Reading, writing and the search for the perfect cup of coffee.

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Have you ever been assaulted by rabid fans pushing their favorite science fiction stories and novels like a drug dealer pushes heroin? Or when reading said classics do you feel like putting it down and saying “What was the point?”

It is these and many more memories which come to mind whenever I meet someone who also happens to be a science-fiction fan. After establishing our mutual interest in the genre we usually start bombarding each other with what we had read. This is then followed by the recommendations, and reproaches, of having, or not, read so and so who had written this and that. Finishing with assertions that you can’t be a real science fiction fan if you haven’t read X (Asimov, Heinlen, Bradbury, etc.).

Does it really have to be this way? Why can’t we talk about science fiction on the bleeding edge. Stories relevant to us now as opposed to classics which held relevance in the ’60’s or ’70’s? A beginning science fiction reader would find themselves mired in classics that hold nothing for the reader and may serve to alienate them from the genre. You know the books I’m talking about. For myself, I found The Forever War to be an abysmally boring and preachy book which made me question why I was writing science fiction at all if this was one of the best the genre had to offer.

In a recent blog post, writer Ian Sales also feels similarly. As a genre which is primarily concerned looking forward, why are we as readers and writers so eager to push fiction from the past? Shouldn’t we be recommending the latest and greatest? Evolutions and revolutions of themes we had read in those same classics?

As an author, I had begun to ask some of the same questions Ian had poised in his entry. Are these classic stories really stories or are they historical documents as Sales asserts? Looking back at some of the Foundation novels I’d read and loved when I was a kid, I can see things in it as a writer now that I hadn’t seen before; a mistake here an expository dump there. Writing errors which I would be taken for task by a critique partner or an editor if I had done the same in my own work.

But I believe Ian was right in the last sentence of his post:

Further, modern sf readers shouldn’t need to be aware of everything which has gone before, but modern sf writers certainly ought to.

As writers we do need to know what came before and build on it. But I think from now on when I do give my recommendations to other fans and readers, I’ll tell people who ask me to read more recent works so they can see the SF of today and not of yesterday.

Have your coffee and Twitter, too!

This is must have been what they had in mind when they made the Twitsig Mug:

Take your favorite Tweet and have it emblazoned onto your mug for all to see for however long the cup stays in one piece.  But I’d suggest you be careful about which Tweet you put on the mug.

Yes folks, the end of humanity is nigh. Get ‘em while they’re hot.

Thanks to Single Serve Coffee for unearthing this.

I love Social Media.  I’m on at least five different services and spend way more time than I should on them, but I enjoy it considerably and have befriended many great people.  With as much enjoyment as I get out of these services I thought it would be great if could combine together two things I feel passionately about: Social Media and Writing Fiction.

But how do you develop a story in only 140 character bite sized morsels? You could write a longer piece and serialize it, or you could even write Flash Fiction which thrives in such small spaces.  Also, how do you develop characters in serialized stories when you use one account for both posting and comments?  I felt all those approaches left much to be desired.  What I wanted to see was a story, using Social Media where one character interacts with another using separate accounts.  And what’s more, I wanted the story to be science fiction.

The big problem with writing science fiction or fantasy is you usually need quite a bit of space to build your world and have your characters explore it.  Could this be done in 140 character pieces and still be a compelling read?  My answer is yes it can.  And the way to do it is by telling the entire story in dialogue.

Dialogue is powerful.  It’s one of the best tools a writer has in their arsenal to convey emotion and feeling.  Think of the last novel or story you read.  What were the parts which moved you the most?  It was when the characters were speaking.  The author manipulated the words coming from the character into a stream of emotional strength.  You knew how the character was feeling because they told you so in their own voice.

With this in mind, the idea for Calling Home popped into my mind.  A story entirely told within the confines of a damaged ship’s system status messaging and emails.  Each character would have their own Twitter and Plurk account, and communicate with each other through those accounts only.

After some refinement of the idea, I’m proud to announce I have started posting the individual Plurks and Tweets for the story.  Here is the information you will need to follow the story on Twitter and Plurk:

Twitter
Hastag: #chh
http://twitter/ISSMontserrat
http://twitter/JFCAllen
http://twitter/JFCSandeep
http://twitter/ISS_Safeguard

Plurk
http://www.plurk.com/user/CallingHome
http://www.plurk.com/user/Allen
http://www.plurk.com/user/Sandeepz
http://www.plurk.com/user/ISS_Safeguard

If you don’t have your own Twitter or Plurk account, you can get your own Plurk account by following this link and then click on the CallingHome link on my profile.  For a Twitter account, go and register here and then follow the accounts in the list above.

Don’t want a Plurk or Twitter account?  That’s a shame to hear, but I can understand.  If you still want to read the story, you can go to Calling Home’s Archive Page on Tumblr and see the story in the way it was posted.

This story will run for at least a couple of months, so feel free to follow and see what happens to our characters in the deep reaches of space.  For the time being, there will be twice daily updates, however that could change as things progress in the story.  Read and you’ll find out why….

Lastly, if you enjoy the story please tell your friends about it and spread the word on any other Social Media services you’re on.  If you’d like to see it posted to another Social Media service then email me and I’ll look into it.

Enjoy the story!

Have you ever found yourself staring at your screen and praying to your fickle muse to grant you the strength to take the words out from deep within you?  If you say yes, stop it.  Yes, I said stop trying to get a hold of her, because she’s on vacation in Cabo San Lucas and the last thing on her mind is you.

So how do you get back on track?  How are you going to write that blog entry?  Finish that piece of flash fiction?  Top off the novel you’d been writing for the last six months?

Try a writing burst.

A writing burst is a session of writing where you concentrate on nothing but output.  It doesn’t matter what you write as long as you write.  If you wanted to you could focus on writing a letter to your grandmother, a blog entry, a recipe, a short story, or your comprehensive plan on taking over the world using only strawberry Twizzlers.   The point is you just have to write something.

To keep things flowing well, I recommend your writing burst be fifteen minutes long.  Fifteen minutes is a small enough piece of time where it doesn’t feel like a major commitment, but isn’t small enough were you’ll be out of time before you even started.  It also helps you silence your inner editor long enough for you to sit down and produce.  Once your fifteen minutes are over, you’ll be surprised at what you’ve accomplished.

For example, I finished this entire blog entry in fifteen minutes.

If you’d like to try a writing burst, call or message a couple of your friends who also have writing to do and do an impromptu writing burst.  Have no writing friends?  Join me on Plurk and we’ll go ahead and do a writing burst together.  You’ll be happy you did, and your muse will be even happier you’ve left her alone with her tall Piña Colada sunning at the edge of the pool.

There are times when you’re writing you find yourself dead in the water because of one missing fact.  In my case this happened recently when I needed to find out some names for a couple of characters I have.  Unfortunately, the names I needed were obscure Breton names, a people who live in Brittany.

After going through the usual channels of Google, the results were lacking to say the least.  I decided to take my search to the social media networks I frequent.  Almost immediately, I received a reply from one of my friends on Plurk.  He pointed me in the direction of some excellent books in french documenting some 1800 Breton names.  This saved me a considerable amount of time and effort.

In order to have social media work for you as a research tool, you’ll need to join several social media networks.  The best two I’ve found are Twitter and Plurk.  Twitter for the sheer amount and variety of people there and Plurk for the incredible community features and helpful people frequenting the service.  Those are just two services though.  You will want to be on at least five or so to cast as wide a net as possible.

Now, in addition to being on a multitude of services, you also need to have a lot of friends. This doesn’t mean friending or following people indiscriminately, you need to cultivate a broad cross-section of people from different backgrounds.  With this diversity, you’ll be able to ask questions concerning whatever and will be assured an answer.

As writers, sometimes we don’t work well with technology, but sometimes its best just to jump into the waters and start treading.  It is a whole lot easier than performing a public reading and in most cases a lot more fun.

You might have noticed a new look to Renegade Sanctuary today, or even during the weekend. For years, I’ve used Movable Type as my blogging system of choice, but as time moved on and my needs changed I found myself increasingly limited by what I could do with my MT blog with the limited time I had.

Now this has nothing to do with skill, because I know I could have learned what I needed to get Renegade Sanctuary were I wanted. No, it was a matter of what I wanted to spend my time doing. Instead of tinkering with the blog, I’d rather be writing, and with this in mind I decided to make the leap to WordPress.

With the wealth of themes, plugins, and other extensible functions and design elements, I could easily change my blog with little effort. Compare that with the near Herculean effort of finding any sort of theme or design for Movable Type and you can see the appeal.

It took a little work during the weekend (and some help from great friends on Plurk. Hello Allan!) to migrate everything, but thankfully with the use of my blogging software, Ecto, I was able to quickly restore my old entries from MT to Wordpress in only a couple of clicks. I looked around for a couple of themes and decided on a couple of them, starting with Chris Pearson’s NeoClassical. A very nice and clean theme which I plan to build on by switching out the default images and adding a couple of more widgets.

Since I’m still new to Wordpress, if there are some plugins or widgets you’d recommend I use, please feel free to leave me a comment and I’ll look into it.

So, without further discussion, I’m off to continue writing. Keep an eye out here for new features, content and for details on a new writing project I’m working on involving social media and fiction.

Talk to all of you later!

Poe War is a great writing blog that covers everything from identifying ways for writers not to negatively reinforce themselves, to hilarious fun lists of annoyances that writers find out in the wilds.

While a lot of the entries deal with freelance writing, a lot of the information they give can be readily applied toward fiction. One of the most useful I’ve found recently was an entry in how to use slang and accents when writing dialogue. While not entirely addressing what I needed, it was still a very useful starting point for me in trying to find resources to help me with some of my character’s speech patterns.

And some of the posts under the Fun section are items that any writer will definitely get a laugh from.

Well, after a couple of emails between my mentor and I, I have started my revisions in earnest. Right now the majority of them are dialogue related. Which is interesting since I thought dialogue was my strongest capability in a story.

The cardinal sin I committed while writing the dialogue was that I had made the characters sound much to alike. More than likely this was due to letting my own diction seep through as I wrote the draft. Understandable, considering the speed I was trying to keep in order to finish the thing.

So now after having basked in the afterglow of accomplishment, I now start the task of making my characters sound different from one another. I guess for starters some contractions would be nice, according to some of my critique partners.

Picky, picky. Ah well, as long as I don’t all make them sound alike when I relax their speech then that would be good. I could just give them all cockney accents, even though they are nowhere near the British Isles.

It would be hilarious though, wouldn’t it?

I’d like to know what your thoughts are on accents and dialects. Can they be used effectively without making them look like caricatures? And can you use accents or dialects from our own world in Fantasy or Science Fiction worlds without having the reader stop and go “Why is there an Irish guy in the middle of that group of dwarves?”.

Sometimes you want your coffee table to be informative as well as being a place you can put your blessed brew down. If this is so, then this is the coffee table for you:

Yes, that’s right my readers. This is a coffee table with the periodic table. Even better is that in each little square you have an actual sample of the element in question. I think you have to take their word on it that you really do have hydrogen, helium and the other noble gases in there, but I digress. And as far as those radioactive elements and elements with a half life of microseconds only produced in particle accelerators, I think those’ll be nicely indicated by an icon instead.

You can find out more about it (and it’s astronomical price of $,9,500!) at Element Displays. Thanks to Gizmodo for finding this.

You know, this is exactly how I think the iPhone would be like if it did get on a late night talk show.

Thanks to Jeph Jacques at Questionable Content for the great guest strip.