Post #163 April 1 2019

“Time Jumpers: Halfway Through…”

As of this writing, I find myself having completed five of the twelve planned episodes of my serial Time Jumpers.  Episodes 1 and 2 have been uploaded and have 200 downloads between them.  There has been one review that I know of…unfortunately, the reviewer didn’t particularly care for Episode 1, but that’s a writer’s life.

I am three episodes ahead of my upload schedule which is a good feeling.  As I will be taking a lengthy overseas trip in early June, I want to be done and have archived Episode 6 before I leave.  When I come back, I then will have six weeks to do the next episode, a process that is currently taking me about three weeks.  That’s how you do serial stories to a schedule: get ahead and stay ahead.

I have been quite liberal in veering off from my previously developed outlines in order to explore various characters and follow the dictates of the story flow.  Therein lies one of the challenges of a serialized story.  Each episode should stand alone as a story yet they are all clearly connected and I have often left episodes with a big, bold TO BE CONTINUED, at the end, to attract readers to the next episode.  With each uploaded episode, the story flow is more and more constrained by what has gone before.  This is both a challenge and an opportunity, depending on how you look at it.

With all that, I have included below an excerpt from an upcoming episode.  Enjoy…

 

Monthan Dringoth was sobered by the damage the Twister had done when 1^st TD had aimed it down into the Hollows of Gibbons’ Grotto.  When he and Nathan Golich entered The Lucky Dinar deep in the Tenderloin district of Gibbstown and ordered a round of cold ones from the auto-bar, they were also deep in discussion about how Time Guard would respond to such a pyrrhic victory at Sturdivant.  Sure, the Coethi had been driven off, for the time being, but at what cost?

M’Bela and Yang were there, too, along with Acth:On’e.  Only URME remained at the ship, still running down stubborn glitches in Cygnus’ collapser circuitry. 

Dringoth was buying.

Golich slurped some frost around the top of his mug.  Dringoth pressed a thumb into the servbot’s head slot to pay off the round.

“You were lucky,” Golich announced.  “Nobody’s ever done that before…gone through Time’s Peak.  What was it like?”

Yang closed her eyes, sipping at her own drink, twirling the little parasol between her fingers.  “Like being swept up in one of K-World’s sandstorms inside a barrel.  You can’t see anything.  You’re getting bounced and battered around—”

Dringoth added, “We were both pretty much knocked out.  I opened my eyes once and nearly vomited.  It was like watching a million vids at super high speed…none of your senses can make anything out of what’s happening.”

“And you still wound up in T-4487…what are the odds of that?”

“It wasn’t the same worldline,” Yang corrected him. 

“Yeah,” Dringoth said, watching the door as another jumpship crew came in, arguing and laughing out loud.  “Where we wound up, I had died and we lost the Battle of Gibbons’ Grotto.  K-World was a wasteland.  Had a hell of a time convincing our rescuers who we were.”

“Scorpio,” said Acth:On’e.  His lips were covered with beer frost, which he licked with his tongue. 

“She was on sector patrol along that worldline, picket duty outside the Peak.  Captain was a gruff fellow named Valesquez…real Time Guard boy scout, that one.  Everything by the book. He was a couple of years ahead of me at the Academy.  Once we managed to establish our bona fides, it was nothing but investigations and bureaucracy and brass covering their asses from then on.  Once she got permission to jump back to T-001, I was never so glad to get home in my whole life.”

“Me, too,” Yang admitted.  “Never thought of K-World as paradise until after I went barrel-rolling through Time’s Peak.”

The talk stopped when a third jumpship crew swaggered into the Dinar, most of them hammered into slobbering, stumbling semi-comatose jellybags.  The din briefly subsided across the bar as Capricorn’s crew and Gemini’s crew encountered each other along the edge of the bar. Then a jumper from the ‘Corn saw Dringoth and Golich and blinked his watery eyes in disbelief.

“Well, I’ll be a Telitorian birdsnake…that’s looks like a bunch of pukes from Cygnus over there.  Hey, Velho, check out that bunch of Cygnoids…” he spat a wad of something blue, probably chewed khat…the leaf was everywhere in the Tenderloin, “can’t say I ever laid eyes on a sorrier bunch of jumpers than them—”

Golich stiffened and was about to rise to face this troglodyte, but Dringoth laid a firm hand on his elbow.

“Not now, Commander.  Take it easy.  Cornies are just blowing off steam.”

“But, Captain, I—”

“Save it for a better time.  They’re not the enemy.  We’re all on the same team here.”

Dringoth had hoped the Capricorn and Gemini jumpers would cancel each other out, focus on boasting and cursing and insulting each other and leave the rest of them alone.  But when a Gemini crewman sauntered over, sloshing his drink on half the patrons as he came up, Dringoth knew that was a forlorn hope.

The time jumper from Gemini was short, but stocky, a bull of a man with a thick ropy neck and slurred, heavily accented words.  His jump suit had a name patch that read something like Kizim somethingorother.  He was grinning like a skeleton’s rictus and his bald head shone from the overhead lights.

“Cyg…nus…eh?” he got out thickly.  His drink sloshed on Golich’s shoulder.  The commander bit his lip, sucked in a breath and tried to ignore the intruder.  “Heard she was being re-routed.”

“Oh,” muttered Acth:On’e, over the top of his mug.  “How’s that?”

Kizim laughed and drooled at the same time.  “You din’t hear…Guard reassigned that old garbage scow to escort duty…other side of Landfall.  Escorting other buckets right to the scrapyard.”

“Oh,” said Golich, his shoulders tightening for what he knew was bound to come.  “Where’d you hear that piece of crap?”

Kizim’s face scrunched up into a mixture of pain and laughter.  “Ever’body knows it.  Cygnus ain’t nothin’ but a bucket of rivets flying in loose formation.  Couldn’t even aim that Twister thing right, blew off half of Gibbons, I heard.  Go see for yourself, Goldilocks.”

Golich stood up abruptly, knocking over his half-empty mug.  “And I suppose Gemini’s the marvel of the universe…you know, pal—”  Golich leaned close to Kizim’s face, right into a miasma of khat breath and bleary eyes—“…you know what they say about Gemini?”

“Eh?  No…what’s that?”

Golich chuckled a low guttural chuckle.  “I hear that old scum dredger’s nothing but the bastard offspring of an infernal liaison…two diseased arachtyls from K-World, both covered with canker sores, got to humping it and spat out a smoking pile of crap with a vague resemblance to a jumpship.  Guard was so impressed, they stuck a name on it and commissioned it into the fleet…Gemini…the Twins, get it, stinko?”

Kizim blinked hard.  The swing, when it came was off the mark but managed to clip Golich on the ear.  And then, like the proverbial butterfly who flapped its wings and created a hurricane, the brawl was on.

Dringoth never really knew who threw the first punch.  But before he could even get to his feet, the entire front bar of the Lucky Dinar was a maelstrom of flying fists and falling bodies and chairs crashing and tables collapsing and bots beeping and glass shattering and beer everywhere.

Kizim and Golich were in a wrestling match in no time, first on top of the table, then on the floor, rolling in khat leaf and butts and ashes and slick patches of drink spill.  Golich was taller and rangier, but Kizim was stronger, a bull fighting a giraffe, Evelyn M’Bela would later describe it.

Golich landed a few solid punches, but Kizim seemed impervious to everything and just butted like a bull, again and again, right into the commander’s chest, knocking the wind out of him every time.

Acth:On’e rose to come to his crewmate’s defense but soon found himself enveloped in the arms of another Cornie, trying to strangle him from behind.  M’Bela landed a side kick right in the privates of a third Cornie and Alicia Yang was soon crouched herself on top of nearby table, hands in strike position, slashing and chopping at anyone who came near.

Dringoth took a few shoves from hands unseen, shoved back and burrowed his way to the bar, where he hand-motioned the auto-bar for another round of Lick and slurped it carefully, even sitting up on the bar, lifting his legs, when more bodies came crashing by.

It took Time Guard police half an hour to get everything calmed down.

 

So that’s the excerpt.  Let me know what you think.  The next episode to be uploaded, Episode 3, appears on April 15.

The next post to The Word Shed comes on April 8.  See you then.

 

Phil B.

Post #162 March 25 2019

“Developing Believable Alien Characters – 5 Things to Remember”

One of the most difficult yet rewarding aspects of writing science fiction, or as we call it: sf, is developing aliens that readers can believe yet seem alien enough to evoke that proverbial sense of wonder.  It’s definitely an art, yet there are some do’s and don’ts that any writer should remember and follow.  Here are 5 of them:

1. Remember that your readers are human beings.  This should go without saying but some sf writers work so hard and spend so much effort in developing their aliens that they feel obliged to throw it all into the story, overwhelming the reader.  They develop detailed settings and languages, religions, cultures, customs, jokes, and after all that work, have to figure out a way to embed this in the story in a way that keeps the story moving but lends a sense of alienness to the story, a sense of other.  This is the peculiar nature of sf writing.  It’s being read by actual bipedal humans but it often deals with places, people and times completely beyond anything anyone has ever encountered before.  Imagine Gone With the Wind as told by a Tralfamidorean, set on a time ship skirting the edges of the Andromeda galaxy, fighting off those damned Bugs again.  You get the idea.  You can make your aliens too alien to follow.  I’ve read plenty of stories like that.  So how do we avoid this trap?
2. Let the aliens speak for themselves.  There’s a risk in this.  While it’s normally good practice to drop your reader right in the middle of the action, you don’t want your reader drowning in details they can’t understand.  Some readers like this and like to participate with their imaginations in creating your imaginary world.  That’s great.  You can use that.  But some readers will eventually give up and put the book aside.  One way to avoid this is to have a strong, narrative line, clearly evident, so that the reader can at least ground their imaginations in something familiar.  I just put aside a book that came highly recommended as a potential Hugo or Nebula Award winner because I couldn’t find a story there.  There weren’t any aliens per se but the flow is so jumbled and chaotic that I eventually gave up trying to find it.  Make sure your aliens are doing things in service of a strong story line and, most important, make sure the reader can find and follow that story line…maybe some asides or journal entries or narrative stretches narrated by a scientist or something, anything to help the reader.
3. Use a human narrator or a human to interact with your aliens.  I did this in my sf novel The Farpool, with two teenagers Chase and Angie, who represent the human reader in dealing with the alien Seomish people.  Their reactions and responses guide the reader as to how he or she should respond.  And, when done properly, the reader starts to have sympathy and concern for your humans and even better, gets to vicariously deal with the aliens and experience your story that way.  Try it.  It works. 
4. Put humans and your aliens into conflict situations.  This is a great way of illuminating different sides of character, whether human or alien.  How do they react to each other?  Does a friendly human gesture or word evoke disgust or threat to your aliens and vice versa?  This point is a kind of subset of point #3 above, but with a sharper edge and greater consequences.  Conflict gives both your aliens and your humans a chance to find out what the other side will do in tense situations, and to learn more about each other.  Moreover, it can move a story along in a very engaging way, keeping the reader interested.  What will those Tralfamidoreans really do if we build our shelter right here?  Maybe I’m building on a holy site or a capital setting, and the Tralfamidoreans are highly offended?  This gives you a chance to provide some (brief) background as to why they’re offended.  And what will the humans do when they learn this?  Will they stop?  Will they keep building anyway, regardless?  Either way, the reader learns more about the humans involved and the aliens.
5. Make a decision: can your aliens grow and change in their interactions with the humans?  If the answer is yes, your aliens can be shown to change as they deal with humanity, what does that entail?  It could make them even more believable, even more sympathetic.  But it’s also harder to bring off as you really have to understand your aliens’ motivations and feelings well.  If you don’t allow your aliens to grow and change, the story is easier to manage but you run the risk of having cardboard/1-dimensional aliens that aren’t really believable, or seem like humans in funny costumes, a common enough failing of older TV and film sf.  Either way, allowing your aliens to grow and change as they interact with humans does give you a chance to illuminate different aspects of their character, and the humans too.
    
   Writing stories with believable aliens is a real art that is particularly unique to sf.  Remember these five do’s and don’ts and you’ll find yourself on a more productive road to a unique and compelling tale that won’t allow a reader to just set it aside.  And that’s what you want.
    
   The next post to The Word Shed comes on April 1, 2019.  Let’s plan on exploring aliens in sf a little more…I think this is a productive avenue to explore for many sf writers.  It’s so easy to mess it up.
    
   See you then.
    
   Phil B.
    
    

 

Post #161 March 18, 2019

“Writing Fiction Today…the Long Game or the Short Game?”

It’s an old question for every storyteller: does my story fit best in a short form or a long form, like a novel?  I’ve written and published both and they both have their own upsides and downsides.  Novels take longer and require a substantial investment of time and effort.  Short stories take less time, but don’t give you the room to explore subplots, or develop characters as you might want.

Let’s see what others think.

Writer’s Digest gives us five areas to consider when making this decision.

1. Duration of the story.  Normally, a short story takes places in a shorter, concentrated period of time.  My sf short story The Better Angels (part of the Colliding Galaxies collection) occurs over just a few days.  A novel may span years in actual story time. 
2. Number of characters.  You’d better keep a short story down to a few characters.  In the story mentioned above, there are five characters.  But my novel Final Victory literally has a cast of hundreds.  In this novel, I also employed a story frame technique…a story inside a larger story.  You can’t do that in short fiction because you don’t have room or time.  In writing novels, like The Farpool, I have found it advisable to develop character backgrounds and bios just so I can keep things straight.  If Joe has blond hair in chapter 1, he’d better not have red hair in chapter 9, without good reason.
3. Plots and Subplots.  In a novel, plots and subplots can quickly become a management issue, requiring the writer to juggle a lot of balls at the same time.  The way I do this is to outline in some detail and keep outlining until I’m sure I’ve covered everything.  I also group scenes into chapters in a table format, then  re-outline again.  For me, I can’t do too much outlining.   You don’t need to do this in shorter works, though I usually do a shorter version of this.  Maybe just a few paragraphs per scene, with some connecting ideas to draw the scenes together.  As Writer’s Digest suggests, having more characters makes more plot and more action easier to develop.  Conversely, having the time or space constraint of a short story forces you to make every word count and choose only those scenes and words that advance the story.  It’s great discipline but it isn’t easy...for me, at least.
4. Themes.  I can’t do a better explanation of this than Writer’s Digest, so take a look:

“…when I got the assignment to write this piece, I’d been rereading Anton Chekhov’s short stories. My copy, a sublime little clothbound volume issued by the Modern Library in 1932, features marginalia written by previous owners. In the blank half-page after “Grief,” a story about a bereaved hackney driver and his callously abusive passengers, someone wrote, “Second-lowest man has one job in life: to keep the lowest man down.”

Now that is an incisive reading of the story. One vest-pocket-sized tale was all the great Chekhov needed to pierce our hearts with that truth. Just like Chekhov, in a short story you should be trying to get at one or two poignant aspects of being human. In a novel, you can create characters, let them loose, follow them and see what they do. If you feel your story will be more a journey than a statement, you may be leaning toward a novel.”

5. Commitment.  A short story might take a few days or a few weeks.  A novel could take a year.  It’s a substantial investment of time and energy.  For me, often the story or the characters will tell me what they want.  Sometimes a story just feels like a novel, with the abundant room to explore themes, subplots, character details, etc.  Other times, it feels like something shorter.  


 I have found that my particular talents tend toward the longer form.  I feel most comfortable telling stories that give me space to move around, knock things down, explore characters and put them in revealing situations.  Even when I try hard to write a story at a shorter length, it feels like a straitjacket.  It just takes my storytelling motor time and space to warm up.
   
Having said that, I will have to admit that developing and writing my serials Quantum Troopers and Time Jumpers were done, in part, to try out the discipline of doing 15-20,000 word stories to a strict schedule.  Could I maintain the pace and tell the stories over the year plus it’s taken to get to the final episode?  Time will tell on that.   


The short game or the long game is an individual writer decision.  There’s no right or wrong here.  You really have to rely on your instincts and how the story idea feels to you as it gets fleshed out.  And don’t be afraid to change your thinking half way through. 


The next post to The Word Shed comes on March 25. See you then.

Phil B.

1.  

Post #160  March 11, 2019

“How Many Pages Should I Write Today?”

Every writer faces the same question when he or she sits down at the computer in the morning: how many pages, how many words, should I write today?

This is basically a matter of scheduling.  For writers of novels and non-fiction books, it goes without saying that there’s no way you can do the entire work in a day or a week, probably not even in a month. You have to divide it up into chunks, mainly because you’ve got other things to do with your life along with writing. 

Case in point:  I’m currently working on background for a science fiction novel called Monument  I anticipate that when the initial draft of a novel is done, it will come in at somewhere around 250 pages, when formatted for Smashwords.com.  Each page runs on average about 500 words, so we’re talking about 125,000 words in total.  Now, how to divide that up....

I’m doing 3-5 pages a day.  That doesn’t sound like much. But it leaves me with time for other tasks and projects.  Writing 5 pages a day takes me about 3-4 hours, depending.  But it’s 25 pages a week.  Divide 250 pages by 25 pages and you get 10 weeks, about four to five months.  At the rate I have chosen, I can do a draft in five months.  Plus I can work on other things and have a life.

Could I write more?  Of course I could.  But you should choose a rate that is comfortable and sustainable over a long period, since it’s unlikely you can finish a novel-length project in a few weeks.  There are some writers who bat out a draft in a single marathon session of a month but I’m not one of them.  I take longer and take my time and try to do the thing right from the beginning. 

One the most important aspects of this writing process for me, when engaged in a lengthy work, is “staying in the story”, mentally.  I find that a daily regimen like I described above is a great way to do that.  Even away from my desk, I find my feverish brain cogitating on the next scene, the next sentence.  Sometimes ideas for snatches of dialogue or plot variations will come to me when I’m working out, mowing the lawn, eating dinner, watching TV.  I want that. 

Every writer approaches this differently. 

I’m also a detailed outliner and planner, when it comes to writing a novel, or writing anything.  I’ve covered some of this in earlier blog posts, but I work from the beginning to build a fairly detailed outline, with character sketches and setting and background details readily at hand for the actual writing.  Sometimes my outlines and sketches are detailed enough to be lifted and pasted into the novel text as is, or with little change.  That makes life easier, as long as it advances the story.  The story is everything.  I’m even thinking of including an Appendix of some of this material at the end of Monument, for readers who just can’t get enough detail on my imaginary world and its people.

That’s a little peek behind the curtains at the logistics or the mechanics of daily writing life.  I plan to do more of this sort of thing again. 

My next post comes on March 18.

See you next week.

Phil B

 

Post #159 March 4, 2019

“Writing Action/Adventure Stories”

Much of my work in recent years has been in the action/adventure genre.  I read often in this genre and enjoy the challenge of writing in it as well.  So what makes for a great action/adventure story?

The website NowNovel.com offers these tips for good action/adventure writing:

1. Understand (the difference between) ‘action’ and ‘pace’ (and what weakens them)

2. Favor active voice

3. Describe deeds, movements and gestures

4. Focus on characters’ goals

5. Keep details of setting and other description relevant to action

6. Use short sentences to increase pace

7. Set off chains of cause and effect

8. Cut out filter words  (“He saw that it was dark” vs “It was dark”)

 

Let’s see how well I’ve done in using these tips with an excerpt from my new series Time Jumpers. 

 

It was Acth:On’e who saw the ship first, breaching the rough surf several hundred meters out to sea.  The TM1 was loading gear aboard Cygnus, along with Commander Nathan Golich, trying to stay upright in the fierce wind gusts, when he spotted something surfacing just beyond the surf line.  As he watched, the ship rolled in the waves for a few moments, then disgorged a human being, clad in a hypersuit. 

“Commander…look there!  It’s Alicia--!”

Golich looked up.  “Toonie…you’re cracked…Alicia’s—” but he stopped in mid-sentence, for they had both seen the hypersuited figure waddle unsteadily through the surf, stumble onto the beach and drop to its knees.

Both crewmen then tossed their gear away and skidded downslope from the rocky promontory where Cygnus was parked and sprinted out to the beach.

It was Alicia Yang.

She was alive, out of breath, almost giggling at them, but seemingly okay.  They helped the Defense and Protective Systems tech to her feet, brushed wet sand off her face and shouldered her up the slope to the ship, where she ducked through the lockout on F deck and ran straight into Captain Dringoth.

“Well, well…Jumpmaster Yang…decided to pay us a visit, did you?”  Dringoth queried Acth:On’e and Golich.  “She okay…she hurt…what’s her condition?”

But before Golich could respond, Yang blurted out, “Captain…Captain…you’ve got to come with me…come down to the beach.   They said they’d wait.  I think they want everybody to see it…see what I’ve seen.”

“And what have you seen, Jumpmaster Yang?”

Yang fluttered her hands, not sure what to do with them.  Her face was a child on Christmas morning, wide-eyed, electric with wonder.  “You wouldn’t believe it…there’s a whole civilization down there…it’s incredible…there aren’t words—”

Acth:On’e put a hand to her temple.  “These bruises…we don’t know what happened.  The fish may have done something to her.”

“No, really,” she complained, “They just took me to some place called the Pillars…sacred waters…that’s what the translator said.  Ice caves…whispering voices, thousands of them…you have to see it, you have hear it.”

By now, the rest of the crew had come down to F deck and gathered around: M’Bela and URME had joined them. 

“The girl’s delirious,” M’Bela decided, hands on her hips. 

“I’m not delirious…really, Captain…we need to stay awhile, investigate this.”

Dringoth was skeptical.  “Take her to sick bay.  Make sure she’s okay.”  To URME, the Captain added, “And restrain her…you know what to do.”  To the others, Dringoth was firm and unyielding.  “We launch in an hour.”  He disappeared up the gangway.

“Come on, princess,” said Golich.  “Let’s get you to bed.”

So they took her to the tiny sick bay, carved out of a corner of the galley and set up a bioweb.  Probe bots were released—M’Bela drove them—and inserted themselves into her eyes, ears, nose and throat.  She tried to fight them off but it was like fighting off smoke.  Finally, she gave in and sank back in a sulk. 

“Nobody believes me,” she muttered.  “I’m just a DPS tech…just a hired gun.  Nobody ever believes me.”

Acth:On’e was there, a bit sympathetic.  “You’ve been through a lot, Alicia.  Stop fighting.  You know we’ve got orders.  Commandstar said breakdown the Twister and abandon everything else in place.  We’ve got to be at Keaton’s World in three months.  Besides—” he peered out a nearby porthole, “--from the way the light level’s falling off, I’d say this old sun’s about had it.  Maybe a month, maybe a year…then kablooey!”

Yang sat up abruptly and her head penetrated the bioweb, which buzzed sharply, and pressed her back down.  “Ouch, dammit!  Can’t you make this damned web bigger—Toonie, that’s my point.  There’s a whole civilization down below the waves.  A whole culture.  Intelligent creatures, with ships and cities and religions.  We can’t just let them go up in smoke.  TACTRON needs to know about this…there are things he could do…maybe evacuation or something.”

Acth:On’e scoffed, rubbing that faint scar along his jaw—an encounter with thermosaurs on Telitor when he was a young V1—“Doesn’t matter.  Collateral damage.  Casualties of war.  I don’t like it either, but what we can do?”  He shook his blade-shaped head.  “And I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes either, girl…abandoning your post, going AWOL…I’m sure Time Guard’ll have a nice welcoming party for you at K-World.”

Yang rolled over and buried her bandaged head in the pillow.  “I don’t want to think about it.  At least I have this—“she pulled out an echopod from under the sheets and brandished it at Acth:On’e.

He was startled.  “What are you doing with that…you should have left it.  That’s contraband…we don’t know what those things can do.  Let me have that—”

“No way.”  She jammed the device under the sheets again, between her legs.  “It’s just a translator…maybe an encyclopedia too.  I like to listen to stuff.”

Acth:On’e was about to drop the bioweb and reach in and grab the pod,  but a voice came over the 1MC.

“Toonie to the command deck…Master Guard Acth:On’e to the command deck at once….”

He glared back at Yang.  “I’m informing the Captain.  That thing needs to be secured…we don’t know what it could do.”

“Go ahead,” she pouted and turned away.

Acth:On’e left the sick bay with an irritated gesture.

 

That’s a sequence from Time Jumpers Episode 2.  In it, I’ve tried to follow the tips for good action/adventure writing.  This genre demands pace, lots of action, characters always striving to achieve something, and not much in the way of internal monologue or characters contemplating their navels.  Readers of action/adventure stories want to read about things happening to people they can believe in, so they can live their lives vicariously. 

Study the excerpt and tell me if I succeeded.

The next post to The Word Shed comes on March 11.

See you then.

Phil B