Rabia Gale's Blog, page 20

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back to school for writers: Tami Clayton on mental health therapists

Welcome to the Back to School for Writers blog series. Every Wednesday until the end of September, a guest poster will share their knowledge and expertise on a specific topic. Today’s guest is therapist and writer Tami Clayton who dispels 5 myths about the mental therapy profession.

I’ve worked in the field of mental health for the past sixteen years, most of that as a child/family therapist, and in all that time, I have yet to read about or see in a movie or T.V. show a therapist that isn’t portrayed as unethical, devious, deceptive, coercive or in some way inaccurate. It’s no wonder many people see therapists and therapy as suspect. And if you only went off of what you read or saw in those forms of entertainment, then you’d be right.

In preparation for this post, I asked several colleagues about the characterizations of therapists in books, movies, and T.V shows. Before any of them answered my question, every single one of them said if they knew there was a therapist in a movie or T.V. show, they would avoid watching it (or at least the part with the therapist) because of how inaccurately (and terribly) we are portrayed. After I explained why I was asking, all of them were eager to share what the inaccuracies they’ve seen. Here’s what they mentioned:

(Note: I’m using the term ‘therapist’ to also mean ‘counselor’ and consider the two interchangeable for the purposes of this post.)

Myth #1: All therapists subscribe only to Freud’s theories and techniques – you know, the bespectacled, bearded older man psychoanalyzing the client while he or she reclines on the sofa talking about their dreams filled with obvious phallic symbols.

Reality: Psychoanalysis is just one theory among many out there for a therapist to use and claim as their theoretical orientation and in my humble opinion, a good therapist draws from a few different theories in order to best meet their clients’ needs. As for the sofa bit, I’ve always worked in social service (read: underfunded, underpaid and overworked) so many of us have offices that are so tiny there’s no room for one. Also, unless you have sought out a psychoanalyst and want to lie down on a sofa, clients are usually sitting up on the sofa or in a chair.

And for the record, in regards to dream analysis – sometimes a carrot is just a carrot.

Just sayin’.

Myth #2: Therapists must always be overly solicitous about a person’s feelings and only ask questions like “And how does that make you feel?”

Reality: Yes, therapists do ask about feelings, but in all the years I’ve been a therapist, I can’t think of one time I inquired about it in this manner with a child or an adult. A person’s feelings are just one aspect on which we guide clients to focus their awareness. Current patterns of thinking, coping mechanisms, past trauma, past and present relationships, self-esteem, self-awareness, and many, many more topics can be delved into in therapy depending on what a client is seeking it for at that time.

Myth #3: Therapists become close friends with, date, have sex with or have some kind of an outside-of-the-office relationship with their clients.

Reality: Aside from this going against everything you’re taught in your counseling or psychology program, this kind of thing is considered unethical for therapists to do and it can get you a nice malpractice lawsuit and/or the revocation of your license if the infractions are severe enough. The breaking of boundaries is probably the biggest inaccurate portrayal of therapists in movies, T.V. and books. Unless the therapist in your story is the antagonist and needs to engage in such nefarious activities, please reconsider having him or her be a blatant boundary breaker. It’s giving all of us a bad rap.

Myth #4: A client is “cured” when the big epiphany comes wrapped up the big “Aha!” moment.

Reality: Therapy and the therapeutic process is rarely, if ever, a neat, tidy, linear process in which a client reaches a total resolution and is cured of what was ailing them. Therapy is not like getting over the flu or a cold. It can be filled with many ups and downs, a lot like life itself. While epiphanies can certainly be a part of it, they hardly denote a “cure” or complete absence of the mental health symptoms that previously plagued the client. Resist the urge to have your character reach an easily obtained epiphany that somehow cures them. Therapy is a process with many steps forwards and backwards. (Sadly, this is something the insurance companies completely fail at comprehending, but that’s a rant post for another day.)

Myth #5: Therapists are always “on”, assessing people and passing judgment about others’ mental health every moment of the day. This myth is played out in movies, T.V. shows and books, but is just as prevalent at a cocktail party where the inevitable question of “what do you do?” arises when meeting new people. As soon as the word ‘therapist’ is out of my mouth, people often become wary and think I’m assessing the state of their mental health and passing judgment on them.

Reality: I diagnosed you ten minutes ago.

Just kidding.

Well, sort of.

Those of us drawn to this helping profession are obviously interested in human behavior and human nature which is why we’ve chosen to do what we do. Even so, we are not always “on the clock” writing mental health assessments in our heads of everyone we meet. Sure, I may wonder about a person’s underlying motivations for saying or doing certain things and yes, I may have a vague notion of what that person’s thought patterns or coping mechanisms might include. But unless you are going to pay me for my time and effort, I’m not usually going to spend much more time thinking about it beyond that. And as far as passing judgment, unless you are behaving in an utterly deplorable manner, I’m typically not in the habit of casually passing judgment on the state of other people’s mental health. We all have baggage and we’re all on a journey, even us therapists. Personally, I’d rather lend a hand than stand aside passing judgment.

There are also a lot of misconceptions and misunderstandings of the different terminology used in the field of mental health. Here are some terms and their definitions to help in better understanding the field:

A psychologist is someone who has obtained his or her PhD in the field of psychology. They can be refered to as therapists or counselors if they so choose, though most go by the term psychologist.

Therapists and counselors are not psychologists. Therapists and counselors have typically have obtained their Master’s in counseling psychology, psychology, or marriage and family therapy.

Social workers (someone who has completed their Master’s or PhD in social work) can also be considered a counselor or therapist. Quite often, the term social worker is used in movies, T.V. shows, and books as synonymous with someone who works in child welfare. This is not the case. One is a job/career (child welfare caseworker) while the other is what someone who has graduated from a social work program (social worker).

The term “shrink” refers to a psychiatrist, a medically trained doctor who can prescribe psychotropic medications. Psychologists, therapists, and counselors are not psychiatrists and the terms are not interchangeable, though the two types of professions often work in together when treating a client.

I won’t go into detail about different diagnoses here because this post would become far too lengthy. If anyone has questions about a diagnosis for their character or would like further information about symptomology of a particular diagnosis for a character, feel free to contact me and I would be happy to help.

Hopefully this was useful to those who are writing about someone who works in the mental health field or to anyone wanting to learn more about therapists/therapy in general. For an example of an accurately portrayed and well-written therapist, check out This Much I Know is True by Wally Lamb. Aside from being a fantastic book, it has one of the few well-written therapists in it that I’ve ever read.

Tami Clayton is a YA and Middle Grade writer with a passion for travel, all things dark chocolate and coffee, and reading everything she can get her hands on. She is a child and family therapist by day, writer by night, and a dreamer of far off lands she hopes to one day explore in person. Visit her online at Taking Tea in the Kasbah.

hubble picture of the carina nebula

This is not a new picture, but I just recently came across it. It’s stunning. I can see a cosmic warrior on horseback or an interstellar dragon emerging from the dust. What do you see?

Credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Livio and the Hubble 20th Anniversary Team (STScI)

back to school for writers: David Gale on computers

Welcome to the Back to School for Writers blog series. Every Wednesday until the end of September, a guest poster will share their knowledge and expertise on a specific topic. Today’s guest is David Gale. The eagle-eyed among you might’ve noticed that we share a last name, so I’ll confess up front that he’s my smart and funny husband, who put this post together for me on short notice.

Well, Rabia asked me to help out with her “Back to School for Writers” series. I’m supposed to talk about something I know, so since I’m a programmer, here goes: five things Hollywood (and many writers) often get wrong about computers.

1) A geek with a computer can hack anything.

Not only do aliens have wifi, but they’re susceptible to Mac viruses.

You know the scene: the Good Guys are under attack by the Big Bad, everything seems doomed, and then the Nerd pulls out his laptop, hacks into the Big Bad’s computers and takes it down with a single keystroke. We’ve all seen it happen, most egregiously in Independence Day. And I’m here to tell you: it ain’t gonna happen that way unless the Big Bad is a bumbling, clueless technological neophyte–AKA a Minion, in which case they have no right being the Big Bad in the first place. There are a host of different reasons why this scenario is impossible, but the main one is simple: any computer system that holds the Ultimate Top Secret Plans of Doom will not be connected to the internet. You’re going to have to go to a specific location and pass through several layers of security and encryption just to get a listing of the files you still don’t have access to. There was a flurry of excitement recently when someone suggested that they might hack the Curiosity Mars rover, based on the fact that NASA is able to update the rover’s computers from Earth. But then people realized that, in order to pull this off, they’d need to replicate NASA’s Deep Space Network system in order to broadcast a strong enough signal, in addition to breaking the encryption and figuring out the right commands to send. Not something you do in your spare time.

2. When computers break, there’s smoke and showers of sparks. I swear, the electrical engineers who built the Enterprise’s computers must have been paid with baseball cards*, because those things are held together with spit and bubblegum. The ship gets hit–with the shields still up!–and suddenly every computer panel is sparking like a major French city on Bastille Day. Um, no, that’s not going to happen. When a computer goes belly-up, it’s actually pretty boring: things go black and quiet. It’d take a catastrophic heating-related failure to cause smoke (and even then, at least half the time, you’ll smell something but not see anything), and sparks–or even components melting–are only going to happen when something is pushed way beyond its manufactured specifications. People building battleships design a safety margin in, so things generally peak out at about 80% of the safe zone. Oh, and they also build in redundant fail-overs for the really important stuff, so that even if something goes boom, things keep working.

* Yes, I know there’s no money in the Star Trek universe’s Federation. So clearly they needed to come up with something else.

3. Computers talk like robots.

Joshua just wants to play a game…that will kill us all…

War Games is one of my all-time favorite movies. If you haven’t seen it yet, go dig up a copy. It’s one of the best “rogue computer nearly wipes out the world” movies ever, hands-down. But, I confess, it has some issues. And I’m not even going to mention the “sequel” that came out a few years ago…(shudder)…er, where was I? Oh, yes, talking computers. See, when Joshua–the computer from War Games–talked, he used a monotonous, robotic-sounding voice. And that’s been par for most major computer systems out there (the ones which have gotten a talking role, at least) for the last thirty years. But even in the early 1980′s, computers could synthesize voice decently. And we’re in 2012 now; everyone’s got GPS units that sound like, well, whatever we want them to. And if a GPS can do that, then my Doomsday Computer to End All can talk to me in a nice, soothing voice as it searches for the missile codes it needs in order to blow everything to little tiny bits. It may not get every inflection right, but it’ll be close.

4. Computers can’t deal with logical fallacies. There’s a Star Trek episode where Kirk destroys an android bent on enslaving humanity by saying that someone who has just confessed to being a liar always lies. The android can’t resolve this paradox–is the liar lying about being a liar?–and breaks down (complete with smoke, but, amazingly enough, no sparks). Unfortunately for Kirk, there’s very little chance that an artificial intelligence strong enough to handle natural language processing (necessary for understanding spoken commands) will not be able to disregard commands that it doesn’t understand. It doesn’t need to establish the truth or fiction of the statement; it just needs to decide to ignore it. And if it’s not capable of ignoring commands, then you can stop it just by, well, commanding it to stop.

5. Computers will eventually become so smart that they decide humanity is not needed.

Humans apparently generate more energy than they consume. Who knew?

At least in The Matrix, humanity continued to serve a purpose once the computers had taken over. They didn’t need our brains, but they did need our magical ability to produce electricity from our imaginations. But the main problem I have with that premise isn’t with the boundless energy of humanity (I’ve often wondered if I could eliminate my electric bill by putting my seven-year-old in a giant hamster wheel hooked to a generator); no, my problem is that computers are only as smart as we can make them. Oh, and there’s an entire class of problems that computers can’t solve at all (to be fair, neither can humans, but we can often intuit solutions without needing to do all the hard work). So we can make computers “smart” enough to calculate the value of pi to 5,000,000,000 digits (eventually), which no human will bother doing–but only because we’re smart enough to know how to calculate pi. It’s the same with everything we tell computers to do, even landing on Mars. Sure the computer’s doing the heavy work, but we had to tell it how to do the work in the first place. If we can’t figure out how to do something, we’re not going to be able to build a computer that can figure it out. And that’s the dirty little secret of artificial intelligence–until we can fully understand ourselves, how we think, how emotions work, what intuition and art fundamentally are, we’re not going to be able to create anything that can truly be said to think for itself. And if we ever reach such a hyper-conscious state…well, the intelligences we create will still be childish compared to us.

Oh, and here’s a bonus: if you’re still worried about the Robot Apocalypse, here’s what it will look like.

BIO: David Gale is a programmer by day, but don’t hold that against him. He loves his wife, Rabia, very dearly–even to the point of guest-posting on a moment’s notice. He’s also the creator of WriteTrack, a tool for writers who want to write a large number of words in a small amount of time, but don’t want to do the math to figure out their daily goal. And if you’re really curious/in need of something to put you to sleep, you can visit his blog.

more on science fantasy: language and vocabulary

Sorry that this is a day late! Instead of cleaning up the rough draft of this last night, I worked on my fiction. Which only goes to show that I have my priorities, straight, right?

Last week’s post on defining science fantasy (and the subsequent discussion) had me pondering more on the differences between science fiction and fantasy. This week, I want to focus on one aspect of those differences–the language and vocabulary of the two genres.

Fantasy is rooted in the past, and often draws inspiration from historical Earth cultures and societies. The literary traditions in fantasy novels often take the form of mythology, religious and prophetic texts, epic poetry, and song.

The vocabulary of science fiction, on the other hand, is drawn from the modern age, reflecting the huge leaps in technological and scientific progress. It’s unlikely that you’ll find epic poetry in science fiction; instead, you’ll find lines of code, snippets from scientific lectures and academic texts, extracts from instruction manuals, and transcripts of video and audio recordings.

So, even if science fiction and fantasy concern themselves with the same themes, they’ll use different language to do so. Take, for example, encounters with non-human sentient races. Fantasy draws its races from mythology and folklore, populating the world with elves, dwarves, dragon and sea monsters. Their origins are explained through myth and folklore. Science fiction has its aliens, but these are described in terms of their evolution and adaptation to their natural habitats.

Clarke famously said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I’m currently reading Michio Kaku’s Physics of the Future, and his predicted technology looks an awful lot like magic. While the effects of technology and magic might be similar, fantasy and science fiction employ different vocabulary to describe their use. Fantasy’s mages are science fiction’s genius physicists. Witches and wizards create portals between worlds, while space ships cross interstellar distances using FTL drives, hyperspace, and wormholes. The magically gifted might mind-speak to each other across fantasy continents; ordinary people take advantage of advanced communications to do the same in science fiction.

The processes of magic and technology also differ. A wizard’s workshop is often at the top of his lonely tower, and he makes magic by using arcane language and ritualistic gestures, maybe aided by mysterious bronze instruments and jars of dragon liver pickled at the dark of the moon. A scientist, though, is one cog in an industrial-military machine. Her lab is of steel and glass and plastic. Robotic arms and computer screens are the way she interacts with what she’s attempting to change. The end results may be the same–say, creating a whole new species–but the vocabulary used is not.

What happens when the terminology and processes of one genre creeps into the other? A mage might manipulate matter by knowing the True Names of objects or seeing a pattern of living energy. But when a mage manipulates matter by moving subatomic particles around with her mind, as in Jo Anderton’s Veiled Worlds trilogy, your fantasy just got a little bit more science-fictional.

Similarly, when you use a mystical, unmeasurable energy like the Force in your spaceships-and-guns science fiction universe (and follow that up with swords, robes, and prophecies) you’re dangling your feet in the shallows of fantasy.

This crossover of language between science fiction and fantasy is what leads me to characterize some of my work as science fantasy. I have no problem with science and magic running parallel through my worlds. Ward magic exists alongside reality-altering radioactive elements. New species are created through a hybrid process that uses magic and genetic engineering. And I like being able to use precise technical language even in my heavily fantasy-skewed worlds. I like calling an atom an atom.

Do you find the language of science fiction and fantasy to be different? What about sub-genres like steampunk and urban fantasy? Do they fit right into the middle of the spectrum where the lines between science fiction and fantasy blur?

cover reveal: rainbird

Isn’t she pretty?

Cover art and design by Ravven

And here’s the (current iteration of) the back cover blurb:

She’s a half-breed in hiding.

Rainbird never belonged. To one race, she’s chattel. To the other, she’s an abomination that should never have existed.

She lives on the sunway.

High above the ground, Rainbird is safe, as long as she does her job, keeps her head down, and never ever draws attention to herself.

But one act of sabotage is about to change everything.

For Rainbird. And for her world.

back to school for writers: Liv Rancourt on childbirth

Welcome to the Back to School for Writers blog series. Every Wednesday until the end of September, a guest poster will share their knowledge and expertise on a specific topic. Today’s guest is Liv Rancourt. Welcome, Liv!

I WISH Birth Looked Like TV

Thanks, Rabia, for having me on your blog. Since your theme is Back to School for Writers, I wanted to talk a little about a topic I deal with on a daily basis and the disconnect between reality and the way it’s portrayed in the media.

Birth.

My daughter is a big fan of the TV show Bones, and has watched many if not all the episodes. In the 2011 season finale, Bones gavebirth to a baby girl. She and her partner Booth were in a barn in the middle of nowhere when the baby arrived. On his own, Booth prepared to attend the birth, and after a series of discrete camera angles, there was a lovely baby cradled in the arms of her weary mother, the brave father reclining at her side.

Um, yeah. In case you were curious, that’s not exactly how it goes.

In reality, giving birth is a hard and glorious thing. I know this from both personal and professional experience.  I have the enormous privilege of witnessing deliveries almost every time I go to work, and while I don’t want to violate anyone’s privacy, I’d like to share some observations about what birth is not…and what it is…

Birth is not a political act, regardless of what you’re told in your birthing classes. There are as many ways to have a good birth as there are women having babies. People will share opinions about everything from the place the baby is born to the use of pain control medications to clothe diapers vs. disposables. And really, the important thing is to have a healthy baby, right? My observation is that people who approach things with that attitude – who aren’t hung up on living out their fantasy birth – are better able to cope with whatever the outcome.

Birth is messy. St Augustine said, “Inter faeces et uriname nascimur.” Between shit and piss we are born, and while smell obviously doesn’t translate to the movie screen, it’s definitely part of the real birth experience. So is blood, and sweat, and sometimes pus, and other less-appealing matter.

It can be loud, too. In addition to the laboring woman, you’ll hear the father and attendants coaching and cheering her on. I can usually tell when  Mom is getting close to delivering because the pitch drops and her cries become grunts. I’ve heard older nurses talk about the days before epidurals became common when “women used to scream babies out.” It’s a raw experience, and I have yet to see a dramatization that comes close to capturing what really goes down.

Birth is not safe. Wikipedia cites the most recent infant mortality rate in the US at about 7/1000 live births. Canada does better with 5.3 infant deaths per 1000 live births, while at the other end of the scale, Afghanistan has an infant mortality rate of 144 babies per 1000 live births. Equally concerning are the statistics for mothers. The maternal mortality ratio looks at the number of maternal deaths per 100,000 live births. For 2003, those numbers range from 2000 deaths per 100,000 live births in Sierra Leone to 0/100,000 in Ireland.

Something about statistics: it’s real hard to drill down a cluster of numbers to ONE individual birth experience. As a neonatal provider, I only get invited to someone’s first birthday party if they meet certain criteria. There have to be risk factors, indicators that something could be going wrong. And I’ll tell you what, even after fifteen years of doing this job, when I hear the baby’s heartrate start to slow down as Mom is pushing and see the tension in the obstetrician’s eyes, my insides clutch and I start praying. A couple quick Hail Mary’s help me focus and keep me from hearing the pleading in Dad’s voice or from seeing the tears in Grandma’s eyes.

That’s the part that the media NEVER gets right. Regardless of the type of birth you choose, there’s only so much you can control, and it’s that struggle, with the possibility of disaster hanging out in the corner of the room, that makes birth so scary. It’s also incredibly humbling, as again and again I witness this miraculous occurrence.

And birth is a miracle, folks. Whether your baby is an eight pound cherub delivered in your bedroom at home or a one pound peanut delivered in a major medical center, it is one of the few truly universal experiences.  You get any group of mothers together, and sooner or later they start swapping birth stories.  It’s a bonding thing, a rite of passage.  And every birth I’ve ever attended has brought up deep emotions for the people involved. I can’t say they’ve all been positive feelings, but it’s never a neutral thing.

On an intellectual level I understand why they don’t show the reality of birth on network television. They don’t need to. Seeing Bones and Booth on the ground in a barn with their new baby gives us an outline, and lets those of us who have been through it fill in the raw, messy, scary bits.  Every time I watch an episode like that, however, I end up shaking my head.  The portrayal would be so much richer if they’d just get a few more of the details right.

So how do you create a realistic portrayal of a birth? With such an overwhelming experience, it’s easy to fall into melodrama or rely on clichés. The best approach should start from the truth. If you’ve never given birth before, ask those who have what happened and how it went. Most women are willing to talk about their birth experience and will share possibly more than you ever wanted to know. Did they have problems with preterm labor, high blood pressure, or diabetes? How did they know they were in labor? It doesn’t always start with a broken bag of waters. How did they cope with the pain? You can learn a lot from real-life experiences.

For a concrete template, Wikipedia has a nice write-up on Childbirth, which gives an overview of the process and explains many pertinent terms.  Each birth is unique, and a woman who has given birth to more than one child has more than one story.  My daughter was born a month early. I had several days of early labor before my water broke and things began to progress. My son was a week late – isn’t that just like a guy? – and I had to get mad at God before labor would start. The one common element was how little I could control in either situation.  Well, that and the pain. And the incredible peace and joy I felt, holding a new little person in my arms.

Birth is a complicated process and the media rarely gets it right. To create a realistic portrayal of birth, start from the truth, using a few smelly, painful, frightening, joyful details. Remember that most of the time the outcome is beautiful, except when it’s truly devastating. It’s that fear, the wild-card element, that makes it so humbling. If you can capture that in your writing, then you really are creating art.

Liv Rancourt writes paranormal and romance, often at the same time. She lives with her husband, two teenagers, two cats and one wayward puppy. She likes to create stories that have happy endings, and finds it is a good way to balance her other job in the neonatal intensive care unit. Liv can be found on-line at her website (www.livrancourt.com), her blog (www.liv-rancourt.blogspot.com), on Facebook (www.facebook.com/liv.rancourt), or on Twitter (www.twitter.com/LivRancourt). 

are you my genre? on defining science fantasy

There is no doubt that I write fantasy. The whole secondary-world settings kinda give that away.

The trouble starts when I try to narrow my work into a sub-genre.

My stories don’t have the scale and scope of epic fantasy. They don’t have the the coming-of-age themes or adventures of heroic fantasy. I stay away from writing in a historical or alternate Earth setting, so those genres of fantasy (including steampunk) are out. Some of my work is obviously based on fairy tales, but a large part is not. YA fantasy is a nice catch-all, but my protagonists are mostly older and I write with an adult audience in mind.

But, Rabia, why not call your genre traditional fantasy and be done with it?

Well, see, that’s what I started writing, way back when. My first novel was set in a pseudo-medieval world, with its attendant attitudes and technology. But since that book, my worlds have become more modern. They feature indoor plumbing and firearms, trams and trains, elevators and radios. My societies perform great feats of science and engineering, whether its using a radioactive element to punch portals into other worlds or hanging an artificial sun on a track made from the skeletal remains of a cosmic dragon. I have magic in my worlds, but my sorcerers are just as likely to be scientists as they perform genetic experiments and create mechanical constructs.

And not only that, but I have a fixation with what goes on in high above the ground. My first novel featured a sorcerer-made flying fortress. I love to deprive worlds of their suns and create weird universes. The back stories of many of my races has them traveling from other planets. Events on my worlds are affected by what comes from the sky, whether it’s space dust or the aforementioned cosmic dragons.

You could blame all this on too many episodes of The Universe. But truth is, science fiction elements have always crept into my stories and woven themselves into the background.

Can it be that I’m really writing science fantasy?

Turns out that it’s not too easy to define what science fantasy is. It’s a fluid genre with fuzzy boundaries. Often it looks to be straightforward fantasy, with the science fiction elements so well-hidden that they come out either in later books or in bonus material. Or it might look like science fiction until the elves and dwarves show up.

Take for example, Anne McCaffrey’s Pern book. The first book, Dragonflight, has a pseudo-medieval and low-technology setting that is familiar to readers of traditional fantasy. It contains dragons, another classic fantasy element. Yet the threat to Pernese society comes not from Dark Lords rising from their underground tombs, but in the form of Thread falling from the skies when the Red Planet draws near to Pern.  In later books we learn that the dragons were genetically engineered to fight Thread and that the Pernese people can trace their origins back to our Earth.

The Star Wars movies are often classified as science fantasy, and I can see why. When you take fantasy conventions (princesses, a brotherhood of mage-monks with arcane powers, swords–even if they are made out of lasers and called sabers) and plunk them into a universe with spaceships, firearms, and tanks, you’re blending the two genres. I think one could even put Cameron’s Avatar in the same sub-genre.

I love both science (chemistry and anything space-related) and the humanities (literature and history). When I write science fantasy, I’m free to draw inspiration from both these wells. And that makes for a happier writer and better stories.

Do you read or write science fantasy? Do you have any other examples of the genre? How would you define it?

this week on writer at play

Summer’s flying by.

In just over a week, we go back to school at home. Hard to believe it, but Sir I. is going into third grade, Miss M into first grade, and the Baron into pre-K. I’ve stockpiled my school supplies, got in a big box of curricula and workbooks, photocopied, printed, and hole-punched worksheets galore. Now I need to tackle the schoolroom!

This week also brings the first post in the 2012 edition of the Back To School For Writers blog series. For the next seven Wednesdays, a guest poster will share their knowledge and expertise on a subject that is too often shrouded in misconceptions or portrayed wrongly in fiction. I’m thrilled about the series and I expect to learn a lot. I hope you will enjoy it, too!

On Monday I talk about (maybe) finding my genre and on Friday I give you a sneak peek of my latest fiction project.

Stay tuned!

curiosity on mars

This. Is. Awesome.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

More details and images of Curiosity’s mission on Mars here