Category Archives: writing

Accessible Science Fiction

From Hugo Gernsback in the mid 1920s to today modern science-fiction has grown encompassing a number of fields, styles, and literary approaches that in some case are rather inaccessible to readers who are not extensively read in the genre. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The field, any field, grows at the bleeding vanguard edges not in the safety and comfort of what has been well established and explored. Stories that challenge notions about reality itself and what it means to be human are exciting frontiers for SF and we need them to expand our horizons.

Science Fiction also needs new blood, new readers and we can rarely entice them into the genre if the only selection available require a deep experience in the field. There must also be science-fiction stories that are inviting to new readers. Stories that people without experience in the genre can relate to and enjoy.

One of the persons who read my novel Vulcan’s Forge wrote me to share that she rarely reads SF. It is not her genre but she thoroughly enjoyed by book and found it difficult to put down. As an author that of course is very pleasing to hear but it has also made me realize that I want to write accessible science-fiction. I know my limitations both in imagination and in literary devices means I would do poorly trying to be the vanguard of the genre. There are many authors I admire and enjoy who are so much better at it that myself that I can leave that area of the genre to them. I’d be happy to be the sort of writer that can invite and introduce new people to this style of literature that I adore.

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Quick Hit

Automobile emergencies have stolen some of my morning posting time away from me so today’s posting will be brief.

I have decided as an experiment and practice to do something I have not done in quite a while, write a screenplay.

I used to primarily think of myself as a screenplay writer. Films are a passion of mine and if you have read Vulcan’s Forge you can see that passion represented in the plotting of the novel. While I haven’t sold a screenplay, I have written and co-written a few and I find the form to fun to work with. For the last several months I have been listening to the podcast Scriptnotes and I am exciting to incorporate some of the things I have learned about screen writing.

So, this week I started a screenplay with no intention of selling it. To keep from spinning wheels, I decided that the best form of this experiment is to adapt my novel Vulcan’s Forge. It should be fun.

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The Weird Ways I Dream

With the recent passing of actor Brian Dennehy, I got to thinking about the weird way I sometimes dream. Don’t worry those two disparate concepts do eventually tie together.

People when they are asleep dream in sorts of manners. My sister has told me that her dreams are in black and white and only in two dimensions like something from an old television show. Personally, I dream in full color three-dimensional glory in absolute fidelity. In fact, when I awaken from a dream there may be several moments when I have to sort out what is reality and what was dream. We’re not talking delusional things like nightmarish monster and the like but if I dreamt of eating an apple then I will wake up with the taste still lingering in my mouth and I have to take note that I was not actually having one. But full realism is not where I find that my dreams are the oddest.

Sometimes I dream movies.

I don’t mean that I dream about movies, though that has happened but rather my dreams become films. Occasionally I will be in one of the film dreams as a character but there have also been instances where I never appear in the story at all and I’m observing it like any other movie.

Dennehy appeared in one of my nightmares. This is one of those movie dreams where I watched and did not find myself inside of it as a doomed character. Dennehy, Anthony Perkins (of Psycho, though he had already passed when I had this nightmare) and a woman whom I did not recognize take a small boat into icy waters to retrieve cannisters of toxic waste that they had illegally dumped. They have to move the barrels before authorities discover the crime. The woman really really hates Dennehy’s character but the backstory reasons are never revealed. Diving for the waste they are attacked by eel-like monsters. Perkins is killed and the two survivors end up stranded on a rock jutting from the sea trapped by the eel/monsters.

I used the nightmare as inspiration for a short story “Araceli” that appeared in my collection Horseshoes and Hand Grenades: Tales of Technology and Terror. I have always felt that nightmares are gifts for my creativity.

 

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Post Release Thoughts

So, it hasn’t quite been a month, ten more days for that mark on the calendar, since my first novel Vulcan’s Forge has been published and I have a few reactions to the whole process.

Naturally I was a little bummed that the sole event tied to its release a signing at Mysterious Galaxy was canceled due to the stay at home order issued here in California just seven days before the book’s release but I’m happy our governor took the action as our state is weathering the crisis better than nearly any other.

Amazon seems to be utterly unreliable as a source of sales information. Though I know for certain books were sold via Amazon directly and more from other sources neither Amazon nor Bookscan is reporting that information so I have no idea how well or poorly the sales numbers are.

The Blog Tour where a different book blogger reviewed the book each day of its release week was quite enjoyable. All of them gave the book varying levels of positive reviews which is nicely gratifying for a novel that I wrote entirely to my own personal tastes.

Speaking of reviews a few have popped up on Amazon that are not from the blog tour and reading those has been informative. It’s quite interesting to see the various lenses and filters people bring to the process. All of the reviews have been positive, 4 and 5 stars so far, but eventually it will land in the hands of someone who hates it.

Overall especially dealing with this pandemic I have been very happy with the novel’s debut.

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Life’s Most Vital and Most Difficult Skill

There are a lot of skills to master in life some are more important that others but there’s one in my opinion that rises above the rest in significance and sadly it is the one a vast majority of people find difficult to acquire.

At my, what used to be in pre-Covid 19 times, regular writer’s groups meetings we take turns reading aloud 1200-1500 words of our work and then sit silently as everyone present takes turns giving you notes and feedback on the project. On any one piece opinions are bound to vary, sometimes quite a bit, but each and every time there is feedback that is dead on target, some element where intent or choice has gone astray and I’ve fouled up what I was trying to achieve as a writer. The natural and very human tendency is to reject that which is painful to turn defensive against the critique. It’s always possible to justify why the feedback is wrong and not the piece. It’s much harder to admit error, accept that that truth, but without that vital step there can be no improvement.

That’s’ the life skill I am talking about, no specifically learning to take writing critique but learning to admit that you are in error. This is something that transcends political philosophies. Few people are willing to admit error. I see it over and over again. The leaps of logic, the twisted arguments, the reframing’ of facts all to avoid facing that an earlier call, decision, or position was in fact the wrong one. Sadly, until such an acceptance is achieved it is impossible for a person to learn from that error and move on to better and greater things.

I am no more immune to this failing than I am to Covid 19. I try and struggle to keep an open mind about things and accept that I may have held terribly wrong position in the past. I like to think that doing so with my writing has helped me leverage this skill in other areas but I am also painfully aware how easily we deceive ourselves. This is not a skill that is learned and then nothing more is required. It takes constant vigilance because that easy route, that path of least resistance where you justify the error rather than admit is always there and it always looks more inviting than the long hard road of truth.

 

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The Blog Tour’s Final Stop

The final stop on the blog tour for Vulcan’s Forge happened yesterday March 29th with Jessica Belmont. She apologized for being a day late but hell, in these hectic, crazy, and frankly frightening times a date getting slipped is fully understandable. The pull quote from here review that I am using is:

Tension, intrigue, and action galore, Vulcan’s Forge was a compelling read

It has been very gratifying watching the response come in from the blog tour. The book has gathered responses from enjoyable to enthusiastic with none of the reviewers giving it bad marks or savaging the piece. That will come. It will eventually gain dreaded 1-star reviews at Amazon, Goodreads, and other places but that is how things should be. Nothing is a good fit for everyone.

This has been a long road to publication and it’s been surprising that it was my odd little SF-Noir that was the first novel to cross the finish line. This is an example of how you should not self-reject. I wrote this book for myself, first. It was what I wanted from a science-fiction noir but I wasn’t certain that others clamored for the same thing. I didn’t write this to the market and I think because of that it found its success.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the blog tour, to those who pre-ordered and have ordered the novel in these dark times you’ve given me a ray of warming sunlight.

 

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Publication Day Plus 1

The Blog Tour for Vulcan’s Forge continues at Scintilla. My pull quote from this review is:

Robert Mitchell Evans manages to create a world that is both a caricature and frighteningly believable. 

As they stream in it has been interesting to read the reviews of the novel. I know there is a great deal of advices suggesting that authors should not read reviews. After all reviews are for readers, to help them find the next book to add to their ‘to be read’ pile and not for feedback to the authors and there is a truth in that. Find reviewer whose taste matches closely with your own and use their information to help you find the next thing you’ll fall in love with. For author negative reviews can be emotionally crippling, or so I am told. Perhaps it is because I am coming to professional publication later in life but I find I can hold negative reviews and feedback at a personal distance. So far no one has hated the book but they will change it simply is the nature of the beast.

However, I am enjoying reading the reviews. It is fascinating to see all the various lens and interpretations that get applied to the text. In my writing group I am fond of saying that no honest critique can be wrong. It is how that person, on that day, reacted to that piece of work. Sometimes people see what is there more clearly than the author and other times what they see says much more about themselves and their worldview that it does about the words on the page. None of that is inherently right or wrong it is how people function. I can know my intention in writing a piece, or in a bit of world building but I too have lens and filters through which I interpret the world and that impacts on my world building in ways that may be invisible to me. So, some of these reviews might even open interpretation that I agree with but never considered because the very premises were obscured from me.

I hope that when the inevitable terrible review rolls in I will react the way I suspect I will. I have always been that sort of person for whom a professional rejection carries little emotional weight. The rejection slip doesn’t trigger imposter syndrome or send me spiraling into self-doubt and depression. My reaction to rejection slips has always been, ‘okay, not for them’ and sending the piece on to the next editor. We shall see if I feel the same way once the first 1-star reviews start appearing on Amazon.

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Publication Day Is Here!

Today is the day. You can now buy Vulcan’s Forge online and at your local booksellers, that is if you live in an area where the shops are open. California has been under a stay at home order since last week but my local favorite bookstore, Mysterious Galaxy, is staking order online and yours might be as well.

It has been a long and twisty road to this day. It started years ago when I decided that I wanted to write a science-fiction noir that didn’t rely on the private eye or police detective plots. And there I stalled for quite a while grinding the gears of my mental transmission searching for the plot and characters of the story.

One thing that consumed more time in my gear grinder than other elements was the search for a McGuffin. Hitchcock coined the term McGuffin referring to the thing that everyone wants in a plot to drive the action of the story, think the bejeweled statue in The Maltese Falcon or the NOC list from the first Mission Impossible movie. Borrowing the wider universe from an unpublished novel of mine I finally worked out the McGuffin and then the characters and story fell into place.

With that I sat down and write Vulcan’s Forge as a 15,000-word novella that did not work.

All the core elements of the story were there but far too compressed lacking the sense of building disaster that I think is one of the central elements to noir fiction. The story had to be a full novel.

So, then I planned on writing a short 60,000-word novel that I expected to self-publish as SF books of that length haven’t really been in fashion since the 60s. However, I overshot that mark and landed at 80,000 words a much more traditional, if a bit on the short side, for novels today.

Once the manuscript was finished, survived it beta-read, I sent it to my then agent where it languished unread until our partnership dissolved and he no longer represented me.

One my own I searched publishers for someone who might be interested in this odd mix of science-fiction and noir and discovered the wonderful people at Flametree. I submitted it, they made an offer, we negotiated, and now the book is out in the world.

Flametree has been wonderful to work with. From the editorial through the promotional processes I have had nothing but good experiences with these people.

Looking back on the trials and tribulations this novel faced to reach publication all I can say is ‘Never Give Up, Never Surrender.’

 

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1 Day Until Release and The Crush of a Deadline

Tomorrow Vulcan’s Forge will be released upon an unsuspecting public. Today’s blog tour stop was Miss Known’s blog and book review site. Let us all give thanks to book bloggers getting the word out there and help authors connect with readers. The pull quote I am taking away from this review is:

“There was so much happening, it made me forget that this was a sci-fi book.”

In addition to traditionally publishing novels one of my goals has been to win The Writers of the Future contest. WotF is a quarterly contest with 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners each quarter, then at the conclusion of the contest year the 12 winners are brought together for a week of instruction lead by one of my favorite authors, Tim Powers. The contest does not disclose how many submissions it gets but it is known to be in the thousand each quarter and to date my best placement has been as a finalist, one of the top eight from which the winning three are selected.

Eligibility is restricted to writers who have not been professionally published and that means I lose my eligibility to enter the contest tomorrow with the publication of Vulcan’s Forge.

I have a story in progress the question is; Can I finish it before midnight tonight?

It will be an effort but I am going to try.

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3 Days Until Release and The Blog Tour Begins

This Thursday Vulcan’s Forge will be available from all your usual and favorite booksellers and as of today the link for the e-book went live.

The publisher, Flametree Press, organizes a week of book bloggers reviews the book around each book’s publications date and today my blog tour kicked off with a review at The Bookwormery.

Here’s my pull quote from the review but read the entire thing yourself.

“Wow…..the world building in Vulcan’s Forge is just so well done, the feeling of almost claustrophobic tension is felt throughout. “

In other news my sweetie-wife and I are handling the shelter in place order imposed on California rather well. We get along fabulously, part of why we’re married and all that, and we each have plenty of activities to keep us engaged. Her employer has instituted a work from home policy while I continue to go into the office at my day job, but the office staff is reduced there as many are being sent to work from home as well. A few others and I have volunteered to maintain the critical office roles for as long as possible. I am fortunate to have a job that is critical to helping people get medical care so not only do I still have work and pay but I am also helping people directly during this crisis.

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