Ask the Author: Tom Chmielewski
Answered Questions (5)
Tom Chmielewski
Reading fiction and news stories, good conversations, and some particularly good dreams I've had overnight. I get inspired by those times when I open up my mind to input of life around me and start to see connections and a thread of something to write about.
Tom Chmielewski
Besides working on selling "Lunar Dust, Martian Sands," I'm starting on its sequel. I'm still ruminating on the direction it will go. I also have some blogs I need to write for my blog site.
Tom Chmielewski
I'm doing what I want to do, write. I'm lucky enough to be a writer for a living, though this is my first foray as a novelist. Writing a novel was especially exciting, however, since it was purely what I wanted to write rather than filling an assignment for a magazine or newspaper, or now a website. Not that those assignments weren't fulfilling and exciting. Most times, they were, and they broadened my insight into the world around me.
Tom Chmielewski
It used to be harder, but now I turn back to my practices as a journalist. I just start writing. I become stalled when I try to write a perfect sentence. Instead, if I don't come up with something good, I just start writing until I stumble across the sentence I like, and the rest starts to follow. I throw everything else away that I wrote before that sentence.
Tom Chmielewski
I've wanted to write a story for a while now about Mars and life beyond Earth, but still within our solar system. I'm somewhat dismayed at the spate of zombie and vampire stories that fill the science fiction market. Not that there aren't good stories within that group. I just think there are better stories to be told about people engaged in an epic struggle to leave Earth and settle on new worlds, be they a desolate planet such as Mars, an asteroid, or an artificial world of a large space station.
I like writing about Mars set in a not very distant future because it is a story about a society that tries to recreate the life they knew on Earth, but their new society seems a quarter of a turn off kilter, living in a low gravity that affects their movements and their architecture, and limited to living space located in small, isolated clusters beneath steel and glass on an desolate world. Why would anyone want to come to such a world? I hint at the answers in my novel, but I do give a direct answer from one of the characters in the audio drama prequel, "Shalbatana Solstice." Yet her answer isn't the only one.
I like writing about Mars set in a not very distant future because it is a story about a society that tries to recreate the life they knew on Earth, but their new society seems a quarter of a turn off kilter, living in a low gravity that affects their movements and their architecture, and limited to living space located in small, isolated clusters beneath steel and glass on an desolate world. Why would anyone want to come to such a world? I hint at the answers in my novel, but I do give a direct answer from one of the characters in the audio drama prequel, "Shalbatana Solstice." Yet her answer isn't the only one.
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