Week 16: 4905 words

Well, this week was a good lesson in why you shouldn't procrastinate. I got one chapter and some blogging done this week, then Friday kept piddling around intending to knock out another chapter, then thunderstorms came through and knocked out my power for most of the afternoon. I didn't get any writing done Saturday since I was in Wilmington for a con. (And some amazing pizza at a place called Slice of Life Pizzeria and Pub. It's easy to get complacent about pizza, since even mediocre pizza tastes pretty good. But Slice of Life was pretty much perfect. Amazing dough. I could have eaten a crust just by itself. But the toppings, sauce and cheese were absolutely in perfect ratios. I'm really happy this place is three hours away from my house since if it were nearby I'd likely be eating way, way too much pizza.) Anyway, excuses aside, I got in 4905 words and can look back and see the gaps in time of the last week I should have filled with writing.

I've been helping to organize the Hillsborough Comics Fair for my local library, plus helping design a flyer for the upcoming book sale, plus also organizing the Local Author Book Fair that's happening in September. I enjoy organizing events for the library, but it does always take up more time than I plan.

Still, the positive development this week was that the chapter I reported having lost last week showed up this week! Because I'm paranoid about losing stuff in the cloud, I'd actually cut and pasted the text to save it in a different file, then forgot I'd done so! So I was very relieved when I spotted the file on my hard drive this week.

I've now completed 10 chapters of Nobody Nowhere. The final book will likely be 25 chapters long, so I'm pretty far into it. The book starts with all the characters scattered in very different locations. I mean, two of the characters are on Mars, one's on a planet in another solar system, two are on a remote island on Earth, and four are in a completely different universe. Oh, and some of the characters have multiple versions, as the same characters living in different timelines run into one another. So, pulling all the characters into a common setting has been something of a challenge. But, now the characters are all positioned where I need them to be to interact with each other, and the rest of the book should have less jumping around between POVs and settings. Most of the rest of the book will just involve two different mashed up teams of characters pursuing a common goal with different motives. I like writing team ups, where the interplay of characters can really drive the story. Also, the next couple of chapters are pretty much big fight scenes, which are often fun to write.

Forward!

Hey! I did some covers!

Stephen Euin Cobb and I have been doing panels together at conventions since probably 2003. He's the guy behind "The Future and You" podcast and I always look forward to going to dinner with him each year at ConCarolinas. He's a big old science geek, and, as you might expect, when he does write science fiction, he writes it hard. I've read his novel Bones Burnt Black and feel like it's an underrated gem of the genre. There's a mechanic who's been thrown from the ship following an explosion of the fuel tank. She's in a suit leaking air, with her tether severed, and a head injury that's stripped out her memory of how she got stranded in the void. She has to figure out how to get back on to the ship, which is damaged and tumbling toward the sun. Oh, and there's a killer aboard the ship murdering the crew one by one. Even if they figure out who the killer is, it doesn't change the hard orbital equations that there's no way to avoid certain death once the crippled ship's new orbit takes them so close to the sun they're all going to be burnt to ash. To call this novel a page-turner is an understatement. 

Last year, I started talking to Stephen about it and seriously considered reprinting the book under the Word Balloon Books imprint I use for my own titles. In the end, I decided I should keep focused on my own publishing efforts, but by then I'd already been daydreaming about how I'd redesign the cover. So, here it is! (click on the links below the covers to be taken to Amazon)

Bones Burnt Black

Stephen has two more novels, and while I haven't read them, I learned enough about them that I went ahead and designed covers for them as well so that all three books would share as similar visual style.

Plague at Redhook

Skinbrain

These are the first covers I've ever designed for another author, but hopefully they won't be the last. My years of experience selling books directly at conventions has helped me learn what catches the eyes of potential readers when they see the book in print, but that also works as a tiny thumbnail on Amazon. So, if you're an artist looking for a cover designer, drop me a line! 

10018 words for week 15

Didn't gain ground but at least I didn't lose ground, hitting my 10k for the week. A somewhat terse update this morning; I'm currently on site at Festival of Legends waiting for gates to open in 10 minutes. Sales yesterday at the Festival were very strong, but selling books outside during thunderstorm season is rough! Even with the tent blowing wind threatened the inventory several times. It's tough to sell stuff while they are under tarps. Still, this is definitely a dragon crazy crowd!

Week Fourteen Word Count Update: 2942

I normally post these on Sundays, but last Sunday I was literally too sick to get out of bed. Cheryl had been sick the week before, so I'd known I was in the crosshairs. As far as illness goes, if you absolutely must get sick, this was a fairly decent virus to get. No stomach issues, no sniffling, just a mild fever and complete exhaustion, so that pretty much all I could do Sunday and Monday was sleep around the clock.

Except for a cough, I'm mostly over it now, so this week I should be back on the word count wagon.

Last week was my worst word count of the year, 2942. But, really, that's not because I was getting sick, it's because I'd finished the first draft of Dragonsgate the week before and was mostly brain dead.

This week, I'm trying to get momentum going on Nobody Nowhere, but stumbled out of the gate when I discovered that I've lost the last chapter I finished. I wrote it on my chromebook offline while I was riding to an event with Cheryl. When we got to the event, I plainly recall signing in to wi-fi to make sure the chapter was saved to google drive. But, when I returned to google this week to download it, only the first two pages had been saved. I went back to my chromebook, and nothing. The other four pages I wrote have vanished.

In retrospect, going with a chromebook over a Windows laptop was a big mistake. My reasoning was that I now do 90% of all my writing in my office. I mean, all my life I dreamed of having my own writing office, and now that I do, I definitely want to make use of it. I've got a good desktop system, since I like typing on a big key board. I've also got a big monitor to make up for my poor eyesight. And, I like the modular nature of a desktop system. If I spill coffee on my keyboard, I haven't crippled the whole system. So, I didn't want to spend a lot of money on a laptop, and the chromebook was light, had a good monitor, and has amazing battery life. But, despite the promise that google docs will save your work when you're offline and update it later, I've found that my worries about losing work have come true. There are workarounds to save a local copy manually, but I've been spoiled by Windows to not worry about losing my work.

Anyway, gripe gripe, it's not the end of the world. I know what happens in the chapter I lost, have typed a few notes, and am already moving on. Still, it is frustrating.

Enough moaning. Time to finish another chapter of Nobody.

How Much Science Do You Need to Know the Write Science Fiction? Part Four: The Art of Babble

How much science do you need to know to write science fiction? So far my answers have been "a lot," and "not a lot, as long as you know a lot about science fiction." Today we get to a third option available to every author, which is to know absolutely nothing about science. 

This answer isn't going to make a lot of science teachers happy, nor will it make people who love well grounded hard science fiction very happy. Science fiction, for all of its attempt to ground itself in reality, is ultimately part of the larger umbrella of fantasy fiction. Fantasy takes place in a world not quite our own. This can be a fully magical fairy land, or it can be an alien planet. It can very closely resemble our world, but with vampires and wizards, or be our world transformed by some new technology, like an immortality pill. 

The greatest gift to every writer is the seemingly innate human ability to accept nearly any premise as true, no matter how contrary to reality it might sound. This is so common we're almost blind to it. Children from an early age demonstrate a remarkable ability to buy a premise while still understanding that the premise isn't real. No kid watching cartoons on television stops to give a second thought about why a bunch of dogs are talking and wearing shirts, nor do they expect their own family pets to start having conversations. The fact that some people can fly and punch through walls after donning a cape or mask is accepted without a lot of follow up questions. That there were times in history where dragons terrorized villages and wizards teamed up with knights to fight them doesn't raise any red flags. 

Novelists, playwrights, cartoonists, and puppeteers rely on this notion of "the willing suspension of disbelief." Readers enter into a novel, or a comic book, or a stage magician's performance agreeing to ignore their skepticism and allow the artist to present a new world where reality follows slightly different rules. In exchange, they expect to be rewarded with entertainment, and, in the very best art, with wisdom and wonder. 

What's remarkable is how easy it is for the audience to transition to this new reality. This is a world populated by intelligent rabbits, and one of them has to solve a murder mystery? Got it. Move on. Tell your story. 

You see this presentation of a wild premise a lot in comedic science fiction TV series, like Futurama or Rick and Morty. Here's a pill that will make you telepathic! This watch will let you jump back in time five minutes! That explosion has caused our minds to switch bodies! The audience will buy the bit and not worry about the underlying logic. Superhero shows on TV also run with this, often not trying to be comedic. "I got hit by a wave of dark matter and now I can talk to animals!" "I got injected with nanobots and accidentally de-aged into a baby!" "I caught an virus from an alien and my fever is letting me melt steel!" An utterly absurd idea about what would  happen if a radioactive spider bit a nerdy teen has been selling comic books for as long as I've been alive, and can still pack movie houses. 

It might sound like your audience will swallow anything you put before them, but this isn't quite true. They will accept nearly any alteration to reality you care to make, but with the following caveats: 

1. The alteration to reality should be apparent very early on. If you write a book about an alien invasion, the readers will buy the premise if there's a UFO in the first chapter, or even a fleeting mention of one. If, in your thirty chapter novel, you wait until chapter twenty nine to mention that, oh, right, there are aliens and they're going to kidnap the hero's love interest, you will wind up with some very negative Amazon reviews. 
2. The premise should possess an internal logic and the story should follow the rules you set up front. Let's say that you're writing a novel about a genius who's built a shrink ray. All through the book, he keeps getting small and navigating under doors and riding cockroaches and dodging getting stepped on. Then, in the final confrontation with the bad guy, he does nothing at all with his shrinking powers, but instead pulls out a pistol and shoots the bad guy in the head. Most readers would feel cheated. Or, let's say that your character has designed a sentient artificial intelligence that borders on omniscient. Now your character is famous as a master detective because he uses the computer to help interpret clues. Great! But if he never asks once the obvious question, "Say, who killed this guy?" and you don't explicitly give a reason why the computer can't answer that, most readers will feel like you've not treating them with much respect. 
3. Know the commonly accepted "rules" of any premise you're recycling. Let's say you've come up with a science fictional explanation for vampires. But, your vampires aren't harmed by sunlight or even adverse to it. They don't need to drink blood, they can be killed by an ordinary bullet, and they can't fly or change shape. They don't even have pointy teeth! Calling a character lacking at least a few of these traits a vampire will likely not be well received by readers. 

Finally, the commonly used term to hide implausible technology beneath a sheen of science is "technobabble." You see it used a lot on television shows, and it's often cringeworthy. Scientific sounding words get tossed around to explain the essentially magical thing the writers need to happen. So, a supervillain is rampaging through the city, but the hero has built a device that can neutralize his powers: a neutrino ray! The writer might feel pretty clever. Neutralize and neutrino sound alike, one must have something to do with the other, right? Meanwhile, anyone who actually knows even a tiny bit about particle physics is on Twitter writing short, angry protests about scientific illiteracy. On the other hand, suppose your character needed to build goggles that would let him see into a bank vault. He can say with a straight face that his "neutrino goggles" can decode the "neutrino shadow" of the trillions of neutrinos streaming through the bank vault each second. It's still gibberish, but the fans of particle physics would appreciate the fact that you did at least get the part about the trillions of neutrinos passing through the vault each second right. 

In a way, we've come full circle. Yes, this is fiction. You can just make stuff up. But knowing what the words you're using really mean is part of the craft of writing. No matter what exotic technologies your imagination comes up with, there's probably some appropriate realm of science that relates to it at least tangentially. The more science  you know, the more authoritative you'll sound when you twist that science into pretzels to make it justify your story needs. Start studying! 

Dragonsgate First Draft is Done! + word count update

Last Thursday, the Frankenstein's monster of a manuscript parts that is Dragonsgate, V1, was finally sewn together into something very closely resembling a novel. 

I've written twenty six chapters, or roughly 120,000 words. I'm including in this count two versions of chapters ten and eleven, where the novel took a serious wrong track that led me to break my own rule about rewriting before a draft was done. My original plan had Graxen and Nadala meeting who I thought was going to be an important player in the plot, while Bitterwood and Anza encountered an earth-dragon named Delta who was also going to be a big character. I had to go back and switch things around so that Graxen and Nadala are the ones who first encounter Delta. 

I'm aware, by the way, of just how boring it is to read about my changing my mind about characters that you don't know in a book no one has read. This is something I suspect all creatives struggle with. A painter of a vase of flowers will always be haunted by the fact that the person appreciating the painting will never understand hoe the flower he decided not to paint is what gives the canvas its beauty. The songwriter will never be able to explain how the song people are dancing to exists only because of the notes he decided not to play. Novelists will always see their books in the light of the characters and plots that could have been, or briefly were, before vanishing forever. Every book I've written emerges from a quantum froth of books I might have written, books that might have been better or worse. 

A bit of trivia that I don't think I've shared before: In the first Bitterwood novel, for most of the first draft, there was a dragon named Belpantheron who was an explorer. He knew that the society of dragons was built upon several myths and was determined to get to the truth behind these myths. He was a useful frame for revealing the true story of how dragons had conquered mankind. I wrote several scenes with him, and he was a pretty good character, smart, courageous, and driven. And... poof! He's gone. His name got recycled into a literary work the dragons sometimes reference called The Ballad of Belpantheron. And, though it's been twenty years since I last wrote a scene featuring him, I still kind of feel like I let him down. 

I've got a note file with a bunch of stuff I need to put into the next draft of Dragonsgate. Hex has several big scenes I need to write to give him a full character arc. Zeeky's story didn't really come together for me until around chapter fifteen, so pretty much every scene including her before then will need to be redone in the light of what I know now. She was a character with an established ability that I knew would be important to the plot. But that meant that for most of the book, I didn't know what to do with her until her gift became important later. I knew what she would do in the book, I just didn't know why she would do it. Now that I know, I think she'll have one of the more interesting storylines in the final novel. 

For now, I'm putting the novel aside. I need to get a little distance from the book before I start a fresh draft. My goal is to work on Nobody Nowhere during April. After I'm done with that draft, I'll have a clearer picture of how ready I am to tackle Dragonsgate V2. 

Completing Dragonsgate, plus a few blog posts, gave me 12,138 words for the week. At the end of week 13, one quarter into the year, my word count year to date is 132,496. 

How Much Science Do You Need to Know to Write Science Fiction? Part Three: On the Shoulders of Giants

The next best approach to writing science fiction, aside from studying actual science, is to study science fiction. In fact, you really should do both. If you study the science but not the science fiction, it's easy to come up with ideas that have already been thoroughly explored to the point that the ideas have become quaint or unpopular, or have been explored better elsewhere. For my own personal experience, in the early nineties I started reading about the possibility of virtual reality, usually explored in popular science magazines like, uh, Popular Science. Reading about virtual reality, I naturally started getting a lot of ideas about stories where people are trapped in computer generated worlds and don't know it.

I'd read science fiction almost exclusively through the early 1980s. Then I went to college. As an English major, I was trained to regard science fiction and fantasy as a lesser form of literature unworthy of my attention. (This is still a common attitude, but now there are respectable universities with programs that study these genres.) Because my college degree  had steered me toward reading more "literary" fiction, I'd stopped reading contemporaneous science fiction just before the rise of cyberpunk novels. In this genre, virtual reality was a fairly common concept, and I was only vaguely aware the genre existed. When I was writing my VR stories I thought I was being original, but every editor reading my work probably wondered why I was wasting their time with stories they'd seen before.

This need to know what's already been done can create a real challenge for the would be science fiction author. If you read essays by professional editors of science fiction publications, one of the things you'll quickly discover is that they have a huge list of stories they never want to read again. The classic "don't send us this" story would be a male and female astronaut find themselves stranded on an alien world with that's eerily Earthlike. It turns out their names are Adam and Eve! Or, shocker, your neighbor/wife/mother is an alien! Or you discover you're living in an intergalactic zoo!

Ten thousands stories based on these ideas have already been written. What hope is there of writing an original story?

On the other hand, music is built out of a limited number of notes and chords and time signatures. People have been writing love songs since before there was even a way to write them down, let along record them. But, every day new love songs get written, and some of them are great. There is no idea so old or worn out that a good artist can't find a fresh use for it.

The cheesy alien zoo premise? It was old when Kurt Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse Five. So were stories about time travel. But, rather than shying away from these elements, Vonnegut just incorporates them with an audacious swagger and self-aware humor. Sure, the character travels through time. Sure, he's been exhibited in a zoo on an alien world. But these are included in a much larger story about war and justice and mortality. The story isn't built on time travel. Instead, the science fictional elements serve as a frame that provides an emotional distance that's required to tell the destruction of Dresden without being destroyed by the telling.

Beginning authors often assume that great science fiction stories are about exploring some cool science or technology. In reality, most great science fiction is about exploring larger human truths. Any tools you choose to need to show these truths are fair game.

Once you know this, the vast body of science fiction that's been written before is no longer a constraint on your originality. It's now part of our common cultural language, and fair game to be incorporated into art.

For instance, H. G. Wells wrote a book called The Time Machine. The technology behind the machine is somewhat blurry, but the science shown in demonstrating how man might evolve based on the theories of the day, and how the planet would change based on what's known about how the sun and moon will change, are reasonably sound. For any current author, the important thing about The Time Machine is the fact that anyone even vaguely familiar with popular culture knows what a time machine is. If you want to write a time travel story, you don't need to do serious research into the plausible construction of a time machine. You write, "I set the controls of my time machine to 1941 and pressed the button." Poof! The reader will follow you to 1941. The time machine can look like a Police Box, a fast car, or a watch. It can be a phone app, a special beverage you purchase at 7-11, or a do it yourself kit downloaded off the internet. It's a free idea, yours to use with gusto, with the caveat that your story shouldn't be about time travel. H. G. Wells wrote his book about time travel. His is the story that explains the concept. You, get to use the concept. You can use time travel as a plot gimmick, but the focus of the story can't be "wow, what an amazing technology." In my own case, my first novel Nobody Gets the Girl has a time machine in it. It exists not to explore the wonders of time travel, but to provide my protagonist with existential angst once his life gets erased. I use it as a device to take my character apart and put him back together in pursuit of exploring the larger question of just what, exactly, is a "normal" life. Oh, and there are some giant baby dolls and some superheroes and a trip to Mars, for literary merit.

The big advantage of stealing from existing science fiction is that you know going in what sort of market exists. If you want to write stories set on a post apocalyptic Earth, or about travelling to an alternative reality, or about first contact with aliens, you know that there's already a viable base of readers who've enjoyed the concept in the past and might have liked it enough to read another one. This is how genres come about--readers enjoy murder mysteries, or romances, or stories about robots that fall in love while solving murder mysteries, and want to recreate the pleasure of that experience.

The disadvantage of recycling old ideas is that, well, they're old ideas. Great science fiction thrives on instilling a sense of wonder. That can be tough to do when you're staying safely within the predefined lines drawn by authors who happened to have the unfair advantage of being born a century before you. Now, no matter how fresh you try to make your time travel story, it's probably going to vanish from bookstores in a few years, while H G Wells is still in print and being read over a century later. Writing the familiar is a great strategy for selling books. It's far less likely to earn you literary immortality.