Ask the Author: Rand B. Lee
Answered Questions (8)
Rand B. Lee
Happy Birthday, Momma.
You won't need your head in Heaven.
You won't need your head in Heaven.
Rand B. Lee
Ellery Queen and his father, Inspector Richard Queen of the New York City Police Department. They live together, work together when Ellery is called in as a consulting detective, and they have a close father-son bond based on mutual respect (still unusual in modern fiction).
Rand B. Lee
Lots of writers don't know where their ideas come from, and I'm usually one of them. An exception is my new book-in-process, Centaur Station, in which the origins of the themes and images are pretty clear to me.
Centaur Station takes characters from several of my published SF short stories and puts them in a space station setting where half the staff are members of an alien race, the Damánakíppith/fü (duh-MAN-uh-KIP-pith-FOO?).
The D'/fü (duh-FOO?) originally appeared in my story, "Tales From the Net: A Family Matter", published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Vol. 7, No. 5, Whole No. 65, May 1993. It was only many years after I invented these furry, silver, huge-eyed tall friendly aliens that I realized my unconscious had swiped them--or their looks, anyhow-- from Robert Heinlein's "Mother Thing" aliens in his juvenile SF book, Have Spacesuit Will Travel, which I'd read several times as a 13 year old.
But my larger ideas for the book--a policeman with PTSD being posted to a space station that is both a research station and a haven for aliens seeking eventually to settle in the Earth system--comes from my own sense of isolation as a child growing up in a dysfunctional home, and my longing for a hero to come and rescue me and take me to a place of safety.
Only when I was 13, it was Robin Hood and his Merry Men I thought of.
Centaur Station takes characters from several of my published SF short stories and puts them in a space station setting where half the staff are members of an alien race, the Damánakíppith/fü (duh-MAN-uh-KIP-pith-FOO?).
The D'/fü (duh-FOO?) originally appeared in my story, "Tales From the Net: A Family Matter", published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Vol. 7, No. 5, Whole No. 65, May 1993. It was only many years after I invented these furry, silver, huge-eyed tall friendly aliens that I realized my unconscious had swiped them--or their looks, anyhow-- from Robert Heinlein's "Mother Thing" aliens in his juvenile SF book, Have Spacesuit Will Travel, which I'd read several times as a 13 year old.
But my larger ideas for the book--a policeman with PTSD being posted to a space station that is both a research station and a haven for aliens seeking eventually to settle in the Earth system--comes from my own sense of isolation as a child growing up in a dysfunctional home, and my longing for a hero to come and rescue me and take me to a place of safety.
Only when I was 13, it was Robin Hood and his Merry Men I thought of.
Rand B. Lee
I was inspired to write by my parents, who filled our house with books. My mother read to me when I was just a baby, and throughout my toddler and middle childhood, until I could read for myself. She hooked me on fantasy—"The Wind In the Willows", "Peter Pan", "At the Back of the North Wind". And my father, who wrote mystery novels and stories, introduced me to science fiction. He gave me a copy of Robert Heinlein's "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel," an SF juvenile about a boy who is given a spacesuit and meets an alien in his back meadow. The alien, whom the boy calls Mother Thing, is gentle and softly furred, and served as the inspiration for my gentle, furred aliens, the Damánakíppith/fü, whom I have written stories about and are now characters in a novel I am writing.
Rand B. Lee
(1) Write what you really want to write, not what you think will sell.
(2) Make your first draft a vomit draft: that is, pour it out of you without regard to spelling, grammar, punctuation, or future sales probabilities. Compulsive editing too early can bring on writer's block big time.
(3) Write something every day, even if it's just a suicide note.
(4) Never discard anything you have written. You never know if the piece you are tempted to discard might contain a gem of an idea or turn of phrase or theme that will inspire you down the road.
(5) Read omnivorously works by writers you admire. As you read, ask yourself, "What about this piece turns me on?"
(6) When you finish a piece, make a list of the top ten paying markets you think it's suited for. Then send it to the first one on the list. If it's rejected, send it to the second one and so on down the line. If everybody rejects it, get yourself a nice big Belgian dark chocolate bar and eat it (the bar, not the piece). Then start work on something else. You may find that time off from the rejected piece will pay off in the long run when you have sufficient distance from the piece to reread it and see what's wrong with it.
(7) Get a day job. We can't all be Stephen King or J. K. Rowling.
(2) Make your first draft a vomit draft: that is, pour it out of you without regard to spelling, grammar, punctuation, or future sales probabilities. Compulsive editing too early can bring on writer's block big time.
(3) Write something every day, even if it's just a suicide note.
(4) Never discard anything you have written. You never know if the piece you are tempted to discard might contain a gem of an idea or turn of phrase or theme that will inspire you down the road.
(5) Read omnivorously works by writers you admire. As you read, ask yourself, "What about this piece turns me on?"
(6) When you finish a piece, make a list of the top ten paying markets you think it's suited for. Then send it to the first one on the list. If it's rejected, send it to the second one and so on down the line. If everybody rejects it, get yourself a nice big Belgian dark chocolate bar and eat it (the bar, not the piece). Then start work on something else. You may find that time off from the rejected piece will pay off in the long run when you have sufficient distance from the piece to reread it and see what's wrong with it.
(7) Get a day job. We can't all be Stephen King or J. K. Rowling.
Rand B. Lee
CENTAUR STATION, A full-length science fiction novel using characters and settings from some of my published short stories.
Rand B. Lee
Getting paid. Oh, all right: getting paid and getting positive reviews from readers.
Rand B. Lee
I moan, groan, and fling myself from one side of the apartment to the other. Then I sit down and ask myself the question, "What are the benefits and detriments to having writer's block?" In other words, what am I getting out of it? Usually it comes down to one of three things:
(1) Protection from shame: I'm afraid it will be rejected by publishers and/or readers, so I'd rather not finish it at all than finish it and have it tank.
(2) My inner writer knows there is something about the piece--a theme, a character, a major scene, an approach--that isn't working, and I am too attached to that theme, character, scene, or approach to want to change it.
(3) I'm bored and lonely and need some exercise to get my brain working again.
(1) Protection from shame: I'm afraid it will be rejected by publishers and/or readers, so I'd rather not finish it at all than finish it and have it tank.
(2) My inner writer knows there is something about the piece--a theme, a character, a major scene, an approach--that isn't working, and I am too attached to that theme, character, scene, or approach to want to change it.
(3) I'm bored and lonely and need some exercise to get my brain working again.
About Goodreads Q&A
Ask and answer questions about books!
You can pose questions to the Goodreads community with Reader Q&A, or ask your favorite author a question with Ask the Author.
See Featured Authors Answering Questions
Learn more