Paul Briggs's Blog, page 2
September 19, 2017
The Motherlode of Writing Prompts
If you’re a writer and you have not already discovered the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, I highly recommend it. It’s a compendium of freshly coined words for feelings we don’t have words for in English. It’s also the single greatest source of writing prompts I’ve ever seen.
Let me show you a little of what this site has to offer. We’ll start with altschmerz, which the Dictionary defines as “weariness with the same old issues that you’ve always had—the same boring flaws and anxieties you’ve been gnawing on for years.”
Lock has a moment of this in Chapter 3 of Locksmith’s Journeys, when he sees a cougar ripping into the carcass of a deer and realizes that even after the climactic fight that ended Locksmith’s Closet, he still has a slight aversion to the sight and smell of blood. Late in Year Five of Altered Seasons: Monsoonrise, Isabel’s frustration with her own irrational, egodystonic guilt drives her to… nope, not spoiling it.
The Dictionary defines anemoia as “nostalgia for a time you’ve never known.” There is a moment in Year Four of Monsoonrise where Isabel feels something close to this:
I think an ambitious young engineer like Isabel could hardly help feeling a certain longing for an era like that. (Although, as a bisexual female engineer, she would have had some trouble fitting in.)
Another — and you really should go and read the whole description of this one — is kenopsia, “the eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that’s usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet.” Locksmith’s Closet and much of Locksmith’s Journeys are absolutely dominated by kenopsia. The exploration of an abandoned world, hour after hour looking at landscape after landscape where people are (to quote the Dictionary) “so conspicuously absent they glow like neon signs,” takes something of a toll on Lock’s mental well-being. There’s also going to be a little of it in Locksmith’s War, but for the most part this delicate emotion has to take a back seat to paranoia and terror.
This video cites a house whose inhabitants are moving out as an example of kenopsia, which brings to mind this passage from Monsoonrise:
Pretty much every major character I've ever invented suffers from monachopsis, “the subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place, as maladapted to your surroundings as a seal on a beach.” (I give you one guess why.) Isabel at a party, Lock in almost any social setting and Irene J. Harris anywhere in the built environment all suffer from monachopsis.
At the end of Monsoonrise Isabel has an overwhelming moment of nodus tollens, “the realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore.” Lock, on the other hand, never really expects things to make that much sense, so this isn't so much of a problem for him.
Finally, here is the usually unflappable Jerome Ross getting flapped upside the head by opia, “the ambiguous intensity of looking someone in the eye”:
On an unrelated note, Renee Scattergood's novel Shadow Stalker Part 1 (Episodes 1 - 6) (available here) is listed in the fantasy category on the TCK Publishing 2017 Readers' Choice Awards. I'll get around to reviewing this book properly one day. For now, all I'll say is that it manages to take a trope I'm very tired of and do something interesting with it. Vote!
Let me show you a little of what this site has to offer. We’ll start with altschmerz, which the Dictionary defines as “weariness with the same old issues that you’ve always had—the same boring flaws and anxieties you’ve been gnawing on for years.”
Lock has a moment of this in Chapter 3 of Locksmith’s Journeys, when he sees a cougar ripping into the carcass of a deer and realizes that even after the climactic fight that ended Locksmith’s Closet, he still has a slight aversion to the sight and smell of blood. Late in Year Five of Altered Seasons: Monsoonrise, Isabel’s frustration with her own irrational, egodystonic guilt drives her to… nope, not spoiling it.
The Dictionary defines anemoia as “nostalgia for a time you’ve never known.” There is a moment in Year Four of Monsoonrise where Isabel feels something close to this:
The ORCS was a product of a different America than the one Isabel had grown up in. It was planned and built in an age of big dreams and big projects — the interstate highway system, the Apollo program… the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, come to think of it. It reminded her a lot of the Bay Bridge — massive, strong, purely functional but with a kind of unintentional beauty.
I think an ambitious young engineer like Isabel could hardly help feeling a certain longing for an era like that. (Although, as a bisexual female engineer, she would have had some trouble fitting in.)
Another — and you really should go and read the whole description of this one — is kenopsia, “the eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that’s usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet.” Locksmith’s Closet and much of Locksmith’s Journeys are absolutely dominated by kenopsia. The exploration of an abandoned world, hour after hour looking at landscape after landscape where people are (to quote the Dictionary) “so conspicuously absent they glow like neon signs,” takes something of a toll on Lock’s mental well-being. There’s also going to be a little of it in Locksmith’s War, but for the most part this delicate emotion has to take a back seat to paranoia and terror.
This video cites a house whose inhabitants are moving out as an example of kenopsia, which brings to mind this passage from Monsoonrise:
Afterwards, Isabel went through the house one last time, making sure nothing valuable was in here. With no furniture, with nothing on the walls but wallpaper and none of Jourdain’s toys on the floor, the place seemed strangely impersonal. It was as if this house were an elderly relative that had forgotten she was family.
Pretty much every major character I've ever invented suffers from monachopsis, “the subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place, as maladapted to your surroundings as a seal on a beach.” (I give you one guess why.) Isabel at a party, Lock in almost any social setting and Irene J. Harris anywhere in the built environment all suffer from monachopsis.
At the end of Monsoonrise Isabel has an overwhelming moment of nodus tollens, “the realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore.” Lock, on the other hand, never really expects things to make that much sense, so this isn't so much of a problem for him.
Finally, here is the usually unflappable Jerome Ross getting flapped upside the head by opia, “the ambiguous intensity of looking someone in the eye”:
Rome was normally a big believer in eye contact, but sitting in front of Governor Camberg’s desk tested his faith. Her eyes were warm and brown and gave him the sense that they were watching his thoughts put themselves together before he could even open his mouth. She was like his mom, only smarter. And she had that little smile on her face.
On an unrelated note, Renee Scattergood's novel Shadow Stalker Part 1 (Episodes 1 - 6) (available here) is listed in the fantasy category on the TCK Publishing 2017 Readers' Choice Awards. I'll get around to reviewing this book properly one day. For now, all I'll say is that it manages to take a trope I'm very tired of and do something interesting with it. Vote!
September 12, 2017
Satellite Characters
First, the bad news — I’m not going to have Altered Seasons: Monsoonrise out until early next year. Which means I’m going to miss out on the holiday shopping season. (At least for this book. I have others.)
Now for something I’ve been thinking about since a talk an author gave at a conference I went to recently. (If you’re curious, the author is Viet Dinh. His book After Disasters is on my to-read list.)
I’ve been thinking about Satellite Characters. Satellite Characters are supporting characters who act like supporting characters, and even seem to think of themselves as supporting characters. They are characters whose life seems to revolve around the main character, who seem to be more preoccupied with his or her thoughts and feelings than with their own. Sometimes they are servants or employees of the main character, but often they aren’t.
This can be done well or badly. Done well, they are characters who could be the main character of their own story but act this way for reasons of their own. Done badly, they make the story feel false and artificial.
Case in point — a scene in Left Behind. The protagonist, Rayford Steele, has just lost his wife and son in a mass disappearance. The key word there is mass. All the children in the entire world have vanished in the Rapture, along with a number of adults, not to mention those who died in car and plane crashes because God just had to get everybody at the exact same moment and couldn’t hold off on taking a few people until they’d landed or stopped. Every parent is bereaved, and anyone on Earth who isn’t at least shocked and stunned is someone who hasn’t been paying attention. And yet, when Ray asks a co-worker "You know about my family?" the response is "Everybody here knows, sir." Fred Clark nails this one.
Well, yes. The other characters are, in effect, Satellite Characters, not (I suspect) because LaHaye and Jenkins thought it should be so but because they forgot that every character is the protagonist of his or her own story. Writers don’t normally make that mistake, but — to be blunt — LaHaye and Jenkins aren’t writers trying to evangelize, they’re evangelists trying to write.
Of course, where you really run into trouble is when your main character is white and your satellite character isn’t, or your main character is male and your secondary character is female, or your main character is straight and your secondary character is gay. The Magical Negro, the Black Best Friend, the Asian Sidekick, the Gay Best Friend, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl* — despite their differences, they all have this in common. They are individuals of such merit and wisdom that it would seem their creator could not possibly be prejudiced, but you have to ask why they don’t have anything better to do than aid and/or mentor the far more flawed main character.
I try to be careful how I use Satellite Characters in my own writing. In a crucial scene in Locksmith’s Closet, Lucy Thames, a character who has been emotionally supportive of Lock and whom we’ve never seen except when she was exerting time and effort on his behalf, has to absent herself at a critical moment because (as a result of in-story events) somebody else needs her help more than he does. This not only leaves Lock desperate enough to make the unwise decisions that allow the plot to go forward, but it gets across that Lucy is more than just his personal talking teddy bear — or rather, she plays that role for a lot of kids and she can’t show favoritism.
In Altered Seasons: Monsoonrise, we meet Jerome Ross. He describes himself as “the right hand of Carrie Camberg and the pimp hand of God.” The first part of that is the important part. He has worked for others, but we never see him doing it. He’s a Satellite, but one that broadcasts a lot of entertainment. I’ll get into his psychology and his reasons for being the way he is in Altered Seasons: Age of Consequences.And there is a moment, near the end of Monsoonrise, when Isabel considers a course of action which may lead to her becoming a Satellite Character — in fact, she uses the metaphor of being pulled into orbit around someone else. She prizes her independence, but her options at this point are limited.
In other words, tropes are tools. It’s okay to launch a few Satellites, as long as you know you’re doing it, and why.
* If I wasn’t working on too many other things, I’d write a story in which five characters fitting these tropes team up to save the world from something or other. They succeed, but none of them ever actually takes full charge of the group and each of them occasionally stops for a moment to reflect that they feel like their team is missing somebody, but nobody can figure out who. (Someone else has probably already done this.)
Now for something I’ve been thinking about since a talk an author gave at a conference I went to recently. (If you’re curious, the author is Viet Dinh. His book After Disasters is on my to-read list.)
I’ve been thinking about Satellite Characters. Satellite Characters are supporting characters who act like supporting characters, and even seem to think of themselves as supporting characters. They are characters whose life seems to revolve around the main character, who seem to be more preoccupied with his or her thoughts and feelings than with their own. Sometimes they are servants or employees of the main character, but often they aren’t.
This can be done well or badly. Done well, they are characters who could be the main character of their own story but act this way for reasons of their own. Done badly, they make the story feel false and artificial.
Case in point — a scene in Left Behind. The protagonist, Rayford Steele, has just lost his wife and son in a mass disappearance. The key word there is mass. All the children in the entire world have vanished in the Rapture, along with a number of adults, not to mention those who died in car and plane crashes because God just had to get everybody at the exact same moment and couldn’t hold off on taking a few people until they’d landed or stopped. Every parent is bereaved, and anyone on Earth who isn’t at least shocked and stunned is someone who hasn’t been paying attention. And yet, when Ray asks a co-worker "You know about my family?" the response is "Everybody here knows, sir." Fred Clark nails this one.
"Everybody knows," and everybody cares, about Rayford. They know that he lost his wife — the same wife he couldn't stand to be around, the one he blew off to hit on young flight attendants — and they regard his loss as somehow more special, more important than their own. It's not just that these people are undeveloped extras in the background of somebody else's story — it's that they know they're merely extras in the background, and they enthusiastically embrace this status.
Well, yes. The other characters are, in effect, Satellite Characters, not (I suspect) because LaHaye and Jenkins thought it should be so but because they forgot that every character is the protagonist of his or her own story. Writers don’t normally make that mistake, but — to be blunt — LaHaye and Jenkins aren’t writers trying to evangelize, they’re evangelists trying to write.
Of course, where you really run into trouble is when your main character is white and your satellite character isn’t, or your main character is male and your secondary character is female, or your main character is straight and your secondary character is gay. The Magical Negro, the Black Best Friend, the Asian Sidekick, the Gay Best Friend, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl* — despite their differences, they all have this in common. They are individuals of such merit and wisdom that it would seem their creator could not possibly be prejudiced, but you have to ask why they don’t have anything better to do than aid and/or mentor the far more flawed main character.
I try to be careful how I use Satellite Characters in my own writing. In a crucial scene in Locksmith’s Closet, Lucy Thames, a character who has been emotionally supportive of Lock and whom we’ve never seen except when she was exerting time and effort on his behalf, has to absent herself at a critical moment because (as a result of in-story events) somebody else needs her help more than he does. This not only leaves Lock desperate enough to make the unwise decisions that allow the plot to go forward, but it gets across that Lucy is more than just his personal talking teddy bear — or rather, she plays that role for a lot of kids and she can’t show favoritism.
In Altered Seasons: Monsoonrise, we meet Jerome Ross. He describes himself as “the right hand of Carrie Camberg and the pimp hand of God.” The first part of that is the important part. He has worked for others, but we never see him doing it. He’s a Satellite, but one that broadcasts a lot of entertainment. I’ll get into his psychology and his reasons for being the way he is in Altered Seasons: Age of Consequences.And there is a moment, near the end of Monsoonrise, when Isabel considers a course of action which may lead to her becoming a Satellite Character — in fact, she uses the metaphor of being pulled into orbit around someone else. She prizes her independence, but her options at this point are limited.
In other words, tropes are tools. It’s okay to launch a few Satellites, as long as you know you’re doing it, and why.
* If I wasn’t working on too many other things, I’d write a story in which five characters fitting these tropes team up to save the world from something or other. They succeed, but none of them ever actually takes full charge of the group and each of them occasionally stops for a moment to reflect that they feel like their team is missing somebody, but nobody can figure out who. (Someone else has probably already done this.)
August 29, 2017
Cover Me, I'm Going In
It’s time to start thinking about what a book cover for Altered Seasons: Monsoonrise should look like.
For a different sort of book, this would be a lot easier. There are people who do pre-made covers for crime thrillers, fantasy, science fiction, westerns and romance. If you are a genre author and you see a cover that happens to be a good enough fit for your book, you can buy it. From what I’ve seen of these covers, they are excellent works of art, and I have nothing but praise for the artists who make them. But it does say something about the genres in question that people can do this at all.
Cli-fi is a relatively new genre. No one has come to a decision on what the cover of a cli-fi novel is supposed to look like. Authors have come to cli-fi from both literary fiction and science fiction, and this shows in the covers. Some of them are sort of minimalist. These are the covers of The Water Knife and The History of Bees.
Here are three different covers of Flight Behavior.
The covers of The Year of the Flood and American War are a little more dramatic, although in the case of the former that has more to do with the font.
And for contrast, these are the covers of The Burning Years and New York 2140. Note that although one of them was done by an absolute top-of-the-line artist, they both have more of a science-fiction style.
I’m a science fiction writer. I might also be literary, but that decision will probably be reached about fifty years after I’m dead. So for me, the bottom line is that anyone who can do a sci-fi cover can do a cli-fi cover.
The next question is what to put on that cover. You might be wondering why this is my job — normally, the cover artist would come up with an idea. Thing is, I want to get this out in time for Christmas shopping, and I want the image in time to be used in pre-release promotion. Having an artist read through a novel more than 140,000 words long and then come up with an inspiration would not speed the process.
My first idea was to show Isabel Bradshaw doing a dramatic pose at the Old River Control Structure in Louisiana. There were two problems with this.
The first one is that although the ORCS arguably deserves to be an American icon like Hoover Dam or the Brooklyn Bridge*, it isn’t one. People won’t recognize it. The second problem was that the ORCS, as you can see, is gigantic. In a picture that showed anything but the smallest part of it, Isabel would be a tiny figure. In fact, in doing this cover I found myself faced with the same problem I often faced during the novel — showing events on both the human scale and the epic scale.
(And something about the idea of Isabel doing a dramatic pose bothered me. Isabel is not the sort of person who does dramatic poses. She’s the sort of person who rolls up her sleeves and does things while other people are striking dramatic poses and making sure the artist is getting their good angle and the light is hitting them just so.)
So one idea I came up with was an evacuation — headlights receding into the distance on both sides of an interstate highway, with a storm on the horizon, as seen in this rough, not-entirely-finished concept art.
Another idea I had was a wall of data and a wall of stormcloud (basically an overcast, stormy sky tipped onto its side) with Isabel in the middle, symbolically standing between order and chaos, as seen in this really rough, half-finished concept art.
Judging by Facebook analytics, the first image was the more popular one, although that might just be because the second one was only half done and depended much more on my own amateurish skills. Also, someone who really is an artist thought Isabel in this picture looked like an actuary, which is not what I was going for at all. Also, I think the band logo on her shirt needs some rethinking.
That said, there seems to be general agreement that a human image of some sort would be good, and Isabel is the most photogenic of my major characters. Maybe if I had her doing a (sigh) power pose on one side and the highway/evacuation/storm combo on the other…
*If it ever collapsed, the Mississippi would have an entirely new outlet and we'd have to abandon the city of New Orleans and move a big chunk of our petrochemical industry somewhere else.
For a different sort of book, this would be a lot easier. There are people who do pre-made covers for crime thrillers, fantasy, science fiction, westerns and romance. If you are a genre author and you see a cover that happens to be a good enough fit for your book, you can buy it. From what I’ve seen of these covers, they are excellent works of art, and I have nothing but praise for the artists who make them. But it does say something about the genres in question that people can do this at all.
Cli-fi is a relatively new genre. No one has come to a decision on what the cover of a cli-fi novel is supposed to look like. Authors have come to cli-fi from both literary fiction and science fiction, and this shows in the covers. Some of them are sort of minimalist. These are the covers of The Water Knife and The History of Bees.
Here are three different covers of Flight Behavior.
The covers of The Year of the Flood and American War are a little more dramatic, although in the case of the former that has more to do with the font.
And for contrast, these are the covers of The Burning Years and New York 2140. Note that although one of them was done by an absolute top-of-the-line artist, they both have more of a science-fiction style.
I’m a science fiction writer. I might also be literary, but that decision will probably be reached about fifty years after I’m dead. So for me, the bottom line is that anyone who can do a sci-fi cover can do a cli-fi cover.
The next question is what to put on that cover. You might be wondering why this is my job — normally, the cover artist would come up with an idea. Thing is, I want to get this out in time for Christmas shopping, and I want the image in time to be used in pre-release promotion. Having an artist read through a novel more than 140,000 words long and then come up with an inspiration would not speed the process.
My first idea was to show Isabel Bradshaw doing a dramatic pose at the Old River Control Structure in Louisiana. There were two problems with this.
The first one is that although the ORCS arguably deserves to be an American icon like Hoover Dam or the Brooklyn Bridge*, it isn’t one. People won’t recognize it. The second problem was that the ORCS, as you can see, is gigantic. In a picture that showed anything but the smallest part of it, Isabel would be a tiny figure. In fact, in doing this cover I found myself faced with the same problem I often faced during the novel — showing events on both the human scale and the epic scale.
(And something about the idea of Isabel doing a dramatic pose bothered me. Isabel is not the sort of person who does dramatic poses. She’s the sort of person who rolls up her sleeves and does things while other people are striking dramatic poses and making sure the artist is getting their good angle and the light is hitting them just so.)
So one idea I came up with was an evacuation — headlights receding into the distance on both sides of an interstate highway, with a storm on the horizon, as seen in this rough, not-entirely-finished concept art.
Another idea I had was a wall of data and a wall of stormcloud (basically an overcast, stormy sky tipped onto its side) with Isabel in the middle, symbolically standing between order and chaos, as seen in this really rough, half-finished concept art.
Judging by Facebook analytics, the first image was the more popular one, although that might just be because the second one was only half done and depended much more on my own amateurish skills. Also, someone who really is an artist thought Isabel in this picture looked like an actuary, which is not what I was going for at all. Also, I think the band logo on her shirt needs some rethinking.
That said, there seems to be general agreement that a human image of some sort would be good, and Isabel is the most photogenic of my major characters. Maybe if I had her doing a (sigh) power pose on one side and the highway/evacuation/storm combo on the other…
*If it ever collapsed, the Mississippi would have an entirely new outlet and we'd have to abandon the city of New Orleans and move a big chunk of our petrochemical industry somewhere else.
August 22, 2017
Some Progress to Report
It’s approaching the end of August, the month in which I was planning to release the third book of the Locksmith Trilogy. Obviously, that's not going to happen. Locksmith’s War is about half done.
The good news is that Book One of Altered Seasons, tentatively titled Altered Seasons: Monsoonrise, is done. It’s over 141,500 words long. I am meeting with a publisher soon, and am thinking of cover designs. Now comes the fun part — the pre-release marketing plan. First I’ll need a finalized cover image and release date, so everyone will know when to expect it and what to look for. Also, I have two websites, one of which looks about ten years old and the other looks like it emerged from the eldritch mist of Geocities. I’m going to have to get those updated and redesigned before I do anything with them.
Speaking of climate change, there’s been some debate on Twitter and elsewhere over exactly what tone to strike. You may have read this article, for instance. Not everyone is sure that this sort of thing helps. Some say we should emphasize available solutions, and the side benefits they carry with them.
Realistically, if we want to avoid some degree of climate change, the best time to act is… about twenty years ago. It’s already happening. What isn’t set in stone is exactly how much we have to deal with. Think of it as being on a scale of 0 to 10 — 0 being the state of the world at the start of the Industrial Revolution, 1 going on 2 being where we are now, 8 or 9 being the point where the tropics become hot enough to be uninhabitable for mammals like us and 10 being the Canfield Ocean scenario, where the deep ocean basically rots and produces enough hydrogen sulfide to render everywhere uninhabitable. Between 2 and 8 there are many different possible scenarios for the world, many gradations of degradation, each worse than the last. The world doesn’t have to venture very far in that direction for things to get really, really bad. This is the world of Altered Seasons — 2 going on 3, on that scale.
Personally, I try to avoid outright despair, because one thing I’ve noticed is that people who fundamentally do not want to act on the issue, or do not want to grant the government the power to act, will go directly from “no problem, in the future we will adapt and thrive” to “guess we’re all doomed” without ever hitting “this is a problem and we should do something about it.” Ironically, their opposition to acting comes from a love of freedom and a fear of constraint. In times of national emergency, freedom is the first thing to go, and, as said, long before we get to the end of the world we’ll reach something that could easily qualify as a national emergency… except that emergencies are not supposed to last for the rest of your life.
From a writer’s perspective, the most interesting scenarios are some of the nearest and least bad scenarios. Those are the ones where people and governments still have some degree of choice as to how they deal with the situation that confronts them.
The good news is that Book One of Altered Seasons, tentatively titled Altered Seasons: Monsoonrise, is done. It’s over 141,500 words long. I am meeting with a publisher soon, and am thinking of cover designs. Now comes the fun part — the pre-release marketing plan. First I’ll need a finalized cover image and release date, so everyone will know when to expect it and what to look for. Also, I have two websites, one of which looks about ten years old and the other looks like it emerged from the eldritch mist of Geocities. I’m going to have to get those updated and redesigned before I do anything with them.
Speaking of climate change, there’s been some debate on Twitter and elsewhere over exactly what tone to strike. You may have read this article, for instance. Not everyone is sure that this sort of thing helps. Some say we should emphasize available solutions, and the side benefits they carry with them.
Realistically, if we want to avoid some degree of climate change, the best time to act is… about twenty years ago. It’s already happening. What isn’t set in stone is exactly how much we have to deal with. Think of it as being on a scale of 0 to 10 — 0 being the state of the world at the start of the Industrial Revolution, 1 going on 2 being where we are now, 8 or 9 being the point where the tropics become hot enough to be uninhabitable for mammals like us and 10 being the Canfield Ocean scenario, where the deep ocean basically rots and produces enough hydrogen sulfide to render everywhere uninhabitable. Between 2 and 8 there are many different possible scenarios for the world, many gradations of degradation, each worse than the last. The world doesn’t have to venture very far in that direction for things to get really, really bad. This is the world of Altered Seasons — 2 going on 3, on that scale.
Personally, I try to avoid outright despair, because one thing I’ve noticed is that people who fundamentally do not want to act on the issue, or do not want to grant the government the power to act, will go directly from “no problem, in the future we will adapt and thrive” to “guess we’re all doomed” without ever hitting “this is a problem and we should do something about it.” Ironically, their opposition to acting comes from a love of freedom and a fear of constraint. In times of national emergency, freedom is the first thing to go, and, as said, long before we get to the end of the world we’ll reach something that could easily qualify as a national emergency… except that emergencies are not supposed to last for the rest of your life.
From a writer’s perspective, the most interesting scenarios are some of the nearest and least bad scenarios. Those are the ones where people and governments still have some degree of choice as to how they deal with the situation that confronts them.
July 12, 2017
Things Writers Worry About
One modern (I think) literary convention is that unless the story is written in first-person POV, internal dialogue is expressed in italics, so that the reader doesn’t mistake the character’s thoughts for things he or she says out loud. Not every writer does this, but it’s common.
In writing the Altered Seasons books, I’m experimenting with this a little. Isabel has a number of internal conversations with something that poses as her conscience but may actually be just a lump of internalized negativity with delusions of wokeness. I’m using bold rather than italics to distinguish this particular inner voice, as follows:
Thing is, Isabel isn’t the only character with an inner voice she’d like to hit the mute button on. Carrie also has a voice like that. It is the voice of the part of her that is constantly calculating her own advantage. She thinks of it as “the cold thing” or her “inner sociopath.” You can read all about it here.
It occurred to me to wonder if that voice should be in boldface too, since it is also egodystonic — that is, it’s something the character doesn’t like to think of as a part of her mind. After some thought, I decided against this.
One reason is that they’re two very different voices. One is deliberately unhelpful, the other helpful in a rather nasty way. The other reason is that Isabel’s inner critic rarely manifests itself in her behavior. Most of the other characters who know her would say that she’s prone to an excess of defensiveness, not realizing what it is she’s trying to defend herself against. Whereas Carrie sometimes chooses to act on the advice of her inner sociopath, and sometimes chooses not to. Basic existentialism says we are what we do, not what we think or intend.
If all this seems like way too much philosophizing for a question like this, well, welcome to the voices in my head.
In writing the Altered Seasons books, I’m experimenting with this a little. Isabel has a number of internal conversations with something that poses as her conscience but may actually be just a lump of internalized negativity with delusions of wokeness. I’m using bold rather than italics to distinguish this particular inner voice, as follows:
You calmly told Governor Camberg that Miami and New Orleans were lost causes. Now you’re shedding tears over a place whose whole population could fit into one housing project in either of those cities. Parochial much?
Smith Island is different. It literally has its own accent. Last time Mom and I got to talking about Sandy, Mom slipped and said “billionahrr.” If we lose it, we’ve lost something irreplaceable.
Right. Unlike New Orleans, which is of no cultural importance whatsoever. Especially when it comes to music or cuisine.
What about the Smith Island cake? It’s the official state dessert. And it’s delicious, I might add.
Thing is, Isabel isn’t the only character with an inner voice she’d like to hit the mute button on. Carrie also has a voice like that. It is the voice of the part of her that is constantly calculating her own advantage. She thinks of it as “the cold thing” or her “inner sociopath.” You can read all about it here.
It occurred to me to wonder if that voice should be in boldface too, since it is also egodystonic — that is, it’s something the character doesn’t like to think of as a part of her mind. After some thought, I decided against this.
One reason is that they’re two very different voices. One is deliberately unhelpful, the other helpful in a rather nasty way. The other reason is that Isabel’s inner critic rarely manifests itself in her behavior. Most of the other characters who know her would say that she’s prone to an excess of defensiveness, not realizing what it is she’s trying to defend herself against. Whereas Carrie sometimes chooses to act on the advice of her inner sociopath, and sometimes chooses not to. Basic existentialism says we are what we do, not what we think or intend.
If all this seems like way too much philosophizing for a question like this, well, welcome to the voices in my head.
July 8, 2017
A Preach Allergy
This is an advertisement I recently saw on Facebook for the Netflix original movie Okja. I look upon this ad, and I marvel that people came up with it. Not only that, they filmed it. And when they had filmed it, they looked at it and said to themselves, “Yes, this is a good ad. This ad will persuade viewers to watch this movie. It will not persuade them to avoid it like the annual Anchovy and Pineapple Pizza Festival with live music by Nickelback.”
And I wonder if these people know something I don’t. (In fact, they almost certainly do. One thing my brief career in sales taught me was that I can’t sell steak to a hungry dog. People tell me that as a writer, I am my own best marketer, and this is true… but, alas, only by default.)
There is a show, also on Netflix, called Dear White People. I feel like I’m supposed to be watching it, but I haven’t. The title is kind of a turnoff. “Dear White People” is more specific than “To Whom It May Concern,” but not by a whole lot. I feel like it’s trying to tell me something, and that something is “I don’t know who you are, and I would consider it an imposition on my time and attention if I ever had to meet you face to face, but I believe I know what’s wrong with you and what you ought to do about it.” Which is not a message that appeals to me, but again, clearly some people like it.
This is going to sound strange, coming from someone whose politics run left of center, but… I don’t like to be preached at. I just don’t. Maybe it’s just that I was brought up Quaker. Different Quaker meetings follow different traditions, but the one I went to always followed the tradition of silent worship. The theory is that God might actually have something to say to one of us, and we should be listening in case He does. Anyway, I never got the chance to build up a tolerance for preaching.
But obviously some people like it. I wonder if it’s a lot of people.
And here’s the strange part — even though I don’t like preaching, every now and then I kind of like looking at PSAs* on YouTube. I can’t say what it is I like about them. They’re meant to be preachy, much more then they’re ever meant to be entertaining. Thing is, my favorite PSAs tend to be about bad behaviors I don’t engage in, such as smoking and drunk driving. When I watch them, I find myself identifying with the messenger, not the intended recipient. I have a dark suspicion that this also explains the appeal of a good many other message-oriented pieces of work.
So why does all this concern me? Because (as I may have mentioned) I’m working on a piece of cli-fi while consciously trying to avoid preachiness. I’m not trying to write a book that people buy out of a sense of obligation to a cause and then feel their work is done. In the first place, I have no idea how to elicit such a sense of obligation. In the second place, I want to be read for pleasure.
So while there are moments in what are now the Altered Seasons books where characters reflect on how nice it would be if people in previous decades had listened to the many, many warnings they were given, these moments are few and far between. The characters spend most of their time trying with various levels of success to cope with their drastically changing circumstances while preserving their values and finding humor, occasional joy and in general reasons to get up in the morning. I have some experience in this from writing the Locksmith books, which are not too dark and grim despite being half set in a future world where the human race has gone extinct.
I just hope I haven’t misjudged the market too badly.
*Public service announcements. Also called PIFs, or public information films.
And I wonder if these people know something I don’t. (In fact, they almost certainly do. One thing my brief career in sales taught me was that I can’t sell steak to a hungry dog. People tell me that as a writer, I am my own best marketer, and this is true… but, alas, only by default.)
There is a show, also on Netflix, called Dear White People. I feel like I’m supposed to be watching it, but I haven’t. The title is kind of a turnoff. “Dear White People” is more specific than “To Whom It May Concern,” but not by a whole lot. I feel like it’s trying to tell me something, and that something is “I don’t know who you are, and I would consider it an imposition on my time and attention if I ever had to meet you face to face, but I believe I know what’s wrong with you and what you ought to do about it.” Which is not a message that appeals to me, but again, clearly some people like it.
This is going to sound strange, coming from someone whose politics run left of center, but… I don’t like to be preached at. I just don’t. Maybe it’s just that I was brought up Quaker. Different Quaker meetings follow different traditions, but the one I went to always followed the tradition of silent worship. The theory is that God might actually have something to say to one of us, and we should be listening in case He does. Anyway, I never got the chance to build up a tolerance for preaching.
But obviously some people like it. I wonder if it’s a lot of people.
And here’s the strange part — even though I don’t like preaching, every now and then I kind of like looking at PSAs* on YouTube. I can’t say what it is I like about them. They’re meant to be preachy, much more then they’re ever meant to be entertaining. Thing is, my favorite PSAs tend to be about bad behaviors I don’t engage in, such as smoking and drunk driving. When I watch them, I find myself identifying with the messenger, not the intended recipient. I have a dark suspicion that this also explains the appeal of a good many other message-oriented pieces of work.
So why does all this concern me? Because (as I may have mentioned) I’m working on a piece of cli-fi while consciously trying to avoid preachiness. I’m not trying to write a book that people buy out of a sense of obligation to a cause and then feel their work is done. In the first place, I have no idea how to elicit such a sense of obligation. In the second place, I want to be read for pleasure.
So while there are moments in what are now the Altered Seasons books where characters reflect on how nice it would be if people in previous decades had listened to the many, many warnings they were given, these moments are few and far between. The characters spend most of their time trying with various levels of success to cope with their drastically changing circumstances while preserving their values and finding humor, occasional joy and in general reasons to get up in the morning. I have some experience in this from writing the Locksmith books, which are not too dark and grim despite being half set in a future world where the human race has gone extinct.
I just hope I haven’t misjudged the market too badly.
*Public service announcements. Also called PIFs, or public information films.
June 10, 2017
The Eternal Quest for Meaning
Stand back, everybody. I’m about to go into Usage Nazi Mode. Most of us, I hope, understand the difference between its and it’s, your and you’re, and their, there and they’re, but here are a few other words that seem to trip a lot of people up.
Rain is water that falls from the sky.
Reign is what monarchs do.
A rein is one of the straps a horse wears on its head and neck, which you can use to give the horse instructions.
Thus, to “rein in” somebody is to exercise greater control over them, as if using the reins to control a horse. Likewise, if you give somebody “free rein” you aren’t making any effort to control them. Except in cases of bloodbending or demonic possession, nobody gets to “reign in” anybody.
Foul is usually an adjective. It means vile, filthy or disgusting. As a noun, it can refer to a violation of the rules of a sport, or a foul ball, a failed attempt at a base hit in baseball.
Fowl means a bird or birds. It is most often used to refer to domesticated birds or game birds, but it can be any kind of bird.
Thus, “fouling” is contaminating or making hazardous, like powder residue in the barrel of a firearm. “Fowling” is the hunting of wild birds. So before you go fowling, be sure to clean the fouling out of your fowling piece.
“Foul language” is profanity. “Fowl language” is chicken or duck noises, or bird calls. “Foul weather” is any sort of weather, such as heavy rain, wet snow or hail, which is extremely unpleasant to walk or drive in. If the passenger pigeon still existed, then an example of “fowl weather” would be a rain of their droppings on the land as their giant flocks darkened the sky… which would actually be a lot fouler than most “foul weather.”
A hoard is a very large pile of gold being sat on by a dragon. It can also be any large collection of something valuable that is being kept hidden from the world.
A horde is a very large group of disreputable-looking people who probably found out about your hoard and are coming to plunder it.
If you are callused, then the skin on certain parts of your body (most likely your hands and feet, but we won’t speculate) has developed calluses — that is, it has become thick and insensitive in patches because of heavy use.
If you are callous, then you are thick and insensitive and don’t care about all those hardworking people getting calluses on their hands and feet and wherever.
When you wait with bated breath, your breath has abated — that is, you're expecting something major to happen any second, and you're holding your breath until it does. Obviously this is uncomfortable for you.
When you wait with baited breath, it's more uncomfortable for the people around you, because you've apparently eaten something that makes your breath smell like bait.
Any questions?
***
P.S. A rogue will wear rouge if he or she feels like it. Viscous blood is shed in vicious fighting. It would be grisly if a grizzly bear ripped out your gristly bits, but if the bear just started whaling on you, you would still be able to do some wailing. And if your interest in mountain peaks is piqued, take a sneak peek at them. I hope this clears up any further confusion.
Rain is water that falls from the sky.
Reign is what monarchs do.
A rein is one of the straps a horse wears on its head and neck, which you can use to give the horse instructions.
Thus, to “rein in” somebody is to exercise greater control over them, as if using the reins to control a horse. Likewise, if you give somebody “free rein” you aren’t making any effort to control them. Except in cases of bloodbending or demonic possession, nobody gets to “reign in” anybody.
Foul is usually an adjective. It means vile, filthy or disgusting. As a noun, it can refer to a violation of the rules of a sport, or a foul ball, a failed attempt at a base hit in baseball.
Fowl means a bird or birds. It is most often used to refer to domesticated birds or game birds, but it can be any kind of bird.
Thus, “fouling” is contaminating or making hazardous, like powder residue in the barrel of a firearm. “Fowling” is the hunting of wild birds. So before you go fowling, be sure to clean the fouling out of your fowling piece.
“Foul language” is profanity. “Fowl language” is chicken or duck noises, or bird calls. “Foul weather” is any sort of weather, such as heavy rain, wet snow or hail, which is extremely unpleasant to walk or drive in. If the passenger pigeon still existed, then an example of “fowl weather” would be a rain of their droppings on the land as their giant flocks darkened the sky… which would actually be a lot fouler than most “foul weather.”
A hoard is a very large pile of gold being sat on by a dragon. It can also be any large collection of something valuable that is being kept hidden from the world.
A horde is a very large group of disreputable-looking people who probably found out about your hoard and are coming to plunder it.
If you are callused, then the skin on certain parts of your body (most likely your hands and feet, but we won’t speculate) has developed calluses — that is, it has become thick and insensitive in patches because of heavy use.
If you are callous, then you are thick and insensitive and don’t care about all those hardworking people getting calluses on their hands and feet and wherever.
When you wait with bated breath, your breath has abated — that is, you're expecting something major to happen any second, and you're holding your breath until it does. Obviously this is uncomfortable for you.
When you wait with baited breath, it's more uncomfortable for the people around you, because you've apparently eaten something that makes your breath smell like bait.
Any questions?
***
P.S. A rogue will wear rouge if he or she feels like it. Viscous blood is shed in vicious fighting. It would be grisly if a grizzly bear ripped out your gristly bits, but if the bear just started whaling on you, you would still be able to do some wailing. And if your interest in mountain peaks is piqued, take a sneak peek at them. I hope this clears up any further confusion.
May 18, 2017
This Big Long Purple Paragraph
First some good news. I came up with the title of Altered Seasons while reading H.P. Lovecraft’s prose poem “Nyarlathotep.” The opening paragraph conveys the sense of a world changing in terrifying ways, very basic rules and assumptions on which human civilization is built being thrown out the window with no regard to how it affects us all. When I read this paragraph, I knew I just had to use it as an epigraph. Here it is in all its glory. (You might want to wear sunglasses to read this — Lovecraft’s prose is so purple it’s ultraviolet.)
The good news is that according to this source, “Nyarlathotep” is in the public domain, which will eliminate the need for a lot of negotiating with the Great Old Ones only know who. (Although one paragraph might fall within the realm of “fair use” anyway. And yes, I probably should have looked all this stuff up before getting my heart set on using this quote.)
Now for the not-so-good news. There’s no getting around it — Altered Seasons is becoming very, very long. My original estimate was that it was going to be about 150,000 words. I’m approaching that mark now, and I’m nowhere near done. Assuming Years Six and Seven (see below) turn out to be as long as Year Five (which might be as long as Zero through Four put together), 200,000 words is looking more realistic. This raises the possibility of breaking it up into two or three books. It would split fairly naturally into two books — Years Zero through Five in one book and Years Six through Eight in the other. Three books would be a little more complicated.
On the other hand, I’m in the middle of Patrick Rothfuss’ The Wise Man's Fear, which is the middle book in an uncompleted trilogy — and no wonder it hasn’t been finished yet, since both books are prodigiously long. The Name of the Wind is over 250,000 words long, and The Wise Man’s Fear is a whopping 395,000 words long — as Rothfuss himself points out here, longer than the entire Hunger Games trilogy and more than twice as long as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. (I think the “fear” in the title refers to the danger of throwing your back out while picking it up at the library.) That one book is also longer than the entire Locksmith Trilogy is going to be, and much longer than I have any plans to let Altered Seasons become.
If it does get broken up, what should I call the parts? If it’s two parts, I could just call them Parts One and Two or Books One and Two. Or I could call them Altered Seasons: The Northern Monsoon and Altered Seasons: [something ominous and weather-related but not too clichéd]. If it’s three books, maybe I’ll go back to that Lovecraft quote:
Altered Seasons: Daemoniac Alteration
Altered Seasons: Autumn Heat
Altered Seasons: Gods or Forces
Ultimately this is a decision for the publisher, of course. The bigger a book is, the harder it is to bind. (And if I split it up, Part One will be out much sooner.)
And while you're waiting, Cheril Thomas' new novel Squatter's Rights has come out. Check it out.
To a season of political and social upheaval was added a strange and brooding apprehension of hideous physical danger; a danger widespread and all-embracing, such a danger as may be imagined only in the most terrible phantasms of the night. I recall that the people went about with pale and worried faces, and whispered warnings and prophecies which no one dared consciously repeat or acknowledge to himself that he had heard. A sense of monstrous guilt was upon the land, and out of the abysses between the stars swept chill currents that made men shiver in dark and lonely places. There was a daemoniac alteration in the sequence of the seasons — the autumn heat lingered fearsomely, and everyone felt that the world and perhaps the universe had passed from the control of known gods or forces to that of gods or forces which were unknown.
The good news is that according to this source, “Nyarlathotep” is in the public domain, which will eliminate the need for a lot of negotiating with the Great Old Ones only know who. (Although one paragraph might fall within the realm of “fair use” anyway. And yes, I probably should have looked all this stuff up before getting my heart set on using this quote.)
Now for the not-so-good news. There’s no getting around it — Altered Seasons is becoming very, very long. My original estimate was that it was going to be about 150,000 words. I’m approaching that mark now, and I’m nowhere near done. Assuming Years Six and Seven (see below) turn out to be as long as Year Five (which might be as long as Zero through Four put together), 200,000 words is looking more realistic. This raises the possibility of breaking it up into two or three books. It would split fairly naturally into two books — Years Zero through Five in one book and Years Six through Eight in the other. Three books would be a little more complicated.
On the other hand, I’m in the middle of Patrick Rothfuss’ The Wise Man's Fear, which is the middle book in an uncompleted trilogy — and no wonder it hasn’t been finished yet, since both books are prodigiously long. The Name of the Wind is over 250,000 words long, and The Wise Man’s Fear is a whopping 395,000 words long — as Rothfuss himself points out here, longer than the entire Hunger Games trilogy and more than twice as long as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. (I think the “fear” in the title refers to the danger of throwing your back out while picking it up at the library.) That one book is also longer than the entire Locksmith Trilogy is going to be, and much longer than I have any plans to let Altered Seasons become.
If it does get broken up, what should I call the parts? If it’s two parts, I could just call them Parts One and Two or Books One and Two. Or I could call them Altered Seasons: The Northern Monsoon and Altered Seasons: [something ominous and weather-related but not too clichéd]. If it’s three books, maybe I’ll go back to that Lovecraft quote:
Altered Seasons: Daemoniac Alteration
Altered Seasons: Autumn Heat
Altered Seasons: Gods or Forces
Ultimately this is a decision for the publisher, of course. The bigger a book is, the harder it is to bind. (And if I split it up, Part One will be out much sooner.)
And while you're waiting, Cheril Thomas' new novel Squatter's Rights has come out. Check it out.
May 6, 2017
"The Caged Hummingbird"
I’m still plugging away at Year Five of Altered Seasons, which really is getting long. I also finished “The Caged Hummingbird,” Chapter 7 of Locksmith’s War. I’ve mentioned this chapter before. Let’s just say that once, back in college, I wrote a short story from the point of view of somebody being trampled to death by a crowd, and that was the darkest thing I’ve ever written… until now.
I wasn’t entirely sure I could get away with including this chapter in a YA novel, until I read another YA novel which contained an actual rape scene. (I’m not going to mention the name or author of the novel, because I don’t think this is quite the sort of publicity she wants.) “The Caged Hummingbird” doesn’t have anything quite that extreme, but what it does have is a little bit of violence and a lot of psychological torture. If anybody but the severely disturbed actually enjoys this chapter, I did it wrong.
And I wrote something completely unrelated to either of these things — a creepypasta called The Pathfinder Rituals. Creepypasta is a genre of short online horror stories. Ritual creepypastas aren’t exactly stories so much as they are the potential inspiration for stories. Examples include The Devil Game, The Staircase Ritual, 11 Miles, The Dead Poet’s Game (which, unlike a lot of them, actually includes a story) and Three Kings (a.k.a. “Please Don’t Actually Try This.”)
Also, here’s a list of quotes from Altered Seasons that I plan on using to advertise it, slightly censored for the benefit of the sensitive among you:
I wasn’t entirely sure I could get away with including this chapter in a YA novel, until I read another YA novel which contained an actual rape scene. (I’m not going to mention the name or author of the novel, because I don’t think this is quite the sort of publicity she wants.) “The Caged Hummingbird” doesn’t have anything quite that extreme, but what it does have is a little bit of violence and a lot of psychological torture. If anybody but the severely disturbed actually enjoys this chapter, I did it wrong.
And I wrote something completely unrelated to either of these things — a creepypasta called The Pathfinder Rituals. Creepypasta is a genre of short online horror stories. Ritual creepypastas aren’t exactly stories so much as they are the potential inspiration for stories. Examples include The Devil Game, The Staircase Ritual, 11 Miles, The Dead Poet’s Game (which, unlike a lot of them, actually includes a story) and Three Kings (a.k.a. “Please Don’t Actually Try This.”)
Also, here’s a list of quotes from Altered Seasons that I plan on using to advertise it, slightly censored for the benefit of the sensitive among you:
A lot of Walt’s viewers thought of California as a socialist hellhole — especially the ones who couldn’t afford a home there.
“An infinite number of prison cells isn’t the same thing as freedom.”
“Hey, is there a thing in kashrut where if somebody gives you burnt toast and runny eggs, you get to dump it down their shirt?”
He walked up to her with the cold, confident swagger of a man who’d watched an online video tutorial called How to Swagger with Cold Confidence and practiced in front of a mirror several times a week.
“Hope is like money — false hope drives the real thing out of circulation. And the more you try to print, the less people take it seriously.”
“How the f*** do you look at a crowd of women and not notice the six-foot redhead?”
“It’s not enough to tell the truth. You have to emphasize it. You have to enforce it. And nothing captures and focuses attention like seeing other people punished.”
It was a pleasantly cool April evening… in the middle of January, but people were getting used to this sort of thing by now.
She felt like saying If you want people voting for fascists, just say so! Don’t incentivize it! But nice girls didn’t say things like that.
“Sometimes I feel like an English Lit major who got rich writing ‘My Stepbrother the Billionaire Were-dinosaur’ erotica. No complaints about the money, but I want to do more.”
“The government can give you the freedom to step off a cliff. Nobody can give you the freedom to step back on it.”
“The United States of America has never ceded territory to a foreign power in its history, and Carolyn Camberg wants to cede our most valuable lands to Davy Jones! She’s a quisling for the fish!”
“Watching Congress in action is like watching pandas f***. You wait forever for them to do something and then they do it wrong.”
“You and your friends had a debate about ethics? I am aflame with morbid curiosity.”
April 20, 2017
Books That Inspired Me
A couple of notes. First, I’d like to say that I’ve found a good substitute for phone books as far as surnames go. Movie credits. Especially big-budget movies with massive crews. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it years ago. Second, Patrick Hodges, a friend and a great author himself, is branching out into scifi/fantasy and has just released the first book in the Wielders of Arantha series. Check it out.
But now it’s time to talk about some of the books that have inspired me in the writing of Altered Seasons. One of the main ones is Earth Abides by George R. Stewart. I don’t think I’d ever read a book before that shifted so smoothly in perspective between the global/omniscient and the human point of view. Altered Seasons owes a lot to Earth Abides and Storm, and (with the shifts in perspective between the different human characters with different sets of problems and access to different levels of information) possibly something to the alternate histories of Harry Turtledove.
Then there’s War Day by Whitley Streiber and James Kunetka. This was the book that introduced me to the concept of the semi-apocalypse. The limited nuclear exchange of the title doesn’t end the world or lead to the total collapse of civilization, but the United States is a battered, hungry, constrained version of its former self. In addition to exploring the different parts of the United States and how they were affected, the authors explore the impact of the war on everything from agriculture to the economy to society. I learned a lot from them about the need to think about every aspect of a given possible disaster.
A more modern example is World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks, who takes a seemingly ridiculous premise and explores it in all its ramifications. Brooks looks at every part of the world, and shows how the disruption of modern life by the zombies is at least as lethal as the zombies themselves.
But I think the best example is the 1632 series by Eric Flint and many others. The premise: the “Ring of Fire,” a disruption in the space-time continuum created by super-advanced but careless aliens, causes a small town in West Virginia in 2000 to be transported to central Germany in 1631… which, as you history majors know, is right in the middle of the Thirty Years’ War. The townspeople — badly outnumbered, but easily the best-armed force in Europe right now — make alliance first with the refugees fleeing the fighting, then with other towns in the area, and finally with Gustavus Adolphus himself, with the goal of building a modern society that can fight off the various power-hungry assholes fighting over Germany.
There are now so many books and stories in this series that I haven’t read them all and am not sure I could, but a big part of the books is the “up-time” West Virginians and their friends among the “down-time” Germans trying to solve the various problems they face — making antibiotics, getting the economy going, building an industrial civilization with the hardware and knowhow that came through the “Ring of Fire” and what’s available in the seventeenth century. This is a classic kind of science fiction, the kind that’s about problem-solving the way romance novels are about love.
Now, more than ever, I think the world needs books about problem-solving.
But now it’s time to talk about some of the books that have inspired me in the writing of Altered Seasons. One of the main ones is Earth Abides by George R. Stewart. I don’t think I’d ever read a book before that shifted so smoothly in perspective between the global/omniscient and the human point of view. Altered Seasons owes a lot to Earth Abides and Storm, and (with the shifts in perspective between the different human characters with different sets of problems and access to different levels of information) possibly something to the alternate histories of Harry Turtledove.
Then there’s War Day by Whitley Streiber and James Kunetka. This was the book that introduced me to the concept of the semi-apocalypse. The limited nuclear exchange of the title doesn’t end the world or lead to the total collapse of civilization, but the United States is a battered, hungry, constrained version of its former self. In addition to exploring the different parts of the United States and how they were affected, the authors explore the impact of the war on everything from agriculture to the economy to society. I learned a lot from them about the need to think about every aspect of a given possible disaster.
A more modern example is World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks, who takes a seemingly ridiculous premise and explores it in all its ramifications. Brooks looks at every part of the world, and shows how the disruption of modern life by the zombies is at least as lethal as the zombies themselves.
But I think the best example is the 1632 series by Eric Flint and many others. The premise: the “Ring of Fire,” a disruption in the space-time continuum created by super-advanced but careless aliens, causes a small town in West Virginia in 2000 to be transported to central Germany in 1631… which, as you history majors know, is right in the middle of the Thirty Years’ War. The townspeople — badly outnumbered, but easily the best-armed force in Europe right now — make alliance first with the refugees fleeing the fighting, then with other towns in the area, and finally with Gustavus Adolphus himself, with the goal of building a modern society that can fight off the various power-hungry assholes fighting over Germany.
There are now so many books and stories in this series that I haven’t read them all and am not sure I could, but a big part of the books is the “up-time” West Virginians and their friends among the “down-time” Germans trying to solve the various problems they face — making antibiotics, getting the economy going, building an industrial civilization with the hardware and knowhow that came through the “Ring of Fire” and what’s available in the seventeenth century. This is a classic kind of science fiction, the kind that’s about problem-solving the way romance novels are about love.
Now, more than ever, I think the world needs books about problem-solving.
