How to tell the truth in fiction? Author Karen Heuler considered the question for The Inner City, her collection of stories, and in the end drew inspiration from one of our greatest poets. Here she is to explain.

KAREN HEULER:

The stories in The Inner City are about the way the world works, about the way people work, about the dodges and twists and sneaky surprises of life as we know it—whether it looks like our life or not. One of Emily Dickinson’s poems goes, “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant.” The slant is what I’m after.

People have confidence in what they see, what they believe, what they do; and confidence comes from a sense of normality. But what’s normal? And what happens when the “normal” is different for you and for the rest of them?

And it’s not so much the outsider/insider thing as it is how strange the Other can be. Occasionally strange and interesting, as in “The Large People,” where a retired office worker finds people growing out of the ground, and follows them into the city where they start doing things you wouldn’t think a retired office worker would approve of—but then again, why not? Why not take note of the newest order of things and consider what it all means? Or just watch it? Those poor people in “Landscape with Fish”—when nature starts throwing them curve balls, all they can do is keep their eyes open. Something new is coming.

No two people live in the same world, and that’s why we have cults—someone beguiling us with the belief that all can be shared emotionally and physically. It can’t. People may come together and try to predict their lives, as in “The Great Spin,” about the wrong people being gathered in the Rapture. Or they may find a new and frightening form of existence in “Thick Water,” but it’s not for everyone. It’s not for most. It involves losing some of the particularities that like it or not make you into you.

And to be honest, you don’t want to be too different; it might attract attention.  But my neighbor’s conspiracy theory is nowhere as credible as my own. Their reason for paranoia is not as good as my reason for paranoia. In fact, there is “The Inner City” sneaking around and doing things to mess me up. I know this to be a fact. I know that certain things are done just to annoy me—trains pulling out as I run for them; lost Metrocards that magically reappear after I’ve bought a new one; another missing sock.  You would think that, if I’ve lost 30 individual socks in my lifetime, I must have found someone else’s 30 individual missing socks, but I haven’t. I don’t know if there’s one person who ends up with all of them. Is this the reason for Sock Monkeys?

Who hasn’t felt at some point that change was getting out of control, that it was going on despite you? Some things you can opt out of; some things you can refuse; but you won’t always know if it was the right decision or not until it’s too late.

So why not get hooked, roped, nailed into a change because, after all, it’s different? We all evolve, going through life in distinct phases, even as our minds and bodies adjust from the clumsiness of toddlers to the grace of adults and then back again. Isn’t there a metaphor for that, for the process of radical change we go through? Like the children in “The Difficulties of Evolution,” who knows what our offspring will become? Or us? Are we ever done with it?

Who knows what we will become? We can fight against it, the modifications of life, until a brilliant mind somewhere crosses a girl with a dog for a new breed of servants. Is that wrong? As wrong as creating a cow out of meat, for instance, and finding it has gone bloodthirsty? What would you do with what you’ve created at that point?

And despite all our advances in science, have we forgotten that things aren’t necessarily right just because they can be done? If it’s possible to breed girls and dogs to get a special servant class—well, should we do it?

Of course we’ll do it.

And of course we have to accept it. But then again, why should we accept it?

There are tough choices here. One explorer on a distant planet finds her team has gone out and gone native in a  new and terrifying way; should she join them?  A worker finds that a new employee has not only stolen her hair, but is out for her job and much more.

It’s not always recognizable.

Sometimes you can see something coming—but when it gets near, it’s not exactly what you thought it would be. The Rapture approaches, but who will be blessed? Your wishes are granted, but are they what you wanted? That doubt, of course, is in the nature of wishes as well as of life—there’s a catch somewhere, a little bit of snickering, if not downright buffoonery.

We ask for something, and we get it slant.

—-

The Inner City: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Visit the book’s page. Follow the author on Twitter.

Facing a horrifying dearth of available science fiction YA anthologies, Editors, Erin Underwood and Hannah Strom-Martin sought to rectify the problem. Crowd-funded through Kickstarter, Futuredaze: An Anthology of Young Adult Science Fiction aims to make a dent in the market, complete with 33 short stories and poems aimed toward the younger fans of the genre.  Here are Erin and Hannah to explain the genesis behind their Big Idea.

Erin Underwood & Hannah Strom-Martin:

Our big idea for Futuredaze: An Anthology of Young Adult Science Fiction was born out of a discussion about a lack of short SF for teens.  If you haven’t heard of The Hunger Games by now you’re probably living in District 13—but while we both enjoyed Suzanne Collins’ series and looked forward to a Harry Potter-esque revival of science fiction stories for teens, we ended up holding our breath a long time, at least as far as short stories were concerned.  (Erin nearly passed out at a Boston B&N when she realized the lack of SF anthologies. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.)

Since our Big Idea evolved as a dialogue it seems fitting for both of us to share the story here.

Erin: In early 2012, the Earth stood still. That was the day I entered a Boston Barnes & Noble’s YA section, really “looked” at what they had to offer.  I didn’t see a single SF anthology for teens. Standing there among the paranormal romance, urban fantasy and horror anthologies, I felt a bit betrayed. I’m a girl who grew up consuming a regular diet of geek fiction, and finding an absence of geek among the sleek, shiny anthologies told me that something had gone desperately, horribly wrong with the world. We were being invaded by werewolves, vampires, and witches, and there wasn’t a single space alien to blast them off the anthology shelves. That’s when I called Hannah and the Big Idea for Futuredaze: An Anthology of YA Science Fiction began to germinate. From there, our Big Idea grew into a Kickstarter campaign that gave life to Futuredaze.

Hannah: I’d noticed that, despite the Susan Collins juggernaut, comments about SF or the classic tales from which The Hunger Games derives appeared limited to a few mentions of Battle Royale.  As someone who remembers hearing audio broadcasts of Ray Bradbury’s short stories on NPR I kept waiting for some snarky critic to point out the grand tradition of ersatz future fiction that The Hunger Games had drawn on for inspiration.  I also noticed that dystopian SF seemed like the only sub-genre to have really gripped the public imagination—and while I adore those kinds of tales, there is much more to the SF universe.  This is the genre of James Tiptree, Ursula K. LeGuin, Kurt Vonnegut, and Stephen King’s Bachman books (I can’t read The Hunger Games without thinking of “The Long Walk”).  When we started reading for this anthology, we wanted to explore the possibilities of SF written for young adults, but we also wanted stories that hearkened back to our own formative reading experiences and gave us that special thrill of discovering characters who reflect a bit of your own experience—even if they’re in a far different time and place.

Erin: I agree with Hannah. I looked for the stories that made me “feel” something while reading because those are inevitably the stories that stay with me long after the last word is gone. If a story from our submission pool didn’t have that effect on me, I couldn’t imagine it within the anthology. Eventually stories began rising to the top, and we saw several standout stories per subgenre.  This encouraged us to move toward a much more generalized anthology that could showcase the best of what science fiction can offer. Except…..

Hannah: Except then we were invaded by robots.  My favorite aspect of YA is that it doesn’t talk down to its audience.  Likewise, I feel it must be said that our early submission period saw a deluge of what I nicknamed “white-girl robot” stories.  Speculative fiction has been going through some self-analysis lately and this sudden influx proved why.  A good chunk of those early stories not only thought “inside the box” when it came to the possibilities of scientific advancement—they were also obsessed with the idea of white-girl robots.  Not just the obvious sex-bot variety (although those were there, some even well written).  The robot horde came from white suburbia and, relentingly, had white suburban concerns.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with that—but the sheer volume of such submissions proved why we need more projects like Futuredaze.

Erin: The robots were tough. We received so many we had an abundance of “mech” stories to choose from, but “The End of Callie V” was our favorite because it approached the idea of life and love in a unique way. For me, the biggest concern was the number of stories that, while well-written, didn’t fit the contemporary definition of young adult fiction. By this point, I’d been promoting and working with YA authors long enough to start wondering if there was a fundamental misunderstanding of what constitutes “YA fiction” within parts of the science fiction community. That realization was a bit of a shock for me.

Hannah: My one frustration with this anthology was that the overall submission pool wasn’t quite at the level I would have hoped for—either in terms of cultural awareness or an ability to think outside the box and get away from typical SF cliché’s like rocket ships.  However, the stories that were really thoughtful and original had a way of popping out so we quickly had more than enough entries for a highly entertaining, book length project.

Erin: My biggest challenge was to stop being nice. (If you know me, you’re laughing right now. I know it!) But seriously, once these gems floated to the top, it became a lot easier to cut the other pieces. Eventually, I learned an invaluable lesson: each anthology must have a story that sets the bar for every other story, if you want to avoid publishing an average anthology. For me, that story was “A Voice in the Night” by Jack McDevitt. I’d been a fan of his Alex Benedict series for years, and when Jack agreed to write a YA story for us featuring a young Alex (a teen with his very own “big idea”), I was thrilled. Once I read Jack’s piece, I saw what Futuredaze could be. The bar was set.

Hannah: While I would have liked to see a bigger representation of cultures from our submissions I really think this anthology will be a good jumping off place for kids who may have read The Hunger Games and are wondering what other sorts of characters and situations they can find.  We’ve got stories set in the near future, grand space opera type stuff and unique tales from emerging writers like Alex Dally MacFarlane whose “Unwritten in Green” was one of my favorite pieces.  This is a story that straddles the fantasy and SF genres in a really interesting way, ups the level of writerly craft, and points the way towards what this nascent rebirth of young adult SF can be.  We also decided to include poets in our line-up, which I feel provides yet another avenue for exploration.  Exposing our audience to new things—that was the idea all along.

Futuredaze: An Anthology of YA Science Fiction: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powells

List of Contributing Authors. Visit Erin Underwood via her website.

The “whydunit”, is arguably the more intriguing of questions asked along a literary journey suggests Jamie Mason, author of Three Graves Full.  In today’s Big Idea, Jamie explains the method and mentality that went into polishing her debut novel.

Jamie Mason:

I’ve never written anything that went theme first, story second. Probably someone could do it. No doubt someone has – or likely many someones. Lord knows maybe even I could do it if I wanted to or was paid a million dollars to do it that way. It’s just that neither of those scenarios has presented itself yet.

So, I got a Big Idea: There is a man, a mild man, not a bad guy, but a guy prone to doing the wrong thing. Then he kills somebody. In a panic, he plants the problem a little too close to home, if you know what I mean. And because, in fine non-psychopathic form, he can’t stand doing any yard work after that, he hires a landscaper to keep the front of his house − just the front – nice and presentable. He’s concerned that that the neighbors will start looking at him funny if his grass grows up to the windows and the hedges jump their beds.

Wouldn’t you know it, those landscapers discover a buried body on his property – only it’s not the body this guy buried.

And then this guy has about 300 pages of problems after that.

Since the foundation of Three Graves Full is one hell of a coincidence, I realized as I went along that the characters were going to need to be latched onto this ridiculous ride with some thematically very sound bolts. I noticed that, within the bounds of this story, everything seemed to turn on how inclined each character was to take the bald truth full in the face. The more they lied – and there were little lies and great big whoppers in the spectrum from omission to full on fabrications – the more the breadcrumbs fell to lead me back to why they were the way they were, and why they did the things they did.

I became fascinated with the idea of what I called “The Liar’s Margin” which was, in fact, the original and working title of the book. Here’s a little of what I had to say on it:

“Every event is boxed in by a set of facts; the truth as it were. There’s the what and the when of a deed; there’s where it happened and how it was done. But it’s at the why that the liar’s margin begins. It’s from this border that we launch the justifications for everything we do, and for all that we allow to be done to us. Only our distance from the hard truth and the direction of our push—toward or away from it—is the measure of our virtue.”

What I’d set out to do, and hope I’ve managed, is to take one fictional character’s worst nightmare, and gild that nightshade flower with a caper at the intersection of a few more fictional character’s worst nightmares. Then, as we seem more readily able to do with someone else’s problems, I wanted to find the humor there − and most importantly, to find the why. For me whodunit is almost always less interesting than whydunit.

The Big Idea of the liar’s margin is that it is the perfect laboratory for distilling ‘why’. If we know that she won’t face her reasons for putting up with a cheater, or that he’s not entirely ashamed of the murder he committed, or that another person is unwilling to admit how very like his father he really is – well then, we’ve done more than solved a fictional crime. We’ve earned ourselves a Diploma of Advanced Amateur Anthropological Studies from The University of Armchair.

And that’s not too shabby for just the price of a book.

Three Graves Full: Amazon|IndieBound|Powell’s|Barnes&Noble|Simon & Shuster

Read an excerpt.  Jamie Mason can be found via:  Website|Blog|Facebook|Twitter

Sometimes, in the telling of the life of a character, it’s not just what the author reveals that’s important, but also the when — that is, when in the life of the character the author focuses her attention. So Laura Lam learned while considering the main character of her novel, Pantomime. She’s here now to give you the fuller picture.

LAURA LAM:

A caveat: I hmmed and haad for a time on the subject of the post, wondering whether or not to discuss the “twist” of the story or hedge around it. I could discuss my fascination with the many interests that fed Pantomime and its world—the circus, the Victorian era, a dying empire, the line between technology and magic—but the world was not the initial “Big Idea” that led to writing Pantomime. It was the character of Micah Grey and his story. So instead of skirting around it, I’m going in: HERE BE SPOILERS (of something found out 25% into the novel).

The character of Micah Grey appeared first, in around 2007, and the world of Ellada and the Archipelago grew around him. I was apprehensive and scared that I wouldn’t be able to do the character justice: I didn’t know much about the experience of being intersex.

If you’re unfamiliar with the term, intersex encompasses a spectrum of sexual development conditions. Some call these Disorders of Sexual Development/Differentiation (DSDs). There are more than a dozen types of these “disorders,” and some say that it is about as common as red hair (source: The BBC documentary Me, My Sex, and I). People who are intersex should not be called hermaphrodites, as it is considered a politically incorrect and misleading term.

For quite a while, I didn’t write about Micah Grey. I wrote some other stories and some poems. But I kept thinking about him, niggling at his background, hopes, and dreams like a loose tooth. I researched a lot, from the history of intersex people in the Victorian era to the present. I watched documentaries and I read interviews. After a year, I knew he wasn’t going to go away and his was the story I needed to tell, so I tried.

But I didn’t start with Pantomime.

I started with Micah Grey as a 27-year-old, and I have about 80,000 words of a manuscript with a more mature, world-weary person that I will re-visit one day.  I was 19 at the time, and kept struggling to tap into his voice. In December 2009, when working in a very boring filing job after I’d graduated university (I’d studied creative writing after all; it was all I could get), I started thinking about Micah’s backstory as a teenager. I decided to write a short story about Micah Grey before he was Micah: when he was the daughter of a noble family named Iphigenia (Gene) Laurus, and how he would leave that life behind to become Micah Grey, the newest aerialist of the circus.

As you might have guessed, it didn’t stay a short story.  As soon as I started writing 16-year-old Gene/Micah, it all clicked into place. That’s not to say that the first draft of Pantomime was perfect—it was far from it—but I had found both sides of Micah Grey: both his and her voice. Micah was a teenager trying to find himself, walking the tightrope between childhood and adulthood and between genders.

Initially, I wrote the book chronologically, but during a rewrite I split the narrative. In spring, Gene’s life of afternoon tea parties and debutante balls is contrasted against  Micah Grey’s rougher life in summer as the newest member of the circus, where everyone is hiding a secret or three.

Pantomime is set in a fantasy world, with a pseudo-Victorian setting and advanced technology left behind by a long-vanished civilization, called the Alder. The Alder and the mythical beings they created called Chimaera are long gone, or are meant to be. Pantomime is set in a circus with aerialists, fire eaters, equestriennes, a ringmaster, and a freakshow with a four-legged woman and a strongman who reads philosophy.

While Pantomime is set in this world, the big idea is that every character in my book at some point feels like an outsider, or a freak, but they can also find a place they call home, if they can find the courage to take it.

—-

Pantomime: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Follow the author on Twitter.

Sometimes, to get at the big idea in your story, you have to ask someone else about it. For Exile, author Betsy Dornbusch asked one very special person, with a… unique perspective on the events of the book.

BETSY DORNBUSCH:

I admit it. I struggled to nail down exactly what Exile’s Big Idea is.

I started with the Twitter pitch. A half-breed, ex-slave bastard falsely accused of murdering his wife is exiled to the arse-end of the world. And I came up with lots of ideas, but I kept getting distracted by the fun parts of the book. There’s prejudice. (Epic fantasy!) A crisis of faith. (Swords!)  Slavery. Crushing grief. (A quest!) Guilt. Suicidal tendencies. (Magic!) Revenge. Never belonging anywhere again. (Evil spirits!) Corruption, power, and civil war. (A ghostly Greek Chorus!) The role of the anti-hero…

Er, well…I needed to narrow my focus. Overwhelmed, I did what I do when I write stories. I asked the protagonist, Draken, what he considers his Big Idea.

He promptly discarded the notion of hero or anti-hero. He has no intention of saving the day. Prejudice he’s been dealing with his whole life; nobody likes a half-breed. He’s bitter, not grieving. Guilt he’s got in spades, but he was taught to buck up early on by slave whips. And never mind the suicidal tendencies, life isn’t worth living without his wife anyway.

Really, the only thing keeping Draken going once he drags himself onto the wild shores of Akrasia is thoughts of revenge against the man who killed her. He feels guilty as hell about failing to protect her and knows revenge will solve nothing. He knows he’s going dark-side after a life of overcoming significant odds. But morality, honor, and truth don’t put food in your belly when you’re banished to enemy territory.

Draken commits more crimes on his first day of exile than he’d ever been accused of: lies, robbery, murder. From there he moves on to making himself useful to the powers that be, except this time ethics be damned. Despite a deeply-ingrained religious prejudice against magic, he allies with an influential necromancer. Soon he’s navigating a dangerous foreign court by telling enough lies to start a war. While everyone from lowly slaves to the very gods conspire to sway him to nobler purposes—rescuing an abused young princess, solving an assassination attempt on the queen, negotiating peace—he uses all of Akrasia’s hostilities and bigotry to serve his own lust for vengeance. And if Akrasia is destroyed in the process, well, it’s a backwards, godsforsaken kingdom he never pretended to like anyway.

Except… other characters are loyal to Draken. His friends keep his secrets, acquaintances admire him, his enemies give him grudging respect. He is completely mystified by it. After all, his accent is awkward, his skin color is wrong, his attitude is bad. He’s always been a man who makes strangers loosen their swords in their scabbards when he walks into a tavern, but the Akrasians trust him. They ask him for help, and offer it. The gods gift him with magic and power. He collects so many unlikely friends his merry band feels like LOTR all over again.

So Draken’s question, his Big Idea, is pretty simple: why do they like me?

I think it’s because we’re fascinated when decent people who have every chance to do the right thing choose the wrong things for the wrong reasons. They’re curiosities of humankind, aren’t they? Driven, accomplished, wounded, sometimes narcissistic, always charismatic.

Draken keeps salving his wounds with lies and immoral choices even when he succeeds for the betterment of others, even when life would be easier if he chose righteousness over corruption. He tests the boundary between their love and his dishonesty. And just like real people, the other characters are obsessed with him and his darker nature, even as he clings to revenge right to the bloody end.

Besides. Epic Fantasy! Swords! Magic! Evil spirits!

—-

Exile: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Follow her on Twitter.

The great thing about Sharon Lee and Steve Miller is that they give true value for your reading time. For example, in this post about Necessity’s Child, the latest installment in their celebrate Liaden Universe series, they are not content to give you just a single Big Idea — no, they give you a whole smorgasbord of ideas. Let’s dig in, shall we?

SHARON LEE and STEVE MILLER:

The ideas that ganged up on us and finally produced Necessity’s Child come in several sizes — Huge, Big, Medium, and Small.

The Big Idea came from Sharon’s maternal grandmother, who was wont, when she was particularly exasperated with her granddaughter’s elementary school self, to exclaim: “If only you would be stolen by the gypsies!”

That actually sounded kind of cool. Unfortunately, though the wish was frequently repeated, the Rom of Baltimore clearly knew better than a funny-looking gadje kid who read better than she talked; Sharon remained unstolen

On one particularly. . .strained. . .day, the wish having been reiterated several times, with feeling, Sharon thought she’d take matters into her own hands. Whereupon, she put the question — subtle-like, you understand: “Where do the gypsies live, Grandma?”

Grandma was reading a magazine. She answered without looking up from the page

“They live hidden.”

Oooh, that was even cooler, though it posed a potential problem.

“Where?”

Grandma beamed a look of disdain over the top of her half-glasses.

“If I knew where, they wouldn’t be hidden, would they?”

Point.

Since there didn’t seem to be any way to pursue this line of investigation without opening herself up to even more grandmotherly scorn, Sharon abandoned the topic. But, had she only known it then, she’d already gotten the gold.

They live hidden.

Face it — there’s a reason why so many fantasy and science fiction stories want to talk about the Land Beyond the Wall, and Those Beautiful People, and The Slans, and The (various) Secret Societies of This ‘n That.

They live hidden? That’s not just a Big Idea; it’s a Huge Idea.

It’s certainly an idea to which we’ve returned many times, because, in fact, we all live hidden; we’re each of us more, or other, than we show ourselves to be — and often more than we, ourselves, know. You could write a million riffs on they live hidden and learn something new, every time.

For Necessity’s Child, we decided to take the Huge Idea more literally than we often do. We not only wanted to find out what-or-who, specifically, was hidden, and why, but what would happen when (1) it-or-they were revealed, and (2) what was hidden over here intersected with what had been hidden beneath our feet.

So, we met three characters in our shared headspace, as we do; three people from very different circumstances, each of whom lived — or had lived — hidden.

First, we met Kezzi of the Bedel, apprentice to the kompani’s grandmother. Kezzi glories in the hidden life and despises Those Others, the gadje.

Syl Vor yos’Galan Clan Korval has until recently reluctantly lived hidden from Korval’s enemies, learning survival skills that no little boy should ever need. Reunited now with his mother, on a strange world, he’s struggling to re-adapt to open living.

And, last, we met Rys, a man so deeply hidden that he’s even a cipher to himself.

So, what do we have so far?

Huge Idea — they live hidden; Big Idea — Sharon’s unrequited romance with the gypsies; Medium Idea — what will happen when the lives of three very different people intersect; how will they change; and what will we learn, this time?

Which brings us to the Small Idea.

The Small Idea is, well. . .awfully prosaic.

You see, this month, February 2013, marks the Silver Anniversary of the Liaden Universe®. The first book in the series, Agent of Change, was published by Del Rey, in February 1988. Necessity’s Child, available, well. . .right now, from Baen, is the sixteenth Liaden Universe® novel.

When you’ve been writing in a particular universe for twenty-five years, it’s only fair to those readers who may want to sample your work, but who are understandably hesitant to commit to sixteen novels — it’s only fair to give those readers a door into the Universe; a book they can read without any prior knowledge of the series, or of the ongoing characters. We’ve previously written several Liaden portal novels. . .and it was time to write another.

The challenge in writing portal novels is that they have to be satisfying to both new and existing readers of the series. There should be new characters, new situations, and hooks into the rest of the Universe so readers who have been with us since 1988 will find a fresh and exciting narrative, characters that catch their hearts, and a story that enriches the existing canon.

In addition to all of that — because who doesn’t want an exciting story and engaging characters? — a portal book needs to do scene-setting, and lay deep background, for the new folks, so that when they, hopefully, step through the door to explore the rest of the Liaden Universe®, they’ll feel right at home.

Portal books ought, also, and ideally, be fun to write. That’s true of all books, really; life is too short to write stories you hate. But it’s especially true of portal books, which allow authors to leave the straight narrative pathway, and chew up the scenery a little — or, OK, a lot.

Necessity’s Child was enormous fun to write; it was like giving ourselves two weeks at the ocean in high summer, with unlimited roller coaster rides.

We hope you have just as much fun reading it.

—-

Necessity’s Child: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|IndieBound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Visit Sharon Lee’s Facebook page. Visit Steve Miller’s Facebook page.

Normally, when someone approaches a writer with the words “I have a great idea for a book!” the writer reels back in exasperation and fear. But in the case of John Hornor Jacobs, there was this one guy he just had to listen to. Who was this guy and how does he relate to Jacobs’ latest novel The Twelve-Fingered Boy? Here he is to tell you all about it.

JOHN HORNOR JACOBS:

I got the idea for The Twelve-Fingered Boy from my father. But don’t tell him that.

My dad’s a funny guy. He’s seventy-four and seriously cranky. My kids adore him but call him Grumps.

He’s a man of contradictions. When I was a kid, he introduced me to The Illiad and The Oddyssey, Frankenstein and Dracula, The Hobbit and Dune, possibly to get me to stop pestering him but really because of a deep-seated love of all things fantastic. When I was sick, he brought me The Savage Sword of Conan and Batman comics and ginger ale. He told me once, “You can have any book you want, I’ll buy it.” Two weeks later he brought me my first library card, saying, “I’m not made of money, son.”

But he could (and still can) be a tremendous dick. He made me a bookworm but then he forced me to do so many things that directly contradicted that bookworm nature. From eight to thirteen years old, I was in some boat every weekend, somewhere in Arkansas, Mississippi, or Louisiana, fishing for bass, or crappie, or gigging frogs, or freezing my balls off shooting ducks, or ass-high in scrub-brush hunting turkey. I had to play football because, goddamn it, no son of John Jacobs was not going to play football. (Yes, we have the same name…and yes, I have heard “John Jacobs Jingle Heimer Schmidt” about 17,235 times, give or take. That is why HORNOR is in there.)

He’d often make me arm-wrestle him. Or he’d ask if we needed to get some boxing gloves. He stopped asking that question when I got older and said, Yes, yes we do.

Eventually, there was a break. Bet you saw that coming. Nothing dramatic—no tearing of hair, no rending of clothes. No fistfight. (Well, not really.) But at a certain point, it became obvious I was tired of being his hunting and fishing companion and wanted to do whatever the hell fourteen-year-old boys did in 1985. Play Dungeons & Dragons and talk about girls and pick at our acne and masturbate furiously in the privacy of our bedrooms. Stuff like that.

But there was this other side to him. The one that loved The Lord of the Rings. He gave me that, and I’ll always be grateful.

As I’ve aged, my dad and I have become closer. Every Monday night, my daughters and I go over to my folks’ house and have pizza. Mom and Dad are well-to-do (Grumps was a fairly successful Southern lawyer, owning TWO seer-sucker suits) so we drink good wine and sit in their immaculate kitchen and catch up.

Invariably, a conversation like this will occur:

GRUMPS: Son, you’re the writer. You know what would make one helluva book?

ME: No, what?

GRUMPS: A vampire that works for the government. He’s old and bored so he offers his services to his country. And, of course, he’s the most badass hombre they’ve got, like a one-man swat team. Shit, that’d be a good book. You should write that!

ME: I think that one has already been written. It’s called The President’s Vampire. It’s pretty good.

GRUMPS: Well, shit on a shingle. I got another one. Was thinking about it when I was reading Harry Potter the other day—

ME: You’re reading Harry Potter again? How many times is that?

GRUMPS: Goddam it, I’m in my seventies. I’m not gonna waste my time reading crap. I want to read the Harry Potter series again before I die. [shakes his head, sour look crosses his face] That woman.

ME: Don’t start on Rowling again.

GRUMPS: I could die tomorrow! There’s so many more damned adventures she could tell in that world!

ME: [Clearing throat] What was your idea?

GRUMPS: Okay, picture this. There’s a family graveyard up in the Ozarks. The government’s putting an interstate right smack-dab through the graveyard. Imminent domain. So when the family begins to move the graveyard, they discover Grandma and Grandpa aren’t totally dead. They’re witches!

ME: That’s a little Harry Potter-ish. Might be something in it, but I’m working on this Lovecraft meets Southern gothic thing now—

GRUMPS: Lovecraft? Southern gothic? Nobody gives a shit about Southern gothic.

ME: Well, I do.

GRUMPS: People want more stories about witches and wizards, goddamn it. And one of the kids, a descendant of these witches, he’s got the power to shove things away from himself.

ME: Shove things away from himself? That’s kinda puny.

GRUMPS: You’re a writer? He does it when he’s angry. Use your damned imagination. Think of the possibilities!

And so I did. I thought out some of the possibilities. I scuttled the witch idea (though I reserve the right to return to it, just FYI) and thought about this explosive ability more as a superpower and pondered what might give someone that power. Genetics and a catalyst, maybe? I began searching the web for real human mutations. I’d been aware of polydactylism and the title sort of popped out at me in one of those ah-ha! Moments. Like in all my books, I mashed up many of the things I was interested in at the time: juvenile detention (and, snort, rehabilitation), prison escape stories, superheroes, physical and emotional abuse and how it tends to be passed on, generation to generation. “Man hands misery onto man. It deepens like the coastal shelf…” the old poem goes.

I realized I wanted to tell a superhero story, but without the superheroes. Just kids trying to figure out what to do in a morally ambiguous world with supernatural—or extranatural—abilities.

Thematically, I was interested in exploring the cages we all live in, both figuratively and literally. My protagonists are physically caged, both in space and in their own bodies. They’re isolated and alone—isolated by the knowledge of their own differences. What kind of bonds form in juvenile detention? What does having a real obvious physical “deformity” in a juvenile male society mean? What kind of coping mechanisms will boys develop to survive in a world poised to grind them up?

A constant word I use in this novel is incarcerado, which takes on a larger meaning as the boys learn more about their extranatural abilities.

In the end, I wanted to tell an adventure story my dad might enjoy. It’s weird, but he’s always my first audience.

Too bad he’s so cranky.

—-

The Twelve-Fingered Boy: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Visit the book’s Web page. Visit the author’s blog. Follow him on Twitter.

Sharon Short made a name for herself as an author of mystery novels — but sometimes an idea comes to you from outside the usual places. In the case of her mainstream novel My One Square Inch of Alaska, that idea came from the northern wilderness… and the 1950s… and a cereal box. Here she is to explain how all three came together.

SHARON SHORT:

At a book club gathering, one of the women asked if anyone remembered the deeds to one square inch of Alaska that used to come in cereal boxes in the 1950s. (The question wasn’t related to the book we were discussing.) The 1950s were before I was born, but I was immediately taken with this compelling concept… the desire for a deed to one tiny bit of land in a vast frontier, and what that could symbolize. Almost immediately, the shadowy image of a young woman and her little brother (Donna and Will), standing together and holding hands, appeared in my imagination. I couldn’t ‘see’ them yet in sharp detail, but I could ‘feel’ them saying, “tell our story.”  I had no idea what their story would or should be, but by the time I returned home, I’d written in my head one of the closing scenes, which narrated itself in what would become Donna’s first person voice.

Frankly, it took a while for me to firmly grasp “the big idea” that’s the driving force in my first mainstream novel, My One Square Inch of Alaska.

First, I had my doubts about an entire novel kicked off with the concept of a kid longing to get a square inch deed in a cereal promotion. (In real life, the promotion was for a deed to one square inch of the Yukon Territory, but interestingly, everyone remembers the promotion as being to Alaska, which I think says something about what Alaska represents in the collective imagination, so I went with the way the promotion was remembered. Besides, “My One Square Inch of Yukon Territory” doesn’t quite flow off the tongue.)

Yet, the story wouldn’t let go of my imagination. So I kept plowing along, writing draft after draft, trying to figure out just who Donna and Will were. And why their story was important. And why I had to tell it.

For a while, I thought the novel might be suitable for a Young Adult audience, since Donna is 17/18 in most of the novel. I’d written a draft of the opening chapters that was good enough to win a local literary arts grant, and I invested that money in going to a conference that focused on writing for children and young adult readers. That conference happened to be in New York City… and coincided with the big snow storm of January 2011.

My flight was cancelled. So, I tossed my luggage in my trunk and started driving east. On the drive out (10 hours of boredom followed by 30 minutes of sheer terror), I thought, hey, look at me! I’m off to get advice on this YA novel I’m writing.

But at the conference, an editor (not mine!) told me that YA fiction set in early to mid-20th century America never, ever sells. (That afternoon, it was announced that a wonderful novel set in the late 1930s Midwest America won the Newbery Award.) On the other hand, that same editor told me that she thought my novel’s concept and theme were better suited to an adult audience, with crossover appeal to older teens—if I’d think more carefully about my protagonist’s story goal.

On my drive home–30 minutes of sheer terror followed by 10 hours of… well, not boredom, because I realized that on this point she was right. Somewhere in Pennsylvania, I pulled off the highway to a rest stop and re-thought my novel, then went home and revised (again), feeling much more on track when I finally realized I was writing an adult mainstream historical novel.

But… I still hadn’t quite tuned into The Big Idea of my novel. Then I started writing what I thought was the opening to Chapter 18, with Donna (a wanna-be fashion designer) describing how she’d discovered her mama’s suitcases full of costumes and beautiful clothes. And suddenly, I realized I’d actually just written the opening lines to my novel. (Fortunately, I didn’t have to toss out Chapters 1-17… just revise… yet again.)

I’d also discovered my novel’s Big Idea. Not about suitcases and clothes and mamas… but about dreams. About the power of embracing, believing in and following one’s dreams…. even if the odds are long or everyone else is saying ‘you can’t do this!’ And about the danger of ignoring those dreams.

And I realized that’s what Will’s quest for one tiny square inch in all the vast Alaskan Territory represents: the life-affirming importance of embracing one’s dreams, even surrounded by the vastness of the challenges life can offer. Will himself represents the wonderfully innocent belief of the very young in chasing dreams simply for the joy of the chase. Donna represents the journey from not believing in one’s dreams to embracing them. Other teen characters find themselves under pressure to ignore exploring their own dreams in order to follow others’ expectations, while many of the adult characters have denied their dreams or followed a dream that’s really an illusion. Two of my favorite adult characters, though, are the exceptions to this; they understand and embrace their dreams, and encourage Donna and Will in theirs.

I’ve always believed in following one’s dreams and working hard to achieve them, balancing that belief with realism. (For example, it’s a good thing that being a world class diver wasn’t my dream; I’m terrified of heights and deep water.) But I think this novel was important for me to write to reaffirm my own writing dreams, as well as to find the courage to tell a story that, in a way, is very personal—Donna’s emotional coming-of-age journey tracks very closely with my own, although the details of her background are different than mine. Additionally, my children were transitioning from being teenagers to being young adults, so this also influenced my attraction to exploring the Big Idea of the impact of affirming (or denying) personal dreams.

I hope readers, whatever their dreams are, enjoy going along with Donna and Will on their journey in My One Square Inch of Alaska.

—-

My One Square Inch of Alaska: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Read the author’s “Literary Life” columns in the Dayton Daily News. Follow her on Twitter.

Shadow Ops: Fortress Frontier, the second book in Myke Cole’s Shadow Ops series, is out today. And on this auspicious occasion, Cole wishes to think on subjects like competence, training, preparation and readiness – and what happens when life takes all of those things and just chucks them out the window.

MYKE COLE:

Life’s got a way of throwing us curve balls.

You get 20 years or so to build a career, become a veritable expert in your field, undisputed master of your domain. You’ve got this shit down. Nobody, but nobody has more contacts, a better instinct or more natural talent than you do at . . . assessing properties. Making donuts. Putting out fires. Whatever. You’ve reached the pinnacle of whatever it is.

Which is precisely when your boss runs into your office. You’re desperately needed to handle a critical project. Everyone else has been suddenly carried off by flying saucers mysteriously targeting only your department. You’re the only one left. It’s up to you. And this critical project? It’s in another department, one you’ve never had anything to do with. Suddenly, you’re a novice, in way over your head, with everyone counting on you to get it right.

Dramatic, huh? It happens all the time. It happened to Lieutenant John Chard, an engineering officer sent to fix a bridge near a mission station on the Buffalo River in what was then known as Natal. He was great at his job: you know, bridge fixing. Sure, the British army did other things, like fight wars, but that wasn’t his real job.

It became his job, when he found himself the ranking officer in charge of the garrison at that mission station, some 150 soldiers, most of them convalescing. Surrounding them were 4,000 Zulus, not at all pleased with British colonial ambitions in their lands.

Chard didn’t want the job, wasn’t ready for the job. He’d done everything right, studied hard, been an upstanding citizen and loyal servant of the crown. He didn’t deserve this. It wasn’t fair.

We have a saying in the Coast Guard: “The sea doesn’t care about you.” In Chard’s case, neither did the garrison, who looked to him to lead them. Neither did the Zulu, who were determined to use him as an example of what would happen to those who sought to colonize them. Neither did the wind or the air or the waving grass. Chard could have cursed and spit and cried. He could have beat his breast and shouted to the heavens, called God to account. But none of that would have helped, so he didn’t.

He dug in and fought. He closed his eyes, grit his teeth and put one foot in front of the other.

And when he’d opened them again, he’d won.

Granted, that’s an extremely dramatized/simplified version of events, but drama is what us storytellers are after. The Battle at Rorke’s Drift fascinates me. Not because of the tactics, or the gear, or the fraught questions of European murderous disdain for human life in their frantic grab for Africa. What fascinates me most is the story of a man, in over his head, who digs deep and finds the courage to fight.

In Fortress Frontier, I ask that question. What is the secret ingredient that makes some people shrug their shoulders in a crisis? What allows some of us to simply say, “I’ll figure it out,” when others go to pieces? It’s a question we love to ask, if genre stories are any indicator. Luke Skywalker joins a rag-tag rebel alliance in what seems a hopeless resistance against an all-powerful empire. Frodo lugs the soul-poisoning ring of power into the dark lord’s backyard, with the largest army ever seen standing between him and his goal. Alone. And did I mention he’s like three feet tall? Taran doesn’t even make it to full pig-keeper (he’s still an assistant) before he’s called to battle the greatest evil the land has ever known.

They have their failures, the moments they take a knee, try to set their burden aside. But they always get up again. They always take up the one ring, or their father’s light saber, or the burden of command. They close their eyes like Chard did, putting one foot in front of another. They don’t know how they’ll make it work, recognize the strong chance that they won’t.

But they go forward anyway.

Because. Sometimes, you win.

—-

Shadow Ops: Fortress Frontier: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

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When you build a universe, you set up rules that you have to follow from then on out. But can those rules in themselves add to the drama of the story? Steven Gould returns the universe he created in the best selling (and movie-adapted) Jumper with his new novel Impulse, and tells us how he fought the laws — and everybody won.

STEVEN GOULD:

When I wrote Jumper (over twenty years ago) I was writing a book about the only person in the world who could teleport. By the time I wrote its sequel, Reflex, (ten years ago) the number of people who could teleport had doubled. Now, that number has tripled with the release of Impulse. At this rate I’m hardly going to achieve the massive societal transformations that jaunting did in Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination. Jumper has a smaller frame than that. But from the beginning it has made some assumptions about teleportation and though I do different things with teleportation (jumping) in each of the books these things have always followed from what we’ve found out in the first book.

In the first book we learned a few things about Jumping:

1. Jumping does not conserve momentum. Davy can jump off a cliff or a tall building and, as long as he jumps before he goes splat at the bottom, he carries none of the acquired downward velocity with him when he appears elsewhere. Likewise, when he changes latitude on the surface of the earth. Standing at the equator, the a person is traveling west to east at 465.1 m/s, 1,674.4 km/h or 1,040.4 mi/h. The angular velocity at any other locations on earth can be calculated by multiplying the speed at the equator by the cosine of the latitude. So, the velocity at near Davy’s house in Canada (at the end of Reflex and in Impulse) is less than half that of the equator. So, if momentum were conserved, jumping to the house from the equator should hurl him through the appropriate wall at over 500 miles per hour. This doesn’t happen so we are not only matching two disparate locations we are matching their relative velocities.

2. Another thing we learn in the first book is that jumping is opening a hole between both locations. This is illustrated by the original cover as a video camera captures a momentary Davy shaped hole through which his destination can be viewed. In Reflex Davy learns how to actually hold this hole open for longer durations allowing air pressure, water, fish, and even a bullet to pass through this Davy shaped hole in the universe, but the fact that it is a hole is set up in the first book.

3. You can’t jump anything you couldn’t physically drag around. Davy manages to move some fairly heavy books shelves from New York to Oklahoma in Jumper but when he is handcuffed to a railing he fails to teleport and nearly dislocates his shoulder. This property is exploited by Davy’s captors in Reflex to hold him prisoner.

So, Cent, Davy and Millie’s daughter, can jump, like her parents, but she takes this to another place, exploiting rule 1: Momentum is not conserved. If she can jump to the equator, gaining over 500 miles per hour to match her destinations angular velocity, why wouldn’t she be able to jump in place and add that same velocity? If she can fall off a cliff and be rushing toward the ground at over sixty miles per hour, then return to the top of the cliff with that velocity negated, why couldn’t she jump in place and add sixty miles per hour of velocity…straight up?

And so she does.

I will leave, as an exercise for the reader, the direction the next book, Exo, will take. I promise one thing, though. It will all have been set up in the first book

On the personal note, Jumper the series continues to mirror and process my personal life. I was that teenage boy with the alcoholic father. I was the reluctant parent unsure whether my own childhood would poison my ability to parent well. And, now with Impulse, I have daughters who amaze and surprise me with their choices and abilities

Hope you enjoy Impulse.

—-

Impulse: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

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Space is vast, and dark, and deep. How does that make you feel? Because, as you are about to find out, it makes author James Smythe feel a very specific way, a way that he examines, at depth in his new novel The Explorer.

JAMES SMYTHE:

To my mind, the best moments in SF are the quietest ones. They’re the ones before the chaos starts: before the astronauts land wherever they are going to land, or meet the aliens that they’re going to meet or discover the MacGuffin at the heart of their journey. They’re the moments where the characters look out at space and they revel in it: in how lonely it is, and how isolating, and how empty.

My favorite true story about space exploration concerns Michael Collins, one of the crew members on Apollo 11. When Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon and made their own history, Collins did something even stranger: he was in space by himself. For 48 minutes, he was out of contact with the Earth. He was totally alone, on the far side of the moon. In interviews, he says that he wasn’t lonely or scared: that he was excited, enjoying the mission. But he’s an astronaut. They’re made of sterner stuff. In his position, I would have been terrified: at being able to look out and see the nothingness, the void going on and on and on, into the infinite. Every time I have loved a work of space-set SF, truly loved it, it’s dealt with that emptiness as well. The Stars My Destination, Solaris, Alien, Moon: they all busy themselves with how it feels to be alone. In space, there’s nothing scarier.

So, my big idea, and the big idea that runs through my novel The Explorer: that space is a) empty, b) isolating and c) really very lonely indeed. I know, right? Crazy. Nobody’s ever thought that before.

I wrote a novel a few years ago called The Testimony, which had twenty-six different narrators, presented almost as talking heads. They were from all over world, telling a very big story about god and lies and terrorism, and it took a lot to write. Post-it notes on the walls, headaches, long walks to clear said headaches before returning to sort out the post-its, all that crazy stuff. When I was done, I decided that I had to write something completely different. Something that was, by necessity, a lot smaller. Self-contained. One narrator. Only a handful of characters, in fact, in the whole thing. And, I thought, lets start the book when they’re all dead, or most of them. Let’s start with my narrator, alone and horrifically lonely, and beginning to lose the plot. He can piece together the story – and himself – from there.

So I began with the freshly-named Cormac talking about how the people that he had been with had died; and how he was the only one left alive. It wasn’t until the third paragraph that I called them his crew; and it wasn’t until a few paragraphs after that that I realised he was talking from a spaceship. The isolation came first, and then the logical leap that it had to be set in the most horrifyingly isolated place I can conceive of: deep space. It was freeing, to write only the void of nothingness as the setting; to just write the character and let the story come from him. With The Testimony, I had worried over every little detail from the very start, trying to knot all of these narratives and sub-plots together. Now, writing what would later become called The Explorer, I only had to write loneliness. As soon as I realised I was writing an SF novel set on a tiny spaceship in the near future, everything else started slotting into place. The story had to be about what happened to the crew; how five people could die when there was nothing there to kill them. It had to be about Cormac, and how he had become stranded. And it had to be about space itself: the emptiness, the isolation, the incomprehensibility.

As I wrote myself further and further into the novel, I wanted Cormac’s sense of personal isolation to grow. As he looks back on what happened, and he is no longer alone – at least, in his memories – and as the various twists of the narrative reveal themselves, I wanted him to feel as if what he lusted for (normality, his old life, some sort of stability) was far enough out of his reach that he needed to find a new solution. I think about Michael Collins, and he must have wondered, even if he claims that he didn’t. He must have thought, What if I something goes wrong? What if I’m round here, on the far side of the moon, and I’m by myself; in the dark, out of contact, drifting. I try and imagine it now, and it terrifies me.

I love it when a novel imparts some of the emotional impact to the reader itself. With The Explorer, as Cormac discovers exactly what happened, and where he is, and makes a discovery about the nature of the mission that he and his crew were undertaking that changes his entire perception of what it is to be truly alone, I hope that the reader feels somewhat as he does, and that it reflects that initial inspirational concept for the novel: that space is lonely, isolating, and so very, very empty.

—-

The Explorer: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

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A mind is a terrible thing to waste — but might it also be a terrible thing to improve, if those improvements came from an outside source or technology? Or would it in fact be potentially amazing? It’s an interesting question to pose, which is probably why Ramez Naam poses it in his near-future novel Nexus. And as someone who has written non-fiction books on the possibly transhuman future which awaits us, he’s got thoughts on what rights you have to expand your head, and where (and if) government has a role in telling you where and when to stop.

RAMEZ NAAM:

Who decides what you can put in your brain? Who draws the line between human and non-human? How do we choose between liberty and security?

These types of questions come up in ACLU newsletters, in fiction like the X-Men, in the writings of Benjamin Franklin and further back.  While they’re not new, they’re as relevant now as ever, and they’re a context for telling stories about both science and adventure.

My novel’s called Nexus.  The word ‘nexus’ means a connection between things, often a great many things.  In this case, ‘Nexus’ is the name of a drug. No ordinary drug, mind you.  Nexus is a collection of nanoparticles that self-assemble in the brain, latching onto neurons and transmitting what’s going on in your brain to others, and vice versa.

The science of Nexus and the ways it can be used are downright life-changing.  And, while the book is definitely fiction, the science in it is based on real work happening now. We already have cochlear implants that restore hearing to the completely deaf by sending signals to the brain via the auditory nerve. We have artificial eyes that have restored vision to blind humans via electrodes jacked into the visual cortex in the back of the head, and now retinal implants that are essentially the early version of the ‘bionic eyes’ long imagined by science fiction. We have wireless electrodes implanted in the brain that allow paralyzed men and women to move computer cursors and robot arms – even to move them from thousands of miles away, connected over the internet.  We have algorithms that can look at an fMRI scan of your brain and put together a crude image of what you’re seeing. It’s clear that we’re tapping into the brain and learning to decode it. Nexus just happens to be a much more advanced version of this technology.

But technology doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It affects society, and invariably society affects it back.

In my novel, Nexus is illegal, partly because it’s used as a recreational drug, and partly because it bears too much resemblance to other, earlier, technologies that have been abused. And by abused, I mean tremendously so. A technology that can get information in and out of the brain can, in the wrong hands, be used for mind control – to steal from people, to make slaves of them, to form cults and worse.

Frightened societies clamp down on freedoms. The world I’ve drawn in 2040 has been shaken by past terrorist attacks that have used biotechnology to kill tens of thousands, by apocalyptic cults that have tried to use biotech to build new posthuman ‘master races’, and by the earlier mind control technologies that Nexus somewhat resembles.

So, when a group of young scientists in San Francisco get caught trying to improve on Nexus – to extend its range, to increase the amount you can communicate with it, even to build software that runs on top of the nanobots in the brain – things go very badly for them.  Our protagonist, Kade, finds himself in a situation where he has no legal rights, where he’s not guaranteed a lawyer, where an agency created to fight the threats of emerging technologies has complete authority to do whatever they want with him. And the only option they give Kade – aside from a lifetime in an internment camp for him and all his friends – is to become a spy, working his way into the confidence of a famous Chinese scientist who might or might not be militarizing Nexus for the Chinese government, as a tool for political mind control and assassination.

All of this may sound terrifically far-fetched, and it is fiction, after all.  But it’s not that far off from reality today. We have ‘extraordinary rendition’ without trial for suspects accused of terrorism, even for US citizens. We have laws that govern what you can and can’t put in your body and your brain. Not that long ago we had a President’s Council on Bio-Ethics which released reports arguing that we should use ‘the power of the state’ to put a clamp on biotechnologies that might make people smarter, stronger, or longer lived.

I’m not totally unsympathetic to the urge to clamp down against threats.  Terrorism is a real thing, and we want our government to guard us against danger. Drug abuse and addiction are scourges that have a cost to society. There are real ethical questions about what happens if, at some point in the future, the very wealthy can afford to enhance their minds and bodies and the rest of us can’t. There’s more gray than either black or white here.

I try to present that ambiguity and complexity in Nexus. There are no arch-villains in this book. There are no technologies that are purely good or purely evil. There’s no one out to rule or destroy the world for fun or out of pure self-interest. Instead, there are men and women and organizations each working towards what they each think is best for the world, but coming from very different perspectives on what that means.

Nexus is fundamentally a near future thriller. It’s full of danger and suspense, spycraft and battles, and a protagonist who is in way over his head.  But underneath that thriller storyline are these foundational questions: What would happen if we could link our minds together? How would society react to so profound a change? How would we choose between choice and control, between security and liberty?

And I have to tell you – when the rubber hits the road, I come down on the side of individual liberty.

—-

Nexus: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

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Hey! My pal Adrienne Kress has released her new novel The Friday Society, and in doing so, she’s not only put together a kickass YA adventure tale, but she’s also checked off some personal goals as a writer. Find out what they are right now.

ADRIENNE KRESS:

My Big Idea shouldn’t really be a Big Idea. It should be a really Boring Idea.  A common-as-muck idea.  An “Are-you-sure-you-want-this-to-be-the-subject-of-your-Big- Idea, Adrienne? sincerely-John” idea.

Alas, it is not.

Yet.

My big idea for my new YA Steampunk mystery adventure The Friday Society was “Write a story about girls in which they are strong and smart, but, more importantly, well-rounded individuals who are more than just token females (even as the leads of their own work), and, you know, likable characters.”

Which ought to be a given. But alas, again, is not.

A lot is made of strong female characters. To the point where panels are created at conventions to discuss the topic. Yet it is most rare to see a panel on strong male characters. And by “rare” I mean, well, I’ve never seen one. The reason? We are still working hard to promote female characters as characters and not as female characters. Look at Soderberg’s Ocean’s 11. No seriously, look at it. It’s a really fun movie. I’ll wait two hours . . . Okay, you back?  Notice anything? Each man in the film is a type. The sexy type, the nerdy type, the funny type – you get my drift. And then there is the woman type. A single solitary female. A bit like you tend to have a single solitary person of colour (POC). But that’s a whole other contentious issue.

Men are seen as people first, gender second. They are considered gender-neutral. They are the waiting forms into which you can pour your types. Women, on the other hand, tend to be seen as their gender first, people second. They are not a ready form for a dozen different types. They are all, inclusively, already a type.

If you make a film about eleven men robbing a casino, the story is about eleven people putting together a cool heist first and foremost. But switch the genders around. Do you see now how the film becomes first and foremost about women robbing a casino, not about a cool heist? The surprised audience questions why women would do such a thing. Why has the filmmaker chosen to cast all women? We don’t ask these same questions when a filmmaker casts all men. Men are seen as the default setting. The norm.

And until we can see female characters the same way, until we can see them as people first, gender second, this idea of writing female characters who are entirely their own people will remain rather Big.

So how did I attempt to address in The Friday Society the problem of not only making my girls people first, female second, but correcting some sexist tropes that have become so common in books that they aren’t all that necessarily noticeable?

Well, like this:

1. I made my female characters strong, yes, but, more importantly, fallible.

We’ve spent the last several decades attempting to compensate for years of representing women as being completely vulnerable and helpless (i.e.: the damsel in distress). But the problem is that instead of creating three-dimensional, interesting characters, we wound up going too far in the other direction and created characters of another type, characters who have no weaknesses, who never lose a fight (i.e.: the kick-butt girls). That’s not human. Because (here’s a secret:) humans have flaws.

And so I created smart, strong, kick-butt characters, yes, but people who also on occasion screw up. Who have fears and foibles. This is important for two reasons. One, it shows that women are just people too. And two, it also shows girls that – you know what? ­– you can screw up and get over it. I think a lot of girls these days have so much pressure put on them to be perfect that it’s nice to see that sometimes you can make a mistake and move past it. More importantly, that you can learn from it.

2. I wanted to show was that my girls got along.

This is something sorely lacking in most media today. Even when you have a strong, positive, three-dimensional female main character, she is often the exception rather than the rule. Other female characters with lousy character traits are put around her to demonstrate just how amazing our lead character is, and often our FMC has contempt for most women in the story. The characters the FMC does relate to tend to be male.

On the off-chance that the FMC does have female friends, they are often represented as frenemies (I really hate that word). Relationships between women are evidently supposed to be catty, manipulative, and just all-around unpleasant. By contrast, there is a beauty to men’s bromance. It is held up as an important and wonderful thing, whether it be a Fellowship surrounding, say, a piece of jewelry, or someone to whom you can say I Love You, Man. But the female bond is derided, considered a necessary evil. Something to mock. It’s actually why I believe so many women love bromance books and films. We so rarely see our own friend relationships represented as high-quality and fulfilling, that we relate better to watching the way male relationships are represented.

That’s not good.

So. In THE FRIDAY SOCIETY my goal was to create female friendships that I relate to. Similar to the bromance. Relationships based on trust, support, loyalty and congruency of interests. On having fun with each other and making each other laugh.  Of good communication and not letting misunderstandings fester. Relationships between reasonable and kind human beings.

3. Allowing one of my kick-butt girls to be girly.

It took me a very long time to realize that my having disdain for girly things did not make me a better person. In my early youth, anything that was associated with what a stereotypical girl liked was clearly bad (e.g. makeup). And anything that I liked that was liked by a stereotypical boy was good (e.g. action movies). You can imagine my shock when one day it occurred to me that my considering typically feminine things less important meant that I was perpetuating a pretty darned sexist attitude very common in our society. There is a notion that things that interest men are more worthy than things that interest women.

I decided to embrace the part of me that was more feminine. And doing so meant also embracing it in my book. Nellie loves being girly, loves playing dress-up, loves sparkles. None of this takes away from her ability to be strong, intelligent and get the job done. In fact, I truly believe her more girly qualities enhance these three powerful ones. Quite frankly I think she’s an utter delight.  If I do say so myself.

4. Writing a book that has girls as the main characters where romance is so secondary as to be almost non-existent.

There is nothing wrong with romance, and I love a quality romance book/film (see! I’m embracing my girly side – though I think men are just as romantic as women, so . . . I’m embracing my human side). But often the only reason a female character is introduced into a story is so that she can be the object of desire for a man, or, if she is the lead, her story is all about her search for a man. There are, of course, exceptions, and I very much enjoy those exceptions. But right now they really remain exceptions.  Not the rule.

I wanted to write a book about girls saving the day. In fact, no. I wanted to write a book about people who save the day. People who just happen to be girls. Now, there is a little romance in my book, because it made sense. Heck even The Lord of the Rings, which is about saving the world, had a couple romantic subplots in it. But mostly my girls are focused on solving a series of crimes.  And you better believe this means they therefore pass the Bechdel Test in spades. (For those not in the know, the Bechdel Test goes like this, according to Wiki: The Bechdel test is used to identify gender bias in fiction. A work passes the test if it features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man).

I could go on. I could discuss my disdain for the girls-choosing-the-bad-boys trope, and how I attempted to subvert that. I could also discuss how I made my girls attractive, yes, but confident about that fact, as opposed to “What, me? I’m just so plain . . . why are these guys paying attention to me?” (which I won’t dismiss as just absurd, despite my disapproval of it – there is so much baggage that comes with women and how we view ourselves when it comes to appearance, is it any wonder we get confused?) But I won’t.

All I will say is that, in a way, it’s a pity I needed to be so focused on how I wanted to represent my girls in order to make them strong characters that were more than just their gender. But at the same time I think it’s a necessary thing to do. I hope that some day I won’t have to be so dogmatic. That female characters will be seen as gender-neutral in print as much as male characters (for that matter I hope the same for POCs as well – heck really for anyone who isn’t a straight white male), that stories about women will be stories everyone can enjoy that just happen to have women as protagonists. And I truly do think we will get to that day. But until we do, I’m going to put in the extra effort.  Because it’s really that important to me.

—-

The Friday Society: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|IndieBound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Visit the author’s blog. Follow her on Twitter.

Martha Wells’ richly imagined Books of the Raksura series reaches a climax in the latest installment, The Siren Depths. And while the adventure takes place on a fantastic world far away, many of the themes in the book are rooted back here in the real world, and with Wells’ own personal history. She’s here to look back, and forward.

MARTHA WELLS:

The Siren Depths is the third novel in the Books of the Raksura series, adventure fantasies set in the Three Worlds.  It ties together and ends the story begun in the first two books, The Cloud Roads and The Serpent Sea.

Like a lot of my books, The Cloud Roads dealt with themes of isolation and loneliness.  The main character, Moon, had to pretend to be something else in order to survive and was afraid to show who and what he really was.  In that book, he finds his people, and despite fears that he has been alone too long to fit in anywhere, he manages to find a place among them.

The next two books, The Serpent Sea and to a larger extent The Siren Depths, deal with what happens after the happy-ever-after ending.

Like a lot of people, I did not have a Hallmark card childhood, and even now I can tell that it still affects the way I think and react to people.  So in these books I wanted to explore the ways that the past affects the characters’ perception of the present.  And I wanted to show how Moon, who saw his whole world destroyed and lived for years in isolation, and who survived by a talent for deception and pretending to be something he wasn’t, would cope in what was supposed to be his normal environment. He has to learn how to trust his new, large, and somewhat dysfunctional family.  His place in Raksuran society is also a tricky one, since he is a consort, the only fertile male Raksura capable of breeding with the queens.  He’s gone from being an isolated loner to someone with a high position in a matriarchal society, who has some difficult and sometimes violent political waters to navigate.  He has to face the fact that it may take him a long time to learn how to trust, and that he may never entirely fit in because of it.

There were times in my own life where anger and resentment is about the only thing I had to keep me company.  It can be very hard to give up, even when the source of it is long gone.  To a large extent, The Siren Depths is really about confronting your past.

Moon has found his footing in the court of Indigo Cloud, when another court claims him and he has to leave the only place that ever felt like home.  His queen, Jade, swears she will come after him and bring him back, but is he really capable of trusting her to keep her word?  He also has to face the people who he believes abandoned him to die as a child.  But Moon has been living off his anger and resentment for a long time; even after he hears the real story, it’s still hard for him to give it up and face what really happened.  Especially when he discovers that he’s not the only one scarred by those events who is still living in the past.  And the Three Worlds are a pretty dangerous place in the present, too.

—

The Siren Depths: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Visit the author’s LiveJournal. Follow her on Twitter.

Today’s Big Idea is slightly different: It’s about a video game, not a book. Because (and not only because I am currently in the process of writing a video game myself), I figured, what the heck.

So, today writer Mark Yohalem tells you the idea behind Primordia, in which two of mankind’s heirs embark on a quest and learn more than they expected. The game takes place in the science fictional future, but Yohalem’s starting point for the game is rooted in the past, and in a genre not often associated with robots and video games at all.

MARK YOHALEM:

The story of Primordia is inspired by the opening stanza of “The Inheritors”; my own creative life owes as much to the poet as my game owes to the poem.

I’m pretty sure that when I was a kid, I cared more about made-up worlds than the real world. That’s probably true of everyone, but almost everyone ages out of it. As a result, part of childhood—one of the hardest parts of childhood, for me—was knowing that the people you admired and relied upon and loved were, at best, bemused and, at worst, embarrassed by things that mattered enormously to me.

The exception to the aging-out rule was my great-aunt Virginia. No matter how young I was, it was obvious that she was unusual, more of a character than a real person. Later I understood how hard her life had been: growing up with a severely bipolar sister; married (the first time) to a psychiatrist who threatened to have her diagnosed as crazy and committed; bent by arthritis; stabbed by gout. But she was a magical creature. She had been a dancer, a reporter, a world traveler; she was a socialist; she lived in New York, in the “the Ant Hill,” where she said chocolate flowed from her faucets. It seemed possible. Old friends from China doted on her; with ludicrous, offensive, endearing exaggeration, she insisted that she was the “Empress,” revered for her age. She seemed to speak a great number of languages—Spanish, Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, at least—but did she really? I don’t know.

She was a poet. But above all else, almost certainly because she had survived by believing in things other than her own world, she accepted with open arms the invented universes that were so important to me. Even when I was in my twenties, writing fantasy novels, and she was in her 90s, slowly dying, she read them, annotated them, reworked sentences, always for the better. To her—a serious writer whose poetry about the horror of Buchenwald was read aloud in Israel, whose works were published in the Nation and the New Republic—there was nothing wrong with stories about wizards and knights and orphans coming of age. She accepted them, and me, and believed in them, and me.

“The Inheritors” is my favorite of her poems.  It begins:

I sing of the race that came to be
After man’s brief tyranny
Over all beasts ceased,
And we became a theory
In another species’ pre-history;
Endowed, as theories often are,
With false glories and iniquities.
The truth is, we lost our vision.
In the man-pit of night
We fought for light;
And with faith in fission
Lit one blaze too bright.
The world will never see such flames again,
Nor know the dream and worth that was in men.

When I was a kid, and couldn’t memorize anything to save myself from an exam, I memorized that stanza. And when the amazing artist behind Primordia invited me to craft a story to fit his paintings, “The Inheritors” was at my shoulder.

Primordia is a game about the robots who inherit the world after humanity has become extinct. The game’s Big Idea is that these robots must struggle to make sense of that inheritance, one they were never built to receive. They are purpose-built for purposes that scarcely make sense anymore; endowed with knowledge completely impractical for a post-organic environment; and they cling to a memory of creators they cannot begin to understand.

The game’s protagonist, Horatio, is a Humanist, which is to say, a robot who worships humanity. His Gospel describes Man as the perfect image from which robots were made: “a machine of unbreakable form, endless memory, and absolute logic.”  The dramatic irony, of course, is that humans are none of those things: not perfect machines, but fragile, forgetful, fallible animals. Horatio, in his worship, both over- and undervalues humanity. By erasing our flaws, he transforms the wonder of human achievement into something trivial. For a perfect machine to build the things we have built—or that the humans in Primordia’s world have built—is nothing remarkable. For women and men to have done so is extraordinary. Humanism grants Man “false glories” without understanding his “dream and worth.”

What I wanted to do with Primordia, aside from capturing the melancholy and hope of “The Inheritors”—melancholy for humanity; an immigrant’s hope that our inheritors can surpass us—was to tell a story about the relationship between robots and humans that wasn’t about some titanic struggle (Terminator, Matrix, Battlestar Galactica, etc.) or about the “robots among us” (I, Robot; AI, Bicentennial Man, etc.). I wanted to tell a story about the relationship between creators and created, about the departed and the inheritors. I wanted to use robots to tell a story about humans, but I didn’t want the humans around because I didn’t want us to tribally root for humans or self-loathingly root for robots. Instead, trusting the maxim that one creates in his own image, I wanted the robots’ own qualities to tell about humanity.

So, on one level, Primordia is the story of two robots, Horatio and Crispin, who—having been robbed of the power source they rely upon—begin a desperate journey to recover it or find a replacement. On that level, it’s a story about obstacles overcome, about friendship and sacrifice, and so on. It’s a mystery story and a thriller with maybe a dash of horror.  On another level, though, Primordia is a story about various robots who—faced with a world not quite fitted to their existence—create their own, fantastical visions of that world. Some believe in the divine; some believe in justice; some believe in progress; some believe in the past; some simply go mad.  It is a story that holds up a mirror, or tries to hold up a mirror, to the way we reconcile ourselves to the imperfection of our world.

The way I reconcile myself to it—the way Aunt Virginia gave me—is by telling stories, and I think that Primordia is the best I’ve told. I’m sorry I can’t share it with her, but I’m glad I can share it with you.

—-

Primordia at Wadjeteye Games. Link includes a trailer, a demo and purchase options (including a code for Steam).

Author Robert Boyczuk decided that if one is going to “borrow” themes and ideas for one’s book, then one should “borrow” from the biggest and best. So from whom did Boyczuk borrow from for The Book of Thomas? He explains below.

ROBERT BOYCZUK:

How a small-minded guy like me came up with a Big Idea for a novel:

I stole it. Yup, it was really that simple.

Never one to go half-measures, I stole my Big Idea from the best – God.

How so? Well, my stolen Big Idea began with imagining a massive, artificial world drifting in space, comprised of concentric spheres, a world in which the self-contained environment is rapidly deteriorating. And a boy writing a book in this post-literate world. So what do these well-worn SF tropes have to do with stealing from God?

Turns out that for a recent reading I prepared a small text in an attempt to explain this very thing – that is, how my creative stealing process works and what I hoped to achieve by this shameless thievery from God. So here is what I wrote and read:

An Apology To Potential Readers of This Work

Dear Potential Reader of this work, I apologize sincerely for the book entitled, The Book of Thomas, Volume 1: Heaven. In writing this book I had hoped to offend and outrage. I had conceived of a novel containing murder, incest, sodomy, rape, plague, disease, dismemberment, disembowelment, assassination, blasphemy, war, famine, and the ever-popular genocide. I wanted to write a book that chronicled injustice of every conceivable kind, in particular cruelty to women, children and slaves (including handy tips on the beating, thereof). I wanted a book rife with witches, devils, dragons, satyrs, and all manner of false Gods. A book with perversions of every stripe, with ritualistic sacrifices, pointless mutilations and oxymoronic honor killings. A book in which fear and guilt motivate all, dictating the minutiae of life – no matter the lip service the characters might pay to loftier ideals. In short, I set out to write a book about how religion exploits the incalculable stupidity of mankind.

I apologize for my failure, The Book of Thomas, Volume 1: Heaven.

When I first began this work, my modest goal had been to write a book more outrageous and offensive than any other. But in my research, I discovered that such a pernicious work already existed and was, in fact, already a best seller. A book so perverse that it not only embraces all the outrages I’ve just mentioned and many more, but does so in earnest and with great relish.

The book to which I am referring is, of course, The Bible.

How can The Book of Thomas, Volume 1: Heaven hope to compete with such a work?

It can’t.

So, dear potential reader, if you are considering purchasing my humble tome, you might want to reconsider, for you will surely get more bang for your buck in a copy of The Bible.

If, on the other hand, you want to stick a finger in God’s eye, and show him he isn’t the only one who can sell books filled with gratuitous violence and unspeakable cruelty, then The Book of Thomas, Volume 1: Heaven, is for you.

In case you hadn’t guessed it already, the spheres of my degrading world are known as the Spheres of the Apostles, the Catholic Church rules all, and The Bible and its sanctioned addenda are the only books permitted.

So, thanks, God, for The Bible, and thanks Big Religion for your endorsement of all the Big Ideas The Bible contains – more than I could possibly hope to steal in a lifetime.

—-

The Book of Thomas: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Powell’s

Read an excerpt.

It sometimes amazes people, in this increasingly digital age, how much book covers still matter. They do: They are literally the icons representing the words within. As co-editor of the anthology Diverse Energies, Joe Monti has some definite ideas about covers, and how they have an impact on readers (and the sales that hopefully follow). Here he is to explain to explain it further.

JOE MONTI: 

This month Diverse Energies, released, an anthology of young adult science fiction stories edited by Tobias S. Buckell and me. It contains a range of protagonists that deal with the universal feeling of being the other, through issues of being LBGT, a different race, social class, culture, nationality or species, typically a soup of these issues as these experiences tend to overlap. It was created from our desire to have a positive response to the combination of #racefail and the whitewashing of YA that was occurring at the time. The stories inside Diverse Energies are by Paolo Bacigalupi, Tempest K. Bradford, Rahul Kanakia, Rajan Khanna, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ken Liu,  Malinda Lo, Ellen Oh, Cindy Pon, Greg van Eekhout, and Daniel H. Wilson. A pantheon of writers I couldn’t be prouder of.

When deciding on the subject of this post, just talking about composing LGBT/ PoC protagonists in a YA genre anthology is sadly radical enough. Or maybe discussing how a work like the excerpt from Daniel H. Wilson’s novel,  Robopocalypse, gets reviewed through the lens of perception, as the main protagonist of the excerpt is white, and gets attacked by a robot while working at a frozen yogurt shop. A lot of stuff gets said in glorious four-color language, much of it racial, about the protagonist’s Mexican-American co-worker in retelling to a Native American police officer. But while many people see a white kid expressing off color language what I see is a discussion of modern race relations with the figure of authority, the Police, being a PoC and the other being truly other, a robot remotely controlled by a sentient A.I. Part of the misinterpretation stems from Wilson’s name, which is very caucasian sounding, but Wilson is Native American. How that knowledge directs an interpretation of the excerpt has been fascinating to see in reviews. If you tag the story as written by a Native American, does that make it work? Does it frame it… or put it in a box?

This brings us around to how race and sexual designation tends to get marketed in young adult literature by way of cover design. This may sound like publishing wonkiness, but this is the rug that pulls the whole room together. A bit of biographical information: I was a bookseller, worked as a children’s fiction buyer at a large retail chain, a sales executive at a publisher, a editorial director, and am now a literary agent. All this to say that I have some perspective from experience, and I posit that the default cover concept for many books that deal with protagonists who are PoC or LGBT should utilize a graphic interpretation of iconic imagery. Here’s why: Because books with these kind of covers tend to sell better. And if sales for books of this nature increase, then publishers will buy more of them. When sales hit a certain consistent threshold then the fear that publishing a book about a Latino will tell the readership that this is a book only Latinos will like will go away.

What I am getting at is the complicated correlation between commerce and art. During my tenure as a buyer, I consciously tried to make a couple of things work, one of them being young adult novels with gay or lesbian protagonists. It started slow, but books like Boy Meets Boy, Empress of the World, The Geography Club, Rainbow Boys, and even The Perks of Being a Wallflower were all successful and proved that there was a wide readership for these great books.

The same was true for fantasy in children’s and young adult. In 1999 it was not a popular genre. Publishing a children’s fantasy was all but verboten. The success of Harry Potter changed that, dramatically. Even so, I schemed to get the works of writers like Diana Wynne Jones back on the shelves in the U.S. Right now, science fiction for children and young adult and is undergoing such a sea change. And when these books work, they often work best without people on the cover.  For every Fair Coin and Planesrunner, illustrated by Sam Weber and John Picacio, there are too many covers that limit the potential readership it could have by didactically depicting the protagonist instead of evoking a response from a potential reader that will resonate after the book is read.

Let me make this clear as a former retailer and sales exec: only bad covers do not sell books. Putting a person of color on the cover does not hurt sales. But in my experience, putting any person on the cover of a work of fiction often does hurt sales. Readers don’t want to be told this is what a character looks like. Instead look to the recent repackaging of Le Guin’s Earthsea, or look to Goodman’s Eon. With a wider lens, look at The Hunger Games, Eragon, Game of Thrones and Among Others for a range. When we look at the covers for the novels by Junot Diaz, Louise Erdrich and Zadie Smith, we’re largely looking at this treatment, though typically typographic, but for genre I like the use of art, best. Remember, a novel’s cover is the primary marketing and selling tool. It is supposed to attract a potential reader to pick up or click on your novel. You want that cool factor of interplay between cover and title like Liu’s Legend, Bacigalupi’s The Drowned Cities, Mieville’s Railsea, and Reese’s Above World.

With the continuing sales of books like these the publishing world we love will change. It’s changing more every day. Heck, The Children’s Book Council developed the CBC Diversity Committee which is dedicated to increasing the diversity of voices and experiences contributing to children’s and young adult literature — encouraging diversity of race, gender, geographical origin, sexual orientation, and class among both the creators of and the topics addressed by children’s literature with a committee populated by some of the best editors in the field. This is key because the change has to come from within.

Strive to be bold, writers and editors, artists and designers. Tell stories that reflect the diverse world we live in, and work on those iconic covers that speak to your readers shared experiences. Sell more copies with characters who are not solely white and straight. Continue the momentum. It’s about art and crass commerce. After all, we really do judge books by their covers.

—-

Diverse Energies: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt via Barnes & Noble. Visit co-editor Tobias Buckell’s site. Follow Joe Monti on Twitter.

New York Times reporter John Schwartz covers the nation for his beat at the newspaper. But his latest book Oddly Normal finds him reporting from home, writing about the challenges of raising a child who chooses to come out as gay at an early age. Schwartz and his wife found themselves without a map of this particular child-raising territory and went looking guidance and inspiration. What did they find? Schwartz is here to tell you.

JOHN SCHWARTZ:

When I set out to write a book about our experiences raising a child who turned out to be gay and troubled, I looked for wisdom – the kind of ideas that could propel me through writing a book that other people might actually want to read.

I didn’t want to write a self-help book or a how-to guide, since I don’t read them and don’t see myself as an authority on anything, especially parenting. And since our youngest son tried to commit suicide, I’m not sure I necessarily present the kind of example anyone else might feel compelled to follow. Besides, the best how-to guide in the world could be summed up by its first sentence. The book is Dr. Benjamin Spock’s famous book Baby and Child Care, and the first sentence is simply this: “Trust yourself. You know more than you think.” How could I ever improve on that?

I also knew that I didn’t want to try to transmute my experiences into a novel. As a newspaper reporter, I have enough trouble getting facts right; creating whole new sets of facts seemed to almost certainly be beyond my abilities.

Besides, I was inspired by the words of a journalism buddy of mine, Tim Noah, who wrote that while he couldn’t stand self-help books, he found great comfort in memoirs. Tim wrote that he takes greater meaning, and greater comfort, from memoirs. “What I’ve come to believe is that psychological advice isn’t worth much if it isn’t rooted in personal experience,” he said. “So instead of reading self-help books I read memoirs about the kinds of experience I’m trying to cope with.”

So: a memoir. A memoir about being a parent of a child who is different. A child who was burdened by his differences, and who we tried to help to accept himself.

Like a lot of gay kids you hear about these days, Joseph attempted suicide. He was 13, it was shattering to us all. And it set me to exploring why a kid who is gay might do such a thing. The standard media storyline puts it into a form that can almost be an equation: gay teen + bullying = suicide. But when Joseph took an overdose of pills at 13, it had been some time since anyone had actively bullied him. It made me wonder if there could be something more going on, and that set me on a path to the work of Ilan Meyer, a psychologist who developed a theory of “minority stress.” In his view, a young person who is gay might be bullied, or fear bullying, sure – but he also might carry around an inner bully who kicks his ass more forcefully than any external bully in the cafeteria. Self image can be cruel, and the stress of concealing oneself can increase the pressure tremendously. The underlying problem, by Meyer’s reasoning, is the stress of being different.

It made a lot of sense. And it made me think back on a book that I love: David Gerrold’s The Martian Child: A Novel About a Single Father Adopting a Son. Science fiction fans know David Gerrold as the science fiction novelist who gave us works like “When HARLIE Was One” and the great episode of Star Trek, “The Trouble with Tribbles.” Martian Child was different: an autobiographical novel about adopting a son who had ADHD and other issues—including the boy’s insistence that he was actually from Mars.

Now this is a child who is different. And the experience of raising the boy and trying to understand him through the open-minded perspective of writing science fiction led Gerrold to a memory and a revelation: that “I was a Martian child too.” He remembered that “back when I was a kid, when I was the smallest and the smartest, when I was getting picked on every day, when I was teased for just being alive, I knew that someday the Martians would come and get me.” Once with his own kind, he had imagined, “we would never hurt again, we would never be lonely again.”

So my wife and I are raising a gay kid who is different in many ways: smart, funny, but also socially awkward and emotionally vulnerable. We wouldn’t have him any other way. And I wanted to say that all children, and especially the children who are different, need to be embraced and supported and loved.

Science fiction can save your family. Who knew?

—-

Oddly Normal: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Visit the book’s Facebook page. Follow Schwartz on Twitter.

In creating their books, most science fiction and fantasy writers engage in a certain amount of worldbuilding, developing the environment in which their stories take place. How long does this take? Well, if you are Ryk E. Spoor, and the book in question is Phoenix Rising, the answer is: Longer than some adults have been alive on the planet. Spoor explains why he believes (and hopes you will believe) the incubation period has been worth the wait.

RYK E. SPOOR:

Like many of my works, Phoenix Rising attempts to be classic example of its core genre – in this case, epic fantasy – yet with some interesting twists and turns. So we have the highborn young woman, family slain, on a quest for justice and vengeance; the exiled prince; and the somewhat roguish troublemaker who helps the less subtle heroes get the job done.

But Kyri Vantage is not turning to the gods for help; she’s the last hope of her own god, who is as weakened and betrayed as she. Tobimar Silverun is not fleeing his people or a deposed ruler, but seeking something which only his family can pursue, and in exile to keep them safe; and Poplock Duckweed is an Intelligent Toad barely larger than a hand, yet a fully capable adventurer in his own right, whose diminuitive size leads others to fatally underestimate him.

Phoenix Rising is perhaps the most personally important book I have yet published. It is the first book I sold to my publisher entirely on my own, from start to finish. It is a story I have wanted told since I first began to write Kyri’s story in 1991. And perhaps most importantly, it is the novel which finally brings Zarathan, the World of Magic, to life for those outside my small circle of friends.

I have been working on Zarathan for thirty-five years, building it both as a world for writing and as one for adventurers to enter and play in, since I have been running roleplaying game campaigns since the same year I invented Zarathan. I could write a great deal about how RPGs in general became a tool for me and my writing, and how I avoid (I hope) making my stories read like some guy’s game writeup. But it is Zarathan itself which I think is the core, the heart of Phoenix Rising, and on Zarathan I will concentrate.

I built Zarathan from my own ideas, from those I encountered on TV, books, movies, stories of all sorts. Yet even when I used something from elsewhere, I wanted it to make sense within the world. When a player wanted to create a character different from any others I’d seen, I always wanted to let them go ahead… but it had to be integrated with my universe. Sometimes the creation was a partnership that went farther; the character Kyri had her origin in a game run by my friend Jeff Getzin, author of Prince of Bryanae… while Bryanae itself was created as background for Jeff’s character D’Arbignal, and I gave that background – that piece of my world – to him for his own use. Other players brought their ideas, their dreams, their hopes and fears, and these all left their mark, made me think about how the world could encompass everything that those visiting the world might hope for.

To do this, I had to understand the universe I was building, and make it bigger, make it more real, make it able to be solid and strong enough to encompass anything. I had to reconcile the way that magic worked with the logic of the way people would use it, find a way for it to work without becoming a runaway solution for all problems in the hands of someone who thought differently. I had to find ways to keep it reasonable that a hero could be a simple warrior just as much as he or she could be a magician or a priest. I had to, in fact, figure out why the world could be the way it was, and yet need so many heroes to save it.

And so – without my realizing it at first – Zarathan came to life. The huge empires of the Dragon King and the Archmage of the Mountain, seeming so mighty and all-encompassing… yet actually merely networks of roads and towns surrounded by ever-wild forests and plains and mountains. Dozens, hundreds of different species of sapient creatures, each with their own agenda, powers, interests. The great cycles of the Chaoswars, and my eventual understanding of exactly what caused them – how they had started, how they could manage to even affect the gods themselves with befogged memories and lost knowledge, and what was truly behind their devastating cycle of repetition. The tie between Zarathan and Earth and the fall of Atlantaea, the sealing of the magical conduit that joined them, and how this was connected to the War of the Hell-Dragon and the revolt of the Saurans. All of these things emerged, sometimes as though I had known them all along, as I worked to make sense of a world that could contain so many things.

Zarathan lives so clearly in my mind that I can usually answer detailed questions about it without really thinking. I know the answers are right, just because they somehow fit. And the World of Magic that I see is a world where there are a double dozen countries, hundreds of gods, a million interwoven plots, and a need for untold numbers of Heroes.

Phoenix Rising follows one set of heroes – Kyri, Tobimar, and Poplock – on a mission of deadly importance to the world. But they are not the only such heroes, nor is theirs the only – or even, perhaps, the most important – such mission. Xavier Ross, who shows up at a few points in the book, is part of another group, following other clues to a different but no less vital destination. There are yet other groups of Heroes on other important quests.

I felt this was a vitally important part of Phoenix Rising – to have our heroes at once be on an epic quest, one whose ultimate end will be as desperately important to the safety and survival of the countries they know and love as anything could be, and at the same time to recognize that in a world so huge, with powers so vast, no one group of heroes will be enough; there will be need for heroes aplenty.

There are many books, and RPG adventures, where it seems that only one set of heroes are available, or needed, where the map is just the right size for the heroes to visit all the vital locations. But I built Zarathan to handle smart roleplayers – and those people always go somewhere you didn’t expect them to. They figure out ways to evade your cunning traps, to use magical devices in a manner completely contrary to what you’d intended, and in short make a complete hash of anything that seemed simple and foolproof.

So I built Zarathan bigger. In Phoenix Rising, the main characters will touch only a fraction of the points on the map; in fact, they will touch only a small fraction of those locations even after the entire Balanced Sword trilogy is complete. Even if I get to do the other two concurrent trilogies – The Spirit Warriors (which features Xavier Ross and his friends) and Godswar – all three sets of heroes will still not have come close to hitting all the spots on the map.

Zarathan is also – quite intentionally – a world in which everything works, and where almost anything is possible. So our adventurers are a preternaturally strong God-Warrior (Kyri) with divine-source powers, a swordsman trained in a mysterious martial-art discipline that seems to offer mystical powers (Tobimar), and a little Toad who studies some practical magic, tinkers with clockwork, and knows a lot about dramatic entrances. Along the way, they meet a native of Earth (from, in fact, Morgantown, the setting of my first novel Digital Knight) who appears to have super-ninja style powers and amuses himself with a portable gaming system, another Toad who conducts what amounts to a magical CSI investigation, a meddling magician who seems to be manipulating even the gods, and traces of demons, psionics, and more.

I tried, as much as I could, to give some form of closure to Phoenix Rising; this was necessary because I do not know, yet, whether I will be able to do the two remaining novels in the trilogy (although, if Baen chooses not to continue the trilogy, I intend to write them eventually and sell them independently somehow). But I will admit that I could only do so much. Not only is it clear that their own particular adventures are merely paused, not finished, but the other events they have touched upon – and affected – are themselves dangling threads.

Those threads, however, connect. They are VITAL. Xavier’s presence changes the course of events twice, and it would seem likely that without him, our main characters would have been killed or worse rather than reaching their goals. At the same time, what they have done affects Xavier strongly, and will influence what happens to him and his friends. The connections continue later, also; these plot threads, and some for Godswar which are subtly present in Phoenix Rising, return at various points in the trilogy.

Just as the chaos spreading across Zarathan is all connected – all part of Kerlamion’s ultimate plan – so, too, are these groups of heroes connected, parts of the mysterious wizard Khoros’ manipulations, playing a game of lethal chess across thousands of miles and hundreds of centuries. Yet… even these are only a small part of Zarathan.

This is a world where a dragon stretches its wings and spans the horizon, while elsewhere a dashing swordsman challenges three others for the sake of honor and the joy of the fight; where three rivers – two of chill water, one of orange-flickering lava – plunge as one into a pool of water with an eternal crackling thunder, below a city built across the lava flow between the green and blue waters; where Idinus of Scimitar, God-Emperor of the Mountain, casts his gaze across ten thousand miles or five hundred millennia, seeing all yet unsure whether he has lost himself; where other worlds await the traveller, gateways hidden within lost ruins or beyond a shimmering in the air or around the next bend of the road; and where four friends rise from a battle they thought had ended them, and realize they are now more than mere mortal, raised by the faith they inspired in those they met.

This is Zarathan. It is the world I have dreamed of – and dreamed in – for thirty-five years.

Come. Bring your own dreams with you. There’s room for them all.

—-

Phoenix Rising: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt of the book. Visit the author’s blog. Follow him on Twitter.

I’ve been a huge fan of artist John Picacio’s work for years now, and it was my immense pleasure to be on stage this year to hand him his Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist. Now I’m happy to give him a some space to talk about his latest project: A 2013 calendar filled with some of his most iconic work in the science fiction and fantasy field, which he is doing as a Kickstarter project. An unusual topic for a Big Idea here, but then, big ideas don’t always come in standard forms. Here’s John to explain about the calendar, and what it represents beyond its own timely existence.

JOHN PICACIO:

Can calendars contain Big Ideas? I believe they can, and I think this one does. For some of you, it may even possibly contain at least a dozen. We’ll get to the art goodies soon enough.

But first — there’s one particular Big Idea that I want to share with you, and it surrounds the frame of all of these pictures. It’s one that affects you, me, and the worlds we live in — especially if your world heard recent news of a Random House/Penguin merger, or a Disney/Lucasfilm alliance.

This Big Idea is that all of us are facing a crossroads in cultural choice right now, whether we realize it or not. On a personal level — this calendar is a response to my own creative crossroads. We all experience these in our lives, with some generated by failure; some by success; and some just because life doesn’t favor straight lines.

As some of you may know, two months ago, I won the Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist. It was a moment of success created by an accumulation of work along a path that led through my art for the 2012 George R. R. Martin / A Song of Ice and Fire Calendar.

The safest call after experiencing success like that is to continue marching in lockstep along the way that gained that acclaim – which in this case, would be creating artwork that sells books for major publishing companies, such as Random House, HarperCollins, Tor, Simon & Schuster, Pyr, Baen, and many more. For more than a decade, this work has been what has almost exclusively sustained me, fed my family, and paid the bills. It’s a good, hard-working life. It’s a full-time career in our increasingly uncertain world, and I eat, sleep, and breathe it.

Maintaining that same life is the safest call, it would seem, but it’s not the right call, in my opinion; playing it safe is not what artists do, if they’re doing their job. We’re supposed to explore the frontiers, find the paths, mark the trails, and yeah, I’m gonna say it – boldly go. It’s what we do when we’re at our best.

However, as far back as 2009, I could see sweeping changes coming — and wow, they sure did. At that point, we were headed down the path we now take for granted every day – a co-existence of printed and digital publishing, full of untapped possibility and wonder, that if shaped properly, could transform the way we experience stories, art, relationships and life. Back then, I was concerned that we, as consumers, were becoming too addicted to convenience at the expense of content. I suspected we would be too easily seduced by the mob rule of demanding other people’s work for free, rather than remembering that lasting value always bears a cost in the making. I was concerned that companies would consolidate and cannibalize each other, becoming lesser, rather than greater. I was concerned that budgets for copyediting, professional art, professional design, proper proofing, and general attention to the midlist, would contract, and in some cases, disappear entirely.

We’re a little more than eight weeks from 2013, and I think much of that paragraph now looks sadly familiar and all too real. I often wonder if we’ve fallen in love with our advances so deeply that we’ve forgotten the power they have to unlock better choices, rather than create cozier cages.

So here we are – all of us – at the crossroads. I believe that the future of success in publishing lies in those that embrace the “both/and”, rather than settle for the “either/or”. That’s what I’m doing here — this calendar is my first effort toward building my own “both/and”.

I don’t believe the future of fulltime creatives’ success in publishing is a choice between traditional publishing gateways and independent publishing. I think the most favorable choice for many is to work in both, and use them effectively and often simultaneously.

Lone Boy is my brand new company. It’s a publishing imprint for sharing my artwork and visions with a growing audience. I fully intend to continue working with my wonderful clients in the traditional publishing world, while I build my own company, but the days of me working exclusively via that traditional publishing world are behind me. Sadly, I wonder if they’re over for good for almost all artists who wish to pursue a meaningful, fulfilling full-time freelance career, exclusively within traditional publishing gateways. Time will tell.

This calendar is my first independent creative venture via Lone Boy. It collects twelve of my favorite book cover works (well, actually – eleven, plus one Chesley Award-winning magazine cover) from my science fiction, fantasy, and horror career thus far. It contains artworks I’ve created for books by Michael Moorcock, Dan Simmons, Mark Chadbourn, Brenda Cooper, Jeffrey Ford, Frederik Pohl, and many more. You’ll find it available exclusively via Kickstarter. It won’t be distributed via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Walmart, or any other venue. I invite you to visit the Kickstarter page, see for yourself, and grab yours. Feel free to ask me any question you might have about it. Here are all twelve artworks featured in the calendar.

Here’s one that I asked myself — is a calendar that’s essentially a ‘greatest hits’ collection truly finding a new path, or exploring a new frontier? I think it could be argued that it’s not, if the item were considered on its own. However, as Lone Boy and 2013 unfold, I think you’ll find that this calendar is the springboard toward a path where I get to do just that. Here’s a hint of where I’m headed, and I can’t wait to do this.

For now, a big thanks to all who have already jumped aboard my calendar’s Kickstarter bandwagon. There’s room for plenty more.

In the big picture – we’re living in amazing times. We’re each shaping the future of how science fiction, fantasy, horror, and pop culture will be consumed. I think the future of successful creatives lies in the ‘both/and’, and I think all of us as consumers will reap the benefits the more that we see this more pro artists, authors, and creatives. We see a number of authors forging successful existences in both the traditional and independent publishing worlds, and I think the most prosperous artists are each finding their own models for doing the same.

Good luck to you in the face of your own crossroads. Let’s make a world where we don’t lose quality for convenience, and a world where we expect more art, culture, possibility and diversity than the one we had yesterday.