A Dedicated, Passionate Short Story Writer

Welcome to R. K. Wigal's Words. I am Ken Wigal, a retired computer programmer and a devoted short story writer. My works are known for being innovative, exploratory, and entertaining while teaching moral lessons that make them more relatable and exciting. Please feel free to explore my website to see my writings that will surely capture your heart and open your mind.

I call this website "R. K. Wigal's Words" because, in addition to writing stories, essays, poems, and the like, I also construct crossword puzzles. So instead of writing underlying all that I create, words are ultimately the essence of my art.

I wrote my first fiction stories in a creative writing class in 2006. One, suggested by the instructor, was a short story told as seen through the eyes of a non-human. I wrote Honeygirl. The other was a short time travel story that had been rattling around inside my brain for a number of years. I finally wrote Temporal Shift. My online writings began in March of 2010 at a website for Star Trek fans as flash fiction. I was soon writing fan fiction and original science fiction, all of which were published in the website's newsletter.

One day, I mentioned in a memo to my editor, Marshall Crockett, that working crossword puzzles was an excellent vocabulary builder for writers. He suggested that I create crossword puzzles for the newsletter. Surprisingly, to do so was not all that difficult, but that's another story. I also created Sudoku and word search puzzles for publication. In October, I was made editor and publisher of the newsletter. The last issue of the Blue Alert, sadly, was published in January of 2012, shortly before Online Starbase closed down for good.

In January of 2013, a friend of mine and I founded a similar fan-based website where I continued writing, creating puzzles, and putting out our own newsletter. The last issue of Crockett's Spirit was published in March of 2018. Despite many of our members drifting away over the years, Esprit Starbase is still very much alive.

A few of my stories are posted here. I'm converting as much of my fan fiction as I can into original fiction. I'll be posting more of my writings here as time goes on. I'm currently editing sixty-four of my crossword puzzles in preparation for, hopefully, commercial publication. I'll be posting one puzzle at a time here on a periodic basis which can be solved interactively or printed as a PDF. I plan, ultimately, to publish a short story or two and a novel or two. I'll keep you apprised. For now, enjoy the reading, enjoy the puzzle solving.