"Science Fiction", the "Bad" Word of Academia

I'm still trying to recover from a cold, although I have been getting better each day. I had a couple of relapses last night though, and so I mostly took it easy today and stayed in doors. Because of that I'm going to keep this week's blog entry kind of short but I hope it will be inspirational enough for anybody who reads it. I was reading an online article from USA Today the other day about how science fiction movies have been viewed by the mainstream more respectfully and seriously than they had several decades ago. Particularly this has been reflected in the Oscar nominations. According to Marco R. della Cava of USA Today, Avatar and District 9 have been chosen to run for best-picture Oscar. The article goes on to talk about how "science fiction" has been looked at as a scary word by...

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On Character

There was an interesting post I read on Nathan Bransford's blog that ended with "How do you balance story while being true to a character?"I think this is a question worthy of discussion. The context was a post concerning where characters take you over the course of the writing process. Sometimes we writers plunge into a story certain that we know where it is going. We have the outline either physically laid out or firmly fixed in our minds. We set pen to paper or fingertips to keyboard and suddenly...The characters take on a life of their own. This is a good thing, in part. When characters steal the story, they come alive. When the writer surrenders control to the creative, we learn more about the character than we could otherwise and they shed the the labels confining their personality....

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Labels (again)

Despite a previous post taking a somewhat positive view of labels I am now going to take a somewhat negative view. Just to prove that I can't make my mind up about anything. Though really the two posts have very little to do with each other at all. As I think I have mentioned, this year I am attempting to write at least one short story a month. This has brought to mind a short story I briefly toyed with but ultimately abandoned because it strayed into Science Fiction territory and I have been a strictly Fantasy writer. Despite the fact that in both libraries and book stores SciFi and Fantasy are combined into one section there are many hard core fans who will tell you, in no uncertain terms, that they are two distinct genres. Of course there are others who will tell you that's all a bunch...

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Valentines

In honor of a recent holiday, (or as a sigh of relief that it has once again passed by for happier days of the year), my post this week will be about a couple of the different types of romance commonly found in stories.In the world of modern love stories, there seem to be two main archetypes: the Cinderella and the Beauty and the Beast. Both arising from classic stories that are several centuries old, these each follow a basic path to get to the happy ending. In Cinderella, it’s Unhappy Female is rescued from dire fate by Godlike Man. In Beauty and the Beast, Female is doing all right on her own, but is compelled to rescue Brooding Man from whatever spell/deformity/dark secret he is plagued with.Each type of story has gone through waves of popularity. In the nineteenth century, Victorian...

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Posted in: archetypes,love,stories

Two Recommended Books About Writing

I'm so glad that I've been given this opportunity to write my own weekly blog for Sylvanopolis Writers Society. I've been sick for most of the week with a cold so unfortunately I haven't gotten as much done as I've wanted to as far as writing goes. I think I spent most of my energy finishing up and submitting my article to the Website that I've been writing for payment for. That's where most of my writing has gone for the week. Everything else has been bits and pieces here and there, now and then. But I remembered earlier on this Friday that it is the day that I had agreed with one of Sylvanopolis's coordinators that I would post my blog and so, since I've been recovering more each day, I would at least dedicate some time to this first of my blog entries for Sylvanopolis.I had been thinking...

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Random House :D

So I know it's probably old news, but Random House said "no" to the iPad and agency model. For those of us reading and writing SFF this means Del Rey will not be a part of this arrangement. Now, all publishers have their place in the genre, and those of us who read prolifically own books by all of them. But likewise, wide reading can teach what some publishers publish and what others publish. DAW and TOR like their epics. Thanks to Marion Zimmer Bradley and Mercedes Lackey, DAW published what I call "feminist fantasy" for the longest time, but which is slowly leading into "fluff fantasy" as Luna encroaches on their audience. (And Mercedes Lackey is also writing for that publisher as well). And fluff certainly has it's place, as Erica detailed in an early post. TOR is like DAW but rather...

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To sum it up...

Today's been pretty busy so I'm keeping this post short, but I discovered the following quote and had one of those "oh wow, it's not just me" moments. This is why I write. It's always comforting to know you're not alone."If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it." ~Toni Morrison-Meli...

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Posted in: inspiration,morrison

My Favorite Topic: Culture Change

I think writing, anthropology and my research into the world of publishing intersected when I realized the importance technology was having on the industry. But my interests aren't necessarily in line with the blogs and articles I've been reading. For that matter, while I enjoyed Frontline's Digital Nation, I found some of the MIT professors' perspectives to be completely ignorant of the teen-and-twenty-somethings' reality. The fact is the world is different than even a decade ago. There isn't any going back, there is just a need to adapt to What Is. And the reality of the present affects the buying patterns of the future. Technology is changing behavior. Behavior, especially those habits taking root because of the digital environment, influences priorities and the ways in which...

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Out of My Head

Here’s a kind of stupid confession: I used to write out conversations between myself and my characters. For some reason I thought that this was the best way to get to know them, so I would write a literal encounter, like the character suddenly sat down beside me and said hello.These usually occurred when I was stuck on some aspect of motivation and needed to know why someone did what they did. “I need help on this,” I would write, and the character would inevitably be more than happy to explain it to me. (Side note: If my characters were real, I don’t think that any of them would be quite so pleasant as they managed to be in these instances.)I think I stopped using this technique around the time I read somewhere that Anne Rice claims she wrote the Lestat novels with the title character...

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Posted in: characters,inspiration,lestat,painting,writing

Digital Madness: What does it Mean?

Last weekend Amazon stopped selling Macmillan books. For SFF readers, this means TOR. The issue was that the publisher (Macmillan) was determined to enforce the Agency Model (Which Apple agreed to for the iPad) on Amazon. What is the Agency Model? Publishers set price of e-books as Mike Shatzkin describes at length. The dilemma is clear, with a corporation come maintenance costs of all their departments. All of the departments are necessary in order to get one book on the bookstore shelves. Publishers are scared that the buying patterns are not going to sustain their current model. Well, it can't sustain their current model, and that's the truth. The Agency Model is their attempt to get what they need and meet consumer needs.But it is the consumer who will decide the price in...

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Labels

I've been thinking of late, about labels. Or, more specifically, the human tendency to label not only what we come in contact with in the world around us but our very selves. It seems basic to us. In fact, I cannot think of a single tradition of thought that does not label to one degree or another. (I may very well be wrong about this so feel free to point it out ^_^) I'm not one to knock the habit. If some part of us feels the need to identify and label then I'm all for it. Though of course getting to caught up in that aspect of life definitely has it's downsides, as we have seen proven time and time again. It occurred to me that I have neglected this urge within my characters. Not every novel needs to have characters agonizing over who they are and what the greater meaning of their existence...

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REM

In middle school, I used to regale (or bore, depending on how kind you’re being) my carpool with stories of my dreams from the night before. I used to dream a lot more when I was a child than I do now; probably because I used to sleep a lot more than I do now. And despite the fact that I was as squeaky clean as they come, my childhood dreams seemed to always resemble drug trips. “I dreamed that my teacher boiled my tennis shoes,” one scrawled entry in my journal goes, “and they turned into neon green liquid.” Then there was the one where I was floating in a world of purple television static, scrambling for something to hold on to. Another about giant chess pieces suspended in space. On and on.As I grew up, though, my dreams became less chaotic...

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Posted in: dreams,inspiration,writing