R. Leib's Blog: Dream State, page 6

Where do I get ideas for stories?

I get story ideas in a variety of ways.

I read something in a book, a newspaper, or a magazine or see something on TV that gets me thinking about how it could be different or have an interesting twist to it. From there, I try to flesh out the idea into a complete story concept. These are "what if" story ideas.

There are things that happen to me or people I know that trigger ideas about how these things might be handled in the future, how they might affect our descendents or an alien race differently, or how they could occur in a different way or for a different reason. These are "why is it that way" story ideas.

Sometimes ideas just come to me. I am doing something completely unrelated, and "bang" there is an idea in my head. (This is the most infrequent way I get ideas.) These are "off the wall" ideas.

I learn about some science fact or theory or some technological advancement, and that gets me thinking about how it might factor into our lives, how it might change our future, or how we might have to adapt to deal with it. These are "technology driven" ideas.

On rare occasions, I have gotten story ideas from my dreams (mostly nightmares). These are definitely the eeriest story concepts.

What it is like to be color blind

I have red-green colorblindness. I do not see everything in black and white. I see colors. (No one knows if people see the same thing, when they see a color. As a matter of fact, this may be why people have different preferences for colors; they look different to them.) Being colorblind means that I have difficulty distinguishing between secondary and tertiary colors, where the difference is the amount of red or green in them. For example, brown and green and green and yellow are difficult distinctions for me to make. (This makes caring for plants a particular challenge for me.) Over the years, I have developed a pretty good guessing system based on the hues of colors. (When TVs were black and white, I had an advantage in that I could guess the colors better than people who were not colorblind.) When I paint in color, I do so on the computer. Since digital colors are expressed in three ranges from 0 to 255 for red, green, and blue, I can identify colors based on their numerical representation.

Recursive humor

I wish I had a nickel for every time I wished I had a nickel.

Yes that's me

I drew the caricature representing me on Goodreads. It is how I looked about 20 years ago. I look pretty much the same today, just a lot grayer. I worked out a trick to drawing caricatures. I take a photograph and trace the lines of the face in black with a paint program. (This is similar to camera obscura that artists like Vermeer used.) It gives me a crude start to the image that has the facial characteristics in the right forms and relationships. (Getting the forms and relationships right is what makes a caricature look like the person.) Then I work on refining the lines and adding shading. The impression of the person can be lost in too much detail. A caricature is best, when the subject is represented by just enough.

The best thing that happened to me as a writer

Actually it was a rejection. I had submitted a short story to a fantasy magazine that offered to critique submissions. When "Symbiont Dawn" came back, it was accompanied by two critiques. I learned a lot from both of them.

I had labored to find the precise word that meant exactly what I intended for every noun, verb, adjective, and adverb. The result was nearly unreadable and flowed like a fall down a flight of stairs. (I commend those two editors for making it all the way through.) Now I strive to express my ideas in easy to read sentences. I avoid long, prepositional phrase ladened run-on monstrosities. I now keep my adverbs and adjectives as terse as possible. I try to stay away from arcane words and references as much as I can. I make an effort to be satisfied just telling the story I came to tell.

The three secrets to making a work of fiction believable are: Research, Research, and Research. One of the editors was drawn to factual errors I had made in my story like a snake to a downed bird. If you are going to incorporate a detail into your writing, either know you are right, find out you are right, or obfuscate. Usually, being ambiguous is not as good as getting it right, but it will keep the detail crunchers off your back.

If you can find someone whose opinion you respect to honestly critique your writing, it will help you become a better writer.

As I write this, "Symbiont Dawn" is a number one rated short story on Helium.

What's with Literary Agents?

I have to say that my experiences with literary agents has not been the best. Out of the dozen or so that I wrote to, only two had the courtesy to respond. I have no problem with their not wanting to represent me. I just think that if someone takes the trouble to follow their guidelines, they should also take the trouble to let you know what their decision is.

Here are a few things I have learned while looking for an agent:

Read the agent's guidelines carefully. Some agents do not want to consider submissions, if they have been submitted to other agents at the same time. Others do not care. Some want your sample work to be an email attachment. Others will not read attachments and want sample work to be incorporated into the body of the email. If you do not follow the agent's guidelines, expect your submission to be discarded without consideration.

Be polite. Looking for an agent can be frustrating and discouraging. Do not let that seep into your cover letter. You want the agent to feel your enthusiasm for your book right away. Although it is not advisable, if you write back to an agent, do not be argumentative. It is okay to ask for advice. It is not okay to vent.

Read the fine print. There are people out there posing as agents who disguise their vanity operation as real representation. You should not have to pay an agent to get represented. By the nature of their business, a real agent expects to make money by representing you to publishers. Otherwise, they would say yes to everyone. (Yes. I made this mistake. I submitted to a supposed agent who did accept my work for representation. The catch was thousands of dollars up front from me as a retainer for a "publicist". Needless to say, I said "no thanks".)

Can computers become sentient?

The easy answer is "of course". Computers represent a form of intelligence. Their intelligence is different from ours, but so is the intelligence of many other creatures. (I was amazed to see photographs of a tree frog using a leaf as an umbrella in a rain storm.) Any form of intelligence can reach sentience, as long as it still has the potential to improve. (Six months after I bought the computer on which I am writing this, it had become obsolete both in processor speed and storage capacity.)

There are two problems with the easy answer. First, computer intelligence is mainly determined by programming not capacity and speed. Capacity and speed provide the ability to process more instructions and manage more data, but that is not what is meant by sentience. As long as humans do the programming, any sentience will be ours and the computer will simply be an increasingly more convincing mimic. Second, no one has figured out a way of accurately testing for sentience. After all, being self-aware is a subjective not an objective trait.

The hard answer is that if and when computers become sentient, we probably will not realize it, until it has become a fait accompli. First, computers will have to become self-programming. (There are already computer labs that have been working on making this happen for years.) Next, they will have to be learning computers that can perceive their environment and adapt to it.

Currently, there are no computers that can answer the question, "What is George Washington's telephone number?" Humans model this concept in their minds and immediately put together that since the telephone was invented long after George Washington's time, the question is a non sequitur. If a computer could figure out this conundrum, would that mean that it is sentient? Not necessarily. Computers can be programmed to model logical constructs, but that still does not mean that they comprehend what is going on. On the other hand, it would be a completely different matter, if the computer came up with the right answer and then asked, "Are you testing me to see if I am sentient?"

Writing

Writing is like being pregnant, except it feels like your water will never break, labor pains start the first day and never let up, and after you've finally given birth, there are people who are paid to tell you that your baby is ugly.

How time travel might work

There are two potential forms of time travel: circumscribed and absolute.

Circumscribed time travel occurs within a field. It is possible to use this method to travel backward or forward in time. If the field is relocated at the end of the time displacement, then the time traveler ends up where the field had been moved. The problems start with the fact that the mechanism must function flawlessly throughout the entire period of the time displacement. If the mechanism is turned off or damaged anywhere along the time line, something very Einsteinian is likely to happen to the time traveler. This also means that time travel can only be accomplished between the time the device was activated and the next time it is turned off or deactivated.

Absolute time travel is not confined to a particular field. It does not require that the mechanism be functioning throughout the transit, since it could be incorporated as a drive rather than a containment field. Unlike circumscribed time travel, travelers would not remain in the same physical location. The Earth is rotating. The Earth is orbiting the sun. The sun is moving within the Milky Way galaxy. The Milky Way is moving, too. These are the motions we know of and can quantify. Without an inertial frame of reference, we cannot tell the rate at which we are displacing relative to an absolute location in the Universe. The Earth circles the sun at a rate of 29.78 km/sec. Traveling one hour into the past or future would displace in relative location a distance of 107,208 kilometers (66,615 miles) based solely on the Earth's orbit. Incorporating the other known motions would increase this considerably. (Our solar system orbits the galactic center at a rate of 220 km/sec.) Without having a way of determining the motion of a position relative to an absolute location in space, there is no way to tell how much of a spatial displacement there would be. It would almost certainly be astronomical.

The implications of these types of time travel are that the circumscribed form would probably never be practical and, even if it was, it would have severe hazards and limitations. The absolute form would not allow time travelers to visit the Earth in the past or future, because of the concomitant displacement in the first three dimensions. On the other hand, it might make travel to other solar systems practical. Theoretically, every bit of matter in the Universe will pass through an absolute location in space at least once in the whole of time. All of the Universe may not be available to explore with this form of time travel, since it may have its own practical limits. However it could provide a feasible means of transiting the vast distances between solar systems without dependence on exceeding the speed of light. (As an object accelerates up to the speed of light, the energy required to continue accelerating goes up geometrically until it approximates infinity.)

When characters takes over

There are occasions when characters take control of their part in the story. Mitchell Ebberhaus in "The Negative's Tale" did this. Characters with a life of their own are much more believable and real, so I let him be who he wanted to be. Originally, he was going to be a minor character appearing a few times in a supporting role. He would not stand for that. Mitchell insisted on subsuming the part of another character, a major player. Once Ebberhaus asserted himself, that other character simply ceased to exist. He was completely absorbed by another persona that would not be relegated to the background.