Tag: Writing

  • Ravages of Honor: Handwavium Part 4, The Concept of Generations

    Ravages of Honor: Handwavium Part 4, The Concept of Generations

    When I was creating (handwaving into existence) the donai, I didn’t expect the “rule of cool” concept of “ooh, genetically engineered samurai” to lead down the rabbit holes that it did. 

    One of those rabbit holes had to do with age disparities in a long-lived species and how to deal with the ick-factor brought on by the so-called “creepiness formula” which states that a person can only date/marry someone who is at least half their own age plus seven years.

    What that means is that if you’re 30, the formula says that you shouldn’t date someone who is younger than 22. Why 22? Because (30)(.5)+7=15+7=22.

    Even though it’s a made-up world, we have to deal with two things. 

    • The first has to do with suspension of disbelief which is dependent on things making sense. And the more you know, the harder that is. (Trust me on this. I’m quite ignorant when it comes to historical fashion which is why I can enjoy The Tudors more than my friends who know a lot about fashion history.) 
    • The second has to do with social mores or acceptance of certain practices and it’s a lot more ingrained than one would expect.

    Case in point, the number of people complaining about Edward being so old as compared to Bella in Twilight. Ridiculous really, since it was dealt with up front. 

    “How old are you?” 
    “Seventeen.” 
    “How long have you been seventeen?” 
    “Awhile.”

    —the movie

    The idea of vampires being static, i.e. not aging, not maturing, being anachronistic because they are frozen in place, etc. is a trope of the vampire genre (and some others as well).

    Edward may have come across as too mature for a contemporary seventeen-year-old boy, but that too was dealt with. He was an artifact of his own time, the turn of the 20th century, when a 17-yo was a man, not a boy. He grew up in a world and in circumstances where a 17-yo was far more mature than the 17-yo of today.

    The very same people (the ones who have a problem with this) have no problem with a science fiction story where some guy goes on ice (stasis or cryogenic suspension) and then boings a girl/woman who could easily be his great-granddaughter. Yet the same situation applies, a stasis or developmental pause that is not just physical but mental. And it makes sense in both situations. If vampires don’t age it stands to reason that their brains don’t age either, which is why they’re not grumpy old men yelling at clouds or at kids to get off their lawns.

    (I wrote about this from a more general perspective about a year ago. Vampirism and Other Afflictions)

    But it still presented a problem for my worldbuilding, and not because I figured some might object. It was one of those things I had to figure out, if only for myself.

    So I started off by looking into how generations were defined. I had always assumed (been taught?) that generations were twenty years. Well, there are generations and then there are generations. Obviously I’m not talking about the “Gen X” type of generation, i.e. a group of people born in a certain decade.

    I reached out to one of my doctor friends, as one does, and got quite an education on the more scientific definition. Long story short, generations are determined by how long a woman is fertile.

    Menarche typically occurs between the ages of 10 and 16, with the average age of onset being 12.4 years.—NIH
    The menopausal transition most often begins between ages 45 and 55.—NIH

    Oh no! We’re in girl cootie territory again! Surely this can’t have anything to do with “real science fiction.”

    Sure it does. 

    So let’s go with 50 as the end of fertility and 15 as the start of it (because of the lack of regular periods at the onset of 12.4 years) which gives us a nice number like 50-15=35. (Or if we go with 55, we get 40; either way that’s much longer than the 20-yr span I thought it must be).

    Keep in mind now, this is for handwavium, for a made-up world, so don’t waggle your finger at me about how a real biologist might do this. I’m using this as a launching pad for my handwavium. My handwavium may be crunchy, but not so crunchy that it’s no longer handwavium.

    Now, this period of fertility is obviously dependent on life span as well, so if you live at a time when 30 was your expected life span, it would be 30-15=15 and then also factor in that percentage body fat is a factor so girls who don’t live in industrialized first-world countries or who lived when they couldn’t accumulate enough body fat by age 12, would have later menarche-onset dates. It’s entirely possible that at one point in history, the fertility period (generation) was between 18 and 30 due to limits of body fat percentages and life expectancy, so 12 years. 

    Apply the creepiness formula to that and you can see why a 30-yo man paired with a 22-yo woman wouldn’t make sense or be typical, but a 30-yo man paired with a younger woman makes far more sense. And then factor in the number of deaths due to childbirth on top of that. If you’re not glad that you’re living today instead of way back then, you should be. (Backwards time-traveling heroines notwithstanding).

    This is why we shouldn’t judge the past by our own distorted modern lens. Things happened for reasons (usually) that have everything to do with rules imposed by nature, not because of The Patriarchy (TM) or whatever the hate-on is for today.

    Once you start looking at things with an eye towards impositions made by nature, the world-building gets rigorous, i.e. your scifi elements aren’t just a thin skin or veneer for your fiction.

    For the donai, this meant that I could not use generations at all. When the women that are able to have babies are an anomaly due to errors in genetic coding and only have a handful of fertile cycles, then there is no concept of generations. There can’t be. 

    But it’s not enough to just say and handwave it away. It should be, but it’s not. You need more because of that issue of “aging” in terms of maturity, i.e. old man yells at cloud. The social derision for an older partner comes from the objection that a mature person is taking advantage of an immature one, even if the immature one is 22 and well into being considered an adult whose choices we shouldn’t question due to agency, respect, blah-whatever-blah. Having it both ways, aren’t we?

    I see this derision all the time, especially when an older man is dating a much younger woman. We all assume she’s the poor victim and he’s taking advantage of her. Less so if the older partner is a woman for some reason. Now, there’s some sexism for ya!

    So how to deal with it in-world for Ravages of Honor?

    It turns out I already had a built-in answer, one I didn’t even think of when I created them. 

    Since the donai can live for centuries (How many? I don’t know yet and won’t until I have written it.) and their nanite symbionts keep them in a semi-perpetual middle-age1 for most of their lives, it follows that we have that “stuck at seventeen” or static stage of life like vampires where the character doesn’t transition to the old-man-yelling-at-cloud phase, i.e. senescence.

    Being aware of potential objections made by readers is very helpful, maybe even key, when it comes to rigor. Yes, it means that you can’t just write what you want, and there are certainly times when you’ll want to ignore such “objections” (I certainly do) but it works oh-so-much better when you can head them off with something that makes sense.

    For the record, in RoH, Syteria is, I would say, in her early twenties (or the in-world equivalent) with Darien being about ten years older (chronologically), which makes him very young for a donai. He is not even in that middle-age phase yet. If you were to do an apples-to-apples comparison, as in judging a human by human standards, and a donai by donai standards, she’s “older” than he is because humans age AND mature faster, whereas donai do not. 

    By the way, I was stunned to learn that 20-30 is considered young adult and that middle age as we define it is 40-50. I guess when you don’t start being an adult until you’re 26 that makes sense, but it was still a shock. In my world (IRL), you were expected to act and function as an adult at about 13 and by that I mean in terms of responsibility and maturity, and not by being sexually active. Yes, I’m very Old World. Go figure!

    Now that I’ve started RoH4 and it’s looking like a story where Lady Neria Bhanot and Lord Dobromil (Darien’s father) are going to be forging a new world order, the “May/September romance” question kicked in hard since he is much older. But it doesn’t matter for in-world reasons. People are free to screech about it of course, but that’s not really my problem.

    [crossposted to Substack]

    Side notes for writers:

    This kind of thing is also why I’m glad I resisted the urge to explain, that practice of dumping information into the story when there really is no need for it other than for the author to masturbate on the page and show you how much thought she’s put into it. In fact, I have no less than three deleted scenes over the last three novels where I gave in to that urge and then in going back over it, ruthlessly cut myself out of it. It saved writing myself into a corner, and one of the reasons I continue to love close/deep point-of-view.

    Word of caution. The scientific rigor is what throws such stories out of the Romance genre. Once you start making your story about the worldbuilding or the handwavium rather than the romantic relationship you have crossed into romantic subplot. You’re going to end up overplotting it (for a Romance) because in order for it to make sense you’re going to have to dramatize the “science” to the reader.

    • Cover for Ravages of Honor: Conquest (Book 1)
    • Cover for Ravages of Honor: Ascension (Book 2)
    • Cover for Ravages of Honor Lineage
    • Cover for Dominion: A Ravages of Honor Novella
    • Cover for Featherlight: A Ravages of Honor Novella
  • One-of-Antonia Excerpt

    One-of-Antonia Excerpt

    On May 3, 2023, my latest short-story will be out as part of The Ross 248 Project, a hard-sf shared-world anthology edited by Les Johnson and Ken Roy.

    I am thrilled to join Patrick Chiles, Stephanie Osborn, Brent Ziarnick, Laura Montgomery, Daniel M. Hoyt & E. Marshall Hoyt, Matthew Williams, D. J. Butler, Robert E. Hampson, J. L. Curtis, and K. S. Daniels on this roster of great hard-sf stories. Everyone one of these writers brings in their unique perspective, background, experience, and style to this anthology. I hope you check out their backlists.

    You can pre-order or check out the early release version of The Ross 248 Project here.

    HUMANITY’S HOPE FOR A BETTER FUTURE AT A NEW STAR

    A bold journey into a future where humanity and its children travel to a new star where they must overcome the unexpected challenges on the exoplanets that await them—or die trying.

    Traveling to the stars will be difficult, but not, perhaps, the most difficult part. What about when we get to another star? What then? Will the planets be immediately habitable? Not likely. Will those who undertook the journey be able to easily turn around and come home if they don’t find “Earth 2.0”? Almost certainly not. Therein lies the challenge: Finding worlds that are potentially habitable and then taking the time, perhaps centuries, to make them compatible with Earth life. They will encounter mysteries and unexpected challenges, but the human spirit will endure. Join this diverse group of science fiction writers and scientists as they take up the challenge of The Ross 248 Project.

    Here is the opening scene from One-of-Antonia

    The man in front of Suri was neither sick nor old. Despite the tubes and wires, the monitoring equipment around him, and the fact that they were in Pluto’s premiere clinic for the dying, he was very much a man in his prime. According to his file, Aidan Samuels was forty-two. It was an imprecise measurement—his real age was forty-two years, six months, three days, and sixteen-point-thirty-six hours—one that grated on Suri’s “nerves” such as they were. Tolerating such things without comment was one of the many adjustments that she had had to make.

    She may not have liked it, but humans trusted those who looked and acted like them more than those who did not, especially when it came to their health. That’s why she was wearing a humanoid skin rather than an arachnid one, even though having extra arms would have come in handy for most situations.

    “I don’t understand,” she said, glancing at the virtual-reality clinic supervisor.

    Dr. Benedict Lammens was tall for a human, one-point-nine-eight meters. She knew that he had let his hair go gray because he believed it gave him credibility and she could tell that the glasses he wore were just for the smart-glass lenses. Appearances were important to humans. They went to great lengths to project, not just credibility, but trustworthiness, intelligence—an entire list of positive traits—and mitigate an even longer list of negative ones. Would a four- or eight-armed surgeon with telescoping eyes convey competence and skill? Probably not. More likely to give them nightmares. 

    She filed the idea away, a side project for later, and connected to the clinic’s network. Samuels’ file said that he had gone into a very private and highly customized virtual reality in order to be with his dying wife. When her human body had failed, her corpse had been preserved for a later time in the hope that a cure for her neurological disease would be found. Her corpse had been placed in the family’s vault. There were thousands of such family vaults here on Pluto. It was known for its cryo facilities.

    While Samuels and his wife had been in the VR, thirty years had passed for them. They had essentially enjoyed their “golden years” while only a year had passed in the real world. 

    “Mr. Samuels here is refusing to come out of the VR,” Lammens said.

    “As is his right,” Suri noted, scrolling through the agreements between the SAIN and Samuels. “According to this, the Host agreed to keep him in VR for as long as he wanted.”

    “Unfortunately, the board of 3D-Printed-Homes wants him back in the boardroom,” Lammens said, shoving his hands deep into the pockets of his lab coat. “Some dispute or other. They need his vote to break a tie. Something about a takeover that might destroy the company he inherited from his father. Apparently the Martian cartels are involved and frankly it sounds rather messy.”

    “And he knows this?” she asked as she looked Samuels over.

    “The Host told him. He doesn’t care.”

    “Thirty years have passed for him,” Suri said, scanning through the VR’s logs. It had been just him and his wife for most of that time. There had been other constructs in there, but only artificial ones. No other real person had plugged in and interacted with them except for the Host. “And he’s just lost his wife. Of course he doesn’t care.”

    “We need some time to sort things out with his Board.” Lammens shrugged. “They’ve threatened to pull his credit, force our hand. Sue us. It could get ugly and undermine the trust in both SAIN and our facilities here.”

     Suri had worked with terminal patients and their families before. She didn’t understand grief herself, but she did have to work with it and around it. It was as much a part of working with humans as fixing their bodies was.

    She took hold on Samuels’ left hand. It was cool to the touch, with fading callouses and a simple gold band for a wedding ring. Tiny scars peppered three of his fingers and the backs of both hands. A man whose family had their own vault here, who could afford non-subjective years in VR, hadn’t had those tiny scars removed. Often such things were indicative of sentiment or a lack of vanity.

    She reviewed his public appearances. Not a vain man, but one who definitely understood the importance of appearance enough to opt into standard enhancements—teeth, hair, eyes. A man who liked to work with his hands too by the look of it—there were lots of images of him doing physical labor, building things, making things.

    Humans had such strange affectations. She ran her fingers along the pale scars. Nicks really, tiny little things. What had made them? She wanted to know. It would help her understand humans, which would help her help them, keep them alive, keep them healthy, give her purpose.

    There was a hum in the back of her mind, like a warm caress. She smiled. Antonia, her AI-mother approved. A human would have said that she was giving her blessing. 

    A plan to help Samuels and the decision to proceed was processed at AI speeds. She let go of Samuels’ hand and sat down in the chair next to his bed. 

    “Wait, what are you doing?” Lammens asked.

    “My job.”

    In the time it took her to answer, she ported the specs for her VR avatar to the Host. Suri liked to keep things simple. She liked to manifest as the statistically likely progeny of the two humans who had raised her.

    After all, she was Catrina and Ian Hinman’s daughter as much as she was Antonia’s. So she’d adopted her foster father’s dark hair and mismatched eyes (one blue, one brown) as well as her foster mother’s oval face and sun-kissed skin. 

    Last time she’d been in VR her avatar had worn an eclectic mix of calf-length skirt with a bustle, combat boots, corset-top, and short, bolero jacket with epaulets, all in blues and greens. She discarded the idea of aging her avatar, since most humans, especially older ones, presented as younger, healthier versions of themselves. VR was seductive because one could be anything, or anyone, and things weren’t what they seemed.

    Lammens had stepped back, a skeptical look on his face. But he didn’t say anything. She took it as assent.   

    Suri closed her eyes. She and SAIN came to an agreement at AI-speeds: unless Samuels’ real-world body was in danger, no one was to intervene or interfere. Once inside, she’d be stuck in the VR with Samuels until he agreed to leave or they shut it down and forced him out. Suri would be cut off, her ties to SAIN and her AI-mother severed. 

    She felt herself move as if through a tunnel of light, riding effortlessly through corridors that didn’t exist in physical space.

    The final bit of it, entering Aidan Samuels’ VR, was like fighting her way through a wall of fire. If she’d had any sense of self-preservation, she’d have turned back. 

    Samuels didn’t want her there. That much was clear. Painfully so.

  • Outlander’s Season 6 Review

    Outlander’s Season 6 Review

    As a huge fan of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander*, I (like everyone else) have been looking forward to the end of Droughtlander with the streaming of Season 6.

    How big of a fan am I? I often refer to my Ravages of Honor series as an “Outlander in space.” We share a heroine who is pulled through time, the fish-out-of-water trope, as well as the focus on relationships. We are not pure Romance because while there is a deep, driving, and defining love story, the story itself does not end with the couple getting together and going on to their HEA (happily ever after). The story continues past that and their love story (rather than Romance) continues as they get older, have children, and go on other adventures.

    Limited expectations:

    I know that the pandemic gave us Droughtlander and I knew that we were going to get a shorter season, only eight episodes. But what I did not expect was the cliffhanger ending and the shortened story lines which were just dropped and then summarized with a few trite lines of dialogue.

    With no announcement of when season 7 will come, I felt more than a little cheated by the ending, especially since the storylines were (mostly) well done. There was tension and emotional investment, something that Gabaldon and the show-runners do very well, and they certainly kept me guessing.

    It’s like deja vu all over again:

    I did have deja vu several times, to the point where I went to check the release dates on the off-chance that I was watching the wrong season. At first I thought it might be the disparity between the books and the show. But that wasn’t as much of an issue as what they did: cut off two rather important storylines and then leave us hanging.

    The good things:

    There was a cute little subplot involving the Beardsley twins, and an even more interesting one between Claire and Tom Christie, an old compatriot of Jamie’s. I found Claire and Christie’s developing and reluctant friendship to be very interesting and its platonic nature is much needed as we rarely see such things develop between male and female characters without at least some hint of sexual tension.

    I don’t know how realistic the polyamorous subplot between the Beardsley twins and Lizzie would be given the time period and attitudes, but it was well done and I know that Gabaldon often throws out historical accuracy for the sake of story, a trait that I do admire. It however, felt short or at least not as well-developed as it could be. So maybe the shortened season is to blame for this as well.

    They did a great job with the Malva character. There was something about the look on her face from the moment we met her that said, this person isn’t all that she seems, but only barely. She kept setting off the hairs on the back of my neck and I was wondering, once again, where I had seen her. Well, her name does start with “Mal” and I kept telling myself, “Nope, it can’t be that. Nope, nope, nope.” But it was. Throughout the scenes of her father punishing her, you get this sense that she’s not quite the victim she is being portrayed as. With how the storylines were shortened and abandoned, it’s hard to tell if this was intentional or merely coincidental.

    Conclusion:

    Another well-done aspect is the unwavering faith that Claire and Jaime have in each other. A lot of drama over his alleged infidelity would have ruined their characters and I was really glad to see that the show didn’t go there, no matter how tempting it might have been.

    And if this post has that ending abruptly feel to it, well, yes. Because I honestly have nowhere else to take it. I’m thinking they did the best they could with what they had.

    • Cover for Ravages of Honor: Conquest (Book 1)
    • Cover for Ravages of Honor: Ascension (Book 2)
    • Cover for Ravages of Honor Lineage
    • Cover for Dominion: A Ravages of Honor Novella
    • Cover for Featherlight: A Ravages of Honor Novella

    *As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

  • Review: The Diamond Eye by Kate Quinn

    Review: The Diamond Eye by Kate Quinn

    The Diamond Eye by Kate Quinn* is a recommended read.

    Kate Quinn’s writing always seems to draw me. While her works are classified as historical fiction, they are–more importantly–works about characters. And not just any kind of character. Well-developed characters. Her writing is technically excellent and her storytelling is exemplary (at least it has been for everything I have read of hers). I am of the firm belief that readers will jump genres for good writing, good storytelling, and good characters.

    Quinn supplements her storytelling with an afterword where she goes into where she took creative liberties for the sake of the story. Prioritizing the telling of a story–as opposed to mindlessly parroting a history lesson for the sake of showing us just how much research she did–is one of my favorite things about her works. She also serves the reader by focusing on just a few characters, not a cast of dozens that serves nothing but to (once again) show us how much research a writer did. Honestly, if we wanted a history lesson we’d go to a history book.

    Diamond Eye* by Kate Quinn

    What I liked…

    Since I grew up in Ceaucescu’s Romania (that means under the abomination known as communism) there were several things that resonated with me in this.

    The first was the fact that the Soviet man was fine with paying lip service to standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the Soviet woman, but he still expected her to cook the meals, do the laundry, and subordinate herself to him. Like every promise made by Communism, equality of the sexes was and is and always will be a blatant lie.

    The second was the fact that there was paperwork for everything, notably, filing for recognition/sanction of a sexual/romantic relationship between an officer (a man) and an NCO (a woman). As long as you filed the right paperwork, the Soviets were fine with officers screwing subordinates. All while they were actively fighting at the front, nonetheless. And while she was legally married to someone else. Yup. Pretty much how I remember it too.

    The third was the fact that people were reported and shot for defeatism. Defeatism was saying anything that criticized how things were going. It was grumbling about the length of lines, the lack of food, the corruption of the Soviet system, the sexism, the double standards, all of it. It really hit home and it’s alive and well today in what we might call toxic positivity, where only optimism and praise and positive thoughts, feelings, and expressions are acceptable. Anything that is negative, critical, or that questions something deemed as the “in thing” (hype) is not allowed. Spend any time on social media or any kind of group activity and you’ll see it in action.

    While I cringed every time Mila, the main character, said “For the love of Lenin” it is probably an accurate portrayal of how Lenin came to replace God in the lives of many people who bought into the poison he and his cohorts were selling. (This is phrase I don’t ever recall hearing but different country, different generation).

    Mila is very realistic in that she understood the games that had to be played in the Soviet system–like saying, doing, and parroting the right things (i.e. you know it as political correctness). I did not get a sense that Quinn herself was taking sides in this, because she balanced it out with such things as Mila’s comparative diary entries, “official version” vs “unofficial version.”

    Mila is a sympathetic character. She was a mother at fifteen (yes, under the Soviet system which would not punish the much older man who got her pregnant and married her only because her father forced the issue). Mila had to move back with her parents in order to raise her son. Despite multiple attempts to divorce, she was unsuccessful (because, again, the Soviet system was set up in the favor of husbands and fathers who were not required to provide for or be in their children’s lives).

    She had to somehow make it while raising her son, working at a factory, attending school, including university, and doing all the right Party volunteering. She had help from her parents, but we’re still talking about being a single mother going to work and school and being a good little communist (which meant waiting in ration lines and doing the other jobs we had to do, the ones that earned us real money not the worthless money they paid us with). Despite these hardships she decided to take up shooting as a hobby, so that she could teach her son. She knew that she had to be both mother and father to the boy. That’s how Mila ended up a sniper in the Soviet Army during WWII.

    I really appreciated that patriotism and “love of Lenin and the Party” were not the only things driving her. She had very personal stakes in this–she wanted to protect her son. She wanted to be able to teach him that grown-ups do things by example and she had to be that example in his life. This is something sorely lacking in stories featuring the “Strong Female Character” (SFC) trope which is just a caricature, a man with boobs who just punches things and shoots stuff.

    Unlike the SFC, Mila is never the strongest, fastest, smartest, best-at-everything. No, Mila has to struggle and fight and earn the respect of those around her. She is wounded. She makes mistakes (real ones that cost lives). She is actually surrounded by men who are stronger, faster, and smarter than she is. Men she must train and lead into battle. And while she does put on her “respect my rank” attitude initially, she goes on to earn their respect. Unlike in stories where the presence of the SFC requires that all men be automatically weaker, slower, and dumber in order to make her look good.

    If there was a fault with Mila (and it’s really not) is that she was a fish who had no sense of being in water. Some of her comparisons with how things were the same in the US as in the USSR really showed this. There’s a scene where she is gifted some diamonds (a necklace, bracelets, and a brooch). She immediately thinks that she should give the brooch to the political officer minding her as a bribe so that he can gift it to his wife or mistress. And then immediately figures it must be the same in the US. No, actually it’s not even though she can be forgiven for thinking this since she was in Washington DC at the time. While DC is corrupt and bribes happen all the time (whether actual bribes of money or the trading of favors) there is no political officer hovering–the IRS, yes, but not a member of the Party. And while you may be fined and jailed for failing to pay taxes on that kind of gift, you’re very unlikely to get shot for it (at least not yet).

    The drama with the diamonds was probably inserted to make a point and I do appreciate how well it was handled. I’m not the type of reader to confuse the character with the writer, and that’s why I think that extending the drama with the diamonds to the epilogue worked so well. It’s fifteen years later and Mila is back in the USSR with a new husband whom she must keep safe because his father criticized Stalin and thus his entire family was wiped out. The diamonds go to pay the right bribes to keep him safe. Fish. Water. Well done. I was especially impressed with the balance imparted in the narrative and the fact that she included an epilogue and filled it with all the right things. The main story was over. The epilogue was absolutely necessary–as an epilogue.

    Last, I loved, loved, loved that she solved the story problem with my favorite type of gun. Thank you for doing the research on that one and getting it right.

    What I didn’t like….

    Present tense. It’s horrid, even done by Quinn. Nothing pushes me out of a story faster than something that should have been past tense written as present. There are several present tense entries by Mrs. Roosevelt sprinkled throughout since this story is dual time-line, i.e. we hop back and forth to a post-WWII visit to the White House. I skipped them.

    The use of “the marksman” instead of giving us the name of the assassin failed to convey ANY sense of tension. He knew who he was so withholding that information from the reader was annoying. It would have been much more interesting and tension-inducing to know who he was so we could worry when he showed up in Mila’s viewpoint. Instead he was some “anonymous” shadowy figure. Hell, you could even write an omni narrator and say something like “The would-be assassin went by George, but that was not really his name, just the one he was using for the job” and gone with that. Or even used his actual name. It wouldn’t have mattered at all if we knew his actual name. But the attempt to play with the reader here was insulting. And it denied us much needed tension since he was interacting with her and the “big reveal” wasn’t. Not at all.

    *As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

  • Ravages of Honor pronunciation guide

    I’m a logophile. My Spotify playlist is made up of songs in German, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Hungarian, Norwegian, Icelandic, Mongolian, Latin, French, and Italian.

    One of the reasons I love writing science fiction is that it allows me to make up words and use language in a creative way. I love making up words and names, but not all of them are original, even if they sound that way.

    So, if you were wondering about how to pronounce the unique names and terms I’ve created (and what the stories behind them are) you might enjoy the Ravages of Honor pronunciation guide. Each episode is very short (30 seconds to 1 minute long). I will be adding to it, so please remember to subscribe to my channel so that YouTube will notify you of additions.

    Click here for the pronunciation playlist.

    Pronunciation Guide

  • A blast from the past

    I was working on Ascension, the sequel to Ravages of Honor: Conquest today and went looking for some references related to a plot point. Somehow I found the very first iteration of what was then the opening scene for RoH:C. I’m sharing it with you today because I want you to see what a difference a few years of writing makes. It took me almost three years to finish Conquest and then another year to publish it (slush piles will do that).

    The 865-word hot mess below became the 2449-word second scene of Chapter Two. It went from being a thin, badly written, first draft to a well-written, fleshed-out piece with depth. Depth is really hard to explain but it comes down to how well you are able to pull the reader in and immerse him in your world. It is made up of thick, rich details that allow the reader to be more than a spectator watching a movie–it puts them solidly in the character’s head and heart. It is a hard-to-acquire skill. It is what makes a reader come back to a story again and again (so they can be the character) even after they know exactly what is going to happen next (the plot events).

    If you go to the sample on Amazon, the final form of this scene begins with “The contours of empty, midnight-quiet passageways blurred past Darien. His bare feet struck the metal decking with a steady rhythm.” You can read the entire thing in the sample for comparison if you like.

    Unlike the hot mess below–what I like to call a “first vomit draft”–the final product doesn’t open by dropping you cold into a dark room where you might as well be blind (because the details are absent). Unlike the hot mess below, it’s not full of fake details, devoid of characterization and opinions, and thin as the gruel in a Dickens orphanage.

    It took three long years of listening to criticism that cut me to the bone, that made me lose my lunch, that made me curl up and cry, but it was all worth it. Which is why my best advice to anyone thinking about taking up the madness of writing is this:



    “The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism.”

    – Norman Vincent Peale
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  • The Perils of Gun Pedantry

    The Perils of Gun Pedantry

    I recently attended the LTUE Symposium in Provo, and one of my favorite panels was the one on getting your firearms right.

    Now, you may not be a gun nut, and you may not care, but I can practically guarantee that just about every author who’s written about guns has gotten some–ahem!–feedback on what they got wrong.

    Let me take off my shooting hat (yes, I have one to keep the brass out of my cleavage) and put on my writer hat (let’s say it looks a bit like a crown).

    Just because I know the difference between a magazine and a clip doesn’t mean that every character I write does. Just because I know the difference between an auto-loader (semi-automatic) and full-auto doesn’t mean that every character I write does. Got that?

    Viewpoint matters


    Let’s say I’m writing from Lizzie’s viewpoint. She is Mark’s girlfriend. Mark is a gun-nut. He wears Hoppe’s as after-shave. He carries a bore-snake in his hip pocket. Lizzie on the other hand knows which end is the shootie end and that there’s a thingie that you pull and it makes the gun go boom.

    Alone, Lizzie settled into Mark’s bed. He’d gotten called in for overtime on a mid-shift. She fell asleep easily enough, but the sound of glass breaking woke her as if someone had doused her with a bucket of ice-water. Over the thundering coming from her chest, she heard footsteps. She scrambled for her cell-phone. No signal. None. Lizzie grabbed at the nightstand drawer and pulled out the gun just in time to shoot the big, bad guy barging through the door. He dropped to the floor.


    Notice how I didn’t get into the muzzle, cylinder, or cocking the hammer, or sighting in? Notice how I didn’t even tell you it was a revolver? Why didn’t I? It’s not because I didn’t know the proper terminology. It’s not because I don’t know what it feels like to experience this exact scenario.

    I could’ve quite as easily written this:



    Lizzie lifted the Smith & Wesson 357 Magnum with its six-inch, weighted barrel. She’d loaded it with 38 Special ammo to further reduce recoil and had custom grips made. Its more than 56 ounces was a reassuring weight in her hand. She looked down through the adjustable rear sights and placed the partridge dovetail of the front sight right where it needed to be — between the rear sights and on the intruder’s center of mass. She cocked the hammer. The cylinder made that satisfying click. The trigger pull was smooth as silk; the report, as quiet as a whisper. So, this is time distortion. This is auditory exclusion. This is surreal.

    So, why didn’t I write the second version? Because Lizzie is not me. Lizzie is not a gun person. She doesn’t know these details (that’s actually a competition gun, BTW, but the use of 38 Special ammo in a 357 Magnum is deliberate). She doesn’t know about time dilation and compression. She doesn’t know about auditory exclusion.

    Does genre matter?


    No. Even in the gun-nut genre, if you are writing from Lizzie’s point of view, you have to stay in Lizzie’s head, or else you’re going to have a world populated by gun-Mary-Sue’s (stand-ins for the author; the technical term is authorial intrusion). All your characters will read the same.

    The second version is actually far more appropriate to Mark’s viewpoint, although even there, it’s arguable that he’d go on and on, describing his gun in THAT moment. Now, he might well describe it in such detail if he’s putting it away in the drawer, just before he leaves. Maybe he was cleaning it and got the call to go in to work. Maybe he loaded it just in case, because the self-defense gun was still on the kitchen table being cleaned and he figured that it was better to have the competition gun ready than have none at all. But he wouldn’t describe it in detail as he was shooting it. He might think about lining up the sights just right, but he wouldn’t tell us about the type of sights. He might not even notice the time dilation or auditory exclusion as it’s happening. Later he might, though.

    Point of view matters.

    *As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

    • Cover for Ravages of Honor: Conquest (Book 1)
    • Cover for Ravages of Honor: Ascension (Book 2)
    • Cover for Ravages of Honor Lineage
    • Cover for Dominion: A Ravages of Honor Novella
    • Cover for Featherlight: A Ravages of Honor Novella

  • My favorite FenCon panel

    “Researching the Science in Science Fiction” was probably my favorite panel at FenCon this year. The panel was moderated by William Ledbetter and included Science GoH Marianne Dyson, fellow authors Kristi Hudson (not pictured) and Patrice Sarath (not pictured). Photo credit: C. Stuart Hardwick.

    While all the panels were great, I really enjoy discussing the craft of writing. For a sci-fi writer, that often means research. Sometimes it means going down the research rabbit-hole and getting lost. We discussed our own experiences, i.e. how we approach it, as well as the best methods.

    Doing research may sound easy. Google is your friend, right? Problem is that everything correct is on the internet; along with everything that is incorrect. The search for facts can be as muddied as the search for truth.

    As a writer one must know when to stop. Research is a great way to procrastinate and still pretend that you’re “writing.” Research can also be the death-knell for your premise, your idea, and your story. So how do you handle the story-slayer? Do you write around it? Do you pull out your handwavium and unobtainium? Do you just ignore it? (Think about the sounds that spaceships in Star Wars make in the vacuum of space where sound cannot travel).

    Lots of factors come into play, depending on what kind of story you’re writing. There is more rigor in a hard SF story than a soft SF one. Consistency becomes a challenge, as well as knowing how much of your research to include. After all, you did all that work. Hours and hours. Weeks and months and years. The longer you spent toiling away in the research salt-mines, the more you want to include. But that’s not necessarily the best thing for your story.

    Only about 10% of what I learn via research makes its way into my stories, even the hard SF ones. It has to be absolutely vital to the story, but more importantly, it has to be something that the viewpoint character knows. I think that including things the viewpoint character cannot possibly know is one of the worst mistakes I see consistently across all genres, not just sci-fi.

    Number two would be the dreaded, tension-less, “As you know, Bob” exposition via dialogue. Number three is straight up exposition, usually via author voice. We hashed out some of the best strategies for avoiding not just research pitfalls, but best practices when it comes to incorporating that research into our stories.

    I’m hoping FenCon will continue to offer this panel at upcoming conventions, and if you’re an aspiring writer, I hope you’ll attend. I certainly learned a lot from my fellow panelists.

  • FenCon XV

    FenCon XV

    Well, it’s official. I’m very excited to announce that I will be attending FenCon XV. Schedule forthcoming, and many thanks to William Ledbetter, the science track director, for the invitation. I’m also working on getting a new publication out in early September just in time for this event.

    What is FenCon? Who’ll be there? Why should I go?

    Answers below. Hope to see you there!

    It’s Alive!

    Join us September 21-23, 2018 at the Westin DFW Airpport. See the hotel link for reservations and directions.

    2018 marks 200 years since the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN. Join us as we celebrate 200 years of classic and modern SF! Of course, we’ll have panel programming, concerts, hands-on workshops, and more! All the good stuff that makes FenCon theTexas destination convention!

    Oh, and did we mention SCIENCE? You can’t put the “S” in “SF” without it! Oh you could try, but would it be as much fun as FenCon?

    Advance memberships are on sale now!

    FenCon XV Guests of Honor

     

    Guest of Honor: Larry Niven
    Music Guest of Honor: Marian Call
    Fen Guests of Honor: Aislinn Burrows and Carmen Bryan
    Artist Guest of Honor: Travis Lewis
    Science Guest of Honor: Marianne Dyson
    Special Workshop Guest: Martha Wells
    Toastmaster: Timothy Griffin

     

  • Happy Father’s Day!

    As promised, in honor of Father’s Day, To Be Men: Stories Celebrating Masculinity is live. If you pre-ordered, your eBook is available for download now.

    Whether you like science fiction, fantasy, military sci-fi, historical, or contemporary, adventure, humor, interesting characters, or even thought pieces, this anthology has a story for you.

    My story, “Cooper” is a tribute to Jeff Cooper, one of the iconic, real-life figures associated with the M1911 and the 45ACP. This story was inspired not just by the idea of a sentient/sapient gun. I also found inspiration in The Wizard of Oz, in the fact that the Tin Man had in him, what he was so desperately seeking–a heart. Like the Tin Man, my protagonist is in search of something he thinks he’s lost.

    Scott Bell‘s gritty cop story, “Earning It” explores the meaning of valor and honor. A writer with a unique voice, Scott balances out the grittiness with his trademark humor.

    J Trevor Robinson‘s “Let the Chips Fall Where They May” doesn’t give us the “gentlemen thieves” of the typical pop-culture casino heist story. Inspired by his own father, it is instead the story of a commander, a role model, and a father responsible for the lives of so many others.

    William C. Burns answers the question “So, what are wizards doing in the 21st century?” in his fantasy, “The Heaven Beasts.”

    Karina L. Fabian serves up a noir-style detective story complete with dragons and fae. If you’re a fan of the movie, Bright, this one is definitely for you.

    Michael W. Herbert, a Navy veteran who served in Vietnam, wrote two stories for this anthology, both based on real life events–one about dealing with rape, and another about defending a gay shipmate. I’m particularly fond of the way he handled both of these controversial subjects. As Michael says, “A mature man does not always know what to do, but he will do what he can to help.”

    Richard Paolinelli gives us a dystopian story, “The Last Hunt.” Unlike so many other zombie stories, this one is about one man’s devotion to his duty and his country.

    If you’re a Sherlock Holmes fan, I think you’ll really enjoy Ann Margaret Lewis‘s “The Affair of Miss Finney.” Holmes pursued many dark crimes, but Doyle never addressed the crime of rape. So, how would Holmes deal with the worst crime a woman can suffer?

    In “For Man or Beast,” award-winning science fiction author Brad R. Torgersen, plunges us into a story about a future, untamed frontier where we discover that it is about being men and women that makes us essential not just to each other, but to civilization.

    “Street Fox” by C. J. Brightley is set in her Erdemen Honor universe. Children need to believe in heroes. And not just in this fantasy, but in the real world.

    In “Bring the Pain,” veteran and writer T. L. “Tom” Knighton, delights and entertains us with a story about a guy who is, quite literally, a tank.

    In “The Messenger” Lloyd Behm II makes us cheer for an aging green beret who keeps his oaths, even in a post-apocalyptic world where the US no longer exists.

    Marina Fontaine‘s “Picture Imperfect” is set in the near-future dystopia of her Chasing Freedom novel. Her hero is forced to choose between protecting his family and complying with a system that provides him with comfort and power.

    Jon Del Arroz‘s military sci-fi adventure, “Compassion,” shows us that we must continue to fight the good fight, to fight for what is right.

    Newcomer Jamie Ibson‘s story, “Priorities” takes us into the world of the school resource officer, the cops that investigate offenses involving students and schools.

    No speculative fiction anthology would be complete a werewolf story, right? Julie Frost‘s “Man-Made Hell” mixes science-fiction and the supernatural, giving us a character who embodies virtus (the manly virtues) no matter his form.