Spaceship Wars

Truth be told I’m not entirely sure that I remember the title of this accurately, but it was some generic space opera title.

I wrote this around 3rd grade/ 4th grade. All of it in a single night as well as I can remember. It was inspired by repeated re-watching of “Star Wars” but I was also in the period of my life when I had to incorporate Wolves into everything I wrote.

The story starts out with an Alien named Jot, who is a citizen of one of those standard intergalactic evil empires, but escapes to start a new life on Earth.

Jot lives out in the countryside in peace. His alien race has a special way with animals, and Jot is able to communicate with a wolf, who becomes his pet and is given the name of Jotted. (I remember my mom used to complain about the similarity in names when I gave this to her to read, but it seemed natural to me that the Alien should give his pet wolf some variation of his own name. I don’t know why).

Two boys, Mike and Tom (or some generic names like that) run away from the orphanage one day and are also taken in by Jot.

The four of them are living quite happily until the evil galactic empire returns. At which point Jot is captured and taken as a prisoner back to the space ship.

Mike, and Tom find one of Jot’s spare spaceships and decide to go on a rescue mission. They take the wolf Jotted with them as well. Also somehow a girl named Judy gets mixed up in all this as well. (I’m really sketchy on all the details).

The main action of this story was inspired by Star Wars, in that almost all the action took place inside the big space ship with everyone running around the ship having laser gun battles. The heroes were captured several times, and escaped several times. I don’t remember any of the details, except that at one point Jot escapes by grabbing the arm of his guard and throwing him over his back (a move I saw a lot in action movies in those days, but I’m not entirely sure if it makes sense).
In another instance, the boys are climbing up a rope ladder to escape into a shuttlecraft, when laser fire cuts the ladder in two and they fall back onto the ship.

And that’s all I remember. I assume everyone managed to escape in the end and the good guys were victorious, all that stuff.

My most vivid memory associated with this work is when my 4th grade teacher allowed us to bring in stories we wrote and read them to the class. I brought this one in, but while I was up in front of everyone I discovered I could barely read my own handwriting (something that happened to me a lot in the days before my parents bought a word processor). I could make it out if I looked at it hard enough, but it was painful for everyone involved in listening. Eventually the teacher cut me off and told me I could finish reading it another time, but she never mentioned it again, and neither did I.

Influences on Later WorksWhen I was creating a Wolf Character for my Fabulae story, I gave him the name Jot in memory of the wolf in this story (even though in this story it was the Alien who was named Jot, and the wolf was Jotted).