Richard A. Bartle: Original Fiction

Original Fiction

Items of fiction:

	The Special Relationship, a screwball romcom screenplay. I was offered an option on this in 2001, but the prodco reneged before they paid me any money. Needless to say, if you'd like to option it instead, drop me a line.
	IN^sight_flames, a science fiction/fantasy novel.
	Learning to Live with Orcs, a humorous science fiction/fantasy novel.
	Learning to Live with Goblins, a short story set in the universe of Learning to Live with Orcs. It's told from the point of view of the Karen Cox character, concerning her second visit to Virginia.
	The So Book of Spoons, a collection of amusing short stories for children. Although adults and older children may realise that many of the stories playfully parody stereotypical tales of the genre, nevertheless they do stand up well without any such subtext. Each one contains a reference to a spoon, and ends in a punchline prefaced by the word So.
	The Right Ingredients, an amusing short story for children. I quite like this one!
	The Space Alien, an amusing short story for children. It seems a bit "forced" to me.
	The Princess Pash'Pashan, an extended version of the original from The So Book of Spoons.
	Saving Myself for Maddie, a romantic science fiction short story. This was published in April, 1996, in the small-press SF&F magazine Xenos; I wrote it some three years earlier, however, well before the birth of my daughter, Madeleine. It was an experimental piece, to test the effect of switching suddenly from an iambic rhythm to unstructured prose, and I was quite pleased by the result. The SF content is marginal - it's primarily a romance - so I used the pseudonym Richard Allan, which I prefer for this kind of material.
	Learning about Love, another romantic science fiction short story written under the Richard Allan pseudonym. I polished and polished this until it shone, but the ending is perhaps too obvious for it ever to merit publication (sigh).
	Longing and Belonging, at 1,500 words, is 75% of the minimum required for publication. Nevertheless, for a long time, I resisted lengthening it because I like it the way it is. Eventually, though, I did relent, and padded it out to a more acceptable size. I submitted it to the online magazine Disenchanted, because it seemed to be exactly the kind of material they were after. Indeed it was: the longer version was duly published in issue 2 (under my own name, although I had originally intended for it to be a Richard Allan story). Generally, I avoid writing female characters in the first person, but in this case I made an exception: as a result, she has a sense of "otherness" about her which, for me at least, makes her situation seem all the more real.