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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Map It Out for Your Reader

by Marina J. Lostetter

“Lost” is an interesting topic to pick for a theme issue, because the concept is truly universal. We’ve all been lost at some point in our lives. Perhaps it was at a shopping center as a small child, or during a road trip as an adult. Most people can remember getting physically lost at least once, but many of us get mentally lost on a much more regular basis. Every time we, as readers, open a book or start a new short story, we enter into a state of limbo--we don’t know where the writer has put us, and we don’t know where the writer intends for us to go. Essentially, we’re lost.

In most cases there are a few sign posts: genre indicates what literary continent we’re on, and the subgenre suggests climate; a blurb might hint at what kinds of potholes and roadblocks are ahead. But beyond that we’ve been dropped into the middle of nowhere with a blindfold on and a cell phone that only dials one number: the author’s.

The author’s job is to get the reader to understand their surroundings as soon as possible, so that they can navigate the story’s terrain without distraction. Grounding the reader, while inviting them to explore, is the key to a good opening in fiction. Conciseness, clarity, and balance are the cornerstones of writer-to-reader communication, and these are achieved through a synergy of reader-questions and author-answers.

When I write, I try to touch on the basic who, what, when, and where, within the first three to ten percent of the story. These are the first items of interest that pop into a reader’s mind. Who is this story about? What is happening (in particular, what is the conflict)? When is it happening? Where is it happening? Why and how usually rear their heads not long after, but they aren’t as crucial when first introducing a reader to a new piece.

Some authors find themselves getting bogged down in the where, which leads to the type of beginning that’s all about setting. In this instance, all the reader sees is scenery.

Some writers get stuck on the who, which often results in the author failing to acknowledge that there’s a world beyond the internal dialogue rolling around in a character’s head.

Writers who get consumed with the what have a tendency to open with The Epic Fight Scene, The Hunt, or The Scientific Conundrum without acknowledging that their characters are anything more than vehicles for the action.

The when focus becomes a trap with historical settings, as the author might have a tendency to try and over-authenticate.

Why and how-centric authors are all about back story--an aspect which is often irrelevant to an opening, even if it’s relevant to the greater plot.

And then there are writers who, instead of becoming hyper-focused on one question, purposely evade the four key questions. They believe that withholding information is how one creates mystery, but it doesn’t. It creates confusion.

The answers don’t have to be given in their entirety right out of the gate--that is where the author shows their skill in regulating the flow of information. The trick is achieving balance--making sure that one element doesn’t overshadow the others. It’s how these components work together that ensures the reader is secure enough in the basics to let the author lead them through the more abstract parts of storytelling--transforming a lost audience member into an engaged voyager. Other gratifications can be delayed if the four immediate questions of who, what, when, and where are answered as soon and as skillfully as possible.

Marina J. Lostetter’s short fiction has been accepted to venues such as Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show, Writers of the Future, and Penumbra. She currently lives in Arkansas with her husband, Alex.

To learn more about Marina, please visit her website and follow her on Twitter.

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.

Prompts for the Poet

by Beth Cato

I used to believe in Muses, in writing only when inspiration galloped through my head. And you know what happened? I rarely wrote. Inspiration is a fickle thing.

A few years ago, I decided that I wanted to write speculative poetry as well as fiction. There are lots of romantic ideas about poets and Muses, but in my experience, it's rare that I spontaneously create a poem. Ordering myself to think of a poem on the spot will likely cause me to go completely and utterly blank. It's too much pressure. The world is too vast, and most poems are a brief flash of emotion. I need a narrower focus. I need prompts.

Almost all of my poetry is written during two months of the year, April and November. That's when the Writer's Digest Poetic Asides Blog hosts its Poem A Day Challenge. The name really says it all: for the thirty days of each of those months, the goal is to write a daily poem. Most of the prompts are general enough that they can easily be adapted to a science fiction or fantasy focus. This is made even easier by markets like Penumbra that supply their themes well in advance. I can approach the challenge, already knowing, "Okay, let's see if I can combine this day's prompt with the Fae, or gaslight fantasy."

That narrow focus means everything when I'm trying to shove a full story of subtext into twenty lines of verse. Speculative poetry has a lot in common with flash fiction in that you want a straightforward plot or image, and very few characters. I rarely use names. It's enough to attach pronouns. I also can approach the poems knowing that the editors and readers likely have a thorough understanding of mythology or other tropes of the genre. This means I can get to the magical heart or scientific angle of the poem right away. There's no time for development or explanation.

Each day of April and November, I begin by looking at the basic prompt. Then I look at other prompts to layer with it. I let my thoughts drift. I go wash dishes, bake cookies, or work on another writing project, and all the while these prompts are clashing in my head.

With the goal of one poem a day, there's no time to mess around. I can't wait for Muses. My creative process is violent. I'm jamming together puzzle pieces from completely different sets. Oftentimes, the first line comes into my head, and the rest of the poem flows from there. I usually don't know how it will end until it ends. The poem finds its natural rhythm with its unnatural subject matter, and takes on a life of its own.

If a Muse does visit me, it's not because I'm idle in wait for inspiration. It's because I set a trap and lured her in.

Beth Cato's poetry can be found in The Christian Science Monitor, The Pedestal Magazine, Every Day Poets, and on various pieces of paper crammed into her purse. She lives in Arizona, but is from Hanford, California.

Learn more about Beth on 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.

Confidence as a Work in Progress

by Christopher Cornell

Ask most writers about self-confidence and be prepared for heavy sighs. The industry is set up to accommodate failure more often than not, and even the most confident artist or wordsmith must deal with disappointment on a regular basis. The road to every acceptance is paved with rejection slips. Judging by several conversations with well-established professionals, the struggle does not end with a bestseller or glowing reviews. And, in this most solitary of pursuits, the need for positive reinforcement is readily apparent.

This problem is near and dear to me as I make strides toward becoming a professional writer. Maintaining enthusiasm is often harder than turning out a good read. Here are a few things I’ve learned from thoughtful others (or am attempting to learn, in spite of myself):

Write, write, write. Submit, submit, submit. The more you write, the less attached you become to each individual word. The more material you submit to markets, the less those individual “no thank you” letters matter. (Also, the more chances you have for an acceptance. Sounds logical, but I have to remind myself every so often.)

Remember the good. Keep good feedback on hand to pull out when the sea of rejections and bad notices reaches a high tide.

Have confidence in the reader. When you’re creating an entire world on the page, it’s easy to get caught up in wanting to convey every detail. Readers appreciate bring allowed to figure things out for themselves. And it’s okay for the story to hold different meaning for someone else. Of course, too much/not enough is a delicate balance. But once achieved, they’ll respect you.

Constructive criticism for the win. When someone tells you what doesn’t work for them as a reader, they are helping you strengthen your work. As long as noted problems are specific and fixable, everyone wins. “It sucks” doesn’t help, but “I lost interest at this point” certainly does.

People will hate your work. This can’t be helped. As a colleague recently impressed upon me, wanting to be liked by everyone is the mark of an amateur. Do what you do, and find your audience. Everyone else can read something else, and it’s just fine.

The interwebs are best served with a grain of salt. It’s a fact that people who are dissatisfied with something are far more likely to express their feelings. And sometimes it gets ugly. The perceived anonymity of the internet encourages some to indulge in behavior they wouldn’t dream of in person. (As an artist friend noted, “Whenever I start feeling too good about myself, I read reviews online.”) You know the drill: don’t feed the trolls. And don’t stoop to that level in return.

Write what you enjoy. If you love your work, others will, too. Then the trick becomes finding those others.

Failing that, Scotch works well. In moderation.

Christopher Cornell is a writer, musician, interface developer and somnambulist in California's East Bay. He has also studied film and television, and is a graduate of the Viable Paradise writers' workshop.

More information and inane anecdotes can be found on his website and on Twitter.

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.