Wincing at Light

Wincing at Light is the blog for science fiction novelist Darren R. Hawkins and the home of his online serialized fiction.

Official Bio (from my first novel)

Darren Hawkins lives in Owen County, Indiana with his wife and three sons. He purchased a B.A. in English from Indiana University so he could work in a field completely unrelated to his degree. When not writing science fiction, he divides his time between gainful employment with his alma mater as a database analyst and SQR developer and the Front Office Baseball League, where he has successfully been running his fantasy baseball team into the ground since 2002. He is disturbed by how pleasant it is to discuss himself in the third person.

From the Hands of Hostile Gods is his first novel.

Unofficial Bio (from my previous website)

That’s all more or less true. Here are the things I left out:

• I wrote my first serious SF story at the age of 10. It was called “Journey into the Mind” or some such thing. Since I couldn’t type, I read it onto a blank tape and mailed the tape to an editor at Redbook. It was rejected. But it was the first personal rejection I received from an editor, and the last one I received for a very long time. I’ve long since lost the letter itself, but in my heart, I’ll always be grateful to that person who took a couple of minutes and scribbled some encouragement on a rejection note to a ten year old kid.
• My second serious SF attempt was a fifteen hundred page SF/Fantasy novel written during my sophomore year in high school. I still have it. I’d rather have kept the letter from the nice editor at Redbook.
• I worship the prose of Neal Stephenson. How he does what he does flabbergasts me.
• The most trouble I ever got in as a child: Growing up in central Illinois (Saybrook, Ill., for the curious), I lived in this cozy little small-town neighborhood. Like most kids in the mid and late ’70’s, in the summertime, mom and dad went off to work and we pretty much managed ourselves all day long.The summer that I was eight or nine, my favorite thing to do was to go over to a friend’s house and play CHiP’s (even though I always ended up being John, which is not nearly as disturbing to me now as I look back on it as it was then. There are two kinds of people in the world–those who played Ponch as a kid, and those who played John. Those who insisted on being Ponch are now all in prison or working for Denny’s. I firmly believe this to be true.) Anyway, in my friend’s back yard was a very nice (as I remember it), glossy black ‘68 Mustang his dad kept under a tarp. I can’t swear to it, but I believe his dad was in the process of restoring it. We loved that car. We’d sneak into when his dad was at work and jerk the wheel, mash the pedals, pretend like we were Ponch and John racing down the California freeways after seriously bad dudes.One day, our imaginary bad dudes happened to steal a car with nitrous boosters, and our old police clunker just couldn’t keep up with them. I’m not sure whose idea it was (though I’m going to say that it was my friend’s), but it became painfully clear to us that we needed to pull our cruiser into the ultra-secret police chop shop for some “augmentations”. Not having canisters of nitrous sitting around, we compensated the best we could. We used Kool Aid. Add a couple cups of sugar, mix it with water until it’s the consistency of wet sand. It went right into the gas tank. After that, we were freakin’ flying, dude.It took about two weeks for my buddy’s dad to figure out what we had done. One Saturday morning, he pulls off the tarp, pops the hood, starts tinkering around. Jumps in and tries to fire it up. You can imagine that he was a little hot when he figured out what we’d done.

  We did catch the bad guys, though.

• When I was 11, I “married” a girl named Virginia Thomas who was in my class. We used to spend our entire recess periods hiding out on the playground making out. At the end of the school year, she moved to Virginia (the state). I still wonder what happened to her.
• I once set an empty field on fire that threatened to consume my entire neighborhood. It was an accident. Mostly. It was late autumn and a buddy and I (different buddy than above) were out playing. It was cold, and we didn’t want to go inside, so we collected some firewood and some matches and decided to build ourselves a nice cheery fire.Not being stupid, we knew we had to have some sort fire ring or fire pit to contain the flames. The field we were in had grass as tall as we were, and we had a pretty good idea that if the flames got out of hand, they’d take off pretty quick. Not being able to find a fire ring or a shovel to dig the pit, we improvised with a big sheet of particle board we found in his father’s garage.Particle board is not (NOT) fire retardant.Inside five minutes, the whole field was on fire. Being a responsible lad, I ran straight home and told my mom about the fire. She called the fire department. For a couple of hours, it looked like the whole neighborhood was going to bite it (though, fortunately, no homes ended up being damaged).After the fire was put out, one of the firemen stopped at my house and told my mother I was a hero, and that I’d probably saved the neighborhood with my quick action.I never told anyone the truth.
• My first car was a tan 1976 Ford Pinto with a rear bumper that was held on by coat hangers.It had the exact same engine as my second car, a 1986 Ford Thunderbird Turbo Coupe.
• In every novel I’ve ever written, there has been a character named Ray. This is not an accident.
• After investing four years and tens of thousands of dollars in higher education so I could land a decent job, I’ve begun to realize that I was happier when I was working at McDonald’s in (and just after) high school.
• I have loved many women in my life, but none of them as deeply or profoundly as I loved Judy Garland when I was 13.
• My valedictory address at my high school graduation was given completely off the cuff. Most people believe that this happened because I was a rabble-rouser. The truth is that I was so terrified when I got up there, I couldn’t imagine reading the speech I had written and the school board had approved. I just didn’t have the courage for it.When I was a sophomore in high school, I actually packed a bag, snuck out of my house and had hitchiked almost a sixty miles on my way to Denver because I had to give a five minute expository speech in English the next day and decided that running away from home was the easier choice. I came to my senses at a rest stop just inside the Illinois state line and managed to flag a ride home with a long haul trucker on his way to Indianapolis. I was back in my room an hour before my parents got up for work. I got a B+ on the speech. It was about leprosy.
• I have spent too much time pondering the mystery of at what point in your life it is too late to switch your career goals to “Life of Crime”.
• I have about a dozen novels sitting in my house that are absolutely so hideous they will never be allowed to see the light of day. I’ve already murdered most of the people who have seen copies of them (except mom, of course), and am prepared to kill again should they ever escape my secret vault.