I’ve been telling you about my short story, “The Pratty Who Saved Chrissmuss”, in LET IT SNOW! SEASON’S READINGS FOR A SUPER-COOL YULE. Now I’ll tell you how it came to be.

Long, long ago, as I’ve told you before, children, my high school buddies and I wrote what’s known as “fan fiction” about Star Trek (The Original Series). Our stories were sometimes full of angst and action, but they were sometimes silly. My pal Jane created a half-Vulcan troublemaker named Tetra, and I created a human troublemaker named Bel.

Time passed. I took one of my fan fiction stories and turned it into a piece of original fiction, FORCE OF HABIT, having gotten Jane’s permission to turn the half-Vulcan Tetra into an amphibian from the planet Gilhoo.

Enter Holly Jahangiri. Holly won a contest I ran, the winner of which got her name in a story set on the planet Llannonn, where FORCE OF HABIT takes place. That’s “By The Book”, $0.99 in the Kindle store. I had so much fun, and Holly enjoyed being in a story so much, I did it again.

As for pratties, they were first mentioned in FORCE OF HABIT, and featured prominently in my fan fiction “Hizzoner Mudd”. (Yes, it has Harry Mudd in it. I love Harry Mudd. In FORCE OF HABIT, Harry has morphed into Connell Morgan, who is a bit the same, but a bit different.) Pratties, as I was saying before I so rudely interrupted myself, are like sheep the size of llamas.

One of the scams Connell runs is the sale of Earth names to the natives of the planet Llannonn. Naturally, when I was invited to write a winter holiday story connected to one of my books, the name Dickens O’Henry popped into my head. Then what could the first line be but Dickens O’Henry was mad to begin with?

I’m very sorry if this dashes anyone’s romantic fantasies about how stories come to be, but it often happens that they just get cobbled together out of this and that and then get struck by lightning and come to life. Rawr.

LET IT SNOW! SEASON’S READINGS FOR A SUPER-COOL YULE is free today for Kindle. Check the LET IT SNOW! SEASON’S READINGS FOR A SUPER-COOL YULE Amazon Kindle page. If it is NOT free, don’t let the price of a measly $4.99 stop you. ALL that money goes to Superstorm Sandy relief efforts.

A WRITING PROMPT FOR YOU: Invent an animal.

MA