I'm pleased to announce the publication of (AFTER) life from Purple Passion Press which includes my story 'Ghost Nebula.' That means that I've now published in (AFTER) life and After Death anthologies.
Today I welcome author, Jake Elwood, onto my blog. Jake's story appears in the published today Fiends: Ten Tales of Demons.
Three Things I Discovered When Writing "Thief
and Demon"
Heroes Come in All Shapes and Sizes
My protagonist in Thief and Demon is a
little girl. She's a street rat, an orphan, an escaped slave. She's about as
far removed from my life and experiences as it's possible to get and still be
human. I'm middle aged. I'm six and a half feet tall, and male. You would think
I would find it a bit of a stretch to get into the mind of an impoverished and
desperate little girl. And to some extent, you'd be right.
But I can remember being young and
penniless and powerless. Not to the extent that Fleetfoot Mina is, but still.
I've been an outcast. I've been broke. I've wondered how long the gap between
meals might be this time.
And I've run up against people who were
bigger than me, stronger, meaner. I've known bullies. I've known people with
power over me and the worst of intentions. We all have. Mina's life takes these
things to an extreme level, but her experience is a distilled version of what
we've all gone through. She is us.
So does power
Mina's not a mover and shaker, but she's
not helpless. There's no joy in writing a story about someone who can't do
anything. A protagonist should protag, after all. I pitted a penniless street
kid against a powerful sorceress who can summon demons to do her bidding. As I
threw the two of them together, though, something interesting happened. Little
Mina surprised the sorceress. She surprised me. No matter how bad I made things
for her, she just kept fighting back. Effectively, too.
Every human interaction is an interplay of
power, and power is something that both people have. There can be gross
imbalances, but in every case, no matter how powerless someone may seem, no
matter how downtrodden or insignificant, that core of power, however deeply
buried, is there.
It's an easy thing to forget. Mina came to
life on the page for me, and she helped me remember.
Setting Is a Character
In my earliest attempts to write fiction,
it was all plot. I took to plot like a duck to water, but the characters were
just hollow placeholders. Hero. Villain. Victim. Bystander. Love interest. And
the setting? Entirely an afterthought. Who cares where the characters are? It's
what they do that matters, right?
Er, not so much.
What's Frodo Baggins without Middle Earth,
or Harry Potter without Hogwarts? Did you ever watch a Star Wars movie and find
yourself wanting to peer past the characters' shoulders so you could just soak
up that amazing PLACE they were in? A good setting can be fascinating on its
own, and it can interact with your characters, give shape and meaning to your
plot, and make your theme reverberate long after the book's been set aside.
For Thief and Demon I needed a city in a
world where most people don't live in cities. I needed the chaos and hurly-burly
of urban life, a place with room for a small thief to hide and thrive, a place
with pockets to pick and danger on every side.
I also needed a larger world, one that Mina
would stumble into without ever quite knowing who the players were or anything more
than the very basics of the game.
She brushes against icebergs, and Mina –
and the reader – never sees more than the tip. The world she lives in is much
bigger than what makes it onto the pages of the story. It's infinitely more
complex, and mostly hidden, as it should be. I've told the story as it happened
through Mina's eyes, and I've given peeks and hints about the world that shaped
her, the world that made this story possible, the world that made it all
happen.
Clichés Lurk on Every Side, Ready to Drag Down the Unwary
Genre writers walk a fine line between
delivering the tropes that readers expect and mucking up a perfectly good story
with a lot of worn-out clichés. I've got a demon summoned inside a pentagram –
like that hasn't been done before – and, in an earlier draft, Mina set the
demon free by breaking the outline of the star.
Remember that fine line I mentioned
earlier? I crossed it there, and a beta reader called me on it. I sulked for a
while, thought about finding a better beta reader, and finally went back and
took a hard look at the story. And I dug deeper, and I found a better way. I
won't spoil the ending for you here, but I think you'll like the final version
much better than what I almost inflicted on the world.
Always be suspicious of your first idea.
Consider rejecting it, not because it's bad exactly, but because your fourth or
fifth idea is probably better. Dig deeper. See what you find.
Adventure isn't enough; even very small
heroes should grow
There was a time when I wrote boisterous,
tidy plots that brought everything to a pleasing conclusion with the hero back
where he started, invigorated but unchanged. I'm not satisfied with that sort
of thing anymore. Now, at the end of a tale, you can look at one of my
characters and see that they've been through a story. Mina at the end of the tale is not the same little girl who
nicked a handkerchief a few dozen pages before. She's only a few hours older,
but she's wiser and stronger and her view of herself, of her place in the
world, is utterly different. And when that happens, I know I've done my job. # Fiends: Ten Tales of Demons edited by Rayne Hall, can be found on AmazonmyBook.to/Fiends
Beyond SF a free collection of five space opera stories available at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com and all other e-retailers.
Do check it out, if you've got a moment. And many thanks to Milo, co-author and editor.
GET IN OF STAR WARS, STAR TREK, FIREFLY, AND GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY, THIS SPACE OPERA COLLECTION INCLUDES HUMOROUS ACTION AND ADVENTURE ALONGSIDE STORIES WITH HEART. THESE TALES WON’T LEAVE YOU IN THE PITS OF DESPAIR. INSTEAD, THEY’LL LIFT YOUR SPIRITS, TAKING YOU TO PLACES UNKNOWN.
You’ll travel the stars to far-flung planets, meeting heroic humans and aliens alike — even a mech and a clone. There may be lions and jet packs, to boot. No pigs in this space, but otherwise, all bets are off.
Today I invite Michael J DeLuca onto my blog, the guest editor of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet #33: Humanity's Relationship with the Earth issue
Michael was born in Boston and now lives in Southeast Michigan, where he spends too much time permaculturing over his lawn. His fiction has appeared in Interfictions, Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Apex and is forthcoming from Mythic Delirium and Escape Pod. He also co-operates Weightless Books, an indie ebook site, with Gavin J. Grant. LCRW #33 is his first try at editing.
One LCRW theme issue, two Readercon panels and a lot of hallway/bar/dealer's room conversation (not to mention years of bumping around blindly alone in the dark), have only whetted my appetite for a much broader, sustained conversation about the promise and pitfalls of writing fiction in and about the anthropocene epoch.
Don't get me wrong--the panels were great (see previous post for titles/descriptions)
and I even got to moderate one of them. But I confess I am not particularly
good at steering discussion, especially not in person, in front of a crowd,
with four smarter, more eloquent people all of whom have equally valid and
quite distinct perspectives. And there just wasn't enough time to cover it all.
My fellow panelists laid out fascinating ideas, and I got a decent line in here
and there, but we barely got into stuff I thought we could have spent a whole
panel on, or two, or seven. And I had all these lovely panel notes I didn't
even get to! One of my hall conversations afterward was with Emily Wagner,
program chair, who I asked for more like that next year. "Propose
panels," she said, and I will. But I'm also going to do what I can to get
people talking in the meantime. To that end, I've convinced a few of the LCRW
33 contributors to field some questions about how they apply these ideas in
their own work. I'll be posting those interviews here over the next couple
weeks, and doing a few interviews myself elsewhere (here's one with the
UK-based Nottingham Writers' Society).
First, though, I thought I'd recap the
Readercon discussion for those who missed it (insofar as I remember it), share
some of those notes I haven't yet managed to get the good out of, and lay out
the directions in which I think this conversation needs to go.
I opened with a definition of the anthropocene: a new epoch
in the history of time in which humans are the dominating influence on the
trajectory of life on earth. The concept places us on a level with geological
and even astrophysical processes. Part of the point, I think, is to make people
realize the scale at which what we do has an impact. There is very little
"nature" left in the world that's the same as it would have been if
we hadn't become what we are: forests, deserts, the ocean floor, as far away
from humans as you can get, you can almost always see evidence of our impact.
Which presents a fascinating perspective on the way human institutions interact
with natural ones. Invasive species, domestication, genetic engineering,
breeding, habitat loss, which species thrive, which go extinct, which reach the
verge of going extinct and then we rescue. Unintended consequences. Not much of
which I managed to say, actually, besides the basic definition. Time
constraints, me not wanting to talk too much.
Vandana Singh brought up the limitations of the concept of
the anthropocene: that it makes humanity seem monolithic rather than complex
and incredibly varied. The people most responsible for altering the climate,
habitat, animal and human life on this planet are relatively few and immensely
privileged. The people who are by far the most impacted are those with the
least impact themselves. She mentioned the 18 million Bangladeshis who are
already in the process of being displaced by rising waters. Michael J. Daley in
the solarpunk panel brought up that William Gibson quote which Readercon's
bylines require be brought up at least once every year:
"The future is already here, it's just unevenly
distributed."
We talked about climate change and its impacts, about the
viability of various technological solutions/mitigations including nuclear
power, solar, batteries, desalination plants. Gwendolyn Clare brought up
geoengineering: ejecting coolant chemicals or particulates into the atmosphere
to dim the sunlight/mitigate greenhouse effect. To me, that's a terrifying
prospect, useful only as a threat, "Here's what we might have to resort to
if you people can't get it together and stop using fossil fuels," but
Gwendolyn seemed to consider it a viable option. I would have loved to ask her
more about that but did not manage to corner her in the halls.
We talked about the dominant narratives of climate change,
the propaganda and PR, how wrong and blindered they are and why. It's hard to
change those narratives because the institutions that support them
(corporations, governments) are so huge and we rely on them for so much. The
cruise ship metaphor came up: the world is too big and has too much momentum to
turn or stop on a dime. A change in trajectory takes time. The implication
being that we're pretty much doomed to slam into that iceberg and take to the
lifeboats.
We talked about science fiction's strong tendencies to
dystopianism and escapism and how those tendencies can gloss past the real
problems we're facing rather than encourage practical thinking. Michael J.
Daley, in both the anthropocene and solarpunk panels, brought up the problem of
presenting utopian visions of society in fiction, the fact that utopia doesn't
necessarily include a conflict that can drive a story. In neither panel did we
get too deep into the ways around that problem, but I think it was Max
Gladstone who said that a setting is just a setting, the conflict and the story
comes from the people you place in that setting.
We talked about reader expectations. People who've been
brought up on a steady diet of the dominant narrative expect more of it, and
it's a very delicate, limiting thing trying to address those expectations while
also providing counter-narrative. Vandana Singh talked about teaching climate
change to kids, how she found she needed not just to provide information but to
address the emotional impact of that information at the same time. Finding out
that humanity is destroying the world isn't an easy thing. It was Max Gladstone
again who tried to bring this back around to story and character--but I don't think
he quite got the chance to make the connection that right there in those
emotional consequences is a way to tell a compelling story.
We talked (a little in both panels, but much more in the
solarpunk panel) about progressivism in the history of SF and previous forward-
(and backward-) looking movements in the genre, particularly cyberpunk and
steampunk. This was surprising and enlightening for me: in my preparations I
spent some time thinking about classic SF and how it almost incidentally
influenced the trajectory of technology: not spaceships or flying cars, but
ipads and cellphones. Star Trek was a naive form of social SF: a black female
officer on the bridge of the Enterprise. Cyberpunk, though, was way more
prescient; it was depicting a future nearer to hand and actively pushing
forward technological concepts as well as social structures that had already
been demonstrated in their infancy. Whereas steampunk seems to represent the
opposite tendencies: the real world is increasingly shitty, technology's
advancement has outpaced our capacity to adapt to it socially, so let's escape
back to a simpler time and postulate this vast, utterly impractical escapist
utopia. Advocates of the nascent solarpunk movement want something that
combines the utopian aesthetics of the latter with the practical
forward-thinking of the former. I went into that second panel with some healthy
skepticism, but listening to them talk about it, it started to sound like a
pretty solid idea. Though I wish they'd decided to call it something else--the
word "solar" is too limiting.
Ecopunk?
Towards the end of the anthropocene panel, I slipped in part
of an idea I had. Earlier, talking about the value of the anthropocene as a
concept, Vandana Singh brought up the question of what separates us from
animals and how the answer keeps slipping the more we learn. First it was
tools, but now we know all kinds of animals use tools. Then we thought it was
language, but birds and apes and even insects maybe have language. I suggested
the concept of narrative. There's some debate as to when the anthropocene epoch
began: the '70s? the industrial revolution? But as far as it applies to
narrative, I feel like there's a strong argument the anthropocene began with
the dawn of the dreamtime, the origin of metaphor: let's say 40,000 years ago.
It began when humans first started to ask themselves that perhaps most arrogant
of questions: what separates us from everything else?
By any measure it was all very left-leaning, progressive
discussion. Not once, thank Pan, was it suggested on either panel that global
warming wasn't real or caused by human beings. I believe communism was even
mentioned without anyone in the audience getting up and leaving. From
Readercon, I would have expected no less. And yet for me it didn't go far
enough. No surprise, I guess. I am a radical when it comes to this stuff. Not a
revolutionary--I'm too meek and polite for that, unfortunately--but the new
world order I'd create if you made me dictator...let's just say I fear the
average Readercon liberal SF fan would be plotting my assassination.
At the top
of the list of things we failed to address fully are science fiction's blind
spots. Let's be honest, despite or perhaps as a prerequisite of genre's recent,
much-boohooed explosion into mainstream culture (I was relieved, when reviewing
the Readercon program, that they left off the "Did Fandom Lose By
Winning" panel this year), science fiction and genre on the whole remain
the purview of the white, affluent and privileged, and the thing about the
white, affluent and privileged is that there's nothing forcing them to look at
the world from outside of their own experience.
In my opinion genre itself
ought to be doing that, but to some extent, as with the dominant narrative and
global warming, there's a positive feedback loop. You grow up in a bubble of
privilege, that's what you know to write about, that's what your fans get to
read about. Vandana Singh touched upon this in the anthropocene panel, and I
think would have gotten further into it if we'd let her. Later, in the hall
outside the dealer's room, I was telling her my line from the LCRW 33 editor's
note about how great and eye-opening it was to see all those diverse viewpoints
in the submission pile, and she said (again I paraphrase), "This is what
people don't seem to understand about We Need Diverse Fiction--it's not just
about fairness or letting everyone have an equal chance, it's about exposing
people to different viewpoints."
Shall I pull out the inbred royalty
metaphor? Ages ago, an innovative thinker came up with the ideas for spaceships
and FTL drives, and everybody liked it so much that they kept doing it long,
long after it ceased to be an innovative or even inspiring idea. The field
needs new, different voices with new, different ideas, or the bloodline will
thin until every novel comes out anemic. Another related blind spot is SF's
tendency to resort to technological solutions. When the only tool you have is a
hammer, everything looks like a nail. Yes, development of cheaper, more
efficient solar technology and next-generation battery storage and etc will
doubtless help curb global warming, and we should absolutely get the hell off
fossil fuels. But there are non-technological solutions already available and
in use by enormous swathes of the human population of the earth--it's just that
those people don't happen to own cars or ipads or rely on fast food for their
sustenance or feel the need to water their driveways and feed their lawns
better than they feed their kids.
On the anthropocene panel, Gwendolyn Clare
pointed out the very real threat of food shortages posed by climate change. For
every degree that we warm the planet, we lose 6% of our global yield of wheat.
One solution would be to let the corporations that brought us Roundup-ready
corn engineer a more heat-tolerant wheat, thereby subordinating farmers even
further to that corporation's draconian intellectual property litigation.
Another would be to adapt away from corporate monoculture and turn to the
thousands of varieties of wheat and other grains humans have developed through
conventional means over the past 9,000 years of agriculture. I'm afraid that
because that's not a technological solution, it falls squarely into the blind
spot.
Michael J. Daley brought up the myth of the mad scientist, the lone
inventor who singlehandedly saves the world with his brilliant scientific
advance. And yes, that archetype certainly speaks to SF's penchant for the
heroic. But it strikes me as rather narrow. Something the wonderful Emily Houk
said to me as the solarpunk panel was getting out: "I was wondering why
nobody talked about using plants as technology." And she's right. Plants
are a freaking amazing technology developed by mad scientist earth over
billions of years. Why cast that aside? Because it doesn't prop up the dying
myth of the hero? It's so simple: as long as there are enough plants on earth
to balance out the CO2 generated by everything else, the climate stays stable.
But it can also be incredibly complex. The earth's enormous biodiversity, which
we are winnowing down by the minute, includes granular solutions to a host of
problems we haven't even considered. Just one example I learned about the other
day: the osage orange tree, a springy, resilient hardwood that makes giant ugly
fruits like rock-hard, bitter oranges. Before European colonization its range
was restricted to a small area of northeast Texas and its wood was prized by
Native Americans for use in bows. In 1934, FDR's Great Plains Shelterbelt
project planted 220 million trees stretching 18,000 miles as windbreaks to
combat the erosion that caused the Dust Bowl. Now they're everywhere. I know
it's not fiction's responsibility to come up with these ideas or to encourage
people to think differently.
You'll hear that repeatedly from some of the LCRW
contributors whose interviews I've got lined up for the next few weeks. But
there's also nothing stopping us. There's no reason fiction can't be a source
of inspiration for change that will make the world a better place. And if we
can, why wouldn't we want to?
In another way, this is an answer to the question
of how to get readers excited, how to make them care, how to inspire them to
think for themselves about these issues. For the most part I think both panels
spent more time talking about the ways that didn't work and couldn't be done
than how it could. But inspiring, surprising ideas are one of the things that
got us into genre in the first place. The sense of wonder: there've been plenty
of Readercon panels on that too over the years.
Yes, the chance to see for the
first time the surface of Pluto is indeed mindblowingly cool and amazing, and
SF has the capacity to approximate that on the page. But I'd argue it can be
just as if not more inspiring to discover a real-world solution to a real-world
problem tossed away as an aside in a book about the human heart in conflict
with itself. Which of course is the other way to get readers excited, the same
way you get them excited about any story, by writing brilliant, strong characters
and putting them in impossible situations and showing us how they react. And
here's another way that diverse perspectives in fiction can help us.
To a lot
of us in the privileged affluent white first world, global warming is still an
abstract problem, something that may be coming a few decades in the future. But
to tons and tons of people in the world now, more every day, global warming is
a real threat, a source of anger and grief and devastation, a source of real
conflict, the stuff epic drama is made of. I want to see that in fiction, to
teach those of us sitting here sipping lemonade in our hammocks what that feels
like. I think that's what the solarpunk advocates want too. Though I still wish
they'd change the name.
To come: LCRW 33 contributor interview #1: Giselle
Leeb! Update: Hey, you didn't even have to read my recap, because both panels
are online. Though I'm glad you did anyway. Here, I made a playlist: And hey, if you happen to be one of those people whose opinions I have horribly mangled and misused in the above, I would love to be corrected. Really.
I used Arnie Rimmer from Red Dwarf as a starting point for my main character in this one. And Hemingway as a starting point for another character. That was a fun technique. Which for some reason I never did again. Note to self: do it again.
Do you ever use people real or imaginary as jumping points for your characters?
I love the cover for the Hides a Dark Tower anthology, which I may have a little story in. So creepy. I'm looking foward to seeing the table of contents for this, and seeing which of my friends I'm going to be TOC buddies with. It's a small writing world, sometimes.
Fabulosso. A trio
of story acceptances this week. Reprints to Evil Girlfriend Shorts (got to love
that name) and Domain SF. And my story 'Joining the Dots' about quantum
computing, predictive policing and privacy in the sea of
information age , has sold to Sci Phi Journal
My story of thinking cities, based on the Three Little Billy Goats Gruff, 'Three Brother Cities' has been accepted by Broken Worlds anthology. That's my 76th sale this year. I am quietly pleased
Wow. I couldn't be more pleased, if I'd sold there myself. A new writer on
Wattpad asked me about selling to magazines. I sent her to Amanda's 'Beginners'
Guide' blog post, (which is an excellent resource) and told her about reprints.
Now, she tells me that she's just made her first trad sale as a Croatian
translation. How cool is that? I'd like to have that on my bio.
Here are some links: useful for newbie writers. If you have any other suggestions, please let me know.
