Archives for April 2020

As you can see from the date, I’m a day late with this post.  No excuse for that, or no good one.  Need to do better.

I did finish Sharon Kay Penman’s historical fiction, The Land Beyond The Sea.  This is a magnificent book, the story of the downfall of Outremer, the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem.  Like all of Penman’s works, her exhaustive research into the topic shows both in the detail of the settings and the historical accuracy of the events that she describes.  These are coupled with the terrific way she has brought a huge cast of characters to life.  These range from Baldwin IV, the leper king of Jerusalem, who is presented as someone who could be the lead in a Greek tragedy, to numerous minor characters rescued from the dustbin of history.  They all feel like real people, most of whom make frightfully myopic decisions about matters of existential importance and they either ignore the overall picture or talk themselves into believing  they are taking it into account.  You can see how they get to the actions they take as you realize that this is what the real people did.  Penman references observers who were there for the dramatic scenes of both Reynald and Balian with Saladin – she points out in her note that is the way these happened – and they come across as perfectly in keeping with the way the characters have acted throughout the story.  The one exception, I suppose, is de Ridefort, but he may well have been a one-dimensional individual in real life with no redeeming features.  As you can tell, I loved this book and would recommend it to anyone.  You do not need to be a fan of historical fiction, or this period, to enjoy it.

Reading this work makes me wonder about the task of creating what we like to call three-dimensional characters.  How do we move a character from – as reviewers are wont to say – being cardboard or two-dimensional to being someone who appears real?  Some of it, I am sure, is a function of the scale of the work.  Many older science fiction works are much shorter than today’s books and there is simply less room to flesh out the characters.  Whether a book is plot-driven rather than character-driven matters, too.  It is also more than simply having back-story for a character, although I think that is necessary.  You can’t understand a character’s actions unless you understand where they have come from.  Seeing a tug of war on decisions in a character’s head is also important.  Certainly, these are points I need to think about since I’m in the middle of a draft.  That and don’t be late!

I talked a little about the concept of hard sf last week.  One topic I mentioned but didn’t go into is the idea of hibernation/deep sleep/suspended animation.  For all the attention that we pay to physics, we don’t spend much time on this, but if we don’t have an FTL drive or a multi-generation ship, we need it.  How would it or could it work?  Hibernation does work (at least for bears), so maybe we could find a way to slow our metabolisms and, maybe, the ageing process.  If we could, what would it be like getting up after years?  I know how stiff I feel getting out of bed in the morning!  Then, there are parts of us that are accustomed to moving on a regular basis and become cantankerous if they don’t – like our gut.  I explored some of this in Starman’s Saga and I’m sure you’ll let me know if it seems realistic.

The audiobook has gone to QA review!  Here’s hoping there are no issues that need correction and that publication is just ahead.

Science fiction conventions, like all gatherings of large groups, have become impossible now and for some time into the future.  How long, no one knows.  The Nebula Awards at the end of May have gone to an online event.  On a smaller scale, I saw that PortCon, up here in Portland, Maine and scheduled for late June, has done the same.  It did occur to me, that this cloud could have a silver lining.  PortCon is a small, local con, but by going online maybe it can attract folks who would never think to travel here.  So, look at the PortCon website and sign up to join the fun!

The term hard sf (or hard science fiction) is used a lot but it seems to mean different things to different people.  To me, it is a story in which the author sticks within the confines of how the universe acts based on science, with as small a number of extrapolations as possible.  Some stories like this stay entirely in the solar system and adhere very closely to current scientific understanding.  To me, The Martian by Andy Weir was a great example.  To get outside the solar system, the most obvious constraint is the speed of light and the theory of relativity.  If you accept this constraint, you are locked into generation ships or interstellar ramjets, either Bussard’s original proposal or the catalytic variant that was published in the 70’s.  Many people will accept as hard sf a reasonable postulate for a way to circumvent this limit or the distance involved (wormholes, hyperspace, Alcubierre drives).  Cherryh’s Alliance-Union universe (at least the Company Wars part), McDevitt’s Priscilla Hutchins series, and Scalzi’s Collapsing Empire (a particularly innovative way of approaching it) are good examples.  What doesn’t work so well anymore are books like the Foundation trilogy.  There is more to sticking to the science than relativistic physics, though.  How could suspended animation work?  If the star your planet circles is red, would the plants be green?  (Probably not.)  For good or ill, I tried to wrestle with some of these in Starman’s Saga.  It’s fun but then there is always the risk that the science starts to dominate the story.  Curious what others think.  Let me know.

Close to completion on the audiobook!  Can’t wait to see (hear) how that finally comes out.

Stay well and stay sate.

There is a lot happening in the world today, but this blog was never designed as commentary on politics or pandemics.  Here, I will stick to writing and books.

Closing in on getting the audiobook of Starman’s Saga ready.  I had never thought much about audiobooks before it was so strongly recommended to me.  I read very fast and figured that an audiobook would slow me down and interfere with the way I imagined the characters sounding.  Listening to the draft narrations, though, I am changing my mind.  It is a whole different way of perceiving a story.  I do want to see how this works, but I am beginning to think of doing it again.

Taking a few days away from the stack of paper that constitutes the print of the first draft.  I find that makes the mistakes stand out more when I sit down to revise and it makes the places where a scene needs to be cut/added/re-written more obvious.

Working on the first draft for the next book brought to mind a session I remember Salvatore Scibona running at the Wesleyan Writers’ Conference a couple of years ago.  He made the point, rather emphatically, that when you are writing a first draft, you should not stop to polish the words or try to make a scene perfect.  What is important is getting the draft done, get it all written.  Write a sh**ty first draft.  There is plenty of time to take that draft and edit it (and repeat that process) but unless the first draft is written completely, you don’t have your story.  I think he is right.  What would be the point of polishing a piece of dialog so that it is just right if, when we revise the story, it turns out to be unnecessary and we delete it?  Waste of time right?  So, that’s my objective.  Get the whole story out, then start to take a critical look at it.

I do want to mention that Starman’s Saga is going to become an audiobook.  This will be my first.  I’ve had a number of people ask if there would be one (and at the time, I was saying no) and then I got a blunt piece of advice at Boskone that I was making a mistake.  So, here we go.  I’m hoping to have it out by the end of April.

I’d also like to mention a quick and fun read: The Bookish Life of Nina Hill by Abbi Waxman.  This an enjoyable story of an introverted bookworm without any meaningful family, who suddenly discovers she has a large, slightly crazy family and (maybe) a large inheritance.  The characters are well crafted, especially Nina, the sort of people who you could imagine meeting at Starbucks.  Her predicaments and how she works them out suit both her and the overall tone of the book, which is breezy.  I also like the setting but that may also be due to the fact that I know the Larchmont area outside LA where much of the story takes place.  The ending did wrap up a little too quick and too tidily, in my opinion, but that’s a minor complaint.  A good read and you can go through it in a day.

Now back to the sh**ty first draft.