I'm an independent writer with a love for science fiction and cosmic horror! Check out all of my free works here, and if you like what I'm doing, I'd love it if you'd check out my longer works.
Normally I write an extended post that kind of explains the video so that you can get most of the value out of reading it.
This time, I'm just going to say that my incredulous reading of some of my ideas as I worked on a title for Pursuit of the Heliotrope is something mere writing would be unlikely to capture.
After I finished the book, I spent about two days fumbling over a title (despite all the thinking I had done while writing) and some of the goofy things I came up with are worth hearing about.
How many bizarre and unlikely coincidences does it take to connect a new song to a video game that is several years old, and takes place over thirty years ago? I count at least six.
Reading older sci-fi has made me think a lot about how, as time goes on and scientific discoveries are made, the universe of "plausible" science fiction narrows. A century ago, there were so many things that we didn't understand, or where our only understanding came from mathematical models untested in the real world.
Einstein wrote his famous paper on special relativity in 1905, but it took decades for that theory to be backed up by significant experimental data. Hell, there was a man named Herbert Dingle who was the president of the Royal Astronomical Society from 1951 through 1953--not a crank or kook! In the late 1950s he managed to "un-convince" himself of special relativity and he spent the rest of his life trying to explain what he discovered (or thought he had discovered) was wrong with it.
It's worth noting that, just because a mathematical model is created to solve a particular problem (in this case, the apparent constancy of the speed of light), that doesn't mean that no other models exist that could also explain the same phenomenon and have different forms. Models with very little data to back them up should be met with some skepticism!
But think about all the discoveries that got data to support them over time (special relativity included)... each time that happened, some gap that science fiction authors could play with and still be "plausible" got closed up.
It's easy to forget that 50, 80, 100 years ago, authors were dealing with very different explanations about how the universe worked. One of the things that happens when you're writing in those olden days is that you could write a "hard" science fiction story hypothesizing a stable nucleus at high atomic number, or faster-than-light travel, or other things.
The video above contained some of my musings on the topic of how "not knowing" can sometimes open up paths for authors to write plausible works that we instinctively reject as impossible today. That means that works that could be seen as "hard" sci-fi 100 years ago might be classed as the softest of soft sci-fi today. Something to think about!
The address of Nero Wolfe's famous brownstone is given several times in the books, and there are even a couple of different addresses attributed to the great old house.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Photo by Clemens Vasters from Viersen, Germany, Germany, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Just a little fun thing: I'm re-reading Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness because (I think) Justin and I are going to talk about it on our next episode of The Wordy Pair.
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.
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).
(Something random and funny I found on my old hard drive, never published before...)
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In my most recent novella, I talk about a laser in use by Luca's group in an interferometer. Initially, I just wrote "The best measurements they had suggested that the beam might be
expected to increase in size by one percent over a hundred meters, a
fairly difficult feat, considering the diffraction limit at that
wavelength," but damn it, I can do better than that, so let's go!
This prompt was a nice change in tone, and made me think of a warm, light comedy. Without further ado:
Thwack.
Isabella was jarred awake by the ugly sound. She rose from her bed
and flitted over to her door, her wings shaking loose a night's worth
of scales. There was no one at the door, she confirmed as she peered
through the little window.
This time, I needed to come up with a reasonable gas giant planet's parameters and calculate reasonable and minimum orbit times, so more research and more fun math!
It's an easy calculation, but I thought it was funny that I wasn't willing to brush it off. I'm working on a full novel-length story featuring the Misevelin Salvage team, and had some rough ideas about how far apart some things were, but I just needed to be absolutely sure. I dunno, I just thought it was funny.
Is this a point in favor of hard sci-fi, or against? Is it both?!
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