Jeremy Bates's Blog: Latest News, page 14

A-Z Challenge: A is for A Simple Plan

Okay! It's on! This crazy thing I've been hearing about since I started blogging (around summer last year I think, which means I missed the 2011 A-Z Challenge). Anyway, I've seen badges for it everywhere but never really knew what it was until recently. Here's the lowdown if you don't know what it is: Bloggers [...]

A-Z Challenge: Monday April 1, 2012

Okay! It's on! This crazy thing I've been hearing about since I started blogging (around summer last year I think, which means I missed the 2011 A-Z Challenge). Anyway, I've seen badges for it everywhere but never really knew what it was until recently. Here's the lowdown if you don't know what it is: Bloggers [...]

Top 5 Dr. Seuss Books

Dr. Seuss. Theodor Geisel. Call him what you want, but Seuss was a literary giant. Yeah, he wrote children's books (which are no easy feat), but he also snuck in satirical and political messages with profound philosophical depth–not to mention the lyrical (anapestic tetrameter), can't-get-it-out-of-my-head quality of the writing. Oh, and did I mention that [...]

5 Great Personal Library Designs

I can read books anywhere. In a car, on a boat, at the beach, in a box, with a fox, I can read them here or there, I can read them anywhere (yeah, I have Dr. Seuss on the brain right now). Truth is, I read anywhere because books are a good way to pass [...]

5 Fiction Books that Make You Want to Travel

Fiction is supposed to whisk you away to some alternate reality. After all, the novelist's primary concern is having you care for the characters he or she creates so you will relate with them, feel what they feel, experience what they experience. Coming right behind that–or some say before–is plot. You need a damn good story to get the reader involved and turning pages. What is sometimes overlooked, however, is setting. I've read so many stories set in New York City they all blur into one. (Actually, I shouldn't talk, as the current novel I'm writing is set in the Big Apple X_X). Anyyay, point is, it's sometimes nice to get away to a different, exotic location. Below are a few great books that do just that.

1) The Beach - Alex Garland

In a cheap hostel on Khao San Road in Bangkok, Richard, a young English traveler, meets a strange Scotsman going by the pseudonym of Daffy Duck who leaves him a hand-drawn map of a supposed hidden beach located in the Gulf of Thailand that is inaccessible to tourists. Together with a young and beautiful French couple, Étienne and Françoise, the trio sets out to find what they believe must be paradise on earth.

This really is the epitome of the beach book, no lame pun intended. What better story when you're sunning yourself at some resort than to read about sun, sand, and some very very good suspense. The movie remake of this one wasn't bad, but if you haven't seen either, read the book first. Otherwise you're going to have a stoned Leo DiCaprio in you're head the entire time.

2) The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway

A group of American and British expatriates travel from Paris to the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona to watch the running of the bulls and the bullfights (which I've seen!). The setting reveals the seedy café life in Paris, and the excitement of the Pamplona festival, with a middle section devoted to descriptions of a fishing trip in the Pyrenees.

To talk about this one you have to talk about the man himself. Ernie had it all. A haunted past. Functional alcoholism. An adventurous spirtit. A way with women. And one hell of a beard. You'll find all that packed into this novel (except maybe for the beard), which is what makes it such a jolly good ride, as they say.

Best way to read it? With a bottle of absinthe!

3) Into the Wild - John Krakauer

This one's based on a true story, but since no one knows exactly what the protagonist, Chris McCandless, did, it sort of qualifies for fiction. The story: After graduating in 1990 with high grades from Emory University, McCandless ceased communicating with his family, gave away his college fund of $24,000 to Oxfam, and began traveling, later abandoning his car, ending up in Alaska with only ten pounds of rice, a .22 caliber rifle, several boxes of rifle rounds, a camera, and a small selection of reading material.

The book exposes the true power of nature by revealing what it would be like to be plucked from your comfortable modern-day life and dropped into one of the most inhospitalbe environments on earth.

Interesting note: This was published in 1996, the same year as The Beach.

4) Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson

The full title–Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. The story follows its protagonist, Raoul Duke, and his attorney, Dr. Gonzo, as they descend on Las Vegas to chase the American Dream through a drug-induced haze.

Las Vegas might not be as exotic as some of the other locations on this list, but it still remains one hell of a travel destintion. The book will take you on a bizarre, twisted journey and show you a side of Sin City best left read and not experienced.

5) Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)/Lord of the Flies (William Golding)

Heart of Darkenss centres on Charles Marlow, an Englishman who takes a foreign assignment from a Belgian trading company as a river-boat captain in Africa.

Lord of the Flies is about a group of British boys stuck on a deserted island who try to govern themselves, with disastrous results.

Both these are fantastic, quick reads, that take you to the Congo and a deserted island respectively. How much more exotic can you get than that?

Five Tips for Getting an Agent Interested in Your Self-Published Book

One question I'm seeing on some forums and blogs I visit is the following: what are traditional publishers looking for when they decided whether to pick up a self published book? This would have been a silly question a few years ago, but with the indie publishing revolution, the world of authors, agents, and publishers has dramatically changed–and an agent shopping a self-pubbed book to a publisher has become a reality. Now, I'm not a publisher, but I've read a lot of opinions from different bloggers/commenters, and I decided to whittle the best advice I heard down to five points.

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1) Good writing

I know–you're thinking, yeah, yeah, of course. But it had to be mentioned. Is the writing style original? Is it fresh? Fast-paced? Or is it too wordy, too heavy on exposition and fact-telling? In fiction, does it whisk the reader along so it becomes almost effortless? What's that blurb at on every James Patterson book: The pages turn themselves! (With a little help from his ghost writers X_X)

2) Intriguing topic

Every story has been told in one form or another: the revenge story, the love-triangle story, the time-travel story, you name it. What publishers want are new twists on old themes. And of course that all-important twenty-five-word-or-less pitch. I used to think that was unfair, trying to compress a four-hundred page book a sentence or two. But then I realized when a customer goes to a bookstore, they read the blurb on the back cover and decide whether they want to buy it or not. All's fair in love and war and publishing.

3) A platform.

This, I believe, is extremely important. In this new world, the author and publisher are marketing partners, and I've even seen some e-publishers like Diversion Books, which is open to new authors and publishes the likes of Jason Pinter, ask for your, in addition to a query, a complete marketing strategy, including: your blog, unique monthly visits, number of Facebook friends, number of Twitter followers, number of newsletter subscribers, etc.

So if you don't have a blog, start one! It is your centerpiece of social media. It allows you to start a dialogue with your readers, or future readers.  And it also serves as a hub for all your other social media ventures, such as Twitter, Facebook and so forth.[image error]

One thing in particular to mention with your posts–and experienced blogger will know this–is the importance of tags. If you have a self-pubbed book, and you want to get the word out with your posts, don't tag the book's title, because chances are nobody's going to be searching Google for that. Instead,  think how people search, use their words. For example, if you wrote a book called Doctor Death, adding "doctor" or "death" to the tags will have your book popping up in medical searches! It would be much more beneficial to use tags like "adult suspense" or "quick read" etc. This way, even if people aren't searching precisely for your book, you will be searching them.

5) Don't bother going to traditional publishers and just self publish!

I've seen a lot of bloggers  raise this point and it's very valid.  I recently read a JA Konrith post where I believe he said he was making more than three grand a day on his self-pubbed ebook sales. Now, that's a rare case of course, but you never know………

PS: And get your blog listed on as many search engines as possible. Speaking of which, I just entered mine in technorati, and part of their validation process requires me to paste the following code in the post, so ignore the password-looking thing below!

Technorati code: 2VABMG39PUDW

Origins Blogfest

Hello to everyone stopping by for the Origins Blogfest hosted by DL Hammons at Cruising Altitude, along with co-sponsors Alex Cavanaugh , Katie Mills aka Creepy Query Girl and Matthew MacNish.

If you don't know the gist, the purpose of this blog hop is to say something about when or why you began writing. I'll keep mine short because I know there's something like a bazzilion people signed up for this, and it's going to be tough for the people doing the hop to get through a bazzilion long posts![image error]

Anyway, the story: I was in grade eight, so a teeny tiny tot of twelve or so, and I'd just finished a Terry Brooks book I really liked (coincidentally my last post was on Terry Brooks!). It was the first time I said to myself I wanted to do that: create an entire world. I read a couple more of his books, and when I realized the next in the series wasn't going to be out for six months, I gave it a ghastly, cringe-worthy shot. Leave those fifty pages (printed with a dot-matrix) in the sun, and they'd likely self-combust! But that was the beginning–or origin, so to speak. 

Magic Kingdom for Sale (sold!) – And it's about damn time!

Then a classmate gave me the Tommyknockers by Stephen King. It was the first Big Book I ever read. And I have to say I only got about halfway through the beast. But then a few months after that the same someone gave me Terry Brooks' The Elfstones of Shannara. I devoured it. Read the entire thing in like two weeks, which was an absolute milestone for me, at that age, when I'd been used to spending all my spare time at hockey practice or playing Sierra computer games (yes, it was early nineties!). I finished it on the very day I graduated, and I remember feeling doubly sad: sad I would not see many of my school friends again—and sad I would not see any of my fantasy friends either.

[image error] Then I discovered the Elfstones was part of a trilogy. I went to the used bookstore down the street and immediately picked up the first and third books: The Sword of Shannara and The Wishsong of Shannara. I read them both quickly. To my delight, there was a fourth book coming out; to my dismay, it wouldn't be released for months.

 In the meantime I tried to write the sequel myself…and I guess that's what got me into writing! I didn't write anything else for about ten years. Then, after I graduated university and the party died down, I started writing again. Roughly ten years after that I sold my first book.

 Anyway, not to diverge, to fill the gap until the Scions of Shannara was released, I decided to try his Landover series. I wasn't sure I was going to like it. At that time I had become a big fan of the epic fantasy worlds of elves and dwarves and the like, and I didn't want modernity to intervene. (If you don't know, the Landover series is about a New York City lawyer buying a magic kingdom.) Regardless, I gave it a shot—and I loved it.

Now, it appears it is coming to film. I know Terry Brooks has been working on getting any one of his films adapted for a while. For a bit it looked as though it would be a Shannara novel, but that was scraped. I guess it makes sense. To do a Shannara adaptation justice, it would have to be something on the scale of Lord of the Rings. A Landover film, on the other hand, would require a much smaller budget, and it would likely appeal a wider audience—especially with the alternate-world craze a la Harry Potter.

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I'm excited about it, and I think any fantasy fan should be. If you haven't read the novel, you can read the first 50 pages of Magic Kingdom for Sale: Sold! for free via Suvudu.

And who knows? If this is a massive success, maybe the studio will have the guts to take on the world of Shannara after all!

Here's a blurb from Terry Brook's website:

MAGIC KINGDOM FOR SALE – SOLD! To Warners and Weed Road

Warner Brothers has optioned Terry Brooks' best-selling MAGIC KINGDOM OF LANDOVER series of books for Akiva Goldsman's Weed Road Pictures and Andy Cohen's Grade A Entertainment. Goldsman and Cohen will produce with Weed Road's Kerry Foster and Alex Block overseeing for Weed Road. Warner Brothers' Matt Cherniss brought the book series into the studio and will run point. Brooks was represented by Anne Sibbald of Janklow &Nesbit Associates.

The film will be based on the first book in the series, MAGIC KINGDOM FOR SALE – SOLD!, which was first published in 1986 by Del Rey Books, a division of Random House. The most recent book in the six book, ongoing series is A PRINCESS OF LANDOVER which came out in 2009. Other titles in the series are: THE BLACK UNICORN, WIZARD AT LARGE, THE TANGLE BOX, and WITCHES BREW.

Brooks is a prolific author best known for the LANDOVER series and the SHANNARA series of fantasy books, which began with THE SWORD OF SHANNARA. There are currently 19 books in the SHANNARA series with the next book due out later this year.

Weed Road is in preproduction on A WINTER'S TALE written and to be directed by Goldsman. Recent credits include PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 3 and FAIR GAME.

Cohen last produced UNTRACEABLE starring Diane Lane. He's currently working on the stage show, HEATHERS – THE MUSICAL and the indie film, IN SIGHT.

February Insecure Writer's Support Group Blog Hop

[image error]I'm currently in that no man's land between first book and second book. Getting the first one published, I admit, was a tough, long, and sometimes draining journey. I thought once I got one published, everything would become much more fun and easy. And, to be truthful, it has.

Until I got stuck in that no man's land I mentioned.

What I'm finding is there is almost more pressure writing the second book than on the first. Because it has to be as good if not better than the first. You can't exactly start taking steps backwards  at this point. Also, there is a deadline–the first time I've ever had a deadline for writing. And it's approaching quickly.

I was about three-quarters of the way through the next book yesterday. Today I'm halfway through it! That's because I've had a major case of writer's block for the past two days. When I get this, I don't really know it, and I don't shut down writing completely. I just find myself going over the stuff that's written, revising what I know needs to be revised. In other words, I'm subconsciously avoiding writing anything new.

So yesterday I faced up to the fact I had the Block. I sat down with a pen and paper (I only ever use a pen and paper when I'm brainstorming notes), and started re-plotting.

I once read somewhere the beginning and the end are the easiest parts of a novel to write. The middle is where you can sink it. I find this to be true. So I was sinking a bit in the middle, but I think I've gotten out of the quagmire–though "think" is the keyword, hence the IWSG post! We'll see how it goes from here………

 

The Perils of Plotting a Time Travel Novel

One of the great fantasies in fiction is to travel into the past to experience how it might have been like to live in historical worlds that we see only in history books, or to travel the other direction into the future. In most cases, authors and scriptwriters present these fantasies by simply setting the entire story in this other time: hence historical dramas and futuristic science fiction. But there's another way to present this fantasy, and that is to have your characters travelinto the past or the future, usually starting their journey from a setting in today's world.Welcome to the time travel novel!I've just finished a time travel novel myself. It's called The Reality War. In this post, I'll share some of my experiences because plotting a time travel novel isn't always as simple as it looks.

A brief history of time travel

 

Most commonly the writer sets up most or all of these time-traveling characters to come from the present day so that we, the reader, identify with them. As the characters marvel at the wonders these other times present, and struggle to prosper in worlds they don't fully understand, we marvel and struggle with them. We're right in there, exploring these times as if we too are time travelers.

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Writers have used this approach to time travel for most of the past few centuries. TV shows such as  Quantum Leap, books such as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) by Mark Twain, and films such as  Back to the Future largely fit this description, though some of these stories, such as Twain's, are designed to satirize contemporary society, and by the time Quantum Leap and Back to the Future were shown, there's an increasing interest in the mechanisms and the reasons for time travel, something that has often been to the fore with the longest-running time travel saga of them all: Doctor Who (first shown in 1963, the day after President Kennedy was shot).

More recently, while many time travel stories remain content to transport the characters to an adventure in another time, others are increasingly interested in the consequences of time travel, such as the beautifully circular nature of Schwarzenegger film The Terminator, and the complicated romance of The Time Traveler's Wife (2003) by Audrey Niffenegger.

So when I started writing a time travel novel a few years ago, I first had to make some decisions about what kind of book I wanted to write.

Scientific Romance or technobabble?

 

First off, I read some novels featuring time travel. It's quite a fun kind of research. Plenty of people would point to The Time Machine (1895) by HG Wells as the first modern time travel novel. Wells described his 'scientific romances' (as he called them) as changing just one thing about the modern world and seeing what would happen. In his case, that change is the time machine built by the Victorian gentleman inventor. The future worlds the inventor travels to extrapolate Wells' thinking about the class divide in the wake of the industrial revolution (Wells has the workers and the wealthy evolve into separate species), and contemporary scientific thinking about the entropic universe (the Earth of the far future is dying). While Wells makes a lot of effort to invent credible futures, he makes no attempt to explain the physics of time travel or its possible consequences. We see shiny brass control panels and levers; that's enough for Wells.

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I also listened to an audio version of Kindred (1976) by Octavia Butler. Here the author takes a black woman living in 1976 California and transports her to a life of slavery in Maryland of the early 1800s. Rather than present a straight historical novel, Butler uses time travel as a literary device to transport a modern woman into the past in order to make the realities of slavery more immediate to the modern reader; we're also transported with the main character, and we also find the transition shocking.

But in Kindred, there is no attempt to cast a veil of explanation over the way in which the character time travels. There's no moment of Star Trek technobabble, where (at its worst) it suddenly occurs to the chief engineer that if we reverse the phase of the forward shield modulators, we conveniently have the capability to time travel. Butler's time travel is a literary contrivance in order to set up an otherwise impossible scenario that she wants to write a story about. We know its contrived. Butler knows that we know it's contrived, but none of that matters. She makes such a brief reference to the traveling that we quickly accept the story conceit, and get on with enjoying what Butler wants to show us.

Then there were other books I read that I'm too embarrassed to mention here. Ones that start with the worst technobabble from Star Trek, add some half-remembered terms from school such as hypotenuse and coefficient, and present that as impressive science. No, I wasn't going to take that approach with my novel.

I thought Kindred's if-I-mention-it-quickly-no-one-will-notice approach to time travel worked for that book, but was too vague for the science fiction I like to read. So to start with, HG Wells was my pilot through time, and that's not a bad thing.

How to make your reader's brain melt

 

Time travel can get really complicated.

I'm not talking about the mechanics of how it's done, I'm talking about the storytelling. In most novels, each scene takes place a little further along in time than the previous one. If there's a big gap, the author will probably start a new part and add something like 'Ten Years Later…' so you know there's a big jump in time. The reader is so familiar with this sequencing of scenes that he or she won't even stop to notice what the author's doing.

But with time travel, what is the correct sequence of scenes? Well, of course, there isn't one. When the characters can move backward and forward in time, it's up to the author to chose whatever sequence best fits the story they want to tell.

Sometimes the author wants to write about the dislocating effect of time travel. Well, that's easy enough: just jumble your scenes into a random order; that should do the trick. Problem is, most readers will give up if you do that; I know I would.

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The Time Traveler's Wife pushes this about as far as I think you could go. The sequence of scenes is difficult to follow, but that's okay because that book's more about the psychology of troubled relationships, with the time traveling more of a metaphor for how people in relationships often don't seem quite in phase with each other. I wanted my book to be essentially action-adventure (though a thematic connection with The Pilgrim's Progress soon became very important — but that's another post). So I knew I had to make my plot easier to follow than The Time Traveler's Wife.

That's much easier said than done. I kept a book of scrawled notes and diagrams about how my  fictional world(s) worked. I needed to be clear how everything fitted together because that way I could concentrate on the parts of the story that mattered most and were most exciting. Sounds strange, perhaps, but I find the deeper my understanding of the background to a story, the more confident I am at knowing what to focus on, and what I can safely leave out.

Even so, there were two redrafts where I looked at my notes, and then scratched thick red lines through sections of the plot that were overcomplicating the story and so had to go.

But I wanted a story where time travel wasn't only an excuse to have an adventure; it was at the heart of event, it caused them.

So I couldn't ignore perhaps the most powerful — and dangerous — idea in plotting time travel novels: CAUSALITY.

Causality causes confusion

 

At the kind of simplified level that you and I might understand, causality is actually a pretty obvious concept. It's a fancy way of saying that cause leads to effect.

Take this example: you hold a glass vase of flowers out of the fifth-floor window. You let go… what happens?

Well, it's not a trick question. You let go — nothing resists gravity accelerating the vase toward the ground — vase hits ground — vase shatters. It's so obvious it seems a pointless waste of time describing the sequence of cause leads to effect. Cause happens first (drop the vase) followed by the effect (vase breaks).

Not so with time travel.

Take the first Terminator film: John Connor leads the human resistance in the future — so a cyborg assassin goes back in time to kill John's mother, Sarah Connor — so John sends his friend, Kyle, back in time to protect his mother — which leads to Kyle getting Sarah pregnant with John — so Sarah goes into hiding and prepares to train up John to be an effective leader and fighter — which brings us back to John Connor leads the human resistance in the future — a cyborg assassin goes back in time… and so on.

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In this example, causality breaks down. In other words, it is no longer true that effect always happens after cause. Humanity needs John Connor to lead the resistance (cause) which leads to Sarah preparing him for that role (effect). But the rise of the machines hasn't happened yet. The effect is occurring before the cause.

If that feels complicated, it's because it is complicated. In the world we live in, cause always appears to lead to effect; time only flows in one direction and our brains can't really cope with anything else. In The Terminator, the script cleverly implies a closed loop. If you follow events in the right sequence, as I listed them above, then it appears that effect follows cause and everything appears simpler than it really is. And yet the sequence is impossible; it's a paradox, but maybe it's just what the universe has decided to settle with. It might be impossible, but it's the most stable version of history.

That's a neat trick, so I make use of closed loops and the idea of reality settling into the most stable and least confusing version of history.

But I needed something to shatter all this neatness, to be the spanner in the works that kicks off the Reality War I write about. And for that I need a little more from PARADOX.

Professor Paradox is/ was/ will be my grandfather

 

Let's go back to The Terminator. If Schwarzenegger's cyborg assassin succeeded in killing John Connor's mother in the past, then John would never be born — which would mean the cyborg would not be sent back in time — which means…

This is sometimes called the Grandfather Paradox. If you go back in time and kill your grandfather, then you would never have been born… in which case you couldn't have killed your grandfather… in which case you can travel back in time and kill him…

Argghhh!

Plotting with time paradoxes is like cooking with the hottest chili peppers: a supremely memorable ingredient, but use sparingly or you'll blow your readers' heads off.

But if we can time travel…

 

One more time travel plotting idea to consider… If time travel is possible, what's so special about the times when your story is set? Take the Victorian gentleman inventor of HG Wells. If he invented time travel in the 1890s, why don't other people invent time travel in his future? And what about the people in their future? What is so special about the 1890s that this is the only point that time travel is invented? To his credit, Wells raises this point in his novel. I think he's right to do so.

Keep watching the shadows in my novel because in The Reality War there are other people hiding there.

Conclusion: The Reality War

 

And so you had — until a few weeks ago — my time travel series, entitled My Future in the Past. It has a history of simplifying and simplifying again, a big shift from events toward the effect of events on the characters. The last change of all was to the title. I tested out My Future in the Past. People thought it sounded like time-travel, but it also sounded complicated. So I simplified that too and a came up with the name The Reality War, which was more popular (especially with men, for some reason).

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In conclusion, plotting a full-on time travel is not for the fainthearted There are many pitfalls and a lot of  work. And when you sit back and release your novel into the world, I have no doubt that some readers will vigorously attack it because they will be convinced that's not how time travel really works.

No worries. I look forward to such discussions, because if there's one thing I've learned about writing time travel, it's that it is addictive.

About Tim C. Taylor

 

Tim C. Taylor is a writer and publisher of science fiction. The Reality War Book1: The Slough of Despond is his debut novel and will be published on his birthday, February 9th 2012, initially as an eBook. The second and concluding book will be published in the spring.

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For more information on The Reality War see http://greyhartpress.com/our-science-fiction-stories/the-reality-war-2-novel-series/

For more about Tim, follow his blog at www.timctaylor.com