Post #259 May 31, 2021 “Just One More Page: Setting SMART Goals for Writing” In previous posts to The Word Shed, I have said many times that my usual daily goal as a writer is to complete 3-5 pages. This is true for any story I’m writing, whether a novel, novelette or short story. It’s an aspirational goal that I usually achieve okay and it keeps me moving toward completing whatever project I’m working on. Which brings me to the topic for this post: how to set goals for yourself as a writer. I’m indebted to the fine folks at writers.com for the following guidelines on how to set goals for yourself as a writer…. Be S.M.A.R.T. with your writing goals: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant & Time-bound. SPECIFIC …means the goal is easily identifiable and simple. Let’s take writing goal examples like wanting to write a screenplay or a novel. If you want that kind of lofty goal, you could easily be overwhelmed because it’s not only too big, it’s also too vague. Instead, make a goal of writing for an hour a day, or a specific word-count, or page count. Be as specific as possible. Unclear, over-reaching goals are rarely attained. If you don’t set specific writing goals, you’re unlikely to reach them. It’s all about taking those larger goals and making a plan, knocking them out step by step so you aren’t overwhelmed. MEASURABLE …means you can identify clearly when the goal is accomplished or how much you have left to do to cross it off your list. If you’re setting a goal of writing five pages a day, but you’re only meeting it half the time, you either need to up your game or adjust your goal. We’ll touch more on being realistic in goal setting in the next section. Bottom-line, creating a measurable goal will help you understand how to set the time aside to complete it. ATTAINABLE …simply means the goal is realistic and you aren’t setting yourself up for failure. Note, we’ve also seen the ‘A’ be defined as Actionable. Use actions verbs to define the goal, and then act on them. Nothing kills a goal faster than failing at it right out of the gate. If you say you’re going to write 20 pages a day while working a day job and raising a family, chances are you’ll fall flat on your face, beat yourself up and possibly stop writing altogether. You can’t be a better writer if you aren’t giving yourself time to put the words on the page. But even if you do set a lofty goal of 20 pages a day, there’s no shame in readjusting your expectations. Is adjusting your goal downward giving up? No. Re-evaluating is smart (no pun intended). In war, Generals re-evaluate and adjust their strategies. In parenting, mothers and fathers always re-evaluate their skills and practices in order to raise healthy children. In our day jobs, our bosses re-evaluate us and we re-evaluate ourselves so we can get more accomplished in less time. Changing gears is part of life, and those who can adapt best, survive. There’s no shame in moving the bar for your goals to an attainable one, even if all you’re doing is writing 15 minutes a day. That alone keeps the story in your mind even when you’re not in front of a keyboard. There’s zero point in setting a goal that isn’t achievable. RELEVANT …means the goal is directly related to your overall vision of your life or career. Some people also define the ‘R’ as Realistic. If your goal is to be a successful author, you need to create an author platform, build a website, write blog posts, and still have time to write your novels or screenplays. So if you create a goal of writing a 1200-word blog post every day for your new website, you won’t have time to write the novels or scripts that actually make you a marketable writer. Set realistic and relevant goals that enhance your overall objectives instead of distracting you from them. TIME-BOUND …means you can identify a period of time a goal can be reached and be able to schedule it into your days. On-going goals are ones like “Write an hour a day.” Yes, you can say that’s “time-bound” because if you don’t write today, you didn’t meet your goal. But you should also have other truer time-bound goals, such as having an outline done in 30 days, or finishing the first act by the end of the week. Those mini-goals of the bigger objective help you stay on track and keep your motivation. The other importance of having time-bound goals is to stay sharp on the practice of how to meet deadlines Goal setting is essential to become a better writer. Set your writing goals today. And I might add that, as my goal is 3-5 pages a day, I enjoy seeing the physical stack of paper pile up. That’s a rewarding visual indicator that I’m doing something, that I’m actually achieving my goal. That in itself can be a powerful motivator. Make a plan. Set up your goals as the SMART people at writers.com have suggested and write them down on a calendar. Then get to work. The Word Shed will take a one-week hiatus for the Memorial Day holiday. The next post comes on June 14, 2021. Have a great holiday and remember our veterans and all they have done for us. See you then, Phil B

Post #258 May 24 2021 “Facebook, YouTube and Emails, Oh My! Finding the Time to Write” I am currently writing the first draft of my next title in The Farpool Stories, called The Farpool: Plague. I anticipate being able to upload this on or before Labor Day 2021. After that, I’ll take some time to prepare for the next title in this series. I like to have a little time to relax and decompress between projects. Which brings to mind a question every writer asks: how do you find time to write? I want to address what works for me in this post. Primarily, finding time to write is an issue of motivation. What motivates you? What gets you out of bed in the morning? What keeps you up at night, mulling over possibilities and options? I know a fellow named Tom. He’s not a writer but he’s surely one of the busiest people I know. Multi-tasking is his middle name. He drives full time for Lyft. He attends daily to a wife who has a serious disease. For years, he attended nearly daily to an aging father in declining health, now in a nursing home. Oh, and he’s also president of our Sunday School class. How does Tom even find time to breathe? Here are my rules for being able to carve out time to do something like write. 1. Make it a daily thing. Pick a time. Stick with it. Writing should be like exercising. Even like flossing your teeth. You do these things because you know you should and you like the results. As a writer, I enjoy seeing the pages mount up. I always print what I’ve written that day. As the pile gets taller, I feel some pride and sense of accomplishment at seeing that. I get a bit of a rush…by God, I’m a writer! Here’s the proof! But the most important thing is to pick a time and a place and stay with it. Preferably every day. Make it like brushing your teeth or showering. If I don’t put down 3-5 pages a day (and I give myself plenty of time off as needed), I just don’t feel right. 2. Set a goal. I’ve alluded to 3-5 pages a day for my own schedule. That’s 15 to 20 pages a week. Assuming a genre novel is around 200-250 pages, that means you can have the satisfaction of completing a draft in about 3 ½ months. Does that mean the job is done? No, of course not. There’s still editing, re-writing, cleaning up the prose, marketing stuff, etc. But it does mean you can bang out maybe 2+ books a year. That’s a clearer path to success than waiting for the muse to strike. Take my advice: don’t wait for the muse. Blast ahead and put words down on paper. Even if you have to edit them later. 3. Give yourself permission to slide a little but feel bad when you do so. Glory in the guilt. This may be controversial, but in my experience, we live in a feel-good time and if you have worked out a schedule and a discipline that works for you, and you don’t do it, you’ll feel bad when you’re not doing something writerly every day. If and when that happens, you’ve climbed an important motivational hill. You’ve made putting words so much a part of your daily living that you can’t envision a day when you’re not doing it. I have become so good at motivating myself that occasionally, I find it hard to turn myself off. That can be bad too because it can lead to burnout. But remember: nobody’s making you do this. You have to make yourself do it. And one way to accomplish this, is to understand what motivates you to do something hard and isolating and not always initially rewarding. Hopefully, the results later will be what motivates you but everyone is different. Examine what works for you, set up a schedule and stick to it. 4. Keep a record and celebrate meeting your goals. When I finished The Farpool: Union, I gave myself a few days off and then we went to the beach. My kind of reward. When your work is (finally) done, reward yourself. Have lunch with friends. Buy a bunch of books. Go see a movie. Hike in the mountains. Whatever is rewarding. And then get back to work. In between works, I make myself spend a few hours in the office every day. I might be developing outlines for a new story, developing character bios, researching or just day-dreaming. But I always go back to my schedule and begin the process all over again. And when I see the downloads mounting up my author’s dashboard on Smashwords, that’s pretty good motivation for me to continue, because it means somebody out there thinks enough of my work to download it. Finding time to write is really about knowing yourself, as (I believe) Socrates once said. Writing is a solitary art. Only you can motivate yourself. Motivation theorists tell us that it’s the rewards at the end that provide a lot of motivation. If you believe Maslow’s theories, then that puts writing somewhere around love/belonging, esteem and self-actualization. That’s good enough for me. The next post to The Word Shed comes on May 31, 2021. See you then, Phil B.

Post #257 May 17 2021 “Excerpt from The Farpool: Plague” At the beginning of April 2021, I re-started my original series The Farpool Stories. The new title is called The Farpool: Plague. So far, so good. I intend to make this available for download on or before Labor Day (September 6, 2021). Look for it. Most of the characters are new but the storyline picks up from the last Farpool story, The Farpool: Union. Below is an excerpt from this story: Chapter 1 Wright Memorial Hospital Scotland Beach, FL July 3, 2195 (Friday) Death would be a relief, Cory Everett thought, as he watched his wife Leah struggling underneath the bioshield. What was left of Leah was a shriveled, emaciated, bruised, convulsing skeleton of bloody skin and bone, consumed with late-stage effects of the Purple, an infection of unknown origin that had been sweeping the world in a global crisis for several years now. Her prognosis was grim, as there was no vaccine or cure of medbotic intervention that seemed to work. Nanoscale medbots had been suffused throughout her body for months now, yet the Purple bacteriomechs had been able to defeat or blunt them in every session they had tried. Cory closed his eyes, willing the imagery to go back to that closet in the back of his mind reserved for monsters and nightmares. He heard a door hiss open and looked around. It was Dr. Evan Wilshire. Wilshire was clad in a Level 4 biosuit, his helmet off. He carried a small capsule in one hand. Two technicians came in too. Cory knew them as Max and Elayne. “We’re going to try another session this morning,” Wilshire announced. As he explained what would be happening, Max and Elayne positioned the AMAD unit next to Leah’s bed, hooked up some tubes and lines and prepared to drop the shield. “We’ve been working with the Lab to tweak AMAD,” Wilshire told them. “New effectors, new probes, lots of new gear. It’s worked well in lab tests and simulations.” Cory glanced at the skeptical faces of his son Reuben and daughter Jessica. He knew AMAD was the Autonomous Medical Assembler/Disassembler. “Can it really make a difference now, Doc? Is there any real hope?” Wilshire forced an optimistic smile he didn’t really feel, for the truth was that Purple was an aggressive bacteriomech and every attempt they had tried with AMAD had failed miserably. “Cory, there’s always room for hope. We want to try everything that has a reasonable chance of working.” “Of course.” Wilshire always tried to be upbeat in sessions like this, even when there really was no reason to hope. “Let’s give it a shot, okay? You’ll all have to leave now. Go back to the waiting room. Have a doughnut and coffee. Let us do what we can here.” “Of course. I think we’ll just go to the chapel…and pray.” Max helped them through the door with a sympathetic smile. After the three of them were gone, he sealed the door, which hissed in response and snugged down his own helmet. Wilshire and Elayne did the same. Elayne then spent the next few minutes readying the AMAD cart while Max dropped the bioshield. A spray of light around the bed flashed. Wilshire loaded the new and improved bots into a nearby port on the cart. Finally, Elayne announced, "Okay, Dr. Wilshire… she patted down the incision she had just made in the side of Leah's skull. "Subject's prepped and ready." Max handed Wilshire the injector tube, attached by hose to the containment chamber. "Steady even suction, Doctor. AMAD ready to fly?" Elayne came back, "Ready in all respects." "Vascular grid?" "Tracking now. We'll be able to follow the master just fine. I'll replicate once we're through the blood-brain barrier." "Watch for capillary flow," said Max. "When her capillaries narrow, your speed will increase. And viscosity will stay up." "Like slogging through molasses. AMAD's inerted and stable…ready for insertion." The insertion went smoothly enough. A slug of plasma forced the replicant master into Leah's capillary network at high pressure. Wilshire got an acoustic pulse seconds later and selected Fly-by-Stick to navigate the system. A few minutes' run on its propulsors brought the Autonomous Medical Assembler/Disassembler to a dense fibrous mat of capillary tissues. The image soon appeared on Wilshire's IC panel. "Ready for transit," he told Max. "Cytometric probing now. I can force these cell membranes open any time." Max used AMAD's acoustic coupler to sound the tissue dam ahead, probing for weak spots. "There, right to starboard of those reticular lumps…that's a lipid duct, I'd bet a hundred bucks. Let’s try there, this time.” Wilshire steered AMAD into the vascular cleft of the membrane. He twisted his right-hand controller, pulsing a carbene grabber to twist the cleft molecules just so, then released the membrane lipids and slingshot himself forward. Seconds later, AMAD was floating in a plasma bath, dark, viny shapes barely visible off in the distance. The plasma was a heavy viscous fluid. Wilshire tweaked up the propulsor to a higher power setting and took a navigation hack off the vascular grid. "Ventral tegmentum, guys. Just past the mesoencephalic nucleus. Looks like we're in." Wilshire navigated AMAD through the interstices of Leah's brain for the better part of an hour. He had programmed the assembler to send an alarm when it encountered any kind of unnatural activity…especially assembler maneuvering or replication. If there were any remnants of Purple left in her brain, he wanted to be ready. "Hopefully, the last treatment finished them off," he muttered to himself. At 1824 hours, AMAD sent the alarm. The imager screen was at first murky, crowded with the spikes and cubes of dissolved molecules. Lumpy, multi-lobed sodium molecules darted across their view like shadowy ping-pong balls. Wilshire studied readouts from AMAD's sounder…something was there, hidden in the data traces on the scope. He fiddled with the gain on the imager, tweaking it, subtracting foreground clutter. Something approximately sixty nanometers in one dimension, narrow with a globe structure at one end…and scores of probes, effectors, cilia, whatever. Incredible mobility…triple propulsors beat an idling rhythm as AMAD closed in…. Max let out a whoop. "Will you look at that?" Elayne came closer, squinted at the vague, fuzzy outlines on the screen. "It’s Purple, all right. A whole colony of them. A welcoming committee, it would appear. Come to see what we're about." So that’s an excerpt from the first chapter. Look for The Farpool: Plague on or about Labor Day this year. The next post to The Word Shed comes on May 24. See you then. Phil B.

Post #256 May 10 2021 “Water Clans of Seome: Writing about Alien Cultures” One of the greatest challenges as a writer of science fiction, and at the same time, one of the joys, is writing about alien cultures. In my own recent series of sf novels The Farpool Stories, I describe a marine civilization of intelligent, sentient creatures who have created an entire civilization below the waves of the ocean planet Seome. The series involves stories of how the Seomish people interact with each other and with humans. Every sf writer approaches worldbuilding a slightly different way. In my case, I wrote a novel called The Shores of Seome many years ago (which mutated into The Farpool) and in the process created a lot of background for this world and its inhabitants. In fact, I created an Appendix containing much of this material and stuck it at the end of The Farpool. Writing a story about aliens and setting it on an alien world is a real juggling act. You want to convey a true sense of alienness without turning off the reader. You don’t want to write an encyclopedia or something like National Geographic. You still have to have a compelling story and somehow work in enough alien details to transport the reader to this other world and its people and bring them to life for the reader. In my case, I created background encompassing the following areas and then wrote extensive notes to give my background some depth. When and where I could, I worked this background bit by bit into the story. I even hit on the plot device of having a sort of universal translator called an echopod, which had some encyclopedia functions. When the human characters needed to know something and an info dump was unavoidable, I had the aliens tell them to trigger the echopod and it would spit out material from my background. As long as I didn’t overdo this, it seemed to work pretty well. I tried to keep these passages to less than half a page. Here are the categories I tried to develop pretty extensive background for: 1. The language with key words and concepts and a few notes about grammar 2. Maps (entire globe and by quadrant) 3. Description of the world itself as a planet 4. The major cities and settlements and their key features 5. The physiology of the Seomish (remember, these are talking fish) 6. The biology of Seome (other plants and animals) 7. Theology and First Things of the Seomish people 8. The Hierarchies: Government, Politics and Organizations 9. Commerce, Industry, Crafts, Trades, Science and Technology 10. Communications and formal relations between the Kels (tribes or clans) 11. Education and training 12. Entertainment and recreation, diversions and amusements 13. Home life and intra-kel relations 14. The Kels (tribes or water clans): their history, key details, etc 15. More detailed description of one kel including cuisine, history, architecture 16. A brief chronology of Seomish civilization 17. An historical timeline and key events, notes on timekeeping 18. Seomish rituals and customs Was this a lot of work? It was and most of it was done 40 years ago. I never tried, in writing the actual stories, to get all of this into the story. But by having it as background, the detail dictates some aspects of the story, such as how events might unfold one way versus another way, always in keeping with the background. This kind of detail is like a crutch in that I can always look up how one of my characters might do something and I can be consistent across a number of stories in how I describe things. An echopod in The Farpool works the same as an echopod in The Farpool: Convergence. And sometimes having this level of background will suggest obvious plot developments and natural conflicts that can be used. It even triggered me to pick up the series this year and outline three more Farpool stories. One of the greatest mistakes as an author is to try to get all of your background into the story, at the expense of the story. Story comes before everything else. I have found that a little background goes a long way. If you do your job right as a storyteller, you’ll find the reader more than willing to help out by filling in some details with their own imaginations, even if you didn’t supply the details. In fact, many readers prefer that since it engages their faculties even more…adding to their enjoyment of the story. Give your readers enough detail, well described, believable and internally consistent, to transport them to your alien world and then let the natural conflicts and the characters carry the story. You’ll even find that once in a while, something will crop up in the story that you never expected, something lurking just below the surface of your feverish brain, that is triggered by a background detail you worked out months before. At that point, you say wow! And then put it in and pat yourself on the back for having thought that up. It was all because you were steeped in the alien culture from the beginning. Maybe it is like working for National Geographic. The next post to The Word Shed will come on May 17 2021. See you then. Phil B.

Post #255 May 3, 2021 “When Your Aliens are Too Alien” Some years ago, I was about halfway through my last Johnny Winger novel (Johnny Winger and the Battle at Caloris Basin) and it looked like I may have written myself into a corner. In this last episode of Tales of the Quantum Corps, Winger had become a disassembled swarm of nanobots, what I have termed an ‘angel’ in previous books. The deconstruction occurred in the previous novel (Johnny Winger and the Europa Quandary). Now, I had to tell the story of what it was like to be a cloud of bots no bigger than atoms, a cloud that could form simulations of human beings and just about any imaginable physical structure. I may have made my main character a bit too alien. Writing a story about someone who is so different from you and me is stretching my descriptive and story-telling abilities. On the one hand, I wanted to accurately describe what it was like for Winger to be an angel. I wanted to describe it in ways a human reader could understand, so out of necessity, I used a lot of analogies and a lot of “it’s kind of like this—“text. Winger himself struggled to put his experience into words, often drawing on things he remembered from his former life as a ‘single-configuration being,” even from childhood. There are a lot of guidelines on creating believable aliens in science fiction stories. Johnny Winger is not intended as an alien but the effect is the same. One writer, Veronica Sicoe, did a blog post I saw on 7 aspects about aliens you shouldn’t ignore…here’s an excerpt… If you want to write sci-fi, or even if you’re just a curious reader, there are a handful of screwy aspects about aliens that you need to watch out for. So here’s where it’s at. 1. Aliens should be alien If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, you can call it Rakumph all you want, it’s still an ‘f…ing’ duck. Giving creatures fancy names and changing their color doesn’t make them alien. If you’re on an alien planet that has purple skies, three moons and something else than oxygen floating around, you can bet your dog’s chewbone all creatures will be completely different than on Earth. Different chemistry > different environment > different evolution of life. Don’t strap a funny costume on a donkey and call it a fearsome Sharzahkrath. That’s just lazy worldbuilding. 2. Aliens aren’t humans in rubber costumes Humanoids? Really? You think the whole universe is populated by humans with wrinkly foreheads or an extra tit? Come on! Hollywood resorted to humanoid aliens because it’s cheaper to stuff an actor into a costume than to build a whole alien from scratch. As a fiction writer, you’re not limited by a production budget. Go wild! Go freakishly inhumanly outrageously alien and stun the wits out of your readers. 3. Aliens have their own history Maybe they never had a war on their planet; maybe they’ve always viewed both (or all three?) sexes equally; maybe they make art out of living creatures and eat their elder in annual festive rituals. Alien creatures will have alien–as in unfamiliar–societies and hence a very different history. They might have evolved from fungi and still reproduce through spores, each female spawning 10,000 young every three and a half cycles, who knows, but this would greatly affect their entire history, don’t you think? 4. If they were smart enough to fly to Earth, they probably know your butthole is not the most interesting part of your body Aliens that come all this way to abduct people and stick probes up their bums must be retarded. We’d be invaded by morons who got kicked out of their own society for shaming their ancestors. Why in the name of Planet Shmurp would they go there? To learn the secrets of our race? 5. Aliens that are naturally telepathic won’t even grasp the concept of language Humans have developed language because there was no other direct way to communicate. If an alien race is naturally telepathic, they will never have developed language. That has huge implications! No language means no words to describe things, no symbols to represent experiences, and no written signs either. They would be absolutely unable to grasp the concept of language, let alone learn it. Your human characters will never be able to communicate with such aliens in any simple way, because even if the telepaths could to tap into your thoughts, they won’t understand them. We think in words, we think in describable concepts, we think in relations that make sense in our language-dominated sense of reality. An alien that has never felt the need to name a thing, simply won’t understand us. 6. Aliens that can’t hold a tool won’t invent space ships Space faring slugs? Highly technological fish-like creatures? How the hell did they come up with buttons if they don’t have hands? How would they have felt the need for tools if they have no possibility to grasp them? How did they weld metal or shape a console if they can’t even hold a screwdriver? Think a bit about this one before you put such nonsense on paper. And this one…very important. 7. Aliens are subject to the same laws of physics as we are Unless you’re writing about converging dimensions, which would make it fantasy not science-fiction in my opinion—but that’s an entirely different debate (read: stay tuned for more)—your alien races will be subject to the same basic universal laws of physics as we are, like gravity, electricity, the laws of movement and so on. If you throw an alien down the well, he will fall down not float upwards. If you ram a fist into his face, he will budge (unless he weighs ten tons, in which case you’d better get the hell out of there fast). My predicament as a story-teller was how to describe the living experience of a being who is a loose collection of atoms surrounding a processor that can organize that collection into just about any form you can imagine. This being (Johnny Winger) experienced things like Brownian motion and van der Waals forces that are so far beyond your and my thinking that words were hard to find. In the next post to The Word Shed, on May 10, I’ll delve into how science fiction writers describe such alien experiences in ways that make you think you’re actually there. See you May 10. Phil B.