A Moment with Hannah Adcock

When and why did you decide to pursue writing as more than a hobby?

I always wanted to write, or at least to make stories, since I was about six. Maybe even five. I was obsessed with rewriting fairy tales, and my own versions of them were, looking back, quite grisly. For example, Goldilocks would find Baby Bear lost in the woods and then raise him…only to have him turn around and eat her once he was big enough!

My first audience (who were my nan and mum) would read these stories and be going, “Why so gory? What did she do to deserve that?” - and laughing - and I’d say, “’Cause it’s funny.”

The urge to write came to light around the same time I got the urge to make people laugh. It was only when I started to read the Roald Dahl books, and the Beatrix Potter books, and then a little later the Narnia series by C.S. Lewis, that I began to get the idea you could actually do this for a living. It was like, “Hey - wait a minute. These people are adults…and they get paid to scribble down whatever they’re daydreaming about?…I want to do that!”

I wasn’t sure how. I still wrote, though. My first novel, aged seven, was a farcical story about a family of rabbits who constantly fell out and beat each other up. From then on I was known, by close relatives, as ‘Potty Beatrix’ until I abandoned that particular book. (If you can call all of fifteen pages a book.)

I didn’t try to write a proper book again until I was just finishing my GCSEs. I have to confess, whatever opportunity I had, I’d whip out my notebook and start scrawling when I should have been revising…not in ALL my lessons, of course…how the teacher never noticed I’ll never know. But the fact is, I wanted to write more than anything else, and this was because it was about the only thing I could do well, (apart from wonky comic strips which haven’t seen the light of day). It was like swimming, or flying. Brilliant.

So, I typed up the novel, which was going to be a fantasy novel for older children - dead chuffed, had it all set up in my head - and, aged sixteen, I posted it to a publisher. And I had no idea what I was doing. No idea of how the publishing side of things worked. I was flying, yes - but by the seat of my pants.

They were very nice about it. I got a long letter back giving me words of encouragement and some suggestions about what I should try first before actually spitting out a book. Still kept the letter. I have it lurking somewhere in a frightening corner of my drawers. (Chest of drawers, in case you were wondering.)

After that I left it again for another couple of years. Did my A-levels, reasonably well, but by that time I’d decided I didn’t want Higher Education. I wanted to get off the treadmill and just get on with work. I thought I’d be a pre-school teacher and went on a childcare course for all of six months, and thought, “These people are all right, but I don’t belong here. This isn’t for me.”

So, I set out to learn a bit more - finally. I did a short course in creative writing with the Open University, read An Author’s Guide To Publishing by Michael Legat (written in the days when they still used typewriters, but still interesting), got the Writers and Artists’ Yearbook, and it was like, “Oh!” (slaps forehead) “That’s how it works! You send shorter stuff to magazines!”

I’ve been doing just that (as well as poetry) for almost a year now, and I’m overjoyed to say it’s working.

Hannah Adcock is a writer of fantasy, sci-fi and poetry (often with a humorous bent)living in a strange corner of Lincolnshire, England. Her work has appeared in Poetic Diversity, Clockwise Cat and Penumbra. She posts poetry, artwork and other oddments over at inspirationandlaughs.wordpress.com.

Learn more about Hannah Adcock her Facebook author page.

Roger Rabbit at Comic-Con 2013!

Comic-Con 2013 took place this past weekend in San Diego, and included a panel on the making of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. The beloved animated movie based on the work of author Gary K. Wolf is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, and the panel was led by a world class group of animators including producer Don Hahn, animation masters Andreas Deja and James Baxter, writer Tom Sito, special effects guru Dave Bossert, and a special appearance by the voice of Roger Rabbit himself, Charles Fleisher!

There is an audible buzz of excitement throughout the audience for the entirety of the panel, and served to be a great opportunity for fans wanting to discover the ins, outs, trials, tribulations and accomplishments of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, both during its making and afterwards.

The panel begins by paying homage to Gary K. Wolf, who of course without his novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, there would be no script for the movie. The panelists then discuss how Who Framed Roger Rabbit? was one of the first movies to be a hybrid, which combines live action with animated character. At the time (1986), digital technology hadn’t progressed to the point of being even half as fast as it is now, so the movie shines as a “hand painted” work, where every facet of the animation is pure hand creation.

Charles Fleisher, the voice of Roger (as well as Benny The Cab, Greasy, and Psycho), seems very Roger-esque to this day. He hops around on the panel—alternating between sitting, standing, and cracking jokes. He also performs his Roger Rabbit voice after an audience member requests it at the drop of a hat, and it is still flawless, twenty-five years later!

Jessica Rabbit. You knew we were headed there, right? The panelists discuss how Rita Hayworth and various supermodels were inspiration for her. In fact, the animators would have supermodels come into the studio to walk and pose in order to capture an essence of Jessica on paper. Her main animator, Russell Hall, was very quiet and shy according to the panelists, and had a very hard time with her character at first. That is to say, he couldn’t quite bring her to life until he ultimately “exaggerated certain parts of the anatomy” (panelists words!). His routine was to smoke incessantly, get up and move about rather sensually around his office, then get back to his drawing board, never breaking focus. And for this quiet, chain-smoking man who danced solo around his office, we thank you for Jessica Rabbit!

The panel concludes with questions asked by audience members (one woman dressed in impeccable Jessica garb!). The best answer comes from Charles Fleisher, who when asked “How would Roger Rabbit react with current video game characters like Sonic the Hedgehog, Mario, or Optimus Prime?” responds with “He would destroy them all by making them laugh, and then stealing their batteries.”

Well said.

To watch the You Tube video of the Who Framed Roger Rabbit 25th Anniversary at San Diego Comic Con please click HERE.

Remember to be on the lookout for Gary K. Wolf’s new novel in the Roger Rabbit series, Who Wacked Roger Rabbit? available for pre-order by Musa Publishing on October 22nd, and for release on November 22nd! And be sure to check back here for any Roger related news!

A Moment with J.M. Scott

When did you first become interested in writing?

I became interested in writing fiction when I was at San Francisco State University. Between classes, I had a lot of down time, so reading more than just my text books became a standard practice. I’d spend many foggy afternoons enjoying the works of authors like Peter Benchley, Michael Chrichton, and occasionally, Stephen King. I respected their creativity, but at that point in my life, never thought that I would try to write my own stories.

During my senior year, I took an advanced screenwriting course. It was very educational but extremely labor intensive. The instructor wanted a completed script by the end of the term. Needless to say, I spent countless hours penning my screenplay. When it was time to turn in the assignment, only a few students had completed the work. The sheer volume of the project had disenchanted many of my fellow writers. It was then that I thought I might have the qualifying skills to merit publication. I wrote a couple science fiction pieces and eventually sold one to an online magazine. That same summer, I was hired as an English teacher at a local high school. I was very enthusiastic about my new job, so I went back to earn a master’s degree in Education. Unfortunately, because of the demands of my fledgling career I had to place writing on hold.

Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to read and teach many incredible works of literature, but I always felt that there was something missing. Most English teachers appreciate and critique the written word often, but few make an attempt to publish work for other people to read. It became important to me to show my students that I could demonstrate the skills that I was teaching them, so one fateful day I started typing.

I made every mistake in the book, but after two years of believing in myself and listening closely to editors and other trained authors, I started to find some success. I finished my first novel, Tarus Falls, and was able to write several short stories that are either out for consideration, or have been published.

I enjoy the craft immensely and still get excited when I take a course or purchase a new book on writing. Optimistically, I’ll continue to learn with each word that I press onto the page, and with a little luck, build a readership that will enjoy my work for years to come.

J.M. Scott is a writer from Fremont, California. When he is not working on his next story, he enjoys an active life of scuba diving, Aikido, and amateur marksmanship.

Jarrod, Jessica, and Roger

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, but its literary basis, Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, by Gary K. Wolf, first hit the shelves over thirty years ago, in 1981! Needless to say, Roger fans of both the screen and page have been quite hungry for more, and this upcoming fall they will be greatly rewarded when Musa Publishing releases Wolf’s third book in the series, Who Wacked Roger Rabbit?

With this release approaching, it’s only right to recognize those fans that have been waiting over twenty years for the third book. Fandom surrounding Roger Rabbit has never been lacking, and a common fan favorite has always been the ever-sultry Jessica Rabbit. If you’re wondering what she’s been up to these past few decades, look no further than the only Jessica Rabbit news site and photo archive on the web: ImNotBad.com, to discover everything Jessica. Below, I ask the site’s author, Jarrod, a few questions about his personal journey and experiences with Jessica Rabbit fandom:

Tell us about yourself and ImNotBad.com—how and why did you start it?
I've always loved art and animation ever since I was a kid. It impressed me that people were drawing those characters. I enjoyed watching the process of that as well - the behind the scenes stuff. I loved art, and drawing. I would often copy what I would see in a picture or on TV and try to match it as close as I could. I still do art, traditionally or digitally. I created my first ever Jessica Rabbit custom doll. I never painted before and it came out better than I expected.

I originally had a Who Framed Roger Rabbit Yahoo group, but the character Disney was focusing more attention on, surprisingly, was Jessica. So In 2003 I started the Jessica Rabbit Group. I started mainly because she was my favorite character and thought it would be fun. It allowed me to make lots of new artwork of her, which I put on the site monthly. Then her collectible pins were really taking off and there was a smattering of other merchandise - so I knew Disney was pushing the character more. Why they did it still remains a mystery. I had wanted a true stand-alone Jessica website. There were only two good sites before which didn't last long. After a few years on Yahoo I knew I needed to branch out, so I started ImNotBad.com- really thinking only a few people would see and visit. There's actually thousands of visits a week during holiday times and when big news hits. It's exciting.

What does Jessica Rabbit mean to you?
There is a wide range of characters I like - but Jessica Rabbit is THE favorite. She was such a different female cartoon for that time: A great combination of sexiness and Disney, which we had never seen before. Knowing real people created her by hand also added to it. The animators really put effort into the film and it shows. Because of the look of the character I think she became hard to create as a collectible back then, so her merchandise was rare. It was like a hunt to find anything, but I enjoyed it. Aside from that, the movie came out during a very hard time in my life when I was so young. It really was my escape. The whole experience of the movie was like fate helping me through something so difficult. So it all grew from there.

Do you have a wide collection of Jessica Rabbit memorabilia?
Yes, though I definitely don't have everything. I own the merchandise I review on my site. I have Jessica statues, snow globes, mugs, shirts, and just over three hundred Jessica pins. The Jessica Rabbit store was open for about a year and by chance I was able to visit. Had I known it was going to be temporary, I'd have stocked up!

Have you always been a Roger Rabbit fan? What's your earliest memory of first watching Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
I've always loved the movie, and all the characters. The first memory I have of seeing the characters was in a commercial for the film. It pretty much stopped me in my tracks, and all I knew was I wanted to see it - especially when I saw Jessica walk across the screen. In fact I insisted leaving a friend's house early to see the movie with my family. For some reason I think I knew this was going to be something special, so I didn't want to see it with anyone but them.

How would you describe the fandom surrounding Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
With the Internet, people really got vocal about Roger Rabbit when the Blu-Ray was released. It was also shown on TV around that time, and people were commenting how it was one of the best movies ever. I think that’s great. I feel the true "fandom" got whittled down to less people when Roger and Co. disappeared from the parks for whatever reason that was.

…versus the fandom surrounding Jessica?
The fandom for Jessica alone was different, because her merchandise kept going, and she was a character who collectors kept alive. I hoped that would be enough to keep her in the forefront of minds, and perhaps it was. Now, you see many women dressing like Jessica at conventions. So she's definitely remembered, and people want more of the character.

On ImNotBad.com it shows that Disneyland (in Paris) has finally represented Jessica Rabbit in the parks—this is something a long time in the making.

Do you think it will ever carry over here in the states?
I really hope so. The fact that they did this is huge - at least that's how I view it. No matter how it that mask looked, it was so cool to see Jessica along with all the other characters. People want to see her in the parks. That's been wanted for a while now.

The reactions you got from people about Jessica being a face vs. masked debate in the park seems split. You say on ImNotBad.com: "The shape of Jessica's face alone does not match a real human, so if a woman were to take on this role as a face character - as good as she might look - she won't really look like Jessica." Which I agree with, but I also agree with Gary K Wolf (the creator of Jessica Rabbit) when he says: "...I think this could be a better Jessica. In this rendition, she does look a lot like a blow up doll." Is there any way Disney can improve upon her masked look?
Yes, Gary is right on that. It's missing the whole attitude of Jessica Rabbit we know from the movie. She has no expression at all. The mask is also really small - character heads need to be slightly bigger and exaggerated. I tried to translate as much from Disney Paris messages boards as I could, and people think perhaps she was a last minute addition. Either way, I wish people were a bit more open to the fact Disney tried this than criticizing the look.

What is the Jessica Rabbit community like?
The community was mainly collectors. It is definitely expanding though, even after all these years. People love the character. Jessica Rabbit was like our Betty Boop of the 80's. I see women Tweeting about how they wanted to be Jessica when they grew up, or are now copying her hairstyle. The men have always liked her for many reasons, but male collectors do have an eye for her as an art piece. I think if you like Jessica, you're kind of forced into being a collector because her merchandise was usually higher end stuff. A Premium Format statue was released of her, the most accurate you can find. People not even a fan of the movie were buying it because they said it looked so good. That's the power of Jessica Rabbit, and that statue helped push her out in front little more at conventions.

You've been running your site for over 10 years now, what are some of your fondest memories and best interactions with your readers?
People have asked me for certain pictures or merchandise knowledge. I do my best to accommodate when someone is trying to find something in particular. Readers will tell me how much they enjoy the site, I'm happy they are even visiting! Someone gave me the heads up on Jessica in Paris, so it's cool that they are helping me too. Some really great interactions have come from the Disney Artists I've interviewed, sharing all their stories about creating Jessica. I also talk with other artists who create custom pieces of Jessica and feature them on the site. There are some really talented people out there.

Assuming you have met your fair share of Jessica fanatics throughout the years, do any stand out? Any impressive impersonators?
I've become friends with two other fanatics, Andoni and Mark. They often help me with the site if they find out news or merchandise. For a long time I thought it was only the three of us - but I know there are more fans out there. I think Jessica fans were shy. I don't know what's up with that. I think it was because of the nature of the character, and that she wasn't as well known. That's changing though. I've never met anyone in Jessica costume, but the ones I've seen on the Internet lately have been amazing!

How do Roger fans feel about the upcoming release of Who Wacked Roger Rabbit?
They are hungry for it, especially with being teased for twenty-five years now of a movie sequel. The books might be the only kind of sequels we ever have, so I think it's great that Gary K. Wolf is continuing with the characters stories. We have gotten to a point where a successful book is immediately looked at for making into a movie - which could still make it possibility. The fans are in support of this new book fully - as well as the other Roger Rabbit projects Gary has in the works. Those other projects garnered quite a lot of interest.

What are you hoping to see for Jessica in Gary's upcoming novel?
Just more! I'm afraid that Jessica's popularity has eclipsed Roger's slightly because her curvaceous look, and that her merchandise kept her in the public eye, but Roger is such a wonderful character. The two of them are peanut butter and jelly - different, but made for each other. They both make the other more unique in a complimentary way. So, I'm hoping that there's some great interactions between the two of them and we get more of a look into their relationship.

What are you especially looking forward to see in the upcoming novel?
I've gotten a few clues on what might possibly be in the works, but I think it will be so much fun to have the character's back again - in a way that is a reminder of how it all really began - with Gary's wonderful storytelling.

Reuniting fans with their beloved Roger Rabbit characters in Who Wacked Roger Rabbit? will absolutely be a wonderful, worthwhile reward after all these years.

Thank you Jarrod for sharing your Jessica Rabbit expertise! Check out ImNotBad.com to see what is happening with Jessica worldwide on a daily basis, and stay tuned here for more Who Wacked Roger Rabbit? news!

The Creative Domino Effect

by Martin Rose

I'm sitting in the lobby of the Ace Hotel while amused film director, producer and screenwriter Stephen Soucy of Modernist Enterprises attempts to pry space between my overflow of words so he can speak. We cradle coffees in the half-lit atmosphere, overlorded by the stuffed heads of antlered mammals. We're caffeinated and entering a hazy hinterland where magic floats in on hotel lobby dust and the bowed heads of professionals tapping away at open laptops. Anything seems possible with enough caffeine.

Soucy was discussing an array of projects and the string of events that can pull a man from the ordinary work-a-day life into matters of myth and fiction. Having done his time with the corporate world, a story brought him to New York. A story brought us together for an instant at the Ace, and more stories would send us forth into places yet unimagined.

While he discusses the ins and outs of what it's like to produce the film Paperdreams, the man is on fire with future ideas – namely, Soucy's taut screenplay based on John Morgan Wilson's short story "Edward on the Edge," coming to life as a short film called Tightwire.

"You're a story teller," is what I blurt out.

Many writers I know, particularly those in the speculative fiction field, share a similar complaint; in gatherings of friends or family, their assertion that they are artists, writers, filmmakers, all meets with the same stubborn silence or general derision – as though such an occupation were only fit for reprobates or amoeba with no other options.

"Sensible" – or perhaps, "secure" – occupations are desirable, but should you be toiling in the midst of a sea of cubicles and wake up to discover you are a story teller, woe is you. (It is just such an awakening that led to the creation of "Company Man," in Penumbra's August issue.) Misled and bamboozled, you'll find a way out – and I know some have elected for homelessness rather than return to the long snooze of "comfort" and "security." No occupation, no matter how plentiful and promising, guarantees you success – unless you yourself have something genuine to offer. If you plan on bare-knuckling it through that upper tier of professional story tellers, you must pursue what resonates within you, or run out of steam before you even begin.

The moment I realize that Stephen Soucy is a natural born story teller is the moment I understand that nothing from here on in is going to the be same. A story gets inside you and must find release; something authentic and unbeholden to anything surges within and will heed nothing without the chance to be heard. Stephen Soucy is infected with the spirit of the story teller and I smile and sip my coffee because this is the future – story tellers are the future.

It takes a special kind of creature to become a story teller. In any of these artistic endeavors you study the nuts and bolts of what moves and evokes people. The mechanics of seducing an audience of one or an audience of a thousand. Many mistakenly believe that artistic endeavors must surely be easy because so many of the greatest make it appear so – but this couldn't be further from the truth. To evoke visceral response in a reader, a viewer, requires a touch as practiced as that of a heart surgeon. We cull emotion instead of blood and vessels. And like surgery, we must put you to sleep first so we may provide the fertile ground to ferment dreams – and wake you up gasping, crying, screaming.

Hardly an endeavor for the weak of heart. Not all will make it.

Artists of every stripe have long shaped the dreams and the culture of nations. Dante was exiled for it. Caravaggio was hunted for the audacity of introducing realism into his art. Dostoyevsky was sent to Siberia for years of hard labor. Salman Rushdie. Female artists who took on other guises: Charlotte Bronte as Currer Bell, Amantine Dupin as George Sand. And the list goes on, and on. Art is no joking matter when how you choose to express yourself can cost you your life, and yet, so many come to me with the same disappointment – why am I doing this anymore? Why is this so hard? What's the point? Why does no one approve?

Get used to it. No one ever approves. It's never easy.

We forget that words, notably stories, have power. A gun may only fire one bullet at a time but with the increasing velocity of communication, we can break the hearts of millions with a keystroke. This is nuclear fission on a human scale. It's easy to forget, given the barrage of words and images we must wade through on a daily basis to ferret out the meaningful, the genuine, the authentic.

While Soucy and I depart to carry on with the business of life, it is the stories that remain – ideas that grow and take shape into lives of their own. I doubt John Morgan Wilson, a winner of both Edgar Allen Poe and Lambda Literary Awards and an accomplished author, realized at the time his story would gain momentum through Soucy's efforts – a creative domino effect. I await Tightwire with anticipation; and when a writer laments their creative condition, keep in mind what magic you wield when you put pen to paper: Name yourself a storyteller, and make no apologies.

Martin Rose writes a range of fiction from the fantastic to the macabre. He holds a degree in graphic design, and resides in New Jersey. Look for his zombie detective novel, Bring Me Flesh, I'll Bring Hell, forthcoming from Skyhorse Publishing. Learn more about Martin Rose on his blog.

TIME TRAVEL

Sci-Fi Deak Style
by John Deakins

Fictional Time Travel is so universal that every SF writer feels obliged to write a Time Travel story. “Our heroine’s time machine leaves 2013 Chicago and emerges in . . .” 1913 Chicago, future Chicago, Jurassic Chicago, Native American Chicago; etc. What wonderful possibilities! Unfortunately, Time Travel carries the worst scientific flaws of any major SF idea.

We live in an Einsteinian universe. Newton’s laws also work pretty well. Time Travel requires a Ptolemaic, geocentric universe, of which this ain’t one.

If you travel in Time from a particular spatial location, you should emerge in that same location: Right? As the Earth rotates, Chicago is rolling eastward at 1600 km/hr. In the next second, your position will separate from your original by over 400 meters. Five minutes in Time is over 130 kilometers in space. The spinning Earth just won’t hold still!

Unless you repeal Conservation of Momentum, when you arrive with a twelve clock-hours difference than the time of day you left, you’ll exit onto an Earth in which everything on the rotational counter-side will be slamming into you at 3200 km/hr.

Just make sure that you travel exactly multiples of one day. Chicago will have rotated to the same spot . . . except that the Earth is revolving around the Sun at 30 km/sec more. Five minutes is almost 9000 km away. Even a quick jaunt leaves you breathing vacuum.

Don’t forget the Sun’s orbit around the Milky Way’s core (Add hundreds of km/hr more.) and the motion of the galaxy relative to the space-time continuum. Unless your time machine is also a sealed space craft, you won’t survive to appreciate just how much airless space the universe contains.

What about reentry? When you reach a new space-time locus, will you simply push the air aside as you expand from an infinitesimally small point? That would produce a whopper of a thunderclap. Arriving secretly would be impossible. If your machine were too flimsy, the rebounding shock wave would crush it.

Will you and the local molecules simply become one? Writers agree that arriving inside a solid, regardless of method, would be a poor survival idea. With untold trillions of molecules present, some of yours would arrive inside other molecules. You might blow up like a balloon, or simply blow up. If your atomic nuclei appeared in the same space as local atomic nuclei, and the strong nuclear force would fuse them, with fatal radiation and energy release. Nuclei that were close, but not close enough, would be repelled at particle-collider speeds. You’d create thousands of fast particles that would shred your cells like a radioactive shotgun blast.

We don’t want to give up Time Travel, but what can be done? You can always Ignore It. Your readers are also geocentric. They won’t notice that you can’t travel from now-Chicago to then-Chicago without cheating on the universe’s rules. Have fun.

That’s a solution? We’re Science fiction purists. There has to be a better way. More next time.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom and author of his own fantasy series Barrow.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.

Independence Day

Photo courtesy of PatriotIcon.org

by SS Hampton, Sr.

On July 4, 1776, the Virginia representative to the Continental Congress, Thomas Jefferson, presented one of the most important documents of the ages to that Congress. The Declaration of Independence was written on vellum parchment, “paper” made from sheepskin. In that simple yet complex document of a little more than 1,300 words, a collection of thirteen colonies expressed the reasons for their armed revolution against the British Crown.

By the time Jefferson, the senior member of the drafting committee, presented the draft, the Colonies had been at war for over a year. The first shots were fired on April 19, 1775, at Concord and Lexington when 77 minutemen—no trained professionals but all volunteers—faced some 700 British troops sent to seize arms and munitions. The Battle of Bunker Hill took place in June 1775, and though the British took the hill, they suffered horrendous casualties. The Battle of Trenton took place in December, 1776 after the dispirited and freezing rag-tag Continental Army crossed the icy Delaware River, marched on the town and took it from Hessian mercenaries. The crucible of the savage winter of 1777-1778 at Valley Forge tested the resolve of the Continental Army, and even George Washington’s spirits were low. Finally, there was the Siege of Yorktown in October 1881 that ended with British Lord Charles Cornwallis forced to surrender his army. The war would drag on for almost two more years until the Treaty of Paris was signed in September 1783, and the United States of America obtained the freedom it sought and took its place among the nations of the world.

Thousands had died and tens of thousands were wounded during the war. Homes were lost and farms devastated. “Loyalist Americans” and “non-loyalist Americans” had warred with one another.

Names, filtered by the passage of centuries, loom larger larger-than-life with an almost mythical quality. George Washington. Henry Knox. Marquis de Lafayette. Friedrich von Steuben. Benjamin Franklin. James Madison. John Adams. Nathanael Greene. And, Thomas Jefferson.

The Declaration of Independence is a wonderful, even poetic, document. It was given life by the dedication, deprivation, and sacrifice of men and women the length and breadth of the Thirteen Colonies, and that of foreigners who arrived to serve in the Continental Army.

What many people may not think of is that without the sacrifice of so many there would never have been the Articles of Confederation; a Constitution of the United States; the Bill of Rights; and the Constitutional Amendments. The documents above are so few in number, but their importance and their meaning give our country life, a life that many nations around the world envy.

That, I believe, is the real meaning of the 4th of July, Independence Day. An eloquent document of a little over 1,300 words began the remarkable journey of a fledgling country with all of its faults and weaknesses—and today the incredible journey continues without end in sight.

SS Hampton, Sr. is a full-blood Choctaw of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, a grandfather to thirteen, and a veteran of Operations Noble Eagle and Iraqi Freedom. He served in the active duty Army, the Army Individual Reserve (mobilized for the Persian Gulf War), then enlisted in the Army National Guard; he was mobilized for active duty for almost three years after his enlistment. He continues to serve in the Guard, where he holds the rank of staff sergeant.

He is a published photographer and photojournalist, an aspiring painter, and is studying for a degree in anthropology—hopefully to someday work in underwater archaeology.

Hampton's first short story was published in 1992. His writings have appeared as stand-alone stories, and in anthologies from Dark Opus Press, Edge Science Fiction & Fantasy, Melange Books, Musa Publishing, MuseItUp Publishing, Ravenous Romance, and as stand-alone stories in Horror Bound Magazine, Ruthie’s Club, Lucrezia Magazine, The Harrow, Penumbra E-Mag, and River Walk Journal, among others.

Sure Fire Ways to Procrastinate

by Kendra Leigh Speedling

Writers write every day, they say. It makes sense; the thing that separates writers from People Who Have Ideas is actually writing, and it's easier to keep at it when it's part of a routine. Writing every day not only helps you improve the writing itself, but means that you finish things. It's the advice that comes up in every book, blog, or interview about writing. Write every day.

I would like to extol the virtues of writing every day, but since the most I've done this week is open a Word document before launching myself away from my computer with a wail akin to that of an injured baby manatee,* that would make me a hypocrite.

The usual excuses apply—day job, other obligations, frustration with everything I'm attempting to work on at the moment—but writers work past these things, I've been told. Writers power through scenes even when they feel like they'd get a better result letting the cat walk over the keyboard.

In this particular climate, write every day starts to feel less like advice and more like a rebuke. Where's your discipline? the malicious brain imps will whisper. Don't you know that real writers write every day? The subsequent spiral of guilt and recriminations generally culminates in a realization that I've spent the last three hours alphabetizing my bookshelves so I don't have to acknowledge the fact that I have a manuscript I haven't touched in two weeks.** It eventually evens out again, but I could do without the 3-4 day period where I feel like I'm the laziest person in the entire universe. I used to keep a spreadsheet to enter my word count for each day, but had to stop when each 0 started feeling like a reflection of my worth as a person.

So absolutely, make time for your writing. Try to write every day, or as often as you can. Enjoy those days when it's easy; sit down to write even when it feels your plotline and your life are having a contest to see who can collapse into a gooey mess first. If you really, really can't bear to look at your manuscript on a particular day, write something else: something short, something silly, something about your world, something you don't intend to ever see print. But if you, like me, find yourself sacrificing your sanity for the sake of a word count, don't beat yourself up if a few days pass without anything resembling productivity. You've had a break, and now you can get back to writing.

In the end, it doesn't matter if you write 2000 words a day or 100, write every day, every other, on weekends, in the mornings or evenings or under the light of a full moon. What matters is that you write, and keep writing, and remember why you wanted to write things in the first place.

*I don't actually know if manatees wail, so this may be horridly inaccurate. If you have identified it as such, you clearly know far more about zoology than I do, and can feel free to imagine the animal of your choice.

**The fact that there is an entire website dedicated to the concept of cat vacuuming assures me that I'm not entirely alone in this regard.

Kendra Leigh Speedling's short story "They Shall Know Us At the End" appears in the July issue of Penumbra. She graduated from the University of Minnesota with a major in English and a minor in Asian Languages and Literatures. She is a 2011 Dell Awards finalist, and will someday master the art of productivity.

Live With It

Sci-Fi Deak Style
by John Deakins

In the case of faster-than-light travel, we’re stuck with Ignore It or Unexplained Science. It’s possible to Live With It. If you can’t go faster than light, go slower than light. We can add Bussard Ram Jets or light sails, gradually accelerating to a useful fraction of light-speed. We won’t even try for trans-light speed, heading outward at a relative crawl. That’ll require decades or centuries of travel. That could work, but those solutions arrive with their own new problems.

We’ll need a “generation” ship even for the close stars. Youthful astronauts launch for Proxima Centauri; their grandchildren arrive to send back data. That involves maintaining a closed ecosystem for decades and shielding passengers and plants from a universe awash with cosmic rays. Otherwise, Generation 1 dies from lack of oxygen or fails to reproduce after being sterilized. Everybody dies of cancer, or the crew can’t control the ship because of accumulated brain damage. Social problems aboard would be huge.

A well-shielded craft would solve some problems, but its mass would reduce it to even slower crawl-speed, no matter what was pushing it. The crew would go from “generation” to generations. Could we maintain a viable social system and a closed ecosystem that long? I doubt it.

A round trip? You’re kidding, right? Slower-than-light flights are all one-way. Earth wouldn’t be your Earth anymore if you ever returned. The big problems rise from keeping a crew awake for an incredibly long time. So, put ‘em to sleep. We don’t have “cold sleep” or suspended animation for humans, but those are the kind of reasonable future developments that Science Fiction thrives on. Don’t wake up the crew, unless you can put them back to sleep. Machines don’t have to worry about century-long flights. Let a super-computer oversee all the sleepers. We could call him “Hal.”

Maybe you could wake the crew periodically. That leads to social complications. What if something goes wrong with the rotation? What if an active crew member goes bonkers?

You’ll need a ship that cosmic rays can’t reach the crew or the frozen passengers. A shaped asteroid would be the logical vessel. You’d have to postulate controlled fusion for energy, a perfectly recycling closed ecosystem, frozen sleep, and solutions to a myriad of social problems, but those are difficult. Trans-light speeds are impossible.

With so many scientific mountains to climb, why would we go there in the first place? Maybe we have to. Has the Earth become uninhabitable? Is the Sun about to explode? Have aliens driven us from our home? The writer can shine with new ideas there. Maybe we just want to go to the stars. Could interstellar travel become a religious quest? Could a star trip become the ultimate “high” for the enormously rich? Perhaps, for certain pre-disposed humans, the stars will become the ultimate Mt. Everest. Each new reason is the parent of another story.

Past writers have found a dozen exits bypassing the “No FTL” roadblock. Try out a few yourself.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom and author of his own fantasy series Barrow.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.

IGNORE IT

Sci-Fi Deak Style
by John Deakins

Nothing goes faster than light; no matter in our universe can reach light-speed. We can’t get around that fact. First, there’s presently no easy way to accelerate to anywhere close to light speed. To leave Earth requires roughly 11,000 m/s. Our fastest spacecraft might have reached 20,000 m/s. The speed of light is 300,000,000 m/s. We’re not even close (.7%). At conventional rocket velocities, the nearest star is over sixty thousand years away. No one is going to survive even the shortest interstellar trip using current technology.

We are Science Fiction! We have to go to the stars! For that, we need trans-light speeds. The first approach we must be Ignore It. An FTL ship takes off from Earth, and after plot-development (days; weeks) reaches Proxima Centauri. Or Hans Solo zooms the Millennium Falcon toward Cloud City. No one asks how his FTL drive works.

Many readers are completely unfamiliar with interstellar distances. They have a feeling that if you go fast enough, you’ll get there in a reasonable time. The trouble is that you can’t go fast enough. The closest star is over four years away at light speed. We don’t produce anything even close to light speed. We’d have trouble keeping interest in a voyage lasting even four years, and no one is projecting any planets orbiting Proxima Centauri. Every reasonable solar system is much farther. A thousand-year star voyage is almost beyond fiction. It rapidly drops off into silly science contrivance. Ignore It burns out its batteries trying to fix too many scientific contradictions. Nevertheless, Ignore It may be the only solution. Hopefully, our plotting will be so good that readership won’t notice when we travel at speeds that simply aren’t possible, never mind the rest of the impossibilities involved.

The second approach is Unexplained Science. No one has to explain how a “warp drive” works on Star Trek; they only have to name it. Some works hint at “wormholes” or “hyper space,” but the smart author will slide around the hard science. If you find a golden egg in your basket, don’t be dumb enough to ask how it arrived. If you postulate a ship with FTL drive, don’t be dumb enough to tinker with explanations. Unfortunately, that makes Unexplained Science just a subset of Ignore It.

How do we make this all work? Ignore It works well in Space Opera. (Have you ever wondered why ships that have anti-gravity and FTL drives still need fuel?) Let’s leave the “how” of FTL and impossible speeds entirely alone and concentrate on the action and the human interplay. Throw in a little Unexplained Science if you think the audience is getting restless.

Limit your FTL Unexplained Science to names only, hopefully a single pseudo-science title: maybe Space-time Folding or Worm-hole generator. Otherwise, you’ll end up looking like the Hollywood pimps are running you, too. (That would make you a . . . Never mind.)

There is another way out, but not this week.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom and author of his own fantasy series Barrow.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.

A Moment with Jenny Blackford

How long did it take you to get your first publication, and what were some of the obstacles you had to overcome?

That's a surprisingly complicated question! I'll have to tackle it in layers.

If you had asked me ten years ago, I would have said that my first publication was "Dave's Diary" back in 2002. It's a creepy sf short story for kids, in which aliens are stealthily taking over Dave's suburb. Dave realizes something is wrong when his hippie mother and heavily-tattooed older sister start going all Stepford Wives, but it's not long before Dave himself is taken over. I wrote it for a set of two-story paperbacks for kids that was edited by Meredith Costain and Paul Collins, who to my great joy accepted it.

So what obstacles had I faced? For a start, Meredith and Paul are by no means pushovers, even for old friends, and my story had to be at least as good as the stories submitted by real published authors. They'd kindly but firmly rejected a story I'd submitted for a previous project. But the main obstacle to the publication of this, my first published story, was that I had needed time and space to let my brain work creatively, so that I could actually write it. A lot of time and space. Basically, I needed to leave my job of twenty years.

I know that many people can work at high-pressure jobs and still manage to write two thousand words at the kitchen table before breakfast or after midnight, or a thousand words every weekend, or whatever works for them. Some even manage to sneak in a few hundred words while they're in the office. But none of those strategies ever worked for me.

I spent twenty years as a computer network specialist, at first with IBM then running my own consultancy, and during that time I didn't manage to write any creative words, though I was heavily involved with books and writing. I was a partner (with my husband Russell Blackford) in small press Ebony Books, which published lovely things including Damien Broderick's novel Transmitters; I was one of the founding members of the collective that produced Australian Science Fiction Review: Second Series; and I wrote many reviews for the New York Review of Science Fiction and the Age newspaper – but I simply couldn't produce creative words during those twenty years. I could stare at a piece of paper, or a computer screen, for hours or days, but nothing happened. My brain was set purely to produce analytic thought, not for creativity. Even when I tapered down to working two days a week, the creative juices still refused to do their bit.

I gave up my day job totally in mid-2001, and spent a lot of time gardening, walking and generally decompressing. I almost despaired that it would ever happen, but eventually the creative words started to flow, and kept on flowing. So you could say that "Dave's Diary" took twenty-one years from when I started at IBM, or one year from when I gave up computer networking, or even longer, if you count in the absence of any creative writing during my four-year Classics (Greek and Latin) degree plus two years of my long-unfinished Ph.D in comparative ancient religion.

But I had in fact been published decades before that story came out. I had almost forgotten, because I'd almost forgotten about writing poetry until I started doing it seriously again, this last few years.

Back when I was fifteen or sixteen years old, my English class in a (fairly rough) high school near Newcastle, north of Sydney (in sunny Australia) was set the task of writing poems to enter into the Hunter Valley Research Foundation Poetry Prize. Mine won, which pleased my English teacher immensely, and emboldened me to submit the poem to my favorite magazine, Dolly – which published it and sent a gratifying check. (That was before the cult of celebrity took over the world, and even a magazine aimed at teenage girls included serious content.) I had no idea at the time how unlikely this publication was, so fear of rejection wasn't an issue!

So what were the obstacles to that publication? (Deep breath.) It was really, truly, seriously difficult, to be a poet in a rough high school in a working class town. It wasn't easy being anything much, at my school, unless you were one of the rough kids, and, preferably, a surfer. My life was rejection, scorn and mockery from everyone except a handful of like-minded close friends. In retrospect, though, it's hard to know whether the others mocked and scorned me any more for being a poet as well as a "brain", or whether being conspicuously clever was a sufficient crime – so maybe it wasn't as big an obstacle as it may have seemed at the time.

But even that long-ago glossy-magazine publication wasn't my first. There's one more layer in this onion. Back when I was a tween, I spent a lot of my spare time sending poetry and (very bad) artwork in to the kids' page of the Sunday newspaper. Most of the time I got cards denoting points; when the points mounted up, they could be exchanged for cash. At least once, though, one of my poems was actually published.

While I was looking for something completely different last year, I found a newspaper clipping of what I'm fairly sure was my first paid publication, a poem, "Viking", which even notes my age as twelve, and shows that I was paid $1.50 for it. (Once more, the major obstacle was increased opprobrium at school.)

My immensely helpful husband read the newspaper clipping with delight, when I showed it to him. I'd thought it embarrassing juvenilia, but he told me that the new-found poem was perfectly all right, and that I should send it to the School Magazine – our equivalent of the US Cricket. I did, with a note about its rediscovery – and it's going to be reprinted in the August issue of that marvelous institution of a literary magazine for kids.

Viking
Slender, clad in white,
with her golden plaits
over her shoulders, and
wearing a torque
of twisted silver,
she looks at the stars
and thinks of a Viking
in his longship,
tall and strong,
the light of sunrise
glinting on his helmet
and his sword.

– Jenny Blackford

Jenny Blackford's stories and poems have appeared in places as diverse as Random House's 30 Australian Ghost Stories for Children and The Pedestal Magazine. Pamela Sargent described Jenny's historical novella set in classical Athens and Delphi, The Priestess and the Slave, as "elegant." Jenny's current major project is writing the violent, sexy life of Bronze Age princess Medea.

Learn more about Jenny Blackford on her website and blog.

Speculative Poetry and the Writings of Jennifer Clement

by Wilda Morris

Speculative poetry is a fairly broad category. There is no universally accepted definition, even among journals for which it is a specialty. Alan Deniro has even argued that “All poetry is speculative in this sense: there is a chasm after every line break, and a deep unknowing of the next line until it is reached.” This statement would not provide a very helpful guideline for an editor selecting poems for a journal or anthology of speculative poetry.

It is generally more helpful to think of speculative literature as creating a world which differs in some ways from the world as we “know” it, from the perspective of Western rational realism. Magical realism, fantasy, science fiction, myth, folklore, fairy tales, and surrealism, the mainstays of speculative poetry, create their own worlds.

A few important prizes are offered for speculative poetry, evidence that the genre is being taken seriously by at least some critics. In 1978, the Science Fiction Poetry Association initiated the Rhysling Award. Each year the association picks one long and one short speculative poem from among poems nominated by members of the association. The nominated poems are published in an anthology. More recently, the Association announced the creation of the Elgin Award for a chapbook of speculative poetry. The Rannu Fund, founded in 2008, offers one prize in speculative fiction and one in speculative poetry.

Jennifer Clement, co-founder and director of The San Miguel Poetry Week in Mexico first got me interested in trying my hand at speculative poetry. In a writing workshop, she challenged participants to try writing something surreal. She suggested that we find some way to persuade the reader to suspend disbelief. My poem began with the assumption that someone had dropped something into my cola.

Clement is an accomplished (and award-winning) writer of speculative fiction and poetry. You can read more about her on her website.

Clement’s work makes use of magical realism, surrealism, myth, science, science fiction, psychological suspense, history—and peculiar people and incidents about which she reads. In both her fiction and her poetry she makes use of all the senses. Taste and smell often play an important role. Her fiction and poetry are rife with myth and metaphor.

Clement’s broad-ranging interest show up in her work—anthropology, science, strange and unusual stories. Her poem series, “The Lady of the Broom” (for which Jan Gilbert composed “Eleven Song Setting”) is based on a character mentioned briefly in James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson. Another set of poems is composed of “Seven Letters Written by Marie Curie to Pierre Curie After His Death.” The astronomer Caroline Herschel shows up in her poetry, as does Einstein. It is often said that science fiction that depicts a coming era actually says more about the present than the future. These poems depicting the past are also speculative, saying as much or more about the present (and the poet’s interests and thoughts) as about the past. They are, in a sense, science fiction projected backward instead of forward in time.

I am intrigued by her poems “The Ocean House” and “The Night House,” both of which are in the “New Poems” section of her New and Selected Poems (Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2008), pp. 21-23). In these poems, Clement imagines new worlds. In “The Night House,” she says, “there is no shelf for my shadow.” Here is a line on which I could muse for quite a long time!

The Ocean House
He built a house for me on the ocean floor
and planted a pine tree and azaleas.
He even built a chimney in the water –
a chimney I can swim up and down inside.
When I live in our ocean house,
I am not interested in rivers
and streams or even drinking water.

On the ocean floor,
when he says kneel, I obey.
The sun is obedient to the shadow.
The clouds are obedient to the wind.
My breath is obedient to my heart.
So when he asks
I kneel down on the sand
and rest my head against his knees.

In our ocean house the bricks sink
and the wooden beams float away.
Our clothes (and this is the truth)
are devoured by sharks
and a barracuda has eaten all his hats.
But he does not mind.
and I do not mind
because, underwater,
we move so, so slowly
one dance can last for days.

~ Jennifer Clement

These two poems of Clement’s inspired me to invent a new world, a shadow world. Here is my poem:

Our Shadow House
after Jennifer Clement

Before entering,
we slide out of skin
and skeleton.

Even sun
cannot create silhouettes
of our abandoned bodies.

We eat the shadows
of apples and pears, sip
water from our phantom well.

When moon glows above,
you wrap an illusory arm
around me,

run fingers
along the penumbra
of my vertebrae.

The shadows of my toes curl.

~ Wilda

Speculative writing frees the poet to use his or her imagination. Although these poems are not “realistic,” they have their own logic. The reader can just enjoy these strange worlds or, with careful attention, may siphon truths hiding under the details and speculate about possible meanings. And maybe reading these poems will inspire you to write a poem in which you invent a new world.

Wilda Morris, Workshop Chair for Poets & Patrons of Chicago, and a past president of the Illinois State Poetry Society, is widely published in print and on the Internet. Her book, Szechwan Shrimp and Fortune Cookies: Poems from a Chinese Restaurant, was published by RWG Press. Wilda Morris's Poetry Challenge provides a poetry contest for other poets each month. In addition to poetry, she writes an occasional nature blog (“Walking with Nature”) for the Bolingbrook Patch, an on-line newspaper.

Write What You Love

by Shannon Fay

The one piece of advice I would give new writers is to not just to write what you know but to write what you love. Maybe you love astronomy and have a head full of constellations, or you have a gift for languages, or you’re an expert in some field or hobby. These things that interest you, that take up your idle time, use these things in your stories. Your knowledge on the subject will give your story more credibility and your passion will give it life.

And the things you love don’t always have to be so specific. Maybe you love unconventional narratives and finding new ways to tell a story. Maybe you love rousing adventures that make the reader forget their troubles here on the ground. Or maybe you think often about how men and women relate to one another, or how parents and children relate to each other, or how people in general relate to each other. Figure out what interests you and cultivate it.

There have been times when I’ve grown stuck while writing, working myself deeper and deeper into a rut the like a wheel spinning in the mud. The most frustrating thing was that there was nothing technically wrong with the stories I was working on: the plotting was sound, the words at the very least in the right order, but there was something missing. I didn’t care. And why didn’t I care? Because I just didn’t care. There was nothing I loved in the story. Usually this happens because I’m so focused on writing something technically good that I stop writing about things I care about. Instead of following my passions I end up following trends, tapping into the popular consciousness rather than my own. And that’s when I get stuck.

There are stories only you can write. They might end up being very weird and/or personal stories, and they’ll probably be rejected a lot. But that just means that when they do connect with someone, the connection is all the stronger.

Write what you love sounds like obvious advice, and it is. In fact, new writers usually have a better handle on it than writers further along the path (in which case maybe this post should be about advice I’d give to ‘old writers’ instead of advice I’d give to new writers, not that I feel overly qualified giving advice to anyone). But it’s something that’s easy to lose sight of. So, even after you’ve written thousands upon ten thousands of words, remember what you love.

Shannon Fay is a freelance writer/assistant bookstore manager living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She has recently won the James White Award and has had several short stories published in a variety of genres.

Learn more about Shannon Fay on her website.

Bolts of Lightning

by Chris Pavesic

Speculative fiction has been a favorite genre of mine for years. I like the ideas in the fiction; I like the short story length. It gives a writer a chance to work on his/her craft; in essence, it gives a writer a chance to be a wordsmith.

Writing comes down to creating connections—making that momentary bridge between the writer and the readers—and those connections are made through words. In its basic sense, writing is a means of transmitting the thoughts and images that reside in a writer’s brain to a reader in the most effective and accurate fashion. In a letter to George Bainton in 1888, one of my favorite authors, Mark Twain, described the desire for this accuracy in the following way: “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter--it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

This is what I look for in speculative fiction—words or phrases that can make that connection between the reader and the writer with the force of a bolt of lightning. This is what I search for as a reader and this is what I strive for as a writer—the amount of impact that will make a story memorable.

Recently I had that “lightning bolt” reaction when reading Ken Liu’s speculative fiction story, “The Paper Menagerie.” A friend of mine had a similar reaction when reading Brian Grigg’s “Wendell, Custodian of the Galaxy,” published in the March, 2013 issue of Penumbra (a story that I really enjoyed as well!). What causes that “lightning bolt” reaction with a reader? I know when it happens to me as a reader, but it is something I continue to work on each time I put a metaphoric pen to paper.

Many of my short stories start out a great deal longer than their finished versions. I pare them down, looking for those essential words or phrases that will connote as much meaning to a reader as an entire paragraph. This is not an easy task; changing one paragraph can alter the entire meaning of the story. This is where multiple drafts come in, and why I am grateful for the technology we have today. I can save one version of a story, make changes, and go back to the first version if I prefer it with a mere click of a mouse button. (I almost cannot imagine writing and revising with pen and paper the way that Twain did!)

If all this goes well, I will create a connection to my readers with my words. They will interiorize the thoughts and images from my writing. They will see the characters, experience the emotions, and wander in the storyscape I create. We will have that momentary bridge of understanding, complete with a lightning bolt or two.

Chris Pavesic lives in the Midwestern United States and loves Kona coffee, fairy tales, and all types of speculative fiction. Her story, “Going Home,” is the featured story in the June, 2013 issue of Penumbra. Between writing projects, Chris can most often be found reading, gaming, gardening, working on an endless list of DIY household projects, or hanging out with friends.

Stay in touch with Chris on her blog.

P.M. GRIFFIN GOES LIVE!

Romance novelist Bernadette Walsh interviews science fiction and fantasy writer P.M. Griffin Sunday May 26 at 7:30 p.m. EST on Nice Girls Reading Naughty Books. Please stop in to cheer P.M. on.

To watch the interview live please click HERE or go to: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/bernadettewalsh/2013/05/26/nice-girls-reading-naughty-books--pm-griffin

Pauline (P.M.) Griffin's Irish love of story telling coupled with her passion for history, the natural world, and research have resulted in seventeen novels and ten short stories, two Muse Medallion Award winners among them, all in the challenging realms of science fiction and fantasy.

She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her cats Jinx, Katie, and Nickolette and three tropical fish aquariums and devotes just about every 'spare' moment to writing, research, and reading.

To read excerpts from P.M. Griffin's books released by Musa Publishing, please click HERE.

Are You a Science Fiction Writer?

by John Deakins

Never mind what you write: what do you read? Scientists and technologists who never write SF themselves, read it continually. They may not always recognize bad writing, but they’ll immediately spot a scientific or logical blunder. Science fiction has a better educated readership than that of bodice ripper romances. Listen as your SF-reading friends rip into some recently released SF film. Want more readers? Your current readers can make your book by word of mouth, but those readers can kill your book the same way. The Ignore It approach to scientific road-blocks may not be enough.

Live With It

Science is cold, hard, and unyielding, but it won’t let you down on consistency. If you’re stymied by missing FTL drives, write a story with slower-than-light interstellar transport. If it’s too dangerous to land on an alien planet, create a way to make contact without landing. If you can’t use your time machine for time travel, use it for space travel. Real science happens all the time. Most of what happens within our solar system follows fairly simple Newtonian physics, never mind Einstein. That’s a huge canvas on which to paint your word pictures.

You have before you enormous possibilities within Science. Mars doesn’t have multiply armed green Martians, but what it does have is fascinating, even if it is hard, cold, and unyielding.

Unexplained Science.

You don’t have to explain how your SF technology works; you only have to name it. In fact, the more you explain it, the sillier your explanations will sound to anyone who actually knows science. Some stories need controlled time travel, faster-than-light speed, and the ability to smooze with aliens, but the smart author will tiptoe around hard-science details of exactly how those things are accomplished.

The biggest danger of unexplained science lies inside the writer. We know our science. “Unexplained” makes us itch. It’ll be hard not to yield to the pressure to throw in “subspace” devices or “tachyon pulses.” Hollywood pimps are eager for more “drama” in their SF. They know no science, but they’re full of hackneyed “science fiction” ideas. (Well . . . they’re full of something.) Their “science” explanations stink up the genre; flawed logic flows from mainstream media as from a ruptured sewer line. How easily unexplained science crosses over into partially explained fantasy! On the west coast, that’s a mighty thin line. Nevertheless, it’s a line that we shouldn’t cross.

It’s time now to take on the behemoths of science fiction. We’ll beat them into submission, and then harness them to pull our stories. The blogs that follow are full of story “hooks.” If one snags you, go with it If you get that literary gestalt, when a story leaps full-blown into your mind, quit reading this and write that story. When you do, you’ve made this work a success.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom and author of his own fantasy series Barrow.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.

On Writing Advice

by Michael Hodges

Writing advice all tends to blend into wallpaper. And soon it becomes like that old peeling stuff in your kitchen you pretend isn’t there as you glance back down at your coffee cup. I could write about using too many “ly” adverbs, or not to use “and” too often in one sentence (Mr. McCarthy would disagree), or even suggest copies of On Writing or The Elements of Style. I could say “find your voice”…something I think is more about writing a lot and consuming stimulants than performing Jedi mind tricks. These are all fine things. But you probably know them.

Discussing one aspect of writing will almost certainly segue to others. There’s an ecosystem here, an unavoidable connection. We void these connections at our own peril.

In our daily paths, we try to make that separation. We are closer to the plump raccoon that sneaks onto our porch at night than we like to think. There are things out there—living, breathing things that share our space in this world. The raccoons, the bats, the geese, the frogs, this frenetic symphony amongst the soggy parks and brown rivers that we pass on our way to Costco or whatever the next big box store is. If we are holding coffee, perhaps we can avert our gaze once more.

We are slaves to the sun. We are forced to wake and sleep, wake and sleep in the rhythms that have brushed this planet for billions of years. But today, and maybe just today, you are free. The world is more than credit and bills and our paths amongst the strip malls.

What is real? What is important?

Writing is one of them. You know this or you wouldn’t be here. And I guess this leads me to pluck a single focal point for this piece:

Awareness.

It’s the writer’s best friend. Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips, in their classic song “Do You Realize” asked, Do you realize, we’re floating in space?

No shit. We’re floating in space. Once you are aware of this truism, you are already ahead of the game. The writer, at his or her desk is at that moment, floating in space. Your mind is the sun, your hands the rain, your writing software the caked plains of Northern Africa.

What is important? What moves you? Can you feel all of this about you? The violence and the love and the dying and birthing? There are few things we have control over. Writing is one of them.

So go. Create your own universes within universes. Today, you are the creator, and the characters in your stories will wake and rest to the sun of your mind.

Michael Hodges resides in Chicagoland, but often dreams of the Northern Rockies. His work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. He is represented by FinePrint literary, and hard at work on a new novel. You can find out more on his website.

Is Truth Stranger than Fiction?

by Elizabeth Porter Birdsall

It's been said often enough to become cliché: truth is stranger than fiction. But when we write about aliens and magic and strange creatures from beyond the abyss, it's sometimes easy to doubt that. Of course, fiction has to follow an internal story-logic in a way real life doesn't, but surely the real world – this boring, everyday world where we go to school and pay our bills and trudge along the same streets day in and day out – doesn't have a patch on what we can come up with in our flights of imagination.

The human imagination is a wonderful, expansive, glorious thing. I mean no insult to it at all when I say that I respectfully disagree with the notion that we can come up with things stranger than the universe already has. What is imagination, after all, but another way to look at the world around us? A way to reshape the world, to draw one thing out of focus so we can get a different, better view on something else? And that world is full of bizarre marvels.

When I'm looking for ideas for a story, one of the first things I do is look to nature. It's probably obvious that I did that for my story "Convergent Motion," which takes place among sea slugs at the bottom of the sea. (And all the weirdest bits, except the starting conceit of bodiless spirits, come straight from fact.) But a story doesn't have to be set among hydrothermal vents to draw on the strangeness of the world. Speculative fiction explores the corners of the universe, and the what-ifs that might live there. That can mean the edges of the galaxy, or your own backyard; it can mean the crushing depths of the sea, or the overlooked cracks in the sidewalk. Writers and artists are among the people who stop, and look closer, and look again. We study, and we dream, and then we transform what we've studied into what we've dreamed about.

Of course, that doesn't mean that the job of speculative fiction (or any fiction) is simply to talk about the strange bits of the world exactly as they are. That wouldn't be much speculation, for one thing, but more importantly it wouldn't be much fiction. One of the important jobs of fiction, in my opinion, is to take something outside the reader – whether it's the bottom of the sea or the thoughts in their next-door neighbor's head – and make that something seem close and comprehensible and important. Speculative fiction tries to look to farther shores and wider vistas, but the principle is the same.

Truth is stranger than fiction? All right, sure. But that's the beauty of it. Because fiction arises from truth, and opens a window onto it; that's the whole point of speculation.

IMPOSSIBILITIES

by John Deakins

We’re going to take on some Science Fiction favorites: Time travel, Faster-Than-Light, alien planet landings. It’s not that those haven’t happened yet; they can’t happen. Think how bleak Science Fiction would be if those mechanisms were missing. We’ll beat them mercilessly, proving that they absolutely cannot work scientifically. Then, we’re going to rescue each concept. They’re too important to Science Fiction to let ugly Science kill them. We’ll nurture them before they depart down bright new pathways.

Erk! Touchy-feely exposition isn’t the answer here. Gritty, bottom-line repair work is There are three ways to get around a real-science roadblock. Here’s the first one - Ignore It.

Pretend the gorilla isn’t in the room. Throw an afghan over him, and call him an armchair. Stick to your plot’s logical development. Sweep your readers along so beautifully that they’ll suspend disbelief in that flawed area. Hollywood SF runs on the “Queen of Hearts Principle.” Viewers are expected to believe six impossible things before breakfast. Since Star Wars, some studios believe that with enough special effects no one will notice how scientifically ridiculous and logically impossible their plots are. The Core and 2012 are first-line examples. Anyone who knew science or logic ran from the theater screaming. Their science was ludicrous, their logic was M.I.A., but they had great special effects. Each also probably made enough money to pay for itself, which is all that Hollywood wanted anyway. Science fiction is expected to have higher standards.

Each of us is often expecting our readership to fork over more than a $10 “ticket.” Readers have no “Now Showing“ deadlines. They don’t have to either open your creation when the lights go down or close it when the credits roll. They have plenty of time to catch you with your scientific knickers around your knees. Each additional scientific impossibility means that suspension of disbelief has to jump a higher hurdle. Once a movie hits disk, the same rule applies. That audience has all the time they need to autopsy that film.

Can you get away with ignoring science anyway? Yes: You just have to be a terrific creative liar. Remember those first three seasons of Star Trek? Seasons two and three were written by Hollywood hacks. They almost got away with swiss-cheese science (more holes than curds) and lousy logic, because the series was ground-breaking in so many other ways. Trekkies are still a force, but some of those later episodes were pure twaddle.

Perhaps you’ll get lucky. Perhaps many of your audience will be unaware of the particular science that you’re violating. You and they can skip along together, blissfully pretending. Some will always be carried along by the spectacle, whether written or cinematic. I wouldn’t count on that, though. Remember how Star Trek’s five-year mission fizzled out after three years? Even for SF fans, bad writing and spotty logic begin to smell funny after a while.

There has to be a better way, and we need to find it.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom and author of his own fantasy series Barrow.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.

Challenge Yourself

by Rie Sheridan Rose

There are plenty of answers I could give to the question “What is the most important piece of advice you can give an aspiring author and why?” Do your research. Read in your field. Write every day.

But above all of these, I would put “challenge yourself.” This is my new mantra, and it is what I would put at the top of the list.

It’s easy to say, but what does it mean?

When it comes down to it, any one with the will to do so can write a book—look at all the self-published authors on Amazon if you don’t believe me. It may not be a good book, but it can be a complete novel, just like you’ve always wanted. And, however good you are when you start out, with practice, you can get better. These things are given.

But just writing a novel or short fiction and staying in your comfort zone (writing what you know, for example) isn’t nearly as much fun as going outside that familiar world. Give yourself a stretch goal. Something that you never in your wildest dreams expected to do.

Are you a short story writer? Challenge yourself to write a novel.

Are you a novelist? Challenge yourself to write a collection of poetry.

Do you submit to the same markets over and over? Send a piece to the biggest publication or press you can think of. For example, I sent a poem to The New Yorker this year. It was rejected, but that doesn’t negate the challenge.

I’ve just set myself a new challenge. I have started Book Two in a series for the first time. This provides its own exciting roadblocks to surmount.


Exciting roadblocks?
Yes.

Any job can get dull and routine if it doesn’t include challenges. The more you stretch yourself, the stronger your “writing muscles” will become.


Challenge yourself to write something requiring research if you haven’t ever written anything but contemporary fiction.

Challenge yourself to write a science fiction story if you only write romance.

Challenge yourself to write Steampunk, or Urban Fantasy, or a Young Adult.

The broader your abilities, the more likely you are to find your niche, your audience, and your “bliss” as a writer.

Once you have found what suits you best then you can specialize, but if you don’t challenge yourself to try new things, you may miss out on the one thing that makes you happy and successful.

I invite you to join me in a challenge that I have been set. My husband—wanting to jump start my career to the next phase—has challenged me to get three hundred rejections this year. That isn’t submit three hundred pieces, that is submit as many as it takes to get that many rejections despite acceptances. So far, I am standing at about thirty rejections to ten acceptances. That’s more acceptances than I even had submittals last year, I think.

Now, it is already May, so I wouldn’t expect someone starting now to get that many rejections, but I challenge you to shoot for one hundred. If you are a new or aspiring author and start with that goal in mind, just think what you can do!

Never stop challenging yourself.

Rie Sheridan Rose has pursued the dream of being a professional writer for the last ten years. She has had five novels, three short story collections, five poetry collections, and several stand-alone pieces published by over a dozen small presses in that decade.

Learn more about Rie Sheridan Rose on her website and blog. Stay connected with Facebook and Twitter.