-adventure realm, and then there is the world of Transcendence, a gritty blending of sci-fi and character driven explorations of morality.

Timeless evolved out of an early attempt at building a world of high fantasy. When I realized my efforts were tending towards the cliched and derivative, I scrapped the whole universe and built Timeless from the salvage. I kicked off the new world by releasing an episode a week for 6 weeks. The results were pleasing, but too time consuming. I ceased the episodic release of Timeless stories to work on longer shorts. I enjoyed the challenge of working to release episodic content, and look forward to doing it again.

Transcendence sprang fully formed from a request by a peer, Roy Steves, for a story treatment. The world of Transcendence is about questions of morality and how people answer them. I try to invest each character of Transcendence with as much engaging realism as possible. I've structured the overall plot and history of the universe to facilitate a modular approach to storytelling, allowing me to experiment with characters, devices, and concepts while preserving an integrity of theme and worldscape. It's fun.

Starting in late 2006 I began submitting my work to the Writers of the Future contest. My first submission returned a form reject letter, but it had a handwritten "write more soon!" scrawled on it. Glee.

Below is a chronology of submissions:

  • First submission: Cost of Living served as my honors thesis in the creative writing program at CSU, Chico. Rejected. Universe: Transcendence. How long did it take? Almost 18 months.
  • Second submission: Dreams was written mostly while in Hawaii. It's a surreal story. I experimented with several weird storytelling devices such as interweaving flashbacks, dream sequences, and stream of consciousness. As a result, Dreams is challenging to read and was hard to write. Rejected (no surprise). Universe: Transcendence. How long did it take? A little over 1 year.
  • Third submission: Life is Funny. After submitting Dreams I bought eight of the Writers of the Future anthologies so that I could learn what stories win. Life is Funny was written "to spec" and is much simpler and easier than either Dreams or Cost of Living. My rejection slip for this story arrived mid-December, 2007. Universe: Timeless. How long did it take? 3 months exactly.
  • Fourth submission: The Beautiful Batteries of Alander Mekanikson: An Immoral Tale hasn't been submitted yet. It is also written to spec, although it is darker than Life is Funny. Alander Mekanikson is my first foray into the tightly structured world of genre fiction, specifically the Revenge Plot. Universe: Transcendence. How long did it take? A little over 6 days to write the first complete draft. Since then, the manuscript has undergone one major revision.

    The opening scene and first few pages have been revised so often I became sick of the whole thing. The ending has remained largely unchanged--the best few pages of the story are easily the last few. My frustration has grown from the realization that, practically speaking, it ought to be the first few pages that are the best. I hope to refine the opening scene to an acceptable state and get rid of this story by July 1, 2008. It's a horrible story, and I'll eagerly await its rejection slip. For my next work, I think I'll write something funny. Ha ha.

My goal is to be published by the Writers of the Future by mid-2009. I'll submit to them 1 story every 3 months. If I haven't been picked up by Writers of the Future by mid-2009, I'll broaden my horizons. Maybe take more seriously self publication! I'm certainly encouraged by the above timeline. My composition speed is improving exponentially. At this rate, I should be able to generate rejection slips with unprecedented haste, further magnifying my indie cred. I need as much underground rep as I can get, seeing as how I work for the Man.