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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Living in the Moment

by Laura Hardgrave

I don’t care what anyone says—writing awesome, short speculative fiction stories is hard. Writing short fiction is a challenge in itself, but when you add in that lonesome planet out in the middle of nowhere, that new tech that needs thorough descriptions, or that cool fantasy race that popped into your dreams one night that’s when the real fun begins. Every word in a short story must be carefully crafted and have a purpose. If there’s no purpose for a line of dialog or that interesting description, both are best left on the chopping block. That’s tough when you’re describing things no one’s ever read about.

That’s also one of the reasons why science fiction and fantasy short stories are so fun to write (and read!). That challenge kind of calls to us and chants an eerie tune, daring us to fully flesh out new worlds, characters, plots, conflicts, emotions, and deeper, resonating meanings that shine in as little words as possible. We have to be extremely delicate when choosing what we say and how we say it. It’s all in the details. When readers are able to read a paragraph and get a true sense of where the main character is, what he/she is feeling, and where the risks of the story lie, that’s more than just great storytelling—that’s magic.

I think that’s why I tend to write my short fiction in what I call moments. We all have our own methods, of course, but I like to guide my short fiction using character snapshots that are made of emotions. One scene may be driven by my main character’s intense curiosity. I’ll allow that character to have a moment with his/her sense of curiosity, then I’ll take the emotion one step further and move the plot forward while keeping my character’s frame of mind as the driving force. If a word, description, or line of dialog doesn’t make sense for that emotional snapshot, it will generally get omitted or saved for another moment.

Once the plot’s moved forward enough to force a change in the emotional snapshot, I’ll shift gears and form a new moment in my mind. These moments usually surface as full-scale images that will also provide the details of what imagery and scenery I describe. Since speculative fiction short story descriptions need to especially be tight, I find this method also helps keep my tendency to go overboard with descriptions down (what can I say—I like the shinies).

I may want to describe how gorgeous that duo-moon sunrise looks, but my main character? Oh, no. She’s far too busy running from a herd of police droids. She may notice the way a single ray of sun reflects off her shuttle in the distance, but that’s about it. And that’ll be the line of description that gets mentioned. If I’m ever in doubt of what to say, I stare into the eyes of my character’s emotional moment and instantly find my answer. It works well. When my characters cooperate, that is. Some characters are prone to harebrained ideas more than others. Gotta keep an eye on those!

Laura Hardgrave is an MMORPG video game journalist by day and a LGBT speculative fiction author by night. She kind of frantically dives back and forth between writing short stories and novel-length fiction. She’s currently working on a series of fantasy novels with a huge host of characters and a bit of inter-dimensional travel.

Learn more about Laura on her blog or follow her on Twitter.

A Moment with Lindsey Duncan

If you could give an aspiring writer any one piece of advice, what would it be and why?

The one piece of advice I would give an aspiring writer is to know yourself. Books on craft and fellow writers have a lot of theories about the best way to write whether insisting it is crucial you write first thing in the morning every day, requiring an outline, decrying outlines as stifling to creativity, telling you that humor or elaborate prose or stories about garden gnomes don't sell and it doesn't get any clearer with editors. More than once, I've had a story rejected by one venue where the editor cited a specific element of the story as their reason for rejection and the next place I submitted it, their editor loved the very same element.

To decide which advice to take and which to ignore, you need to know who you are as a writer and how you work. Do you need the discipline of daily sessions? Are you a night-owl and likely to get your best work done after midnight? After years of trying to push through writer’s block, I finally realized that usually, when I block, it’s my subconscious telling me I’m coming up on a plot hole I haven’t worked through yet – so now, rather than trying to force it or giving up, I stop and consciously analyze what’s going on in the work. Part of knowing your process, though, is not taking the easy route. If you know you need breaks to recharge and incubate ideas, take breaks – but don’t let the break itself become a habit.

The same applies to the style of your writing. Do you enjoy vivid descriptions and unusual metaphors, or do you prefer to write streamlined and to the point? As long as you’re not grinding the story to a halt to immortalize a patch of moss or conversely, not giving enough information to picture a scene, it’s almost a guarantee there are readers for whom your prose is just right. Knowing which you are can help you identify problem spots in your fiction. You’ll know to scan for places to cut or hunt for long stretches of barely interrupted dialogue to fix the dreaded talking-head syndrome.

Don’t worry about fads and should-nots. I’m reminded in reading an intro for Robert Asprin’s Myth series that he was told humor didn’t sell. His series took off – long before Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels dominated the public consciousness. Conversely, with the speed of publishing, by the time you latch onto a trend, it’s likely to have passed.

You might need a detailed outline before you begin, or you might need nothing more than a name and a core concept. If you’re the latter type – a pantser, as in “by the seat of your” – go into the process knowing the final draft will probably need more revision and rewriting. I’ve discovered I don’t need any kind of outline for novels, but what I do need is near-exhaustive world and character-building. With the backdrop and cast fully fleshed out, I can write as a pantser and still create a (relatively) smooth plot in the first draft.

Knowing your strengths and weaknesses is invaluable in analyzing critiques or editor comments – deciding what to keep and what to change. While it’s always important to pay serious attention to amassed evidence of a problem – when every reader / editor is saying the same thing – this self-knowledge helps you decide what to do with conflicting opinions or outliers. Otherwise, you’d drive yourself mad trying to edit to everyone’s liking.

Finally, the most unique part of any writer’s work comes from the individual. I’m not saying that you have to bare your soul in print or write solely based in personal experiences – disagreeing with both these concepts is part of my identity as a writer – but rather that no one else has your precise combination of opinions, beliefs, personal style … and a hundred other things, besides. I’ve always agreed with those who flip the old “write what you know” adage on its head and say that the real goal is to “know what you write” – and the most important subject for a writer to know about is themselves.

Lindsey Duncan is a life-long writer and professional Celtic harp performer, with short fiction and poetry in numerous speculative fiction publications. Her contemporary fantasy novel, Flow, is available from Double Dragon Publishing. She feels that music and language are inextricably linked. She lives, performs and teaches harp in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Learn more about Lindsey on her website.

SCI-FI DEAK STYLE

Science That Doesn’t Work In Science Fiction. . . But Has To

by John Deakins

The first word in “Science Fiction” is “Science.” “SF” includes Speculative Fantasy, but Science Fiction is supposed to remain pristine. The Science has to work. Readers expect the paranormal in fantasy, but Science Fiction must stick to the rules of the universe. Certainly, every hard SF story springs from some scientific aspects that have fictionally altered. When we adventure in the Asteroid Belt, both writer and reader are aware no humans have yet reached the Asteroid Belt. That’s why they call it fiction. We’re all in on the inside joke: We all know we’re lying. The object is to make the lies entertaining.

Once we’re committed to the Asteroid Belt, however, writing rules change. The remaining science must be correct; the logic must be consistent. Our flights among the orbiting rocks must obey the Newton’s laws. Our spacecraft can’t be towed by a dragon flapping its wings. A wizard can’t wave his wand and transport us instantly to the next rock. An Elf isn’t going to lead us down tunnels inside magically orbiting mountains. We’re obliged to stick to scientific facts. Our fiction is like an exotic SF game, but we’re only allowed playing pieces that actually function in this universe. We must follow if>>>then logic: If certain current scientific knowledge has been altered, then a story follows thus…

Some of the greatest fun of SF writing is the amount of mayhem we can create from behind our keyboard. We can destroy the world with an asteroid impact, nuclear war, or plague. We can suffocate our astronauts in unforgiving vacuum. We can kill space colonists with unnamed pestilence or human-devouring monsters. We can deliver supernovas, rampaging aliens, and fatal time paradoxes. We can alter history or bring humans to extinction. It’d be a shame to see our reign of terror end just because we’re shackled by science’s rock-hard rules.

The trouble is that scientific laws are hard, cold and unyielding. There is nothing sadder than a beautiful theory killed by an ugly fact. For the Science Fiction writer, that sadness occurs when a beautiful story idea is gored by an ugly scientific principle. For example, Burroughs’ Mars and Venus just aren’t there. We’d like to ride a thoat across the lichen-covered plains or explore the steaming Venusian swamps, but we simply can’t do that in Science Fiction. Alas, the Mars of red princesses is fantasy only.

Science is supposed to be the mainstay of Science Fiction. What happens when Science gets in the way of Science Fiction? Sometimes the story-telling urge is so powerful that it makes us willing to slide around our own dogma. To get that story written, we are (shudder!) willing to commit adultery on science. The result is often an offspring that really needed an abortion.

What are we going to do, then? (Funny you should ask that, since that’s what this blog’s about.) Over the next weeks, we will push Science Fiction into several deep science pits and try to rescue it. Stick around.

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.

Make Them Feel

by Heidi Kneale

One day my film professor said to us, "Here is a piece of white paper and a ping-pong ball. I want you to photograph it."

Okay. White ping-pong ball on white paper. First thing through my mind: why? Second thing through my mind: how hard can it be?

Pretty difficult, when there's a catch. "Everyone's shot must look different."

So while the rest of us were trying for closeups, long shots, angular shots, and all sorts of funny shooting, one bright spark went off on his own.

When he'd come back, he had his shot. In a dark room, he'd lit the ping-pong ball with a blue key light and a red fill light from down low.

He succeeded in showing the ping-pong ball in a different light. It was dark, moody and evocative.

Unlike all the other plain white shots of ping-pong balls, this one stirred something in our souls. And he walked away with an A+ for the assignment.

This ability to evoke emotions in our audience is also vital in writing. We want our audience to feel empathy with our characters and take them on the same journey. The hook that grabs a reader is the one that entices them to make an emotional investment in the story.

Open your favourite novel and read the first page. What emotions stir in your heart? From the very beginning, that author managed to grab you and never let go.

As authors, we don't have the benefit of lighting to create mood and atmosphere. We must rely on words--words with subtle shadings and similar meanings to elicit an emotion.

What emotion/s do you feel from the first page of your favourite novel? What words bring out that emotion?

Picking on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, a favourite novel of many a romantic soul, her first opening lines are:

IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.

Certain words will evoke certain emotions. "Universally acknowledged," "must be," "truth so well fixed", "considered as the rightful property", will make people react.

The reactions will be different from person to person. But they will react. Pride and Prejudice is all about characters' emotional reactions, and Austen does an excellent job in stirring these various emotions in her readers as well.

As you read through this month's issue of Penumbra, make a note of your favourite story and what emotions it stirs within you.

Meanwhile, ever thought about photographing a ping-pong ball?

Heidi Kneale is an Australian author of moderate repute. By day she works computer miracles for the local library. The rest of the time she writes books and raises babies.

Learn more about Heidi on her website.

A Moment with Samuel Marzioli

Why did you choose to write speculative fiction instead of another genre?

Perhaps it started in childhood. That always seems like the time period people dredge up to explain their current proclivities--some oddity post-infancy which maintained its edge throughout the years. And if so, who am I to go against the grain? Yes, let’s say it started in childhood, and we can blame my parents.

I was first introduced to spec fic when I was four and five. From books to movies, to comics, and books on tape, or even stories on vinyl. It was never a question for me if I would read or watch or listen. Only when. Because speculative fiction was a seamless part of my life, no different than school or bedtime, and I enjoyed it absolutely.

I remember when my family had just bought a brand new laserdisc, and we invited our family friends over for dinner and a movie. The dinner I’ve long since forgotten (maybe spaghetti?), but the movie stayed with me ever since. It was Star Wars, original and unbutchered, and--even for a kid whose idea of a great time was any 80’s video game turned cartoon--I was pretty damn impressed. Sometime later that year I remember sliding out of bed one dark night and making my way to the living room after a fit of sleeplessness. There I found my father reclining on the couch and on the TV another sci-fi film that I hadn’t seen before. I asked my dad if I could stay up and watch it too, and he said yes. That film was Ridley Scott’s Alien.

Many nights my brother and sister and I would snuggle up beside our parents in bed and they’d read us works by the masters of children’s speculative fiction: Roald Dahl, E. Nesbit, C. S. Lewis, Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum and more. Sometimes they’d even pull out a few issues from one of their many long white, and dusty, comic boxes and we’d follow along the pictures as they read to us Judge Dredd or Groo the Wanderer. In fact, it was Judge Dredd and Groo more than anything else that made me want to read. Because I soon became impatient waiting for my family to absorb the next adventure from these characters of absurdist sci-fi and ridiculous sword and sorcery, respectively.

From this groundwork, and the accumulation of a few more years, I branched off into more mature works as well. There was some H. P. Lovecraft, Poe, and Shakespeare thrown into the mix, as well as Stephen King. Maybe a few books by Clive Barker, or Michael Crichton, and of course Douglas Adams and Robert Aspirin. Probably a ton of books of pseudo histories of supernatural beasties, and various bits of parapsychology, by the likes of Harry Price, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Cesare Lombroso, and Montague Summers.

If this seems a disparate mix, it’s because that’s how it began and that’s how it continued, and to this day that’s what I write. One day I may type a tale of terror involving spilled guts with gratuitous descriptions, the next a humorous space opera involving intergalactic toys and the enthusiasts that collect them. The fact is speculative fiction is a rich and rewarding set of genres, the pixie dust that infuses the mundanity of this world with true, honest-to-God magic. And I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Anything!

‘Cept maybe a literary book deal.

Samuel Marzioli still does all of his writing on a laptop outside, under an umbrella. His fiction has appeared several times in Penumbra eMag, once in Stupefying Stories, and is forthcoming in Stupefying Stories Presents, Space & Time Magazine and the "A Darke Phantastique" anthology by Cycatrix Press.

Learn more about Samuel and his current projects from his blog.

If I Could Redo One Thing In My Life

What would I change?

by Julia Nolan

I wouldn’t have stopped writing.

Let me provide necessary context. From eighteen to twenty-four, I was convinced that I was meant to be a writer. Although I had a very sensible engineering degree and a good job in my field, I also had literary aspirations. To achieve them, I set some goals. I’d write for an hour a day, then submit my stories. I figured success was soon to follow.

The hour a day soon became an hour a few times a week. My goal to receive feedback was stymied by my conviction that critiquers “didn’t get it”. And the vast majority of my submissions came back with form rejections. So after six years, I gave up. I still hadn’t done more than publish in a few token paying markets. The evidence was clear; I was a terrible writer. Deciding this was not easy for me, I abandoned all aspirations for nearly a decade, before I started writing again with a more mature perspective.

And what perspective was this? Mostly the realization that I’d been lazy. I had assumed since I was reading at three and writing at five, the first time I tried my hand at fiction writing, I’d be genius. What I hadn’t taken into account was that I’d thrown myself into an incredibly competitive field without any practice or training. (Consider what would happen if I had decided to perform open heart surgery despite my lack of a medical background. After all, I’d been studying science all my life, and had even completed a high school biology class. Surely open heart surgery isn’t that much more difficult…it sounds ridiculous when put that way, and yet a similar arrogance infected me.)

The second time around, I looked at things differently. I sought critique, even when it hurt, from writers whose work I respected. I read short stories and novels with a critical eye, trying to figure out what made them worthy of publication. I gave critiques, hoping to improve my own ability to judge good from bad. Eventually I applied for (and received), a position at Allegory which allowed me to get a feel for what it is like to read hundreds of submissions and accept only a very few. In short, I learned patience and humility.

By doing this, I improved.

Now I suspect I’ll never be Shakespeare or Stephen King (they’re both one of a kind). And I doubt I’ll ever be able to support myself by writing alone. (Fortunately, I like my day job.) But…I’ve gotten two stories accepted in publications I love and suspect that if I continue working more success will follow. Probably not as fast as I’d like, but there’s no hurry, either. If I continue to practice, I will continue to improve. And good publications buy good stories.

Why do I regret my earlier arrogance if it did no long lasting damage? Because if I had not wasted all those years, I’d be a decade ahead of where I am now. More importantly, writing has always been a source of pleasure. It helps to ground my thoughts, and to stretch my mind and imagination. Giving that up for nearly a decade because I thought I wasn’t “good” was a self-destructive act. If we only did the things we instantly excelled at, we’d do nothing.

Julia Nolan is a project manager of epic proportions. The other ways in which she wastes time include making elaborate costumes, dancing, singing, and playing with chemistry. She had work appear in Mars Dust and will have stories in Penumbra and Stupefying Stories. She also edits for the ezine, Allegory.

Another Step Along The Way

by Jude-Marie Green

If writing can be likened to a staircase, which is a lousy metaphor but will do for this idea, there’s that important step between typing “the end,” and typing, “Dear Editor, Please consider my story,” the step of critique, of giving the story up to the writers’ group. The cold, grimy hands of the writers’ group. The ice-rimed hearts and acid-filled pens of the writers’ group. Family, best friends, acquaintances, professionals, and other strangers who take a gimlet eye to the words and deliberately misconstrue every nuance of plot, every turn of phrase, every poetical use of a semi-colon.

In other words, the writers’ group is invaluable. Mine saves me from myself all the time.

I’ve worked with writers’ groups since before I started writing. Readers are an important resource for critique, right? I’ve participated in workshop critiquing at conventions from Potlatch (a small, West Coast literary genre convention) to WorldCon (the World Science Fiction Convention.) I’ve been in Critters (online critique) and Speculations (online writers’ group with occasional critiquing opportunities, now sadly defunct.) I’ve attended workshops from the thre day weekend of the Borderlands Bootcamp (in Baltimore,) to the two week Center For the Study of Science Fiction workshop (in Lawrence, Kansas,) to the six week extravaganza of Clarion West. The experience of these workshops was invaluable. My story, written in intense privacy and passion, was exposed to others’ experience and reading prejudices and ability with grammar, plot, and characterization that I myself don’t necessarily have.

These workshops are a professional honing stone. What have I learned from them? I’ve had my faults as a story-teller revealed. This is invaluable knowledge. Once I know my faults I can learn to spot them myself and work on them. Plus, the audience is small enough and sympathetic enough that I don’t fear being told the story is worthless, even if I know in my heart that maybe it’s not an award-winner.

I’ve been with my long-term in-person writers’ group, The Writers’ Orbit, for several years. Once a month, we dedicate a Sunday to story critique. We spend the first hour around the table eating potluck and chatting. Once we get through announcements – who has sold what to or been rejected from which market, who has been invited to speak at what seminar, and similar writerly news – the critique begins. We use the Clarion method. The writer remains mute while critics have a few minutes each, in turn, to discuss individual impressions about the story. I sit there with my teeth gritted behind a plastic smile and write down the comments. They’re all valid. Some of the ideas I won’t be able to use, they won’t help the heart of my story. Some I’ll steal wholesale. At the end of the first round I get to do something a writer can’t do in real life: explain myself. Yes, there’s a reason the butterflies are yellow. I’ll try to foreshadow that more. No, I didn’t know about skunks and exuda, thank you for mentioning that.

In my group, there’s a second clarifying round of commentary and discussion, then the written comments are passed down the table to me. My story’s taken its first step up the staircase.

(My favorite critique I’ve ever garnered came from a first-timer with sharp eyes. She said, “Um, your first sentence? Where your character is watching the sun rise in the West? Doesn’t the sun rise in the East?”)

Jude-Marie Green has edited for Abyss&Apex, Noctem Aeternus, and 10Flash Quarterly. She has an interview with Larry Niven appearing in Michael Knost’s “Writers Workshop of Science Fiction,” coming in April 2013. Also, she has a Deadliest Catch In Space story appearing in MENIAL: Skilled Labor in Science Fiction, released January 21, 2013.

To learn more about Jude-Marie Green, please visit her website.

TRUST THE VOICES

by Davyne DeSye

My family thinks I’m nuts – the benign, harmless kind of nuts – because I hear voices in my head. It came to the fore one time when I was writing, madly banging away at the keyboard, when one of them interrupted me with mundane household question. I don’t recall the question. My response was, “Hush, hush, give me a minute. They’re talking and if I don’t get it all down, I’ll miss it. They won’t just come back later and say it all again for me.”

And then I was back to it, and it wasn’t long before I had managed to “transcribe” the conversation.

Yes, if you have developed a character well enough in your head, if you know what motivates them, they’ll do all the work for you.

This is true whether you are the kind of writer who starts writing a story with nothing more than an intriguing first line or idea, or whether you are of the plot/outlining ilk. If you have developed a character that will truly stand out from the page, he or she will do all the work. You won’t have to wonder what they will say, or how they will react under certain stimuli, or why they seem to misunderstand a situation. They tell you. They do it. You just have to get it down.

Thomas Harris described much the same process in his “Forward to a Fatal Interview” which appeared in a reprinting of his novel, Red Dragon. In that forward he explains how he first “met” his character, Hannibal Lecter.

The question then becomes how best or how most easily to develop your character to the point where they are bearing the load. One of my favorite tools for this is to “interview” the character – to ask questions about the character that will help you to understand who they are. Most of the information you garner will not make it into the story, but will help you transfer the workload from your shoulders to theirs. Of course, you have to ask questions like: What is your name? Age? Sex? Are you tall or short, brunette or bald, thin or fat? Do you walk with a limp? (Why?) But you can also ask more interesting questions, like: What was the happiest moment in your life? The worst? What fears wake you up at night (or do you always sleep peacefully)? What do you keep in your refrigerator? What do you use for transportation? What do you do with your hands when you are thinking/nervous/happy? What trinket (or piece of furniture, or tool) do you keep because it means something to you? What are your hobbies or phobias? What good or bad habits do you have?

When you interview your characters, be an investigative reporter – follow the leads your character gives you. You wouldn’t ask the same questions of a Hollywood star that you’d ask of an old woman living on scraps in an abandoned building. The character (and the story) will dictate some of the questions, or even the number of questions.

Once you’ve finished your interview, you’ll find that you are more interested in your character, that your character is richer than you initially imagined. You’ll find you can hear their voice in your head. When you set them loose, even within the framework you’ve constructed for them, you’ll notice that they do all the walking, thinking, jumping… and talking for you.

Trust the voices.

Davyne (pronounced "DAH-vee-ANN") DeSye was born to foreign royalty and spent her youth traveling among various countries assisting in her parents' efforts to acquire and refurbish old world castles. Davyne left her parents and their lives forever upon learning that she was born an orphan and was merely the subject of a nurture vs. nature experiment. She still loves to travel, although she tends to avoid visiting castles.

She now lives in Colorado with her husband and five children.

(Or at least that's the story this month...)

Davyne's stories have been published in, or will soon be appearing in Tomorrow, Daily Science Fiction, Penumbra eMag, MindFlights, Tales of the Talisman, Foliate Oak, and Nth Degree.

To learn more about Davyne, please visit her website.

A Moment with Samuel Marzioli

Do you write a story before you find a market, or do you find a market before you write the story? Why do you work this way?

I’m more of an “and” rather than an “or” sort of writer. I do everything I can to maximize my creativity. For the most part, I believe it pays to find and research a market before bothering to write for them. Editors are readers first, and every reader has a preference for what they want to read. Obviously, you don’t want to send an erotic story to a children’s magazine, or a western to a mystery journal. And you don’t want to send stories that don’t incorporate the themes of markets that require them. It’s just common sense. It may seem daunting, and may take a lot of extra work, but that’s the business we’re in. Putting text into word documents is only the first step.

However, the process may not be as difficult as some newer writers imagine. Recently I corresponded with a man who was struggling to publish his first story. We discussed NY Times best-selling author Joe Hill, and whether or not he had an easier time breaking into the business because he was Stephen King’s son. The man reasoned that anyone with a family member so closely connected to the industry had access to every editor’s preferences. All Mr. Hill had to do was pick his father’s brain and, viola, instant sales, instant success. While I disagreed with the main thrust of his argument, he certainly had a point. Knowledge is power! However, I countered that every writer is on equal grounds, because every single issue and anthology an editor works on is stamped with their particular tastes--everything from POV, to prose style, to subject matter. In other words, you don’t need to be blessed with the genetic lottery. All you have to do is follow the suggestion that is present on most every writer’s guidelines: “Read an issue.”

On the other hand, trying to conform to a single market’s preferences can be limiting. It can kill the mood, staunch the flow of creative waters like a tampon in the pipeline. As such, sometimes I write a story first and then find the best match. Research always plays a part, of course, but not necessarily in the beginning. It all depends on where the muse leads.

Samuel Marzioli lives in Oregon, and often writes outside in the rain under an umbrella. His fiction has appeared in Stupefying Stories 1.8 and the January 2013 issue of Penumbra. Several other stories are forthcoming in Stupefying Stories, Space & Time Magazine and the "A Darke Phantastique" anthology by Cycatrix Press.

Learn more about Samuel Marzioli his blog.

How I Turn an Idea into a Publishable Story

by Barbara A. Barnett

Easy. Bunny wrangling.

If you're a writer, you've likely encountered the term "plot bunnies"—those pesky little story ideas that suddenly spring up and nibble at your brain until you finally write them. I find the bunny metaphor apt. My ideas certainly reproduce like bunnies. That's where the wrangling comes in.

For much of what I write, going from idea to story is a fairly straightforward process. First, I spew out words and see what happens. I try not to overthink things at that stage; the first draft is playtime, when I can let the plot bunny run wild. Then, once I have a crappy first draft, I put on my editorial hat and try to figure out where the story is. Revision is when I consider voice, structure, characterization, style, and all of those other elements that will help turn my crappy first draft into something potentially publishable. Of course, that's assuming there's a story there worth telling. Not all plot bunnies are created equal. Some are worth prettying up to send hopping through editors' slush piles; others are better off staying home in their burrows. How one tells the difference between the idea worth pursuing and the one best left in the trunk is tricky business that I have no good answer for other than this: go with what feels right. If still in doubt, talk it out with other writers, then go with what feels right.

That's my usual process, but some plot bunnies are more easily wrangled than others. Sometimes I need to set the bunny aside and let my subconscious figure out what the heck to do with it. Days, weeks, or even months later, I'll be doing something inane like brushing my teeth when poof! There's the bunny again, letting me know which direction he wants to go hopping in.

Some plot bunnies require research. And often, a cool detail uncovered in that research will help me figure out what the story is. For "Ghost Writer to the Dead" (Penumbra, October 2012), I knew I wanted to set a story at the Edgar Allan Poe house in Philadelphia, but that was all I had: the setting. So I researched. A lot of tidbits from my research ended up in the story, but one particular detail—that a woman named Lizzie Doten had published what she claimed were new works channeled to her by Poe's spirit—led to my plot in which Poe's ghost tries to dictate a new story to a psychic.

Finally, there are the plot bunnies that go hopping in so many directions that I become overwhelmed trying to catch the little buggers. Or, the bunny just kind of sits there, threatening to do something interesting, but mostly it just nibbles at the grass. That's when I find brainstorming with other bunny wranglers (aka writers) helpful. It's not their bunny, so they can look at it a bit more objectively, or at least from a different angle that I hadn't considered.

Barbara A. Barnett is an avid rejection letter collector, musician, MLIS student, Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate, coffee addict, wine lover, bad movie mocker, and all-around geek. Her fiction has appeared in publications such as Fantasy Magazine, Shimmer, Daily Science Fiction, Black Static, and Wilde Stories 2011: The Year's Best Gay Speculative Fiction. In addition to writing, she has worked in the performing arts world for several years.

Learn more about Barbara on her website.

WRITE MORE

by Ken Liu

Aspiring writers often get this bit of advice from pros: "write more." In this post I want to explain, based on my own experience, why there is real wisdom in this simple suggestion.

First, writing more allows you to find out if you actually like writing.

A lot of people like the idea of writing. Many of us probably have had the experience of being inspired, feeling the flow, and banging out a bit of prose that we're proud of. And we think: I can do this. Being a writer is easy.

Unfortunately, being a writer means that you have to write whether you're feeling inspired or not. A pro has to produce under tight deadlines (such as when an editor suddenly expresses interest). To make a living, a writer sometimes (often) has to force herself to sit in a chair and put words on screen even when she'd rather do anything else.

Writing more is the only way to find out if you can write away from your muse.

Second, writing more is the only way to get better.

There are no magic books you can buy, no prestigious workshops you can attend, no writing groups you can join, no secret tricks from experts that you can copy, that will short-cut this process. All of these things will help, to various degrees, but nothing will be a substitute for putting in the hours and pounding out the words.

Writing is a skill that requires your brain to be rewired in certain ways. Persistent practice is the only way to discover your voice, to hone it, to learn how to wield it to say what you want to say.

Finally, writing more also starts a positive feedback cycle that makes more writing easier.

I think writing is really a way of thinking in slow motion. It is how I work out the implications of the fictional world, to get to know the characters and to experience their feelings. When I write, I must fill out the details that had only been hazy shadows in my mind.

So as I write, I tend to discover new things about my world, about the ramifications of the speculative "what if" question I asked, about the characters I put on stage. New ideas take shape, sparks created by the chiseling of words onto page. Sometimes these lead to new scenes, new plot twists, but sometimes they become the seeds of new stories, entire new worlds that I long to set the next story in.

Writing more is the best antidote for writer's block. It is when I'm writing consistently and regularly that I find myself constantly bombarded with new ideas, kernels for fresh tales. The more you write, the more likely it is that you'll be inspired, that you'll feel again the mythical flow.

If you want to become better as a writer, begin by writing more.

Ken Liu’s fiction has appeared in F&SF, Asimov’s, Analog, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and Clarkesworld, among other places. He has won a Nebula, a Hugo, a World Fantasy Award, and a Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award, and been nominated for the Sturgeon and the Locus Awards. He lives near Boston with his family.

Learn more about Ken Liu on his website and blog. Stay connected on Twitter.

What I Learned About Writing

by Joyce Frohn

This story began during the proverbial ‘dark and stormy night’. Okay, so it wasn’t really night, but it was stormy and I was stuck in my Grandmother’s farmhouse. I did what many of us did when we were kids, went looking for a something to read. After thumbing three dog-breeding magazines, I found a ten-year-old copy of The Whole Earth catalog that had a serial story in it. I don’t know how it began or ended. What I had was a piece with a drug-addled guy, a girl, and a van crossing America. The van told the story. It complained a lot, especially that its carburetor was painted purple in an attempt to improve its feung-shui. The guy kept saying there was an invisible dragon in the backseat.

For some reason, this hippie mess fascinated me. For the first time in my life, I took a story apart in my mind. I liked the van, if it would shut up. I liked the girl and the invisible dragon. I jotted down some things and tried to figure out where I wanted to place these characters. Little did I know this was me becoming a writer. I was twelve and had already learned to read everything: the good, the bad, and the cereal box.

I had already learned one important lesson of writing; there is no story so bad that it can’t inspire something. I took those characters and popped them into various places which meant I threw away a lot of stories. The first one involved the girl being a ballerina and was set in Medieval Europe. Before burning it, I learned something else. There needs to be a balance of weird and normal to make a good speculative story. I also needed to get rid of that druggie.

Later, I spoke with a former drugged-out hippie. He said the strangest thing that ever happened was after he got sober. He went to a gas station for the first time in more than ten years. After that, everything fell into place and it only took a little more than thirty years.

There’s another important thing; don’t throw away all your early work, there maybe something worth salvaging. I recently had the shock of being paid for the scribbled notes that I put in my Jr. High Student Manuel where I fantasized about how much better the school would be if there were werewolves, vampires and other assorted monsters in attendance. Think about it, it would make Jr. High better wouldn’t it?

And from those dog breeder magazines, I learned that my version of a nightmare killer dog is a Rhodesian Ridgeback crossed to an English Mastiff. I still haven’t written that story, but the notes are saved.

Joyce Frohn has been writing since childhood and published since her research on slime molds ended. She is married to a man who says he never wants her to stop writing. Jouce has a nine-year-old daughter who envies how much time Mom gets to spend on the family computer.