D L Richardson

People often ask me how I come up with my story ideas. THIS is how I come up with story ideas. The following is a true event. I woke to the sound of the doorbell ringing and glanced at the clock. It was 2am. I thought I had just woken from a dream.Then my husband rolled out of bed and stood up to stare out the bedroom window.I mumbled, "What's up?"He said, "If you can believe it, the doorbell just rang.""So it wasn't a dream," I said.Our front doorbell had chimed at 2am in the morning. Our front door is downstairs, we were sleeping upstairs. The husband was staring out the bedroom window which overlooks the driveway, but I don't need to get up to know that we can't see down to the front door. I gave him the most logical explanation I could think of at 2am in the morning. I said, "It's probably the battery dying."He agreed, and we both did a quick look out the front and back windows before heading back to bed.I never went back …

I've been watching, James Cameron's 'The Story of Science Fiction'. It's on TV each Thursday night and each week it features another aspect of sci-fi. He interviews other directors and actors, and it's like a who's who of sci-fi. It's great. It's also given me the jolt in the arm I need to keep working on my sci-fi novels. I love sci-fi. Always have, even before I knew it. I love space opera, dystopia, post-apocalyptic, aliens, artificial intelligence, robots, off-world. I love it all.What I love most is that many of these great sci-fi books and movies are cautionary tales about humanity and the planet we inhabit. I love how the writers and creators seek out unique ways to deliver these messages. BUT... I lost my love of writing sci-fi earlier this year. 2020 came at me with a bang, first with the horrific bushfires in Australia that decimated the Australian east coast, then we had floods, then the pandemic. For me, these cautionary messages were be…