Colin Alexander's Blog, page 5

Mid-week Maunder 6 May 2020

The Nebula Awards have put up the schedule for the meeting 29 – 31 May.  Many of the sessions look good and I plan to attend a number of them.  Zoom has been working well for a number of different meetings; it will be interesting to see how it goes for a very large one.  I’ve been looking at the set up for the Book Depot and hope to be able to make my titles available.  This is one area, though, that may not work as well as a physical meeting.

A few minor issues showed up on the QA of the audiobook.  Those have been fixed and now it’s back to QA at Audible.  Hopefully, not too much longer.

Back to last week’s comments about realistic (as opposed to two-dimensional) characters, I think the following are important: 1) they must have a back-story, how they got to be who they are; 2) they need to make both good and bad choices and, in the same way, they need good and bad characteristics; 3) their decisions and choices are not simply actions to move the plot forward.  My final criterion is a personal one.  I need to be able to picture an interaction with them and that could be anything from a conversation at Starbucks to an argument in a bar.  I’m sure some of this is personal perspective.  I’ve seen plenty of reviews comment on “cardboard characters” when I thought the characters were very good (or maybe it’s just me).

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Mid-week Maunder 30 April 2020

As you can see from the date, I’m a day late with this post.  No excuse for that, or no good one.  Need to do better.

I did finish Sharon Kay Penman’s historical fiction, The Land Beyond The Sea.  This is a magnificent book, the story of the downfall of Outremer, the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem.  Like all of Penman’s works, her exhaustive research into the topic shows both in the detail of the settings and the historical accuracy of the events that she describes.  These are coupled with the terrific way she has brought a huge cast of characters to life.  These range from Baldwin IV, the leper king of Jerusalem, who is presented as someone who could be the lead in a Greek tragedy, to numerous minor characters rescued from the dustbin of history.  They all feel like real people, most of whom make frightfully myopic decisions about matters of existential importance and they either ignore the overall picture or talk themselves into believing  they are taking it into account.  You can see how they get to the actions they take as you realize that this is what the real people did.  Penman references observers who were there for the dramatic scenes of both Reynald and Balian with Saladin – she points out in her note that is the way these happened – and they come across as perfectly in keeping with the way the characters have acted throughout the story.  The one exception, I suppose, is de Ridefort, but he may well have been a one-dimensional individual in real life with no redeeming features.  As you can tell, I loved this book and would recommend it to anyone.  You do not need to be a fan of historical fiction, or this period, to enjoy it.

Reading this work makes me wonder about the task of creating what we like to call three-dimensional characters.  How do we move a character from – as reviewers are wont to say – being cardboard or two-dimensional to being someone who appears real?  Some of it, I am sure, is a function of the scale of the work.  Many older science fiction works are much shorter than today’s books and there is simply less room to flesh out the characters.  Whether a book is plot-driven rather than character-driven matters, too.  It is also more than simply having back-story for a character, although I think that is necessary.  You can’t understand a character’s actions unless you understand where they have come from.  Seeing a tug of war on decisions in a character’s head is also important.  Certainly, these are points I need to think about since I’m in the middle of a draft.  That and don’t be late!

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Mid-week Maunder 22 April 2020 – more hard sf

I talked a little about the concept of hard sf last week.  One topic I mentioned but didn’t go into is the idea of hibernation/deep sleep/suspended animation.  For all the attention that we pay to physics, we don’t spend much time on this, but if we don’t have an FTL drive or a multi-generation ship, we need it.  How would it or could it work?  Hibernation does work (at least for bears), so maybe we could find a way to slow our metabolisms and, maybe, the ageing process.  If we could, what would it be like getting up after years?  I know how stiff I feel getting out of bed in the morning!  Then, there are parts of us that are accustomed to moving on a regular basis and become cantankerous if they don’t – like our gut.  I explored some of this in Starman’s Saga and I’m sure you’ll let me know if it seems realistic.

The audiobook has gone to QA review!  Here’s hoping there are no issues that need correction and that publication is just ahead.

Science fiction conventions, like all gatherings of large groups, have become impossible now and for some time into the future.  How long, no one knows.  The Nebula Awards at the end of May have gone to an online event.  On a smaller scale, I saw that PortCon, up here in Portland, Maine and scheduled for late June, has done the same.  It did occur to me, that this cloud could have a silver lining.  PortCon is a small, local con, but by going online maybe it can attract folks who would never think to travel here.  So, look at the PortCon website and sign up to join the fun!

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Mid-week Maunder 15 April 2020 – What is hard sf?

The term hard sf (or hard science fiction) is used a lot but it seems to mean different things to different people.  To me, it is a story in which the author sticks within the confines of how the universe acts based on science, with as small a number of extrapolations as possible.  Some stories like this stay entirely in the solar system and adhere very closely to current scientific understanding.  To me, The Martian by Andy Weir was a great example.  To get outside the solar system, the most obvious constraint is the speed of light and the theory of relativity.  If you accept this constraint, you are locked into generation ships or interstellar ramjets, either Bussard’s original proposal or the catalytic variant that was published in the 70’s.  Many people will accept as hard sf a reasonable postulate for a way to circumvent this limit or the distance involved (wormholes, hyperspace, Alcubierre drives).  Cherryh’s Alliance-Union universe (at least the Company Wars part), McDevitt’s Priscilla Hutchins series, and Scalzi’s Collapsing Empire (a particularly innovative way of approaching it) are good examples.  What doesn’t work so well anymore are books like the Foundation trilogy.  There is more to sticking to the science than relativistic physics, though.  How could suspended animation work?  If the star your planet circles is red, would the plants be green?  (Probably not.)  For good or ill, I tried to wrestle with some of these in Starman’s Saga.  It’s fun but then there is always the risk that the science starts to dominate the story.  Curious what others think.  Let me know.

Close to completion on the audiobook!  Can’t wait to see (hear) how that finally comes out.

Stay well and stay sate.

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Mid-week Maunder 8 April 2020

There is a lot happening in the world today, but this blog was never designed as commentary on politics or pandemics.  Here, I will stick to writing and books.

Closing in on getting the audiobook of Starman’s Saga ready.  I had never thought much about audiobooks before it was so strongly recommended to me.  I read very fast and figured that an audiobook would slow me down and interfere with the way I imagined the characters sounding.  Listening to the draft narrations, though, I am changing my mind.  It is a whole different way of perceiving a story.  I do want to see how this works, but I am beginning to think of doing it again.

Taking a few days away from the stack of paper that constitutes the print of the first draft.  I find that makes the mistakes stand out more when I sit down to revise and it makes the places where a scene needs to be cut/added/re-written more obvious.

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Mid-week Maunder 1 April 2020

Working on the first draft for the next book brought to mind a session I remember Salvatore Scibona running at the Wesleyan Writers’ Conference a couple of years ago.  He made the point, rather emphatically, that when you are writing a first draft, you should not stop to polish the words or try to make a scene perfect.  What is important is getting the draft done, get it all written.  Write a sh**ty first draft.  There is plenty of time to take that draft and edit it (and repeat that process) but unless the first draft is written completely, you don’t have your story.  I think he is right.  What would be the point of polishing a piece of dialog so that it is just right if, when we revise the story, it turns out to be unnecessary and we delete it?  Waste of time right?  So, that’s my objective.  Get the whole story out, then start to take a critical look at it.

I do want to mention that Starman’s Saga is going to become an audiobook.  This will be my first.  I’ve had a number of people ask if there would be one (and at the time, I was saying no) and then I got a blunt piece of advice at Boskone that I was making a mistake.  So, here we go.  I’m hoping to have it out by the end of April.

I’d also like to mention a quick and fun read: The Bookish Life of Nina Hill by Abbi Waxman.  This an enjoyable story of an introverted bookworm without any meaningful family, who suddenly discovers she has a large, slightly crazy family and (maybe) a large inheritance.  The characters are well crafted, especially Nina, the sort of people who you could imagine meeting at Starbucks.  Her predicaments and how she works them out suit both her and the overall tone of the book, which is breezy.  I also like the setting but that may also be due to the fact that I know the Larchmont area outside LA where much of the story takes place.  The ending did wrap up a little too quick and too tidily, in my opinion, but that’s a minor complaint.  A good read and you can go through it in a day.

Now back to the sh**ty first draft.

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Mid-week Maunder 25 March 2020

COVID-19 dominates most discussions and most news right now and certainly occupies a lot of my thoughts.  I’m finishing the last day of a 14 day self-isolation after an exposure.  Saying thanks to all the health-care workers who are now the front line fighters in what is truly a war.

It seems almost selfish to talk about writing with this going on in the world, but that is the purpose of this blog.  There are far better places to read about the pandemic (here is one of them: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama...).  Isolation does provide the necessary conditions for writing and I am continuing to work through the first draft of a new book.  Having sketched the book out in an not-chronological sequence, I am now trying to fit the pieces together.  Many places need to be re-written and there are the inevitable sections that have actually been written twice in different ways and different places or no longer fit at all.  Hopefully, not too many weeks until I have an entire draft that I can read through.  (Of course, then I will probably cry and start ripping it apart again.)

Haven’t finished reading anything new this week.  Part of that is writing and part of that is having my hands on Sharon Penman’s new book, “The Land Beyond The Sea.”  For historical fiction set the in 11th and 12th centuries, nothing is better than her books.  I’ll be reading and enjoying the one for a while (they are big books).

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18 March 2020 – Mid-week Maunder

On one hand, it seems presumptuous to think this blog is important in the midst of the COVID19 crisis, but, on the other, maybe it is truly important to find ways to adapt our activities and carry on.  We are pulling back into our shells here, one of the most important things we can do.  It doesn’t matter whether you are at high risk from COVID19 or young and low-risk.  We need to slow down the accumulation of seriously ill patients so that our medical systems can handle them, buy time to develop therapies, and break the chain of transmission.  Think of it as a war.

Pretty much house-bound, there is time for reading and for writing.  On the reading side, I want to mention Cherryh’s “Alliance Rising.”  This book is part of Cherryh’s Union-Alliance universe, set at the beginning of the Company Wars.  I have liked almost everything I have read by Cherryh and I find this universe and the Company Wars section some of the best science fiction available.  That said, I have two different views on this book.  Taken as a standalone book, it is terrific.  Cherryh specializes in creating  detailed societies that make sense and populating them with well-rounded characters you can believe in (or picture yourself meeting for coffee).  The plot is well constructed with the tension and the pace rising as the book moves toward its conclusion.  Definitely worth reading.  What did give me pause is its place in the Company Wars period of the Union-Alliance universe.  Maybe it’s me, but I cannot make this book fit into the framework of events that have been built by the other books.  I found this an irritant.  Again, if viewed as a standalone, it’s not an issue; the book is great.

For my own work, I’m still banging away at the keyboard trying to render a pile of handwritten pages into a coherent digital file.  I’ve got the time at home now, but it’s going to take a lot of it.  Meanwhile, Starman’s Saga is making progress to an audiobook.  Hoping to have that out in April.  Hoping for a lot of things in April.

Be well.

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11 March 2020, Mid-week Maunder

Can’t believe it’s been almost a month since Boskone in Boston.  That was a great con and I hope everyone who worked to put it on feels really good about what they accomplished.  They should!  It may be a while before we can have a con like that again, and here I’m referring to COVID19, which is hanging over everything these days like the sword of Damocles.  I have registered for Heliosphere in Tarrytown and the Nebulas out in LA, but I wonder if either will happen this year.  We don’t have it in Maine yet, but the operative word is ‘yet’.  Sitting here looking at the advancing numbers and listening to the steady stream of closings and states of emergency makes it feel like that scene in “On The Beach” where the characters are discussing the advance of the radiation.  Granted, that’s a bit extreme (and morbid) and COVID19 is not in that category – thankfully – but it does capture the mood.

It does make it a good time for reading.  Liked Jack McDevitt’s “Octavia Gone”.  Good plot and mystery and the story moves briskly.  Some of the characters were a bit thin, though, and some of the devices have appeared in previous books in the series.  Actually, some of the AI characters seemed more three-dimensional than some of the people.  In the non-science fiction world, I read Neville’s biography of Anna Komnene, a fascinating re-visiting of an historical figure.  Neville shows beautifully how much of what Anna Komnene did was to fit into the expectations/requirements for a high-born woman of the Byzantine Empire and how that has been completely misinterpreted by later historians viewing her actions through more modern lenses.  Of course, from a novelist perspective, Anna is a more interesting character as the schemer to tried to grab the throne (as she has been seen) rather than the fairly apolitical, top intellectual of her time (as she more accurately was).  Anyway, worth the read!

This is also a good time for writing, which is what I have been spending much of mine doing.  I have a habit of generating most of my Really Dirty First Draft in ink (actual ink out of a pen).  Since I do not write from the beginning of a book to its end, but get a scene in mind, write that, go to another scene that may come before it, and often come up with elaborations on scenes later on, this creates a pile of paper that has to be sorted out and then massaged into a continuous electronic document that I call a first draft.  That’s the stage I’m in now and probably will be there for the next month.  All good, though (I hope).

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26 December – Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year Coming

Cannot believe that it is the end of the year already! Not sure where it all went.

Starman’s Saga has launched, both the e-book and paperback available from Amazon.  The e-book is available through Kindle Unlimited, so it can be downloaded and read for zero dollars.  I haven’t gone this route before, so I’m interested to see how it works.  If you like (as I do) a physical book in your hands, I think Amazon did a nice job with the paperback.

Next up is getting ready for Boskone 57.  For those of you who will be in New England in February, Boskone is a large science fiction and fantasy con in Boston and definitely worth attending.  I’m hoping to have a table in Authors’ Alley, so look for me if you are there.  Also, it’s time to get back to the new project, which is still without a name but starting to develop.

Happy New Year to all!

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