The world in a speculative fiction story should be extremely specific, as well. Don't use bland adjectives like pretty. (World-building is a great place to use similes or metaphors--again, they should be unique.) Don't use any generic nouns. For example in your story don't use 'a guitar', use 'a Fender Jag-Stang,' or whatever's appropriate. Also, don't explain, never explain.
I'll get more specific about the next exciting issue of Electric Spec (coming March 15, 2014) starting next week!
You may be wondering why I mention all this. Well, I'll tell you: our upcoming marvelous March 15, 2014 Electric Spec issue has two stories inspired by other famous literary works. One was inspired by William Carlos Williams' poem "This Is Just To Say". One was inspired by William Shakepeare's play "The Tempest." Of course, any story inspired by something else must stand on its own two feet; it must make sense whether you're familiar with the other work or not. If you are familiar with the reference work, it can add some lovely layers and complexity.
However, be careful not to let the other work overtake the story. In an early draft of the Tempest-inspired story the author was too slavishly following the plot of The Tempest. Readers raised important questions like 'Why is the Cal[iban] character so bad? Why's he trying to hurt the hero?' Once the author looked at the story with fresher eyes, it became clear the story could lose some of The Tempest influences and be stronger for it.
We'd enjoy reading more fiction-inspired fiction in the slush pile...
We'd especially like to thank our Associate Editor Nikki Baird who helped us read stories. Thanks, Nikki! You rock! :)
At the meeting we had a spirited discussion about stories and what makes a story good. (Okay, we also had buy one get one free drafts.) Once a story makes it to hold-for-voting the competition is fierce.
Some thoughts:
Stay tuned in the coming weeks for more info about the new issue!
Furthermore, it's not the first time we've had such coincidences. The meme 'meme' is an intriguing idea. Wikipedia says, A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing …or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.
Very cool idea! Our culture has definitely evolved over the years and possibly memes were the mechanism.
What do you think? :)
I think I will not be asking our authors what they did over the holidays...
A lot of my writer friends have been telling me about their writing resolutions and goals for 2014. They are very impressive including such goals as finishing novels, publishing novels and the like. Wow! They also say sharing their goals makes them feel more accountable and hence more likely to complete their goals. I absolutely wish my ambitious writer friends the best of luck in achieving their 2014 goals.
I must admit, however, I'm not a fan of grandiose goals or resolutions, writing or otherwise. I prefer small daily assignments such as: write something new every day and every time you get a rejection, submit the piece somewhere else right away. I like assignments I can definitely complete. I guess I'm more like the turtle than the hare. But everyone's process is different. Go with what works for you.
How about it? Did you make a lot of writing resolutions and goals for 2014? Feel free to share in the comments.
Good luck with your writing in 2014!
In the meantime, one of the founders of Electric Spec, Renata Baron Hill, suggested we blog about the Narrative Prompt Story Glove. It's used for brainstorming new stories. You can see a nice picture of it here: instagram.com/p/gXprv3jFgO.
Here are some highlights:
The editors are at differing levels of slush-pile completion. Consequently, some potential authors have gotten prompt responses and some have not gotten prompt responses. Editors are assigned stories randomly so don't read anything into this. The bottom line here is we will get back to you. Please do not email us for an update.
It turns out one of the editors has a book deadline at the end of February 2014, so we will be postponing the publication of the next issue to March 15, 2014. This is one-time-only publication postponement. The following issue will still be May 31, 2014. If you're interested in behind-the-scenes info, the production meeting is being pushed to the second week of February. :)
What else? We need art submissions for the cover. Please email us some art! See the info here: www.electricspec.com/submissions/submitting-art. We are also looking for an author interview. If you or someone you know has a speculative fiction novel coming out in the beginning of 2014, please let us know. I recommend you send an email to submissions at electric spec dot com, with the subject line: POTENTIAL INTERVIEW. Thanks!
Finally, a couple comments from the slush pile:
I hope your 2014 is going well and you're still on track for your writing-related resolutions.
Professor Emeritus James E. Gunn passed along the following very interesting predictions of 2014
by Isaac Asimov. It's getting a lot of interest on Huffington Post and elsewhere so I thought I'd pass it along even though it's long. I do love The Good Doctor. :)
Enjoy!
August 16, 1964
Visit to the World's Fair of 2014
By ISAAC ASIMOV
[T]he New York World's Fair of 1964 is dedicated to "Peace Through Understanding."
Its glimpses of the world of tomorrow rule out thermonuclear warfare. And why not?
If a thermonuclear war takes place, the future will not be worth discussing. So let
the missiles slumber eternally on their pads and let us observe what may come in the
nonatomized world of the future.
What is to come, through the fair's eyes at least, is wonderful. The direction in which man is traveling is viewed with buoyant hope, nowhere more so than at the General Electric pavilion. There the audience whirls through four scenes, each populated by cheerful, lifelike dummies that move and talk with a facility that, inside of a minute and a half, convinces you they are alive.
The scenes, set in or about 1900, 1920, 1940 and 1960, show the advances of electrical appliances and the changes they are bringing to living. I enjoyed it hugely and only regretted that they had not carried the scenes into the future. What will life be like, say, in 2014 A.D., 50 years from now? What will the World's Fair of 2014 be like?
I don't know, but I can guess.
One thought that occurs to me is that men will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better. By 2014, electroluminescent panels will be in common use. Ceilings and walls will glow softly, and in a variety of colors that will change at the touch of a push button.
Windows need be no more than an archaic touch, and even when present will be polarized to block out the harsh sunlight. The degree of opacity of the glass may even be made to alter automatically in accordance with the intensity of the light falling upon it.
There is an underground house at the fair which is a sign of the future. if its windows are not polarized, they can nevertheless alter the "scenery" by changes in lighting. Suburban houses underground, with easily controlled temperature, free from the vicissitudes of weather, with air cleaned and light controlled, should be fairly common. At the New York World's Fair of 2014, General Motors' "Futurama" may well display vistas of underground cities complete with light- forced vegetable gardens. The surface, G.M. will argue, will be given over to large-scale agriculture, grazing and parklands, with less space wasted on actual human occupancy.
Gadgetry will continue to relieve mankind of tedious jobs. Kitchen units will be devised that will prepare "automeals," heating water and converting it to coffee; toasting bread; frying, poaching or scrambling eggs, grilling bacon, and so on. Breakfasts will be "ordered" the night before to be ready by a specified hour the next morning. Complete lunches and dinners, with the food semiprepared, will be stored in the freezer until ready for processing. I suspect, though, that even in 2014 it will still be advisable to have a small corner in the kitchen unit where the more individual meals can be prepared by hand, especially when company is coming.
Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence. The I.B.M. exhibit at the present fair has no robots but it is dedicated to computers, which are shown in all their amazing complexity, notably in the task of translating Russian into English. If machines are that smart today, what may not be in the works 50 years hence? It will be such computers, much miniaturized, that will serve as the "brains" of robots. In fact, the I.B.M. building at the 2014 World's Fair may have, as one of its prime exhibits, a robot housemaid*large, clumsy, slow- moving but capable of general picking-up, arranging, cleaning and manipulation of various appliances. It will undoubtedly amuse the fairgoers to scatter debris over the floor in order to see the robot lumberingly remove it and classify it into "throw away" and "set aside." (Robots for gardening work will also have made their appearance.)
General Electric at the 2014 World's Fair will be showing 3-D movies of its "Robot of the Future," neat and streamlined, its cleaning appliances built in and performing all tasks briskly. (There will be a three-hour wait in line to see the film, for some things never change.)
The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords, of course, for they will be powered by long- lived batteries running on radioisotopes. The isotopes will not be expensive for they will be by- products of the fission-power plants which, by 2014, will be supplying well over half the power needs of humanity. But once the isotype batteries are used up they will be disposed of only through authorized agents of the manufacturer.
And experimental fusion-power plant or two will already exist in 2014. (Even today, a small but genuine fusion explosion is demonstrated at frequent intervals in the G.E. exhibit at the 1964 fair.) Large solar-power stations will also be in operation in a number of desert and semi-desert areas -- Arizona, the Negev, Kazakhstan. In the more crowded, but cloudy and smoggy areas, solar power will be less practical. An exhibit at the 2014 fair will show models of power stations in space, collecting sunlight by means of huge parabolic focusing devices and radiating the energy thus collected down to earth.
The world of 50 years hence will have shrunk further. At the 1964 fair, the G.M. exhibit depicts, among other things, "road-building factories" in the tropics and, closer to home, crowded highways along which long buses move on special central lanes. There is every likelihood that highways at least in the more advanced sections of the world*will have passed their peak in 2014; there will be increasing emphasis on transportation that makes the least possible contact with the surface. There will be aircraft, of course, but even ground travel will increasingly take to the air*a foot or two off the ground. Visitors to the 1964 fair can travel there in an "aquafoil," which lifts itself on four stilts and skims over the water with a minimum of friction. This is surely a stop-gap. By 2014 the four stilts will have been replaced by four jets of compressed air so that the vehicle will make no contact with either liquid or solid surfaces.
Jets of compressed air will also lift land vehicles off the highways, which, among other things, will minimize paving problems. Smooth earth or level lawns will do as well as pavements. Bridges will also be of less importance, since cars will be capable of crossing water on their jets, though local ordinances will discourage the practice.
Much effort will be put into the designing of vehicles with "Robot-brains"*vehicles that can be set for particular destinations and that will then proceed there without interference by the slow reflexes of a human driver. I suspect one of the major attractions of the 2014 fair will be rides on small roboticized cars which will maneuver in crowds at the two-foot level, neatly and automatically avoiding each other.
For short-range travel, moving sidewalks (with benches on either side, standing room in the center) will be making their appearance in downtown sections. They will be raised above the traffic. Traffic will continue (on several levels in some places) only because all parking will be off-street and because at least 80 per cent of truck deliveries will be to certain fixed centers at the city's rim. Compressed air tubes will carry goods and materials over local stretches, and the switching devices that will place specific shipments in specific destinations will be one of the city's marvels.
Communications will become sight-sound and you will see as well as hear the person you telephone. The screen can be used not only to see the people you call but also for studying documents and photographs and reading passages from books. Synchronous satellites, hovering in space will make it possible for you to direct-dial any spot on earth, including the weather stations in Antarctica (shown in chill splendor as part of the '64 General Motors exhibit).
For that matter, you will be able to reach someone at the moon colonies, concerning which General Motors puts on a display of impressive vehicles (in model form) with large soft tires*intended to negotiate the uneven terrain that may exist on our natural satellite.
Any number of simultaneous conversations between earth and moon can be handled by modulated laser beams, which are easy to manipulate in space. On earth, however, laser beams will have to be led through plastic pipes, to avoid material and atmospheric interference. Engineers will still be playing with that problem in 2014.
Conversations with the moon will be a trifle uncomfortable, but the way, in that 2.5 seconds must elapse between statement and answer (it takes light that long to make the round trip). Similar conversations with Mars will experience a 3.5-minute delay even when Mars is at its closest. However, by 2014, only unmanned ships will have landed on Mars, though a manned expedition will be in the works and in the 2014 Futurama will show a model of an elaborate Martian colony.
As for television, wall screens will have replaced the ordinary set; but transparent cubes will be making their appearance in which three-dimensional viewing will be possible. In fact, one popular exhibit at the 2014 World's Fair will be such a 3-D TV, built life-size, in which ballet performances will be seen. The cube will slowly revolve for viewing from all angles.
One can go on indefinitely in this happy extrapolation, but all is not rosy.
As I stood in line waiting to get into the General Electric exhibit at the 1964 fair, I found myself staring at Equitable Life's grim sign blinking out the population of the United States, with the number (over 191,000,000) increasing by 1 every 11 seconds. During the interval which I spent inside the G.E. pavilion, the American population had increased by nearly 300 and the world's population by 6,000.
In 2014, there is every likelihood that the world population will be 6,500,000,000 and the population of the United States will be 350,000,000. Boston-to-Washington, the most crowded area of its size on the earth, will have become a single city with a population of over 40,000,000.
Population pressure will force increasing penetration of desert and polar areas. Most surprising and, in some ways, heartening, 2014 will see a good beginning made in the colonization of the continental shelves. Underwater housing will have its attractions to those who like water sports, and will undoubtedly encourage the more efficient exploitation of ocean resources, both food and mineral. General Motors shows, in its 1964 exhibit, the model of an underwater hotel of what might be called mouth-watering luxury. The 2014 World's Fair will have exhibits showing cities in the deep sea with bathyscaphe liners carrying men and supplies across and into the abyss.
Ordinary agriculture will keep up with great difficulty and there will be "farms" turning to the more efficient micro-organisms. Processed yeast and algae products will be available in a variety of flavors. The 2014 fair will feature an Algae Bar at which "mock-turkey" and "pseudosteak" will be served. It won't be bad at all (if you can dig up those premium prices), but there will be considerable psychological resistance to such an innovation.
Although technology will still keep up with population through 2014, it will be only through a supreme effort and with but partial success. Not all the world's population will enjoy the gadgety world of the future to the full. A larger portion than today will be deprived and although they may be better off, materially, than today, they will be further behind when compared with the advanced portions of the world. They will have moved backward, relatively.
Nor can technology continue to match population growth if that remains unchecked. Consider Manhattan of 1964, which has a population density of 80,000 per square mile at night and of over 100,000 per square mile during the working day. If the whole earth, including the Sahara, the Himalayan Mountain peaks, Greenland, Antarctica and every square mile of the ocean bottom, to the deepest abyss, were as packed as Manhattan at noon, surely you would agree that no way to support such a population (let alone make it comfortable) was conceivable. In fact, support would fail long before the World-Manhattan was reached.
Well, the earth's population is now about 3,000,000,000 and is doubling every 40 years. If this rate of doubling goes unchecked, then a World-Manhattan is coming in just 500 years. All earth will be a single choked Manhattan by A.D. 2450 and society will collapse long before that!
There are only two general ways of preventing this: (1) raise the death rate; (2) lower the birth rate. Undoubtedly, the world of A>D. 2014 will have agreed on the latter method. Indeed, the increasing use of mechanical devices to replace failing hearts and kidneys, and repair stiffening arteries and breaking nerves will have cut the death rate still further and have lifted the life expectancy in some parts of the world to age 85.
There will, therefore, be a worldwide propaganda drive in favor of birth control by rational and humane methods and, by 2014, it will undoubtedly have taken serious effect. The rate of increase of population will have slackened*but, I suspect, not sufficiently.
One of the more serious exhibits at the 2014 World's Fair, accordingly, will be a series of lectures, movies and documentary material at the World Population Control Center (adults only; special showings for teen-agers).
The situation will have been made the more serious by the advances of automation. The world of A.D. 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders. Schools will have to be oriented in this direction. Part of the General Electric exhibit today consists of a school of the future in which such present realities as closed-circuit TV and programmed tapes aid the teaching process. It is not only the techniques of teaching that will advance, however, but also the subject matter that will change. All the high-school students will be taught the fundamentals of computer technology will become proficient in binary arithmetic and will be trained to perfection in the use of the computer languages that will have developed out of those like the contemporary "Fortran" (from "formula translation").
Even so, mankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom, a disease spreading more widely each year and growing in intensity. This will have serious mental, emotional and sociological consequences, and I dare say that psychiatry will be far and away the most important medical specialty in 2014. The lucky few who can be involved in creative work of any sort will be the true elite of mankind, for they alone will do more than serve a machine.
Indeed, the most somber speculation I can make about A.D. 2014 is that in a society of enforced leisure, the most glorious single word in the vocabulary will have become work!
I had some folks disagree with me about my comment from last week that fictional dialogue should be better than real dialogue, so let's talk about it some more. (Pun intended. Doh!) Fiction is supposed to be realistic, right? Realistic, yes. Real, no.
Have you ever taken the time to listen to folks talking around you, say, in a crowded place? Take a moment and do so. You'll hear a plethora of "um", "like", "so", "well", "yeah", and the like. :) Try transcribing it. Very little actual information is imparted. Probably several people talk with similar jargon, dialect, and vocabulary.
Dialogue should impart information and create character. Re. info: This is done by having one character tell another character something he/she does not already know. Do not use any "As you know, Bob's". Re. building character: This is also done by having each character utilize unique voice/jargon/dialect/vocab. Ideally, each character's dialogue is so unique you wouldn't need a dialogue tag.
Speaking of dialogue tags… You don't need more than one dialogue tag per paragraph. (Of course, you would never have more than one speaker per paragraph.) You should only use forms of "said" and "asked" in tags--because they're invisible to the reader. You don't need to tag all dialogue if there are only two people in the scene. You do need to somehow tag all dialogue if there are more than two people in the scene--this can be accomplished by the uniqueness mentioned above. You can also use what some people call "beats," small physical actions. Facial expressions also work here. But be careful with punctuation! I'm not talking about using beats as dialogue tags.
For example: "Hubba, hubba," he grinned. <--is not correct.
"Hubba, hubba." He grinned. <--is fine.
Good luck with your dialogue and everything else in 2014!
The seven medieval or classical planets were the Sun and Moon and the five non-earth planets of our solar system closest to the Earth: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Notice these form the seven days of the week: Sun-day, Moon-day, Saturn-day, and in Latin: 'Martis' (Mars, Tuesday), 'Mercurii' (Wednesday), 'Iovis' (Jupiter, Thursday) and 'Veneris' (Venus, Friday).
Neat!
Each of these heavenly bodies was believed to have certain attributes, and Ward says that these attributes were de liberately used by Lewis to furnish elements of the stories of each book:
Eric Del Carlo brings us a story about a boy who flies in "At Wave's Ebb." In "A Page of Skulls," Tony Peak tells a dark tale of a dark and magnificently strange world. On the lighter side, Fredrick Obermeyer's "The IUD that Landed in Grandpa's Backyard" show us the humorous side of first contact. "Discarded" by Miranda Suri is an artistic urban fantasy with a dash of crime. And, finally, our debut author Steve Rodgers shows his stuff with an exciting backwoods cyber-thriller, "Cortex." For our special features, our spec-tacular movie critic Marty Mapes takes a look at "hard" science fiction movies making a comeback at the box office. Huzzah!
We also have a very interesting Editor's Corner entry from Editor/Author Betsy Dornbusch on "Gender Equality in Science Fiction and Fantasy Fandom and Industry." Huzzah, again!
What's your favorite? They're all so good, I can't decide. :)
In "Discarded" modern art comes to life to help (or not) a man come to terms with his issues. Why's it titled "Discarded"? You'll just have to read it and find out. We've published Suri before. You can find her story "The New Arrival" here.
In "At the Wave's Ebb" an unusual man also has to come to terms with his issues. How's he unusual? What issues are these? Again, read it to find out. :) We've also published Del Carlo before. Check out his story "A Crowd of Possibilities" here.
A couple weeks ago I was remiss in not linking to Fredrick Obermeyer's previous story for us. Check out "The Coincidence Factory" here. We actually have another Obermeyer story, "Birth of a New Day" here. Clearly, we like Obermeyer. Hopefully, you do too.
Please check out all the new stories on November 30 2013!
Thank you in advance to all the behind the scenes folks and all the contributing authors. We couldn't have done it without you. Huzzah, for you! :)
Of course, the subdivisions of fantasy literature are many. Closely related to high fantasy is epic fantasy. Epic fantasy is fantasy that is defined by the epic nature of the characters, plot, and/or themes. Notice most epic fantasy is also high fantasy. Famous examples here include the classics The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, A Song of Ice and Fire.
Interestingly, we don't get a lot of high or epic fantasy stories. Think about submitting one, if you've got one or an idea for one.
Probably the most popular kind of fantasy these days is urban fantasy. I said the other day that urban fantasy is a fantasy set on contemporary planet Earth. Notice it definitely does not have to be set in an urban area--this is a common misconception. Urban fantasy takes place on our world; it just has fantasy element(s) added to it. Next week I'll discuss a couple urban fantasies we'll be publishing in the next issue.
Check back then! :)
It raises the interesting question of sub-genres. Last year I got my M.F.A. in Writing Popular Fiction and extensively studied the different genres and sub-genres associated with speculative fiction. One very popular sub-genre now with readers and writers is urban fantasy. Urban fantasy is not necessarily what it sounds like, however; it doesn't have to be set in an urban area. Urban fantasy is set on the contemporary Earth and fantastical elements are just added in.
Hhm. Based on the concept of urban fantasy, maybe the stories in question should be classified as urban science fiction...
You'll have to read them on November 30, 2013 and decide for yourself. :)
We, The Editors, try to be as objective as possible with our story selection. Thus, before the meeting we each rank the stories in hold-for-voting on a numerical scale. Interestingly, our pre-meeting rankings were very different this time. It didn't bode well... But when we discussed the stories we ended up with just five that were 'still in the mix', five stories that we all enjoyed, were original, and showed a mastery of craft. Viola; the stories in the issue! We've never had such a harmonious meeting. I'll blog more about the stories a little later in the month. Purely by coincidence (we don't consider the query letters or author names in our objective rankings), four out of five authors were folks we've published before. I don't know if that's good or bad, but it does seem to indicate we like what we like. Also in the issue Editor/Author Betsy will have an interesting essay in Editor's Corner. We've also got some neat art in the works. As we close out our eighth (!) year at Electric Spec, it promises to be another excellent issue.
We'd like to thank our awesome Associate Editor Nikki Baird for her help with the infamous slush pile: Thanks, Nikki!
So, what's next for the November 2013 issue? All the authors who submitted by the October 15, 2013 deadline have been contacted with a yay or nay. If you haven't heard from us, we probably didn't get your story. :( Once we hear back from the 'yay' authors, we start editing their stories and setting up the new issue on our Content Management System. Once we edit the stories, we send them back to authors for their approval, or if needed, for rewrites. Rinse and repeat as necessary. And then it magically all comes together by the end of the month...
Happy Halloween!
How you write your story can make a rather tired plot fresh again.
In general, authors should be as specific as possible, especially for nouns. Don't refer to 'a guitar', refer to 'a Gibson SG' (or whatever is appropriate). Create a unique world. Always paint your story picture through the protagonist(s) lens. Descriptions should be from the character(s) perspective. Adjectives like 'beautiful' are relatively meaningless; how is it beautiful to the character?
If you've noticed I'm using the words 'character' and 'protagonist' a lot here, this is no accident. A unique character can make a tired plot fresh. A little girl assassin was fresh (the first time we saw it).
Another way to impart originality in the 'how you write' vein is voice. This concept is more difficult to pin down but it is the combination of vocabulary, sentence length, paragraph length, tone, and all the other writerly tools used to create a story. I've blogged about voice before here:V is for Voice and here:Spec Fic Tools II: Voice.
Good luck creating your unique story.
In the coming weeks I'll start blogging about the new November 2013 issue. Stay tuned for that. :)
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