S. Andrew Swann's Blog, page 29

Fan Fiction is Evil!

At least that's the conclusion that Diana Gabaldon has come to.

OK, my position on fan-fic is pretty clear: I think it's immoral, I _know_ it's illegal, and it makes me want to barf whenever I've inadvertently encountered some of it involving my characters.

Of course, I have some different conclusions (or I probably wouldn't be posting about it.)

You can't camp in someone's backyard without permission, even if you aren't raising a marijuana crop back there. And you can't use someone's...

Opening Week: Exposition

And to wrap things up, the opening scene from Profiteer:

For a hundred million years the two-kilometer-long Face had stared impassively up at the Martian sky. Dimitri Olmanov had only been visiting it regularly for the past century.

The first time he had seen it, Dimitri had needed a pressure suit and the sky had burned a hostile red. Today he survived wearing only a heavy parka. Today his breath fogged beneath an infinity of crystal blue that was only slightly tinted by clouds of...

Opening Week: Action

Here we have the first part of Stranger Inside:

Jimmy didn't know how the fight started.

He'd been standing in front of his locker and he remembered watching that asshole Frank Bradley pass by. In Jimmy's mind there was an abrupt cut from that, directly to the sound of his skull hitting the locker. He didn't have time to shake the painful ringing out of his ears before he felt Frank's fist slamming into his gut.

Frank must be having a bad day.

Jimmy felt his back slam into the locker behind...

Opening Week: Setting the Scene

Now, here's the opening passage from Wolfbreed.

In the darkest woods in Burzenland, south of the Carpathian mountains, a knight of the Order of the Hospital of St. Mary of the Germans at Jerusalem, Brother Semyon von Kassel, ran as if he was in pursuit of the devil himself.

Mud smeared his mail, leaves and stray twigs poked out from tangles in his hair and beard, soot darkened his skin, and crusted blood smeared his face. His lips cracked and bled as he whispered a Pater Noster over and over...

Opening Week: Blank Slate

Next up on my opening page series is from The Omega Game:

Quaid Loman woke up— or at least became fully aware of his surroundings— sitting on the edge of an unfamiliar bed. His hands shook, sweat dripped down the back of his neck, and he needed a drink more than at any time in the past six months.

He tried to remember the previous night, and he couldn't.

Quaid rubbed the palms of his hands deep into the orbits of his eyes, and fairy ghosts of color shot across the insides of his eyelids. It...

Opening Week: Breaking the "Rules"

I recently started following a new group writer blog, Kill Zone, featuring a bunch of thriller writers. They've recently had a series of posts critiquing first pages submitted by their readers. I thought this a cool idea, and it inspired me to do my own series of posts on openings, in this case from my own novels, giving some commentary on what I was trying to do.

First up is from Broken Crescent.

Long after the great and terrible battles, long after the world had been broken by the forces...

Apocalyptic SFnal Nightmare Scenario of the Day

(with thanks to Instapundit)

Thanks to an NPR article we have a concept worthy of a Phillip K Dick novel, with Orwellian commentary that should scare the crap out of you if you have any imagination— or remember the CIA's history dealing with other chemical substances.

The money quote:

Does Biology Affect Our Trust In Government?

Zak first got interested in trust more than a decade ago after co-authoring a study that looked at trust levels in different nations and their economic stability. The...

Robotic Melding

I've be asked again to provide mental melding on the SF Signal blog.  The topic this time is "The Coolest Robots in SF."  I've cross-posted my entry here, but you should go see the rest:

The coolest robots in SF? That's a tall order. The field is vast, including everything from the ambulatory logical puzzle machines of Isaac Asimov's Robot stories, to the Cylons of BSG. Gort to Wall-E. It's almost an impossible task to narrow it down…But, if we agree that we're talking about...

Writing toward the abyss. . .

I'm literally in the home stretch of Messiah now, a few thousand words from capping off ten books and seventeen years worth of work.  This is where I'm getting all sweaty and nervous.   Especially since I've spent 250K+ words so far continually upping the ante, I'm hoping that the climax will justify the build up.  Also nerve-inducing is the fact that I don't yet have any commitments for what I'm going to write after this, it will be literally the first time in my writing career when I don't ...

Idiot Authors (or, just because you're published doesn't mean you're not a douche)

I've written enough about authors that have shown very public displays of ill judgment that it seemed to be almost mandatory that I talk about Mr. Patrick Roscoe (his name is not a link because you absolutely must hear the story before landing on his site.)  This is especially true because my list of authorial asshats seems to be overwhelmingly female, and we do need some gender balance.

So did Mr. Roscoe do?  Well, he sent the following to literary agent Colleen Lindsay,  to whom he queried f...