Post #262 June 28 2021 “Plague is Done; Get Ready for Diaspora!” In the last few days, I have completely finished my latest book in The Farpool Stories. It’s called The Farpool: Plague. I plan to upload this new title on 2 July 2021. Look for it in the days to follow, at Smashwords.com and other fine ebook retailers. The next title in The Farpool Stories is called The Farpool: Diaspora. Almost all prep work is done and I expect to begin writing the first draft on or about 9 August 2021. With luck, this title will be done and ready to upload by the end of 2021 or early into 2022. Following is an excerpt from Chapter 1: Chapter 1 Aboard Europa Clipper Jupiter Orbit Insertion January 5, 2210 (Earth U.T.) Three days and a handful of hours after arriving in Jupiter orbit through the Atlantic Farpool, Europa Clipper had put in at Gateway Station for some light maintenance work and re-provisioning. Alicia Wu and Evgeni Kotlas were sitting at a table in the ship’s crew’s mess, nursing a few beers. Kotlas fiddled with the gain on the main viewer to bring Jupiter into full resolution. “Looks like a fuzzy beach ball,” Wu said. “With hair—“ Kotlas pronounced himself satisfied with the view. “Yeah, a beach ball with enough radiation to fry your pretty little brain in about two seconds.” “You’re assuming I have a brain…I checked mine at the recruiting station when I signed up for Farpool school.” It was a salmon-hued world, mottled and banded with oranges, reds, browns and ambers, a cauldron of clouds, storms and majestic seething turbulence. Alternating strips of light and dark wrapped the planet in a calico shroud and several small red spots boiled away in the north tropical zone, companions to the Great Red Spot in the south, a centuries-old hurricane churning since the time of Cromwell and King Charles. “Ten seconds to separation,” Sonora called. The captain scanned her boards and instruments, pronounced herself satisfied with what she saw. Europa Clipper was docked at the forward nose port of Gateway Station, a giant sausage stuck on a plate, secured to a kebab skewer, as Alicia Wu had termed it. “Three…two…one…separating now—“ There was a gentle shudder and the sound of capture latches releasing. Sonora pulsed Clipper’s aft thrusters and the ship backed off at a stately pace, eventually settling into a co-orbiting position several thousand meters from the Station. Below them, Europa turned like a cracked golf ball, dimpled, rutted with deep ice canyons and odd brown streaks. As Clipper backed away, the huge banded disk of Jupiter itself poked over the Europan horizon, at a crazy angle. The moon was in a three-and-a-half-day orbit about the giant planet, averaging three quarters of a million kilometers above her cloud tops, bathed in hard radiation. Miriam Sonora was glad Clipper and Gateway both maintained active rad defensive shielding and emitters. Otherwise, they would have all been fried to cinders days ago. For several days after departing Gateway, Europa Clipper coursed through the Jovian skies in a steeply inclined orbit, skirting the shoals and reefs of her radiation belts, until at last they found the first of several holes in the sheath of charged particles. Captain Sonora passed the word to all hands that the ship was about to begin a series of maneuvers which would end up bringing them into orbit around Europa. Clipper dropped to a lower orbit through the first of these holes, like navigating a minefield in a wartime harbor. After a few days had passed, the ship settled into orbit half a million kilometers above the cloud tops. By now, the planet filled nearly a third of the sky and hundreds of frothing spicules and cells of gas swept by beneath them. The speed of its rotation flattened Jupiter at the poles and widened it to a bulge at the equator. Ferocious winds resulted and they smeared the columns of gas into all sorts of grotesque and beautiful shapes. Wu and the rest of the crew that came by the crew’s mess watched the scenery below for hours at a time. Wu found herself transfixed by the ever-shifting palette of colors and shapes. She could well imagine the planet’s visible face as a giant’s palette, where Nature worked as the artist to create an ever-changing panorama of colors, forms and brush strokes. In time, Clipper made her way into orbit about Europa. Clipper’s pilot, Reynaldo Diaz, joined some of the crew in the mess compartment, as the cracked billiard-ball of a world turned slowly below them. “Gives me the creeps,” Casey Winans said. She shuddered involuntarily and sucked at her drink. “All those cracks are seams in the ice plates,” Belket klu kel: Om’t marveled. “And to think that’s where we’re going, right into one of those seams.” “And below—“ added Sonora. She decided it was time to finish up their final briefings and get ready for the landing. “All right, boys and girls, all hands lay aft to the Service deck. I want to go over last-minute details before we head down.” The briefing lasted half an hour…. Okay, so that’s the excerpt. I hope you’ll like the final result and I hope the excerpt whets your appetite to learn more about the world of The Farpool Stories. My final title in this series, after Plague and Diaspora, will be called The Farpool: Destiny (likely available sometime in the middle of 2022). That will make a total of eight stories in the overall arc. That’s enough for me. The Word Shed will take a brief hiatus for a mid-summer vacation next week. There won’t be a post for July 5, due to the holiday. The next post to The Word Shed comes on July 12, 2021. See you then and have a great holiday. Phil B.

Post #261 June 21 2021 “The Plague is Coming!” In the last week, I finished the first draft of my sf novel The Farpool: Plague. It comes in at 225 pages and about 123,000 words. What’s next? The real work begins. I keep a file called Next Steps for every project I do. It tells me what I have done and what still needs to be done. Below, I’ve reproduced this file for the current project…. 1. Complete any needed expansion of Story Outline, and Sequence of Events. DONE 2. Re-read all titles in The Farpool Stories for continuity with new stories DONE 3. Complete List of Major Players DONE 4. Background and personality sketches on major characters DONE 5. Details on medical/biological effects of the Purple and medbot interventions DONE 6. Write Chapter and Scene Details (2195 CE) DONE 7. Started first draft: 5 April 2021 8. Finished first draft: 10 June 2021 9. Review and edit final 10. Spellcheck 11. Book descriptions 12. Tag lines 13. Word 97 version 14. Set all text to Normal and enforce my styles 15. Verify cover format USE JPEG! 16. Projected upload date: 2 July 2021 From this, you can see I’m proposing to have this work finished and ready to upload to Smashwords by 2 July. This list is to remind me of all the things, after writing, that need to be done to finish a project. I’m currently on #9. So, there is still a lot of work to be done. And the job is somewhat more difficult in that this book is #6 in the series The Farpool Stories and there are 2 more to come. Just preserving continuity with earlier works is a big job in itself. Once the book file and cover file are in good shape, the job turns to marketing efforts. Smashwords offers a lot of recommendations on how to market ebooks. I’ll cover a few here that I like to follow. First, consider including an excerpt from the next novel at the end of this one. This is a form of pre-selling, or maybe whetting a potential reader’s appetite. Of course, this also means you have to have written enough of the upcoming work to make an excerpt. That has not been done yet…one more thing to do. Another marketing idea from Smashwords is to do your upload at a strategic time, ideally just before a major holiday, or even just on a Thursday or a Friday. The idea behind this is that it is during these periods that prospective readers will have more time to browse and come across your work. In my experience, this works pretty well. A third recommendation is to do what I’m doing right here…pre-notifying all my blog readers that something is coming. Also, you should do some of this on your web site and also on Facebook if you have an account, which I don’t yet. All of these ideas are good ways to get the word out that you’ve got something new coming and there’s even more new stuff after this. Pretty much anything that gets your name into the minds of readers is a good thing (like a review in Goodreads). As mentioned, The Farpool: Plague is title #6 in my series The Farpool Stories. As of mid-April 2021, this series had garnered 6587 downloads. That means I potentially have a ready-made audience who might be interested in any new works in this series. Anything I can do to let them know of new titles coming is a good thing. So, here’s the moral of the story: Just finishing the first draft of a book is only the beginning. What follows is at least as important to your success as doing the storytelling in the first place. Don’t skimp on it. The next post to The Word Shed comes on June 28, 2021 See you then. Phil B.

Post #260 June 14 2021 “Researching a Novel…or Just the Facts, Ma’am” Nobody writes a novel without doing some kind of research. It can be detailed and extensive or barebones, but if you want to be taken seriously, you’d better get your facts straight. Currently I’m into researching, planning and outlining for my next sf novel The Farpool: Diaspora. I’ve got electronic and real folders for character bios and backgrounds, book covers, Earth circa 22nd century, Human-Coethi conflict and Jupiter/Europa details, plus a variety of additional files and notes. At this moment, I’m developing background and bios for major characters (but not all of them). The great question for any storyteller or novelist is how much research is enough? How much detail is enough? There is a term—verisimilitude—that writers sometimes use. It means ‘resemblance to the truth.’ No storyteller tells a story with all possible details. He’d be writing or reciting an encyclopedia instead of a story. The storyteller chooses details selectively to enhance the story and give it a flavor of being real. You should include just enough detail to transport your reader into your imaginary world and ground him there, believing that all this could in fact have happened. Which means that you do enough research to provide enough detail to achieve verisimilitude. In practical terms, that means you have to do a bit more research than you ultimately might use. As an author, writing about how a character feels or might react to a situation, I want to be able to pick and choose details to explain, illustrate or dramatize the situation in such a way as to put the reader right there in the character’s shoes. Little details can matter, especially if a reader has some experience with the subject matter. When I wrote The Farpool, I used the term valsalva maneuver to describe something that scuba divers do to clear their ears and sinuses when experiencing pressure changes. The concept was relevant to the story and I had to use it accurately to maintain verisimilitude. I had to research it to know what I was talking about. And I’m sure some of my readers are well familiar with this technique and would have bitten their lips in anguish or firebombed my house if I had used the term incorrectly. I should add that I’ve never scuba dived a day in my life. Ernest Hemingway once said all writers should have a built-in bullshit detector. Why? Because all readers have a built-in bullshit detector. What about science fiction stories, where the writer is taking us to worlds and times and alien cultures that have never existed anywhere outside the writer’s imagination? Here again, the details have to read true, sound true and feel true. And they have to be internally consistent. Often, the littlest detail—what someone ate for dinner last night, how they dressed for descending into that cave, what it felt like when they landed on the icy surface of Europa—if done right, can connect with the reader in just the right way and they’ll find themselves saying: “Yeah…I can believe it would happen like that!” Author Tom Young, writer of many well-regarded military thrillers, writes in Writer’s Digest some tips to follow when researching a story: 1. Write what you know (personal experience has a value all its own) 2. You can do research on the cheap (that’s why we have Wikipedia and libraries) 3. You can find anything on YouTube 4. You can find things anywhere. Keep pen and notepad nearby during all waking hours. 5. Use all your senses 6. You can leave things out. I particularly like Young’s advice about number 6 above. To quote: “If you do thorough research, you’ll find more material than you need, and no reader likes a data dump. In my own writing, I could bore you to death with the details of aircraft and weapons. But a very good creative writing professor once advised me to let the reader “overhear” the tech talk. Say, if my character punches off a HARM missile that might sound authentic and pretty scary. But scary would turn to dull if I stopped the action to tell you that HARM stands for High-Speed Anti-Radiation Missile, which homes in on anti-aircraft missile radars. Who cares? The damn thing goes boom.” In other words, a little bit of detail can go a long way if it’s chosen properly and used correctly. But it’s still necessary. You still have to do the research to dig out that little nugget and save it for the right moment in the story. Researching is ultimately about being prepared, ready to write the story with the flair and power that will grab the reader and pull them into your imaginary world and strand them there for the duration. The best stories, the most memorable stories, have memorable characters and memorable settings and details. Anyone remember the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey? The next post to The Word Shed will come on June 21, 2021. See you then. Phil B.

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.