how Lake Fossil came to be. Thank you Gerald.

What Grimmett taught me when it comes to my writing is that I had to expand out from my genre of horror, and this was something I did all along even when I was younger.    But the one thing I did as much as write horror was read a lot of Science Fiction.   So the evident step for me was to try my hand at writing Science Fiction but the hard part is to do it in a way where it doesn't give the same feel.   It took a chance correspondence with Jayme Henry to get that off the ground again.  
                It took a little bit of both authors to give me the kick in the ass to give writing Science Fiction a try -- I needed something different and Lake Fossil was it.   I showed this one to Gerald and he nodded in approval but suggested I added a few fatalities to it -- I told him I will do that in future stories,  this wasn't that story to do it in.  The imagination behind this one for me was the type of thing that didn't really show my signature,  but at the same time it did feel like a short story written by Nickolaus Pacione.   Just not a horror story though -- it wasn't too far off though from the influences I have as a horror writer but writing this one was special for me. 
                I was proving I could do other genres as well, and when it was done I showed this to Nicholas S. Stember compared notes and both of us started laughing because we were saying which was harder to write. For him,  it was horror fiction -- me,  Science Fiction was hard as hell.   Then I released this one on FictionPress,  then was having more fun with the ideas of future stories that I want to write in the Science Fiction genre.  I could actually see myself reworking LAKE FOSSIL into a novella or a full length novel given the right climate.  I will rework Lake Fossil 10 years from now where I can do the story its justice.
               The test with LAKE FOSSIL would be with the die-hard readers of my work.   This was a reinvention for me because I just got done writing one of the nastier horror stories of my 14 plus year as a writer.   Fossil for me showed my influence of Ray Bradbury because he had the tendicity to write with a lot of prehistoric creatures.   It started from a joke in fact,  my parents kept some tabloid newspapers around.  Lake Fossil was a mix of Science Fiction with a Literary Fiction element -- I found that being a lot of fun to do so I went on to do stories that did that as well.  Fossil had the characters that I made human.   This story is the one that readers will be drawn to if they could not get into my horror works.   I am going to look back at this one when I get older and futher along in my career to say this story is going to be the classic, as one of the readers from FictionPress said to me.  I just cannot believe I managed to pull a story as Lake Fossil off. 
                I will be writing a sequel to the story but do it in a way that the story is going to be bigger than the first story.   The key element for this one will be trying to figure out how I can do this without scaring the crap out of the readers.   It will have to be the story that will be part of Taboid Purposes, Volume II.   It was hard for me to write the Fossil,   but this is the story my parents actually approved of me writing -- originally wrote it for my baby sister but right now the story would be too weird for her to read at the time.   The ideas are there for Lake Fossil II,  just want to do it in a way that will make the story as special as when I wrote Lake Fossil.  So this would be for those who are reading this -- if you read the story,   how would I go about writing the sequel to this beast.
                It will come to me eventually just thought I would write this in rememberance of Grimmett's legacy,  and in that -- Gerald,  if you are up there reading this somewhere,  you were a damn good mentor.   You taught me a lot in the less than a year that I've been in corespondence with you.   Lake Fossil will be the story that I will say is worthy of your influence -- and you were one of the influences on this one. The other one was from a few speculative authors who've been published with me on an anthology or two.   Take a bow Ms. Latham,  you earned it.   Between what Gerald Grimmett taught me about writing literary fiction, and what I knew about when it comes to writing the speculative and the weird -- just put two and two together and a story such as Lake Fossil was done.