S. Andrew Swann's Blog, page 31

Newsweek needs to get out more. . .

I love conspiracy theories, but the latest article on such by Newsweek has left me a little cold.  Not a single black helicopter to be had.  And how does questioning the maternity of Sarah Palin's kid rate high enough to be on a list with Goldman Sachs looting the world? Nary a COINTELPRO, ECHELON or Skull & Bones to be found. I mean they're trying to be topical, but really. . .

Getting a line on real mind-altering conspiracy theories from Newsweek is like watching a sitcom to discover what ...

I'm still alive. . .

The blog's been falling by the wayside a little while I work on the climax of the Apotheosis Trilogy.  It's a little hard to shift gears for me after spending thousands of words destroying the universe I've been building for the past fifteen years.  To say all hell's breaking loose is a bit of an understatement. . .   All this, and I have to do a credible wrap-up to a universe spanning ten books.  Not easy.

Oh, and I do have planned another callback to the first trilogy, beyond Nickolai's...

Another Truffle Update

If you've followed my blog, you've seen me talk about our dog Truffles. Back during the summer, she was stricken with something, no one has yet diagnosed what, that weakened her until she was unable to walk. At first we thought it was neurological, but she was never completely paralyzed. In fact, even when I had to carry her outside three times a day she still has had fewer accidents in the house than Lilly the boxer. So we got her a cart, and started swimming her three times a week....

How to fake out your readers.

Another quick tip while I'm buried in the middle of this novel:

Tropes and clichés are a great tool with which to surprise your reader.  Wait, you might say, how can you possibly surprise the reader with a cliché? Well what exactly is a cliché? It is a situation that's so familiar that the moment the audience picks up on the typical signposts, they already know how it will turn out. (i.e. any cop buddy film or spy thriller will almost always have the protagonist's friend, ally, or boss turn ...

Quick rules for tightly plotted fiction

Plot's one of my strong points as a writer.  That's brought home to me when I see reviews saying that the Apotheosis Trilogy is "tightly plotted."  To my POV that is amusing because it (and its predecessor, Hostile Takeover) are, for me at least, vast sprawling shaggy dog stories that throw in just about everything but the kitchen sink.  They've been the most free-form seat-of-the-pants writing of any of my stuff.

But a 300K epic sprawl of a novel segmented into three parts can still be...

Rocking out with POTUS

Deep in writing deadlines and such, so here are some videos for you all:

And equal time:

And a bonus clip from across the pond;

Trash picking at the Info Dump

I09 led me to a post by Ian Sales about the dreaded Info Dump:

Unless the writer has chosen to use an outsider as a protagonist – a common trick in fantasy, but much less so in science fiction – the only way the reader is going to learn anything about the world of the story is through info dumps. There are elegant and inelegant ways of info dumping. Having one character tell it to another character, who already knows it, is a particularly bad way. Nor is it unique to science fiction – see...

Godwinizing Climate Change

Me, babbling. . .

If you missed it last night, I was on the Nightstalkers internet radio program.  I talked about werewolves, writing and Wolfbreed.  (Ain't I alliterative?) With the exception of one technical glitch with my phone (I think you can hear me swearing) it went well.  If you missed it, don't fret.  It should be on their podcast feed shortly.

Will the Nation-State cease to exist?

Remember Rollerball?  The original 1975 version with James Caan?  One of the interesting premises of the movie was the collapse of the nation-state in favor of the corporation.  That premise was somewhat prescient,  anticipating one of the main tropes of cyberpunk by almost a decade.  The idea is commonplace now, a shorthand for some deep systemic dysfunction in films from Robocop to Avatar.

The idea of corporate governance seems at odds with our current reality, where the state is advancing i...