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Tag Archive for TOR

Self-fulfilling prophecies

May 2, 2014 People, Writing Comments Off on Self-fulfilling prophecies

PredictionsSm

 

My medium of choice is science fiction.  People keep telling me that the things I write qualify as “hard” sci-fi, but through my eyeballs my work is still pretty lightweight compared to guys like Vinge, Gibson, Suarez and Brin.   Thing is though, most of the hard science fiction I’ve run across is “informed” fiction.  When you work in a medium that predicts the future, you have to have a touchstone in the now, a point where you and your reader can both stand upon before taking a step into what comes next.  As a writer it helps keep the tech from overriding the characters, as a reader it helps keep you from getting mindbogglingly lost.

There are lots of posts running around nowadays about how this writer or that writer “predicted” the future, cel phones or satellites or touchscreens, but I think it’s a much more complex relationship than that, it’s rarely just some whiz-kid sitting in her parents basement imagining things to come.  See, writers ask questions, they read books, they say “hey I have this idea” and then they go hunt it up, or they go hunt up somebody who knows something about the idea (really, I find that cold-calling as a writer is a much easier thing to do than cold-calling was in my previous life as a stockbroker).

On the opposite side of that, we have the scientists, the ones who are talking to the writers, the ones who are reading the books that get written and saying “hey wouldn’t it be cool if you *could* make a rope out of buckyballs or a solar-powered exoskeleton”.  (Then as a third leg you get the artists and moviemakers who actually *visualize* this stuff so the investors and the public get all excited and chuck money at it).

So on the one hand, I love to see infographics like this, that point out how we are making our own futures.  How there was an idea, and then the science and funding and materials all came together to actually make that idea, that we, as humanity are guiding our own development (for better or worse).  On the other hand, I’m also very aware of how these kinds of things are not monolithic.  They are only very rarely the product of a single person, a single mind.  There’s conversations and brainstorming and questions and all kinds of information that flows from one individual to another until it achieves a kind of critical mass.

i09 has a great large-form copy of the graphic here for your perusal.

Short forms

April 5, 2014 Uncategorized, Writing Comments Off on Short forms

You know what I miss? Novellas. Or, what we now think of as novellas. I used to own stacks of books than ran 150-200 pages long. They were serials, like the Travis McGee novels I still have locked away in my storage unit, or classics like The Scarlet Pimpernel and it’s many sequels.

Recently, only a very few writers are permitted the novella form. I think the last one I saw as a standalone was Patricia McKillip’s “The Changeling Sea” back in the late 80’s.

They still exist, but usually in that odd flip-flop format, you know where they print one novella by a famous name author in the front half of the book, then you flip the book OVER and rotate it and voila! There is a completely different novella on the back.

But now, with the ebook coming to the fore, I’m wondering if page-count will be less important. I mean, open a half a dozen books in your average Barnes and Noble and you will find different typesetting, different formatting, a different number of words per page, just so that the book can hit a satisfying weight and feel in the hand. Sometimes you run across a book (looking at YOU, “Monuments Men” where the type is small and crowded, or you run into a book (A few recent Patterson novels have this) where the font is large and the kerning stretched as far as you can take it before the words start to fall apart.

But without the page count, without the need to make a reader feel like they are getting $8 work of paper and ink, what counts is a satisfying story. What counts is that, at the end of the work, the reader feels they paid just the right amount (or maybe even that they got a bargain).

A couple of publishers are starting to take advantage of this new opportunity. Tor, for example, publishes exclusive shorts from it’s bestselling authors. Some are short stories, some are novellas, all are works too short to fit into the trade paperback format, but all are works equally worthy of sale.