With the return of the long-dormant Star Trek: Strange New Worlds fan-submission writing program after nearly a decade, we thought it might be time for one of the original run’s top stars, longtime Trek author Dayton Ward, to remind us all what the contest is all about!

Are you a Star Trek fan with ideas about your own stories?

Maybe you feel the itch to put fingers to keyboard—or pen to paper, if you’d rather kick it old school—and write an all-new tale that’s never been seen in an episode or film, or appeared in the pages of a novel or comic book.

You don’t necessarily want to get paid for it or have it collected into a real, honest-to-goodness book, but let’s face it: it’s a pretty cool thing, right?

Starting in 1997, Simon and Schuster set out to grant such wishes to Star Trek fans, when they began Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Presented as an open-call anthology contest, it invited fans to send in their own Star Trek short stories, which were read by veteran writer/editor Dean Wesley Smith. Over the course of ten annual contests, Dean screened thousands of stories, pulling about twenty stories from each year’s field of entries to be published in the resulting book.

Strange New Worlds launched several writing careers, including the one belonging to the guy who wrote what you’re reading right now. With the recent announcement about the return of the contest, people seem to either be learning or remembering that the reason I get to write Star Trek stories and occasionally annoy people with guest blogs like this one is thanks to the competition’s original incarnation.

Before the first contest was announced, I’d never written anything with the goal of being professionally published. I had written stories which appeared in a few print fanzines and I posted a couple in places like America Online. I was convinced to enter the first contest by a friend, and was as shocked as anyone when my name was announced as one of eighteen winners whose stories would appear in the inaugural edition of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

I entered stories the following two years and they were picked for the resulting anthologies, and after the third win I was no longer eligible to enter the contest. I had disqualified myself, as I now apparently owned the moniker of “professional writer.” Star Trek editor John Ordover cemented the deal when he extended to me an offer to write a Star Trek novel for Pocket Books. The rest, as I often say, is a frappin’ mystery.

There have been many positives to come from entering that first Strange New Worlds contest all those years ago. The best takeaway has been my friendship with Kevin Dilmore, with whom I frequently collaborate on various writing projects. Fate saw to it that he was the writer for the old Star Trek Communicator magazine assigned to interview that first year’s crop of winners, and when we discovered we only lived a short distance apart, I accepted his invitation to meet and talk Star Trek over a beer. We’ve been joined at the brain ever since.

I’ve made more friends than I can readily count, be they fans, other writers, artists, or other publishing professionals. Some of those are people whose books I read and admired years before I ever got the harebrained notion I might be able to write one, myself. I’ve benefited from numerous rewarding opportunities that have served to further my writing career.

If I were to sit down and plot it all out, I could probably draw lines between dots and connect everything back to the story I submitted to that first Star Trek: Strange New Worlds story.

Even after I had moved on from the contest, I continued to follow it to each year. I acted as something of a cheerleader, encouraging people to write their own Star Trek stories and send them in, and I celebrated when each new class of winners was announced. Many of those people ended up selling their tales and getting published in the next edition of the anthology before heading off for their own writing careers.

When the contest ended after its tenth year in 2007, I was sad to see it go. I did and still do think those ten competitions and anthologies created from them were a wonderful way for fans to get in on the fun of playing in the Star Trek sandbox. Now the contest is back, and I’m as curious as anyone to see what the future holds.

Without question or hyperbole, the original Strange New Worlds writing contest along with the people who edited it—Dean Wesley Smith, John Ordover, and Paula Block—changed the course of my life. I got to live a dream, and I continue to live it thanks to them as well as other editors and publishers and the fans and readers who’ve taken a chance on me. I’d love nothing less than to see someone else’s dream similarly realized.

Maybe that someone else is you?