S.F. Chapman's Blog, page 2
December 15, 2012
Be a good guest
When you read other people’s work, you are being invited into their heads for a visit.
The authors have undoubtedly prepared and fretted over your arrival for many hours: straightening things here and there, making many adjustments for your benefit and polishing every nook and cranny to show it off in the best light.
Your arrival certainly qualifies as a special occasion for the host.
Remember where you are and try to consider the effort that was expended for your enjoyment. You are not at your rambling homestead up on the hill or your fine beachside cottage on Oahu. You are in someone else’s abode, perhaps in a tough neighborhood in East LA or at a mining colony on Mars.
Compliments should be hearty and criticism should be muffled. Quibbling over the little mismatched soaps generously provided in the bathroom or the bit of stray dog hair on the sofa reflects more on the manners of the visitor than the skills of the resident.
Please remember to be a good guest.
SF Chapman
December 15, 2012
The authors have undoubtedly prepared and fretted over your arrival for many hours: straightening things here and there, making many adjustments for your benefit and polishing every nook and cranny to show it off in the best light.
Your arrival certainly qualifies as a special occasion for the host.
Remember where you are and try to consider the effort that was expended for your enjoyment. You are not at your rambling homestead up on the hill or your fine beachside cottage on Oahu. You are in someone else’s abode, perhaps in a tough neighborhood in East LA or at a mining colony on Mars.
Compliments should be hearty and criticism should be muffled. Quibbling over the little mismatched soaps generously provided in the bathroom or the bit of stray dog hair on the sofa reflects more on the manners of the visitor than the skills of the resident.
Please remember to be a good guest.
SF Chapman
December 15, 2012
November 23, 2012
About the book: The Ripple in Space-Time
During the warm and sleepy mid-summer’s days of 2010, I had a few gossamer ideas for a new science fiction tale floating around in my head.
I now suspect that these bits and pieces came to me at that particular time mainly as an intriguing distraction to draw my attention away from the more pressing and daunting task of beginning my third novel, the soft science fiction piece entitled Xea In The Library.
Xea is the sequel to my first work, the post-apocalyptic mystery called Floyd 5.136.
In one of those wonderful little moments of inspiration that led to much larger things, an irresistible title came to me while taking a long, hot shower: The Ripple In Space-Time.
I’d been considering the intriguing notion of ‘Space-Time,’ Albert Einstein’s speculation that space and time are inextricability linked together as the four dimension, after enjoying Isaac Asimov’s nonfiction work Atom: A Journey Across the Subatomic Cosmos, CalTech’s fantastic Mechanical Universe video lectures and Carl Sagan’s seminal series Cosmos.
The title fused together with a first chapter during a burst of nervous energy on the afternoon of August 12th.
For months I had been playing around with the idea of alternating viewpoints in a novel and I decided to write chapter 1 in the dry, formal style of a newspaper obituary. Where the novel would go from there, I had no idea at the time.
With Xea In The Library looming, I set The Ripple aside.
Almost exactly 6 months later, I returned to The Ripple In Space-Time.
Of all of my seven novels to date, I had the most fun writing this sometimes brutal, sometimes poignant and often quite tongue-in-check tale.
The Ripple in Space-Time will be available worldwide in paperback and as a Kindle e-Book on February 1st 2013.
Preorder the paperback now at Barnes & Noble.com
I now suspect that these bits and pieces came to me at that particular time mainly as an intriguing distraction to draw my attention away from the more pressing and daunting task of beginning my third novel, the soft science fiction piece entitled Xea In The Library.
Xea is the sequel to my first work, the post-apocalyptic mystery called Floyd 5.136.
In one of those wonderful little moments of inspiration that led to much larger things, an irresistible title came to me while taking a long, hot shower: The Ripple In Space-Time.
I’d been considering the intriguing notion of ‘Space-Time,’ Albert Einstein’s speculation that space and time are inextricability linked together as the four dimension, after enjoying Isaac Asimov’s nonfiction work Atom: A Journey Across the Subatomic Cosmos, CalTech’s fantastic Mechanical Universe video lectures and Carl Sagan’s seminal series Cosmos.
The title fused together with a first chapter during a burst of nervous energy on the afternoon of August 12th.
For months I had been playing around with the idea of alternating viewpoints in a novel and I decided to write chapter 1 in the dry, formal style of a newspaper obituary. Where the novel would go from there, I had no idea at the time.
With Xea In The Library looming, I set The Ripple aside.
Almost exactly 6 months later, I returned to The Ripple In Space-Time.
Of all of my seven novels to date, I had the most fun writing this sometimes brutal, sometimes poignant and often quite tongue-in-check tale.
The Ripple in Space-Time will be available worldwide in paperback and as a Kindle e-Book on February 1st 2013.
Preorder the paperback now at Barnes & Noble.com
November 16, 2012
Writers are definitely crazy
Writers are definitely crazy.
That phrase popped into my head many years ago during a brief lull while I was typing out my first novel. I uttered the words a few times trying to decide why they had come to me.
It was a warm morning in July and I was stuck partway through a subchapter and it didn’t seem that I would get unstuck anytime soon.
More as a distraction than anything else, I toyed with the phrase to see where it might lead.
Writers are definitely crazy. Being a writer, was I suspect as well?
Maybe I should consider this notion in an abstract classical psychology context.
I’ve always had a swirling, ever-changing and very detailed alternate universe buzzing around in my head; the National Institute of Health calls that sort of thing delusional with a dash of hallucinations for good measure: a strange sounding recipe that means wacko.
Mmm; this wasn’t looking good.
I thought about the tricks that I’ve used when I write dialog.
“Hello Mr. Smith, how are you today?” wondered the little girl.
“I’m just fine Becky. Thank you for asking,” replied the old man.
To knock those two lines out, I briefly become a well-attired four year old lass bedecked in a lovely white Sunday dress and then a dapper but approachable seventy-eight year old gent.
How would they sound?
I could hear their particular voices; the old man’s is warm and throaty but not quite hoarse, perhaps the result of smoking a pipe for many years; the little girl chirps in high clear tones like a sparrow might early on a spring morning.
Occasionally several people will chatter away in my head like quarrelsome chipmunks offering opinions and suggestions while I write, especially if I’m working on a frightening disaster or maybe a vexing murder.
“Intermittently becoming someone else is often referred to as Multiple Personality Disorder,” reminds the National Institute of Health.
“Auditory hallucinations can be a major component of schizophrenia,” chimes in Wikipedia.
Yikes! It seems that I’m well on my way to Bedlam.
Long ago in the 1970’s when I went to college, a wave of experimentalism left over from the previous decade was sweeping though the curriculum.
I took a composition class in the English Department called Short Story Writing. As a way to produce believable characters in our novice attempts at fiction, the instructor encouraged us to role-play different parts.
We would slide all of the classroom furniture to the side and huddle together on the floor while she called out progressively more difficult personas.
“Old women!” she’d shout and twenty-three reluctant students would hobble around like their grandmothers.
“Babies!” We rolled around on the floor crying and generally complaining about diaper rash.
“Cats!” The more adventurous staked invisible birds and mice while the more timid merely cleaned themselves or stared vacantly into space.
“Cabbage!” Nearly everyone stood in consternation while a few imaginative drama students slowly popped out of the fertile brown earth and produced wide green leaves under the warm California sun.
Later we would write a few paragraphs about what it was like to truly be an elderly woman or a hungry feline or a garden vegetable.
Nearly everyone who wrote well in that class reported that they saw the world for a time as a helpless newborn or a sharply focused tabby.
To craft good characters, you must become your characters: actually hearing their voices and feeling their aches and pains. To successfully convey the fantastic lands that have never existed, you must first dwell there for a time: climbing the mountains on the moon or swimming through clouds that shroud distant worlds. To write fiction, you must be able to imagine.
Perhaps I am crazy after all...
That phrase popped into my head many years ago during a brief lull while I was typing out my first novel. I uttered the words a few times trying to decide why they had come to me.
It was a warm morning in July and I was stuck partway through a subchapter and it didn’t seem that I would get unstuck anytime soon.
More as a distraction than anything else, I toyed with the phrase to see where it might lead.
Writers are definitely crazy. Being a writer, was I suspect as well?
Maybe I should consider this notion in an abstract classical psychology context.
I’ve always had a swirling, ever-changing and very detailed alternate universe buzzing around in my head; the National Institute of Health calls that sort of thing delusional with a dash of hallucinations for good measure: a strange sounding recipe that means wacko.
Mmm; this wasn’t looking good.
I thought about the tricks that I’ve used when I write dialog.
“Hello Mr. Smith, how are you today?” wondered the little girl.
“I’m just fine Becky. Thank you for asking,” replied the old man.
To knock those two lines out, I briefly become a well-attired four year old lass bedecked in a lovely white Sunday dress and then a dapper but approachable seventy-eight year old gent.
How would they sound?
I could hear their particular voices; the old man’s is warm and throaty but not quite hoarse, perhaps the result of smoking a pipe for many years; the little girl chirps in high clear tones like a sparrow might early on a spring morning.
Occasionally several people will chatter away in my head like quarrelsome chipmunks offering opinions and suggestions while I write, especially if I’m working on a frightening disaster or maybe a vexing murder.
“Intermittently becoming someone else is often referred to as Multiple Personality Disorder,” reminds the National Institute of Health.
“Auditory hallucinations can be a major component of schizophrenia,” chimes in Wikipedia.
Yikes! It seems that I’m well on my way to Bedlam.
Long ago in the 1970’s when I went to college, a wave of experimentalism left over from the previous decade was sweeping though the curriculum.
I took a composition class in the English Department called Short Story Writing. As a way to produce believable characters in our novice attempts at fiction, the instructor encouraged us to role-play different parts.
We would slide all of the classroom furniture to the side and huddle together on the floor while she called out progressively more difficult personas.
“Old women!” she’d shout and twenty-three reluctant students would hobble around like their grandmothers.
“Babies!” We rolled around on the floor crying and generally complaining about diaper rash.
“Cats!” The more adventurous staked invisible birds and mice while the more timid merely cleaned themselves or stared vacantly into space.
“Cabbage!” Nearly everyone stood in consternation while a few imaginative drama students slowly popped out of the fertile brown earth and produced wide green leaves under the warm California sun.
Later we would write a few paragraphs about what it was like to truly be an elderly woman or a hungry feline or a garden vegetable.
Nearly everyone who wrote well in that class reported that they saw the world for a time as a helpless newborn or a sharply focused tabby.
To craft good characters, you must become your characters: actually hearing their voices and feeling their aches and pains. To successfully convey the fantastic lands that have never existed, you must first dwell there for a time: climbing the mountains on the moon or swimming through clouds that shroud distant worlds. To write fiction, you must be able to imagine.
Perhaps I am crazy after all...
October 29, 2012
The city and the sky
Tucson is a city where there should be none. It is in the blazingly hot Sonoran desert of southern Arizona. What water there is there comes in torrents to temporarily flood the terrain. Life (human and otherwise) is ruled by these extremes: Bakingly hot or drowningly wet.
This is a city imposed upon the wilderness.
On the outskirts of the town is a graveyard for ancient military airplanes. The bones and flesh of the old flying beasts are neatly laid out in long rows. They are but sad vestiges of past glory. Carcasses of long faded vigor. An accumulation of billions of dollars spent on yesterday’s latest technology.
Airplanes don’t naturally inhabit the air.
Only an extreme expenditure of energy keeps a plane aloft or a city intact. Air and gravity force the plane back to the earth. Decay, oxidation and erosion corrupt the city and slowly return it to the wilderness.
Entropy and chaos can only be temporarily thwarted.
This is a city imposed upon the wilderness.
On the outskirts of the town is a graveyard for ancient military airplanes. The bones and flesh of the old flying beasts are neatly laid out in long rows. They are but sad vestiges of past glory. Carcasses of long faded vigor. An accumulation of billions of dollars spent on yesterday’s latest technology.
Airplanes don’t naturally inhabit the air.
Only an extreme expenditure of energy keeps a plane aloft or a city intact. Air and gravity force the plane back to the earth. Decay, oxidation and erosion corrupt the city and slowly return it to the wilderness.
Entropy and chaos can only be temporarily thwarted.
October 1, 2012
Crashing towers
There’s a game that nearly every kid ends up playing at sometime or another. Blocks or cups or rocks get stacked up to form a shaky tower.
Swaying and quivering, its stability is always in doubt.
The young builder then proudly demolishes the tower. A miniature urban renewal. The promise of an upgrade yet to be built.
Often my life has been a shaky tower. Stretching ever upward, the top bits crushing and distorting the earlier parts. Eventually the whole is unable to resist even the slightest disturbance.
Crash. Down it all goes. The past: a jagged heap of sharp edges and dusty debris. The future: a promising but vague vision of things to come.
It has happened many times. Sometimes with jarring suddenness, occasionally long predicted.
Why?
Why this titanic collapse of a life?
The loss of a beloved friend, a job that is little more than a tedious act of daily prostitution, the slow realization that a “friend” has only their interests at heart, the dull dissatisfaction with just about everything. All of these have lead to a painful crash and the hopeful ensuing self-rebuild.
Lesson learned, adjustments made, foundation stabilized.
And the tower starts upward again....
Swaying and quivering, its stability is always in doubt.
The young builder then proudly demolishes the tower. A miniature urban renewal. The promise of an upgrade yet to be built.
Often my life has been a shaky tower. Stretching ever upward, the top bits crushing and distorting the earlier parts. Eventually the whole is unable to resist even the slightest disturbance.
Crash. Down it all goes. The past: a jagged heap of sharp edges and dusty debris. The future: a promising but vague vision of things to come.
It has happened many times. Sometimes with jarring suddenness, occasionally long predicted.
Why?
Why this titanic collapse of a life?
The loss of a beloved friend, a job that is little more than a tedious act of daily prostitution, the slow realization that a “friend” has only their interests at heart, the dull dissatisfaction with just about everything. All of these have lead to a painful crash and the hopeful ensuing self-rebuild.
Lesson learned, adjustments made, foundation stabilized.
And the tower starts upward again....
September 25, 2012
The challenge awaits
As an eight year old during the long summer break from school, I would stand sullenly nearly every hot afternoon at the very edge of the neighborhood swimming pool contemplating the water.
Being a native Californian during the 1960s, I learned to swim shortly after I had mastered walking. With dozens of other youngsters, I would jostle about for hours in the pool playing dozens of games of Keep Away or Marco Polo.
But unlike other kids who leapt into the chilly water with great glee, I resisted that first frigid plunge.
I knew that the shocking transition from the comfortable and dry 90-degree air to the shivery 58-degree water was essential if I was to join the merriment, but I really didn’t like it.
No kid can ignore the prospect of great fun and eventually I would succumb. A minute or two of numbing torture was the admissions price to the watery land of youthful amusement.
Most of the grand adventures in life seem to require a similar brief and often distressing shift from the safe and dull to the bracing and exhilarating.
Progress is often painful but the rewards can be immense.
When the economy jittered into a recession a few years ago, the opportunities in the construction industry faded away and I was without work. I dithered about for a while, moodily contemplating my future.
The shimmery blue and inviting pool of writing beckoned but I resisted. It seemed like a lot of effort to produce that first book, I fretted. What if the novel wasn’t very good? Wouldn’t all that time be wasted?
What if, what if, what if...
I certainly would never know if I didn’t try.
And so I jumped in and authored my first book in July of 2009.
In the beginning I didn’t know what I was doing and it was difficult for a few weeks but I learned from my mistakes and struggled forward. The writing became easier and the results much smoother.
About a hundred days later, the work was done. My three editors agreed that the effort had paid off. That first book, entitled Floyd 5.136 is scheduled to be published in about a year.
I’ve since completed five other novels and just this month published my literary fiction novella I’m here to help, currently available at Amazon.com.
Whether it is marriage or mountain climbing, writing that first novel or learning a new language, jumping into a cold swimming pool or traveling the world, the challenge awaits but you must take the plunge.
Being a native Californian during the 1960s, I learned to swim shortly after I had mastered walking. With dozens of other youngsters, I would jostle about for hours in the pool playing dozens of games of Keep Away or Marco Polo.
But unlike other kids who leapt into the chilly water with great glee, I resisted that first frigid plunge.
I knew that the shocking transition from the comfortable and dry 90-degree air to the shivery 58-degree water was essential if I was to join the merriment, but I really didn’t like it.
No kid can ignore the prospect of great fun and eventually I would succumb. A minute or two of numbing torture was the admissions price to the watery land of youthful amusement.
Most of the grand adventures in life seem to require a similar brief and often distressing shift from the safe and dull to the bracing and exhilarating.
Progress is often painful but the rewards can be immense.
When the economy jittered into a recession a few years ago, the opportunities in the construction industry faded away and I was without work. I dithered about for a while, moodily contemplating my future.
The shimmery blue and inviting pool of writing beckoned but I resisted. It seemed like a lot of effort to produce that first book, I fretted. What if the novel wasn’t very good? Wouldn’t all that time be wasted?
What if, what if, what if...
I certainly would never know if I didn’t try.
And so I jumped in and authored my first book in July of 2009.
In the beginning I didn’t know what I was doing and it was difficult for a few weeks but I learned from my mistakes and struggled forward. The writing became easier and the results much smoother.
About a hundred days later, the work was done. My three editors agreed that the effort had paid off. That first book, entitled Floyd 5.136 is scheduled to be published in about a year.
I’ve since completed five other novels and just this month published my literary fiction novella I’m here to help, currently available at Amazon.com.
Whether it is marriage or mountain climbing, writing that first novel or learning a new language, jumping into a cold swimming pool or traveling the world, the challenge awaits but you must take the plunge.
September 14, 2012
A book by its cover
Just about a year ago as I was writing I’m here to help, some thoughts as to what the cover of the book might look like popped into my head.
Decades ago at San Francisco State, I poking around the perimeters of the School of Creative Arts before finally settled into the Design and Industry Department. One of my favorite classes was Graphics Design.
Being as ancient as I am, that was long before computers were used to layout restaurant menus or album covers. Photoshop was a brick and mortar storefront down the street where you brought your roll of 35 mm Kodacolor II for processing.
Cutting and Pasting as you slogged away on artwork was just that: carefully trimming photographs and long strips of lettering that was never quite the size and font that you wanted and eventually gluing everything down with lumpy rubber cement onto a presentation board.
It was a lot of work for often mediocre results.
I’ve since moved on with everyone else to more modern, computer-based graphic design. The scissors and the rubber cement stay in the desk drawer now.
But I still think of artwork as crudely cut bits of paper that can be slid around on a blank background before a dollop of rubber cement forever affixes them into place.
In January, I engaged the design services of my talented nephew, Clinton Anderson, and he and I toyed with several ideas for the cover of I’m here to help.
Without giving away the story, I’m here to help is about a woman named Sharon who tells her seventeen year old daughter, Renita, a long hidden tale about her past. Sharon does this by using many family photos that hang on the living room wall of their house.
Clint and I quickly decided that we both liked the idea of a mishmash of photographs spread haphazardly across a white wall for the background of the cover.
In a line from Chapter 2 of I’m here to help, Sharon describes the wall of pictures as “frozen memories; some happy, many sad and some a bit mysterious.”
We dug around and came up with a dozen or so candidates that were happy, sad or mysterious and then spent hours arranging them in a way that seemed both apparently random and subtly ironic.
When you buy a copy, either the e-book or the paperback, look just above the young woman on the front (She’s a wonderful professional model named Jordan Michaela Fowler. You can see more of her work at www.jordan-fowler.com.), there is a proud and a bit enigmatic black and white of a four year old tyke; that’s me.
Just behind Jordan/ Renita’s head is smiling elderly woman in blue: my mother and Clint’s grandma.
The portrait of my mom wraps around the spine of the paperback allowing my dad, who is next to her, to watch over the back cover copy. I guess that he is insuring that no shenanigans will break out amongst the verbs and nouns or especially those unruly adjectives.
A more recent picture of me peers out from behind some text just above the bar code. I accidentally snapped the photo a few years ago while I toyed with the self-timer on a new camera. It’s slightly out of focus and I have a mild look of annoyance at my difficulties with the unfamiliar gadget.
A good portion of my large family, past and present, populates the frames on the cover, including Clint’s kids and his wife. My brother Mark and his three kids peek out around Jordan’s hands on the front of the book.
Clint decided that our model should be gazing at a picture frame. As simple as it sounds, it required around two hundred shots to come up with one that was just right. There is a good deal of mystery in the book and we wanted to convey that on the cover. The angle of the frame and how Jordan held it sometimes threw off otherwise perfectly good shots. I wanted to add to the elusiveness of the cover by just showing a mere sliver of Jordan’s face.
Everything came together in one shot about halfway through the session.
The “picture” that Jordan is holding catches nearly everyone’s eye and I’ve been asked many questions about it, “Is it a mirror? Is it a photo of the character Renita? Is it one of the many snapshots mentioned in the book? Is she studying an image of one of the other characters?”
We had talked about Jordan holding an empty frame but Clint decided to create a colorful abstract image to clutch instead. As he snapped away, he asked her what she could make of the swirling and undefined image. If she flagged a bit, he would suggest that perhaps she was holding the abstract upside down.
It is blurred a bit from the original photo taken during the shoot, but that is what she saw.
Decades ago at San Francisco State, I poking around the perimeters of the School of Creative Arts before finally settled into the Design and Industry Department. One of my favorite classes was Graphics Design.
Being as ancient as I am, that was long before computers were used to layout restaurant menus or album covers. Photoshop was a brick and mortar storefront down the street where you brought your roll of 35 mm Kodacolor II for processing.
Cutting and Pasting as you slogged away on artwork was just that: carefully trimming photographs and long strips of lettering that was never quite the size and font that you wanted and eventually gluing everything down with lumpy rubber cement onto a presentation board.
It was a lot of work for often mediocre results.
I’ve since moved on with everyone else to more modern, computer-based graphic design. The scissors and the rubber cement stay in the desk drawer now.
But I still think of artwork as crudely cut bits of paper that can be slid around on a blank background before a dollop of rubber cement forever affixes them into place.
In January, I engaged the design services of my talented nephew, Clinton Anderson, and he and I toyed with several ideas for the cover of I’m here to help.
Without giving away the story, I’m here to help is about a woman named Sharon who tells her seventeen year old daughter, Renita, a long hidden tale about her past. Sharon does this by using many family photos that hang on the living room wall of their house.
Clint and I quickly decided that we both liked the idea of a mishmash of photographs spread haphazardly across a white wall for the background of the cover.
In a line from Chapter 2 of I’m here to help, Sharon describes the wall of pictures as “frozen memories; some happy, many sad and some a bit mysterious.”
We dug around and came up with a dozen or so candidates that were happy, sad or mysterious and then spent hours arranging them in a way that seemed both apparently random and subtly ironic.
When you buy a copy, either the e-book or the paperback, look just above the young woman on the front (She’s a wonderful professional model named Jordan Michaela Fowler. You can see more of her work at www.jordan-fowler.com.), there is a proud and a bit enigmatic black and white of a four year old tyke; that’s me.
Just behind Jordan/ Renita’s head is smiling elderly woman in blue: my mother and Clint’s grandma.
The portrait of my mom wraps around the spine of the paperback allowing my dad, who is next to her, to watch over the back cover copy. I guess that he is insuring that no shenanigans will break out amongst the verbs and nouns or especially those unruly adjectives.
A more recent picture of me peers out from behind some text just above the bar code. I accidentally snapped the photo a few years ago while I toyed with the self-timer on a new camera. It’s slightly out of focus and I have a mild look of annoyance at my difficulties with the unfamiliar gadget.
A good portion of my large family, past and present, populates the frames on the cover, including Clint’s kids and his wife. My brother Mark and his three kids peek out around Jordan’s hands on the front of the book.
Clint decided that our model should be gazing at a picture frame. As simple as it sounds, it required around two hundred shots to come up with one that was just right. There is a good deal of mystery in the book and we wanted to convey that on the cover. The angle of the frame and how Jordan held it sometimes threw off otherwise perfectly good shots. I wanted to add to the elusiveness of the cover by just showing a mere sliver of Jordan’s face.
Everything came together in one shot about halfway through the session.
The “picture” that Jordan is holding catches nearly everyone’s eye and I’ve been asked many questions about it, “Is it a mirror? Is it a photo of the character Renita? Is it one of the many snapshots mentioned in the book? Is she studying an image of one of the other characters?”
We had talked about Jordan holding an empty frame but Clint decided to create a colorful abstract image to clutch instead. As he snapped away, he asked her what she could make of the swirling and undefined image. If she flagged a bit, he would suggest that perhaps she was holding the abstract upside down.
It is blurred a bit from the original photo taken during the shoot, but that is what she saw.
