Trek Blurbs

I can’t help but be struck now, nearly forty years later, by the raw enthusiasm of kiddo-me not giving a single whiff…

Back in grade school I had a million ideas, and no filter.

Of course, following through on any of them was not my strongest suit. After all, I was in class all day and doing extra curricular activities in the evening and, heck, those computer games were not going to play themselves.

But I do recall something that I did with a kind of dedicated passion: I wrote Star Trek blurbs.

See, my friends and I (gasp, you’re shocked I can tell) were very much nerds. Such nerds were we, in fact, that our lunch hour passion was discussing the detailed nuances of Star Trek: the Next Generation episodes (which at the time were freshly aired on television.)

One of the ways I took this a step further than my friends was to pull out a blank sheet of paper, sketch the Star Trek logo on the top half of the page, and then write a one hundred-ish word plot outline for a dream episode of my own creation.

I admit now, those plots I wrote were pretty derivative and simplistic, but over the course of a couple years of school I made about thirty, brought them to show my friends, and dreamed of sending them into the writing staff for the obvious fame and fortune that such an effort would bestow.

I never actually wrote an episode (nor have I since done anything in the realm of fan fiction, for anything) but I can’t help but be struck now, nearly forty years later, by the raw enthusiasm of kiddo-me not giving a single whiff about what others thought and the joy such a creative pursuit brought me.

Oh, to be fourteen again, huh?

Brad Salomons is a time traveller and intergalactic secret agent for hire. He writes blogs about technology, creativity and life between gigs.