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.

Another thing I see as being pretty stable is clothing. People have been wearing trousers for 3,000 years – why are they suddenly going to stop? Of course styles and fashions will always change, but spare me the goofiness.

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.

I submit that the gunslinger Shane is an Arthurian knight, and so is Robert Parker’s Spenser for Hire.

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:

What’s Opera Doc from 2K HistoryClips on Vimeo.

Till next time …

Regular readers may recall I’ve been sending my book, Bandal The Only, to agents. I blush to reveal the exact number, but let’s say since last November I’ve submitted the book over one hundred fifty times. The two most common responses are: Nothing, no response (57%), and a Rejection message (31%); the remaining 12% or so are still-active submissions. Of course, silence, after 10 weeks or so, is also rejection. But here it’s the concrete, not-gonna-happen ones I want to share with you all.

The Short Form

The majority of the rejections an author receives are pre-made, from templates. A great many of these are to the point:

Thank you for including me in your agent queries. I have reviewed it, and am afraid I must step aside on this proposed book. I wish you all the best with your endeavor.

or:

Thank you for your submission. I appreciate the opportunity to consider BANDAL THE ONLY. After careful review, I will be stepping aside.

Not much to be gleaned here, other than you didn’t make the cut. There’s a few more elaborate patterns I see, however.

We’re The Ivy League

In this type, the message is telling you: Hey, we’re the “Harvard” of agencies, don’t feel bad if you didn’t get in. Like this:

Thank you for considering me as a possible fit to represent your book. I have reviewed your query and, at this time, I do not believe that I am the right agent to represent your work. Please know that we are extremely selective, even with the materials we review. I do appreciate you thinking of us as an agency, however, and I encourage you to continue your search for an agent who is just the right fit for you. I wish you every success in your publishing endeavors.

or:

Thank you so much for thinking of <<AGENT>> for representation, but BANDAL THE ONLY is not right for her list at this time. With her very full client list, <<AGENT>> has to be extremely selective, and she wasn’t able to fully connect with your project. We wish you all the best, and thanks again for reaching out to us.

Love Is (Not) In The Air

Sometimes you get reminded of the need to get all googly-eyed over a book:

Thank you for submitting your query for BANDAL THE ONLY to <<AGENCY>> for our consideration. We apologize for the delay in our response. Unfortunately, we did not fall in love with the opening pages as much as we had hoped. For that reason, we are going to respectfully decline the manuscript this time.

Another:

It may not seem this way, but saying no is tough for me. I’m sure hearing it is tough for you, but it’s really important for me to fall in love with a project and that just did not happen in this case. Please know that I really appreciate your patience during this process and I truly wish you the best of luck in finding the right agent! I’ll be rooting for you!

And then there’s this longish one, trying (I guess) to soften the blow:

At <<AGENCY>>, we understand that writing is a passion, an intensely personal calling, a long-time dream for many, and frequently a lonely endeavor. We have great respect for authors, and we share the writer’s passion—that is why we are literary agents.

Unfortunately, publishing is a business that necessarily involves a lot of rejection, at every stage. One of the most difficult things for us as agents is to have to say no. Yet, we can take on only a small fraction of all the work we see, and this is simply a business reality.

We say no for many reasons—because of changing trends in the market; because we already have something similar on our list; because we know of similar published or forthcoming titles; because something isn’t right for us; because although something may be strong, well-written and even publishable, we didn’t fall in love with it.

Please do try to keep this one “no” in perspective. This is a highly subjective business and another agent may adore your work. All it takes is one “Yes.” We wish you success in finding that “Yes,” whether with us or another agent and publisher.

Grasping At Straws (of Feedback)

I can say with certainty that there’s nothing between the lines of these messages. The possible reasons for rejection are pretty clear:

1. The book’s premise or theme is weak and/or unmarketable.
2. The writing or voice is weak.
3. The agent is busy and actually is not accepting anything, or your submission wasn’t strong enough to justify pushing out existing work.

That being said, sometimes you get a rejection that does make you wonder, Was I close? or Should I change something? An example of a vaguely heartening one:

Thank you for thinking of me with your query for BANDAL THE ONLY. While this sounds like a strong project, I’m afraid it doesn’t strike me as a likely fit with me and my particular editorial contacts. I wish you well in finding the right agent for your work.

What this agent is saying is, with the publishers (i.e., the editorial contacts) they work with, they can’t envisage one of them wanting to take Bandal. So, all the mechanics of the submission were fine, just not a “fit” here. Here’s one that makes you think about making a change:

…apologies for the delay in responding. Unfortunately, I’m afraid I must pass. There is a lot to like here, but the narration felt very concerned with world building and I didn’t find myself as drawn in as I’d hoped.

Science Fiction by definition needs a lot of world building. If you’re writing a romance set in New York City, virtually no world building at all is needed, everyone has a picture of what NYC is like. But until they read your SF book, nobody knows what the planet Oglethorpe 5 is like. So, you have to show them. For all that, it is definitely possible to overdo it with SF world building, and today the market is much more about “character driven” books than those with a lot of elaborate details about environments or science.

Does Bandal have too much worldbuilding? Should I start in on a rewrite? The answers are: Maybe, and No. There’s still a lot of agents I haven’t heard from. Better to completely exhaust those possibilities before considering changes. If nothing else, sometimes agents get back to you explicitly requesting changes, the coveted revise and resubmit response.

‘Dese Are The Conditions That Prevail

That was Jimmy Durante’s catchphrase, and it reminds us that the key with dealing with a lot of life is just getting used to it – cause life ain’t gonna change. So it is with rejection. If you’re a writer, better get used to it – by the truckload.

That doesn’t mean you sit there in patient silence, waiting. First off, you need to bear in mind the positives on your ledger. In my case, one of these is that an agent requested my full manuscript and is currently reviewing it. That’s a big step. It could well lead to rejection .. or it could lead to that revise-and-resubmit, or even to an offer of representation. Then on top of that, one has to keep working. I’ve already talked about completing a new novel, Stone By Stone. I’m working on engaging an editor to help me polish that book. And at the same time, I’ve gone back to work on finishing the trilogy that begins with Bandal The Only. Just this past week I completed, I think, a strong outline for Only’s End, the conclusion to Blair and Terendurr’s struggle with Bandal. Hope it doesn’t have too much worldbuilding …

Then, you need to spend time looking at things like this, that I came across whilst Googling the Great Durante. What can I say, I’m a sucker for this old-time stuff. Till next time …

Back in March I wrote about my approach and progress on writing a new novel, Stone By Stone. On the last Saturday In June, I finished the first draft. Accompanied by glasses of wine, I read the concluding chapter to Kim and, for about 24 hours, I felt a sense of mild elation, a sort of I kicked ass on that! feeling. But it didn’t take long for the long list of everything ahead to start weighing, and you wonder, whose ass exactly got kicked?

An actual milestone

Ok, it’s not that bad. First of all, while estimates vary, it’s clear that no more than 1-3% of people who start a novel actually finish it. Getting to the end of a book is an accomplishment. Here’s some stats on the 1st draft effort, starting with the length of the in-progress draft over time:

Having generated this graph just now I’m fairly surprised how straight the line is; in my mind progress was way more bursty. The total is 95,000 words. My expectation at the start was 85,000, but I’m not going to worry about 10K extra, at least not now. A logistical thing I’m pleased at is how few adverbs and awkward repeats there are in the text, much lower than the average for published works. Since I didn’t do any copy editing yet in the draft, I guess I must be getting better at not introducing those things in the first place.

Something that bears reflection is pantster vs. plotter. For this project I took the plotter approach – working out character sheets, worldbuilding master-book and action outline first, actual writing second. Looking back, while the main plot elements all were kept, there was a ton of change and refinement along the way; for example the main action at the end has not just one, but two types of peril! I recorded all these changes in my outline document and it looks like about every 3 weeks I had enough of a change to warrant a notation. A big general change from the starting conception was having fewer bad guys. Initially I had a *lot* of evil people but, as I tried to convey that it quickly became unworkable – a world where virtually *everyone* is a Draco Malfoy is just not credible. I turned most of those folks into red herrings – they do suspicious seeming stuff, but in the end it’s mostly explainable or just petty – kind of like life.

What Now?

I’m still sending my previous Civspace book, Bandal The Only, to agents, and I don’t want to query another book until I’ve exhausted possibilities on that. That means I have time to refine and improve Stone By Stone. The new book is set in my Civspace universe, introduced in Fractured Symmetry. One possible path is, if Bandal doesn’t get an agent, is to query Stone By Stone and if it hits, follow-up with Bandal.

So I have time to make Stone By Stone as good as possible. My first step is sending out the call for beta-readers. In fact, here’s the blurb:

Five hundred years ago, the planet CARON was colonized by the KERET, a utility-minded species, who sought to escape what they felt were burdensome laws and regulations. To realize their vision, the Keret first brought a population of PHAIR to Caron as a labor force; three hundred years later they were joined by Humans. All advanced weapons are banned, save for those wielded by the robotic SENTRIES, AI robots programmed to defend the Keret and to control the population.

After five centuries Caron has become a competitive and ruthless society. Key players in the economy are the HOUSES – business consultancies with expertise in cybernetics, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, manufacturing and more. But these houses complement their skills with teams of enforcers who defend house interests or intimidate rivals.

It is at this time GERALD FRANCIS FINN (“Finn) is born, the son of a master mason. STONE BY STONE is Finn’s story: His childhood watching the work of his father, adolescence where he mixes with the elite of Caron; and finally, as a fighting instructor for AKESHIA HOUSE, where he will face mystery and deceit, loyalty and tragedy, and in the end a plot to seize ultimate power over the world of Caron.

The book is SF, but with lots of thriller elements, and a good deal of fight scenes. If you are interested in beta-reading, send email to author@wild-puma.com.

Another thing I am going to research is partnering with a developmental editor. Where line-editing focuses on syntax, punctuation and so on, and copy-editing on smooth flowing prose, paragraph to paragraph, a developmental editor looks at the book’s themes, characters, setting and plot, providing feedback on what works and what doesn’t, on what should be intensified or what should be dropped, and generally on how to make your story as engaging and affecting as possible. It’s obvious how valuable this can be – if  nothing else, having spent 6 months knee-deep in this book, I have lost a lot of objectivity about it.

Finding the right editor will be a ton of work. I already have a list of 40+ freelancers to look at, they all have varying levels of experience, different processes, and different perspective on working with authors. And of course, this isn’t a free service; cost will be a consideration.

There it is. I’ll leave you with a quote from Stone By Stone, where master mason Charlie Finn and his partner Al Cassini are deciding whether or not to take on a big project:

Al wasn’t sold on the idea, but in the end his desire for the job won him over. Before long they had their land, a square kilometer about fifty klicks from Caron City center. The Keret offered a contract; it provided minimal upfront money and pushed most of the risk on the two Terrans.

Looking at the list of conditions and deliverables, Al remarked, “This is it, then. Seeing it all, I don’t know …”

“What?” Charlie said. “I heard somewhere, ‘With bravery, all things are possible.’ I’m going to sign this, sure as eggs.” He pressed his thumb against the contract tablet.

“You in?” he asked.

“Damn you, Charlie Finn – at least I won’t go broke alone.”

Al stamped his thumb, and that was that.

Till next time …

It’s a goal of mine to learn about the work and business of writing. So far this year I’ve taken a few steps in that direction. One was attending BOSKONE 2024, where I  was able to hear a bit about the state of SF and Fantasy today, as well as attend a number of writing-oriented panel sessions. Another step was taking the Fiction Forge: Write a Novel in 45 days course from Autocrit. While I didn’t finish a book in 45 days, I did create a good outline and some starting chapters. (BTW I am now at the 70,000 word mark in that book.)

Today I want to talk about my latest step on this path, attending the Pittsburgh Writing Workshop and giving my first pitch session.

First off, this was a great workshop. The sessions were very different from BOSKONE, in that they were all hosted by agents or editors, and were all aimed at specific writing topics. A convention like BOSKONE of course has to have content for fans primarily, and writers secondarily. I attended six sessions and I got some value from every last one. Some highlights:

Sinfully Simple Synopsis, by Marlo Berliner. In this context a synopsis is a *short* summary (1,000 words or less) of the characters and events in your book. This is becoming the most important thing in attracting an agent. Query letters are even shorter and there’s so much internet info about how to make a good one their average quality is going up. But with your synopsis there’s no hiding – it has to tell a story that is intriguing to the agent. Lots of great advice here, the standout one was this: A good synopsis does not just recount the things that happen in sequence, it states that B happens because of A, and C because of B and so on. This lets the agent assess the credibility of the story and whether readers will engage with it.

The Pro Ten: Techniques to Take Your Novel from OK to “Oh Wow!”, by Lorin Oberweger. The presenter here, Lorin, was fantastic – her decades of experience were evident in everything she said. Just one of the ten techniques was “Go Deep on POV”. What’s that mean? Writers, myself included, have a tendency to adopt a “reportorial” style in our writing – what we write is like describing what is seen at a play. Sometimes that’s a good choice – noir in particular can really work using a “just the facts”, gritty style of describing action. But the trap here is this detached style risks losing the reader, the descriptions are too distant. “Go Deep on POV” means put yourself in the literal shoes of your protagonist and ask: What are they feeling? Wanting? Even, smelling? For example, if your character encounters a formidable looking dog, don’t write something like:

The dog’s shaggy coat couldn’t hide the powerful muscles in its neck and jaws.

Instead try:

Tom couldn’t help but imagine the dog’s jaws clamping onto his forearm and the powerful neck trying to tear Tom’s arm from his body.

Yes, it’s florid and melodramatic – but sometimes that’s what you need.

Crafting Satisfying Endings with the Story Endings Matrix, by Jes Trudel. I guess I never thought about it, but there are really only five possible endings to any story. The point of this talk was, understand those five types, then tips on how to make sure you use them properly. What drives the types are the story goals – in a heist book, the goal is to steal the boodle – and the story outcome – how did things turn out? In many heist books, the goal is not achieved – even though there was a plan with split-second timing, a fluke event happens and the boodle falls overboard, or whatever – but that turns out to be a good thing – like maybe we find the boodle wasn’t what we thought and getting it would have been disastrous. This kind of ending is called the Sweet Surprise. Other possibilities: The gang does steal the boodle, but then they fall out and their friendship is broken – that’s the Tragic Turnabout; The gang loses the boodle, and someone dies because of that – the Dismal Failure; lastly, the boodle is stolen (hopefully from a mustache-twirling billionaire), and the gang goes off to live on a desert island – the Happily Ever After. Lastly there’s an “open-ended” ending, where either the goal, the outcome, or both, are unclear. Literary works, or books that are parts of series often end this way.

These endings sound cliché, and they are. But they also work. No one will buy a romance that doesn’t have a happily-ever-after ending. Yes, there’s some romantic tragedies out there, but when a reader goes to the shelves marked “ROMANCE”, happily-ever-after is what they expect. That brings me to my main overall takeaway from the sessions, namely: Being a published writer means writing what readers want to read. Seems self-evident, but I believe I never really admitted that to myself. What I’ve been doing so far is write to please myself, and then hope that also pleases others.  Now I don’t intend to make radical changes or to stop writing what I like. But I need to learn more about what works in this industry and, maybe, I can do both. But I’m convinced that nowadays, with so much competition out there, its going to be rare that a writer creates a work that meets industry expectations of character, plot, and ending – you have to know the rules to effectively play the game.

A little bit about my pitch meeting. This is where you meet 1-1 with an agent and try and interest them in your book. At this workshop these meetings were ten minutes; sometimes they can be as short as five. Anyway, it’s on a Zoom call, you both say “hello”, then you start talking. I took my existing query letter and enhanced it to be more conversational. I also added a few cool-sounding details, like “the ENTERTAINERS, a band  of actor-assassins”. I started the pitch with a logline – a single-sentence summary. Probably the most famous logline of all time was created by Ridley Scott for ALIEN: “It’s Jaws, in space!” My original logline was this:

An irreverent investigator finds herself through a struggle with a galactic master-criminal.

In the hour or so before I was rehearsing, something wasn’t clicking, so I changed it to this:

An irreverent investigator finds her power and purpose through a struggle with a galactic master-criminal.

I think the change was way better – to “find oneself” is kind of a meh outcome. But “power and purpose” – cool, everyone wants those!

For whatever reason, my pitch was successful. The agent asked for my query letter and full manuscript to be sent to her direct email. Yay!

To wrap up I’ll leave you with a Pitch Meeting video. I love this guy, as he shows how lame the plots and contrivances are in successful moves. Enjoy.

It’s been more than eight months since I gave up my status  as wage-slave – i.e., I retired. Now Spring is nearly here and with the change of season it seems a good time to talk about what I’ve been doing – aside from cooking, trying to get better at golf, and bits of travel, that is. The constant thing that has been part of virtually every day since last July, is writing. Herewith some of my activities, experiences, and thoughts on all that.

This way? Or that?

Before retirement I did my writing weekends and some evenings, rarely more than 1-2 hours at a time. For all that I think I got a lot done. From 2010 to 2020 I published four books: The Temple of Beauty (short stories collection,  2016);  Fractured Symmetry (Blair and Terendurr novellas, 2017); Treyavir (fantasy, 2018); and The Lady of Dungeness (near-future SF, 2020.) Already there  was a lot more to this than just letting thoughts flow from brain to keyboard, like copyediting, e-book production, and getting covers. After all that, there’s marketing, something that has never excited me all that much. (I’ll build marketing software, but I am not the person you want doing actual marketing.) Anyway I’d say pre-retirement, of all my “writing” time 75% was spent on writing and 25% on everything else.

And now? Before I throw out details, let me share my goal: To reach more people. I think I have entertaining, and sometimes helpful, things to say and I want more people to read them. In a way this isn’t totally different from my working life – after all the goal of a software company is to make things that more and more people need and want to use. It is a bit different in that writing isn’t – or shouldn’t be – merely a product, it has to be a personal creation. Otherwise, we should just let AI write all our books.

How to pursue that goal? There’s lots of indie writers who reach tens if not hundreds of thousands of readers, by publishing and marketing their own stuff. That is absolutely great and there’s many cool authors in this category.  But, my own experiences here have shown, that’s not me. I don’t have the interest in all the promotion activities you have to do. Also, authors here who are successful often have a 1-2 book a year pace; many have catalogs of 20 or more books, which drives their credibility and helps their marketing. Not that I write particularly slow, but just having a big catalog for the sake of marketing doesn’t appeal to me.

And while indie writers often have help and support – beta readers, writing groups, maybe editors – I feel I want a stronger collaboration. So the route I’m pursuing is so-called traditional publishing. Here, your publisher is your partner, they help with edits, marketing, even concept. You still have to do a lot, but this is a formal commitment. Ideally, you’re supported in this by an agent, who offers guidance and feedback on all the early stuff and ultimately pitches your book to publishers.

So, my plan is to get an agent and/or work direct with a publisher. So, I’m sure its a matter of just sending some e-mails and et voila! Agent! Right? Right … ?

One of the Querying Crowd

Turns out there’s a pretty big number of people trying to do the same thing. Example: The app many agents use for accepting queries from authors shows the number of submissions the agent receives. Most are receiving 150 queries a month. That’s a 150 different authors trying to get representation for their how-to book on barrel-making, or their family saga, or their cozy mystery, or their urban-fantasy-romance … or their SF epic. Multiply that by the close to 1,000 agents in the USA and that’s a lot of authors looking for agents – even when you factor in that most of us send the same query to multiple agents at once.

I tried reaching out to 6-7 agents last year with no luck. Briefly, this involves three things:

• A sample of your book, typically up to the first three chapters.
• A synopsis of the book, a 1,000 word or so summary of the characters and the plot.
• A query letter, usually 800 words or less, that makes the case why the agent should take on your book.

The query letter is far and away the most important part – you need it to hook the agent so they read the rest of your materials and then, hopefully, ask to see more of the work. There’s tons of guidance on the web on how to make an effective query, though much of it is contradictory. For example, there’s no set consensus on the acceptable length of such a letter. One camp holds that longer than 400 words is automatic reject; another says longer is fine, so long as the content is high quality. Click here if you’re interested in an example of a successful, real-world query letter.

The longer I thought about this the clearer it became I needed professional help. (Yes, yes, I know you can’t want to be a writer and not need professional help, ha, ha.) There’s actually quite a large market for this, ranging from people who will critique your query letter for $50, to online get-an-agent training for $500 and up, to a whole host of other, pricier things.

My choice was to engage a coach. I won’t identify them, yet – hopefully when I do close an agent, I can share with everyone a testimonial on that. I’m super-happy with this choice. My coach is a former agent, with many active industry contacts. They don’t use those directly on my behalf, but the perspective that comes from that is invaluable. I have learned from them an immense amount about what makes great books different from ok books, what agents and the industry want, and how to go about addressing my goals in a methodical way. My coach read my book – Bandal The Only – and helped me with important improvements. They wrote my query letter and reviewed my synopsis. And – incredibly valuable – they provided me a list of those nearly 1,000 agents, all categorized and with background and contact info. Compiling that bit alone would have taken me a year, assuming I could even ferret-out all that stuff on my own.

Armed with all this, I’ve been querying since November. I hope it goes without saying, this is not an automatic thing – there are those 100’s of other authors competing with me for each agent; on top of that, there’s the subjective aspect of needing to find someone who likes my story.

Stone by Stone

While the master plan to get representation for the current book is grinding away, how do I spend my time? By writing a new book. If you’re a writer, you have to write. Back in January I briefly toyed with updating and/or revising the current book, but it didn’t take a lot of thinking to conclude I had been staring at that book too long. Better to go on to something new – I can always come back to Bandal in the future. The new work is currently titled Stone By Stone.

Not only did I want to start a new story, I wanted to try new ways of writing. You can’t be doing the writing thing for very long before you hear about the plotters vs. pantsers thing – the theme of this post’s title image. Plotters plan out their whole story in outline form before doing any writing. “Pantsers” fly by the seat of their authorial pants – while they have ideas about the story, mostly they just start writing. All my work till this year has been pantser-esque. My new book idea was for an SF-Thriller, set in the Civspace universe of Blair and Terendurr. Thrillers, even more than mysteries, require tight plotting – the goal is to “thrill” the reader with a build of action and suspense that in the end resolves in an unexpected but still satisfying way. The Andromeda Strain is a venerable SF-Thriller; a more recent example is Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary. I decided to go the plotter route with this effort. It was about 20 January when I first began.

I am really liking how this has worked, so far. I started with background text on the world. Like most SF & Fantasy readers, I expect world building, so as an author I have to give that some priority. I don’t need every detail spelled out but what there is has to make sense, and can’t be simply arbitrary. (“On planet X, the aliens there always set fire to something before breakfast.” “Why is that?” “They just do!”) For me, starting this way allowed me to ask, then answer, the “what if” questions that SF works always have. In the case of my story that root question is:

What if a race of commerce- and utilitarian-minded aliens started a new colony planet and explicitly kept themselves isolated for 500 years?

That question prompts a great many second-order questions: How does their economy work? Who provides labor? What do they work on? What do they value? And so on.

Then it was on to characters. This was a lot less reasoning and more just imagining. Aside from the obvious need for backstory and personality, an important thing I worked on here is what are the abilities and weaknesses of the main characters? Fictional characters almost always have a “super power” – like Sherlock Holmes’ deductive reasoning – but also a weakness that leads to conflict and challenge in the story – to cite Holmes again, this would be his misanthropy, his ego, and his short attention span.

I really only started the plot – the incidents and the action – after a good three weeks on background. Something I had decided early on was the structure of the book. There’s 3 stories, all showing the main character Gerald Francis Finn (“Finn”):

1. Finn as a child and his life with father Charlie – a master mason – and mother Mary, an accountant. It is Charlie’s craft that led to the title, Stone by Stone.
2. Finn from age 11 to 17, at an elite private school, supported by the income of his step-father.
3. Finn as a “new adult”, age 17 to 20, working as a martial arts instructor for Akeshia House – a kind of combination business consultancy/mafia protection racket. Akeshia and other houses are accepted players in the unfettered economy of the planet Caron.

The chapters of the book go back and forth between these three arcs, and through them we progressively learn about the world and about Finn’s early life, as the main action of arc 3 unfolds. This is a fun challenge, devising occurrences that are not only interesting, but that reinforce the themes of the other arcs. Anyway, it took about a week, but I set down in spreadsheet form what I wanted to have happen in each of 17 chapters, spread across the 3 arcs.

Ok, nearly done here. I started creating draft text mid-February, and so far have reached the 31,000 word mark – I expect the final length to be around 85,000. And I have a few times gone back and refined the outline – haven’t really changed or dropped anything, but have filled in details on many whys and hows. So now I just have to keep repeating that till I get to the end.

I’ll leave you with a few lines of actual writing. Akeshia House, like many classic gangster organizations, affects a style of dress, in their case of green and black. Finn’s mentor, Will Machado, takes Finn to a tailor who fits Finn with garments suitable to his position. The tailor, a Phair named Fuscule (bonus props to anyone who recognizes that name!) has these parting words for Finn:

Out of Finn’s earshot, Machado and the Phair seemed to haggle, then come to terms. The two Terrans departed with four everyday ensembles for Finn, and the promise of two formal suits.

Fuscule saw them to the door, saying, “A pleasure fitting you, young Finn – I daresay you look reborn. A word of caution though.”

“And that is?” Finn asked.

“Why, it is that you bear in mind that while my fabrics are proof against ordinary stains, notably blood, they offer nothing against stabs and slashes. I do so hate it when one of my works comes back for mending of such – even more so when it never comes back at all. And so, fare you well!”

Till next time …