Morally gray heros?

One of my readers told me he thought the villain of Tendrils to the Moon was the good guy until he was almost through with the book. That confusion was not my intention, but I can see why it happened:

• Tendrils has two lead characters, and neither consistently exhibits villainous or heroic behavior. (Tropes would have served me well here, to communicate to the reader how to feel about the characters.)
• During the drafting phase, I understood who the villain was long before I settled on a character for the hero. The tortured choices the villain makes drive the conflict. This resulted in the villain having a stronger presence until well into the second act.

Theoretically the story is a corruption arc for the villian and a redemption arc for the hero, and they're pushed into conflict by the villain's choices. I could have executed the latter a lot better, because it's not clear what Col. Montgomery Ames (U.S. Air Force–retired) needs redemption from, if anything. Writing that book was a learning experience, but I'm glad people who've read it enjoyed it, even if I do rank my second book higher.

The occasion for this is Yakov Merkin's post about the disconcerting trend of morally gray heros in fiction. Here's a highlight:

What’s important is seeing the hero we like face down these challenges, come to the edge of falling to them, but then finding a way to get through. The hero refuses to betray his friends even under intense pressure. The hero refuses to let himself return to being a merciless conqueror when the opportunity presents itself. Consciously deciding to stay a hero. Physical threats don’t give you that sort of opportunity, most of the time.

And before anyone gets the wrong idea, I’m not saying a hero needs to be a literal boy scout. Batman’s policy of never killing his many murderous foes is idiotic and not heroic. There are times when a truly good hero must take harsh action against evil in order to protect the innocent. Don’t mistake that for a falling into darkness.

The moral-graying of heros is a symptom of naturalist and deconstructionist movements to eschew artistic representations of the ideal. In the real world people are complex and do good or bad for a million different reasons. You're drawn to the villain because he's not simply evil; he got to be this way. You often hear how interesting a villain is, like Killmonger in Black Panther. The audience expects there's a reason this person turned bad. (This is so prevalent, it's now considered subversive to have the villain just be the villain.)

The flip side of that is the audience's assumption that all people start out good, or at least okay. Thus the hero's backstory doesn't have as much juice as the villain's. To give the hero's role weight to at least counter the villain's presence in the story, the writer morally shades the hero.

The problem with that? Moral shading diminishes the most powerful emotion an audience can feel: catharsis; the triumph of good over evil. Look at what Zack Snyder tried to do with Superman, perhaps the most idealized hero in American culture. Snyder transplanted him into a darkly shaded setting and narrative. The result? Superman doesn't feel like a hero.

What we can learn from Snyder's failure is you can't have your cake and eat it too. Some characters, like classic heros and villains, can't be moral-grayed without creating dissonance in the audience. If we want better heros, we're going to have to cut down on the moral-graying.

Side bar: I'm no Batman aficionado, but the no-kill principle is indeed idiotic. And I thought the tongue-in-cheek "I won't kill you, but I don't have to save you" line in Batman Begins acknowledged it as such, until the sequel showed Batman refusing to kill the Joker while the Joker was on a murder spree. Why are we even fighting if we're morally opposed to killing the bad guy in defense of innocents?

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like science fiction, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

Managing the flow of information

One of the reasons I hated Tenet, the movie that flopped last summer at the height of the epidemic and failed to save old Hollywood, was the obscurity of its action. Some of this could have been fixed with better acting, editing, sound mixing, and musical scoring. But most of it owes to the central conceit of the movie, that people and things can pass through a portal and invert their passage through time.

The Protagonist: "The cause comes before effect."

Laura: "No. That's just the way we see time."

Leave it to Christopher Nolan to make a $200 million action movie that reverses the order of cause and effect. The result is action that's impossible to understand, a muddle that doesn't make sense until it ends—or starts, whatever.

I've thought about that movie and what I can learn from it a lot since last summer. These big-budget blockbusters have no equal in terms of production value, but their scripts, whether written by committee or by one man, consistently fall short. Tenet doesn't work because of the fatal flaw of reverse chronology. Nolan's so devoted to the concept he withholds information until after you needed it. The action, instead of thrilling, is confounding like a Rubik's cube and similarly lacking in kinetic energy.

That's not to say I don't make these kinds of mistakes. A writing skill I've yet to master is managing the flow of information to the reader. That's giving the reader what he needs before he needs it. No more, no less. It sounds simple, but you can get really mixed up writing a scene with just two people, each one trying to deceive the other. I was working on a book years ago, which I never finished, that had a scene just like that. I must have written 10 versions of that scene. I couldn't keep straight what the two men knew, what they were pretending to know, and what they didn't know.

My go-to tactic to manage the flow of information is to hide it from the POV character. This can be achieved through simple ignorance or deception by other characters. That necessitates a reason for the POV character's ignorance, such as he's new in town, or young and naive. In the case of deception—well, people lie for all kinds of reasons. If you can link that reason to a unique facet of the setting, you're doing well.

The Martian by Mike Weir is many things. What I admire about it is the amount of information Mike Weir includes without being boring. The choices he made for the main character's personality, the narrative structure, and all the screw-ups and surprises facilitated the exposition. That information was essential to the book's plot and tone, which created a vicarious feeling of working side-by-side with NASA engineers on a high-stakes space mission.

It's wild thinking about the general lack of information in the pre-Internet era. Remember when you had to look things up in an encyclopedia? Now I can find the answer to any question that pops into my head in seconds. That we can instantly satisfy our curiosity about any topic under the Sun caps our imaginations a bit. When Michael Crichton wrote Timeline, he counted on the fact that you couldn't see through his quantum deception without doctarate-level research. If he wrote that today, would he take the same risk with the facts, knowing we could fact-check him on the spot? If not, we would have been deprived of what I regard as his best book.

With so much information at hand, it takes as much time to discern what's important as it does to discern what's true. The book I'm writing now has stonemasonry in it. I know nothing about stonemasonry, but the Internet knows everything. I don't have time to become conversant in stonemasonry or a hundred other topics my book touches on. I don't want to regurgitate every fact about stonemasonry to show the reader the stonemasons in my book are the real deal, either. What a writer does is show the basic knowledge of what's necessary for the scene to unfold—to know what's important—and discard the rest.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like science fiction, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

Hobbit sex

A Twitter mutual brought to my attention a 1958 essay by Murray Rothbard about naturalism, or realism, in modern literature. It's one of the most succinct and pertinent articles written about its subject matter that I've read, right up there with C S Lewis's The Abolition of Man.

But first, a quote from George R R Martin, to give fuller context to Rothbard's observation.

Martin's stock and trade is "humanizing" his characters by shining a light on their most intimate, often illicit, activities. Tolkien, a devout Catholic, leaves it to our imaginations what hobbits do in the bedroom. I wouldn't categorize the writing style as asexual or celibate, but rather chaste in the sense that sex is best undertaken within the frame of conjugal love as part of God's created order.

In answer to Martin's challenge, I find it almost too easy to imagine hobbits falling in love, getting married, and having lots of baby hobbits. They're farmers, and farmers get it on more than any other profession.

But let's get back to this preoccupation with representing sex in detail in fiction. It's indicative of a certain type of writing that leaves no privacy to the characters or to the reader, that relies on carnal impropriety to pivot the story this way or that. It's been known a long time that man is fallen and, left to his own devices, perverts God's order. Why then has this writing style become more popular since Tolkien's heyday?

Rothbard writes (click to enlarge):

By employing this rationale, the GRRMs of the world absolve themselves of responsibility for the contents of their books. "Are people, especially those in power, not depraved?" they argue. "If so, you have no reason to object. I'm just writing to reflect reality."

Not so fast. One of the most underrated responsibilities of the writer is to choose what to put in and what to leave out of his book. Chekhov's gun dictates that every story element should contribute something to the story. If you fail to discriminate what goes in your book on large scale, everything will come out looking muddy and meaningless.

For the sake of argument, let's say Middle-Earth appeared to Tolkien's imagination fully formed, hobbit sex and all. He left that part out, preserving the characters' nobility in a tale of epic moral scope. As difficult it is for Martin to imagine hobbits having sex, can you imagine how absurd it would be to read about how Sam ravaged Rosy Cotton after years of pent-up longing?

Those who have waited to be inspired to write a book know that's not how it works. The writer creates what goes on the page. It's hard enough work to not take credit, whether the audience loves or hates it.

Rothbard continues:

The fact of the matter is Martin writes about sex because he wants to write about sex, and he'd rather you not treat him like a guy who likes to write about sex. So he employs a red herring, detracting from Tolkien because the latter, to his credit, didn't write about sex.

I suspect the reason we have more popular writers like Martin and fewer popular writers like Tolkien today is because atheists and secularists subverted the art landscape and reshaped readers' expectations. There's no time like the present to reverse that trend. I encourage you to patronize indie creators listed or otherwise engage their work, as they have engaged mine.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like science fiction, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

Time skips

In both of my books, the part of the story I had the most trouble executing was the time skip. They were challenging because I had set up tension and couldn't resolve it until certain conditions some distance in the timeline were met. This was the result of me not really knowing what I was doing and/or being a poor outliner. Regardless, winding up my characters and leaving them in the lurch did not sit well with me, and I felt like I couldn't just cut to the resolution without giving readers narrative whiplash.

For Tendrils to the Moon, I tried to mitigate the problem with filler content, showing the colonists' progress in building a communal lunar habitat. The downside is you can cut many of the scenes from chapters 8 and 9 and you wouldn't hurt continuity.

I handled the problem better with Seeds of Calamity, employing pharmaceuticals as a plot device to make time whip past for the hero. This also involved some structural reworking of the second act that set me back over a month. I have no regrets, though, because it paid off. Despite a huge 5-week gap bookended by events that span mere days, the story doesn't slow down at all.

David V Stewart used a time dilation device in The Water of Awakening, where the heroine enters a sort of magical realm where time outside passes very quickly. This allows for the people and places she encountered on her journey to be quite advanced in their respective conflicts as she's headed home. Time dilation is also used to great effect in Interstellar, where the hero's proximity to a black hole creates a situation where he and his kids are practically the same age. The scene where he watches them grow up in a series of video diaries is a tearjerker.

I recently finished reading Seveneves, which involves a whopping 5,000-year time skip. I liked this book a lot, but this time skip I believe is impossible to pull off. None of the characters or plot tension carry over from the book's first two acts. There are strong narrative connections to what happened before, but they serve less the story than Neal Stephenson's worldbuilding exercise. There's a bagful of kernels of a whole 'nother book in that third act, which is a shame because it would have made a terrific duology, with the first two acts standing on their own. Putting it all in one book may have been a business decision, not an artistic one.

Good time skip execution synchronizes with the human experience and focuses on what stands out from characters' routines. The difference between any given hour or month is arbitrary, but days, weeks, and years have an inherent structure. A day in the field looks different than a day at the office. A week in the mountains looks different than a week at home. A year in Okinawa looks different than a year stateside. If a plot has enough interesting beats, it'll condense the mundane, and the reader won't even notice the stretches where nothing's happening.

Among the many things the Harry Potter books do really well, this is one of them. Can you imagine what those books would look like if JK Rowling hadn't skipped over days, weeks, or sometimes months in the course of a year at Hogwarts? It would have bored children to tears.

In a fictional space setting, which I've used twice now, you can throw out most human experience of time. It does not apply. Outlining may be more important to pace out the building of tension because the environment imposes an entirely different set of constraints.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like sci-fi, check out Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

A lack of imagination

I usually bristle at blowback against writing advice, because the blowback often comes from people the advice isn't meant for. But one piece of writing advice that really is bad is "Write what you know." On its face this advice precludes most genre fiction. For that reason it can be safely ignored.

Writing requires imagination, a mind that ventures outside the known. If I wrote what I knew, there'd be little variety in my writing. My stories would be stale and predictable. So with every story I've written, I've reached beyond my limited frame and learned something. Mostly technology and occupational stuff, but also character types who aren't like me—especially people not ethically like me. To keep it fresh, I have to be able to write more than one type of good guy and more than one type of bad guy.

F Scott Fitzgerald said intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time. I say that's more a necessity of imagination than intelligence. The writer creates drama and tension by bringing characters who believe in what they're doing into conflict. Neither one of them has to be right by the writer's personal standards, but they should think and act as if they are.

There is a stunning lack of imagination in "mainstream" science fiction and fantasy today. It shows in the puritanical and Pharisaical attacks from today's celebrated writers and publishers on dead writers and dead editors who built the market for the former to sell books to. Today's supposed standard bearers cut off their literary ancestors because of their transgressions against the idols of the present age.

Modern sci-fi/fantasy writers seem really intent on just hating on the people that paved the way.

— Vik and Me (@ViktorGorchev) February 28, 2020

Can such narrow-minded, reactionary writers faithfully explore the range of human experience that connects with the broadest possible audience? Can they characterize a patriotic soldier, religious disciple, or Brexit voter without inserting their contempt? Or, will they "write what they know," effectively cutting their readership by 80% before the book goes to print?

I don't pretend I don't have a point of view, but I'm humble (and hungry) enough to know my point of view shouldn't be the only flavor in my writing. It would bore you. It would bore me as well.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like hard sci-fi that's neither didactic or boring, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

Is worldbuilding like an iceberg?

NK Jemisin, Brandon Sanderson, and YouTuber The Closer Look all liken worldbuilding to an iceberg. The tip of the iceberg you could call the "here and now" story elements: places, characters, motivations, tension, plot: the things that propel the story and hold the reader's attention. The bigger underwater part is history, backstories, metaphysics, religions, cultures (HBMRC). Without these things, the here and now story elements wouldn't fit together⁠—not well, at least. That's the craft of worldbuilding.

The metaphor is appealing, but is it true? To what extent is "invisible" worldbuilding truly invisible?

I've written before how it's wise to leave details up to readers' imagination. Give too much detail, and you run the same risk as movie adaptations: depicting a setting or character differently than how the reader imagined it. Describing a character as handsome allows the reader to picture whatever he wants depending on his tastes; describing the character's features in detail⁠ to the exclusion of others would limit the effect of that attribute. Plus, as a general rule you should err on the side of brevity.

HBMRC gainsays this principle. The reader may think it's there under the surface, holding up the tip of the iceberg, but it's really not. It's not anything until the writer breathes it into existence with words on the page.

Sure, if you take a snapshot of a conflict, it will be stripped of most subtlety and subtext. You'll see the the tip of the iceberg, from whose detail you can only hope to infer what holds it upright. But stories are not snapshots. Exposition can interrupt at any moment to clue the reader in as to why and how the here and now came to be. It's not so much invisible as handled deftly since it's not as pressing as the here and now.

Some examples:

• The Battle of Gettysburg lasted 3 days, but you can go back months to trace the causes of the battle, and decades to trace the causes of the Civil War. To tell the story of that battle to someone who never heard of it, you wouldn't leave all that out, but you wouldn't give it proportional time either.
• The Abyss is a great story. It takes place over a handful of days, but Orson Scott Card's novelization goes years into the past to explore the main characters' backstories. Although the movie couldn't devote that time because it's a different medium, you can still understand the characters and their primary traits through their actions. The B plot tension derives from Bud and Lindsey's failed marriage, and the movie makes a point of reminding you of this early and often.
• Inception has a very complex setup. The technology of shared dreaming has to be explained, and Cobb's, Sato's, and Fischer's backstories have to be explained for the movie to make any sense. That's why the main job doesn't begin until almost an hour into the movie. The worldbuilding isn't hidden. The filmmakers put it front and center because without it you'd be lost.

In conclusion, I don't believe the iceberg metaphor best describes the reader's experience of worldbuilding. The anticipation of HBMRC can sustain for a time, but not to the end of the story. The writer eventually must support the tip of the iceberg with specifics that are inherently visible to the reader. The method of worldbuilding, like writing anything else, is a matter of craft.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like hard sci-fi, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

Realism and the quest for meaning

At its best, worldbuilding not only offers an escape to the audience. It enhances the verisimilitude of a story. However novel the setting, if its rules are internally consistent and logical, and the setting-bound characters have understandable motives, the reader will connect.

The idea of fully immersing the reader in the setting is seductive. What quicker way to learn, or what better way to make them feel as the characters do? It may seem intuitive that the more realistically the setting is presented, the more verisimilitude the story has, but that is often not the case. Realism flattens the space the writer works in, disallowing narrative concepts that inform the reader how they should feel about the characters and where the story is going. This can actually leave the reader confused and with a cold, empty feeling.

From the realism Wikipedia page:

Realism as a literary movement was based on "objective reality." It focused on showing everyday activities and life, primarily among the middle or lower class society, without romantic idealization or dramatization. It may be regarded as the general attempt to depict subjects as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation and "in accordance with secular, empirical rules."

You've probably heard of Chekhov's gun. It's the dramatic principle that if you take the effort to show the audience something, it should come into play later. A gun is the most striking example of this, but it could be anything. Cranky Uncle Bill has a prosthetic leg. The question leaps to our mind: Why? Such a detail must be included for a reason. That reason is the payoff. The prosthetic leg is the setup.

Realism disdains this principle. If something is there, it's there whether it comes up again or not.

This extends to all story elements, not just setting. Real people are textured and exhibit the full range of emotion. They do not fit into the molds of heroes and villains. The realist approach calls that "simplification." Thus, for the sake realism, character archetypes are done away with. There is no black and white, but endless shades of gray.

The same goes for plot. What did you do today? You may have started a book, cleaned out the garage, taken the kids for a play date, or prepared a big family meal. But so many other things happened that don't align with personal narratives. You watched TV, slept, ate, went potty. These mundane activities, interchangeable day to day, have no bearing on plot. But, if a depiction of reality is the foremost goal, who are you to leave it out?

This cuts the writer's job in half. Normally a writer creates the fictional world of the story and selectively depicts it in service to the story. Under realism, the writer gives you everything without discernment. You might call this vain and lazy, and I wouldn't disagree.

Realism has its place, especially in literary and period fiction. Elsewhere, though, it has a tendency to demoralize the reader. People approach stories with a variety of wants and desires. Perhaps first among them, on the meta level, is the quest for meaning. What is a story but to give meaning? I'm not talking about the meaning of life, just something to care about, like the success of a startup or the outcome of a battle. Realism denies this want by obscuring meaning in the people and events it depicts in copious but profane detail. So the reader's left feeling cold and empty.

For further reading on this subject, I recommend Rawle Nyanzi's blog post, "Indoctrinated Into Realism."

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like hard sci-fi and a quest for meaning, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

A word is worth a thousand pictures

While readers form varying degrees of attachment to setting, characters, and plot, from a writer's perspective it's setting that makes the plot and characters possible. In science fiction and fantasy, we call this worldbuilding.

In a misguided effort to "show, don't tell," novice writers risk killing the setting by describing it to death. The hero walks over a hill and is presented with a vista no one has ever seen before. What follows are several block paragraphs amounting to set design notes for the Hollywood adaptation that'll never be made. You can practically hear the whir of the camera as it pans left to right.

I get it because I've been there. My natural state is to communicate my unique vision in all its glorious detail. It's why I started writing in the first place.

There are two problems with this. One, it limits the reader's imagination. If you say castle, it conjures a different image in everyone's mind. But if you say an imposing gray castle with a 15-foot moat, stone towers thrusting into the cloudless sky and flying the lord's coat of arms, a horse stable, a chapel, 46 liveried servants, and a roaring fire at one end of the banquet hall, you have conditioned the reader to rely on you to tell him everything that was otherwise implied.

Now, there's nothing wrong with those details. Some of them may serve a purpose. But if they don't serve a purpose, they're just more words the reader has to muddle through to get to the point. This brings me to a good general rule about detail. Books are not a visual medium, so don't focus on how something looks. Focus on what it is, on what it does.

Two, and I credit my editor with this: The more you explain something, the less it makes sense. Unless you are a wizard like Tolkien, make broad brush strokes except as needed. Every detail and nuance you introduce that doesn't impact the story has the potential to confuse the reader and break the worldbuilding.

I've been rereading Dune to analyze how it so effectively connects with readers. A big part of this effectiveness is the worldbuilding, which has no rival except in Tolkien's Middle-Earth. So how did the master, Frank Herbert, craft the world of Dune?

He started with a lot of expositional dialogue. He couched it in the tensions of a royal family being ordered to a new fief, something even a child can understand. The Baron Harkonnen's scheming and Paul's sparring session with Gurney Halleck serve the tension well. The exposition also comes via Paul's questioning of his identity, jumpstarted by the famous gom jabbar scene. The exposition never comes all at once, but in pieces, with the important pieces often repeated for emphasis.

When it came to the setting of Arrakis and literal world building, Herbert focused on relevant details. For example, Fremen have blue within blue eyes and wear stillsuits to conserve their bodies' moisture. Most other details about them are incidental. House Atreides's base of operations is a city in the Imperial Basin, surrounded by the rock cliffs of the Shield Wall. Other than that, Arrakis is worm-ridden desert. Simple. How far and how high the cliffs are from the city, the size and population of the city, etc. doesn't matter. So why act like it does?

This post was inspired in part on Jeff Vande Zande's post, "World building in fiction." Check it out.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like hard sci-fi, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

Over the hump

I'm 14,000 words into drafting The Water Siege, the first book of my as yet unnamed epic fantasy trilogy. It will really be one long book that I intend to release in three ~50,000-word installments. The Water Siege will be the hook, and I'll give it away for free while charging for the second and third installments. I've seen other authors try selling books this way, with varying level of success.

It's taken me awhile to get this far. I took up this new project in January, took a long break in February (during which I vacationed in Chile), and resumed writing with gusto in March. This past weekend put me over the hump and gave me the confidence I need.

Having written two books in 2 years, I have a feel for the process of writing a book. For me there's usually a point of crisis as I'm bringing the first act to a close. The idea that motivated me to write is depleted, and I'm forced to reckon with a lack of narrative momentum. Without momentum to propel the rising action, exposition and climax are all there is, which is to say not enough.

Getting over this hump is the difference between merely having an idea for a book and writing a book.

Here's how I know when I've gotten over the hump: When I've fully realized the setting and characters, and there's enough promising stuff to keep the reader's attention while I execute the plot.

There's a lot of risk in writing this part of the book. As I throw in various elements, seeing what sticks and what doesn't, it can get long and messy. Editing these "early middle" chapters will be important when I finish drafting.

Here's a rough sample from the start of chapter 6, which I drafted this morning:

After serving dinner, Gwen went onto the roof of inn, took the linens off the clothesline, and made up the beds in the attic and second story apartments. Her father liked to spread the guests out even if it meant having to clean the inn top to bottom every day, and tonight was no exception. He had even made Gwen move into Xavier’s old room so he could convert her room into additional guest space.

Xavier hadn’t liked it when she came in and touched his things, but that never stopped her. She often would find him stooped over his child-sized drafting table he used even as a young man, looking out the window at the buildings for inspiration. Like her, he was keen on their uncle’s trade, more so on the design side than on stonecutting. Still, his interest had given Gwen a plausible cover story for why there was an old set of stonemason tools in his room.

Now that he was gone and the room was hers, she tried to keep everything as he’d left it when he was pressed into the king’s service. The drafting table still stood before the window curtain. The chest of drawers still held his clothes, neatly folded. And his books, which she’d read through twice, still lined the shelf above the bed.

All her things she kept in a trunk by the door. She lifted a heavy satchel out of the trunk and touched the tools to ensure each one was in its proper place.

Quiet as a mouse she returned to the attic. Thomas’s bed was the farthest from door. She ducked under the gabled roof and spread the satchel under the top sheet next to the headboard. Satisfied no one would see it but him, she returned downstairs.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. I'll reply to you as soon as I can.

I have made available the first 4 chapters of my second book, Seeds of Calamity, for free. If it piques your interest, get yourself a copy at Amazon. I appreciate the support!

Craft vs titillation

When I was 14 I thought cursing was cool. I thought movies with a lot of profanity and explicit content were cool for that very reason. Pulp Fiction was my favorite movie.

I grew out of this fad by the time I struck out on my own at 21. I suppose that makes me lucky. Rian Johnson is 46, and he still hasn't grown out of it.

Although it’s primarily a whodunnit murder mystery, Knives Out looks like it will have its fair share of amusing moments, including one shown off in the first trailer where Chris Evans’ Ransom Drysdale-Thrombey points out members of his family and tells them to “eat shit.” One person even gets a “definitely eat shit.”

As it turns out, this Knives Out scene could have been a lot more profane, as Rian Johnson, the writer and director, originally had Chris Evans’ character drop f-bombs instead. But he ultimately reversed course in order to avoid his movie getting stamped with an R rating.

Because eat "s**t" is appropriate for 13 year-olds, whereas "f**k you" isn't? Sound logic. But I don't blame Johnson for working with the MPAA's weird standards so he can pollute the minds of as many theater-goers as possible.

Still, isn't there an artful way to show a character's contempt? Take this monologue from Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov for instance:

The more I love humanity in general the less I love man in particular. In my dreams, I often make plans for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually face crucifixion if it were suddenly necessary. Yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone for two days together. I know from experience. As soon as anyone is near me, his personality disturbs me and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he’s too long over his dinner, another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me. But it has always happened that the more I hate men individually the more I love humanity.

Or how about this scene from There Will Be Blood?

You don't have to be one of the greats like Dostoevsky or Daniel Day-Lewis to show a character's misanthropy. Going back to Knives Out, Chris Evans's playboy character could scowl in silence while suffering his relatives' inanities. Perhaps that wouldn't jive with what Johnson wanted. He wanted to show a family at each other's throats. I can see how that would be cathartic for people who have hard feelings towards their family members. But if your movie doesn't show the family reconciling, what are you saying about family? Nothing good.

I too limit the amount of profanity, sex, and violence in my writing to appeal to a broad audience, but also because I don't want to titillate readers and give them over to sinful thoughts. It's also a craft thing for me. If I can achieve a high level drama without resorting to cheap profanity, I feel I've proven something about my craft that I wouldn't have otherwise.

I rate my debut book, Tendrils to the Moon, PG-13 based on language and violence. My second book, Seeds of Calamity, I also rate PG-13, but only for violence. There were nine curse words in Tendrils, but only one in Seeds, and it's a mild one. The violence in Seeds, however, is more pervasive and more intense. The sexual content in Tendrils is mild. It's practically nonexistent in Seeds.

I doubt I'll ever remove violence completely from my writing. My stories feature characters in conflict, and conflict erupts into violence. That's not necessarily a problem. Violence can be done for just ends.

There is the matter of presentation, though. You don't want the reader to revel in crushed skulls and disemboweled torsos. How much blood and gore do you want to show? As much to convey the action, is what I've come up with so far.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. I'll reply to you as soon as I can.

I have made available the first 4 chapters of Seeds of Calamity for free. If it piques your interest, get yourself a copy at Amazon. For a free digital copy of Tendrils to the Moon, sign up for the mailing list on the right side of the blog page. Or, if you're viewing this on the mobile site, click here. I appreciate the support!

The mystery box is empty

Say what you want about the Jack Reacher series. Lee Child's explanation for how to write page-turning thrillers is brilliant:

How do you create suspense? I’m asked that question often, and it seems that every writers’ symposium has a class with that title. It’s an important technical issue, and not just for so-called suspense novels. Every novel needs a narrative engine, a reason for people to keep reading to the end, whatever the subject, style, genre or approach.

But it’s a bad question. Its very form misleads writers and pushes them onto an unhelpful and overcomplicated track.

Because “How do you create suspense?” has the same interrogatory shape as “How do you bake a cake?” And we all know — in theory or practice — how to bake a cake. We need ingredients, and we infer that the better quality those ingredients are, the better quality the cake will be. We know that we have to mix and stir those ingredients, and we’re led to believe that the more thoroughly and conscientiously we combine them, the better the cake will taste. We know we have to cook the cake in an oven, and we figure that the more exact the temperature and timing, the better the cake will look.

So writers are taught to focus on ingredients and their combination. They’re told they should create attractive, sympathetic characters, so that readers will care about them deeply, and then to plunge those characters into situations of continuing peril, the descent into which is the mixing and stirring, and the duration and horrors of which are the timing and temperature.

But it’s really much simpler than that. “How do you bake a cake?” has the wrong structure. It’s too indirect. The right structure and the right question is: “How do you make your family hungry?”

And the answer is: You make them wait four hours for dinner.

As novelists, we should ask or imply a question at the beginning of the story, and then we should delay the answer. (Which is what I did here, and you’re still reading, right?)

I found this quote by way of this video critiquing JJ Abrams's mystery box method:

The takeaway from this is, as a writer, you shouldn't be in the same boat as your readers. You're the storyteller. You should know the answer to the questions you're asking, and you should know how to string readers along. It's okay if your first draft doesn't have that. But a finished work should.

Abrams is said to be a fan of the franchises he's rebooted. Perhaps that's why the Star Wars sequel trilogy sucks. He emulated a feeling he had when he watched Star Wars. That feeling comes from having a layered story slowly revealed to your imagination. When the creator himself doesn't know where a story is headed, he's reduced to gimmickry. Sure, he may be excited and motivated throughout the creative process as a fan, but it has to culminate into something tangible for the audience to feel invested.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. I'll reply to you as soon as I can.

I have made available the first 4 chapters of my second book, Seeds of Calamity, for free. If it piques your interest, get yourself a copy at Amazon. For a free digital copy of my debut book, Tendrils to the Moon, sign up for the mailing list on the right side of the blog page. Or, if you're viewing this on the mobile site, click here. I appreciate the support!

Embrace tropes in your writing

I've written about stereotypes before and how my writing would benefit from using them. I came across this writing advice video about fantasy tropes and thought it deserved a response.

Many of the character stereotypes, or tropes, she hits on apply to Harry Potter. Let's say she's right on all of them. You'd think, if tropes were a bad thing, this would have held the Harry Potter series back.

Why didn't it? Because JK Rowling used these stereotypes to create an identifiable and memorable character. She didn't just use tropes to construct Harry. Hermione, Ron, Snape, Dumbledore, and others are etched into my generation's cultural memory in a way that Luke, Han, and Leia are etched into the cultural memory of my father's generation. It's an achievement that deserves in-depth analysis, not scorn.

The best advice with regard to tropes is to study them to understand how they work so you can create the effect you want for your readers. If you don't give readers something they recognize, they can get lost and confused, if not upset. Furtheremore, there's a ton of wiggle room to mold a stock character into a fully fleshed person. No one mistakes Harry Potter for Pip in Great Expectations because they're both orphans.

Funnily enough, the writer/former literary agent giving this advice admits at the 19-minute mark that a lot of readers like their expectations to be fulfilled (i.e., they like tropes), but you're not going to snag a agent unless you shun tropes in your writing. That's the failure of tradpub in a nutshell: middlemen refusing to give readers what they want.

In my last book, Seeds of Calamity, I brought more craft to my characters and plot. This included intentional use of tropes. My hero is, you guessed it, an orphan. He's also kind of a hothead. His older brother is more mature and deliberate, a point of tension between them. Their best friend is a sage/surrogate father type. The two main bad guys are an officious weasel and a cunning rogue. Someone the brothers are forced to work with is a driven career woman and love interest.

These tropes serve as markers for the reader, which I think is more important in fantasy and sci-fi than in other genres. I don't have to explain the character dynamics for you to understand them. The act of explaining would just dull the emotional edge. You can predict how the characters get along in the beginning, but you can't as easily predict how the plot will change those characters and their dynamics.

Read and see for yourself. I've made the first 4 chapters of Seeds of Calamity available for free here. If it piques your interest, get yourself a copy at Amazon. I appreciate the support!

As always, leave a comment below. I'll respond to you as soon as I can.

On 3rd person limited

This is a continuation of a previous post on my writing goals for my newest book, Seeds of Calamity. One of those goals was to limit the POV to Felton, the protagonist. This was to simplify the storytelling and tell a compelling growth arc for a single character from start to finish. Aside from the prologue, which is told from a secondary character's POV, I succeeded. Along the way, I learned a few things about writing.

Limited perspective has mystery and surprises built in. Much of the tension is in not knowing what will happen next, or not knowing what is really happening beneath the surface of the other characters' actions. In my first book, Tendrils to the Moon, the tension came from the reader knowing more than the hero did. In Seeds, it comes from the reader knowing only as much as Felton.

A small effect of this was my decision to not title Seeds's chapters. I did this for Tendrils's 12 sprawling chapters, and it made sense in the context of that story, where process and detail were featured as much as the plot and characters. The chapter titles I used back then gave a sense of progress as well as foreboding. With Seeds, chapter titles would have taken away the story's unpredictability.

This style demanded more from me as a writer. I had to stage scenes "off screen" without the benefit of showing them, so they had to flow by a logic that I didn't entirely have control of. I was tempted to explain things long after they happened, and there wasn't a lot of room to work with in the moment.

Whereas I could get away with more telling in Felton's POV, I had to find more direct ways to show the other main characters' growth and conflicts. I was forced to be efficient in their presentation, for too much information would have muddied those characters to the point that they wouldn't be identifiable.

It was fun writing minor characters who served their purpose after a couple of chapters—or one scene, as they case may be. It feels true to life. I liked adding dashes and quirks that I didn't feel pressured to sustain over the whole book.

Finally, the limited perspective imposed plotting discipline on me. I didn't have the option of cutting to another POV when a scene ran its course. I had to either advance the plot or cut to a new scene that did. The result was a dense, meaty plot and no real second act doldrums to speak of.

To see what I mean, read the first 4 chapters of Seeds of Calamity for free. If it piques your interest, get yourself a copy at Amazon. I appreciate the support!

For a free digital copy of my debut book, Tendrils to the Moon, sign up for the mailing list on the right side of the blog page. Or, if you're viewing this on the mobile site, click here.

And as always, let me know what you think in the comments. I'll reply as soon as I can.

Yes, write every day

I've seen some caterwauling on Twitter from writers who are pushing back against the common advice to write every day. Below is an example of that pushback. I'll leave the attribution off:

There are a wealth of valid reasons not to write every day. Writing is a muscle you have to work, yes; but too many people are made to feel failures against unrealistic standards.

The use of passive voice here is telling. No honest giver of advice is so Pharisaical as to claim failure to follow his advice will result in absolute failure. Anyone who "is made" to feel a failure is putting that onus on himself.

If you can't take advice without putting more pressure on yourself than you can stand, and you suffer for it to the point that you resent the advice, you may have bigger problems than an inability to write every day. Or, if a particular piece of advice doesn't help, maybe that advice wasn't meant for you; feel free, then, to ignore it.

Every writer wants to be better. One way to accomplish that is to establish a daily routine. That means writing even when you don't feel like it. It also means not getting so hung up on mediocre plotting or subpar prose that you paralyze the rest of the creative process. Move on and fix the mistakes later. That's what writing every day amounts to.

I was 40,000 words into my draft of Tendrils to the Moon when my brother-in-law got married. I didn't write at all that weekend. Am I a failure because of that? No. Life happens. I still finished the book, albeit a month late and 33,000 words over budget.

Writing a book is like running a marathon. It takes discipline. There are times during the process where you don't think you'll finish. Failure is only guaranteed when you stop trying. I'm convinced most writers fail not because they lack talent, but because they get discouraged and stop trying.

Suffering is how you know you're growing. If a goal doesn't require at least a little bit of suffering, you're not growing to reach it.

Am I being too harsh? Let me know in the comments. I'll reply as soon as I can. I invite you to read the first 4 chapters of my new sci-fi book, Seeds of Calamity, for free. If it piques your interest, get yourself a copy at Amazon. I appreciate the support!

Why Seeds of Calamity took so long to write

From start to finish, my writing pace on Seeds of Calamity was one fifth what it was for my debut book, Tendrils to the Moon. What changed?

• The birth of my second child, who turned 1 last week. While my wife's hands were full, I spent more time with our firstborn, which limited my writing time on weekdays. To make time, I started waking up between 3 and 4 am to write.
• Reduced drive. I liken my passion for writing to water topping a dam. When I started Tendrils, I had not written fiction in 6 years. So when the dam broke, all that pent-up desire to write poured out of me. The flow had ebbed by the time I started writing Seeds.
• Plotting. Seeds has a less direct plot than Tendrils. Before I start writing, I have strong ideas about the beginning and end of the story. Writing compelling narrative spanning the middle of a book is a challenge for me.
• Backtracked 6,000 words. In January, I reached a dead end and realized a major plot device in the second act wasn't going to work. So I stopped and replotted it, transforming the whole second act in the process. This, in my opinion, was the single best decision I made over the drafting phase. It facilitated a speedier and more credible plot. No second act doldrums here!
• Premature editing. I broke a cardinal rule and repeatedly went back and edited earlier chapters before I finished the first draft. This worked to an extent while I was writing Tendrils because it helped to beef up setting and characters. For Seeds, not so much. I probably lost months to this aimless tinkering. You don't know a scene is right until you see it in her context of the whole. One of my process goals for the next book will be to not edit until I finish the first draft.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. I'll reply to you as soon as I can. I invite you to read the first 4 chapters of Seeds of Calamity for free. If it piques your interest, get yourself a copy at Amazon. I appreciate the support!

Writing goals met and unmet

I had several goals when I started writing Seeds of Calamity, which I outlined a year and 2 months ago:

• Outline start to finish before drafting: I failed this miserably. I had no outline for two-thirds of the book, and those are the plot-heavy sections. I tended to plot in my head about a chapter in advance of what I was writing at the time. When I started, I had inklings of set pieces I wanted to do, and only vague notions of how they would fit together. Having a clear outline from the outset will be a goal for my next big writing project.
• Told from the perspective of just one character: I managed this well. I discovered in the early going that I did not have the luxury of a passive leading man if he was going to hold the reader's interest. So I gave Felton, my leading man, a bias for action so he would drive the plot. Also, the limited perspective opened up opportunities for surprises in the plot. I'll devote an entire post to what I learned about limited perspective later.
• Prominent female character: I'm proud of what I was able to do with Greta, introducing her toward the end of the first act and giving her just enough characterization and backstory to be interesting. She has agency in the plot and I love her partnering with Felton in the second act. The trust and friendship that develops between them was a highlight for me as a writer.
• Shorter chapters (average 5,000 words): This came naturally with a tighter writing style that was more focused on plot than on scenery, which was the biggest complaint I heard about my first book, Tendrils to the Moon. For Seeds, the prologue and 15 chapters together come out to just over 75,000 words, 5,000 words short of my initial goal, but I'll take it.

Something different I did with Seeds was get my wife to edit the book and involve her in plotting the second and third acts. She was great in smoothing out stilted character interactions, especially when it came to Greta, and asking for more or less exposition at various points. She certainly earned her editor credit. The book is better because of her.

Obviously the writing went much slower with this second book. I averaged almost 1,000 words per day on Tendrils, a pace I was proud of. On Seeds, not so much: less than 200 words per day. I'll get into the reasons for that some other time.

The overarching goal was to improve as a writer. I believe I did, and it shows in the quality of the product. See for yourself. Seeds of Calamity is available in paperback and ebook.

As always, let me know what you think in the comment section below. I'll reply to you as soon as I can.

Backtracking

I'm finishing up chapter 7 of Seeds of Calamity, and I can't understate how pleased I am with how the plot and characters are shaping up. The prose and plotting feel to me so much tighter than they were in Tendrils to the Moon; that was something I wanted to improve on after overshooting the Tendrils's wordcount by a whopping 40 percent.

I want to talk about backtracking--namely, changing your mind about the plot and the direction you want to go in after you've already committed to a different course. I did this recently. I had to retool 9,000 words I had written for chapters 6 and 7 because I was no longer convinced a key plot device was realistic or helping the plot advance the way I wanted it to. I say "retool" because I hit upon a solution that allowed me to keep most of what I wrote instead of trashing all that hard work.

I won't give away the abandoned plot device or what I replaced it with, but I'll say this about it: The moment I conjured up this plot device, I fancied it. It added another layer of complexity to the plot, and I savored the challenge of pulling it off. But after trying it out, I had to admit to myself it was making the book harder to write. I'm already juggling half a dozen characters' personalities, ambitions, and hurdles; why complicate things further? Like expert shot maker Phil Mickelson, I wanted to hit a 200-yard screamer off the pine straw instead of a 150-yard approach shot from the fairway. I'm glad I was able to recognize this and save the book from this dangerous tendency in time, before venturing beyond a point of no return.

I also backtracked over the opening scene of Seeds of Calamity, which I wrote around August, I think. My original opening scene, where a man wakes up from drug-induced sleep, was boring, and it missed the personality of the protagonist. I was able to salvage pieces of dialogue and exposition of secondary characters, but the opening scene is now completely different. It features an asteroid mining crew finding out a rock they had gone out of their way to survey was worthless.

Another one of my goals is for the paperback to go live the same day as the ebook. To that end, I designed the paperback art and interior well ahead of time, and I received the proof copy Wednesday. I need to make a bunch of small corrections, and my fears about the spine were confirmed. The upside is I have a long time to troubleshoot these issues so they're corrected before we go into production. (Don't take this as an indication the book is complete. I'm about half done.)

Tell me what you think in the comments below! I'll reply to you as soon as I can. Feel free to read the first three chapters of Tendrils to the Moon and see if the last 9 chapters are worth your time. The paperback version is on sale at Amazon for $8.99. The ebook is only 99 cents.

Writing with children

Opportunities to write have been few and far between around the holidays and with a newborn child. Last spring, when I was writing Tendrils to the Moon, I was averaging 1,000 words a day, with at least half of my weekly output coming on Friday and Saturday.

That hasn't been the case lately, which means I've had to be creative in finding time to write. I've been using AndrOpen Office on my Samsung Galaxy S5 to edit and write when I'm away from home and have a moment to spare. After experimenting with several apps, I've concluded this is the easiest mobile word processor to edit .doc files on my phone. (I prefer to work in .doc files because they're the most advanced format my old laptop is compatible with.)

The last few days I've been shoring up some scenes in the first two chapters, making characters consistent. The hardest part of the start of a novel is I rarely have a clear mental picture of the characters and their arcs. I've arrived at the first pinch point in chapter 4, and the actions that I required some of the characters to do had not been set up properly. The ratio of effort to net word count is low, but it's work that had to be done regardless.

I suppose more professional writers are able to let stuff like that wait until the editing phase, but it's a mental block for me if the character development is not at the level it needs to be.

I started a writing journal to keep myself motivated. I figure if I average 1,000 words per day, I'll meet my daunting goal of finishing my first draft by the end of January. Today I stopped at 19,261 words.

Here's some back-cover copy I wrote for Seeds of Calamity:

In terrestrial year 2216...

A meteor carrying an alien passenger strikes near a colonial settlement on Mars, killing thousands.

An asteroid mining crew that's fallen on hard times goes to work for a man they don't trust.

A detective thinks she's cracked a human smuggling case, but the real crime is bigger than she could have ever imagined.

The seeds of calamity have begun to sprout.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments section below. I'll respond to your comment as soon as I can.

Archetypal characters and family update

I expressed a desire to my editor for the characters in my upcoming book Seeds of Calamity to be more archetypal. Readers connect quickly with people they recognize, so by using archetypes I could quickly establish character dynamics and reader expectations.

I can think of few examples where deliberately eschewing archetypes for the main character succeeded. But the best example would have to be Die Hard. Every time I rewatch that Christmas classic, I'm fascinated with how unheroic John McClane seems in the first 20 minutes. He's afraid of flying. He interacts stiffly with the airplane passenger and the limo driver. He fights with his wife within minutes of meeting her at her office. He quips about Ellis's cocaine use and fruity Californians. The movie goes out of its way to make you think twice about liking this man. The filmmakers may have been motivated to purposefully break the audience's prior identification with Bruce Willis, who was known as a comic actor in the '80s, not an action star. Nevertheless, they did a super job introducing that character.

In my first book, Tendrils to the Moon, Ames is the hero, but I didn't initially present him as such. He comes off as an uptight, no-nonsense everyman, who happens to be XO on a spaceship bound for the Moon. His character arc is to become the magnanimous leader that his boss proves not to be. One of my readers thought Sheridan, not Ames, was the hero until roughly halfway through the book.

Anyway, my editor was skeptical. She likes my characters and thinks I shouldn't try anything different with them. They're interesting without seeming fake, she said. I'll lean on her judgement for now. She is my wife, after all!

This Thanksgiving is special for my family because last Friday we welcomed our second daughter into the world.

Life has been pretty full since Diana was born, and the writing has not come as quickly as I would like. But I wouldn't trade this child for 20,000 words of clean prose.

Let me know what you think in the comment section below! I'll reply to you as soon as I can. I invite you to read the first three chapters of Tendrils to the Moon for free, and see if the last 9 chapters are worth your time. The paperback version is on sale at Amazon for $8.99. The ebook is only 99 cents.

Why I'm not doing NaNoWriMo

• I started writing Seeds of Calamity over a month ago, and the (slow) writing pace I am setting will probably require me to write at least through January. Rushing to finish by the end of November would result in an inferior product, in addition to stretching my sanity to its limits.
• My slower writing pace (relative to the 1,000+ words per day I set when writing Tendrils to the Men) is due to writing in a different style and family and church commitments impinging on my writing time.
• Tendrils was bursting from me when I spontaneously decided to write it in January. Seeds so far has not had that driving force behind it.
• Last, but not least, my wife and I have a baby due on Thanksgiving, which shortens my November writing time to a mere 3 weeks. That doesn't account for the time needed to prepare the house. After the baby is born, I think my hands will be more full of my 2-year-old daughter than the baby. She's going to have to learn to be less reliant on Mommy and be more reliant on Daddy.

Despite the slow writing pace for Seeds, I'm not the least bit discouraged. If there is a hump to get over in the writing of a book, I'm over it. I am currently on chapter 4 of a planned 15 chapters. The two leading characters are defined and their arcs are set in motion. I have only begun to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the setting. The out-there sci-fi elements that I find exciting are just around the corner. I am learning some lessons in writing this book, which I will explain in a later post.

For your edification, here's the prologue of Seeds of Calamity.

Prologue
First Calamity at Artynia

As she did after every dust storm, Regan climbed the steep switchbacks and aluminum ladders tied end to end out of the canyon. Slung over her shoulder was a shovel and a land-handled brush. They tapped the back of her helmet as she clambered over a squat boulder jutting out of the rock.

Her clunky boots and gloves required she move with caution, double-checking her foot and hand placement before applying her weight. The dirt layered on top of carbon dioxide frost made the trail slippery.

But she was good at this. She was a firsty. Her limbs were thin and willowy, perfect for spanning holds in the cliff wall, easy to twist and fit in narrow spaces. The town physician said she would grow up to be taller than her Earthborn father, and her build was, at best, average among her peers.

Her stubbornness was decidedly above average. That’s why the governor had let her have this job, despite his misgivings about risking the health of a “precious young lady,” a status that relegated most adolescents of her sex to domestic endeavors. Ironic that the place of her birth shaped her body for physical tasks that her specialization as a female demanded she refrain from. As far as she was concerned, that was a long, long way off.

Far off to her right, Torrance shimmied up the funicular rail, which rose up the sheer cliff face from the town to the plain above. He blasted the track and cable with compressed air, sending up puffs of red dust. Because he was a boy, Torrance had been given the more dangerous job, even though she had demonstrated she was the better climber.

The dust that didn’t disperse and fall into the canyon stuck to Torrance’s body, camouflaging him against the red canyon wall. If he didn’t turn the compressed air on himself, the dust could penetrate the fittings in his activity suit, like water seeping into a leaky submarine, as her dad said. (One of his many tales from Earth that seemed more fantasy than reality. Water in such quantity that it filled entire basins? Regan would believe it when she saw it.)

She didn’t like talking while she was out here, preferring to take advantage of the solitude while away from the crowded town. Nevertheless, she knew what radio channel Torrance was using, in case they needed each other.

She cleared the evening shadow cast by the opposite wall of the canyon. The frost was not a factor anymore, as it evaporated within minutes of being touched by the Sun, even when it was covered in dirt. She jogged, no longer requiring the use of her hands on this less exposed part of the canyon wall.

Normally she would have been able to see the distant, rounded peak of Alba Mons looming behind the solar farm, but all she could see was the dust storm’s ruddy smear. Unobscured views north, west, and south revealed a broad lava plain, featureless but for the sandstone hills to the north and the canyon, the 300-mile scar that Regan and her people called home.

She stopped at the first solar cell, which had an inch-thick dusting on its flat surface. She unslung the shovel and stuck it in the red dirt next to the 3-inch pipe. All the electric current from the solar farm routed through a cable in that pipe. It disappeared under the topsoil and ran along the rim of the canyon to meet the rail west of the airfield. After clearing the solar cells and digging out the cable, she would meet Torrance there and ride the rail back into town.

She brushed the cell, exposing the blue, reflective monocrystalline silicon, careful so as not to touch it with any part of her suit. Before she finished, the cell’s motor started to grind, and the broad-faced panel swiveled to face the Sun in the clear, amber sky, shedding the top layer of dust built up on it.

There were more than 2,000 cells laid out in a rectangular grid above Artynia Catena. Regan proceeded along the outer row of cells with her brush. As the first light in days touched their photovoltaic surfaces, they turned to face the brightest light source in the sky.

She made the turn at the far end of the grid. To her surprise, the solar cells in the first row pivoted all at once, like a line of soldiers making an about-face. Regan caught sight of an emerald light above the western horizon, larger and brighter than the Sun.

Her mouth fell open, and she absently dropped the brush in the dirt.

The light grew brighter while moving to her right. It left a turbulent trail of dark smoke in the sky. The ground trembled, like during the graben collapse that shook the town last year. The descending object’s incredible speed became apparent as it drew closer, crossing over the canyon in less than a second. The radio hissed plaintively. Regan pinched her eyes shut to the now blinding light.

The ground heaved violently, throwing her to the ground. Something heavy fell on top of her. A stabbing pain shot up the backs of her thighs.

She twisted out from underneath the downed solar panel and stumbled toward the canyon, fighting a sudden onset of stiffness in her hamstrings and a deep rumbling through the ground. A massive, expanding plume of dirt raced toward her, like a dust storm more violent than any she had seen. It blanketed Monviso, the gateway to the Cottian Hills, a mere 7 miles away.

She hastened to the cliff’s edge, picking up the shovel on her way. She keyed the radio and shouted over the rumble generated by the quake and the gathering pressure wave. “Torrance!”

The boy’s voice shuddered with fright. “Regan! What’s happening?”

“I don’t know! Something fell out of the sky and there’s a storm headed this way!”

She faltered as she reached the canyon rim. The quake was dislodging loose boulders and dirt from the cliff. Two connected ladders twisted in the collapsing rubble, the beams pinching shut like a drawing compass.

She spotted Torrance clinging to the funicular rail 500 feet above the canyon floor. Even from a mile away, Regan observed the joists buckling, bowing the heavy iron rail like a clothesline.

“Hold on!” she said, veering left. She could reach the rail terminus in 5 minutes at a dead sprint, then ride the platform down. The dusty rail would degrade the platform’s wheels, but at least she and Torrance would be safe inside the dome.

“Don’t!” Torrance screamed. “The rail won’t hold!”

No sooner had his words reached Regan than the rail broke. The supports on either side of the widening break leaned away from Regan, snapping cleanly from their bases. Regan watched in terror as the rail bearing Torrance gathered speed and broke up further against the opposite cliff wall. He disappeared in the red haze rising from the rubble.

“No!” she cried out, reaching her hand over the void.

She glanced at the advancing plume. It had reached the edge of the solar farm. Her mind raced as she realized there was no way she was going to make it to safety.

She retreated a hundred feet from the cliff’s edge, still holding her shovel. She found a patch of soft dirt and jabbed the blade down as hard she could. Quickly she retrieved a square foil sheet from a suit pocket and cocooned it around her, pinching the outer seams shut in her clenched fist.

The plume struck. Her body rolled and her helmet struck the shovel handle. Blood vessels in her neck burst and spread warmth and numbness simultaneously. Then everything went dark.

Let me know what you think in the comment section below! I'll reply to you as soon as I can.