Observations, Publishing, Writing

What Most Rejections Really Mean

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Rejection, it sucks. If you’re here, you’ve probably followed this link from somewhere on Twitter or Facebook where writers share tips, advice or pep-talks and, unfortunately, that probably means you know the fear of the rejection letter.

Though, hey, at least you’re not Jim Lee

It’s easy for us to think, because we got that letter, that it closes the door on our chances. Even if it’s just the opinion of one person, that opinion is devastating because it holds the weight of someone who, at the very least, has control over your career for however long it may be in front of them. And, with an opinion of that weight, it’s hard not to take it personally. But there’s something that people need to understand about rejections, something that’s hard to grasp:

If you’re ready, they rarely have anything to do with you. Continue reading What Most Rejections Really Mean →

Observations, Writing

A Tale With No Villain

Learning how to write is built largely on the idea of formulas. You’ll find many students and early writers follow these formulas almost religiously and sometimes, despite their best efforts, they never quite escape them. Time and time again you’ll find stories out there which could best be described as “formulaic” and it’s never intended as a compliment. Unfortunately, breaking away from it can be challenging because rarely do lesson plans include a guide on how to break the mold they so carefully made for you.

One of the examples of this is the idea of how the cast should be constructed. With certain roles being absolutely necessary to the idea of a story to tell, such as a protagonist, it’s easy to understand why. You wouldn’t want to go telling a story that has no protagonist or main character of any sort, as there has to be someone for the audience to relate to. You also wouldn’t want that character to have no one to interact with, because then there’s nothing to provide some of the texture the story arc would so badly need. But often there’s a sense that all roles mentioned in a typical formula are 100% necessary outside of the protagonist even when that isn’t necessarily true.

For instance, not every story requires an antagonist… Continue reading A Tale With No Villain →

Agent of Argyre, FICTION

Gardening With Pixies

Gardening, it’s a surprisingly complex field of work for something that most people just take on as a hobby. In today’s high stress world a lot of people take on gardening as a method to unwind. The slow, gradual process of tending to a garden and watching it grow can give you hours of productive work to do that doesn’t actually require a great deal of thinking, worrying, or bickering with coworkers. As such, many people, including the psyche major working in human resources, have recommended that you should take up gardening as a method of staving off the strain of your soul-crushing job. However, after only a short time, you’ve realized something’s gone terribly wrong.

The act of growing a living thing that only requires sunlight, water, and soil should be a simple task. But anyone who has ever tried it knows that it’s filled with hidden pitfalls and challenges. You may have planted in the wrong location, over-watered, under-watered, failed to properly fertilize, or trimmed it in the wrong way. Any number of these can lead to having a dead plant in your garden. And, for some of us, it’s fortunate that plants aren’t sentient or we’d be serial killers.

But one of the greatest challenges of gardening is pest control. Pests, whether they be bugs, small animals, or simply children, are the sworn enemy of a thriving garden and will generally require you to bring out the poison. Unfortunately that doesn’t always work, with some bugs being resistant and children being illegal to poison. And for those exceptions it can take a trickier approach that may involve organic solutions or even grabbing some sort of psychological device like a tiny scarecrow or a dog that hates small kids. However, should it turn out that you can’t manage to make anything grow, it may not just be that you’re terrible with plants, you may have a pest you didn’t account for.

You… may have Pixies. Continue reading Gardening With Pixies →

Futurism, Miscellaneous, Sci-Fi, Writing

Problems In Post-Scarcity

Images of the future are often polarized along pretty extreme lines. Dystopias and utopias dominate the landscape in science fiction because they’re often thought to be the easiest to write and easiest to deliver a message. The world within a dystopia can be used to magnify today’s problems to be easier to see while the world within a utopia can often highlight issues we don’t see in our daily lives. But the truth is that they’re not nearly as easy to write as people often think and a lot of attempts fall short of the overall mark. Dystopias, in particular, are generally derived from each other and have become attached to tropes rather than genuine ideas. And utopias, as I’ve established not too long ago, are generally the improper labeling of a superficial analysis of what turns out to be post-scarcity societies.

I’ve thrown around “post-scarcity society” often in the last couple weeks without going too in depth on the subject. For some people it would be hard to really tell the differences between a utopia and a post-scarcity society, with the two of them essentially looking ideal from where we stand and showing few of the problems we could readily identify in our current culture. But the division between the two is rather clear: a post-scarcity society has solved many major problems while a utopia has ostensibly solved all problems. And the fact of the matter is, while we’ve never seen a utopia in the real world (and likely never will), we have, however briefly, gone beyond some form of scarcity. Hell, it briefly appeared to happen in the last century before a peanut farmer harshed everyone’s buzz.

He wasn’t wrong though.

But the idealized post-scarcity, the one that you want to see in your speculative fiction, can be a tricky thing to write because it often requires you to understand problems from a completely different perspective. Because writing a post-scarcity society believably requires you to recognize… Continue reading Problems In Post-Scarcity →

Futurism

What’s Left For Us

A few days ago I made mention that there was a good chance that an AI takeover of our lives would be quiet and uninteresting. There wouldn’t bea  great deal of violence or bloodshed, it’d just gently happen over time. An artificial intelligence, lacking the same sorts of pressures that made us who we are, wouldn’t have reason to annihilate us as we so often fear. But the idea that they could take over and leave us without purpose seems like a credible possibility to me. After all, why do we need to do the work if the machines can do it for us?

For some this would seem like a rather ominous and damning thought for our future. If we’re stripped of purpose then what would be our reason to live as the machines take care of us like fleshy children? Yet, despite this possibility, I sit here looking forward to the day when our machines can start to pick up that slack for us. Because when that time comes, humanity will be free to do something we’ve never been able to do before.

Instead of fearing the future’s “lack of purpose”, imagine the one where we find… Continue reading What’s Left For Us →

Futurism, Miscellaneous, Sci-Fi

The Benevolent Dictatorship Of Our Robot Overlords

Presented a new project to work on in the coming weeks, I came to consider several things I’ve blogged about recently. When dealing with the future and ideas of where we’re going as a race we often find ourselves in a scared, frightened position. It makes sense, the future, especially an unknown future, can be terrifying even if all common sense and logic tells us that it should go another direction. We’re constantly afraid of the idea that the world itself may turn into a Mad Max-style wasteland, or that an arrogant politician may become the next Hitler, or that we may end up going to World War 3 over the actions of a single nation.

But in all of these cases we can look at the history of the world and the shape of what has come before to determine that it’s not always as bad as we feel. The world was once hotter than we’re making it and it managed to survive, so it would go to say that climate change is more a threat to us than to the planet itself. Hitler’s movement was born out of a fairly unique set of circumstances where the world’s economy and social climate were far worse than it is today (for now). And the World Wars were both started by a series of terrible decisions which resulted in the world’s power being separated across clearly divided lines. So, as bad as things may get, the conditions aren’t quite right for most of our greatest fears.

But there are other fears of the future where we don’t have that historical frame of reference to calm ourselves. We have no idea what would happen if tomorrow an asteroid were found to be headed right for us. We have no logical frame of reference for what happens if we discovered aliens exist and are trying to make contact. No one’s entirely sure of the full ramifications of the continued development of artificial intelligence. And these all raise interesting questions with few (if any) concrete answers. In fact, some potential answers are so outside of our normal frames of reference that we have a hard time really picturing them.

For instance: if those machines do take over the planet, are we sure we’d see it? Continue reading The Benevolent Dictatorship Of Our Robot Overlords →

Miscellaneous, Writing

Monday Musing: Priorities

Coming out of the tail-end of what we’ll call a “pollen bender”, I’m wide wake in time to see the sun rise and sit in relative silence with my thoughts. And, thanks to the wonders of medication, those thoughts are pleasant for now. Sure, I can hear a lawnmower running at 6:30 in the morning and I know I’ll be cursing that sun before it reaches the other horizon, but at least for right now I’m in an okay place. I might have breakfast today, I may make coffee, I’ll get together a schedule and try my best to make that schedule happen.

Or I’ll pass out again once the meds fully kick in (which is totally what happened today).

But, assuming I have long enough to make it happen, what exactly belongs on that schedule? Creative types who haven’t “made it” are faced with that question often. Every day we’re silently asked by the world at large whether today is a day you should go running head long at that wall. Our brain says that the skull is becoming fragile and that the wall hurts when we run into it, but our hearts say that one more good headbutt and we just might make it through. It’s brick but we’re persistent and we’ve heard other people who managed to headbutt through that wall just fine so it’s clearly a smart decision, right?

Getting to that “made it” point is known to be incredibly hard, downright brutal at times. We sacrifice our days to goals that the world tells us are unobtainable, then we’re told by that same world that if we don’t charge skull first into the metaphorical brick that we’re not really dedicated to it anyway. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, and the schedule’s still not totally filled out. So you’re left feeling around blindly, trying to determine what’s really worth your time, and finding some regrets along the way. Because, until you see the results, everything is a… Continue reading Monday Musing: Priorities →

Observations, Writing

Prequels, Sequels, And Resolutions

We live in a world today where having a “franchise” is incredibly important for writers of every kind. Films are the most visible of this, especially in a post-Avengers world, but it’s also long been true of other forms as well. Writing a film that removes all possibility of a sequel or spin-off of some sort is generally a good way to get executives meddling in your work. Having a television series that couldn’t somehow generate a spin-off or be part of a “universe” is gradually becoming taboo. Comic books and video games are expected to be part of a long running series, sometimes to the detriment of both. And, even as an author of novels, someone who manages to land a book deal is signed for more than one book of the same series. In fact, one could argue that even if you only make stand alone projects, if they keep getting money – you are the franchise.

But that leads to the inevitable problem of prequels and sequels struggling to succeed. It’s well known that making a good sequel can be pretty difficult and making a good prequel is thought at times to be nearly impossible. More than once I’ve heard other writers and critics talk about how a good prequel is something that just can’t be done. And sequels, though recognized to be capable of being good, are generally approached with great caution. Yet, it’s impossible to ignore that some series of books and similar projects wouldn’t have been quite as good as a single stand-alone entry. Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and many others just wouldn’t have been the same without multiple entries building their lore. Though, a word to some, this doesn’t mean you divide a stand alone book into multiple films.

Still, despite these successes, you would be much harder pressed to find a prequel that everyone can agree is somewhat good. In fact, I’ve had prolonged conversations with people who insisted that prequels not only fail but tend to ruin or cheapen the thing they were a prequel to. Frankly, with Star Wars showing us how much prequels can be utterly loathed, you couldn’t blame someone for that idea. And yet, many who hated the Star Wars prequels have had to admit that they were pretty fond of… a Star Wars prequel.

So the question comes, just what exactly divides good prequels and sequels from the bad? When the topic comes up people tend to have a laundry list of things that a prequel or sequel needs to be “good”. However, the items on those lists are usually things you need for any story to be good anyway. So why would it be that it’s easier to write a stand alone than it is to write good sequels and prequels, and just how did the ones that pulled it off manage to do so?

In my opinion, it boils down to one thing: resolutions. Continue reading Prequels, Sequels, And Resolutions →

Miscellaneous, Mythology, Observations

Monday Musing: What Our Afterlives Say About Us

Recently I wrote about the potential drawbacks of immortality and, funny enough, I haven’t stopped thinking about mortality since. We’re the only animals on this planet that understand we’re here for a finite time. From the day we first learn what death is, we know on some level that it’ll eventually be our turn. When we’re young, it doesn’t quite occur to us day to day, but we still feel it on some level. And when we’re older – well some of us can’t stop thinking about it. The fear of death, in one way or another, shapes our very lives as we decide how we want to spend what little time we have here.

And a result of this, as I mentioned last week, is that the very idea of religion is often an attempt at finding a way out. Mythology has often dealt with the ideas of the natural world and explaining what’s around us. We have gods of thunder to explain why lightning streaks across the sky and the world rumbles like the clash of a mighty hammer. We tell stories of how all the world’s ills came from a box opened in a moment of curiosity or eating the wrong fruit. It’s in our nature to personify the forces of the world around us. But your religion, if you’re honest with yourself, is almost always about your mortality – a fact I forgot to mention when writing on how to go about treating the faith of fictional characters.

Many would say that your religion is what you believe in, but there are systems of belief out there which are fairly anti-religious. Others would say that a belief in a god of some sort is required, but there are forms of Buddhism with no gods to speak of. And, of course, some would say the rites and rituals are what make a religion and that you’re otherwise just spiritual – but once again I don’t quite agree. I’ve personally interacted with people who aren’t Wiccan but will still practice some of their rituals. To them, it’s simply a mythology, even if it’s a religion for someone else. And we’ve all known people who hold a religion but don’t stick to the traditions. In fact, many think that someone who does try to stick to all of their traditions zealously is not of sound mind.

So, while these religions may have all of those beliefs and rituals, the one thing holding them above simple mythology is that people believe in their version of the afterlife. And the funny thing is, because it’s so important to these belief systems, that afterlife says a lot about the people that believe in it.
Continue reading Monday Musing: What Our Afterlives Say About Us →

Futurism, Observations, Writing

Immortality and the Mind

As human beings the one thing that is universal among all of us is that we will eventually die. Try as we might, you can’t avoid it. Modern medicine, technology, and society have allowed us to extend our lifetimes to twice as long as our ancestors, sometimes even longer, but we still have to face that one outcome in the hopefully distant future. Not that the fact we all owe a death doesn’t stop people from trying to get out of it. Hell, in ways we’ve built entire cultures around the desire to find a loophole.

When you really think about it, religions are based on this idea that we can somehow be eternal. Sure, there may be explanations for the world that create mythologies with a pantheon of gods or a single almighty deity, but the actual crux of a religion is that there is some part of us that is eternal and everlasting. If you do the right thing in the right religion you’ll go on as an eternal soul, or be reincarnated into a new life, or break free of the bounds of human mortality. It’s undeniable that we’ve gone a long way to follow stories of immortality – even inventing gunpowder.

So it should be no surprise to anyone that speculative fiction is full of possible ways out of it. Immortal beings have been a staple of fantasy for as long as “fantasy” has even existed. Methods of achieving a higher state of existence have been fairly common in fantasy and sci-fi for almost as long. And with modern medicine slowly creeping its way to resolving the biological aspect of aging, sci-fi still has new avenues to explore on the subject. Aliens, demons, gods and other entities walk through these stories timeless and unaging, a pinnacle of the dream that so many of us have and presenting to some a hope that maybe we could do the same someday – possibly before it’s our turn.

But then the question becomes: would we want it if we had it? Continue reading Immortality and the Mind →