Following up from previous links to Henry Baum's experience with the Kindle Nation (and the subsequent delisting thanks to Amazon's draconion price parity policy), Smashwords CEO Mark Coker ventures his thoughts on the impact of Amazon's enforcement of their policies. In essence, it works to Amazon's steep advantage, discouraging authors from even listing with other retailers lest said retailers drop the price below Amazon's, and works against authors' interests. Coker calls on Amazon to review their policy, but unfortunately fails to provide a reason that it would be in Amazon's interest to do so. Still an interesting read, though.

Still on Amazon, S. G. Royle has published a great guide on some of the tax and legal issues for foreign authors wanting to publish on Amazon (so many forms!), while Steve Saus examines some key factors to success in digital publishing, and another Steve from York Writers is rebutting Phillip Goldberg's article (Huffington Post) about what writers really need. Steve has some great points to make about the illusions of advances, and how they might not be such a healthy thing after all.

And on an unrelated note, some posts I enjoyed on the worldbuilding-vs-story issue that seems to crop up far too often in SF texts.

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment. It is, however, getting to the stage where it's rather silly to link posts individually, so I'm just going to link to the tag lookup result here.

I'm making fairly random decisions as I go about what to create and which way to take the world. That's part of the process, for me - just riding along, following the trail of each piece I create, being inspired by the previous ideas to build the next. That doesn't mean anything I decide is iron-cast - a better, more suitable or more interesting idea may well (and probably will) supercede it along the way. The important thing is to keep a hold of which things each decision influences, so I know that areas I need to rethink, should I change an idea.

I just discovered (well, last week, but I'd already written posts by then) a new blog called storyfix.com, maintained by one Larry Brooks. While I'll admit he pushes his 'how to write a novel' book a little too loudly for my taste, a lot of the posts I've been reading so far have been great. Two in particular on story structure present great visual aids for structuring your story. They're PDF's (and pretty large PDFs at that) but they're great visual conceptualisations of story structure, arcs, plot points and turns.

On a completely different note, Dan Wells had a great article on the inherent commercial difficulties in using dramatic, world-changing events in your story - that it means the world that readers fell in love with no longer exists, and can't (easily) be used for other tie-ins, merchandise, sequels or other fund-generating avenues.

And on a more humerous angle, Michael Stackpole has a great article about how much spammers seem to know about him, and (drumroll) there's a new Simon's Cat video out - whee! Also, love the concept behing Neil Gaiman's recent tweet: I dreamed that people from Wikipedia came round to your house to adjust reality if it differed from what they had online. Given some of the discussion pages I've read on wikipedia, my gut response is *shudder*.

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment. It is, however, getting to the stage where it's rather silly to link posts individually, so I'm just going to link to the tag lookup result here.

Let there be light

So our world is ice, with heat and safe living areas forged from volcanic tubes and tunnels. Our people live mostly underground, venturing out only during the night when the sun's gamma rays are hidden.

Outside, they'll be able to see a little by the moonlight, most of the time. And they may even borrow a few tricks from the Egyptians, using mirrors to reflect moonlight down into the tunnels. That's not much light to see by, however.

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment. It is, however, getting to the stage where it's rather silly to link posts individually, so I'm just going to link to the tag lookup result here.

A short one today, because it's now that time of semester when my brain starts melting from answering student questions and resolving staff problems.

Heat

Our ice-world is volcanic, but it's still going to be uncomfortably cold to live on. While our inhabitants can huddle near volcanic vents and lava beds, heat is still going to be scarce - fire is difficult to create on an iceworld, and wood requires venturing up to the surface anyway, so our inhabitants are either going to have to have a technological adaptation to ward off the chill, or be physically adapted to deal with it.

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment. It is, however, getting to the stage where it's rather silly to link posts individually, so I'm just going to link to the tag lookup result here.

Lay of the land

I don't know about you, but I'm rather sick of maths-y mathsness for the time being. So no more maths for the moment at least. We have an ice-cold world with a super-long year and three moons, and people are going to need to live somewhere.

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment.

The sixty-fourth day of Fentebruary

 Our slightly-larger-than-earth ice planet rotates around its deadly start once every 120 years, while its three moons - a small dark, medium red and large white - loop around once every 426, 1150 and 5840 days respectively. We have four eclipses, occuring every 1380 days (dark-red), 7008 days (dark-white), 18396 days (red-white) and 22075 days (triple eclipse). That's earth-days, by the way - 24-hour rotations. We could change the day length (planetary rotation's more or less whatever you want it to be - it's dependant on how fast things were going when the planet was formed, and tidal locking stuff, so have at it. Anything up to about 96 hours is okay- after that, the temperature fluctutation between night and day gets too extreme. Also keep in mind the faster your rotation, the more volatile your weather.) but we've already got complicated things here, let's keep it simple.

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment.

Over the moon

Our bigger-and-heavier-than-Earth planet orbits around its deadly star every 120 years. That's a looong time to wait for Christmas - almost two generations. It'd be nice if they had something else to look at in the meantime.

Satellites are important to a planet's health and not just from a spiritual or aesthetic perspective of the inhabitants. Orbiting satellites help prevent tidal locking - a planet being stuck with the same side always facing its sun, the way the moon always faces the same side to earth. A planet that's tidally locked to a sun will fry on one side and freeze on the other, becoming rapidly uninhabitable. Satellites also help protect a planet from passing comets and asteroids, by influencing the gravitational pull or even providing a physical shield (if we're lucky).

With a solar year of 120 years, I'd like to add a couple of moons in there - it'll help break up that 120 years with varying kinds of eclipses and alignments. And besides, multiple moons is a great ingredient for inventing religions and cultures.

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment.

Planetary plans

So our planet is orbiting around our super-hot, super-short-lived, super-deadly blue star once ever 120 years, far enough out that it's largely made of ice. Or it would be, assuming there's water. There doesn't have to be. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

How big is this planet? What's the gravity like? Do we have huge creatures loping gracefully through a moon-like bound, or short, squalid inhabitants hugging the surface? Are there metals? How thick is the atmosphere?

Some of these are going to be decided for us by the fact that we're orbiting a blue star. Blue star radiation isn't just deadly to DNA, it also breaks molecular bonds in a process called photodissociation - blue stars steal your planet's free oxygen from its upper atmosphere. Without free oxygen, there's no life-as-we-know-it, no fire or civilised technology. So we're going to have to do something about that.

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment.

Starting with stars

I like blue stars, they're problematic. They're too hot, too big, too short-lived, and emit so much deadly-to-DNA UV radiation that they make the Australian hole in the ozone layer look like a giant lead umbrella. Problems are good - they force you to be creative with your solutions, give you opportunities for inventiveness and originality. Problems are the antidote to lazy worldbuilding.

Blue stars only live a few billion years - no where near enough time to get an intelligent life form off the ground. Consider that our planet's about four billion years old, and homo sapiens only started appearing, at the earliest, four hundred thousand years ago, it means anything smart enough to think about the sun in their sky isn't going to have the chance to do so for long. Even your longest-lived blue star will be threatening to go nova when your native species have just begun metaphorically crawling. Which means either we'll have a native species with a really big problem, or a some settlers for whom such a star was either ideal, or the best they could get. All three of those sound promising as starting points.

I wrote a while ago about breaking your own rules, where the audience isn't given the expectation for some crucial elements of your world or story. Here, however, I'm talking about an altogether sillier version - breaking rules that you have specifically enunciated to the reader.

Inspired once again by Doctor Who - the second half of the Weeping Angels. Amy, for retcon-reasons we won't go into, has to keep her eyes shut and navigate a forest with Angels in it. Angels are a perculiar kind of alien that, as explained by Ten in Blink, don't exist when they're being observed - as soon as they're seen by any living thing, they turn to stone. When Amy inevitably encounters the Angels, she has to 'walk as if she can see', to fool the Angels into thinking she can see them, so they won't kill her. When she (of course) gives her blindness away, the Angels attack.

It's happened to everyone. You're writing along, chest-deep in the groove of the story, barrelling forward, and in walks a character you've not seen since the start of the previous novel. Everyone turns to look at them, and - wait, what did they look like, again? Did they have a weird speech mannerism? Do they like sushi?

What do you do? Stop everything and trawl through your work, looking for previous references? Skip over this bit with big FILL THIS IN LATER notes? Wing it and promise yourself you'll check it later (hah)? Whatever you do, your stride is now broken, the engine of story that was driving you along now sputtering and flicking on its fuel light.

And it's entirely avoidable.

Not at all inspired by Moffat's new and improved Weeping Angels on Doctor Who last night, of course (I know it's magic pretending to be science, but is it too much to ask for a little narrative consistency?)

Retcons - "retroactive continuity" - are rife in television and film, where continuity takes second, third, or fourth place to the whims and wishes of the director, the execs, the screenwriter or even the marketing department. In novels it's rarer, but not unheard of (J.K's wand lore in Deathly Hallows, anyone?).  A retcon is a usually-game-changing factoid that, when introduced in a later story makes a previous story no longer sensible. Take the wand lore example - as there are already a half-million copies of this argument on the internet - in early books, the wand chooses the wizard, and wands don't work as well for wizards who aren't their masters. In book seven, a wand changes allegiances away from a disarmed master. Which means, as everyone goes through duelling practice at school, pretty much nobody's wand works properly anymore as a matter of course, and there's no way of knowing who the real master of anyone's wand is. And what happens if you defeat a wizard whose wand already thinks it's somebody else's anyway? Erk.

 

It's often been quoted that the main difference between us and [insert monstrous invader of your choice] is that we bury our dead. It is, for some reason, something that we identify as a key factor of being human - that we have a ritual to honour and mark the passage of our friends and kin.

Animals don't bury their dead - with the exception perhaps of elephants, few animals die in such a peaceful fashion as to allow it. Usually, nature takes care of the basic process, and the dead are someone else's lunch. If you're being hunted by lions as a matter of course, it makes little sense to risk your whole herd in order to perform a ritual for a member who's no longer there. 

It's a recognised luxury, however - whenever the dead start to outnumber those who are left to bury them, rituals tend to go out the window. Consider the mass graves during the plagues (and that was at a time when the law decreed the dead had to be dealt with for the survival of everyone else). Any horror movie or video game will show you - dead left where they lay signifies total social panic - a regression back into our animal values - survivalist rather than social. 

What your society does with its dead speaks volumes. Their mythology and religion is laid bare by the basic rituals (or lack thereof) that mark important life moments - birth, death, marriage or mating, entering adulthood.

 

Picked this up a while ago as an Australian fantasy debut:

Can healing defeat the sword? In seasons long past, twin gold-eyed princes sundered a kingdom. Rejecting his twin brother's warrior ways, Kasheron established a community deep in the southern forests. Forgotten by the outside world and protected by the trackless trees of Allogrenia, Kasheron's Tremen community has flourished, with his legacy of peace and healing upheld generations on. But now the forest has been breached by hostile intruders ... Fighting and bloodshed follow, testing even the skills of Kira, the greatest of all Tremen Healers. As well as sharing Kasheron's gift for healing, Kira has inherited his golden eyes and inspirational qualities - she, too, is seen as a leader amongst her people. As the attacks upon the Tremen become more violent, Kira is faced with a terrible dilemma. Should she stay and risk the annihilation of her community, or set out on a perilous journey north to seek aid from their long-lost warrior kin?

 

 

Religion is always a delicate topic. It's unfortunate that in most novels, it's treated with a very heavy-handed approach. Religion in speculative fiction seems to fall into one of: thinly-disguised Christianity, flat-out corrupt and evil, Gaia-worship, or non-existent.

Which is a shame - because religion will tell you so many things about a society's values and the context of a character. It's an area rich with potential for developing interesting philosophies and concepts. And creating a religion isn't that difficult (hello, Hubbard.) - it's just a matter of looking at how things interconnect.

It's no secret that an overwhelming majority of western fantasy is Euro-centric, stealing creatures, worlds and plots wholesale from old Celtic lore, with the occasional dash of Greek or Roman for flavour. Leaving aside for the moment the rampant borrowing of feudal systems and monarchies, why do so few authors bother to go beyond simple cut-and-paste when it comes to their mythology - especially when said mythology is set within an entirely difference world? There seems to be some kind of romance with Celtic mythology, especially. But it leaves your reader in an odd position: you're linking their world experience (the Celtic fey, of which almost everyone has some experience - Banshees, tricksy fairies and the like) with the otherwise-entirely-unrelated world of your novel. The reader is unsure how much of that experience can be relied upon - often, they'll just dump their whole hazy recollection of the myths into your world, and read on with that mirky not-quite-imagined feeling permeating the whole mythos.

Or, if you luck out on a particularly educated or mythology-enthusiast, they'll sit there picking apart all the places where you deviate from the standard mythology as examples of you failing to do your research. Honestly, why not just create your own?

 

This is the last instalment of How Not To Write A Novel ; a review (of sorts) of a book that shall remain Nameless, broken down into all the things it did that you Really Shouldn't Do. Parts one through six are listed here.

One of the first things intrepid writers discover when penning dialogue is that when you dutifully copy down what people actually say, it's absolute rubbish. Dull, repetitive, banal and pointless, people spout utter gibberish that only makes sense because you're actually there, and you're filling in the blanks with what you know the conversation is about. Real people don't talk like they do in books. 

When building a solar system, or even just a planet, the star(s) it revolves around is one of the most crucial aspects. The star affects the planet's atmosphere and life-supporting capabilities, temperature, year length, climate, life expectancy, mineral composition, evolutionary trends, and a host of other, smaller aspects. 

I'm not going to give you numbers and maths - it would take far too long to explain, and it's usually not strictly necessary. If you want the maths, I recommend World Building by Stephen L Gillet. At some point I'll dig out and share the tiny program I made to calculate these things for me, so I didn't have to. The important thing to remember when creating stars (and indeed any aspect of worldbuilding) is: everything is interlinked. Changing one thing will ripple changes through the whole design. This is clearly demonstrated by star-building:

This is a review (of sorts) of a book that shall remain Nameless, broken down into all the things it did that you Really Shouldn't Do. Part one and two are here and here.

Foreshadowing is a subtle creature. Handled poorly, it can telegraph your plot points for miles, or leave your reader utterly bewildered as they wonder where the galactic spaceship fits in 18th Century England. It's an area where the author really needs a second pair of eyes to skim the text and point out what was too obvious, too obscure, or just downright silly.