I submit that many of these stories, with a few notable exceptions, have been unfair.

Science is a methodology for developing reliable knowledge about the world, and all it depends upon is that there is an objective reality that behaves consistently. Science works in our world. We have a world of technology that demonstrates this in no uncertain terms. It should work in any consistent world, particularly worlds resembling our own. Any world with magic, assuming the magic system is consistent, should be understandable through science.

A conflict under these situations, pitting a logical scientific type against a wild-eyed believer, reason against belief, is a false conflict. Scientists are not dogmatic and their measurements, experiments, and observations can and do change their minds. Or not, in too many cases. How many times have you seen the skeptical scientist character in a story with fantastic elements mutter something like, “There must be a logical explanation,” and then go on to offer something feeble and likely stupid in face of the reality of the story? Let me illustrate this with some TV series that regularly pitted science against the fantastic. The first never really played fair, the second is currently running and there’s hope, and a final case where the appropriate character change finally did come to the skeptical scientist (thanks to smart writers and a long run).

I recall watching Northern Exposure on TV some 15 years ago, more or less. It was an interesting show about a doctor with a fellowship compelled to serve in Alaska for several years to pay off the debt. What was stupid was that he represented a scientific point of view, while the locals provided a new age, fantasy-based point of view, and he never took into account the data of his experiences there in adjusting his outlook. The show didn’t play fair. They cheated. Science takes into account information from the environment, experiments and observations, in reaching conclusions, having an objective fantastic reality. For the majority of the show, Joel just looked like an ass denying the events that occurred based on his past experience rather than the physical evidence he was presented with week after week. It wasn’t science. It was a believer’s version of science.

This is happening on Battlestar Galactica to a certain extent. Baltar is our scientist there. He’s making the rationalist argument, but he’s also being swayed. I’m okay with that, because on the show the faith-based perspective has numerous facts in support of it, with rather unambiguous visions regularly coming true on a regular basis. It isn’t really religion as we know it when the writers can make the visions and prophecies clear and true every week. We call that fantasy. I’m very sympathetic toward Baltar. He’s a smart guy, like me. He has a weakness for women, like me. He just wants to survive, like me, and probably you, too. He’s too often made to be the bad guy. I hope he’s redeemed in the end. He hasn’t been immoral as I’ve seen it. He’s been rationally human. The final verdict hasn’t quite come in yet.

Perhaps one of the best cases, in the end, of how science can tackle the fantastic occurred on the X-Files. In the beginning we had the classic and poor false dichotomy: Mulder the believer against Scully the skeptical scientist. Her job in the early seasons was to disbelieve Mulder’s wild ideas with a more “scientific” explanation, which she did dutifully even in the face of compelling evidence. Eventually, however, her character and the show grew, although it took a very long time for them to move away from the false dichotomy at the heart of the original formula. The data started leading her to agree with Mulder’s notions. The scientific evidence supported them, in the show’s reality, and science got her there.

Look. In a piece of fiction I’ll buy into the realities of that fiction. Just make them clear and honest. Too often we have idiocy. Characters like Joel Fleishmann who keep on with a modern, scientific worldview despite events that he sees and experiences, repeatedly, regularly, and can collect evidence about. Change the rules, and science will figure it out. Stories that fail in this respect represent stories that fail to properly portray science.

I’m not claiming that science is the be all and end all on all matters. Life is about much more than that. But if you want facts to cling to, rules to understand, and live in a consistent world (fantastic elements or not), stick with science.

Where science conflicts with other paradigms, the other paradigms are probably wrong. This is just based on how science works. Science doesn’t work everywhere, but where it works, pay attention. And it should work in any self-consistent fantasy, too. If it doesn’t, someone isn’t playing fair.

When I was young, or even just youngER, I used to write with gay abandon - like that centipede running, with joy, with faith, with a purity of storyteller spirit that picked me up and floated me on top of the story soup and all I had to do was lean over the side and dip a hand in the waters andlo, the stories would leap out at me like golden fish asking breathlessly what my wish was so that they could fulfill it.

Don’t get me wrong, there is still that. There will ALWAYS be that.

MOST of the time.

But there are days when I grind to a screaming halt, and I am thinking in terms of mechanics. This scene doesn’t work, that sentence structure is wrong, this character is acting out of, well, character - you get the picture. So I surrender to the overwhelming urge to sit and nitpick and try to get it damned perfect before I can go on and it USED to be perfect anyway or at least it looked that way before I started unravelling the thing down to its molecular structure to find out just how it works, what makes it tick, what makes it live. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is an autopsy because I”m poking around post mortem  in a thing that’s already dead.

And the story, like the centipede, is in a heap in the middle of the page, whimpering.

It gets worse after you get published and kind of hope and expect to KEEP being published, because not only are you second-guessing the basic mechanics of writing but also of marketing - why am I writing this, will it even sell - and things can come to a fine pass sooner than anyone ever expects, and you’re left sitting there with a block the size of the wall of China staring you in the face without quite knowing how you came to grind to a halt.

I’ve got a chapter that’s bedevilling me that way right now. It’s sitting there mocking me - I can see the shape of it in my head but it won’t let me in, it won’t let me knead it and shape it and bake it, it won’t let itself live.

I have to stop counting legs.

That chapter is going to get battered into submission this week. Today. Dammit. I have the rest of the novel to write.

This is the centipede, slowly and deliberately untangling itself, and swearing to recapture the pure magic of just walking. And who knows, it might lead to running. Or flying.

See you on the other side of the wall.

1. DVDs of Television shows - Yes, I’ve seen them all before, yet…resistance…is futile….

2. YouTube - little gems can be found if you search long enough. Even found a spoof of <i>Poison Study’s</i> book trailer. I’ve been spoofed - how cool is that??

3. Newspapers - Every article must be read regardless of interest.  I’ve become addicted to Suduko - look for references to the number 9 in my next book.

4. Computer Games - Two words - 3D Pinball.

5. Mourning over the death of my favorite pen. *sniff*

6. Searching for a replacement pen from a drawer filled with hundreds (not an exaggeration).

7. Writing lists.

8. Talking to family members - Details of laundry troubles can be fascinating when procrastinating.

9. Pulling weeds - once started there is no stopping until every last one is gone from the earth, terminated, ripped to shreds….er….yeah….

10. Kids - needy little creatures that want things like food, help with homework, and attention.

11. Spouses -  needy little creatures that want things like food, help with housework, and attention.

12. Sleep - who needs it any……zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Any one have a line item to add?

I’m not talking Hitler here. What I’m talking about is every day life and how a bad guy evolves. When I was a lot younger, I remember reading a quote by Mercedes Lackey that said something to the effect of ‘even evil wizards get up in the middle of the night to eat chocolate chip cookies.’ That has stuck with me a long time because it really points to the idea that the bad guy really doesn’t have to actually be evil (i.e. not wearing the black hat and black mustache and killing kittens because he can.) In fact, such bad guys are really boring.

Bad guys can be very admirable. They can be motivated by truly good things–honor, self-respect, a desire to accomplish something, and so on. Bad guys can also be really good people who fail to act–maybe they can prevent a crime but don’t, maybe they don’t speak up for themselves when they should, maybe they are simply weak in a moment that requires strength.

The point is that bad guys and good guys have a lot in common. And who is who may just depend on your point of view in a given situation. And here’s the thing–People fear being the bad guy. I have a sign in my office that says “you say bitch like it’s a bad thing.” And really, there’s a lot to be said for being a bitch–since often it can mean being the bad guy, the one who stands her ground though other people don’t want her to; the one who holds on to her convictions and follows them though it would be more comfortable if she didn’t; the one who speaks her mind when no one wants to hear.

The thing is, a lot of people are motivated by fear. They are afraid of what other people think. I know I fall into that trap more often than I like. I think we’re trained to be that way in this society. It takes a lot to overcome or circumvent those rules of politeness or playground codes of honor (don’t tattle is one. Why the hell not if that means stopping someone else from getting hurt or abused or a theft from happening and the list goes on). It takes a lot to decide to follow your own choices and code of honor when everyone else doesn’t understand or doesn’t support you. Peer pressure is a terrible weight.

So as I reach the middle of my book and one of my main characters has undergone a terrible event, she’s left with questions about being the bad guy and being the good guy and what makes a person one or the other. She’s not quite sure what she is, given the upheaval she’s undergone and the new knowlege she’s obtained. What she thought was good isn’t any longer, and what she thought was bad seems more reasonable. She’s going to have to make choices and her moral compass is bent and she is full of fear. Fear is not the best basis for decision-making. She may just be the bad guy. And I think I’ll be fine with that. Because more and more I’m coming to understand that in my books, anyhow, the good guys and the bad guys are all the same people and it isn’t until they choose what they will do that you find out just who is who.

What the article didn’t discuss in any depth is how strong the pressure can be to continue a successful series — or invent one.  Way back in the late Cretaceous when I got my first publishing contract for Archangel Protocol,I had no intention of “committing series” as a science fiction fan once told me I’d done.  When my editor and I were negotating what the second book in my contract would be, I gave her a whole laundry list of stand-alone ideas in an email.  At the very end of this huge pitch sheet, I added a little note:  “Or I suppose I could write a sequel.”

“Do that,” was the response. 

And that was all she wrote.  Literally.  I spent the next three years revisting a world I had every intention of leaving behind.  I don’t regret it for a moment, mind you, but I often wonder what would have happened if I’d been more passionate about one of the other projects I’d proposed.  Fits of fancy will sometimes have me believe I might still be writing science fiction with all my books still in print.  However, I wonder…  I can only think of a handful of recent authors who have eschewed series for stand-alones whose careers are still healthy and thriving. 

Is there a place in publishing any more for the author who writes something new every time? 

I think this might be another key to the question of why fantasy often outsells science fiction.  The trope of the fantasy package is “the trilogy.”  I think readers, including myself, have a very strong yen for “more of the same” (and not necessarily in a bad way.)  Science fiction, though it, too, is going more and more for series, has in the past fostered “names” rather than series, ie. another completely different, yet mind-blowing book by William Gibson [or fill-in other SF giant of your choice]. 

I’ve always ended up “committing series,” and I have mixed feelings about them.  On one hand, you have the potential to attract readership and keep it growing with every new book in the series.  On the other, I’ve heard the complaint from readers that they’re hesitant to pick up a book only to discover it’s number three in a four book series.  My response as a writer has always been to make my books as stand-alone as possible, but then I sometimes wonder if I do too many contortions to include all the salient information about past adventures….  What are your preferences as a reader?  As a writer?

On weekdays, I write in the evenings. Without going into too much detail, it’s usually around 9-10pm before I am able to settle down enough to work. Since I get up around 6am…let’s say I’m usually tired and not hitting on all mental cylinders. So I’m thinking of resetting my clock, getting up at say, 4am, writing for a couple of hours, then getting on with the rest of the day. It’ll mean an earlier night, and will likely require some adjustment time.

So, the poll w/ essay:

1) when do you write?
2) did you always work at this time, or did you make a switch (morning to night? night to morning?)?
3) did you notice a difference in quantity or quality of output? Did the time change make things better, the same, worse?
4) any comments you’d like to add.

And now I really need to get to work…

But the truth is, I could probably revise the manuscript forever…

A brief anecdote: way back when, I was a Fine Arts student in college. I had a fabulous painting instructor at the time: Bob Fabe, a local artist. One day, I was laboring over a tempura painting I’d been working on for a few weeks. I could feel Bob standing behind me, looking over my shoulder. He watched for a time as I was painting, making tiny little changes. Suddenly, as I reached for another brush, he rapped me across the back of the head with his open hand. “Ow!” I said, annoyed, looking back at him. “What the hell was that for?”

He was grinning at me. “You’re done,” he said. “You’re just moving paint around now without accomplishing anything. Every artist need to have someone standing behind them with a baseball bat to hit them over the head when they’re done, or they keep working and working until they ruin it. You’re done.”

As it turned out, in later years I became much more interested in writing fiction than creating fine art, but I still think of that incident — because I know that what Bob said is true for me and writing. I can look at a paragraph I’ve labored over for half an hour and still make some change. I can go over a scene ten times, read it the next day and decide that it might be better if I tried this. I’ll read work I’ve published and want to have it back so I can change this phrase or that piece of dialog. In some sense, I’m never done. If I let myself, I could revise endlessly. I would always make some change in what I’ve set down.

But at some point, you have to stop and send the damn thing out… or you end up never being published. I’m just never sure where that point should be. For me, there’s rarely a real ‘baseball bat’ moment, no time when I rise up in delight and proclaim “Aha! It’s finished! There’s mostly a sense of being ‘exhausted’…

So how is it with you? Do you have the “Aha!” moments? Does the Muse use a metaphorical baseball bat on your head? How do you know when you’re ‘done’?

It would have done all of these things, if I hadn’t failed miserably when I tried to write the stupid thing.

I don’t know how long I sat there, deleting one attempt after another as too scattered, too confusing, too preachy … it simply wouldn’t come together.  That’s a frustrating experience, and a little scary, too.  I’m supposed to be a professional writer, after all.  What does it mean if I can’t even finish a simple blog entry???

It means … very little, really.  If you’re going to be a writer, sometimes you’re going to fail.  Sometimes the story won’t work, or the idea won’t pan out, or the kick-ass ending will fall flat.  The better you get, the more you’ll be able to spot this sort of problem early and either fix or avoid it, but you’ll never escape completely.  And that’s okay.

It has to be okay to fail, because the only way to completely avoid failure is to avoid taking any risks with your writing, and if you do that … well, let’s just say you’re probably not the kind of writer I want to read.  (If I wanted to sound really preachy, I might say something about life being the same way.)

From talking to other authors, it seems like fear of failure is one of the most common causes of writer’s block.  We’re so afraid to fail that we get stuck, unable to write at all.

Please consider this your permission to fail.  Heck, if you really want to, you can even post your failures for all to see!  Aim high, crash big, and keep right on writing.

Because — most importantly – if I’m sitting here giving everyone permission to fail, that must mean it’s okay for me to fail sometimes too.

I first started thinking seriously about becoming a writer when I was still in my teens. And it’s no coincidence that during my four years in high school I had the privilege of taking classes from four outstanding English teachers.  They taught me to write, they taught me to love the written word.  They were there during class, of course.  But they were there after school as well.  They devoted hours of their time and unmeasurable amounts of energy not only to me, but to all of us. 

There’s nothing new in this.  We hear stories about teachers giving to their students all the time.  It’s still remarkable to me that we don’t pay our teachers the way we pay our baseball stars and corporate CEOs.  But looking back I’ve always been amazed by the concentration of teaching talent in my public high school’s English department.  It’s not just that I had four outstanding teachers of writing and literature.  What’s amazing is that these were the four best teachers I had in any department in all the classes I took during my four years.

The first of these teachers, a man named Duke Schirmer, actually taught all three of my older siblings as well.  Four Coes over a span of fifteen years.  Duke was ageless and not at all what you’d expect a high school teacher to look like.  He was tall and thin, with a face that was deeply lined and unbelievably expressive.  He wore the same thing everyday:  An old white t-shirt and worn khaki pants.  He would talk to us while walking around the room or squatting of the floor like a baseball catcher or sitting with his butt on the back of the chair and his feet on the seat.  Duke taught tenth grade creative writing, and he was passionate about it.  He taught me what it meant to write from my heart, to write what I loved.  I still remember the story I wrote for my final project in that class.  I won’t tell you anything about it, because it was terrible.  I mean REALLY awful.  But it was the story I had to write, the story that was burning a whole in my heart.  And to Duke, that was everything.

The following year, I had Rose Scotch for eleventh grade literature.  I’d been an “A” student all my life, and the first paper I wrote for Rose earned me a “C+”.  I was shocked.  I didn’t know what to think, and frankly I was ticked off.  Until I read her comments.  I mean really read them.  And until I went in and talked to her, and she forced me to admit that it wasn’t a good paper, that it wasn’t the paper I should have written.  Rose spent the rest of that year encouraging me to challenge myself, and making me a better student, a more insightful reader, a more effective writer.

Senior year I took two English classes — American Literature with Mike DiGennaro, and a selective creative writing course to which I was admitted, taught by Phil Restaino.  Mike was a brilliant student of literature.  While still a teacher, he went back to school and earned his Ph.D. in lit.  How many public school teachers do that?  His passion (there’s that word again) for fiction made me look at books and stories in ways I’d never even considered before.  And Phil, who was a terrific critique of our work, taught me the most important thing I needed to learn about writing.  All of us were struggling in the class.  We’d gotten off to good starts, but as we neared the end of the term we were not getting the work done.  I’ve never forgotten what Phil told us then — I’m paraphrasing here, but basically he said that the key to writing wasn’t talent — although talent was important — it was doing the work.  He gave me the high school English class version of “Put your butt in the chair.”

It may well seem strange to readers of this post that I’m praising these teachers by name.  The names mean nothing to any of you (unless you happen to be graduates of Mamaroneck High School).  But if I was talking about writers who had influenced me or movies that had inspired me, you’d think nothing of me mentioning the writers, directors, producers, actors, and characters by name.   So why should teachers be different?  These four people shaped my life; to this day they remain heroes to me.  As a society, I don’t believe we place enough value on excellent teaching.  Maybe this is my small way of saying that teachers matter and that they made a huge difference in my professional life.

In any case, my deepest thanks to Duke, Rose, Mike, and Phil:  my teachers, my mentors, my friends.

If you’re just joining this discussion, it started with a post by Eleanor Arnason over at the Wyrdsmith’s blog, in which she discusses a panel she attended where was postulated that a majority of people prefer fantasy to science fiction.  Some of the reasons listed included that science fiction was:  too hard, too dark, and too much like present day reality.

There’s a lot to talk about there, and I covered some of it in my own earlier post here at SF Novelists.  But I recently had an epiphany about this idea that SF is too dark. 

My friend CV Rick, who blogs as The Ninja Writer, has started an on-line science fiction/fantasy short story club.  Every week, on Friday, he posts links to various SF/F short stories that are available on-line and encourages people to take an hour or so out of their lives to read them and then join in a discussion.  Lately, he’s been listing short stories that are up for major awards.  Last Friday’s was “Tideline” by SF Novelists’ own Elizabeth Bear.

Someone, it might even have been Rick, commented that in their opinion ”Tideline” story fell into the “dark and depressing category” that turns off a lot potential science fiction readers. 

My comments are going to include some spoilers, particularly about the ending, so you have been warned.  Go read the story now and come back if you don’t want your reading of the story to be affected by my opinions of it. 

I don’t think “Tideline” is depressing at all.  In fact, I think it’s incredibly hopeful.  Sure, the adoptive mother-caretaker, the war machine Chalcedony dies at the end.  Her death, however, is not without meaning or purpose.  In fact, it’s exactly the opposite.  She’s able to finish her own personal mission — making mouring necklaces for her platoon — AND she sends the young human she’s adopted and successfully raised on a quest to find people to remember the stories of each soldier. 

To me, that’s incredibly hopeful.  Having personally experienced any number of random and purposeless deaths, a life with meaning is, in point of fact, a precious and awesome thing.  More to the point, Bear does an excellent job of letting us know that Chalcedony’s time is limited.  We are shown at the very beginning how damaged and old she is.  Her death is not unexpected, what she does with the time she has left is what’s surprising… and inspiring.

What is even more hopeful to me, is that Bear’s story shows how ordinary actions — raising a child — can lead to extraordinary results. 

In my opinion, anyone who reads “Tideline” as “dark and depressing,” isn’t reading between the lines enough.