Matthew Rasnake's Blog, page 2

Happy Birthday to You!

If you're not a member at the Astronaut-level or above, you don't even know what you're missing.

It's a Patreon intro video blooper reel, that's what you're missing.

Oh, sure, just tell them.

Spoilsport.

Like pulling teeth, uphill both ways...

At the beginning of last month, I indulged in a bit of self-congratulation regarding my ability to stay on task and carve little bits of precious time out of my days to devote to my writing. And I also indulged in a bit of self-pity over the projects I've had to temporarily back-burner or de-prioritize.

Since then, I've struggled even to get small amounts of time. Kid's sports and extracurriculars and the general chaos of life and work seems to have increased and expanded into those nooks and cra...

Antoniadi Two

Well, folks, today I've got another member-exclusive Rogue Planet Extra for you, in the form of a "deleted scene," or rather, a scene that is scheduled for demolition.

When it’s then, where is there?

Location, location, location!

In storytelling, the setting isn’t everything, but it’s a lot. If you’ve got a story with engaging, well-realized characters, but the mental image you get is little more than Lego Minifigs wandering around a three-year-old’s drawing, you’re probably going to put the story down without finishing it.

Science-fiction provides some interesting challenges, especially if you intend for the story to stay firmly grounded in the real world.
For my upcoming novel Rogue Planet, the date and the time establish many things, but mostly things related to the setting, like the season and what the world looks and feels like.

To nail it down, an online orrery (like this one) helped me find an optimal Mars launch date (Jun/July 2048), and research on future propulsion techniques helped me figure out when they’d land (mid-August). I’m far from an expert in these things, so it’s all best guesses, and pushing and pulling dates as the story requires.

From there, an interactive sky map showed me where things (like Mars or the Moon) might appear in the night sky from given positions on Earth, informing not just the setting, but character action and dialogue as well.

All of it, along with other research, helps to paint a more fully developed picture, ground the characters in reality, and provide consistent touchpoints to keep the reader oriented in the story world.

When you’re reading, what are some of the things that draw you in? What types of things are sure to pull you out of the story?

I’d love to hear how you feel your favorite authors really nail the setting, or what aspects of their story worlds speak the most to you, so please leave a comment, send me an email, or respond to this post on Facebook!

When it's then, where is there?

Location, location, location!

In storytelling, the setting isn’t everything, but it’s a lot. If you’ve got a story with engaging, well-realized characters, but the mental image you get is little more than Lego Minifigs wandering around a three-year-old’s drawing, you’re probably going to put the story down without finishing it.

Science-fiction provides some interesting challenges, especially if you intend for the story to stay firmly grounded in the real world.For my upcoming novel Rogue Plane...

It’s the apocalypse, silly!

If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the last fifty years of scientific advancement and the expansion of our understanding of the known universe, it’s that life is rare and the universe is out to get us.

Asteroids are headed in our direction, the sun will balloon into a red giant and engulf us in five-ish billion years, and rogue planets and black holes are roaming the universe just looking for a nice blue-green planetary party to crash. Closer to home we’ve got global climate change fueling monster storms, water shortages, floods, and fires that threaten our property, while insect migrations spread deadly disease, overprescription of antibiotics breeds resistant superbugs, and scientific illiteracy foments fear, breaks herd immunities, and threatens our most vulnerable. At the same time, extreme political ideologies drive wedges into cracks in the foundations of our freedom, while personal cowardice, corporate greed, and wealth inequality strangle any real social or political progress.

Beset on all sides as we are, it’s a wonder we’re still here.

In the cold war 80s, we practiced ducking and covering from Russian nukes, the New Madrid fault, drugs, and HIV. Now, on the doorstep of the 2020’s we wonder who doesn’t have nukes, when’s Yellowstone going to blow, and how did we let Big Pharma get so many of us addicted to opioids?

As fragile and vulnerable as we are, we’re super good at imagining the worst. So, at times like these, it’s almost inevitable that fictional apocalypses fall from the skies like acid rain after a volcano.

One of my first tastes of apocalyptic fiction came in the form of Thundarr the Barbarian, the Saturday morning cartoon set in a fictional far-future world that was rising from the ashes of our fallen one. About a decade later, a TV mini-series of Steven King’s The Stand kind of blew my mind. Another decade (or two) further on, and TV and the internet are full of examples of our obsession with the end of the world.

When I started writing apocalyptic fiction, books like Phil Plait’s Death from the Skies!, and TV shows like Life After People provided ideas and added visual and conceptual depth to my understanding of literal life-altering events and the environmental ramifications of the absence of humans.

Even now, the poppest pop-culture—like Avengers: Endgame—often features apocalyptic scenarios, and help to show us just how good we’ve got it. So until we’re living in a stable utopia or half our planet has been incinerated by a gamma-ray burst from a nearby supernova, we’ll keep working through our existential angst by telling each other stories about the end of the world.

Plotter or Pantser?

One of the eternal, fundamental debates among the community of writers is between the "plotters" and the "pantsers." Plotters stand on the side of order behind a phalanx of outlines, character sketches, and spreadsheets, while pantsers stand on the side of chaos, poised over a blank page, ready to spill words.

Someone recently asked me what kind of novelist I am:

Are you one of those terrifying people who start with an image or a notion and just plunge into the thing without a roadmap, or are you a serious outliner who knows where they’re going before they write the opening line?

I started work on Rogue Planet several years ago as a NaNoWriMo project with minimal preparation. I developed the story idea from a remembered image of a broken moon hanging in the sky, from the events that might lead to that situation, and what might follow such events. I thought about the unlikely characters to be found in the aftermath, such as a retired soldier and his adopted daughter, or the first family on Mars. I also did a bit of pre-writing in the form of a character sketch of two of the main characters in a different situation, but apart from that, I thought I could wing it and power through a rough draft with only a beginning and ending in mind.

I quickly found that the writing was more difficult than I’d imagined, that time was short, and that I wasted, either from apprehension or procrastination, what time I did manage to scrape together. I quickly fell behind in the NaNoWriMo word count, and after a time I had set the whole project aside.

A few years later, I determined to pick it back up again, and this time came at the project from a different direction—I made an outline. Starting with broad strokes, I summarized the novel’s three acts. From there I continued breaking down by threes until I had a rough plan for more than 20 chapters. I determined the word count target for the whole novel and used that to figure out the approximate chapter and scene word count. I mapped out scenes for the first few chapters and started writing.

With a roadmap in place, the writing went more quickly. I still struggled with time and procrastination, but I was no longer guessing where the characters needed to go, or what they needed to do. I continued breaking down future chapters into scenes as I went, making notes for revisions as I realized the need for them. A few years later, the first draft was complete, and even though the story deviated from that first outline, it would not have happened without it.

Now, after those years of work, and of studying other storytelling methods, I always make some plan at the beginning of a new story, and trust the outline to light a path, whether or not the muse or I follow it.

A Typical Writing Day

I try to carve a little time out of every day to work on my writing. Some days, I use the time getting actual words down, while other days I see to the business side of things. On really good days, I can do a little of everything.

A friend recently asked me how I spend my writing time, about the habits that help me finish a story.

When you’re writing a story, do you shoot for a daily word count and stop when you reach it, or do you just sit down and see where the work takes you?

As an easily distracted and unforgivably lazy husband, dad of three, homeowner, and full-time employee, time is my biggest constraint. Coupled with the fact that I’m a careful slow writer who aspires gets lost trying to find just the right word or phrase, and that I tend to research follow rabbits down holes as I’m writing, I’ve had little success setting day- or session-based word count goals.

Typically, I’ll scrounge together whatever time I can manage: fifteen minutes standing at the kitchen counter, thirty to forty minutes during a lunch break or at night after everyone else has gone to bed, or—if I’m lucky—an hour or two on the rare quiet weekends my family can spare me for some focused time at a nearby coffee shop. The time comes in dribs and drabs, and I try to make the most of it when I can get it.

Usually I sit down to write with the aim of beginning or finishing a scene, doing some editing, or just getting a paragraph or two further along in the current work.

I typically set word count goals at the scene or story level—goals that serve more as guideposts than anything else. Ultimately, the story gets the words the story needs, and if I’m doing really well, no more or less than that.

Are you a goal setter or do you just strive to make the most of the time you get? Follow me on Facebook or join my Patrons and tell me about your favorite trick to get things across the finish line, what your creative or productive time looks like, or just ask whatever burning question you’d like!

A Warm, Wet (but still stinky) Mars

A desert planet, Mars is cold, and Mars is dry. The dust that blows across her landscapes is as fine as baby powder and would probably smell something like the powdered sweet tea my aunt used to mix with her sulfureous well water.

You wouldn’t know it from looking, but Mars also enjoys an abundance of water—she just likes to play coy with it. She keeps her water locked up in polar ice caps, subsurface ice, or wafting invisibly through the thin air. The atmosphere is too thin to hold water in a liquid state, instead allowing it free rein to simply boil away, despite the average high surface temperature in some areas only reaching a few degrees above freezing.

Mars is cold because she’s far from the sun, skirting the edge of the habitable zone, she’s dry because she’s cold and her air is thin, and her air is thin because her slight gravity and strip most of it away.

If we wanted to turn Mars into a livable place, we’d have to address those three fundamental issues. To have liquid water on the surface, we’ve got to turn up the pressure. We’ve got to release all that carbon dioxide and water locked up in polar or subsurface ice and thicken the atmosphere. To do that, we’ve got to raise the temperature.

We can’t pull Mars closer to the Sun, so we’ll either have to hurl giant space rocks, setup Kim Stanley Robinson’s moholes and orbiting mirrors, or nuke the planet from orbit, Elon Musk style.

Being a "greenhouse gas," carbon dioxide release will give us a double whammy, also helping to trap heat from the sun and raise the average temperatures. But with hardly any magnetic field to speak of, the solar wind will just keep stripping away all those beautiful, heavy, pressure creating molecules, and, in a thousand or a million years, we’ll be right back where we started, holding a boiling cup of stinky iced tea, gasping for air.

So, the final piece of the puzzle, the coup de grâce, the flower on the grave of inhospitality is… we’ll just have to make us a planet-sized magnetic field. Easy. Peasy.

Big Dreams of a Younger Writer

When I was younger, and reading mostly licensed, genre novels, I dreamed of writing genre fiction as good as the best literary works, that would garner the same level of respect. I also wanted to write at least one book in every major fiction genre and elevate the entire field of literature. Young men dream big.

In college, having discovered Kerouac and the Beats, I tried to become an avant-garde poet and write sweeping auto-biographical epics. Contemplating a Kerouac poster I’d hung in my room, I yearned to write well enough, and to earn enough respect that some future young man in the 2020s (not so far away now) would hang my poster in his room, dreaming the same big dreams.

Now we live in a world where the nerds have ascended, the highest grossing films feature comic book characters, genre fiction is healthier than ever, and storytelling as an art form has risen across the board. In the same time, I’ve grown into my limitations, and narrowed my grand visions to something nearer my capacity to deliver.

I’m focused on learning the new art of storytelling, and writing engaging, moving science-fiction for adults and entertaining, educational science-fiction for children and teens. I’m also working hard to find people like you who are interested in me and my fiction, and who are excited to help me share it with the wider world.

I haven’t left all those big dreams behind, but I’ve learned that I have to focus, and become the best I can in a narrower plot of land.

How have time and self-reflection shaped your big dreams? Where are you in your own journey? Or how has the world shifted under your feet and changed your presumed path?