Linda Maye Adams's Blog, page 46

Battlestar Galactica at 40

Most of the science fiction shows I look at today are serialized, and often pretty dark.  Gritty is the trend, but gritty has no hope, no wonder.

The original Battlestar Galactica celebrates it’s 40th anniversary this week.  I watched it in its original run and really enjoyed the show.  It was controversial at the time because it was right on the heels of Star Wars.  I believe there was a lawsuit.  But if you look at the past history of TV shows, any time there was a popular movie that came out, some element showed up in a TV series:

Airport – Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, and Airwolf
2001: A Space Odyssey – The Bionic Woman
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century – Star Wars (and then the network ruined it by trying to make it Star Trek)

BG wasn’t perfect, but no show is.  It launched without a lot of time to prepare so they pantsed the heck out of the world building.

King Tut’s treasures had recently made the rounds in the U.S. (I got to see them as part of a school trip), so it was likely an influence for the Egyptian aspect of the show.   That was something I didn’t think of until I was writing this, but it’s amazing to look back and see what influences landed in the story.  Egypt was mystical and mysterious–and BG wouldn’t be the only one to have an alien influence on Egypt (Stargate, Stargate SG1).

But it also had the classic good guy/bad guy, right out of the Westerns.  The bad guys were the Cylons, and the good guys always destroyed the current threat.  There was an overall threat, but it was a time where we trusted that the good guys would always win.   It also kept the entertainment part in full view and never lost sight it.

My favorite episode was the gunslinger one, The Lost Warrior.  Apollo crashes on a planet where a town is being terrorized by a damaged Cylon and a mob boss-type bad guy.  Apollo doesn’t want to fight, but ends up having to confront the Cylon in an old-style gunfight in the street…with lasers.

A picture of the actor who played Apollo, Richard Hatch.  I took this at DragonCon in 1997.

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Flash Fiction Challenge #4

One of the challenges for me is that I’m in a job where they say “Make do with less.”  Which is just an excuse businesses use.  It means they can heap more work on people and not make changes they may need to make.  So I spent a lot of time looking time management books and sites.

A lot of the gurus seem to think that it’s possible to jam as much in the day as possible, doing their system, or using the right tools.  I recently ran across an article that says we’re turning fun into not fun.  People don’t go out on walks to see nature; they do 10,000 steps.  They don’t eat and enjoy food; they track it on an app.  I think there’s waaaaay too many tools to track everything, and that’s how this store was born.  It was a lot of fun to write!

Challenge Stories

Story #1: Mystery, set in Hollywood 1940s, called Lost Starlet.
Story #2: Fantasy, set after a war, called Robinwood
Story #3: Science fiction, set on February 25, 1942, called Time Drop
Story #4: Science fiction, set in the near future, called The Schedule

Flash Fiction Challenge #3

My car is in the shop today, overnight with an expensive repair.  The catalytic converter needs to be replaced.  So I sat in the dealer’s room for about two hours while they checked the car and worked on Story #3, then came home and redrafted it.  The dealership was really noisy, so it was hard to get myself focused.

The story uses a cool piece of historical fact that I picked up researching the 1940s.  There was an event called the Battle of Los Angeles.  Pearl Harbor had just happened, so everyone was seeing Japanese submarines everywhere, even when they weren’t there.  My grandmother, who lived in San Francisco at the time, reported that citizens did submarine watches on the shores.  So a lot of fear.  That night, someone spotted…something, and the military overreacted.  Afterwards, they thought it was a weather balloon, but no one is really sure.

Challenge Stories:

Story #1: Mystery, set in Hollywood 1940s, called Lost Starlet.
Story #2: Fantasy, set after a war, called Robinwood
Story #3: Science fiction, set on February 25, 1942, called Time Drop

Flash Fiction Challenge #2

I revisited fantasy for my second story.  The theme came from a magazine call for “The resistance.”   While I doubt if my version of “the resistance” is the same as what they’re thinking, I wanted to try the story anyway.

So I was driving around after lunch, trying to figure out what to write.  Turned down this street and followed it.  Where I had to turn back, I looked back up at the street sign:

Robinwood.

And the opening to the story popped into my head.

Challenge Stories:

Story #1: Mystery, set in Hollywood 1940s, called Lost Starlet.
Story #2: Fantasy, set after a war, called Robinwood

Flash Fiction Challenge #1

Sometimes it’s easy to do something to mess yourself up when it comes to the writing.  I really want to write full time, and get out my day job.  That means writing longer fiction like novels because it sells better.

And once I set the goal of writing longer fiction, I stalled out because I tied the money to it.  I’ve been shocked at how little I’ve been accomplishing, even though I’m writing every day.

So I’m taking on a Flash Fiction Challenge to get me going again.

Flash Fiction is a story that is 1,000 words or less.  I previously sworn off them because they’re harder to find homes for.  There is a sweet spot for length.  1K–there are pro markets.  Anything shorter, it’s very hard to find anything that pays at all.  Likewise, many indie platforms will not take anything shorter like that.

But 1K is nice because it is doable in a day.

The rules (in case anyone wants to join in):

Story has to be 1,000 words.  Not under, not over.  That’s with the five senses, the setting, characterization.
One story a day.  This is just until September 16, and then I’ll reassess what I want to do next.
It goes out to a market first.  In this case, I’m looking for the market first, particularly themed calls.

Challenge Stories:

Story #1: Mystery, set in Hollywood 1940s, called Lost Starlet.

 

Cover for New GALCOM Book

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I finally broke down and had someone make a cover for me so I could get a book out into print.  I’m working on getting that done now, but here’s a look at the awesome cover.

Guest Panelist at Chessiecon

I’ve been to sci-fi cons for years, but now I’m a guest!  I’m going to be one of those writers on the panels.

The con is called Chessiecon and is in November.

Fear of Ideas

I’m on a productivity message board, and one of the topics that frequently comes up is “How do you store your ideas?”  Everyone pops up with Evernote or OneNote.  Someone says they put them on a task list like Omni Focus.

Me?

I don’t save them.

It’s always quite shocking to the others.  They all say the same thing: They don’t get many ideas, so they have to save ALL of them.  Because they are all important.

I understand that.  I was there on my first novel.  I had this great idea for a mystery, start writing it…and then I got stuck.

I couldn’t figure out why I was stuck, so I figured that the problem was in the beginning and I began to rewrite the story.  Got stuck in the same place.  Somewhere in the back of my mind, a little voice kept saying that I should toss the story and start a different one.

But I didn’t have any other ideas.

Or, actually, I didn’t know how to come up with more ideas on demand.

When cowriter and I were close to breaking up, we were talking about a next project and got into a big disagreement about ideas.  I was coming up with some, and he kept shooting them down, saying “That won’t sell.”  Since we hadn’t written anything, how would he know?

But that’s the nature of the elusive idea to those who struggle to come up with them.  Everything–their entire success–rests on that idea.  The idea is what will make the book get published (not the story, the craft skills…right).

In the early days of the internet, there was a guy who was trying to either copyright or trademark several of his ideas for novels.  He thought it was inspired to do this, like no one else had every thought of doing this for an idea before.  The ideas were quoted…and well, they weren’t that good.  They were the low-hanging fruit ideas.  You know, the one where you write it, and as you finish the book, you pick up a book at the bookstore and it’s the same story!

But coming up with them is a skill that we’re really not taught.  Once you go out of the flights of fantasy as childhood, that ability seems to disappear, possibly because it’s not something that can be measured or graded.  But it is a skill that can be learned.

Dean Wesley Smith and Joanna Penn both have posts up today on ideas.

The Library Card Catalog

When I go to the library to find a specific book, I go to a computer terminal and type in the search criteria.

But it wasn’t always that way.

The library’s list of books used to be on index cards.  They were often typed with a manual typewriter, and dog-eared from all the fingers going through them.

The books all had a pocket either on the inside front cover or the inside back cover.  You wrote your name on the card, the librarian date stamped it, then filed it away.  And you went home to read the book (or stack of books).

I was hunting down when the index card was invented and ran across A Short History of Index Cards.  What’s really interesting is the man who invented the Dewey Decimal System thought eventually everything would go digital.  And now you have to read the article so can see what date he made this prediction.  Astounding!

The Myths of Write What You Know

[image error]My mother loved watching Marilyn Monroe

 

I grew up in Los Angeles, and just devoured any books on Hollywood.  It was fascinating to read the behind the scenes of how John Chambers put the makeup on the actors for The Planet of the Apes.  I read Daily Variety every day at the college library, and the local gossip columns published in the newspapers.  The internet’s largely made some of it go away, but we had columns where people could write in and ask, “What happened to X?” and find out.

So I gravitated into what I’m working on now, a mystery set in Hollywood in 1947.  If you didn’t catch that, it was right after World War II, so I got veterans in there, too.  I’m mostly research fashion of the times, types of cars, popular colors.  I’ve had to do geography as well, since I only saw the mountains.  I didn’t know what they were called.