My Kind of Science Fiction

Or "Why I watch TV shows."

I watch a lot of TV shows on Netflix. I argue that reading is better than movies, that Television is the biggest time waster ever, and that I have better things to do besides play computer games, and yet I go through a new show about every month. Today I am here to defend this practice to the world.

I don't just watch TV shows, I watch scifi TV shows. Star Trek, Stargate, Firefly, Dollhouse, Doctor Who, and Sherlock, to name just a few. My favorite movies are scifi: I, Robot, Tron, Tron: Legacy, Antitrust, etc. I have never seen the Lord of the Rings movies. My fantasy TV picks are limited to Robin Hood and Once Upon A Time. I enjoy very few fantasy films.

I am a writer of both fantasy and science fiction. So how come I prefer to partake of fantasy in written form, but science fiction visually? The first question needs to wait for a future post, the second question is coming up now.

 The grand masters of fantasy are Tolkien and Lewis, but also Rowling and Paolini, and dozens of demi-master, and writers of smaller fame but equal quality. The acknowledged grand masters of science fiction are Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein. I, Robot and 2001: A Space Odyssey are possibly the most well known works of science fiction, with the possible exception of the works of Jules Verne. These writers are fifty years out of date. No one has risen to challenge them. No author has achieved their status, or equaled their work. How hard can it be to trump science fiction so old that we laugh at their future predictions? And yet, when you think of science fiction, what comes to mind? Star Wars. Star Trek. Stargate.

Oh, there's Ender's Game, perhaps, or the works of Jerri Prunelli, but they're still small players compared to the grand scale of the fantasy genre. Face it, in written fiction the science fiction genre nearly doesn't exist. When you do read a science fiction novel you can't expect a fun adventure story of life on a space ship. Science fiction writers wrestle with deep questions like atheism, and life after death. Many science fiction is more fantastical then the highest of high fantasy. Many of them read like a doctorate thesis disguised in a plot.

If an aspiring SF writer wants to learn about things like warp drive, hyperspace, spacial distortions, and other fictional science, where is she to go? To novels like "Revelation Space" where the plot centers around the idea that stars are sentient? To "A Pebble in the Sky" that simply tries to prove that environmentalists are right about radiation from the sun? What if you don't care about the politics of today in relation to what you're writing? What if you want character driven stories with SF elements?

Television doesn't have an agenda. Television can only be profound for a few moments, because then the episode is over and the characters go on. Television has the chance to put a lot of truth into just a few minutes, because they're on a time schedule. Sometimes they skip the meaningful content altogether and just get back to shooting aliens.

From "Firefly" I learned how realistic science fiction can be.
From "Dollhouse" I learned how quickly technology can change.
From "Star Trek" I learned how alien characters can affect the plot.
From "Stargate" I learned a whole lot about physics, and the lack thereof.
From "Star Wars" I learned that a fantasy plot can become scifi with just a few twists.
From "Antitrust" I learned that science fiction doesn't have to be futuristic.
From "Tron" I learned how extraordinary ordinary modern technology can be.
From "Doctor Who" I learned that there's an explanation for everything.

From the written world of science fiction I learned that for a good writer, the sky is the limit. 

My Kind of Horror

Horror is a genre often discussed among my Christian writer friends. They say: can horror be Christian? Is it edifying? Should we read it? What makes it horror rather than thriller? I do not participate in such topics. I stand on the other side of the room with a look in my eyes that says: "Stay away from me, you freaks."

I, obviously, don't like horror. As an example of this, the following conversation occurred recently:

Friend: Do you not like scary stuff?
Me: No. Hate it.

What I realized, upon reflection, is that this is a complete untruth. I love scary stuff. How many times have I been told "the ending was horrible!" or "don't you ever write anything happy?"

What is more "scary"? A creepy monster crawling out of a graveyard or the prospect of a loved one dying? Which is more horrifying; a ghost appearing in your bedroom or a paper you're forced to sign, agreeing to allow experiments to be conducted on your mind?

I write horror, of the most chilling kind. You won't find the unbelievable hair raising elements commonly associated with the genre, but what you will find won't be so easily forgotten. What you'll find is not the dark ravings of a lunatic but the cold calculations of a perfectly sane mind.

“You hate me,” she said finally. “Because of what I am. What I could do.”
“No,” he said swiftly. “Never. Don’t say that. It’s not your fault.”
“I’m not human,” she protested. “I’m just a… a thing.”
Dorus swore. “You’re far more than a thing,” he said brokenly. “What they did to you was an atrocity, an outrage, but it doesn’t change who you really are.”

That is my kind of horror; the brutal reality of what is, or could be. The perversion and wrong-doing that can be imagined by the human race. Ethical and moral dilemmas of the sort you hope never to have to face. Which would you rather face; a mad man wielding a blood stained sword or the betrayal of the person you trusted most in the world?

If we must die, let it be at the hands of strangers, for a friend can make us suffer so much more!

And what can be more truly horrifying than the prospect of Eternity... alone? 

What's Your Wordcount?

The most immediately obvious thing about the month of Nanowrimo is that it's a goal. A very rigid, very tight goal. Write. Write every day, and write a certain number of words a day, or else. As a writer I think Nanowrimo should be every day. If we pushed ourselves as hard the rest of the year as we did during November, imagine what could get done. Imagine the discipline and devotion we would learn. Imagine all the procrastination we could accomplish.

At midnight, on November 29, I hit 50,000 words. I woke up November 30th and wrote another 800, neatly finished my short story series. I spent the rest of the day cheering my friends on as they crossed the finish line, sometimes at the very last moment. Watching them write with my goal achieved gave me a curious feeling of detachment. I was suffering from post-Nano disorientation.

Not to worry, a new goal was approaching! Back in October I promised my friends that come December I would begin editing and revising and otherwise making presentable last years Nano: City of Lies. I woke up December 1st and wanted to do anything but. I got a lot done that day. I made paper snowflakes. I wrote people I hadn't talked to in six months. I worked on music related stuff. I chatted. I read. I typed up an old story. I chatted some more. I opened up all my versions of CoL and looked at them without really reading. But my favorite thing that I did all day was count my words.

No, not my Nano words. All my words. Every word I'd ever written. Ever. From boxes and piles in my room and on my desk I drug out all my notebooks. 42 of them, when all was counted. I had blue notebooks, red notebooks, green notebooks, yellow and black notebooks. I had wide ruled and college ruled. I had notebooks with glittery butterflies on them and psychedelic designs. I had hard cover and spiral bound and some with pages falling out from overuse. I drug them all up into the living room and stacked them on my computer chair. And then I counted.

Top Row: 2006-2007; Second Row: 2008; Third Row: 2009; Fourth Row: 2010-2011

I counted words per line, and line per page, and page per notebook. I stacked them according to the page ruling, and whether or not they had more single sided or double sided pages. I wrote out some complicated equations that looked like this: 140x200x14. Then I got out a calculator and started adding up numbers.

They say that you have to write a million words before you're truly a master of your craft. On multiple occasions I've tried to count up my words, but I always tried to count my novels which are in multiple parts of multiple drafts in multiple folders in multiple location. I always ended up bored, distracted, and out of time. Writing fifty thousand words by hand and having to count them without the aid of an electronic word processor taught me an easier way. I have always written by hand, except for my previous two Nanos, which were easy to add up to a single hundred thousand. I dragged out my notebooks and I counted.

I have, since 2006, written 900,000 words.

Anticlimactic, I know. You wanted to hear me say I'd reached 100,000,000. But who's nitpicking here? That's a lot of words! And it means I'm very close to that mythical million. But most of all, I got to spend about an hour counting them and taking pictures, which means I didn't have to go back to my revision project right away. Procrastination always wins, right?

Fear of Falling

"I realized, the moment I fell into the fissure..."
Riven's Star Fissure

“Where angels fear to tread... even now, standing on the edge. It's that feeling you get. Right in the back of your head. Go on, go on, go on, go on, go on... ... It's not the urge to jump, that's too kind. It's deeper than that. It's the urge to fall.”

- Doctor Who; the Satan Pit

 Somewhere all my darkest fears are gathering,
It's not enough to save the day, I can't escape my nightmares.

- Chameleon Circuit; Nightmares

We're writers. As writers we take the role of God in our stories, dealing out life and death, happiness and despair. As writers we are entitled to a certain amount of insanity, and we revel in our power, make jokes about tormenting our characters, and gleefully keep a death toll. As writers we mirror and exaggerated real life, and what would any story be without a bit of conflict?

Then comes the darkness. The nights alone, with our pen and paper, typing out desperately the fate of our favorites. The more we love a character, the worse it seems we treat him. We grow out of fairytales and develop a vicious desire to show the world how bitterly hopeless life can be. We exalt in this rite of passage, in our ability to tear at our readers heart strings, and to bring people to tears with the grief and pain we depict.

And then, we look back on what we have written, and are ashamed. I wrote that. I was capable of writing that. And more then that, I enjoyed it. If I can write about it in such detail and with such pleasure, what is to keep me from crossing that line of reality, so fragile already in my mind?

We write because we have to. We are compelled to. And when we fear our own writing that is when we write the best. We argue, we debate. How dark is too dark? How violent is too violent? At what point should we cease to shed our characters' innocent blood? Even once we've convinced ourselves that what we write is true, is just, and is acceptable, we do not cease to fear it. We do not stop awaking in the night, haunted by the darkness in the world and in us.

We ask, is this our conscience calling to us? Is this an alarm telling us to stop? Is being a sadistic writer really something to be proud of? And, above all, how do I know when to stop?

When you stop being afraid.

When you wake up one day and the violence doesn't affect you. When your characters' cry for mercy and you no longer hear. When what you've written before really doesn't seem all that violent, and the scenes your friends cry over don't touch you. When you can't see the horror and the pain, then you have gone too far. When you become proud of the goriest parts of your story, instead of ashamed, then be afraid.

A construction worker far above the ground is afraid of falling. It's a long way down, and there's nothing keeping him from falling except his own will. Stand too close to the edge and you could fall over. He is afraid, and he stays away. Don't be silly, his friends say. It's perfectly safe. You couldn't fall off of here any more than you could fall off your front porch. “I've fallen off my front porch,” he says, and stays away from the edge. Still, his co-workers taunts haunt him. Perhaps it is silly to be afraid. Perhaps it's just something he needs to get over, this fear of heights. Or maybe this is the wrong job for him, if he can't stomach him. Day after day these things eat away at him, and over time he becomes less afraid. He stands up straight near the edge, he looks daringly down at the street below. He walks with confidence, bold and fearless.

That is when he falls.

Confidence betrays, you can no longer distinguish between bravery and foolishness. Fear the darkness. Be afraid of heights. Be afraid, and live. Cry for your characters; lie awake and keep watch for your demons. Be hesitant of blood and pain. Never wish to meet your villain. Never wish to be him. Shudder at your vulnerability, and never loose sight of the darkness. Stay away from the edge in case you lose your footing and find yourself...

...falling.

National Novel Writing Month

October 31st. I know what everyone else is writing about: costumes and candy and pumpkins and witches. It's a day of skeletons, of harvest time, of black and orange. It's a day of worshiping Celtic deities and appeasing potentially malevolent ancestors. What day is that? All Hallows Eve, of course, or Hallowe'en.

But that's what everyone else is writing about. Boring. Not to mention a bit creepy, once you start studying the ancient and pagan rites that surround it... so I'm going to tell you about another event that occurs on this day. Tonight, at midnight, all over the world, writers everywhere are going to pick up a pen, or touch fingers to keypads and start typing on one of the most popular challenges anywhere: Nanowrimo.

Ah, the marvelous magical madness of mayhem that begins on the first of November and continues until the end of that fair month. This is my third year, and I like to think I know the process fairly well. This then is your grand tour to that mystical place called Nanoland.

First you need to meet the important people behind this madness. First and foremost is Chris Baty, the insane writer who founded the program, and this year stepped down to pursue his dream of becoming a published author. He is known for wearing a viking hat, for running, and for making hilarious videos to inspire others to write at a pace as insane as his own. He's the author of "No plot? No problem!" the handbook for wrimos and "Nanoland Chronicles; Bedtime stories for Wrimos."

I hear your pleas for mercy. "Slow down," you say. "What's a wrimo?"

National Novel Writing Month abbreviates as NaNoWriMo. Now forget what those words stand for, because only the abbreviated version is important. Nanoland is the place where novels are written. Nanowrimos are the people who write them in Nanoland. Wrimo is an affectionate abbreviation for those people.

Next in the line up of Important People is Lindsey Grant. She is the voice of reason behind the throne of genius, or in this case, the voice of insanity behind the throne of Chris Baty. (Really, I don't know what Nanoland will be without Chris Baty. It's like Holy Worlds without Jay Lauser, or Apple without Steve Jobs. It kind of defies the imagination...)

And the third person you absolutely must recognize is Dragonchilde, also known as Heather Dudley. Dragonchilde is the head moderator of Nanoland, the sort of Marshall or Enforcer. She posts the rules, she notifies you of infractions. She's everywhere at once, a veritable whirlwind of moderating. She makes it her goal to read every single post on the forum, although she confessed that eventually that becomes impossible. All hail the moderators!

Continuing on our grand tour! Like with most writers wrimos are skilled at the art of procrastination. Rulers of Nanoland recognized this fact and, rather than squash it, they chose to foster it. There are many ways of procrastinating.

1. The Procrastination Station. This is the lower right tile found on the Dashboard, which is the Nanowrimo homepage. Every day it is updated with new links to suck your time such as "How many gallons of ketchup it takes to flood a cave" and "How many cubic feet of jello would fill the White House?"

2. NanoVideo. Every day last year a new video was posted by the staff at Nanowrimo, ranging from the pointlessly hilarious, to plot dares, to effective word boosting tips.

3. Nanotoons. Some made cartoons about wrimos!!!

4. Games and Diversions. "If there's one thing more exciting than working on your novel in November, it's not working on your novel in November!" Thus proclaims the description of this forum, who's sole existence is the playing of word games such as: Convince Cleverbot to join Nanowrimo, Last Post, and The Abbreviation Game.

However, November isn't all about fun and games. It's about writing, seriously writing. And sometimes you need to talk about that writing. The forums are equipped with rooms for every type of conversation imaginable, from age grouping to occupation, to genre. But if you're really stuck then you venture into the world of Nano Tips and Strategies. Here is the Adoption Society, where you can hunt down a sidekick for your MC, or an annoying sibling for your villain. Or you can adopt a setting for that gruesome murder, or a food to eat at your MC's favorite restaurant. Or check out the Reference Desk for help on the distance between Alaska and New Hampshire, a believable speed for knitting a carpet large enough to carry an army, or the amount of hot chocolate packages you would need to fill a bathtub. Get help on how to reach those 50,000 words with tips, tricks, and just plain cheating, or go over to plot doctoring and find away around that persnickety wall that has reared itself in your path.

NanoLand is a kingdom with a culture all of it's own. Obsessive Word Counting is one aspect of the world, but there are others as well. I'd like to introduce you straight off to some favorite elements.

1. Word wars! I love word wars. It's such a pity that they tend to go out of season after November. No better way to boost your word count and feel competitive at the same time. Best done with people you know, preferably people you can chat with.

2. The Traveling Shovel of Death. Death by Shovel. How does that work? Well, if you're really stuck, maybe the TSoD will find it's way into your novel. It can be sneaky, sometime's it's a murder weapon, sometimes it's just a means of tripping the unfortunate character.

3. Plot Bunnies! Plot bunnies are the makers of Rabbit Trails. Very similar to Idea Fish they hop about wreaking havoc with your plot, taking your novel in directions you never intended it to go. One method of dealing with plot bunnies is to drop them off at the Adoption Society, or leave them at the bunny daycare center.

4. The Knights of Nanowrimo. For years these friends have ridden together, courageously battling through the Plains of Writer's Block and the Forest of Procrastination, being stopped by Rabbit Warren, or the Gloom of Real Life Duties. Mounted on brave steeds and armed with sharp weapons they press onward, always onward, fighting their way to the kingdom of 50,000. Melodrama is ours, banners waving high in the air proclaiming our quest, and never mind the laughter of those upon the site of our awkward appearance and progress. Join us in epic speechifying as we get our wandering quest underway!

Those are the highlights of Nanowrimo as I have experienced it for the past two years. To explain it all would take a book the size of a Nanoer's novel, and I do not wish to bore you anymore. You must proceed to the site and see for yourself other wonders such as Shoutouts, and Donation Halos. No where else will you find such freedom to be a writer, to write with abandon, to care for nothing but that final word count. Whether you actually turn out anything useful can be arbitrary, if you have truly joined into the wonderful group effort of writing a novel in November.