Category Archives: writing

I am Participating on Panels For LosCon

LosCon is the Los Angeles area science-fiction convention held over Thanksgiving weekend. (This year November 25th thru the 27th.) Finally, after two years of COVID I am returning to Loscon one of my beloved conventions and this year I will be participating on 4 panel discussions.

I will be moderating Everything You Need to Know About Editing Saturday at 10:00 am.

I will be a panelist on Finding Your Own Voice in Writing. Also Saturday at 5:30 PM

Sunday at 11:30 am I will moderate How to Write for a Specific Genre

And I will conclude my panel discussions moderating What the Publishing Landscape Looks Like Today 2:30 on Sunday.

If you are in the L.A. area, I urge you to attend. LosCon is fun and I have missed it terribly.

Writing on an Activation Roll

In the superhero role playing game champions on of the disadvantages you can added to a character’s power to lower its point cost is an activation roll. Basically, when the character attempts to use their power, flight, energy blasty, whatever it is, the player must roll dice and if they make the target roll then the power function otherwise nothing happens.

For me writing can often feel like a power with an activation roll.

I have my stories, my characters, my themes and setting but getting started on that day’s writing can be a challenge. The internet with its endless diversions is a powerful temptation, as are movies, video games, and just plain old-fashioned daydreaming.

However, once I have begun to actually write, burying myself in the exact act of placing words into sentences, bringing the characters and events to life as I type them all resistance evaporates and it is terribly easy to fall into ‘flow’ and just write.

I am certain that there are many writers who feel the same way I do. It’s the basis of my statement ‘The hardest part of writing of butt to chair and fingers to keyboard.’

What exactly is the source of this resistance I am not sure. I don’t think it is a fear of failure. I have failed so many times that is holds little terror for me. Much like rejections its failure is simply another aspect of the writing experience that is nearly inescapable. There are numerous abandoned short stories, scripts, and novel in my history. It is not heart wrenching when a story crashes on take and never achieves flight, it is just part of the process. (Though I am happy to say that unfinished stories happen with far less frequency than they used to.)

I think it is simply the desire to not work.

Writing is work.

For me it is an emotional experience. I feel that same things my characters feel. Fear, elation, arousal, these are mirrored in me as I attempt to put them into prose. That is a tiring and strenuous process and it probably the common desire to avoid strain that levels this activation cost, a toll I again and again must find a method to pay.

Losing Cultural Context

I find it fascinating how knowledge and context can slip away and vanish from cultural knowledge. This has been demonstrated with YouTube reactors and 1973’s The Exorcist.

In the film Father Lankester Merrin and elderly priest and archeologist played by a 40 something Max Von Sydow repeatedly with shaky hands takes tiny white tablets that he carries with him everywhere.

No audience member in the 70s need a word of exposition to understand the meaning those actions. Merrin suffers from severe heart disease and takes nitroglycerin tablets to treat his heart.

And I can’t think of a single YouTube reactor that intuitively understood what the filmmakers communicated when Merrin took his pills or what was being established for the film’s climatic final act.

Times change, culture moves one, and what was common knowledge to one generation is a mystery to another. It makes me wonder what I am missing from stories, movies, and books from previous generations. What did they take as universally understood that passed me by without any impact? What are we creating today so certain of our intention and meaning that future generations will misunderstand or fail to notice at all?

My Novel Vulcan’s Forge

March of 2020 saw the publication of my SF/Noir novel Vulcan’s Forge by FlameTree Press. Sadly, being published the week the world goes into shutdown for a once a century pandemic did nothing for the book’s sales. Still, I believe in the book and for those who are interested here’s some things about this novel.

Deep Backstory

By the end of the 21st century advances in computer sciences produced true artificial intelligence, along with automated manufacturing, advanced 3D printing, and practical fusion power. Instead of ushering in a period of expansion these technologies became the means by which humanity survived a planetary cataclysm. A rouge brown dwarf drifting thru interstellar space was discovered with a trajectory that carried through the inner solar system, disrupting all the rocky planets and close enough to eject Earth from the solar system.

Humanity launched solar sail arks carrying sperm and egg cells, fully capable artificial intelligences, and automated manufacturing equipment to save humanity by planting it on scores and scores of target worlds throughout the local stellar neighborhood. Due to the advanced technology and manufacturing techniques the cost of an ark was low enough that private groups, religious organizations, and loose confederations could launch one to preserve their culture and people.

Vulcan’s Forge takes place on a colony, Nocturnia, whose founders were fixated on racially diverse urban Americana of the 1950s. Like all who become focused on nostalgia their view of the past was not entirely historically accurate but rather a more romanticized and idealized view of that period in American history.

The Story

Jason Kessler helps create the social and cultural norms of Nocturnia by carefully curated film and television preserved in the digital storage of the ark that founded the colony. However, Jason himself find the conformity and repressed sexual mores of his colony stifling, not wishing to marry young and produce a brood of children to re-populate the species. He would rather

Flame Tree Publishing

enjoy to banned films labeled ‘anti-social’ and live a life of pleasure, but the colony’s surveillance and enforcement of their morality makes this impossible.

When Pamela Guest sweeps into Jason’s life everything changes. Contemptuous of Nocturnia’s morality and seeming immune from its enforcement Pamela introduces Jason to the possibility of everything he had ever dreamed about doing and wanting. Jason also learns that there is a secret criminal underworld to the colony and soon he and Pamela are fighting to survive as darker conspiracies than mere criminality threatens Nocturnia.

As a traditionally published novel Vulcan’s Forge can be ordered from wherever books are sold. I am including links to San Diego premier specialty bookstore Mysterious Galaxy along with links to Amazon.

I am also including the YouTube video of myself reading the novel’s prolog.

Mysterious Galaxy Paperback

Mysterious Galaxy eBook

Amazon Paperback

Amazon eBook

Thoughts on Heinlein’s Starship Troopers

One of the most divisive science-fiction novels published is Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. Written as one his juvenile novels it was rejected out of hand by the publisher and immediately upon publication by another house stirred intense political debate that carries on to the present day. My meager thoughts in no way will settle this argument and for those firmly fixed in their camps nothing will dislodge them.

Troopers posits a future where humanity has spread out to the stars following some war with itself that left in its wake a unified government ending unrest and ushering in a period of

G.P. Putnam’s & Sons

prosperity. The political system of this unified government is a democracy, but one where the right to vote and run for office, the civil franchise, is restricted solely to those who have served in the armed forces.

This ‘only veterans’ franchise is often labeled by the novel’s critics as ‘fascist’ and a system of military rule. While I think the system proposed actually would never work in practice and the author hand-waved his way past serious political and practical issues, both critiques miss the mark.

Fascism has no simple, agreed upon definition. It is often hurled as a charge towards a political system, movement, or person that someone intensely disagree with. The left hurls it at the right and right throws it back. Setting aside the definition of childish tantrums, to me Fascism is a species of the political right, obsessed with a distorted and false view of history, former ‘glory,’ centralized authoritarian government, and most importantly of all the philosophy that the individual’s only value is what the state can extract from them.

The novel gives very little to no description of the culture surrounding its political system. What little history that is presented is fed to the reader as exposition to explain the political system and how it arose with nothing that glorifies some idealized historical vision.

Equally unexplored is the actual details political system. We know that military service is required for the franchise and that active-duty personnel do not have the vote but how centralized is thew power is a question that is never addressed. The closest the reader comes to understanding the culture and the government is the barbaric punishment of flogging is a common judicially ordered punishment. This predilection for cruelty as punishment is the most fascistic aspect of the novel’s setting.

Many critics point to required military service as a fascistic aspect, but I think it doesn’t meet that criterion. Fascist regimes such a Fascist Italy or NAZI Germany treat the people as something that had an obligation to the state. An obligation that could not be refused. Their service to the state was something required not chosen. The system in Starship Trooper is an inverse of that philosophy. Service is given, always at the choice of the person, and in fact the novel gives the impression that people are dissuaded from choosing to serve as more than one character attempts to talk to the protagonist out of volunteering. This plays into the novel’s philosophy of graded level of morality and I’ll speak to that and its error later in the piece. The core central issue here is that in a fascist setting the power is with the state, a state that compels service and here the power is with the individual choosing to serve.

One of the novel’s many exposition heavy scenes also display the frantic handwaving to make this political system work. An instructor asks the class why does the system work and after the students offer possible answers based on the limitation on the franchise, better people, chosen people, and so on, the teacher simply answer it works because it does. Utterly circular logic. It works because the author wants it to work.

Elsewhere in the work it is put forward that there are levels of morality with morality defined as the willingness to put oneself in danger for a goal or purpose. The lowest and most base level is self-interest. ‘I look out for number one and no one else.’ The system then progresses through family, friends, and loved one with the ‘highest’ level of morality being expressed when someone serves and risks all for their community.

Heroic self-sacrifice is a common trope in adventure fiction and something that is nearly universally admired. We need to look no further in the genre than Spock’s solution to Kobayashi Maru test in The Wrath of Khan to see this presented as noble. That said it, in my opinion, is a lousy system to base your politics upon.

The logic in Starship Troopers is that those who volunteer to place their lives on the line by serving in the military are exhibiting a ‘higher’ level or morality and thus are ‘worthy’ of the franchise and political power. This is flawed for several of reasons.

First, while the novel goes out of its way to make clear that no one can ever be denied the chance to serve it is also clear that military discipline is in effect and people are ‘mustered out’ of the service and thus forever lose the chance to exercise the franchise. That means on a practical level the military while forced to accept every as a recruit can still eliminate anyone it does not want to have the franchise. It is far too easy for a military to expel members to use service as a qualification for the franchise.

Second, it presumes the motive for joining the military is a desire to serve. This ignores the possibility of enlisted to learn a trade, experience adventure, escape an unpleasant home, or even to live the thrill of combat and killing.

Another reason this is a terrible idea is that it sees the only meaningful way to serve your community is by way of the military. Teaching, local services, research, and healthcare, the last having its own unique dangers all too well know with the current COVID pandemic, are all ways to place your own needs second to your fellow citizens’.

While I cannot agree with those who hurl ‘fascist’ at the novel’s philosophy, nor can I endorse it. Between handwaving and some very broad and simplistic assumptions it simply ignores the world as the way I have experienced it working.

A Bittersweet Time

For me, coming to the end of an artistic project always carries waves of mixed emotions. There’s the high of actually reaching the end, sharing the exctement and thrill of the conclusion with the characters I have spent so much time with. Throughout the writing of a story, short or long, I churn up in myself the same emotional states of the characters I am recounting and creating. The sweeping climax as everything comes to head at the end is often the most emotionally engaging period for me.

There is also a sadness as the journey ends. Writing a long form piece like a novel swells this emotion. The characters, the settings, the very nature and tone of the work become a part of daily life. Even when I am not actively at the keyboard putting words in a line my mind is fluttering about their scenes to come and how they might be crafted and feel. All of that comfortable familiarity vanishes with the end of the project. What had been a stable, predictable schedule of life is no more and as a creature of established routine and habit that is always unsettling.

Finally, there is fear.

Of course, some of that fear is directed at the completed project. It’s about to be sent into the wider world, a cruel cold world of querying agents, submitting to editors, with the near certainty of impersonal rejection or outright dismissal without reply.

But some of the fear is directed at the nascent project already forming. The new work with vague characters and setting, where the tone is already known but achieving that is only a possibility. One that might not be reached. Will the project work, will it come together, or might it like others, fail to take flight and crash like an overladen bomber from the Second World War?

This is the time I am in now. My military SF novel is complete. 100,000 words following an American serving in the European Union’s star forces. It held suspense, fear, and surprises for me but now its time at the front of my mind has come to close. Now it is time to fully commit to the new story, the new characters, and to set fear aside and march into the new battle.

Like A Shark

Most, but not all sharks, need to constantly move through the water to breath. This was the point of the barrels in Jaws, tire the beast out until it cannot swim and then suffocates in the water.

Like a shark most writers, but not all, need to move from project to project. Always writing always creating on some level. As I finish up my latest military SF adventure novel, not just cleaning up and the prose and getting my sweetie-wife’s assistance on my typos and fondness for run on sentences my mind turns to the next book.

Returning the dark cynical world of crime and people making bad decisions as I have with Vulcan’s Forge, my next novel is set on Mars about 2130. Thematically its draws inspiration from crime and noir movies such as The Maltese Falcon, desperate people trying to escape such as Casablanca, and social commentary such as The Jungle.

Here is a smattering of some of the notes I have written as I begin to lay out the bones of the world before I flesh it out with characters and dilemmas.

Major Economic Industries of MARS

ROCKET FUEL

From Martian water and CO2 and utilizing nuclear power (Fission) mars produces Methane CH4 and O2 for rocket fuel used throughout the Solar System. The energy coast of lifting the fuel off the Mars is less than half (about 40%) of that compared to Earth. (3.8 KM/s vs 9. Km/s) This fuel is then transported to Earth and the asteroid mining operations for use in scientific and commercial operations.

MANAGING SPACE OEPRATIONS

Given the lower energy costs to lift from the surface, Mars has also become the principal site for directing space operations. The majority of the operations are commercial but substantial scientific and research projects, crewed and uncrewed exploration, process development, and pure research, are also managed from Mars for governments, Universities, and Private concerns.

WEALTHY RETIREMENT LIVING

The lower Martian gravity, about .3G is discovered to prolong life by way of less stress on vital organs. (Lunar gravity about .16 is too low and like no gravity induces muscle and bone loss along with other health troubles.) Mars hosts a community of wealthy person who have permanently relocated to the red Planet in retirement to extend their lives. They do not live communally, they are rich after all, but have in effected formed their own colony within the Martian community. This option is very expensive with the total number of wealthy retirees less than a thousand. However, because of their desire for personal services they employee a fair number of native Martian persons.

WEALTHY TOURISM

Mars is an exotic destination that can only be afforded by the wealthy. Given the scheduling of the cyclers transferring between Earth and Mars no one visits Mars for a week or two, but tourists are usually required to stay about 2 years. This reduces the pool of potential tourists to just the wealthy who can either afford to ignore their lives and commitments for two or more years or those still wealthy but able to manage their duties remotely and with lengthy communications lags.

MARTIAN SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH

A small community of rotating scientists from Earth live on mars researching the planet itself. Due to bacterial contamination from the settlement of the colony the question of native Martian life has yet to be definitively answered. (all microorganisms discovered to date have similar enough genetic make-up it could either be parallel evolution or contamination.) The scientists live is spartan conditions with nearly all of the technical and lab support coming from native Martian colonists.

MARTIAN FACILITIES SUPPORT

The largest number of people are actual native Martian colonists employed supporting the other forms of economic activity on the Red Planet. Nearly all of these people dream of living on Earth under open skies and weather, but these are dreams as they are shackled to the planet by their debt. None may immigrate from Mars without first clearing their debt to the colony.

I have major questions to research and answer. What would be the schedule of a Mars cycler, a spacecraft that ferries between Earth and Mars about 2130-2140? What the right inflation factor for cost between now and the novel’s period? How does daily assessed interest make loans nearly inescapable? How does the legal regime on Mars develop? And more.

That said I am excited and looking forward to this new project.

Accessible Science-Fiction

There are SF writers whose works is at the cutting edge, the vanguard, of the genre, pushing the artform into new and bold areas. Their work can be illuminating and challenging often difficult for readers new to the genre to grasp and fully enjoy. These works, and they can be thoroughly enjoyable, are more suited to readers already well-versed in the form and tropes of Science-Fiction from which foundation the more experimental pieces can be explored.

I think of my own SF writing as nearly the opposite of that.

I would hope, and what I strive for, is welcoming, accessible science-fiction. That is not to say the vanguard, boundary-breaking, parts of the genre are bad, not at all. We need those bold experimental pieces to take us to new lands, new ideas, to keep the whole body healthy. But we also need works that welcome new readers, that allows people to wade into the safer and calmer waters before setting sail across the genre’s ocean. That is, in part, what I want to achieve.

Local Author, Critic, and Podcaster David Agranoff said of my debut novel Vulcan’s Forge:

“Speaking as someone who likes Golden Age and new wave science fiction I liked that this felt like a lost 60s or 70s novel. There is very little that feels modern about this novel, that is a compliment by the way.”

That is very much the sort of feel I wanted for my novel. The 60s and the 70s were a time of great expansion in the genre both in what was produced and in the readers coming to discover it.

Someone else who read the novel and who was not a big reader of SF books told me that they were particularly happy with how they did not feel lost as the new world with its own backstory unfolded for them. That is one of the most pleasing pieces of feedback I have ever received, and it is what I mean by ‘accessible science-fiction.’ It is the sort of thing I aim for and hopefully with hit more and more in the future.

A gentle reminder that I have my own SF novel available from any bookseller. Vulcan’s Forge is about the final human colony, one that attempt to live by the social standard of 1950s America and the sole surviving outpost following Earth’s destruction. Jason Kessler doesn’t fit into the repressive 50s social constraints, and he desire for a more libertine lifestyle leads him into conspiracies and crime.

Streaming Review: Glorious

Released last week to the streaming services Shudder as an exclusive the cosmic horror film Glorious is a very different take on universe spanning threats.

Wes (Ryan Kwanten) is a man in the midst of an emotional crisis. Driving alone and distraught far from freeways and large cities and after a night of drunkenness at a lonely rest stop he finds himself trapped in the bathroom with an ominous voice (J.K. Simmons) speaking to him from the other side of a stall’s ‘glory hole.’ (If you do not know what a ‘glory hole’ is in reference to public spaces I strongly suggest that you do not Google the term from your work computer.) Wes endures horrors, physical and revelational, as the voice implores and compels him for a favor.

Directed by Academic, Scholar, and filmmaker Rebekah McKendry, and co-written by her spouse David Ian McKendry and Joshua Hull, Glorious is a small film that utilizes all of the potential of its limited location and cast in a spare but efficient 79 minutes. McKendry and cinematographer David Matthews continually find inventive ways to frame and shoot their film with a bare handful of locations, keeping clear of the trap of boredom within such a confined space. Like many ‘cosmic horror’ films following in the wake of Stanley’s The Color out of Space the film leans heavily into the purple and violet to convey the unworldliness of Wes’ plight and the looming threat over existence.

Even with its brief running time the script carefully doles out Wes’ backstory and the source of his emotional trauma, judiciously avoiding rushing in to explains too quickly, leaving revelations for the audience as well as the characters.

While the film is not sexually explicit, see above the term you should never Google from work, it is violent, bloody, and not lacking in gore but does not lean into those elements to achieve its effect, but rather uses them to enhance the story being told. One should not watch Glorious if the sight of on-screen blood is disturbing to you.

I very much appreciated that the film did not linger or lazily get to its point. There is nothing wrong with a massive satisfying 3 hour epic but there is also beauty in a story that flies without need for rest breaks.

The standout star of Glorious is J.K. Simmons. While audio manipulation has been employed to enrich the timber of his voice and enlarge its presence it is Simmons’s delivery that make the unseen character come alive with power and menace. Had a lesser talent been engaged here the product would have suffered terribly.

Glorious will not be to everyone’s taste. It is dark, it is disturbing, and its humor, where employed, though effective can be nausea inducing if that is your inclination. That said the 79 minutes I spent watching the film were thoroughly enjoyable and if this sounds remotely appealing to your tastes then you should surf over to Shudder and give it a go.

The Chain that Broke My Novel

Late March 2020 saw the release of my traditionally published novel Vulcan’s Forge that played with Artificial Intelligence, the fetishization of 50’s Americana, the relationship between the

Flame Tree Publishing

individual and their larger culture, crime, Film Noir, and loads of movie references. It was a novel that I had written solely for myself and yest was purchased by the first editor I presented it to.

Late March 2020 is also the time the world shuttered, going into a prolonged lock-down as a pandemic, the likes of which had not been seen in a century, swept the globe, disrupting every aspect of life and killing far too many people. (Including a friend I had known for nearly 40 years.)

Needless to say, that was a very bad time to release a debut novel. As if a global pandemic was not enough to throw at my arrival as a novelist the fates had more hurdles to place. The publishing house was transition between physical distributors, snagging and disrupting sales to bookstores and they had just ended the contract with the studio that produced their audio versions, leaving Vulcan’s Forge without an audiobook not only as their format continued to grow but as that very format became more readily accepted during the pandemic.

Within eight weeks bookstore had worked out virtual launch events and people had begun to adjust to a new way of living during shut down, but the damage had been done and Vulcan’s Forgenever recovered from its debut.

Such is life. There are always factors in life far beyond your control or even influence. I don’t waste time crying over what has happened and cannot be changed. Life moves in one direction, forward, and that is the focus of your attention with the past providing lessons to improve your choice of paths into that future.

Now, I have not mentioned the most important link in the calamitous chain that broke my novel and the lesson I and others can learn from it.

Vulcan’s Forge sat on my agent’s desk for a year, unread and unrepresented.

When I discovered that my agent had lied to me and withheld critical information about his position at the agency, I contacted his boss and that is when he dropped me as a client. But for months I had been harboring doubts and considering dropping him. And that is the lesson, not all agents are good for you. In fact, they can hurt you in ways you cannot foresee. That is not to say you should never have an agent, but you must always remember that they work for you. If they are a poor employee, fire them and find another.

It can feel scary, nay terrifying, most of us search for years, enduring rejection after rejection searching for that representation but do not let that blind you to the truth. If they are not helping you then they are hurting you. There is no neutral position.

Vulcan’s Forge is history, though you can still order copies, but my future novels are not. I have a murder mystery/sf Novel under serious consideration at a major SF publisher, I am finishing up a military SF novel now and will then move onto crime and corruption on Mars. There is only one direction to life. Forward.

Robert Mitchell Evans

Literary Saboteur