"Hurricane!" isn't the first of Mr. Sparhawk's works to appear in Analog -- this year he's had five stories published in the magazine and there are more on the way. All together he's written about 50 stories, some of which have appeared in other local publications.
The stories keep coming because there's so much material to write about, Mr. Sparhawk said. People often ask him if he ever runs out of story lines.
"How do you not get ideas?" he said. "There's so much material here."
The writer says he adds a lot of local flavor to his stories, which are based on casual conversations and real-life experiences.
A canoe trip with his son evolved into a story about a boy coming of age, and his risky antics sailing a boat through a storm on the Chesapeake Bay turned into a story titled "Hugo and Me," which appeared in Chesapeake Bay magazine.
Another, called "Jake's Gift," is about an old waterman who invents a floating device in which fish and oysters can grow. He's also rewritten the original "Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer" into a piece about an automatic plane with an infrared sensory device.
Mr. Sparhawk says he started reading science fiction when he was 12 years old. "I was a fanatic," he said. "I'm one of those people who reads the writing on the toilet paper wrapper if there's nothing else to read."
He started seriously writing science fiction stories in 1975 during his service in the Air Force in Japan. He sat down one day, started writing and the words just flowed.
"Thirty-five stories later I made my first sale," Mr. Sparhawk said.
Then he stopped writing for about 13 years while he earned an MBA in finance and raised three children. His children are now grown, and he has time on his hands to write.
In the past few decades the traditional science fiction he read as a child has diversified, he said, and now there's hard science fiction and soft science fiction. He likens the latter to romance novels, describing it as "Fabio meets whomever on a spaceship."
In between his consulting job, working on several stories simultaneously and sailing, Mr. Sparhawk is collaborating with Jeff Kooistra, another award-winning science fiction writer. They're working on a time-travel story about the peristence of time. It revolves around a woman who travels back in time to change the past, but a man stops her by inventing new technologies. Note: the writer got this part wrong!
Even thought his hands are full, he says it's difficult to stop himself from taking on more projects.
"It's infectious," Mr. Sparhawk said. "(You) decide what you're going to do... and characters lead you down paths that you didn't know existed."