Daniel M. Bensen's Blog, page 38

Five Star Book Reviews: A Coffinful of Nightmares

Full Disclosure: I edited this book for my good friend Emil.

This book is a sweaty, crawly, hairy, bloody, and surprisingly tender collection of stories. There are a lot of horror stories here, but also science fiction, mystery, and a rather sweet romance. The characters are just as flawed, un-heroic, and gross as the rest of us, but Minchev finds something in each of them to love. He makes you feel it too.

It’s an uncomfortable sensation, sympathizing with a serial killer, or a cannibal, or a robot who…but no spoilers. Just open your heart, put it in a jar on your desk, and learn to love some monsters.

An Unrepaired Bridge

An unrepaired bridge

An old sodium streetlight

In its crook, the moon

Above the Streetlight

Above the streetlights

The morning star of venus

Between them, sunrise

Look up from the Street

Look up from the street

That white and salmon house there

With clouds behind it

Alternatives to water 3: literature review

Start here with my quest for alternatives to water as the solvent for speculative biochemistry, and here’s a brief side-step to talk about water vapor.

It might be clear at this point that my chemistry background isn’t quite solid (ha! “Solid!” Chemistry joke!) So I’ve needed a lot of help to get this far.

Here is a very nice paper on the benefits (and problems) with water in biochemistry. (One of the problems: C02 doesn’t dissolve well in water.) If you want something less dense (I sure did) this page presents some nice little summaries of biochemistries that could work on different planets (and moons) of our solar system. There’s also a slightly more involved look at Alternate Biochemistry here.

And if you’re curious about my aliens, here’s what I’m thinking so far:

Liquid ammonia biome:

Protein-equivalents are tin fluoride polymers suspended in liquid ammonia, contained in the interstices between crystals of sodium fluoride. In primitive lifeforms, the crystals move against each other to open channels for ammonia to flow through. In more advanced forms, tin fluoride polymers are laminated to sheets of crystal, which allows the whole structure to fold itself like origami. (I want to thank Alessandro Allievi, who found some stuff that isn’t soluble in liquid ammonia. You can also assume that anything in the subsequent paragraphs that isn’t wild hand-waving comes from Alessandro as well.)

Plumber biome:

Biochemistry is sulfur rings and phosphorus-nitrogen chains in SO2 (extracellular) and H2S (intracellular). Sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide are only liquid between -75 and -60, so temperature regulation is very important. Perhaps life in this biome evolves a cooling system to keep its temperature around -70. Perhaps this biome has invaded a more Earthlike world, and is aggressively refrigerating it.

A Bird Woke Me Up

A bird woke me up.

It’s too much like before.

I hope it will snow.

Q & A with JD Moyer

This is JD Moyer

Here’s his website and here’s the book he wrote. It has post-apocalyptic Germans and giant mutant cannibals, but, preposterously, I did not ask him any questions about either. I asked about his writing process. Here we go.

What comes first when you write? What do you add later?

With The Sky Woman the world and the characters came first. In terms of world-building I like to think in terms of plausible (or semi-plausible) scenarios — possible futures that could actually occur, depending on what choices we human beings make in the coming decades and centuries.

I don’t know where my characters come from — that’s a more intuitive process. They seem to bubble up from my subconscious, often fully formed, a combination of my own fantasies, flaws, and fears.

What was the first inkling you got of the characters in The Sky Woman?

Plots come together as I outline, and then change radically as the characters make decisions different from those I originally anticipated.

I always go with the character decisions, and adjust the plot as needed. I guess I would feel as if I was betraying them if I didn’t, and that might lead to a feeling of disconnection (or loss of immersion) which could grind everything to a halt.

In The Guardian (the sequel to The Sky Woman) the main protagonist, Tem, is ten years old. He’s loyal and brave to the point of being reckless, and made some life-endangering decisions that I didn’t anticipate in the outline.

What keeps you writing?

Habit, mostly. But that habit was hard to develop and it’s easy to fall out of. For me, the daily practice of writing takes a great deal of energy and concentration. Once I get in the zone the words flow pretty easily, and I always feel fulfilled after I put the work in.

How did you develop your writing habit?

Carving out and protecting the time, mostly. Butt in chair. I do take breaks sometimes, but I don’t let them stretch too long. If I do, it takes awhile to crank up the gears.

What do you do when you need ideas?

Walking, travelling, and reading both fiction and nonfiction. I take walks every day (we have a dog, so I have to). Walking is great for working out the kinks in whatever I’m working on that day. I don’t like travelling very much (I hate airport security), but when I do travel it usually generates an explosion of ideas. And of course I read every day. I’m a relatively slow reader but I try to read widely (fiction of every genre, nonfiction, old and new, authors from different countries and cultures, etc.).

What sort of choices do you have to make when writing? How do you make them?

I’ll usually have a rough outline so I know where I’m going, but the big choices belong to the characters. So I mostly just try to stay true to how I imagine they would think, feel, and behave.

In terms of craft, there are so many choices that I try not to think about it while I write. I can always polish the prose and fix problems while revising.

What have you learned about writing since you started doing it seriously?

That writing isn’t a solitary process. Of course part of it is, but it wasn’t until I actively started to pursue a writing community, both online and from attending conventions, that everything began to click in terms of my identity as an author.

Attending my first writing conference, which was the 2018 SFWA Nebula conference in Pittsburgh, was a big step for me. I didn’t know anybody going in, and I felt like an outsider. After a few days of putting in volunteer hours, hanging out in the SFWA lounge, and doing my best impression of an extrovert, that feeling dissipated significantly. I’ve kept up with those friendships online, and I take advantage of SFWA opportunities including volunteering and being a mentor/mentee.

What mistakes did you make when you started out?

I wish that I had committed to a daily writing practice earlier, though I may not have been emotionally ready for that until I became a father, which seemed to crank up my capacity for commitment.

Submitting my first short stories I probably submitted too widely, and before the stories were fully polished. I was too impatient to be published, but ultimately that may have slowed me down.

What kind of book would you like to see more of in stores?

More Flame Tree books! But generally a wider range of science fiction, especially sci-fi with a philosophical or sociological/anthropological perspective.

What’s your next project?

I’m currently working on a novel entitled The Savior Virus. It’s about a bioengineer who is recruited by a mysterious consortium to help design a mind-altering retrovirus.

Where can I find your stuff?

On my website. I have a list of my published fiction there, as well as links to short stories, many of which are free to read online. I also make electronic music so I have a Discography page as well.

The Sky Woman

A Lavender Sky

A lavender sky

An unusual color

Between the buildings

A Box in the Snow

A box in the snow

We got it from ikea

Bird tracks on its top

I’m on GanBreeder

You want to see more of this nonsense? Follow me on GanBreeder and keep an eye out for this stuff to show up in my books