The New Meta Edda

Confession time. I didn’t read a lot of science fiction growing up. I was a horror geek through and through. Barker, Koontz, King, Rice, McCammon, other books I remember by authors I don’t; I swilled them all down like a gore addict on day three of a two-week bender, voraciously and unstoppably. After I’d read everything by King twice, I branched out into other genres, mainstream and classic literature like Watership Down and everything by Orwell, as well as fantasy, like Tolkien, The Mists of Avalon, A Wizard of Earthsea, everything by Tom Robbins, and numerous others. (My one regret, actually, is that I’ve never read The Dragonriders of Pern. Anyone have a copy they could lend me?) I even went on a Louis L’Amour kick for about a year.

But science fiction itself remained an unturned stone. My favorite movies were all sci-fi based, Terminator, Aliens (ET and The Black Hole before that), but even most of those later childhood favorites had a horror subtheme. So what in the world made me write a space-opera action story for my first full-length published novel, then a full trilogy?

Let me digress for a second before answering that. I’m going to share something about authors that many of us would probably hesitate before admitting publicly, for fear of being locked into the loony bin. We are all possessed. Or maybe you’d call it schizophrenia. The fact is, we are 100 percent inhabited by legions of other people. And they control us to greater and lesser degrees. For me, that possession came in the form of my trilogy’s main character, a Corps-deserter and tougher-than-titanium anti-hero Aly Erikson. To make a long story short, I was out on a run through the Oregon rain one day, and she popped into my head nearly fully formed on a very intense flight from danger of her own aboard a space station in the Algol triple-star system. It was December 2005, and this character was born. Her story was as real in my head as my own life story, and I had to tell it. Hence, science fiction.

In my mind, she is one part Carolyn Fry from Pitch Black, one part Dizzy from the 1997 film adaptation of Starship Troopers, and the rest of her comprises numerous positive and, yes, negative characteristics derived from the heroes from all my favorite books and movies. And after writing her story through three books and one novella (accidentally—I never intended her to span so many words), I think I may be done with her for a while. She had a good ride; she grew, experienced much, and lived through a lot more than she had any right to, and I don’t think she has much story left to tell in her current iteration.

So what’s next? Based on the subjects of my youth, I should be ready to wander the halls of horror, one would think. Strangely, though, that isn’t where my mind is veering these days. In fact, sometime during the writing of Contract of Defiance, I became enthralled by a story from Outside Magazine of a coyote hunting and killing a woman hiking through a park in Nova Scotia, behavior that for this particular animal is completely unheard of. And because, like most writers, bizarre tragedies tend to make my mind spin on surprising new ideas, this unlikely news story spun my brain toward the concoction of a new tale that spanned everything from the cultures of Vikings and Inuits, to ancient history and present times, to Greenland and Wisconsin, to B.A.S.E jumping and academia, to domestic violence and the loyalty of best friends. I spent months researching different facets of the story overtaking my thoughts and wrote several thousand words. Then…it died. The story simply languished as a new book in the Spectras Arise trilogy started to take shape, and I put it aside. When I dusted it off with all intent of resurrecting it, the whole concept had lost its luster. It was not a story I wanted to tell anymore.

But all was not lost (and can never be—if ideas were money, every writer would be captaining her or his own privately financed starship to the moon for a holiday) and the initial characters and bones of that old story squished like Play-Doh into something new. Something that still involves Vikings, but is now dense fantasy with a heavy dose of science fiction. Science fantasy fusion, anyone? Though I’m still in the early stages of writing and development, this new story is an ever-present mouth-breather that I can’t ignore for a second, and I can’t wait to write it!

In a well-timed happenstance, science fiction writer Dylan Hearn invited me to do this fun thing called the 7-7-7 challenge, where you go to the seventh page of your work-in-progress, go down to line seven, then publish the next seven lines. This new novel of mine is as yet untitled and so far from finished that these lines will hardly be the same when it is, but here goes:

If one were to hold a kaleidoscope to their eye and peer through it past reality’s veil to the place where the carnival-colored bits and baubles suspended within become part of the Great Cosmos, they might discover one very unique new reality. The one called Heartovingia. It is a circular belt comprised of a seemingly desolate amalgam of rocks, metals, and ice spinning eternally around the watery, storm-tossed planet called Vann. The light from this asteroid field’s star would be diffuse, bouncing weakly from the multi-elemental belt of particles and giving it a reddish cast, like that of a heart. A heart whose center is chaos and cold sea.

Looking deeper into the kaleidoscope, one would notice that these long-turning stones are not as desolate as one might have thought. In fact, many of these spaceborne satellites appear to be quite large and are encircled by glasslike domes.

As you can see so far, it has a great deal more epic-ocity than my first-person-told trilogy. We’ll see how it goes. You’re welcome and invited to stay tuned and enjoy the lunatic rantings of its progress as my brainmeats suffer through new-series growing pains. And now it’s your turn, all my writer friends. Take the 7-7-7 challenge for yourself and link back here so we can read what you’re up to. Because after all, crazy loves company!

Also, for sci-fi and intrigue fans, be sure to check out Dylan’s new release coming out November 28. Absent Souls (The Transcendence Trilogy: Book 2).

Speculative Fiction and the Curse of Internal Consistency

WARNING: Prepare for a long, rambly post on writing that doesn’t really have a point but to wring out recent writing experiences from my saturated brainmeats.

Building worlds is a job that once fell firmly in the laps of beings like Brahma, Mbombo, Ranginui and Papatuanuku, or even planetary deities, like that scene in Firefly where Saffron explains to Wash the myth of Earth that Was, i.e., the gods and goddesses of the myriad different creator myths of the world. In truth, myths are nothing but best-selling stories with a very long shelf life, right? (So, by extension, since writers are world builders, does that make us gods? Just curious…)

Thanks to their highly active imaginations and the luck of being born or indoctrinated into priest class cultural roles, the original storytellers who dreamt up these fantastical and entertaining origination myths were pretty much free to think big and go long. Granted, the lighting was poorer in those days, which made penning intricate tales late into the night a sure recipe for myopia, and a general lack of hygiene predating written books would have made the oral tradition of storytelling a bit less enjoyable to listeners, but storytellers, being a tenacious and overly wordy bunch, would rarely let much short of death stop them. One thing that is universally true of word nerds is that we all suffer from the same incurable verbarianism.

Yet I can’t help but reflect on the experiences of these storytellers and wonder if they confronted the same issue that I am currently butting my head against. That of building, or creating the myth of, a new world and keeping the facts straight in the process. Nothing sucks more during the writing phase as plunging facefirst into the pestilent seas of incongruences and misremembered facts, where details begin to slither around each other and create a soul-sucking quagmire of internal inconsistencies. We all know that feeling of writing happily along and then BAM! Stopped dead in our tracks when we discover “If this is this way, then that can’t be that way, because, well, physics for one, and…" Rewriting before one is even halfway through takes a lot of the fun out of noveling. It's like turning back after mile 13 of a marathon because you aren't happy with your split times. I think the lesson from most great novelists would be: Don't do that.

Early myth makers had a luxury that those of us who publish books in modern times, which can't be recollected from our readers (and wiped from their memories), didn’t, and that was the ability to change the facts of their stories on the fly when someone pointed out a contradiction. Or, as happens so often in long-lived mythologies, the facts are left to remain contradictory, but the story is shored up by minions of supporters fabricating inarguable arguments like “We must have faith. God works in mysterious ways,” which are supposed to somehow imply that there is no inconsistency, it is simply that our limited human mental and spiritual capacities can’t possibly grok the real truth.

But again, that is a luxury the modern storyteller doesn’t have, and won’t have until we too reach the level of transcendentalism that codifies us as deities in our own right. Walter F. Miller’s 1960 novel A Canticle for Leibowitz explores this theme in a sublime way. Not so much the deification of your average human, but the way in which something relatively inconsequential can become a holy relic through the passage of time because of nothing more than the simple and limited ability of humanity to sustain specific comprehension over epochs. If you haven't read it, the time is now. But I digress.

Early myth makers and their creation stories in a way are a parable for the modern storyteller and our job of creating self-sustaining and internally consistent worlds. Where they’ve had centuries to “get it right,” or at least for fans of their stories to redefine and rewrite problematic points, we, as write-publish-repeat storytellers, only get one shot. It’s a big job to create a workable and believable world, and we don’t even get the satisfaction of knowing someone somewhere may erect a giant statue or church in honor of our books and characters. We are so unloved.

Still, we persevere, because getting it right is more important than getting it done. Right? Right? Which makes it seem as if weare overly analytical, anal retentive organization junkies, and also not really committed to finishing our WIP. But that’s a balance each of us must strike on our own, the balance of knowing when it’s time to stop outlining and noodling to ourselves over various aspects of the work, and when it’s time to start doing the actual writing.

I know I used to shy away from writing even a single scene for fear that it would end up having no place in the final plot. But that’s a baseless fear. Any writing, good or bad, is meaningful writing because you are training your brain for whatever specific story you’re working on, allowing a cerebral exploration just as effective and important as the pre-writing preparation you’ve already spent however many days, weeks, or possibly years, doing. The real danger is not in having to rewrite, but in not having ever reached that point where you start writing. If all one ever does is ponder their stories, it’s just mental masturbation with very little satisfaction.

Maybe I’ll take all those scenes from all those books I’ve written and have had to cut, smush them together into something like an apocrypha, entomb them in a time capsule with a bunch of pretty baubles and important-looking documents, and leave them for the future. Who knows, someday even they could become the genesis of some new myth-based spiritual woo-woo sect, though I really feel for anyone who might get caught up in it. That would be some disturbingly crazy shit. I guess the lesson here, and the thing I’ve been talking myself into, is don’t let yourself get caught too much up in the endless intricacies of worldbuilding before you start writing (unless your name starts with a J and ends with Tolkien). Both are essential to a cohesive and finished novel, but giving yourself the indulgence of doing both simultaneously will get you from masturbation to publication faster than not. What do you all think?

Incidentally, some of my favorite novels that explore myths of creation and deities include Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys, and K. Scott Lewis’s When Dragons Die series.