R.E. Stearns's Blog, page 3

Sensitivity Readers? Sensitivity Readers!

I was revising Shieldrunner Pirates Book 3 last month and I forgot to write a blog post! My apologies. This post is long and it includes a new feature: A slightly sing-songy audio version is available on my website.

Today I'm talking about a (relatively) new service for us writers, called "sensitivity reading," because I haven't seen many articles on it from an author's point of view. Sensitivity readers politely tell people like me if our fiction propagates hurtful and untrue clichés, thereby saving us from making an ass of ourselves in print. Last month I paid for sensitivity reading for the first time, and I am so glad I did. Yes, as with all consultative services, you should pay sensitivity readers if you want a timely and professional response.

In my case, I hired a sensitivity reader because I want to write about a protagonist whose race is different than mine. I am very white. Unfortunately, white writers tend to flatten characters of color and disabled characters into repetitive, one-note people who only care about whatever differentiates them from the author (Nishi, Matias, & Montoya, 2014; Pickens, T. A., 2017; and I would cite more but there are hundreds of literature teachers' case studies on similar topics and I don't want to deal with them today). Since that's the case, sensitivity readers often check for basic character construction issues: Does the character have a multidimensional personality? Are her motivations realistic and interesting? We know we must address this with all characters, but knowing it and doing it are, of course, different things.

And then, because I'm a bad student of history, I was very grateful that my reader considered the character's background in historical and political contexts. Readers will absolutely compare events in your story to historical events. It's delightful to know what comparisons they'll make, so I can write accordingly!

Note that I didn't list any specific feedback I received. Partly that's because traditional publishing is unpredictable and ideas are cheap. It's entirely possible that this story will never appear in bookstores. But also, I want to emphasize that you do not have to tell anybody that you hired a sensitivity reader, or what their feedback was, just as you do not have to tell people that you had beta readers, copyediting, etc. As with all writing processes, you can be as private or as public as you want to be.

Some caveats: A sensitivity reader is one person. That person cannot speak for the entire group of people to whom they belong. Also, you are the one responsible for how you respond to their feedback. Even if you follow all their recommendations, someone may still read your work and criticize how you wrote a character who's different from you. This is normal. Your options are either to get a wider sample of readers from the character's group and incorporate all their feedback, or tough it! You will not please every reader. That is also normal.

Still, a sensitivity reading might prevent you from hurting your fans, improve your writing, and keep you out from under a Twitter dogpile. If you can afford to pay the reader for their time, I highly recommend hiring one!

Further reading:

Kowal, M. R. (2016). Debut author lessons: Sensitivity readers and why I pulled a project. maryrobinettekowal.com
Nishi, N. W., Matias, C. E., & Montoya, R. (2014). Exposing the white avatar: projections, justifications, and the ever-evolving American racism. Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, 21(5), pp. 459-473.
Pickens, T. A. (2017). Satire, scholarship, and sanity: Or how to make mad professors. In Kerschbaum, S. L., Eisenman, L. T., & Jones, J. M. Negotiating disability: Disclosure and higher education pp. 243-254. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Shapiro, L. (2018). What the job of a sensitivity reader is really like. Vulture.com.
Sylvester, N. (2017). What a sensitivity reader is (and isn't) and how to hire one. Writer Unboxed.

The Third Shieldrunner Pirates Book, and Other Things

A third novel in the Shieldrunner Pirates series is coming. With luck, I’ll have a publication date soon.

In unrelated news, I have found a new and amazing thing to read about: Slime molds! Despite lacking anything resembling a brain, they make decisions! They are so good at that that Hamshire College added one to their faculty. They (the molds, not the faculty) also move without muscles and eat without mouths. The mold can already solve some types of problems faster than computers. Not bad for what’s basically a single-celled organism!

So that’s been my 2019 thus far. Although Denver has been spared the polar vortex, I’m hearing wild stories from Americans affected by the extreme cold. Stay safe out there.

Interesting Articles of 2018

Everybody with a bookish blog is blogging about their favorite books of 2018. I am terrible about reading things they year they come out. Check out my Goodreads page for books I enjoyed in 2018, and feel free to rate the books I wrote! Ratings help others decide what to read, and reader data helps me improve my writing.

Instead of book reviews, here are five interesting articles I found during my 2018 fiction research, in order of publication date:

4 Police Interrogation Techniques You Should Know (And Why Not All of Them Work) (Forensic Outreach, 2014) – A succinct summary of each! You never know when might need these. They’re doubly important for writer types. Our search histories may look very suspicious, and also it is important that fiction accurately depict, at minimum, how method 1 fails. Jack Baur was just an asshole: entertaining, but full of... Inaccuracies.
Inferences About Sexual Orientation: The Roles of Stereotypes, Faces, and The Gaydar Myth (Cox, W. T. L., Devine, P. G., Bischmann, A. A., & Hyde, J. S., 2015) – This is behind a paywall, but your local public or college library may have access. The study concludes that “gaydar” is (spoiler alert?) the act of comparing a person’s behavior to a set of gay stereotypes and thinking you’re right.
How would a nuclear blast be different on Venus where the atmospheric pressure is much higher? (Hall, A. E., 2016) – It’s Quora, but the author cites some good (if dated) sources and his claim to aerospace expertise was good enough for Forbes. Venus is wild, people.
How many hours does it take to make a friend? (Hall, J. A., 2018) – Also behind a paywall but Bustle wrote it up too. Keep in mind that Hall studied 112 American college students in 2018. Your hour requirements may vary. I hope this study gets replicated among a wider population.
The Era of Fake Video Begins (Foer, F., 2018) – “The internet has always contained the seeds of postmodern hell.” Video is even less real than you thought it was, and it’s getting weirder! The article also wanders into some discussion of LSD and defining reality, which is a fun and totally safe combination.

Happy holidays to those who celebrate them, and best of luck to those who don’t. See you in 2019!

A Map of Barbary Station

I've received some questions about Barbary Station's layout. My visual art efforts are limited to stick figures and cartoon dogs, but this is the "map" I used while writing. It's not to scale.

Keep in mind that this was my reference which made sense to me at the time! You are welcome to create your own which makes sense to you. I mapped from the outside in, so the top of the diagram is the outside of the ring and the bottom is the inside of the ring. From the perspective of somebody inside the station, this map is upside down. Lables denote the original purposes of each section, and may note their current status in parentheses.

SPACE (Down)




Engine






Engine





Docking Bay 1 - 69 ticks N
Ctrl/Comm/ Drones - 61 T N
Admin - 53 T N
Docking Bay 2
Air/HVAC - 38 T N
Farm
Docking Bay 3 - 23 ticks N
Waste - 15 T N
Water 7 T N
Docking Bay 4 (Fugees)
Cutting - 92 T N
Sorting - 84 T N
Recycling - 76 T N



Servers
Security

Medical


Residential







Observation/ Shuttle 1 (missing)
Packaging
Testing
Observation/ Shuttle 2
Shipping

Observation/ Shuttle 3
Parts Storage
Emergency Mgt
Observation/ Shuttle 4







Power Plant




Pirates

Power Plant





Scaffolding, Shuttle Hub (Up)

The areas in black are outside the station structure. The gray areas are on the hull. The next row down is Floor 1 inside the station (where our heroines arrive), the next row is Floor 2, and the observation rooms and shuttle terminals are all on Floor 3. Orange areas are not pressurized during the story. White areas have breathable air, as do structures on the inner ring’s hull. Station north (for internal navigation purposes) is in Docking Bay 4.

I am no cartographer. If you know a freelance maker of fictional maps, drop their contact info in the contact form on my site.

Mutiny at Vesta is Available Now!

As of today, Mutiny at Vesta is available at Amazon and everywhere else it’s going for first release! The first week is important for books, so now is a fabulous time to buy it or check it out from your local library.

Mutiny was a lot of fun to write. This story finally pits our heroines against the megacorporate conglomerates they’ve been gunning for all along, although not in the way they’d planned. Poor Adda. She’s always planning something and it never quite works out the way she wants it to.

The times when her plans go awry are what mean the most to me in this story, though. I love to see Adda and Iridian think on their feet, weigh their options, and make quick choices that may or may not get them out of trouble. I love watching Adda compare the risks of relying on her AI allies when she can’t be sure what they’ll do versus acting with her own limited capabilities. I love it when Iridian follows her instincts, because it always exposes her empathetic soul.

I am very fond of these characters, and I hope you love this continuation of Adda’s and Iridian’s story. For more of my thoughts on Mutiny at Vesta, check out my interview on The Illustrated Page.

Scary Novels You Might Not Have Read Yet

In October I will be talking about Mutiny at Vesta, but I still want to post this list of horror novels I love! I'm linking to Goodreads because it gives you many purchasing options, but check your local library too.

Without further ado: The scary books!

Crescent by Phil Rossi - I don't have to write a haunted space station story because he already wrote this amazing one. It's not haunted by ghosts, exactly... The free audio production (with free site signup) is out of this world, and it's good in print too.
Ancestor by Scott Sigler - Jurassic Park meets The Thing, kind of? I really enjoyed the genetics and biology in this.
Death Troopers by Joe Schreiber - Zombies in the Star Wars universe. It's better than it has any right to be. That's Schreiber for you.
The Newsflesh Trilogy by Mira Grant - My favorite zombie stories. There is now a collection of the short stories that take place in the Newsflesh universe, but you'll care more about those if you read the trilogy first.
World War Z by Max Brooks - More wonderful zombie stories. Please ignore the movie. I really like journalists covering the end of the world, but this coverage is in a more traditional format than in the Newsflesh trilogy.
The John Cleaver series by Dan Wells - I just love this little sociopath. The character, not the author. Note: This series contains supernatural elements.
Personal Effects: Dark Arts by J. C. Hutchins - The hardcover edition of these "found" serial killer case notes is so cool. It comes with artifacts! I hope the phone number still works.
Harbor by John Ajvide Lindqvist - His name is familiar because he wrote Let the Right One In, too. I don't usually like small town murder mysteries, but this one is so weird and creepy and cold that I can't help but love it.
I am Providence by Nick Mamatas - A murder mystery at a Lovecraft convention which will speak to pre-Tumblr hardcore sci-fi and horror fans. There has always been a Discourse.
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova - My favorite horror novel: Evelyn Carnahan vs. Dracula, with more world history, libraries, and letters addressed to "My dear and unfortunate successor."

Get your spooky reading done now so you can read Mutiny at Vesta in October [Insert a hopeful author's toothy grin here. It does not have to be mine]. The rumors are true: There are a lot of heists in this book.

Audio Mutiny at Vesta Cover

Mutiny at Vesta is still on track to come out in October 2018, and now the audio version has the same release date! Visit the Recorded Books website to check out the audio cover, which features shiny blue title font and a ship which our heroines may see from that exact angle in the story.

Also, hello from probably temporary full time authordom! Due to Circumstances (yes, the capital C kind) I have no day job for the next month. No more just getting to the good part when I have to get ready for work! No more commuting home with ideas which I can barely summon the energy to put in a note file, let alone incorporate into the text before the next day.

I say "probably temporary" because it is time to line up the next project after I've told you everything there is to tell about Adda and Iridian. Who knows how long that'll take to sell? Who knows how much it will sell for? With all that uncertainty, I suspect I'll pick up some non-writing contracts in the fall. I am aware of what a wonderful problem that is to have.

Mutiny at Vesta is Available for Preorder!

I've been so focused on making the next story marvelous that I hadn't checked the status of Mutiny at Vesta lately. Good news! Barbary Station's sequel is available for preorder1 and has a published release date of October 2! That date may change. You can preorder Mutiny at Vesta on IndieBound, Barnes and Noble (including NOOK format), Booktopia (which is outside the U.S. and sells ePUB format), and Amazon. The Audible pre-order is not available yet, since I'm fairly sure the audiobook is still in production.

I've been thinking about the poem Roll the Dice a lot lately. Taking advice from Charles Bukowski feels like a kind of midlife crisis, which doesn't say much for my life expectancy. There are ways I could make more time to write. Plans are in motion, although they are not the sort of plans that improve by being published on the internet. To be as honest as I can be, those plans are not made with writing in mind and if I'm lucky I'll get that extra time after several months of unpleasantness. For now: Back to writing!

Why isn't preorder hyphenated?

Language and Layout Artists

Last week… Or early this week? I sent away the very last draft of the sequel to Barbary Station. It's not even a draft, technically. It is a proof, because many other people are involved in it, and it is formatted like you wouldn't believe. Some of the epigraphs (not epitaphs) are fictional quotes which extend longer than you'd expect would fit under a chapter header, but they look lovely. For your curiosity and persistence in making it through this paragraph, here's a sneak peak of one of the epigraphs: "It told me to. It told me to. It told me to. She told me to."

But the epigraphs were the least of the trouble I caused in constructing this story. The telling of Mutiny at Vesta involves multiple unusual O's and one Han character. Each one of those had to be meticulously translated into print. Self-centered and solitary scribbler that I am, it's strange to realize that part of the publishing process appears to be much easier for me than it is for someone else involved in the project of creating a book. Today is a good day I think for an umlaut! And I have just compressed some poor designer's timeline like an accordion. I'm not sure that will stop me, because there are so many delightful letters out there and Adda's and Iridian's universe includes major spacefarer populations of Hindi, Japanese, Chinese, and Russian speakers, but it does give me pause.

Either the Saga Press experts spent as long learning to lay out books as I spent learning to write books, or they make it look easy. Anyway, publishers and book designers are amazing, folks. And Mutiny at Vesta's interior design is living up to its cover.

Another One for the Storytellers: Maps vs. GPS

I'll break form and put my internet yammering up front, for those of you who don't need writerly musings right now:

Although I've been avoiding it because I am bad with names, I finally shared my casting daydreams for Adda and Iridian at My Book, the Movie. I also went wild on Campaign for the American Reader talking about Winter Tide by Ruthanna Emrys, a book that I frickin' love.

So I had this writing insight over the weekend, because I've been studying what Dan Harmon (creator of the TV shows Community and Rick and Morty, both of which my spouse adores) has to say about story structure. His "Story Circle" is an approachable, practical summary of Joseph Campbell's Monomyth (yeah, you could read The Hero with a Thousand Faces, too). So, classic stuff. But in amongst that story circle business was a great statement from Harmon referring to an outline as a map which can tell you where you are and give you an idea of where to go, but it doesn't provide much detailed information on what to do next.

That's what you need an external reader for. An outline is a map, but readers are your GPS.

I've been experiencing my usual shitty springtime mental health, despite a change in climate and activities from last year. Of course, the novelling stalled. To keep myself writing, I put a short story together. It's not designed for everybody's consumption, but I ran it by a friend and among her comments was "This isn't really where it ends, right??"

It was where I'd stopped writing, and I thought I'd hit all of the map points in the story circle. But once I picked myself off the floor where I'd been staring at a wall in mental self-flagellation over how she hated my story (Her other comments proved that she loved it overall. This what February does to my brain.), I realized that she was correct. I'd stopped writing in the wrong place. Knowing that, I saw exactly where to go to fix it, and which places on the map I needed to spend more time in. Maps are handy, but GPS is much more specific.

It's so important, even for solitary, introverted writers, to find ways out of your own head sometimes. Go outside. Communicate with someone (asynchronously is fine). Read more. And if you can bear it, get somebody else's eyes on what you've written. It doesn't seem like it will help, but it's worth trying, especially if you're having a tough time.