My buddy Justin got me started reading Terry Pratchett's stuff. He let me borrow his copy of The Light Fantastic when we were in high school, and I've enjoyed quite a few Pratchett books since then.
Today's topic is The Thief of Time, a story written in that wonderful period when Pratchett had found a beautiful blend of fantasy and satire, writing stories that were highly creative, mostly standalone, and, above all else, fun.
I really need to remember to put reviews from YouTube up over here... managing multiple sites with different formats is surprisingly easy to screw up!
Setting that aside...
I kind of expected this book to be a demonstration of the unsatisfying path that modern fantasy and science fiction have taken over the last couple of decades. After all, this novella is part of a series that managed to win a Hugo Award, and that whole process has been going downhill for a long time now.
So, it was with a skeptical eye that I began to read Into the Riverlands by Nghi Vo. I figured, hey, if it's bad, at least it's short, so why not give it a try?
Nevil Shute's On the Beach is a strange story. It's horrifying, depressing, but also fascinating. Taking place a few months after a catastrophic nuclear war that spread a lethal quantity of radioactive cobalt dust through the atmosphere, the book follows the last year or so of five characters living in the south end of Australia, as the deadly cloud slowly makes its way to them.
Just some silliness for today. I've been trying to put up one video per day on YouTube, and only some of them are related to writing and fiction.
I'm a little bit behind, but I've got a couple of video book reviews that will soon be posted here. I've gone through First Lensman and On the Beach.
Anyway, today's video about "writing" is actually about the effect that (I think) Amazon print-on-demand is having on the book industry. The old-school 4" x 7" book size seems to be getting less popular, and newer, larger sizes are popping in.
I just did a paperback version of The Chasm of Color, and 5" x 8" was the smallest size they allowed!
At first, I thought maybe it was the market adjusting to people being more used to reading on screens, with their 9x16 aspect ratio (in portrait orientation), but maybe not, after looking at it more closely.
Also worth noting that this video was partly inspired by this episode of The Wordy Pair Podcast.
Stupid me, I made a post on Monday that said (New Release!) in the title but I ended up looking over my final draft one more time on Tuesday and found a couple more tiny things to change.
Now, finally, The Chasm of Color is out in e-book form!
I'm trying to figure out Amazon's print on demand stuff, so I'll add posts for the paperback and hardcover versions when they come out.
For updates, join my mailing list! You can choose whether to get only emails for Chasm stuff or hop on the general list:
Trying to create a little topical content each day over on YouTube, and today's rant was relevant.
Talkin' about bad "localizers" and how they use a few difficult issues in Japanese to gaslight people... I'm a mediocre reader of Japanese, but I go through and cover the things that make Japanese a little tricky to translate and provide some references for you (if you want to get into the language yourself).
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| The front cover for The Chasm of Color. Photo is edited from one by Matt Donders, via Unsplash. |
The Chasm of Color is almost done! I made my final pass through the story today, and I've brought it up over 15k words with some additional character details and interesting thoughts and reactions (I hope). That makes it technically a "novelette," somewhere between a short story and a novella.
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| Part of my cover photo, edited from a picture by Matt Donders, courtesy Unsplash. |
My next work is another fun bit of science fiction, with another reference to the luminiferous ether, as in What the Soul Still Fears! However, instead of a story set in the modern day, The Chasm of Color takes place at around the same time as the Michelson-Morley experiment, in the late 1880s.
The protagonist, an assistant professor at the fictional Lexington University, has read the Michelson-Morley paper but is not convinced. However, he is unable to figure out a good reason for his uneasiness, until one morning over a year later...
In the last week, I read through E.E. "Doc" Smith's book Triplanetary, which is a very weird book in a lot of ways. Most of it was written in 1934, but Smith added a bunch in 1947-1948 to link it up with his Lensman series.
Today, we have to read it with a healthy, thick grain of suspension of disbelief, but it's a pretty cool book with some fun ideas, especially considering it was written nearly a hundred years ago.
Check the video for full details!
My friend Justin Fraser, author of The Good Guy and some other books, recommended this book to me because of its interesting plot twist at the end. What I found was a surprisingly fun and extremely creative little fantasy adventure that you'll probably enjoy as long as you don't hate puns.
A Spell for Chameleon has a few "big" fantasy ideas that are pretty interesting, but where it really shines is in the huge number of "little" fantasy ideas that Anthony packs into the book. The main characters are interesting and well-written, and the pacing is just right--not too fast but steady and constantly moving.
The dialogue is very good, with different characters having very different voices.
The tone is a little strange, with a bit of a childish/storybook feel through most of the books, but enough adult situations to put it in the upper range of young adult. Nothing too raunchy, but descriptions are detailed, funny, and frank through the whole book, including the adult situations.
Kind of the language you might expect a teenage boy to have in his head, but hopefully enough sense not to say out loud.
All in all, a good read as long as you don't mind puns. I really loved the creature-craft, and that alone makes it worth looking at again. Anthony's creativity is seemingly unbounded and a good inspiration. Probably will check out the sequel soon, but I'm not drooling over it.
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I created a short, 60-second trailer for my book, Missed Contact. A little bit more involved than the short teasers I made for some of my short stories, this one uses several pictures and a little bit more thought, since it's not an excerpt from the book, but a "three act" (that's what the Internet told me I should write :/ ) script about the setting, characters, and plot.
For those of you who have been kind enough to visit my blog, I'll note that even though the video says to go check it out on Amazon, it's also available at a variety of other e-book retailers, too.
I'd love to get some more feedback about this book. I really enjoy the mixture of mystery and science fiction that I created for this one. It's a quick, fun read that should be perfect for one night of reading.
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Today I've got a very positive review for a book that I read recently: The Forge of God, by Greg Bear. Watch the video for all the details, but I'll reiterate here that the characters are very strong, the author presents a good number of novel and interesting science fiction concepts, and the plot has enough twists and turns to keep you guessing about who is telling the truth and who are the good guys--if there are any.
Just finished reading Ryan Williamson's book The Widow's Son, and it's a pretty solid pulp western with some nice dark fantasy elements and even some cool steampunk bits. It's a fun, exciting book with some minor negatives that are worth dissecting a bit.
This one gets my recommendation as long as you enjoy that kind of setting. If you're not in the mood for that kind of story, though, you may want to give it a pass.
I gotta say, I'm really proud of the most recent episode of the Wordy Pair Podcast. It's hilarious and it breaks down this really awful post about context cues, of all things. Somebody took a really basic, grade-school English topic and turned it into a confusing mess.
Halfway through, we started thinking it might be an AI article, and by the end, we decided AI would probably be clearer and make fewer mistakes!
If you want something fun and funny about writing to listen to, check it out!
You can find the whole series here. Whether you're a reader or a writer or even a movie watcher, you'll find something fun!
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| Image of Crookes tube in operation, from D-Kuru, CC BY-SA 2.0 AT, via Wikimedia Commons |
I didn't know until yesterday that August 20th was H. P. Lovecraft's birthday! It seemed like a worthy time to go through a couple of his stories, so I read two of them last night: Under the Pyramids (written with Harry Houdini, of all people), and The Shunned House.
I always forget to mention this, but a friend of mine (who is also a writer) and I have a weekly podcast about writing, reading, and media. We're "The Wordy Pair!" (See, it's a pun off of the old Japanese sci-fi novels/TV show "The Dirty Pair")
The most recent episode had a bunch of really funny moments, as well as a really solid discussion of many of the really common things that slow down a writer.
Come for the comedy, stay for the advice.
I recently went through and put a few of the best selling books in "Hard Science Fiction" on my list of books to read, partly for market research and partly just to read some new books.
The first one I chose to read is The Object: Hard Science Fiction by Joshua T. Calvert.
Unfortunately, I didn't find it too engaging, but it did have a few good points.
I tried out making a video review on YouTube:
I'll also put up a text version of my notes here, in case you want to read them.
I realize it's a very mixed review, but if you still want to check out the book, you can find it here.
And if you instead get an urge to read or re-read Rendezvous with Rama, you can find that here.
Thanks for watching!
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| Photo courtesy Patrick Tomasso, via Unsplash |
I just finished reading a relatively new science fiction story and I'm working on a review. The story I read is supposedly a very highly rated, very strong-selling example of "hard science fiction," and, spoiler alert, I was pretty disappointed by it. More on that later.
However, for the time being...
Here's the third video in my series of short audio/visual teasers! This one is for the short science-fiction story that I wrote about artificial intelligence, called Outopos. I wanted to provide a different perspective on the long-term impact of real artificial intelligence, so I had to think a little bit about how to present the idea.
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| Cover image adapted from a photo by Usman Haider, via Unsplash |
“Lew, can you keep an eye on the reactor temperature while I ramp the voltage on these capacitors?” I had my hand on the knob and was looking into a mess of conduits and tubes that were untidily jammed into a service tunnel. Down at the bottom, through the mess, I could just see the capacitors and their connections. We would need to get them charged and the heat damage inside the service tunnel had me worried that the insulation might be torched.
It was several seconds before I heard Lew say, “Okay, Aric.” He must have nodded, and then noticed I wasn’t looking at him.
“Here we go,” I said, and turned the knob slowly clockwise, a few degrees at a time.
“It should be fine,” came a gruff voice from behind me. I sighed—quietly. We should have left him in cryo. “You can go faster than that,” he barked.
“Mr. Waller—”
“Captain Waller.”
I hoped he couldn’t see me roll my eyes. In all my years as a salvager, he was the third person to insist on that title, and the way he acted, he hadn’t affected my prejudices any. Short version: He was an ass.
Just finished the fourth draft of my first novel! At 77k, it's still a fairly short novel, but way better than the ~50k of draft 1.
Also, I'm really starting to like the book.
Here's the second video in my series of short audio/video teasers, this one for my historical fiction journal story, The Paean Project. I really liked the slow escalation of tension and worsening conditions that go through this story.
This excerpt is from the middle of the story and happens after one of the astronauts has some kind of heart attack. The mission is still slated to slingshot around the moon, but right before they lose radio contact...
Check it out on YouTube!
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| Image by Karsten Winegeart, via Unsplash |
As my first novel nears completion, I thought it would be fun to talk a little about what I call "The Derelict Project" and what I like about it.
Back when I was in the darkest days of grad school, I was spending 8-10 hours a day flailing hopelessly at a broken experiment and wasn't sure whether I was going to end up with anything after seven years in grad school.
In those dark days, I wanted something positive, maybe even hopeful, to spend a little of my time on. Something that I had always wanted to try, but never really put any time into: writing fiction. Specifically, science fiction, and, even more specifically, science fiction about people in a future, when spaceflight becomes common, dealing with search, rescue, and exploration of craft that had lost their way for one reason or another.
In my earlier post, A New(-ish) Way to Plug, I said I was making some short teaser videos featuring excerpts from some of my short stories, and my initial idea was to throw these on Twitter or use them to make Facebook ads.
Well, I've completed a few of them, and here's what I've learned:
This little piece was something I tried for the same writing forum flash fiction contest a month after "A Hell of an Anticlimax." You can see that I tried a lot harder to keep the plot and action simple and minimal, to give myself more space for what I thought was really important.
Weight
The streaks hanging across the dyed-pink, sunset sky were grim proof of the situation. They stood out in sharp contrast to the gently rolling fields that splayed out in all directions from the base.
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| Image courtesy Patrick Fore, via Unsplash |
Editing a novel is an extremely time-consuming process, I'm learning. I guess I could go faster, but I feel like if I did, I would miss things and be in too much of a hurry.
I've been tracking the word count of the novel through each step of the editing process, and I thought it would be worth making a little point about the length of written works.
Don't worry too much if things seem a bit short on your first draft. As you read through and redraft, you'll find places to add material--character reactions, atmospheric details, etc.
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| Image courtesy Peter Herrmann, via Unsplash |
I wrote this for a flash fiction contest in the middle of last year, and never posted it anywhere else. Unfortunately, that contest had a maximum of 650 words, I think? And my first draft came out at nearly three times that. So, this little piece is a good example of what happens when you try to bite off more than you can chew, and also what happens when you try to gut a too-long story to meet an arbitrary length limit.
I remember quite vividly the moment that I accidentally saved over my first draft at around 1800 words after cutting about half of the story.
I present this to you as a bit of a cautionary tale...
A Hell of an Anticlimax
My friend Sam flips houses, and he always drags me along. Last year, it was a little cottage by a river. Today, a stately mansion behind a rusty iron fence.
“You've got to see inside!” he said, leaping out of the car. It was three stories of filthy brick. The windows were crusty gray. Inside, the floors were damaged hardwood. The walls were discolored and peeling. I could see pipes through holes, and nasty water stains.
“It's a... fixer-upper,” was all I could muster.
“It has potential!” He practically sang it.
Potential energy maybe. To fall on us.
I've been reading a bit recently about marketing and all that jazz, and I came up with an idea that I'm sure has been done before, but I hadn't thought to try myself until just last weekend.
Yes, I'm still editing the novel, but bear with me:
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| Photo by Clemens Vasters from Viersen, Germany, Germany, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons |
I guess I haven't mentioned our little podcast on this blog yet, have I? Oh well, there it is! It's funny and goofy and we talk a lot about writing and great stories.
Anyway, right at the beginning of Lovecraft's story, he mentions the airplanes they use in the story with the words that make up the title of this post.
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| Just a little bit of me editing like a goober. |
Well, phew. About a week ago I finished the rough draft of what (I think) will be the last chapter of my first novel.
I'm writing a longer story about the Misevelin Salvage crew, an adventure where they are trying to get to the bottom of a very strange event that has everyone worried: the appearance of an empty lifeboat near the orbit of Markledge (the planet where Aric & co. are based).
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| Image Prompt "The Pit," from Iron Age Media |
Warrenton was the first vertical city on Sophra, a planet that had a clean oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, but one too thin at the surface for humans to breathe unassisted. The Vertical City Project was designed to take advantage of the cool, stable crust of the planet and create a haven for humanity deep below the surface. Ten kilometers below the surface, the air was thin but sufficient. Fifteen down, oxygen partial pressures were comparable to Earth at sea level. At twenty, the air was thicker and made physically demanding jobs, like mining, easier and more efficient.
The massive excavation project had just crossed the twenty kilometer mark a few weeks ago. The main shaft was about half a kilometer wide and ample ventilation and modern lighting technology made the deep underground just as healthy as a day in the sun on Earth.
However, today there was a problem. One of the three main ventilators failed, and the other two shut down only a few minutes later. The elevators stopped working, and the network of radio frequency repeaters that made communication possible through and around the caverns went down. The city managers scrambled to get things back online. Without ventilation, the air down at the bottom of the city would be breathable for around three hours. Citizens living deep underground all maintained twelve hour supplies of breathable air, but the clock was ticking.
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| The Canteen literature prompt from Iron Age Media |
I'm writing this because I can't explain the weird, sinking sensation I have right now. I feel stupid suggesting that this piece of paper might end up being my last will and testament. Not that I have much in the way to hand down, but if somebody finds this and I'm no longer around, I guess everything I have should go to my son, Jamie Soerman, who lives with my ex-wife Isabel on Wisdom, in the Artestren system.
I expect I'll be back in a few hours, and I'll destroy this paper and go on with my life, but as I sit here in this hotel room, I have this uneasy feeling in my stomach and I can't get rid of it.
Three months ago I was sitting at the bar in a little hole in the wall on Vitra with my usual glass of whiskey in front of me. The room was noisy, full of smoke, and smelled of stale liquor and all the regrettably human smells that come along with stale liquor. There I was, staring into my glass when a stranger pushed through the crowd of people to the empty seat next to me.
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| The cover of the copy of Dracula I got from the Archive. |
As a writer and a reader, I need a good source of things to read at all times. As I get older, I find myself with a growing desire to read the old classics, and it's easier than ever in history to do it. One thing I've been doing a lot recently is finding old gems over on the Internet Archive. You can find all kinds of out-of-copyright literature over there--great old books scanned in and ready for you to read.
I've enjoyed putting in the names of old authors and classic books and seeing what's available. It turns out that for books that are old enough, there's a fairly good chance of finding a nice PDF or two that is actually easy and pleasant to read on a screen.
