Been a while since my last posting here, I’ll go through updates on various things.
Kim getting better
Wife Kim (https://string-or-nothing.com) continues to get stronger and have an easier time doing day to day tasks. In-home PT visits have ended, and now she does out-patient PT. Included in her daily routine are things like clamshells, between-the-knees ball squeeze, step-ups, and 1000s of cane-aided walking steps.
BTW, Kim’s cane, a carbon-fiber and molded composite affair, like all legendary tokens, has a name: Ichabod. Yes, you heard it right.
We’re soon to start the (hopefully!) last therapeutic process of the year. From the last week of August to end of October, Kim will be receiving proton beam radiation five days a week. We have yet to learn the details but it seems likely this will be a stereotactic method, where CAT-scans are used to aim the proton beams with very high precision. The point of all this is to reduce the chance of the original cancer recurring by zapping the specific precursor cells.
Can‘t I have just a little peril?
The peril at Castle Anthrax isn’t exactly what I mean here … I mean real live, big stakes, life-the-universe-and-everything peril. No, I’m not contemplating a new identity as an Evel Knievel or Felix Baumgartner. It’s just that I’m writing a new SF novel, FORLORN TOYS, and like all genre fiction, there has to be peril to get readers interested.
Of course most readers know this, at some level at least. The peril in Lord of the Rings is violent subjugation of an entire world. The threat of that peril is what gets Frodo out of the Shire, what gets the Fellowship on the road, and what drives Sam to stick things out to the bitter end.
Simple, right? Not really. LoTR puts forth many layers of peril, such as the peril of losing innocence, or the peril of losing an ancient culture. In an important exchange, Sam tells Faramir that “Boromir brought his peril with him” into Lórien, but thinks he has said too much. Faramir replies:
‘But I am not such a man. Or I am wise enough to know that there are some perils from which a man must flee. Sit at peace! And be comforted, Samwise. If you seem to have stumbled, think that it was fated to be so. Your heart is shrewd as well as faithful, and saw clearer than your eyes.’
In the best stories, the peril comes at you from multiple directions, at multiple levels.
Violent and imperialistic overthrow of an existing order or population is the overwhelmingly most used peril in SF and Fantasy. The peril in War of the Worlds was pretty one-dimensional: Technologically advanced aliens from Mars are attacking with an intent to dominate White European culture (reverse-colonialization story!) The galaxy being ruled by the sadistic Harkonens is the main peril in Dune and, being a pretty good book, there’s a secondary peril in that being ruled by Paul Atreides might be worse. There’s too many similar examples to count. All of these were motivated in large part by the advent of 20th century large-scale mechanized warfare, followed by nuclear weapons. These were things that a great many people worried about, so stories that take those possibilities and show the what-ifs – mostly with the good guys living through it – make complete sense.
But is apocalyptic war the only peril that readers want to read about? Well, no. The most common peril in mystery stories is Justice defeated or avoided – a murderer goes uncaught. No one wants that, because we want to think better of the world and that evil-doers will pay for their crimes. Often that gets paired with a psychological peril on the part of the detective: Will I fail to prove myself? Will I fail someone I care about? A top favorite of mine in mysteries is Nero Wolfe who, aided by man-of-action Archie Goodwin, solves a wide range of murders. The peril in these stories is always, Will Nero Wolfe lose self-esteem and not live up to his reputation as a genius. This is a great example of how peril can be personal and small in scale yet still be fun to read.
Romance stories also have peril: Will I live my life alone? or some form of that. The universality of that peril is a major reason romance so strongly outsells SFF.
Back to SF, a class of peril that took root in the 80s, along with Cyberpunk, I call corporate peril. In these stories, a company is typically seeking unbreakable economic power, as a prelude to political power. Think The Tyrell Corp in BladeRunner/DADOES, or evil CEO L. Bob Rife in SnowCrash. Like total-war was the go-to peril for the boomer generation, corporate peril was the same for Gen X.
The details of storytelling peril come and go every decade, but there are some things that are constant:
The peril can be beat. Wouldn’t do much good to write a story with a problem that has no solution – “Jack tried to trick the Giant, but he just got killed” is not bestseller material. Sauron is vulnerable to the destruction of the Ring, the Harkonens are mystified by the weirding way, and the Hindu god pretenders of Lord of Light are unable to counter Buddhism.
The victory has to be credible. Of course we want our heroes to beat the bad guys, but they have to do it the right way. If the enemy is overcome too easily, or if some unexpected help arrives at the very last second, or if the enemy dialogs their plans telling the hero their secret weakness – all of those are weak. We need our heroes to believably suffer for their victories.
The clock is ticking … Almost all genre story climaxes have a time-limited aspect. James Bond defusing an atomic bomb is a cliche (but fun) example. In LoTR as Frodo and Sam approach Mount Doom, the armies of Sauron are close to overrunning the forces of the West; if Aragorn and Gondor are lost, destroying the ring would be a Pyrrhic victory. What you will see in story after story is, there comes a point where the heroes can’t fall back and regroup – that have to win now or all is lost. This keeps the reader engaged until – hopefully! – your unexpected way of succeeding kicks in, just in time.
Knee Deep In Peril
Why, you might ask, am I delving so deep into these perilous waters? It’s because at 79,000 words, my draft of FORLORN TOYS is now at the climactic ending chapters. While I have shown a lot of peril all through the story so far, the heroes don’t yet understand the full origins or extent of their enemy. That’s a good thing. LoTR was able to give a detailed picture of the threat of Sauron right in chapter 2, but that only worked because of the astounding worldbuilding that Tolkien had done – we know from the start the whole world is in peril, but only after 3 books do we really understand enough about that world to feel the real extent of that. So, not having that option, I have to more slowly unfold the details of the peril, which builds tension chapter by chapter, and makes for some – again, hopefully! – cool reveals in the climax.
Here’s an outline of my method:
Something I set down some time back was a high-level description of the bad guys’ capabilities: where they come from, and what they can do.
Based on that I had to do some thinking on what weaknesses were implied in that description.
I then set down 5 different options on how the good guys could prevail.
For each one I listed strengths and weaknesses, mainly using the rubric above, things like: How is the approach time-limited? Is it cliché or deus ex machina?
An additional factor to consider: future books in the series. In genre fiction, once a strategy has been used, it’s not expected to work again. So the strategy for book 1 has to succeed, but not leave the door open to just rinse-and-repeat in subsequent books.
Then, with some comments from Kim, I pick one out of the 5 and we’re off to the chapter races.
I’m happy with the result. Now, just 4 fairly short chapters to go; I’m aiming for a total of 90,000 words or less.
I’ll leave you with a bit from the draft. The heroine, Irá Norlander, is explaining to spaceship captain Judd Maddox something about information theory. Judd’s spaceship is named the Perpetually Unimpressed Bystander:
“What do you think about information Judd?” she asked.
“Me? You mean, facts? Like, what facts do I know?”
“No, no – how would you define ‘information’, in general?”
Judd sat on Irá’s bunk and thought a moment. “Well, it would be facts, I suppose. Facts about things.”
“And then, are things that are not facts therefore not information?”
Judd thought once again.
“Tricky,” he said. “Maybe, I’m not sure.”
“I’m going to tell you something, Judd. Pay attention,” she said. Judd sat up straight and she continued.
“‘The Perpetually Unimpressed Bystander is a little tweeting bird, chirping in a meadow.’ There, was that information?”
This is one of the more blatant easter eggs in the book, but I like it.
Had an interesting experience the past week at a virtual writers’ conference. The instructive sessions were good. One was on defamiliarization, a technique where familiar things or situations are presented in ways that are unexpected or not obvious. The presenter showed great examples from Nathan Pyle’s Strange Planet, like this one:
Of course, this is a non-obvious way of presenting a sunburn.
During the conference I also had two opportunities to make a 10-minute pitch of my book STONE BY STONE to agents. The goal in these meetings is to get the agent to request your manuscript, which they would eventually read. Alas, I did not succeed in that, but I did get valuable feedback, about sub-genres in science fiction.
The vast majority of agents post what is commonly known as their MSWL, manuscript wish-list, the kind of books they are looking for. An example:
I am actively looking for:
Fantasy and space opera with lush, vivid worlds and complex political intrigues with deeply personal stakes. Always enjoy: deadly decadent courts, intricate religious orders, knife-to-throat romance. Especially eager for epic/historic fantasy worlds with cultural inspirations outside Europe from authors who know their way around those cultures and histories (Egyptian! Aztec! Ottoman!)
…
(BTW, this brief is an exact fit for Hugo winner A Memory Called Empire, by Arkady Martine … space-opera inspired by Byzantine and Aztec empire.)
Hard vs. Soft
Many MSWLs list things the agent is *not* looking for. One of the agents I pitched called out that while she was interested in science fiction, she was not looking for hard science fiction. I decided to pitch to her anyway, because her reputation was impressive and I wanted to hear her thoughts, and because I felt STONE BY STONE is not hard science fiction.
Turns out I was wrong.
My appreciation of SF, for good or bad, originates in the 70s and 80s. I read everything by Asimov and Heinlein, everything by Jack Vance, and tons of other stuff, from Greg Bear to David Brin to Dan Simmons. What got fixed in my mind then is this: Asimov, Clarke, Bear, Niven and Pournelle – hard SF. Authors like Leguin were absolutely not hard SF, because their stories were inventive social commentary more than science. And for me, space opera, like CJ Cherryh and much of Vance, also did not equal “hard” SF, because their plots don’t necessarily turn on a scientific problem. For Vance in particular, his stories could be transported to modern day exotic settings and still work.
I think this was once true. Decades ago the SF-reading population was vastly smaller and was dominated by hardcore fans who took delight in the subtle differentiations I described. No SF reader of the 1970s would put Clarke and Vance in the same category.
But today, all is changed. The Google consensus is that 10-20% of all readers in the US read some science fiction. That’s millions of people. The vast majority of those readers buy one, maybe two SF books in a year. Looking at these facts, something one of the agents said to me makes perfect sense … Your book has spaceships and other planets – it’s hard SF. I can see how today’s readers would care about that; rather than obsess over fine distinctions, they probably want to know quickly if a book is adventure-across-the-stars like The Expanse, vs. a near-future Earth-bound story like Black Mirror, where we find that life has become a hellscape due to sentient parking meters.
(Note to self: There might be a novel in that premise. Possible titles: YOUR TIME IS UP, or ADD DNA FOR AN ADDITIONAL 15 MINUTES.)
What to do about it?
Even though I didn’t get either agent to take my MSS, I still feel my two agent sessions were wins rather than losses: Their feedback gave me great clarity on how important genre categories are in the market, and how they are far more important to agents than for readers. The agent who I knew upfront didn’t take hard SF, explained to me she had an author in her list, a good author, whose new books she just cannot place because they are hard SF and she lacks the editorial contacts who are interested in that.
So, what are my take-aways?
Own Your Label
As a book, STONE BY STONE has a lot going on. The main part is an SF-thriller plot where the hero, Finn, ultimately thwarts a plan where an evil oligarchic faction tries to seize total power on Finn’s planet. The personal struggle for Finn in all that is, How do you live a moral life in an amoral society? But a quarter of the book presents events – some pretty exciting ones, I daresay – that show the backstory of the planet and the origins of Finn’s character. I think that part of the book is unique, and so did all my beta readers.
But now I see, I need to not lead with that in any way. First priority – get an agent to read the whole MSS. Then they can decide if my approach was good or not. So, I’m going to run with the hard SF label and even talk it up.
Suss the Competition
Among authors discussions on “writing to market” (ie, writing stuff similar to what sells) rarely arrive at an answer. On one side is the “write what you feel” faction, on the other is the “what’s the point if nobody reads what you write?” faction. But for someone like me, who doesn’t need to write to live, there’s no reason you can’t do both.
So, I need to get a bit in the weeds of what SF is coming out every week, look at the loglines and blurbs, and see if that leads to ideas on positioning STONE BY STONE. Amazon conveniently shows its bestsellers in hard SF. Not surprisingly, it’s dominated by Andy Weir, Murderbot, The Three-Body Problem, and The Expanse. So, I’m not going to be competing with those. But by sifting through the list you find things like
On the wrong planet, at the right time, for the best reasons, Hadrian Marlowe starts down a path that can only end in fire. He flees his father and a future as a torturer only to be left stranded on a strange, backwater world. Forced to fight as a gladiator and navigate the intrigues of a foreign planetary court, Hadrian must fight a war he did not start, for an Empire he does not love, against an enemy he will never understand.
Anthropologist Claire Knowland is about to stumble upon a discovery that will rewrite human history. What begins as a routine excavation erupts into a high-stakes game of survival when her team unearths evidence of an ancient intelligence that defies everything we believed about evolution. But some truths are too dangerous to uncover. As corrupt officials and ruthless oligarchs close in, Claire finds an unlikely ally in geologist Sergei Anachev, who harbors a secret of his own. Together, they race against time to protect a discovery that could revolutionize our understanding of human consciousness—or get them both killed.
Of course I don’t mean I need to start writing military SF, or archaeological SF … though actually with FORLORN TOYS I’m already doing that. What I do need to do is try and pick up on what’s common in the vibe of these books and find a way for STONE BY STONE to leverage that. As the saying goes, publishers want new books exactly like the old books – except different.
Two months since I last posted here, because real life has decided to intrude on my curated existence. This intrusion was in the form of illness – my wife Kim (learn all about her at string-or-nothing) was diagnosed with a rare cancer, chordoma, that affects the bones of the spine. Now, by rare I mean a literal one-in-a-million chance; there’s about 300 cases per year in the USA.
This is not the time to do a lot of world-building, so I’ll jump right to the end of the chapter. The surgery to remove the tumor was successful and Kim is on the road to recovery. Things are going slow, today is the 4-week anniversary of Kim’s stay in hospital, and she will probably have anywhere from 1 to 2 more weeks in a rehab facility. Then after the return home there will be more to do, regaining mobility, navigating stairs, simple around-the-house tasks and so on. That’s all because the surgery she had was truly major and recovery can’t happen overnight. When I think of my own surgeries – replacements of knee and hip for example – those were like Dunkin Donuts drive-throughs in comparison to Kim’s.
Over this month my own mind has bounced back and forth between different states: Early on I was frozen a lot of the time, waiting for results and answers and trying not to dwell on possibilities. Then came a lot of boredom, as for about 3 weeks I’ve been doing frequent drives to Providence, RI (about 55 miles) and Newport, RI (about 85 miles). And there have been episodes of comfort and, dare I say, happiness, like when Kim and I shared lunch a few weeks back, she with a grilled cheese sandwich – the first solid food after the surgery – and me with a ham sandwich from home.
Lastly, I find I have been just plain ‘ol thinking a lot. Herewith some of my musings …
We live in a Sci-Fi world
Science fiction has for a long time conditioned us to think of the future as having magical technology improvements. In the golden age that was mostly about spaceships, space stations, rayguns, etc. Towards the end of the 20th century, the Star Trek replicator was the signature tech idea that defined the SF future. Nowadays, sci-fi tech tends to concentrate on AI and/or virtual worlds as the hallmarks of conceived futures.
But if you look at medicine, as my up-top picture suggests, the future is here already. Chordoma as a disease was first identified in the 19th century, but for over 150 years nothing could be done to treat it. Since these tumors attack the spine or the base of the skull, removing them without destroying or damaging important nerves is extremely difficult. In the early 1980s the first radiation treatments were performed. Success was marginal, as chordoma is a kind of tumor resistant to radiation. In the late 1990’s the surgical removal of these tumors was being explored. Kim’s surgeon Dr. Ziya Gokaslan authored one of the first papers on this technique, available from NIH here. Since then the state of the art has been improving year by year. In my layman’s view that is not just a matter of surgical skill improving, but comes from improvements in imaging, analysis and neuro-physiology. Before Kim’s procedure she had a high-resolution MRI that showed in 3D the shape and extent of the tumor, and the affected nerves, at millimeter resolution. That became the “map” Dr. Gokaslan used to perform the surgery. In the end stage of the surgery, Kim’s spinal nerves received treatment to promote nerve healing. And there’s also biomechanical advances, like the system of screws and struts that now secures Kim’s spine to the two halves of her pelvis.
While I’d welcome Dr. Crusher’s dermal regenerator – BTW something like it is being prototyped – I think what we already have is pretty sci-fi.
Hospitals can’t help but be chaotic
Even just by visiting the hospital – let alone being the inmate – it doesn’t take long to see that things do not exactly go like clockwork. Something that is expected to happen at 9 gets pushed to 11, then to 3, then the next day. Expected people don’t show up, while unexpected people do. Despite endless pages of digital medical records, people often don’t know the plan or what has already been done. Food services send the wrong thing, or sometimes forget you altogether.
I imagine the typical American finds this uncomfortable, if not downright infuriating. Imagine if you took your car for a 1-hour oil change and it ended up taking a week. Probably a lot of people can’t help but view their healthcare services the same way, expecting Jiffy-Lube promptness for all their medical interactions. Popular culture shows this in the MAX show The Pitt, where an impatient man waiting for hours in the ER begins to show violent tendencies.
Now I have no behind-the-scenes experiences for how hospitals work, but I do have guesses on why things perform the way they do. I think the core reason is in our own unpredictability as organisms. Despite all the technical advances I mentioned, no doctor or nurse can predict your future. Something that happened to Kim was about 12-13 days after the surgery, she developed a high fever. The cause was found to be a blood infection, an E. Coli bacteriemia. Dealing with this needed consults from multiple doctors, her original surgeons and an infectious disease specialist. New diagnostics needed to be done, and a special antibiotic, currently in short supply was required. At least 4 people had to drop what they were doing in order to respond to this event. Multiply this by hundreds or thousands of patients and it makes total sense (to me) that hospital sailing won’t always be smooth.
Even though you’re not typing you can still be writing
Last year at this time I was well over 50,000 words into the 1st draft of STONE BY STONE, my 2024 writing project. For this year’s project, FORLORN TOYS, I’m at about the 30K mark – not discreditable but definitely a slower build. A lot is just mental distraction over Kim’s health, as well as days spent visiting down south in RI. Of course I wouldn’t change anything, in a way writing is a luxury.
But I find that even while I have less time doing scenes and chapters, I still can review and think. Like most genre fiction, FORLORN TOYS has a layered story. There’s an immediate plot line that goes like this:
Alien-tech archaeologist Galena Craft made the most important find ever of extinct alien technology – then three people she considered friends betrayed her, handing over the tech to the unscrupulous Dross Corporation and sending Galena to ten years in prison. Now Galena, taking the name Irá Norlander and in a regenerated body of a 10-year-old, is on a quest for vengeance against her three betrayers.
A classic premise, if I may say, with similarities to The Count of Monte Cristo and Vance’ The Demon Princes. If I can’t make something entertaining out of that idea, it won’t be because the premise is weak.
But there’s also a bigger story, a mystery about the future world that Irá lives in: Why did all these alien races, with such cool technology, all go extinct? The answer to that will unfold over 3 books – one for each betrayer, got it? But, you have to know the answer to the mystery before you can write it.
That’s one of the things I’ve been thinking about. I feel I’ve achieved a milestone: I have figured out the mechanism for these large-scale backstory events. I won’t give spoilers, but this “mechanism” is pretty epic in scope and has lots of potential to say things about the world. Now I need to work through scenarios using the mechanism, to satisfy myself they make sense for the narrative. The scenarios need to be credible to readers, not too complicated that they get in the way of the story, yet be rich enough that they offer a spectrum of possibilities.
Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. In the Star Wars universe The Force is the magic macguffin: the writer needs something, the force will do it. For some reason, George Lucas decided in The Phantom Menace he needed to explain the mechanism of the force: midichlorians, kind of like magic bacteria. The only reason for this bizarre invention was to give an objective measurement to the potential force-power in the child Anakin Skywalker. Once we learn “his midichlorians are off the scale!” we never hear about these magic microbes ever again. This is an example of a bad narrative mechanism: shallow, unadaptable, unconvincing.
I’ll leave you all with some lines from FORLORN TOYS. Irá has been traveling with JUDD MADDOX, a former COM-MED trooper and now an amiable but nihilistic spaceship captain. Judd’s ship is named The Perpetually Unimpressed Bystander, Perp or sometimes PUB for short. They are about to visit the surface of Earth, a first-time for Judd:
The rest of the burn Irá rested. There was nothing for Judd or PUB to do for the final dock with the shuttle station, all was handled by a Sol System nav-management satellite. They waited in silence outside the airlock a few minutes for the dock to complete. Judd seemed limp as he floated, looking down at his feet.
“All clear,” PUB announced. “See you in a few days, or a week, or I suppose whenever it suits you. Have a good time.”
The airlock opened. Irá squeezed Judd’s massive hand with her tiny one.
“What’s the matter, Judd?” she asked.
His reply was a mumble.
“It’s a great folly to appear in the marketplace.”
Irá laughed at that, and Judd turned, confused.
“I’m in the mood for folly – let’s go!”
I find I’m more and more of Irá’s mood – I hope next time to tell you of some folly I have committed. Till then …
Just this weekend past was my second BOSKONE, last year’s report is here. It was for us an abbreviated con, due to the snow here Saturday night we missed the sessions on Sunday. But still an enjoyable and, dare I say? inspiring event. Herewith some short observations on the con …
Short Fiction
I haven’t been too interested in trying to do short fiction. I guess that’s because I don’t read much of it, and the reason for that is I rarely find short pieces to be satisfying reads: to me they are too often trite or one-dimensional. A few things at the con have me rethinking that. First was a great panel entitled Editing Short Fiction: Turning Great Ideas Into Perfect Stories. Panelists included Neil Clarke, publisher/editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, Scott H. Andrews, editor/publisher of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Ellen Datlow, past editor of OMNI Magazine, past editor of SCIFICTION (the fiction arm of the SCIFI Channel) and now anthology editor for Tor.com and Reactor.
While this panel looked at multiple facets of the industry and process of short pieces, it kept coming back to the same question: As an editor, what causes you to buy a story? The answers were not very specific, but they made sense – the story has to sparkle, has to grab you, has to shine somehow. Some quotes from the panelists: “It has to have heart and passion” and “Tell the story only you can tell.”
That absolutely resonated with me. And as I’ll recount down below, clicked with things I heard from the BOSKONE Guest of Honor.
Some other points … All the panelists utterly discounted the so-called “market” – ie, the notion that there is some theme-of-the-moment and writers need to write about that in order to sell. Again, what is important is the story is good. Neil Clarke explained the details of the system at Clarkesworld: He has 2-4 slush readers who go through submissions. They get about 1,100 each month. Clarke himself also reads some of the slush. The majority of slush stories are never read past the first two paragraphs or so. Stories that make it past the slush phase then are given full read-throughs and critiques. The majority of stories here are perfectly good writing – whether they go forward is a matter of whether they have that special quality: the combination of intensity, invention, and heart.
All panelists agreed the number 1 flaw they see in stories is the beginning is too slow – the “real” start to these stories tends to be at the 15-20% mark. Sometime a story is salvageable just by cutting the upfront stuff. Another common thing is the story is more of an intro than a story; Clarke said “It’s the second story here that I want.”
Here’s a hopeful point: All the editors declared strong interest in finding new authors; in fact Scott Andrews said that was one of his measurements of success.
Another window on short fiction was the kaffeeklatsche – round table discussion – I attended with Ellen Datlow. She’s a different sort of editor from Clarke and Andrews, now she works exclusively on anthologies featuring stories from established writers. An interesting bit here was how she overbooks each anthology by 30% or so, assuming a proportion of writers will drop out or not finish. Another thing was how the theme of the anthology is the selling point. Among the themes she’s done are: Homage stories for Edgar Allen Poe (all the invited authors wanted to riff on “The Telltale Heart”); Christmas; and “Body Horror” , featuring gruesome plastic surgery, organ harvesting and more. Her view was “Best of” or “Year’s Best” anthologies are always poor sellers.
Guest of Honor: Jasper Fforde
I was a Fforde reader in the early 2000s. I read The Eyre Affair, Lost In A Good Book and (I’m pretty sure) Something Rotten. I also feel I read The Big Over Easy, the procedural about the murder of Humpty Dumpty. I stopped reading him because, to me, the literary world premise was getting a bit stale, and there’s other things to read. I had no idea what to expect from Fforde at the con, other than he would probably be funny and congenial in the British fashion. I ended up spending 3+ hours with Fforde, 2 in panels, and an hour and half in his kaffeeklatsche – I queued up an hour ahead of time in order to get into that.
So, how to sum up? Fforde was fantastic. Generous and easy-going in his conversation, I also found him to be tremendously inspiring. Something news to me: Fforde is dyslexic. He talked about that as a liberating thing: Having been deemed “stupid” by everyone, his parents included, the pressure was off. He could do whatever he wanted and was not burdened by high expectations. His first career was in film production, a camera man I believe. That work is very intermittent and in some of his downtime he decided to try writing. His first efforts were screenplays and he admitted they were bad. But he persevered and, still unburdened by expectations, wrote things that he liked. Among the books he tried selling was what would later become The Big Over Easy. When everyone passed on that, he kept writing books and in 1999 or so, The Eyre Affair got bought. Later he reworked the Humpty Dumpty story and sold that. Lessons here: Write what you like; Keep writing; Throw nothing away. He has published 17 books so far.
An absolutely fantastic notion he shared with us is, as he calls it, the Narrative Dare. The idea of the narrative dare is to articulate a story premise that in some way is extreme and on the face of it, unworkable. Then, you write a story that delivers that premise. The dare of The Eyre Affair is: Books are living worlds and someone kidnaps Jane Eyre from her book. This to me was obviously an intensely powerful notion: What better way to make a book that is unique and not derivative than to start with a premise that seems impossible to write?
BTW, he cited an example of a dare: Do Kafka’s Metamorphosis, but instead of changing into a cockroach, change into a banana. Then he talked through a way to deliver on the premise and I have to admit, it was not without appeal … as it were.
Also in the kaffeeklatsche Fforde spoke a bit about his short fiction writing. He does a lot of it, but mainly as an exercise in writing improvement, and to test out ideas for longer works.
Fforde also presented a 1 hour “master class” in writing. This was a bit meandering, but virtually everything Fforde said was valuable. Some quotes/highlights:
You need an answer to the question, Why do I want to be a writer? If the answer is, make money, then you need to educate yourself on formulaic fiction and start churning it out. If your answer is not that, it will dictate what you write and how.
First paragraphs really are important. If yours doesn’t powerfully set the atmosphere, and foreshadow at least some of the book, you need to fix that.
Tell me, what is your book about – and I don’t mean the plot. Have a theme.
Give your characters hidden agendas and they will express those without you consciously doing anything.
If you look at the sentence or paragraph of yours that you are most proud of, you probably didn’t think a lot about writing that – you just did it.
I don’t revise, I revise constantly. Keep writing, then keep changing, then keep writing again.
The universal answer to any writing question: Write better books.
Writing without risk is barely writing at all.
Takeaways
My first takeaway is: Do some short fiction. I will not stop doing novels – the stories I most want to tell are not short. But I now see short work as a “muscle” that is valuable to have. Just one of the benefits is, if you can write a 3,000 word piece that resonates and grabs readers, then you will be more able to write an opening for a novel that does the same. I’m already starting on some brainstorming on concepts. Right now if I can do two in a year, and also meet my long-form goals, I’ll be happy.
Second takeaway: Take on a narrative dare. My 2025 project, Forlorn Toys, has some daring elements, but I don’t think it’s over the top that Fforde is describing. I’m going to try and concentrate what I have, and elevate it, into a premise that will attract attention and force me to take more risks when I write. Fforde’s implicit message – what have you got to lose? – is hard to argue with.
A great con overall. Wish I had gotten to the Sunday part, there was a roundtable with a notable agent I had signed up for. So it goes.
Lots of writing work happening for me in the new year. I’m finalizing my query and synopsis for Stone By Stone, and I’m starting on a new SF piece, with the hopefully engaging tentative title Forlorn Toys. But this being January I feel like taking stock over some of things I read in 2024 – reading is also part of the work of writing. Here’s my list:
SF Classics
These were to fill in a bit my exposure to important past works.
The Fountains Of Paradise, by Arthur C. Clarke
I read a lot of Clarke in my 20s, notably Rendezvous With Rama and 2001. I decided to read this to reacquaint myself with Clarke as a writer.
The standout things here were first how conflict and peril free the story was. There certainly was conflict, in the form of the protagonist meeting opposition to his ideas for the space tower. But that was so mild, more like being frustrated at work because of a project put on the back burner than the typical clash-of-titans conflict you’ll see in a contemporary SF. And the peril … well, certainly people could have died, but what you really get is Clarke-signature competency bravura, as the protagonist has to MacGyver his way out of a space tower disaster, several hundred clicks above the surface of the Earth.
And the ending couldn’t have been more optimistic: In a few hundred years, every social problem we have seems solved, and we meet cool aliens to boot! I’ll vote for that.
For all the predictability and mildness, it was an enjoyable read.
My take is this book was just puzzling, is best I can describe it. As one of the first and probably the best well-known alternate history SF book, I had high hopes. The book started with interest, albeit a bit slow. I read this last March, so I only recall so much: The guy who is secretly a Jew who wants to make jewelry, the guy who sells antique Americana to the occupying Japanese, a possible Nazi defector and a mysterious plot, plus the couple going to visit the titular “Man in the High Castle”, the in-book author of an alternate history work where FDR lives to be president and the Allies win WWII.
Great setup … then the book just ends. I can’t say what the message was, maybe that all history is fiction.
So, interesting artifact, zero help to me in anything I do.
Solaris, by Stanislaw Lem
Another classic. Before starting this I had read a bit about Stanislaw Lem, and learned he was a philosopher and poet as much as an SF writer. So again, high hopes here.
Alas, I could not finish this. It was just epically too slow, it felt like it took an entire 20 page chapter just to get to the protagonist’s room on the space station. Then what I believed was the core concept, an intelligent planet, just seemed overly trite to me.
I’m sure there was a ton of depth, nuance and meaning there – it will have to fall to others to find it.
The Complete Stories of J.G.Ballard, by J. G. BallardI really only heard about J. G. Ballard in 2024, though the FB #Science Fiction group. Who knew that the author of the WWII/Southeast Asia novel/memoir Empire of the Sun was also an off-the-wall SF writer? I chose the short stories with the idea this would be the widest introductory read for this author.
My assessment was mixed. Lots of cool ideas, but the vibe is definitely of its time, kind of a mix of Twilight Zone and PD James. Example: An unaccomplished man, a life-of-quiet-desperation type, discovers he has the ability to cause the death of people just by willing it. First off, this has got to be a super-common fantasy. I’ll admit that I have had it and thought about writing the same concept. The man moves up the corporate ladder by eliminating rivals, then critics, then just future possible contenders. But the man is also increasingly worried about being found out and concludes there is one more death needed to secure his safety, it is … wait for it … YOU, the reader! Prepare for the end! Holy Fourth Wall, Batman!
I haven’t yet finished the collection. Every so often I read one more story.
New Guard SF & Fantasy
These were all part of my now ongoing mission, to read more of what the SFF market is buying and publishing today. Well, when I say “today” I mean anything from today to the past 20 years.
Mistborn, by Brandon Sanderson
I was a big fantasy reader in the 70s and 80s. Then, The Sword of Shannara came out, I read it, and I lost interest in Tolkien-derivative doorstop-sized fantasy series. But hey, 35+ years have gone by so why not give the genre a fresh look? I had to start with Brandon Sanderson, mainly because I knew what I’d be getting if I read George RR Martin. Mistborn was Sanderson’s second published book; I chose it because it anchors a highly successful 7 book series.
Alas, could not finish this book. Too many tropes: the D&D like setting, evil nobles and cynical but heart-of-gold thieves, a mysterious evil lurking just out of sight. The place where I stopped was a 20+ page section of excruciating detail on the world’s magic system, which in summary is: swallow some shavings of a certain metal, you get a certain power, swallow another metal, you get another power.
My doubtless rosy memories of reading fantasy are about being transported to a new world. Mistborn transported me to a so-so RPG.
The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss
My desire to find fantasy that would spark my interest did not end with Mistborn. Can’t remember how I came across The Name of the Wind, probably while looking for best-of lists. When I saw on Amazon this book has over 83,000 reviews, virtually all of them 5-star, I had to give it a try.
Now, to go back to Mistborn, that was a well-written book. There was action, conflict, worldbuilding, etc. It was just not to my taste. The Name of the Wind, however, for me was not well written. The form of the book is, mysterious innkeeper Kvothe has a mysterious visitor to the inn. There’s a fight, there’s drinking, and then Kvothe begins relating his life story. There seems to be no realtime action in the book, its all past backstory. I suppose as the setup for multi-book series, you can try this, relating the life-to-date of the protagonist.
And what a life. If Mistborn was trope-y, NOTW is the Trope King. Please, other writers, never again write how a young boy, off fetching water, returns to find his parents and community all murdered by mysterious, well, murderers. And the pace. The narrator can only relate a week or two of personal history before he’s wracked with sad recollections and has to excuse himself to feed the horses or whatever. I made it to page 190 of 696 (!!!) before I stopped, having to go off and feed my own horses.
The Death of Sir Martin Malprelate, by Adam Roberts
C’mon, fantasy – you must have some good books, right? I came across Adam Roberts again from the FB #Science Fiction group. Roberts is a writer, seems to me, in the Tolkien-mold: A professor of literature, and clearly writing for himself more than for any market. I chose The Death of Sir Martin Malprelate because it was only a year old, and the premise – 1848 London – intrigued me.
This bet paid off! Roberts deftly invokes the world of Sherlock Holmes, by imagining his father, Vavasour Holmes, working on a case. No spoilers, but other classics of British lit, set in the late 19th century, make appearances here. the actual titular death is by a “demonic locomotive” – remind you of any spectral hounds? The opening sentence firmly tells you what the voice of this work is going to be:
The story of the death of Sir Martin Malprelate acquired, from its earliest telling, a phantasmagorical quality, shrouding the violence of the assault in an embellishment of diabolic spectres and uncanny mystery.
This book will never become a NYT bestseller, which is a shame. Highly recommended.
The Hammer and the Blade: An Egil & Nix Novel, by Paul S. Kemp
Above I mentioned my desire for fantasy books to transport me to new worlds. Well an important sub-genre of that is when the new world doesn’t take itself too seriously. Looking around for Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser style books I found a number of folks citing the Egil and Nix series. Book 1 of the series The Hammer and the Blade, did not disappoint.
in summary: Egil, hammer-wielding priest, and Nix, a scoundrel as Princess Leia would describe, make a living as tomb robbers. In one robbery they awaken a demonic guardian. Well, they have their Hammer and they have their Blade – they kill it. Little did they know that the demon was the talisman of a corrupt and powerful wizard family. Wizards want revenge. Hammers and Blades want to avoid that. Poundings, stabbings and drinking ensue.
Also in the never-a-bestseller category, but a fun read. Recommended.
Too Like the Lightning, by Ada Palmer
Now let’s look at some SF reading. This was another FB SF group find. The author Ada Palmer, is a professor of history, specializing in the Renaissance period. Too Like The Lightning was her first book. The title is inspired by this quote from Romeo and Juliet, where Juliet ponders whether loving Romeo is a good idea:
It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden, Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be Ere one can say ‘It lightens.’
The author’s knowledge and affection for history is apparent: The 25th century she describes is a world of 5 or 6 regional confederations, in the model of Italian city-states, but at much greater scale. These confederations are all led by technology-centric aristocrats, all with different styles, stemming form the cultural differences region to region. Ok, interesting setup, if a bit abstruse.
Unfortunately, I ended up skimming through vast swathes of this one. There was too much interiority of the main character – I wanted something to happen. Once again, a matter of taste – others may well find this book riveting.
Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson
Cyberpunk is a big gap in my SF canon reading. Never piqued my interest, the sub-genre seemed too small scale, too inward looking. Also, being a software engineer for like, forever, I suspected the computer parts would leave me cold. But minds can change and no time like the present. I selected Snow Crash because of Neal Stephenson’s reputation as being a challenging writer.
Challenging isn’t the word I would use, based on this book. After only a few pages the words running through my head were: Glib, Lame, Ridiculous. Harsh, you might say? In the opening pages we learn in this world, the Mafia rule the USA, controlling not only the government but a majority of businesses. the protagonist is a combination hacker, expert swordsman, and pizza delivery driver. Apparently in the future, “30 minutes or less” is enforced by Luca Brasi, so you have to drive fast. It goes on to describe a system that, to the books credit, is almost exactly like Second Life. Kinda cool for 1992, but that’s it.
This thread from Y-Combinator says it all better than i could. A sample:
I greatly dislike Snow Crash: it feels like slogging through Leviticus, plus an astronomical amount of suspension of disbelief.
The Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler
In speculative fiction circles this book is constantly cited, as a prescient and gripping story of climate change and decay of the social fabric. Published in 1993, nominated for a Nebula soon after, the book remained a genre thing until 2020, when it became a NYT Bestseller. So, this is a must-read.
After all this build up for POTS I was surprised at my experience of reading it. My opinion: It is not a good book. Some examples: Future southern California is afflicted by human-set wildfires (something which BTW has happened for decades). The people setting the fires are drug addicts. That’s all we are told and the story frankly lays the blame for all that on these anonymous zombie addicts. But why are they addicts? Does no one care? We never find out. Normal people all walk around armed, if they can manage it. Apparently this is to defend against opportunistic thieves. But we never see anything of what drives that: Is it poverty? Rage? What? The world we see is cardboard. There’s bad stuff happening, but why? No one knows.
All we really see in the book is the protagonist, Lauren. She is even more cardboard than the world. Her big thing is she invents a religion, “Earthseed”. Chapters are introduced with writings from her book of this religion. So, cool, I think, this religion is going to illuminate the problems, and then solve them. The prime tenet of Earthseed; Change is the only constant.
But, guess what? This religion has zero narrative impact. Nothing happens because of it. The final 2/3rds of the book is Lauren and a band of stragglers walking north, trying to get to this lake. Every day some flat, slightly tragic event occurs. Then every night, people talk around the campfire. Neither the protagonist, nor anyone else, changes. A few folks die, then the book ends.
I could go on. Here’s a critique that said it all better. Disappointing.
Station Eternity, by Mur Lafferty
Ok, now we’re getting back into more readable space. There’s several cool ideas in Station Eternity, by Mur Lafferty. Like, there’s some quality or quality attached to the protagonist such that murders consistently happen in her presence. Another one is a race of highly mineralized aliens that, in the maturity phase of their lifecycle, transform into a living artifact, like a space ship. Ok, it does strain belief a bit that a half-ton creature somehow morphs into a multi-ton spaceship, but the idea is still cool. Then, there’s the symbiotes that all sentient life *except* humans have. Except that is for Mallory, who … dang, I guess I spoiled it.
Net: Clever worldbuilding, good characters, good pace of action.
Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir
Hmm, where to begin on this book. The capsule: Lesbian necromancers – in space!
Now that I think about it, the capsule is also a pretty complete summary. There’s quite a lot of characters in this book. The premise is, representatives from 5 or 6 necromantic planets meet on this one particularly spoooooky planet to undergo a trial. Aside form the title character, Gideon, those characters are all pretty interchangeable. Then, stuff happens: monsters are fought, puzzles solved, and so on. There’s little discernable point in this action, but it is entertaining.
The ending was, to me, very emo. Gideon, who you come to kinda like by the end, sacrifices herself and it is a big deal for some of the surviving characters, but for the life of me I can’t remember what was the point.
For all that, in at least one way this is an important book, in that it is an avatar of squeecore, a story style that emphasizes delight or excitement, vs. conflict or character growth. For a more in depth definition, see here.
Mystery
I’m also a big mystery fan – for a long, long time I read more mystery than SFF. Here’s this year’s selections:
The Wolf and the Watchman, by Niklas Natt och Dag
This is a Scandinavian noir, set in 1793 Stockholm. It was a grim time, especially in cities, and Natt och Dag shows every bit of that. The wolf of the title is Cecil Winge, an educated investigator suffering from tuberculosis; he can die at any time during the book. The watchman is Mickel Cardell, a soldier until he lost most of an arm, now a watchman who spends more time drinking than watching. Mickel happens upon the corpse of a horrific murder, Cecil investigates, and they partner up.
Two things to bear in mind about this book: First, it shows very graphically a lot of the ugliness of 18th century life; sometimes it is a bit like a Salvation Army polemic. Second, the book has an offbeat structure. Midway, whole chapters are devoted to new point-of-view characters and we don’t see much of Mickel or Cecil. At first I wonder, what does this have to do with the murder? But these chapters pay off well in the end, stick with them.
So, this was an engrossing read. The Wolf and the Watchman is first of a trilogy, the subsequent books take place in 1794 and 95. I may pick up the next one, if I get a sense it won’t cover the same ground as book 1.
Blaze Me A Sun, by Christoffer Carlsson
Another Scandinavian noir, I came to this through an NYT recommendation. Summary: A serial killer terrorizes a town, first eluding the town’s detective, then being identified by a chance relationship. But 30 years later the detective’s son, now a cop himself, questions his father’s handling of the case.
This is a somewhat slow moving book, but that’s the point: It is about attitudes and truths that persist over time, and how those are handed from generation to generation. I very much like a hard-boiled, this is my code and I’m sticking with it type of noir (see below) but this was a great change.
The Hunter, and The Outfit, by Richard Stark
Richard Stark is a penname of Donald Westlake, overall the most prolific American genre writer of the 20th century. His books have been made into no less than 20 movies, including The Hot Rock and Cops and Robbers. I had heard of Westlake but knew nothing about his contribution to the structuring of mystery and suspense fiction until I read Perplexing Plots. So I decided to take in a couple of Parker books, a series of 24 novels (!!) by Stark/Westlake.
A pseudo-intellectual review of this kind of book makes no sense, so I’ll just say this: If you think you might like a world of ruthless yet grimly principled men, women who are scorned, taken advantage of and who fight back with the weapons they have, and where money means more than justice, these books deliver. The writing is spare, witty, and fast-moving where it needs to be.
I’ll be reading more of Parker, not only because I like the mix of premise and voice Westlake created, but also because I’m curious: How the heck do you keep this fresh over 24 books?
And The Winner Is …
The genre book I both enjoyed the most, and got the most out of, was …
Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
This book, published in 2015, hits all my main buttons for science fiction: Science, in the form of relativistic interstellar travel, uploaded personalities, accelerated evolution and more; Aliens, in the form of earthly spiders who are recipients of aforesaid acceleration; and a Problem, in the form of a collapsed Human Empire, survivors looking for a new planet, and the afore-foresaid spiders, who have the planet and ain’t giving it up. The writing is a bit challenging, requiring the reader to pay attention, which i like. And the structure, which alternates chapters between spiders and humans, kept the anticipation for the next turn in the plot at a high level.
The book is just what-if after what-if, on a scale of millennia.
One thing not in this book: character development. Generally I find flat characters only work for certain kinds of books. In this book, I did not notice or care about the absence in the least.
This book is first of a trilogy. Not sure if I’ll take in the other two, not because I wasn’t sold by book 1, just just because I expect I have a lot of reading ground to cover in 2025.
There you have it. But BTW, I did a lot more reading than this in 2024: there were writing-craft books, political books, popular science books, etc. Maybe that will go into another post. That is, if my two ongoing projects, Stone By Stone and the brand new Forlorn Toys, allow it.
Short post this week. Last time I wrote about the development editing and revision approach for Stone By Stone (SBS). I’ve completed 14 items on my list – yay, me. The majority of these were to add text, or modify text, in order to clarify or strengthen something important to the story. For example, a key premise in the SBS world is that there are these “houses” that work on behalf of the alien founders of the planet Caron to build things, fix things, and generally drive the economy. From one perspective a house is like a business consultancy: experts for hire. But another aspect is they use violence and intimidation when those tactics can advance their interests. A house is then a combination technology contracting firm and Mafia protection racket. I think this is a cool idea.
But some feedback on SBS was to the effect readers weren’t certain about houses. The events the protagonist appears in were clear and, I daresay, exciting. But there wasn’t clarity on “Is this the norm on this planet?” That makes a big difference. If what the hero does is the norm, then we see he’s trapped in a system; but if its not the norm, he’s kind of a bad guy. The improvement was to add 2-3 events where supporting characters have run-ins with other houses. Turned out to be easy to do, and had no disruption to the main plot line.
That brings me to a bigger change I’m starting. Here’s a picture:
This shows the length, in pages, of every scene in SBS. A “scene” is an event or episode, usually but not always in a short period of time, but always with a start and an end. The book has 84 scenes, in 24 chapters. Long scenes are of two types. Early in the book there are some scenes that are context-setting. The 8-page scene at the beginning introduces the main character and his environment; scene 19 is 10 pages long and its where an important supporting character shares some revelations with the hero. But mostly the long scenes are where big events happen. The 8-page scene near the end is where the hero and bad guy have their big showdown. Such a scene has to be long, else after all your build up, the reader will feel cheated.
A last general observation … the variety in scene length is a big part of what keeps readers turning pages. If all your scenes were the same length that would be boring – it would be almost as if there were no scenes at all.
The reason I’m looking at this is I need to make a big change that requires whole new scenes, possibly a new chapter. I like the current flow. For example, the very short scenes, 46 and 47, precede a tragic turning point in the story. Those short glimpses of the main character gives extra context for the event he is about to experience. But if they were too long, that would deflate the impact of the big event. The graph above is my “map” that I’m hoping will let me situate the new content at the best point in the book.
Hoping to finish up these revisions in January. I expect then I’ll have a last call for Beta+ readers – would be chance for you to have an early glimpse of SBS if you didn’t beta-read already.
What, J. Jonah Jameson, editor extraordinaire and bête noir of both SpiderMan and Peter Parker? That can only mean I’m going to talk about the developmental edit of Stone By Stone.
But first a bit about Let This Be The Last, a 6,000 word story that reimagines the Norse god Loki.
I got a notion to do this when I was browsing Duotrope, a site that provides useful info to writers, like directories of publishers and their content specializations. Browsing through SF&F short-fiction publishers, I came across Flametree Publishing, that had an open call for stories about the trickster god. Now, I’ve never been good at writing prompts: “Write a story based on the song ‘My Home Town’”, stuff like that. But in the spirit of training I decided to work on this – a good writer should be able to write about anything, not just what bubbles up out of their own brain.
Here’s what I did. I knew from the start I wanted a story that mixed the age of myth with an SF future. What can I say, the idea seemed cool. Then I refreshed my detailed knowledge of the subject by spending a day or so reading everything Google sent my way. At first I was totally stumped. All the myths seemed, well, trite – I mean by definition they are stories that have been told and adapted for a thousand years or more. In a way, the most trite of all is the myth of Loki and Baldur. It occurred to me to wonder, why does Loki contrive the death of the most noble god? Is he jealous? Devoted to chaos and evil? Just a jerk? Then it further hit me, a new answer to that question might be worth writing about. After that, the three acts of the story – ancient Scandinavia, medieval Africa, and a future colony planet – fell into place. The 6,000 words were essentially done in 2 weeks. It’s with Flametree now, I won’t hear till March if they want it. Meanwhile, I think I’ll keep looking for similar opportunities – it was a good workout for the writing muscles.
Words, Words, Words
When Hamlet answers this to Polonius, he is uttering one of Shakespeare’s trademark ironies: books of course are nothing but words, but Hamlet’s blunt and deranged delivery makes us think, “Everyone knows books are more than that!” Now, having received an edit of Stone By Stone, and embarked on updating the book, I have a little insight on exactly how books are more than words.
If you don’t know what a developmental edit is, a quick definition: where copy-editing involves punctuation and formatting, and line-editing is about grammar and clarity, a developmental edit examines the high-level aspects of your story – character, plot and setting – and both analyzes and critiques your book at that level. The main reason to get a developmental edit is to answer questions like:
Are the characters engaging and believable? Do we understand their wants and needs?
Is the plot engaging and believable? Does it make sense? Does it pose problems that are big and interesting?
Is the setting presented complimentary to plot and character? What is unique about time and place that bears on the story?
I started this process in July. Looking at different directories online, I read websites and bios for about 30 editors. I reduced that to a short list of 4. After video calls with these candidates, I made my pick. Something that quickly became clear – editors, especially good ones, are extremely busy. My chosen editor could not start till mid October. BTW, in future I will share their name. I’m extremely happy with the work, I just want to see how things go with SBS before I say more.
The edit took a month and a few extra days. What I received was a 10-page single-spaced letter, analyzing the book and summarizing key recommendations, and my marked-up manuscript. The MSS included tracked-changes and comments. There were more than 1,000 changes and 1,405 comments.
“I’m a Writer, not an Engineer!”
Dr. McCoy’s catchphrase to the side, I am finding that to deal with this feedback, I have to think like an engineer. There’s two reasons for writing a novel, (1) For your own satisfaction, and (2) To connect with readers. If (1) is your only goal, you probably don’t need an editor at all. But if you are aiming at (2), you have to come to terms with understanding that the raw insight and creativity of your story is almost certainly not enough to connect with anyone. Making that connection requires that some fundamental expectations need to be fulfilled for the reader, like:
Relating to characters. No one is going to enjoy a book where the characters do things and we have no clue why they do them. Good books show us events that let us develop our own guesses as to character motivation. Great books bolster through things that characters say or think.
Knowing why it matters. It may seem obvious that your detective character would go after the bad guy. It’s not obvious to your reader: Why this detective, and not someone else? It has to be crystal clear that if the main character does not accept the challenge posed by the plot, then very bad things will happen.
Getting readers to turn the page. I expect we’ve all experienced books we “could not put down”. Likewise we’ve started some we just could not finish. Good books have a structure and a tone that takes you along for the ride: chapters that build tension and expectation, language that “feels right.” A common thing for poor books is they are like a lecture you just want to be over.
Note how none of this has to do with creativity, theme, or meaning. The same requirements apply to both a bubbly rom-com, and to a grimdark cautionary tale.
What does this have to do with engineering? Like a programmer responding to a code review, I am trying to take my editor’s feedback in a spirit of improvement, not criticism. I will tell you, it ain’t easy. Among those 1,405 comments in the MSS were probably about a 100 to the effect of “Why is he doing this?” My impulsive reaction was frankly, “Isn’t it obvious?” or “How can you not see that?” But just like when receiving a code-review comment to the effect of “The way you wrote this conditional is unclear”, I had to set my first reactions aside and try to see things through the commentor’s eyes. Sure enough, I had to admit, they were right, it wasn’t obvious what motivates my main character. It was obvious to me, and not just because I wrote it – my life experiences set me up to understand my own characters.
Another way dealing with editorial feedback is like engineering is how you do the needed changes. An widely accepted practice in software engineering is the minimal necessary change – the smallest thing you can do to meet a requirement. It’s the same with revising your book. To make your character’s motivation more clear, you don’t have to rewrite the whole book, you look for an important action the character takes, then you insert a thought or some dialogue where the motivation is clarified. Bonus points if you refer to a foreshadowing event that is the origin of the motivation. Net-change: probably 2 lines or less.
But, they have to be the right two lines.
You Write It, You Own It
Here’s where I am now. After I read through the letter and sampled the comments, I had a call with my editor to go over the main findings. The goal was to make sure I understood them correctly, and also to explore some of the bigger criticisms. Next I read every manuscript comment, responding with a quick notation like AGREE, EXPLORE, CLARIFY and so on, plus some short ideas on approach. Then I exported all the Word comments to an Excel file, so I could read them more easily. Going through the comments and responses that way it was easier to identify patterns.
I then created a revision plan document. This document has 22 changes and/or improvements to make. One example:
Condense Prologue
Shorten upfront part, eliminate several Civspace species from the prologue, get to Keret and Talon-va more quickly.
Like many SF books, mine has a prologue that sets the stage for the different species and planets in the story. My editor felt there was too much infodump in it. The new version is 459 words, down from 869, and features only things that directly bear on the story – Talon-va is the founder of the planet Caron, where the story takes place.
Here’s a bigger one:
Split and Condense Childhood and Adolescent Chapters
Split longer chapters into two, properly interleave into the flow. Maybe adult chapters need splitting to do that.
To start with, don’t change content, just the boundaries.
After the chapters are split, all non-adult chapters need pruning and focus. Emphasize connection points to Finn’s adult life.
This speaks to my editor’s biggest point. In Stone By Stone, I use a structure where 3 story arcs – the main character as a child, adolescent, and adult – are told simultaneously through interleaved chapters. The adult story is 75% of the content. I did this for several reasons: I wanted to do something that was structurally distinctive, and I wanted to convey important back story and worldbuilding in a more impactful way than flashbacks. My editor felt this was more a hindrance than a help, that the changes in perspective would be confusing. Their judgement was, this would reduce the marketability of the book.
I hope it’s clear from the above that I’m not switching to flashbacks. What I will do is make these non-adult chapters shorter, so they are less of a break from the main action. I’ll also “punch up” the main character’s early life events that explain his motivations as an adult. Will keeping the current structure make the book harder to sell? Maybe, though I’ve asked a number of people about this, including pros from the industry, and no one seems to feel what I’m doing is an explicit disqualification.
What it comes down to is, I own this book. Where execution is concerned, I will take my editor’s advice and try my best to make improvements. But as far as my vision for the book — I’m not going to give that up without even trying.
Ok, J. Jonah is growling at me for my next revision. Till next time …
Last few weeks I did something that, over the years, I’ve done before, probably more than twenty times: Build a desktop PC from components. The first time I did this was in the late 1980s; at the small software shop where I worked then, it was cheaper to buy components and assemble the boxes, than it was to buy from IBM or Compaq or HP. Somehow I never shook the habit. Between building on the order of 5+ PCs for myself, there were computers for Kim, Alex and Morgan, one I used as a DVR, one as a basement webserver, that since has morphed into an Ubuntu fileserver.
The time before I did this was 2017. Key components from that build:
Memory
16GB RAM (2 x 8GB) DR4 2400
$112
Storage
1TB HDD 7200 RPMSATA 6GB/s
$55
Storage
240GB SSD Hard Drive
$84
System
ATX Motherboard
$120
Graphics
GeForce GTX 1050 Ti 4GB GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 Video Card
$140
CPU
Intel Core i5 7th Gen – Core i5-7500 Kaby Lake Quad-Core 3.4 65W Desktop Processor
$198
TOTAL
$709
That $709 is about $910 in 2024 dollars.
Now that PC was really good. Aside from handling tons of work-from-home stuff, and my writing, it played games like Witcher 3 and Baldur’s Gate 3 like a champ, especially after I upgraded to 64 GB RAM. But it could only run Windows 10, because the motherboard did not support Secure Boot, a technology that prevents malicious code from running at start time. Since Windows 10 is going out of service, I decided it was time for upgrade.
My case and power supply from 2017 were still plenty good – technology for steel boxes doesn’t advance very quickly – so I just got some new innards:
Memory
48GB RAM (2 x 24GB) 288-Pin PC DDR5 7600
$225
Storage
M.2 2280 2TB PCI-Express 4.0 x4, NVMe 1.4 Internal SSD Up to 7100 MB/sec
So I paid about the same today as I did 7 years ago. But performance / price is waaaay better. The old Intel CPU is rated at 6036 CPUMark — the AMD, 34,500 – more than 5x faster. The RAM is 2x faster. And I got 2TB of much faster SSD storage, vs. 1TB of metal-disk-spinning-like-a-record storage.
Anyway, I weirdly find building these fun. There’s something about snapping stuff together, getting the thermal paste just right on the CPU, futzing with the front-panel connectors, and then turning it on and not having it emit jets of sparks from anywhere – something that did occur at least once the first 1-2 times I did this.
Most readers probably know this, custom-built PCS are big with gamers. About a third of “dedicated” PC gamers build their own rigs – it’s both a rite of passage, and a part of the min-max mindset. But the lure of the laptop – compact and mobile – is hard to resist. of course I have one, for traveling. I think its very likely when I get to my next “7 year itch” for a computer, it will be a dockable laptop.
But that is yet to be seen. For now, writing this on the new rig – which is named MIRALDRA, a Vancian reference – I have like 10 windows and 40 tabs all open, and things are zipping along nice and quiet.
Next time, a writing update, including some reflections on a recent short piece, Let This Be The Last, a reimagination of a certain Norse god …
It’s self-evident that for a story to be a science fiction story, it has to portray the future – we have to see a setting or circumstance that hasn’t happened yet, but is in some way credible based on what we know and expect. Classic stories like E.E. Smith’s Lensman series built on realities of the post-WW2 era – rapid progress in military technology, emergence of super-power nations – to present a future that was much like its present, but with spaceships and rayguns. Gibson’s Neuromancer shows a future where massively-networked information technology becomes a landscape for commerce, social unrest and intrigue. There’s an entire sub-pantheon of dystopias, ranging from Brave New World to Fahrenheit 451 to The Hunger Games, that all extrapolate an aspect of the present into a pathologic future. Fans can cite countless examples of conceived futures, it’s a characteristic of the SF genre that the world of the story is often times just as important as the characters in it.
I like a truly inventive or cool SF world as much as the next fan. But what’s on my mind today is the shallowness you get in SF when their creators rush to update the window-dressing of their world, without thinking through what life would really be like. Here’s some obvious examples:
What can we discern from these images? That Zardoz is science fiction because Sean Connery is not wearing a tuxedo, he’s wearing a red nappy – clearly some calamity destroyed all the tuxedo factories. We also learn that in the future, women (unless they are typists) will go everywhere clad in their pajamas, doubtless because the entire world has AC and there’s an abundance of sofas for Raphael-esque posing. Finally, Sting shows us that the centuries ahead will be tough – so tough men need to wear cast-iron codpieces.
I know the 70s and 80s are easy targets for this sort of thing. But they are representative of a fairly common tendency in SF to posit arbitrary change in common activities or items. Its a cheap and easy way to create an “SF feel”. When Clockwork Orange came out with its Russian-infused slang I certainly found it cool: droogies and lewdies were totally horrowshow. But since then? Uggh. I’ve just started reading a late-90s cyberpunk book, included on many “best of” lists, and the terminology and dialogue are just tedious. If you cut from the first thirty pages all the linguistic c**p the author put in to signal to me, “Pay attention, things are really different!”, you’d have maybe two pages of actual events.
A lot of times it’s things that are not explained that leave me wondering. How do people get from place to place? What do they eat? Who cooks the food? What are peoples’ houses like? and so on. It’s not a good idea to over-show these kinds of things in your story, unless there’s a specific plot relevance. But people gotta eat – you can’t say zero about it.
A particular peeve of mine is coffee. Humans have been drinking it for a thousand years or more. Why would we stop, just because we go to Alpha Centauri or wherever? Or, why would we stop calling it coffee or adopt some new, goofy-named drink that takes the place of coffee?
There will be coffee. Don’t take my word for it, take hers:
Anyway, herewith are some of the guidelines I use in structuring my Civspace world, the setting for Blair MacAlister and the (hopefully!) upcoming Stone By Stone:
Big changes happen at the edges and build over time
Today’s hyperconnected/social-media-zed/instant-information world is so radically different from just 20 years ago, we forget how that happened. When I was a kid, TV wasn’t exactly new, but it was new enough that my parents and their friends recalled never having it. But adopting TV was easy. Assuming you could afford it, you just add one to your household, no need to give anything up. In the late 80s, personal computers started doing the same thing, they were easy and useful add-ons to your household. Then we got networks, that worked over cable or phone lines – again, no need to drop anything. After that. network effects were inevitable, and here we are.
The same thing is happening today with power generation. The need for electricity will always exist, but where it comes from changes: from oil and natural gas, and increasingly from solar and wind, in the future maybe fusion, then who knows? My bet is, a century from now when we get electricity from anti-matter powered reactors, people will still use that power to run dishwashers, electric shavers and so on. In another example, imagine we invent spacecraft capable of relativistic speeds. That doesn’t mean we somehow no longer need pickup trucks.
Change most often happens through unforced adoption of new capabilities or alternatives, or through improved efficiency of existing systems.
Technology inflection points do sometimes happen
Counter to my examples above, history does offer cases of radical, displacing or destructive change. Gunpowder and musketry just in the span of a century caused the demise of Europe’s knightly class. An oft-cited span is that from The Battle of Bosworth Field (1485) to the end of the reign of Elizabeth I (1603). A broader but even more significant example was the Industrial Revolution, with the accompanying Transportation Revolution. Again in the space of a century, hand-work and horse-and-cart economies were transformed into systems of centralized mass production and worldwide distribution. This was not a “net add” change – the industrial revolution started the demise of traditional farming and artisanal crafts, led to widespread child labor, emptying of the countryside and overcrowding of cities, and heightened gender-based divisions of labor. This is the world we live in today and I daresay the changes and still echoing.
Will there be similar inflection points and upheavals in the future? Of course there may be. But until there’s some massive innovation, like the free energy Asimov wrote about in The Gods Themselves, I’d say it will be hard for coming innovations to offer enough marginal utility to radically displace what we already have.
Many things will be unchanging
As I said earlier, people will always need to eat. Despite efforts like lab-grown meat, I think the core realities and logistics of food production will be unchanged for centuries. Yes, we probably need to get more calories from grains and less from animals, and we need to make full use of the principles of sustainable agriculture. But it’s really hard to beat a system where you throw down seeds and the food just grows.
Then there’s houses. Just as people have to eat, they also need roofs over their heads. Under those roofs, they need to do everything we do today: cook and eat food, work, sleep, relax. The need for privacy and sometime solitude will never go away. Do despite trends in home design we see today, I forecast we will never see significant adoption of houses with a single multi-purpose-room. How will these future houses be built? That brings me to the next topic.
Physics and Economics will never just go away
The raygun, like Star Trek’s phaser, is an enduring and iconic staple of SF. But when I see one, I always ask myself: Where does the energy come from? You can’t melt steel, or wholesale disintegrate objects, without expending massive amounts of energy – that’s true today and will be true 1,000 years from now. The US Army has in fact deployed a military laser, for shooting down drones. It requires 20 kilowatts to operate. A typical handheld battery supplies 90 watts. Yes, batteries will get better over time, but 200 times better? The theoretical maximum for a lithium-based battery is on the order of 300 watts.
So, rayguns are unlikely. More probable are handheld electromagnetic throwers, which already exist.
Coming back to houses, how will they be built? Again, I think things will be mostly like today. So, here’s a cool house:
You may recognize it, it’s called the Brenton House, and is one of the futuristic homes that appeared in the 1973 Woody Allen film Sleeper. This house was built by spraying a structural foam over a steel framework. As I said, this is cool, but clearly we do not see this technique displacing wood framing, brick and so on. That’s because the cost and marginal utility don’t add up. Just like with batteries and rayguns, that’s true today and likely will always be true.
Maybe we’ll see factory-built, modularized houses. Definitely some possible economic benefits there, but it will be hard for a fixed location that has to expend energy in transport to compete with mobile teams of workers that can show up anywhere.
That brings me to the last economic aspect for the future: labor. A common SF convention is the world where all labor is performed by robots. Of course that could happen, but I view that as an extremely late-stage phase in the development of an SF world. Imagine you’re colonizing a planet. You need an adaptable, general-purpose laborer to built all the bootstrap stuff you need. That means people, not robots – unless you want to magically posit a robot that is essentially a person, except you can order it around. My sense is an advanced civilization, with a technical history thousands of years long, will indeed transition menial tasks to automation. A final question here is, how likely is it such a civilization will have the general purpose AI capability to make such a premise workable? My view is: that may be never be solved, but that’s a topic for another post.
Your future sounds boring
No rayguns, stick-framed houses, primitive farming, no clever/companionable robots – your future sounds boring, you say. But is it? There’s an SF franchise that makes use of most everything in my lists:
The writing challenge is to go beyond overused tropes and look hard at science, and social change, to find new, cool possibilities, like (I think) the following:
Biology is the big frontier
Between Einstein, Quantum Mechanics and the rest of the physical sciences we know a lot about the fundamentals of the universe. These lead to lots of insurmountable limitations, like the whole raygun/battery thing. But for life – how it started, how it adapts – we know the basics but I feel there’s far more unknown than known. And the potential diversity of life is extremely vast. Biology figures prominently in my in-progress trilogy Only’s End, where the neural/genetic mechanism underlying the intelligence of one of the Civspace species leads to unexpected outcomes.
AI doesn’t need to be omniscient to be cool
Like I mentioned, I’m not a fan of the idea of general purpose ultra-intelligent AIs – I don’t think they are computationally credible and, story-telling wise, they are too convenient a device. But that doesn’t mean there’s no possibilities there. Again in Only’s End there’s a Chat-GPT like machine called ALEC (Advanced Learning and Estimating Complex). ALEC has the ability to predict with high accuracy the movements of financial markets – lots of story possibility there! More importantly, it was designed to be self-improving in that it is programmed to “value” certain outcomes and to be “dismayed” by others. It doesn’t feel pleasure or pain the way biological creatures do, but it presents like it does. ALEC triggers self-reflection in Blair and Terendurr to the effect of, Am I really so different?
Big science needs to be done right
A truly transcendent possibility latent in SF is to provoke a sense of wonder. When I watch 2001, A Space Odyssey I don’t obsess over how the monoliths work, or what laws of physics the monolith makers respect and which they break. I’m just awestruck by the concept, by the vast possibilities the story implies. That’s an extremely high bar for a writer to aim for, but it’s worth the shot.
The key (or at least a key) is to show the result and let the reader wonder what it means or how it came to be. A final example from Only’s End: In book 1 Blair discovers The Book of Manjit, a text that presents as folktales but is really a secret encoding of advanced science. An important part of the action is how Terendurr, and the adversary Bandal, respectively decode parts of the book and what use they make of it. It’s not too big a spoiler to reveal that Terendurr discovers a means of instantaneous communication over arbitrary distances, like 1000s of light-years. Yes, it’s LeGuin’s ansible – an idea that I appropriate with reverence.
Don’t shy away from big science – just conceive it such that the impacts are big, then readers won’t care if it is consistent with Relativity.
Alright, that’s enough on worldbuilding. Need to get back to actual writing <g>. Till next time …
No, this post is not about that excellent show Mythic Quest (when is season 4 finally coming out???) What I want to talk about are some of the ideas from – the also excellent – SF YouTube channel authored by Damien Walter.
First off, I’m not exaggerating when I say Damien’s content and ideas are excellent. In my own “quest” to get better at writing, he’s been a fantastic resource about how SF & F have evolved, and what works in stories. But what I’m thinking about today is his view on what makes the greatest science fiction and fantasy stories is myth, that the story connects with the reader and the world in an archetypal way. Now I imagine anyone who’s taken a university English course, or even just read Edith Hamilton, understands that myths are part of our cultural context. When Frodo and the fellowship set out for Mordor – a strategy with almost no chance of success – that makes total sense to us, because we’ve been raised in a culture that “remembers” Orpheus questing into the underworld or Theseus facing the Minotaur. It is well known that Tolkien, an expert in myths like Beowulf, the Norse pantheon and much more, drew upon that in his conception of the world of Arda. When people read Harry Potter, Harry and Dumbledore are easy to understand because of Arthur and Merlin – the hero and mentor.
So, no question that myth provides all of us with concepts that let us relate stories to ourselves and the world.
Myth … or Trope?
Myths are indeed templates for stories. But the same can be said for a related concept, the trope. Tropes are general-purpose narrative constructs; because they are to some extent universal, they appear over and over again. A much-used example is the Ticking Time Bomb – some sort of peril or problem that must be solved in a typically short window of time. Time bomb appears no less than four times in James Bond novels; in the Star Trek universe, the starship auto-destruct with countdown is used (by my count) at least fifteen times.
There’s no ancient myth I can identify that prefigures the ticking time bomb. It seems likely this trope is just that – similar to when a character’s cell phone loses signal at a critical time, or when a hero in a car tells their sidekick, “take the wheel!”, the time bomb is a usage of the modern age. It is nothing more than a familiar, believable device.
But is that always true? Another endemic trope is the con man, a swindler, cheat, shady character, who may or may not have a heart of gold. Harold Hill in The Music Man is a con man, and of course so are Hooker and Gondorff in The Sting; have to include Quark on this list as well. Yes, these are all stock characters in a certain sense, but they have a mythic history: Hermes and Odysseus were con men, so was Loki, the Native American Coyote, and a host of others. The WikiPedia entry on this lists over 70 examples. Looks like some tropes are myths, or at least derive from them.
Meaning
Rather than nerd-out over the difference between myth and trope, I’ll propose a simple answer: Myths have meaning, tropes do not. Let’s take King Arthur as an example. Forgotten as a child, with no expectation of honor or position, Arthur becomes King when he shows his innate virtue by drawing the sword from the stone. Assisted by Merlin, and by The Lady in the Lake, Arthur strives to discover what is means to be a good king. Today anyone who knows the name King Arthur understands it as a symbol of honor, justice, and empathy. This myth is more than an entertaining story or series of clever twists, it tells us something about how we should view the world.
The best stories take myths like these and let us rediscover their meanings in new ways. Who is Aragorn from LoTR but Arthur? Gifted with a sword of kingship, Aragorn is assisted by a powerful mentor, and learns the weak are as important as the strong. Tolkien brought this myth to us in a new way, in a setting of global catastrophe, something that is much feared by those born in the twentieth century.
All these examples are entertaining. But they endure as classics of their genres because they have something more: meaning.
Science Fiction and Myths
Seen from my perspective as a writer, this is not all good news. It is hard enough to write entertainment. Now it has to have meaning as well? Can’t I just be satisfied with writing a ripping good yarn?
For the longest time, that’s exactly what science fiction was – genre tales with plots familiar to readers of westerns, mysteries, or adventure, but in settings with spaceships and planets. Yet something happened in the the 1950s. I’ll go with one of Damien’s videos, where he tags Isaac Asimov as a key point of the transformation of SF:
John W. Campbell had already started the transition of SF to be less adventure and more science. As one of Campbell’s writers, Asimov embraced that, but wanted to take a step beyond the engineering centric stories Campbell was himself writing. The Keynesian “economic revolution” of the 1940s was giving way to a more market-driven model – economics and mathematical modeling were certainly topics of interest for Asimov. Add the high-tension politics of the time, with the Cold War starting, and on one hand the nascent Civil Rights movement, and on the other organizations like the John Birch Society, it was easy to envisage a world spinning out of control.
Out of this, Asimov updates the myth of Prometheus the Inventor, creator of the forbidden, into Hari Seldon, the Scientist-Sage. Seldon’s invention, psychohistory, is a kind of economic modeling on steroids – multiplied by a billion. With it Seldon predicts the future of the galaxy, then plans for a sequence of interventions that will push that future in desirable directions. Seldon is not the mentor for the hero, he *is* the hero, the figure who through rationality and perseverance enacts a plan to save mankind. Unlike Prometheus, Seldon is not punished by the gods for his presumption, because in the Seldon myth, there are no gods – only science, and rationality.
Science Fiction and the 21st Century Myth
Thinking through this, it seems to me that science fiction and fantasy are uniquely positioned to bring forward new perspectives on myth. Why? Because like myths themselves, SF & F are stories where we make stuff up. Take a venerable genre like the police procedural. Yes, you can devise an even more cynical, quirky or mentally unique detective, but you can’t change the rules of the story: the crime must be solved, justice must be done. A romance can be in a never-seen before setting, or have colorful supporting characters, or modern day impediments to love, but at the end the principals must live happily ever after.
In SF & F there are no rules. We can decree the world to be any way we like, and then we can test what that means for a myth. Like:
What would Troy’s Cassandra do in a world where predictive AI was omnipresent?
What if Odysseus’ home was in another dimension?
What if the netherworld Gilgamesh journeys to is an electronic repository of the consciousnesses of the dead?
I know these examples are cheesy – I just made them up this moment – but I hope they make the point: Almost all genres of literature address the world as it is; SF & F explore worlds that might be, letting us do the experiment of whether an old myth is still valid, or needs to change, or needs to be rejected.
What are these “21st Century Myths” going to look like? Hard predictions would be foolish, but I do have guesses:
They are not going to proclaim themselves, we’ll probably only figure out what happened some years after the myth is written.
They are going to be apolitical. Not that there won’t be lessons that bear on politics, but myth is much, much bigger than politics.
They are going to offer solutions. Not easy or obvious ones, but for a myth to resonate, it has to do more than warn, it has to offer the possibility of progress.
I’ll bring my ramblings to an end. Many thanks to Damien Walter for sharing all this. Reading back, I don’t see much above that wasn’t in his content to begin with. Nonetheless, I’m the sort who needs to step through something on my own before I can get it.
I’ll leave you with the most mythic Bugs Bunny cartoon ever:
