Outside of the places we convene as a tribe, such as Worldcon (coming up in San Antonio this coming weekend), it’s hard to find locations where the science fiction writer in me feels at home. It’s easy to go where people love fantasy, and perhaps – just perhaps – mumble behind their hand that they read science fiction. Maybe they say they read ‘it’ when they were younger. But this year I found a new place where fantasy is mumbled about and brings a blush to the cheeks, while the faces of SF gurus show up in PowerPoint slides. Read More »
Posts Categorized: Feature Article
Readers, in many ways, want the same experience they’ve already had, only slightly different.
I was at a convention recently, and I was sitting on a panel with R.T. Kaelin, Timothy Zahn, and Pat Rothfuss. The subject of the panel was the ins and outs of writing the trilogy, but as you tend to do on panels, we started to wander toward other topics. Thus was born the subject of this post.
I was blabbering on about how you create arcs, not only for individual books but for an entire series (a trilogy or longer series), and I coughed up that old chestnut, that your characters need to change over the course of the story. Pat, being the contrarian he is, said something like, “I don’t really know that that’s true. Readers, in many ways, want the same experience they’ve already had, only slightly different.” I’m paraphrasing, of course, but the point is that he DISAGREED WITH ME! How DARE he! No, wait, that isn’t the point at all. Once I got over being flustered, I started to think of all the ways I could defend my point.
I ran out of those relatively quickly.
Then I started thinking about the ways I was wrong. Is it true? Should characters, in fact, not change much at all? Read More »
I Like a Little Globetrotting with My Action
Let’s talk about modern adventure stories. My generation grew up watching what I consider to be the pinnacle of the modern adventure story: Raiders of the Lost Ark. So when adventure comes to mind, Indiana Jones is the first name on the tip of my tongue. Like any classic film, there are so many standout moments in Raiders, and I it’s difficult to narrow its successes to just one or two. Let’s take a handful.
I remember the massive boulder chasing Indy through the narrow corridor and that somehow cocky look of fear only Harrison Ford can pull off. There’s the bar fight with the read poker and burning alcohol, the bad dates and the dead monkey, that guy with the big sword who Indy guns down as he catches his breath. Then there’s the snakes (“Why did it have to be snakes”), the fist fight and bloody plane propellers, and of course the opening of the arc which is so face-meltingly magnificent, it literally melts their faces.
Man, Raiders of the Lost Ark is a great film.
But for all the action and glory the modern adventure genre story tacks on, over the years I worry that it has lost something somehow. Adventure is classified by traveling action. One scene is in America, the next is in France, then we’re stealing some gold in Africa, and dodging explosions in Australia. These days, it seems the between Action and Adventure is only the distance put on the odometer during the course of the story. Read More »
Ever hear the expression, ‘herding cats?’
I’ll tell you something: All anthologists know it!
I know it now too. I am the editor for Unfettered, a fantasy short story anthology that features some of the best writers working in the field. It is newly released as an eBook and a hardcover, the proceeds from sales going to alleviate medical debt I accrued after treating Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2011.
In that regard, it is a special book. At least it is to me. I lacked health insurance due to a pre-existing condition and racked up one helluva medical bill. I could have easily taken the medical bankruptcy route and become another statistic. No one would have begrudged me that course. I decided to take a different path though. And in so doing, be free of the crushing debt that increased day by day by day…
To start, I had lunch with Terry Brooks, author of the bestselling Shannara series. I have been Terry’s webmaster for thirteen years and we are close friends. I asked him to donate a short story to my cause, the proceeds to go against that debt. He agreed. But he added more advice, advice that led to Unfettered:
‘Shawn, you should ask your other writer friends for the same thing,’ Terry said. Read More »
Money problems that are public are like a social media alert button, like Google alerts, a magic wand that summons author attention to even the most obscure rumor mills of the internet.
There’s a kind of creeping horror that strikes the heart of an author when they discover the company with whom they have two novels out is slowly collapsing into a shambling mound, devourer of careers and eater of all working energy. Let’s be clear: Jason and Jeremy are not the subject of what I am discussing. There comes a point where people just sort of don’t make a difference much, because what matters is that the company is collapsing and it wouldn’t matter who was running the broken space ship into the wormhole. It’s sort of like working at any company that’s failing. It’s easy to play armchair quarterback and wonder at the decisions made. But, deep in the muck of collapse, what is it like?
Publishing isn’t the sort of gig that you go to work and go home and vent with your spouse about your day. It’s not like that at all. I work out of my house, and will have fewer than a dozen emails about a project in a year, unless there’s some serious marketing and promotion campaign happening, and then maybe two phone calls total. It’s not like there’s much water cooler chatter, most of the time. Most discussion channels are public. I can’t tweet about that rising uneasy feeling. I can only watch as news comes over the transom. Money problems, which are private, are sort of a low hum in the background of your mind. Money problems that are public are like a social media alert button, like Google alerts, a magic wand that summons author attention to even the most obscure rumor mills of the internet. Read More »
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