Don't Think about Your Reader (But Do Care about Them)

During my sabbatical from Novel Spaces I toyed with ideas for a year’s worth of columns – and often resolved to write them while the were fresh in my mind. I did not. And this morning, when I realized my first column for 2018 was due, I was caught completely flat footed.

While flapping in circles wondering what to do, I came across some old advice about never thinking about your audience or market when you write, just write! I realized I had something to add to that. Because, like all absolutes, it’s not really.

My current novel series, Dirt and Stars, is young adult science fiction. The protagonists’ ages are 15 to 16 in book one, Down to Dirt, and age through 16 to 18 over the course of books two and three, Life on Dirt and Rise from Dirt. The market for YA fiction is, of course, everyone, but publishers usually target readers a year or two younger than the protagonists – in this case, 13 to 16. This perception of who will be reading the novel impacts how the editor and publisher feel topics like cursing, sexuality, emotional trauma, social issues, and other potentially sensitive issues are addressed.

And they’re right to be concerned – I live and have taught in a North Carolina county where Sherman Alexie’s Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian is banned from public schools and libraries because a 15-year-old boy describes the joy of – not the act of – masturbation. The novel intelligently depicts eating disorders, racism, poverty, alcoholism, suicide, and cultural identity – topics that should be addressed and discussed in middle and high schools. But that one paragraph has kept it out of untold numbers of school districts – which translates to the loss of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of copies sold to English classes.

Dirt and Stars is written in multiple first-person, told through the frequently-intersecting journals of five characters. Mara Duval of Tombaugh Station must write about her visit to dirt (Earth) for academic credit; Jael Alden intends to do great things and her father (half jokingly) told her to keep a record so she’d have the facts right in her memoir; Beth Duval writes because her best friend Jael writes; Lije Bronislav dreams of being an entrepreneur and believes great ideas can come from random observations; and Fatima Kielani has a social communications disorder and records her daily interactions for discussion with her therapist.

For thirty years I taught in an alternative high school, or taught “those kids” – the ones in the self-contained room at the end of the hall – in a traditional school, was a community support case manager, and did in-home and community “coaching” for family preservation services. When you’ve been around teenagers long enough that you’re part of the furniture, they’ll converse about all kinds of things in front of you. (Especially if you cultivate the impression you’re a little hard of hearing.) I drew on the things I learned and observed working with kids in crisis when creating my characters, how they thought and felt and how they spoke. And my first try was pretty upsetting for everyone who saw it. Eventually I figured out that realistically depicting what I’d experienced didn’t work for my story – all of my characters came from stable homes, were clean and sober, and didn’t have kids of their own. I had to draw on what I knew, not reproduce it; be authentic without being graphic; and make my people accessible without being generic.

Cursing, as Maggie King wrote so well about on December 22, Do You Let Your Characters Swear?, was an issue. Science fiction tends to attract younger readers and has a tradition of using made up curses. Firefly gave us gorram an evolution of “goddamn” and Battlestar Gallactica simply replaced “uc” with “ra” to give us the ever-popular Frak!
There’s one actual curse word in Down to Dirt, and it’s there for legitimate effect. The rest of the time the dirt kids say “crap” a lot and Mara says “blow” – which is, you guessed it, a made-up curse word. The trick was making this work without being too cute about it. I imply, but do not explicitly state, that while they only say crap "on camera", they use other words in other situations. And, about a third of the way in, after Mara vehemently exclaims “blow”, I have her explain it in this entry from Beth’s journal.

“Why do you say ‘blow’ like it’s the f-word?” I asked.
Mara looked at me sharply ... then the corner of her mouth twitched. “Because it is like the f-word,” she said. “Only not about that.”
“Oookay,” I said after waiting for her to add something more. “How is it like the f-word only not about that?”
“A blow is a catastrophic decompression,” Mara said. “Like a hull breach, or when you’re outside and your EVA suit is punctured, or the seals on your waldo rupture.”
I didn’t know what a waldo was, but evidently having its seals rupture in space was really bad.
“So you’re saying that if someone in space has a blow,” I said carefully, “they’re pretty much f-worded?”
“Pretty much,” she agreed solemnly.
Jael laughed. “Beth, you are the only person I know who says ‘f-word’ when there’s no one around.”

Conversations about sex can be both realistic and PG if neither character is sure of the other’s limits or expectations (or orientation) and they’re both sounding each other out without being explicit.

Late in Down to Dirt Mara is sexually assaulted. That scene went through more rewrites than the rest of the scenes combined. In the final iteration I describe just enough of the physicality to give context, but focus not on the act but on Mara’s panic—evoking the horror without detail. In the end, I think this worked better than any graphic description would have. And, relevant to the point, it made the scene accessable to the reader who might be overwhelmed (or offended) by a rawer telling.

So. Don’t worry about your reader when you write? Maybe not in the first draft, when you’re getting everything out so you can work with it. But at the same time, you should be mindful of the person listening to your story. Not readers in the generic – that’s the publisher’s concern, when they’re marketing the story you wrote – but that one reader you want to read, remember, and share what you’ve given them.

The 3 Books That Scared Me Most

It's October and people are dusting off those old horror movies and preparing to scare themselves silly. This got me thinking about the books that had frightened me most. While the ones I chose don't strictly belong in the horror genre—one is a literary short story, another is a dystopian SF novel and the third is dark fantasy—they scared me far more than anything I've read by that master of horror, Stephen King. Why did they make the top slots? Because the horror factor stayed with me long after I turned the last page and sat in a stupor, eyes glazed and tee-shirt sweaty, my mind reeling from the hellish possibilities conjured by these authors.

Now, what scares me might not scare everyone. I know that some are scared by evil spirits and things that go bump in the night. Storms. Sharks, spiders. No Internet service. I'm not scared of those things. It's reality that makes my teeth chatter, or the logical projection of current reality into a nightmare reality that is all too believable, even inevitable. This brings me to my top contender, the book that scared me more than any other in my 50+ years on the planet....

1. The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
(Spoilers!) Here is the earth, America to be precise, after some ass started a nuclear war. Nothing grows because sunlight can't get through the thick cover of smoke and dust. Everything is covered with ash. Everything is dead, including the ocean. Shorelines are strewn with the bones of all the dead fish. Some people survive, and what they become in the desperate quest for food and water is something that cannot be called human. This book contains the single most horrifying scene I've ever read—even more horrifying than a scene in a short story I read decades ago where a child is slowly disemboweled by a Mephistophelean character. Yes, it tops that.

2. Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury.
This novel should not even be on this list because I never finished it. I was a child when I blithely picked it off a bookshelf at home, and I didn't get very far. All I remember is a fairground where nothing is as it seems, and the more I read, the creepier everyone and everything became. To my child's eyes, this perversion of things that should be innocent and harmless, like carousels and merry-go-rounds, was so terrifying that I closed the book, slipped it back on the shelf—and shivered every time I saw its grey, faded cover over the next couple of decades. Still can't bring myself to finish it.

3. A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor.
(Spoilers!) This is a short story I read just a few years ago, so I vividly remember how this tale hung over me like a seething, dripping, noxious cloud for several weeks. O'Connor takes an ordinary, flawed family, Granny and all, and puts them on a road trip from Georgia to Florida where they make a wrong turn and fall into the hands of some men who embody the worst qualities mankind has to offer. The family—mom, dad, gram and kids—do not survive the encounter, and it was the utter banality of the savagery that did me in. It was a long time before I could push that horrific tale of murder, madness and mayhem out of my head.

There we have it—three stories that scared the pants off me. What are the stories that terrified you the most? Tell me in the comments!

Dread NOT the Back Cover Blurb, for You Can Do It!

Recently I was at Westercon and the topic of writing the back cover blurb came up. You know, those couple paragraphs that describe your book and sell the reader on it. Great ones encapsulate the story and lure you to buy the book. It's the second thing people look at after the cover. If they like the cover, their next move is to pick up the book, flip it over, and read the description to find out what's inside.

One of the authors on the self publishing panel said she hated writing back cover blurbs. I said I actually liked writing the back cover blurb and had written them for all my books, published and un-published. 

I began writing the back cover blurbs with Tea Times Three, then an unfinished novel that I hoped to one day complete. I wrote it is as an exercise to help me finish the book. I continued to write back cover copy and wrote one for Carmine Rojas: Dog Fight which was actually the paragraph describing the book in my query letter. 

I began to do it seriously when I found this blog post by Cat Rambo Notes From Michael Stackpole’s “How To Write a Novel in 21 Days”. Using his plan you write the back cover blurb on day 16. The back cover copy should consist of no more than six sentences. It sounds like an impossible task, to boil your work down to just a few lines. But I went and I counted the number of sentences on the back cover of other, published novels, and by gum, he was right! Most blurbs are just that long. That's not to say they don't cheat with a semicolon here and there too squeeze in an extra long sentence. But that really is the average.

I found that it really helped me focus on the plot, the core conflicts (just like he said it should) and best of all, it will help you write the dreaded query! And you don't have to wait for Day 16 either. If you have a book idea you can always start there. Or write it midway through your first draft when you feel more secure about the plot. Write it when you feel inspired to write it.

Tips to keep in mind:
-Establish your main character(s) quickly.
-You don't need to include the entire plot- get to the inciting incident ("but when").
-Include the stakes! What does your character need to accomplish and what stands in their way?

Breakdown of the original blurb for Tea Times Three:
The sleepy town of Midswich Maine is shaken when three witches arrive and open a tea shop. Bruleé, Anglaise, and Caramel just want to start over in a new place, far from their troubles. Unfortunately Pastor Austin and a pack of upright citizens have other ideas.

Can the witches stay in their new home and save their business? Or will they be run out of town before anyone can even try their magical teas?

Even as they make friends their days may be numbered.

The first paragraph introduces the main characters, the setting, and what the main characters hope to accomplish. The second sentence of the first paragraph introduces the character who stands int heir way, Pastor Austin and his upright citizens. 

The second paragraph raises the stakes for the three witches. Can they save their business or will they be run out of town?

The last paragraph, just a sentence, introduces some hope, they are making friends, but it may not be enough. 

Whole swathes of both plot and characters are left out of the back cover description. The reader will discover those on their own when they buy the book and read it for themselves. They don't need to know everything upfront. If they did, why buy the book?

If you feel intimidated by the task, practice! Write a blurb for a book which has already been published. Or for one that you've read. Before too long you should start being able to tell what to add and what to cut. I will also say that it takes a few drafts too! Don't be afraid to write two, or four, or seven versions. 

Living on Dirt

So. I have news. I waited until after the last second – sixteen hours after the last second, to be precise – to post this column because I was hoping something scheduled to happen sometime this week would happen before I did. It hasn't. (But when it does, I'll edit to add a link.) First, four bits of context. (And no, I'm not burying the lede. When the link is up it'll be at the top of the column and all this framing information will be a footnote.) First, as somewhere between 42% and 63% of you know, the many-faceted relationships between differing races and cultures – in general, of course, but more often the interactions between individuals of different races and cultures as each copes with the mysterious "other" – is a subject that fascinates me. I have been half of an interracial partnership for thirty-four years and the father of people proud of their blended heritage for thirty-two to twenty-four years, depending on the individual. (And, for a bit over two years, grandfather of a dynamic young lady whose self image has not yet expanded beyond certainty she's the center of a loving universe.) I first met Liane and the other founders of Novel Spaces in a romance writers' group because my wife wanted (still wants) me to write interracial romances. If nothing else were going on, I'd have written this month's column about Conrad's Heart of Darkness , which I taught decades ago, and the recent what-in-God's-name-were-they-thinking travesty of A Birthday Cake for George Washington. Second, science fiction is my core genre. I love mystery, historical, fantasy, and enjoy sweet-to-'R'-romances, westerns, and contemporary, but my reader's heart imprinted on science fiction before I understood the concept of genres. More specifically, while I love Golden Age raygun-and-tentacle scifi and what are probably more properly called science fantasies (like Star Trek), alternate histories are at the center of my scifi addiction. What would have happened if: ...there had been no pandemic to wipe out 92% of North America's population two years before the Pilgrims arrived? ...Emperor Constantine had never converted to Christianity? ...Alexander the Great had lived another thirty years? Many years ago I posited a world in which FDR decided against federal funding for research into the atom bomb and chose not to run for a third term (both of which almost happened). As an exercise in world building I tracked the consequences of FDR's third and fourth term decisions, as well as those of his VP and successor Harry Truman, and explored how events would have unfolded differently. In my alternate world James Byrnes is elected President and the Dixiecrats – the 1940s Democratic progenitors of today's Republican Tea Party – become the dominant political party. Without nuclear weapons WWII in the Pacific would have lasted at least a year longer, with much of Japan razed by the Allied invasion. And the economically pragmatic Byrnes, not distracted by the idea of weapons, would have funded nuclear research that led to the cheap, clean nuclear power plants envisioned by writers of the 1940s and the Golden Age mainstay of planetary exploration, "fusion rockets" (the warp drive of their era). Everyday reality would include practically free energy, efficient nationwide mass transit, and colonies on the Moon and Mars by 1980. But the politically paranoid Dixiecrats and their successors would also have instituted tighter government control over communications, information, and technology as a defense against communism and other anti-American forces. Jim Crow laws would have lasted for decades longer and the Civil Rights Movement would not have made significant progress until the 1990s. Through all of this I had an amorphous idea for a novel about that delayed struggle for equality that never quite crystallized into a solid plot. I'm a fan of young adult fiction and a big believer in the power of the genre. (As evidenced by this column from 2012: Juvenile Fiction.) Not only is YA the gateway through which most young people become readers, the clarity with which they (the good ones) address complex personal and social issues make them accessible to adults who are not normally readers (i.e. Harry Potter and Hunger Games). From Ann of Green Gables to The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian, YA is my go-to genre for relaxation. A few years ago I was invited to submit a story to young adult sf anthology on pretty short notice. I floundered for nearly thirty seconds before thinking of my alternative history continually in progress. I wrote a story about a girl born and raised on a space station being required to visit her cousins on 'dirt' – which is what the hyper-elitist white folk in the Space Service called Earth (the Earth folk are 'dirts'). Things are worse, better, and generally completely different from what she'd been raised to expect. The story wasn't accepted, but the YA approach to my civil rights in the twenty-first century concept felt right. Over the next year I developed the narrative outline for a novel about a hyper elitist teen space girl so freaked out by being on dirt she's afraid to touch anything, her egalitarian dirt cousin, and her dirt cousin's best friend, a young woman who is gifted, black, and determined to break the Space Service's color barrier. It took me another year to actually write the novel. (Actually, the writing was impossible until I let go of the idea that everyone's problems could be solved in one novel and set 2/3 of what I had aside for later volumes.) Finally, I am not a publisher. I did want to be, did intend to be. I attended every training and webinar on publishing I could find. With the help of a SCORE mentor, I work out a solid business model. I did, in fact, form Kvaad Press in 2011. But, as evidenced by a forty-year career in human services, including education, personal care, and mental health, I do not have the heart of a business person. Nor did I know any business-minded people who were willing and able to invest the knowledge, time, and money to keep Kvaad Press going. I've been writing professionally for a decade and a half. I have novels, anthologies, websites, even a coffee table book to my credit. But all of my work has been in media tie-in. Everything I've sold has been linked to a television show, movie, or game – intellectual properties that I do not own. Figuring out what to do with something that was mine, that I wholly owned, was uncharted territory for me. I knew I didn't want to go with a major house, where I'd be an anonymous cog, and I knew I had neither the skills nor the temperament to succeed as a total indie, which left.... what? I began searching for a small press that treated writers like partners, or at least team members. Found a lot of predators but found a remarkable number of good people, too. One such outfit is Evolved Publishing. With whom I've signed a three book contract. The first volume in my Dirt and Stars series will be hitting the streets in July.

Collaboration: generalizing from a limited sample.

If you want to learn about how a successful, established collaborative team works, read anything about writing by Dayton Ward. (After you've read this, of course.) He and writing partner Kevin Dilmore have written a dozen and a half Star Trek stories, eBooks, and novels, plus at least one 4400 novel. I, on the other hand, have had one good experience working with another writer, one not-good experience working with another writer, two experiences outlining and pitching Star Trek novels that didn't get picked up, and one "run away!" successful avoidance of working with another writer. Everything I know about collaborations would fit in a monthly column. Which, as it happens, is coincidentally fortuitous.

Note that collaborating with another writer is completely different from being on a writing team. I have been part of the writing team for over a dozen campaign books, scenario books, players' guides (to equipment/character creation/NPCs/settings/etc.) and rule books for assorted role-playing games. I've been on the editorial team for nearly as many more. On one occasion I was the leader of the editorial and writing team – "herding cats" does not do the experience justice. In a team setting the degree of collective brainstorming and/or who's involved in the brainstorming varies during the development stage varies widely from project to project, but once the general structure is set, each writer is assigned sections to write and each editor is assigned writers to edit and from that point on everyone pretty much works independently. In a collaboration the writers work together on every aspect of the project from brainstorming to final edit.
From my limited experience I think there is one criterion vital to a working collaboration. With this criterion in place it's possible to overcome any creative or stylistic differences. Without it, it's impossible to complete anything worthwhile no matter how well the skills and artistic vision of the writers involved might compliment and support each other. It's not a new revelation, or one you haven't heard applied in a dozen settings, but it's one that can be overlooked or taken for granted. The indispensable foundation of an effective partnership is mutual respect. But not too much.

By "too much" I mean, way too much – which pretty much means it's not actually mutual. The writer who reached out to me with the collaboration offer from which I fled, positively gushed about my work. They'd had a couple of stories published to date and their question about collaboration included a high concept for a novel that was intriguing enough for me to ask to hear more. They sent a three-paragraph narrative summary that was fairly solid and showed clear thinking – but it was accompanied by three more paragraphs describing how honored and blown away they were by the fact I was even considering working with them and how much they hoped to learn from me and that, who knows?, we might develop into a lifetime writing team like Ellery Queen. There was no way the real me would ever measure up to the fantasy me this person had created. I told them that, regretfully, my schedule was to jammed to take on another project for at least a year and encouraged them to develop the novel on their own. It's been four years and I haven't heard from them.
In the collaboration that didn't work my partner and I worked out a detailed narrative summary and seemed to be in agreement as to what we were doing, and our skillsets seemed to be compatible. He was well versed in what we were writing about and lived in the area in which the story was set, but wrote in a wooden, passive, academic style ill suited to storytelling. I was almost but admittedly not quite as familiar with what we were writing about, had lived in the setting area in the 1970s but not visited for any length of time since (so everything I remembered was either no longer there or useless to our purpose), and wrote like a storyteller. Somehow this translated into each of us being under the impression that we were the more knowledgeable, more experienced, and more naturally the leader of the team. Worse, when it became apparent early on that we had different visions as to what the final product would look like, we both moved forward with the internal conviction that once the other person saw how it was going to be he'd come around to the correct view. Everything became a power struggle – or rather, everything became a teachable moment in which we each tried to enlighten the other. Not surprisingly, what we ended up with was not what we'd set out to do and was at best 33% as effective as it should have been.
The collaboration that worked began on a fiction site. A reviewer who'd given me glowing reviews of the sort that indicate some understanding of the craft (pointing out how skillfully I'd placed Chekov's gun in an opening scene, for example) mentioned he wanted to write and would be studying my work, along with that of a few others, to see how it was done. I said the encouraging things I usually say to new writers in response, directed him toward a couple of useful writers' blogs, and suggested he look around for serious writers' groups in his area. He told me he really appreciated my guidance, but that last would be difficult because he was in the Army and deployed in Iraq. At which point I realized the appreciation was flowing in the wrong direction and broke my rule about never entering into private conversations with fans. I did not offer to read or edit his work, but I did encourage him to write, offered a few tips and strategies, and browbeat him into submitting his stories. Which got published. And were good. And weren't anything like my stories. For all his saying he was copying me, he'd developed his own voice. We kept in touch, mostly about writing, via emails through his Afghanistan deployments and moves between bases in the US. We met only one time, when he and his wife drove down from Fayetteville for one of my few bookstore signings. Recently I was given the opportunity to pitch for a military science fiction project, and I had an idea for which I'd need help: the story of a battle – including the events leading up to it and the aftermath – told in two narratives from the trenches on both sides. He was game, we hammered out a high-concept pitch, the pitch was greenlighted, and we're now in the throes of actually writing the thing. Our narrative voices are distinctly different – which in this case supports our premise. Our writing methodologies are diametrically opposed. I work mostly in my head – occasionally blurting bits of dialog at the dinner table or mowing the flowerbed as I build bridges between plot points. I may have little more than notes on graph paper in hand when I sit at the keyboard, but I already know the story I'm telling. He makes detailed plans and maps things out. (Literally – he's drawn maps of the major events of the battle that will be in both narratives so the choreography and rhythm mesh; I had to download a pdf of NATO military symbols to read them.) We sometimes seem to speak completely different languages when discussing the project. But. Each of us respects the other as a writer and, more importantly, as a person. And that makes working together possible.

SORMAG interviews Novel Spaces members

Our regular Day 4 poster, the lovely Marissa Monteilh, is recovering from surgery and won't be able to blog today. Get well soon, Marissa!

Last month, LaShaunda Hoffman of Shades of Romance Magazine (SORMAG) interviewed Novel Spaces members Jewel Amethyst, Kevin Killiany, Marissa Monteilh and Liane Spicer. Here is the full podcast of the interview in which we discuss the running of a group blog--how we got started, why we do it, how we do it, what's behind our longevity, and more.

Enjoy!

So--you're a romance writer... *snicker*

The two or three people who've read my work know me as a romance writer. Two of the three novel-length works I've published to date are contemporary romance/romantic suspense, and I tend to get a little defensive about my 'romance writer' label for two reasons:

• Romance writing is generally looked down upon by the rest of the writing establishment, and by academia. (See Romance Schromance: Do Romance Novels Have Any Literary Value?)
• And then there's this: romance is just one of the genres in which I write. 

I decided to count my genres when I read Che Gilson's post "Writing Bucket List", and realized I write in no fewer than seven of them.

I write mystery. I've started a mystery novel that I'm very excited about. It's set on a fictitious Caribbean island and explores the other side of the tourist destination ethos of the region: no smiling 'natives' serving drinks with umbrellas but real people with real struggles, out of control violent crime, white collar corruption, and yes, a little realistic romance.

I write memoir. I've written one on raising my son and it's awaiting a final edit before I submit it anywhere.

I write literary fiction. One of my short stories has been published in a literary journal, another was shortlisted for a lit prize, and several others are cooling their heels on my hard drive. One of my WIPs is a novel which draws on my family history and may be categorized as literary, women's fiction or mainstream. Not sure yet.

I write science fiction. Just one so far. Yup, surprised me too, but I woke up with the story in my head and could not get it out. So I wrote it. Not sure yet what exactly I should do with it, and don't know if I'll be writing any more.

I write poetry. I don't consider myself a poet, but I've always written 'poemish' things. Last year I took a poetry writing class and although I got an A I still don't consider myself a poet. Not too sure what I'll do with that collection of sonnets, haikus, tankas, ballads, acrostics, villanelles, dramatic monologues, modified forms and free verse, but it sure was fun writing them.

I write flash fiction. Submitted my favorite here, and I see more FF in my future.

Seven genres, and I've probably overlooked a couple others. I was told by a well-meaning friend years ago that I should stick to one genre and develop a fan base there before moving into other genres. But I'm wayward. I write what I want, when I want. And with the growth of indie publishing, I can also publish what I want, when I want. Am I making money doing my own thing? Very little thus far. Am I happy doing things my way? You bet I am.

Do you stick to one genre? Or do you juggle multiple genres like I do?

~Liane

The Value of Awards

The winners of the Hugo Awards – the science fiction community's equivalent of the Oscars – were announced by the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) at the 72nd World Science Fiction Convention (aka "Loncon 3") in London this week. In fact, given the time zones, as I type this Loncon 3 is in it's last hour.

If you don't follow the science fiction industry you can be excused for not knowing about the Hugo Award. The award is named for Hugo Gernsback, a man often credited as being the, or at least a, father of science fiction (which he originally called "scientifiction"). His contribution to the establishment of science fiction as a recognized genre was not creative – or at least not creative in the way H.G. Wells's or Jules Verne's contributions were creative. He was a businessman who, early in the 20th century, recognized the popularity – and profit potential – of stories we today call science fiction and began the first pulp magazine devoted to them. Actually he founded three. I've read that Gernsback's recipe for a good science fiction story was three parts story to one part science (even if the science was sometimes little more than a stand-in for magic). As an editor he had an eye for stories that inspired readers' imagination and made scientists more heroic than they had ever been before.

Gernsback did well for himself as an editor and publisher mostly by cutting every corner he could (his cheapness was the stuff of legends), paying writers and artist almost nothing (when he paid them at all), and generally living by an "all's fair" business ethic. As nearly as I can tell, no one who ever worked for or with the man had fond memories of the experience. But his popularizing of what had been a marginal type of story, motivating a generation of youngsters to want to be scientists, and giving the first great names among science fiction writers their (unpaid) start is what he's remembered for today.

This year – as with just about every award ever bestowed anywhere for any reason – the announcement of the winners was not greeted with universal approval and acclaim by the general public. There were murmurings of cronyism, or of politically motivated choices, or of votes indicating popularity of the writer rather than the merits of the works, or that only safe stories that didn't challenge the establishment were selected, or, or, or, ... and could we at least get through something without Game of Thrones winning?
I have no opinion on this year's Hugo Awards – I haven't read a single one of the nominated novels, novellas, novelettes, short stories, graphic novels, or related works. I will say that two people I like won in their categories and two other people I like didn't win in theirs and leave it at that.

The winners of the Hugo Awards are decided by vote. This year they were decided by about 2,500 votes cast exclusively by members of the World Science Fiction Society. What does it take to become part of this august body? $50. That's the annual fee for the lowest level of membership in the WSFS. But if that's all it takes, how come only 2,500 people voted? The WSFS has to have more members than that. I'm sure it does. I'm also sure that if every single member voted, they'd still be a statistically insignificant fraction of the number of people who read the books or stories or graphic novels and saw the movies and TV shows. The number of votes can't be that important; after all, the Oscars are awarded based on the votes of only six thousand people. (Note I foreshadowed this point by linking the Hugo to the Oscar in the opening sentence.) Of course this is a false comparison. With the exception of the honorary members, the people who make up the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – the folk who vote for the Academy Award of Merit, aka Oscar – are all professionals in the industry who understand the craftsmanship and effort that went into the productions on which they vote. (Of course, statistically their mostly white men over sixty, but that's an issue for another column.)
In other words, the Oscar is voted on by six thousand professional peers of the nominees and the Hugo is voted on by twenty-five hundred fans of the nominees willing to pay $50 for the ballot.

Am I saying the Hugo Award is meaningless? Of course not. The Hugo may not be all that the WSFS would want it to be – and it's certainly not on a par with the Oscar – but no award is meaningless.

Not only can winning an award be a validation of your own work, it becomes part of your public identity – your brand as a writer. Awards and award winners have an affect on people – even those who don't have a clear idea what the award is about. Even being nominated for an award elevates the writer in the eyes of the buying public – which is why you see "nominated for...." on so many ads. Being a finalist carries weight – a potential reader unsure of choosing between unknown writers will feel a little safer plunking down $9.99 for a title that made the finals. And of course, once you've won an award you are forever an award-winning author.

So go for those regional, themed, and literary competitions. Check each one out first – it's basic common sense to make sure it's legitimate and respected; there are a lot of scams out there. If an entrance fee is required, use your own judgment as to whether or how much you're willing to pay. It's gratifying to have someone else nominate one of your published works, but writing specifically for a contest helps you build the discipline for finishing what you start, meeting guidelines and expectations, and delivering a story on deadline. It's all about developing professional standards.
And boosting your award-winning brand.

Bringing New Toys to Someone Else’s Sandbox.

For those of you who may still be wondering: Yes, the rumors are true. I do indeed write Star Trek novels.

Why? Well, sure, they pay me, but I also do it because it’s just so gosh-darned fun. I’ve been a nerd for Star Trek for as long as I can remember, having grown up in the 1970s and 80s watching reruns of the original series every weekday afternoon. Catching the gazillionth rerun of Captain Kirk fighting Klingons or whatever was the sole exception to my mother’s “homework and chores before TV” rule. To this day, I’m sure she thinks that hour could’ve been better utilized cutting the grass or cleaning our backyard pool.

And here we are, forty-odd years later, and I still use Star Trek to get out of cutting the grass, but at least now I’m making money from it.

Many of the Star Trek tales I’ve written over the years have featured characters that would be familiar to casual viewers of the various television series. While those of us who write these stories are given a great deal of latitude, there still are “rules we have to follow” with respect to these well-established characters that are so well-known to their legions of fans. In recent years, those rules have relaxed in numerous ways, and we’re now able to develop the characters and take them in directions that never would’ve been allowed while the television series and films were in production.

Another thing we’ve been allowed to do is to develop whole sets of all-new characters, who didn’t originate in one of the shows, and place them in the Star Trek setting, taking advantage of the familiar universe and its trappings to tell new stories which are set completely apart from the television episodes and movies. Pocket Books, the company that publishes Star Trek novels, had achieved success with a handful of series in this vein. Star Trek Vanguard, set during the time of the original 1960s series, was perhaps my favorite thing to write because it gave me the best of both worlds when it comes to writing books based on television or film properties: being able to use a familiar setting or “universe” as the point of departure for new characters and situations which aren’t tied to the “canon” of the parent media property. As the title of this post suggests, writing stories such as these are very much like being allowed to bring your own toys to play in someone else’s sandbox.

Debuting later this month is the first book in an all-new novel series, Star Trek: Seekers, which I helped develop. My longtime writing partner, Kevin Dilmore, our friend and colleague David Mack, and I spun out this idea from the Vanguard series for which the three of us had written. We collaborated on the series proposal and pitched it to our editors and the people who own Star Trek, and then we developed a two-part story to launch our new series, working as a team on the stories for the first two books. David wrote the first book, Second Nature, which is set to be released in about a week, and Kevin and I took the baton from him for our book, Point of Divergence, which will be published next month.

The original Star Trek will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2016, and there are those who might argue that there’s really very little left to be done with something which has been around that long. To them, I say, “Bah!” Writing stories like this is tremendous fun. Anticipation from among loyal readers seems to be pretty high, and we’re excited to see how fans will react. The new series was even given a bit of love by no less than USA Today. As someone who grew up watching the show, getting to stitch a new section into this immense and ever-growing tapestry is an unparalleled opportunity. It truly is a wonderful sandbox in which to play.

Genre-Phobic

by Sunny Frazier

Yesterday, I went to a sci-fi gathering at an eclectic bookstore in Clovis, California. Normally, I avoid this genre because I've never read sci-fi or fantasy. However, I've dragged my friend Che to a number of bookish events she was reluctant to attend, so I owed her.

I don't know who Dr. Who is, but apparently the kid in the suit and bow tie was representing. I felt awkward sitting next to the barefoot woman with the gypsy scarf and leg bracelet, despite the fact that I do astrology (I'd thoughtfully left my crystal ball at home). I still don't know where a mandolin fit into the picture—did I miss something?

There were interesting readings: penguin armies on the rampage, vampire bartenders, severed hand in a Humvee, proof of ancient aliens. These subjects never come up at the mystery events I attend. No, my friends and I are more concerned with the best way to kill people and where to hide a body. Information you can really use.

The trivia contest for free books involved knowing novels like Dune and Lord of the Rings cover to cover. Answers were contested and people googled on their phones to double-check. It all sounded like gibberish to me. The fact that people actually knew the answers set the nerd bar very high.

But, you know, I found much of the same energy and camaraderie among these fantasy aficionados as I see with my murder-loving friends. I could even feel myself being pulled into their strange world of stranger worlds. Maybe I've been too genre-phobic all these years. The level of imagination coming from this group stunned me. Mystery writing requires a certain amount of control and at least one foot in reality. None of that seemed to apply with these authors.

As an acquisitions editor, I've had to open my mind to a wide range of reading material. I introduced a Western line even though Lonesome Dove was the only real Western I'd ever read. I was able to stretch a bit on paranormal plots but drew the line at the werewolf/vampire/zombie trend. However, Oak Tree Press is trying a contest this year for our Mystic Oaks line so yes, bring on all of the above. I can handle it.

Bottom line: maybe I'm ready to explore genres outside my comfort zone. But, I think I have to draw the line at romance writing events. I hear those authors are STRANGE!            

Like Me. Friend Me!

I find it so funny that a few short months ago Facebook was not my friend. Not at all. I definitely didn’t “like” FB. When I first created a profile it sat there. I rarely posted. I mean for months. Sometimes I’d go on and make a brief comment on a post by one of my “friends”. I didn’t get FB, and using it confused me. Months would go by and I wouldn’t event visit FB.

Fast forward a couple of years and FB is now my friend. I talked about my use of FB as an author. Now I’m having great fun as a reader. I joined several FB groups. Two are readers groups that invited me (and other authors). Two are authors groups networking and sharing information. The other group is a hybrid of sorts. Reading In Black was started by author Deatri King-Bey. But the group is also for readers. Of course we authors are major readers/book geeks as well. The over arching goal of the group is to discuss mystery, thriller, horror, Sci-Fi, fantasy and paranormal novels written by and about POC (people of color).



I’ve discovered a long list of authors writing books I didn’t know existed. One example Steampunk written by and featuring POC. I didn’t know! I also have fallen in love with a genre called Sword and Soul – epic fantasy based on African traditions, culture and history. My first taste Griots, an anthology. I’m in love (huge Game of Thrones fanatic).

Since Fringe and Person of Interest debuted their fall season first episodes 9/28, those of us who are fans geeked out to discuss the story lines, actors, scripts and more. I’ve also been buying thrillers, mystery and paranormal novels. We discuss movies, so it’s not just about books. Though there is a lot of book talk. Saturday night (9/29) someone posted that Lake Placid, The Final Chapter would be on the SyFy channel. Spontaneously several of us started posting hilarious comments on FB while watching (silly dialogue, too stupid to live characters, who gets eaten first, etc.)

So I invite readers of the genres we read and write to stop by and consider joining up. We’re not just having a blast, but you’ll be able learn about wonderful books.
I’m writing a book I want to be on sale for the holidays. Now I have to make myself stay away from FB. 360 degree change. Seriously.

News And Shameless Self-Promotion

Now that Devon Archer has moved on from Novel Spaces, we will have occasional empty blogging slots that our writers will use for promotion and news.

I believe I am the first to take advantage of this opportunity, and I have several pieces of news to share.


Campbell Award


I am in my second (and last) year of eligibility for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in the genres of science fiction and fantasy. If you are eligible to nominate works and people for Hugo Awards, you can nominate as many as five people for Campbell Award at the bottom of the Hugo ballot.

Please consider nominating me for the Campbell Award. Last year, it took only 40 nominations to get on the final ballot, so your five votes really do count.  

A list of people eligible to be nominated for the Campbell Award is posted at Writertopia. Clicking on a name will take you to a page telling you what work made that person eligible. Most pages also have a bio and a list of fiction publications and awards. My own page is at http://www.writertopia.com/profiles/ShaunaRoberts.

You don't need to nominate five works or people in every category on the Hugo ballot; in fact, you can leave entire categories blank. If you vote, the nomination ballot must be received by March 11. Thanks.

Novel Sale

Hadley Rille Books, the science fiction and fantasy press that published Like Mayflies in a Stream, will be publishing my novel Ice Magic, Fire Magic.  

Ice Magic, Fire Magic is a fantasy with strong romantic elements. Its heroine is a woman who is  incapable of doing evil and who must become the ruler of her world. Meanwhile, evil people who want to seize her power are out to stop her.

I wrote the novel to explore in more depth the good Kirk–bad Kirk dilemma: Can a person who is all good be an effective leader?

Ice Magic, Fire Magic has some cool elements I had fun creating. The land is sentient and chooses the ruler. The rulers are true servants of the people, and they go barefoot as a constant reminder that they should serve, not be served. Two species of humans share the land; one species wields magic, and the other relies on advanced technology. Women and men work different types of magic; their magic is complementary, and both kinds are needed for the land to thrive. A lonely, 1000-year-old evil spirit tries to influence both the good heroine and her evil opponents. And then there are the ice dragons and fire lizards.

The book is scheduled for publication in 2013.


Story Sale

My fantasy flash story "Moonlight, Reflected in Dewdrops" was published in the January 2012 issue of 10Flash Quarterly. You can read it for free at http://www.10flashmagazine.com/10flash-fantasy/moonlight-reflected-in-dewdrops/. 


 New e-Books

My novelette "The Hunt, " despite having been published twice, is hard to find. This science fiction mystery is one of my favorite pieces I've written. So I've put it up at Amazon.com as an e-book. You can find it at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006WEVR7I.

I hope within the next week or so to put up my 1983 dissertation for Northwestern University (Evanston, Ill.) on mating behavior of Nicobar pigeons (Caloenas nicobarica) at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. Although mating behavior has been studied extensively in other pigeons, to my knowledge my dissertation remains the only such work on Nicobar pigeons, so it will be useful for a few specialists to have it available.

Of more interest to Novel Spaces readers, this spring, if all goes well, I will e-publish my epic fantasy novel Shrine of the Heavens. More on it later. 

Time Travel Writing

As an avid reader of time travel fiction, movies, and TV series, not too surprisingly, I also enjoy writing time travel novels.

My young adult novel, DANGER IN TIME, involves a teenager who goes back in time ten years to save sister's life--only putting both teens in danger.

I have always been fascinated by the concept of time travel, black holes, and such. It is fun speculating on the theoretical twists, turns, and implications of time travel.

For instance, would I be dead or never born today, were I killed during a trip to the past? Or does the chicken or the egg come first when it concerns the time bending of traveling from the present?

Could a single change in time disrupt the entire future?

These are all intriguing questions, giving novelists and screenwriters ample possibilities to play with, leading to varying outcomes.

Some of my favorite time travel novels are:

1. THE MAP OF TIME by Félix J Palma
2. THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE by Audrey Niffenegger
3. THE TIME MACHINE by H.G. Wells
4. A WRINKLE IN TIME by Madeleine L'Engle
5. BOTH SIDES OF TIME by Caroline Cooney

Amongst my favorite time travel series are:

1. THE TIME TUNNEL
2. BEING ERICA
3. STAR TREK
4. LOST IN SPACE
5. JOURNEYMAN

Favorite time travel movies include:

1. TIME AFTER TIME
2. THE TWO WORLDS OF JENNIE LOGAN
3. SOMEWHERE IN TIME
4. THE TIME MACHINE
5. THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE

What do you think about time travel? Where would you like to go if you could travel to the past or future?

What are you favorite time travel novels, movies, or television series?

Space Opera

Space Opera sure has changed since I was young. And not for the good. I’m thinking about this genre lately because my work in progress, “Under the Ember Star,” is definitely a Space Opera. What is Space Opera, you ask? Primarily, it’s adventure fiction set in an SF universe with faster-than-light ships, exotic aliens both friendly and not, and star-spanning planetary alliances and empires. Characters are typically larger-than-life and freely express themselves with blasters and other SF hardware.

Star Trek, especially the original series, is Space Opera. Star Wars is Space Opera. Han Solo may be the quintessential Space Opera hero, with his bravado and his low-slung blaster. Space Opera is fun. Or at least it used to be.

I recently read a big thick book of so called “Military SF,” which is a form of Space Opera. The story was so weighed down with multiples on multiples of characters and political intrigue that I ended up scanning the last half and vowing never to read this author again. Then I started a collection of short stories called “The New Space Opera.” The “new” should have been a warning. The first story, while very well written and relatively entertaining, was a socio-cultural examination of two alien tribes in conflict. Ninety percent of it was essentially a narrator’s internal monologue. Say what?

I suppose if you read the story carefully you might be introduced to some deep thoughts about what it means to be human. Screw that, I say! Blow some shit up! Give us some smoking blasters. Give us some colorful exotic action. Let the characters move and breathe in an unfettered imaginary universe. I don’t want my SF to ape literary fiction.

Now, let me make one thing clear about my meaning here. Just because there is action and a plot that moves does not mean there can’t be character development and important insights into the human condition. But, at least for me, authors need to imbed that development and those insights in a matrix of adventure. Star Wars developed characters. Star Trek developed them. I just love reading about Kirk and Spock and McCoy. They are more real to me than any so called “literary” character ever. I’ve learned more from them about what it means to be human, and to strive to be a better human, than I’ve learned from all the literary fiction I’ve read in a lifetime. And I learned it because it was so damn much fun.

I can tell you one thing, “Under the Ember Star” ain’t going to be no “new” Space Opera. There’s even a chapter entitled “Smoking Blasters.” Things are gonna blow up in my story. Blood is gonna spill. There’ll be larger-than-life characters and cool items like hovercycles and plasma cannon. Cause if I can’t find it in the stuff being published today, I’m gonna have to write it myself.

Time Travel

I have always been fascinated by the idea of time travel. It is a tricky topic, expertly handled by some authors like Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan, not so well handled by others.

On one hand, one can take many liberties when writing about time travel because to my knowledge, no one has ever traveled into the past or future. Who is to say how it happens? Can you affect the future by changing the past? If I go into the past and kill my mother, do I disappear from the future (the grandfather paradox)? Do I disappear from the now, in which case I could not commit the murder? Is the future a parallel world? If the future exists already, does it mean that we cannot make our own decisions? Authors can make up their own answers to those questions, the only limit is their imagination.

On the other hand, as I suggested above, time travel is a circular topic and difficult to handle without slipping up. In many books on time travel, one can find an inconsistency or something that just does not makes sense. It doesn't make the book a bad one, not at all, it just underscores the thin line between creating a fantasy world and losing your reader's ability to ignore reality.

Why is all of this on my mind, you may ask. In my books, the Caribbean Adventure Series, the children travel through time into the past. In the first two books, I avoided all difficult issues. I ensured that the book never skirted over into the area of science fiction, I leave that to my able co-bloggers KeVin and Shauna. The children participated in actual historic events, but their actions had no effect on the outcome of the event or on the future. Not so in the third book. In this book, they affect the life of one person and as a result, their future ... or is it their present (see, I am confused already) is changed. This was the major delay in my (now complete) WIP. It took me a long time to build up the confidence to try to convince my readers that, not only were these children traveling effortlessly through time, but they were also affecting their present by changing the past.

What is your view on the issue of time travel? Do you read it critically or do you let your imagination take abandoned flight into the fantasy?

Giveaway: A Pirate's Passion

I didn't plan it this way but the days on which I'm giving away copies of my books happen to coincide with two days when I'm blogging here. And guess what? Today's the first day!

The Romance Studio has a standard feature they call their Book-A-Day Giveaway and my SFR novella, A Pirate's Passion, will be a giveaway on Monday, 26 April.



How do you know if you'll like the book? Well, the story is a reverse Pygmalion, where the woman -- a member of the Republic gentry -- has to teach a pirate the intricate rituals of her class so he can fleece a rich aristocrat of her money. That's the only way she can get away from him, you see. Except, the more time Tera d'Olzon spends with rakish Gil Ahn, the more she finds herself captivated by him. Just to compound matters, poor little rich girl Tera has plans of her own and they distinctly do NOT include a wanted criminal!

As much as I like both leading characters, I have to say that I also feel rather affectionate towards Kotase, Gil's grizzled second-in-command who is like a father-figure to Gil. And I find the formidable Commander Won to be charming under her terrifying exterior, and hope you do too.

There's time for you to read the entire first chapter here, before you enter the draw here. I'll also be collecting email addresses for restarting my newsletter project, so if you'd like to be included in that, tick the box. And best of luck!

* Kaz Augustin is a writer who loves grumpy characters. You can find her website at http://www.ksaugustin.com and she blogs three times a week, more or less, at http://blog.ksaugustin.com.

Greetings from Malaysia!

It's always difficult coming in on the end of such a strong line-up of writers. They've set such a high standard and you wonder if you're capable of sustaining that. I suppose only time will tell.

So, I'm back home in Malaysia after wandering a few continents for the past couple of decades. And it's been, and continues to be, relatively difficult. There's an old adage -- you can never go back. And it's true. If you've ever left your hometown, then you'll start to pick up little quirks of thought, emotion or action that are foreign to the person you used to be. You'll change. And, when you go back, (depending, of course, on how long you've been away) you'll realise that those changes are enough to perhaps permanently set you apart from your original community. As it has done for me.

Maybe that's why I'm so comfortable writing about aliens and otherwordly landscapes. Because, no matter where I am, I feel like an alien myself. It can be due to the colour of my skin, or the accent in my voice. Home in Malaysia, it's definitely a different way of thinking, including a faster, more abrupt (impatient) way of talking. The locals can tell the minute I open my mouth that I don't really come from around here. Not recently, at any rate.

But what's interesting is also the flip side. I've visited and lived in a variety of countries and had to battle the strange new way of doing things, from examining the labels on unfamiliar-looking groceries (and, believe me, no matter how similar the country to the one you've just come from, there are always going to be several items that completely stump your ability to comprehend), to grappling with a new set of annoying banks, to negotiating the local post office protocols. The language is different -- even if it's English! -- the terrain is different, the smell is different. Yet, the one thing that remains the same are the people themselves.

We all have the same basic dreams, the same wishes for our children, the same hopes for our societies. It's been like this for millennia too because, in reading letters and memoirs from centuries ago, I find a commonality that's startling and, sometimes, depressing. (Haven't we moved beyond [fill in your own pet peeve] yet?) The affirmation part of the equation, though, is what I find so compelling about writing romance. Our humanity is universal, and that is exactly what I feel I'm trying to plug into whenever I sit down and attempt to pen a story.

So, for an alien peering through many windows and -- beyond the surface differences -- seeing the same things, I suppose writing something like science-fiction romance is a natural choice. At least, that's the way I look at it.