When I began publishing, I would print out a copy of a story and mail it to my parents. This is referred to as the poor man's copyright since it would be sealed and dated. There were a few stories I did this for, until I learned this was an exercise in futility and began copyrighting through the US Copyright Office. Soon after I'd forgotten what I'd done.
Recently this time capsule came back into my possession (thanks Mom). Before I opened the folder, I wasn't sure what I would find. It was a bit exciting as I began opening what I'd completely forgotten about. One of the envelopes contained the original draft of my short story Hammock Spiders.
This story is a special one to me. It signified when I first began writing at 13. Over the summer I watched a spider build her web outside a window. She kept getting bigger and bigger, her web intricate and impressively large, and I wondered how big she might actually get. I imagined a spider the size of a cat skittering toward me.
That was it, what sparked my first story, which technically was a summary, beginning my path as an author. In that version society was protected by a glass dome and soldiers were tasked to go outside the dome and hunt down giant spiders with extreme firepower. I was very young. Very inspired by one of my favorite movies, Aliens. And very excited about writing.
In the spirit of that first story summary, as well as my first muse (that spider), I wrote the short story Hammock Spiders twenty years later. On the poor man's copy I sent through the mail I'd written a message to myself: Written in one sitting!
I first published Hammock Spiders as a single publication in 2012 before combining it with other short stories and a few novellas in They Got Out: A Sci-Fi and Horror Collection published in 2021.
When I first published Hammock Spiders, there was a reader who requested it as a novella. Whenever a reader is hoping for a more of what I create I pay attention. I don't always discover more story. One example when I did was The Mauler: The Ravager War Prequel.
In this case I did too. In 2023 I wrote Hammock Spiders 2 and included it in They Got Out 2: A Sci-Fi and Horror Collection. Followed by Hammock Spiders 3 in 2024 included in They Got Out 3: A Sci-Fi and Horror Collection.
This box set of the Hammock Spiders trilogy is for the reader who wanted more Hammock Spiders, as well as the younger version of myself. I even hired my favorite designer to collaborate with, Darko Tomic, to design the cover.
https://www.amazon.com/Hammock-Spiders-Trilogy-They-Got-ebook/dp/B0DRSXNZHQ