My first completed novel was not explicitly about me, but when I look at it now, I can certainly see my emotions, hopes, and fears in the main character.

I’ve thought about this a lot over the years as my writing has progressed. My writing now has more varied and dynamic characters in which I no longer see myself. My hope is that as I’ve matured as a writer I’ve developed an ability to create dynamic characters with their own unique emotions and needs.

Certainly, in Lonely Hunter, there are a number of unique and uniquely motivated characters.  Some of this is due to getting older and more observant. Some of it also studying the craft of fiction and a better understanding that characters and their competing interests is what really drives stories.

The post Are First Novels Emotionally Autobiographically? appeared first on Writing Lives...lots of them...all the time...day and night...awake and asleep...I can't control it....

My first attempt at a novel was a dystopian science fiction story while I was in 7th grade in Hays, Kansas. It focused on the Junior High students and our coming challenges as we were to be protected from a cataclysm that would wipe out society before were were to restart humanity. Probably not the best sci fi book plot of all time. 

Hays has about 20,000 residents and sits on the high prairie surrounded by millions of acres of wheat. 300 miles to our west sat Denver. 230 miles to our east was Kansas City. North of us was…a lot of wide open land up to Canada (and then more open land). South of us the Oklahoma panhandle, and then west Texas.

Culturally it is a different place. The majority of the residents are heavily influenced by their Russian-German (“Volga-German“) heritage, so Hays has an interesting dialect and food you won’t find in very many other places.

All considered, it was and still is a unique island in the middle of an ocean of wheat in the middle of America’s “fly over” country.

Obviously, this made Hays a perfect setting for one of the best sci fi books of all time. Right? Or so I thought as a 7th grader.

As an aside, my experience helping on my friends’ farms, sitting in the cab of a “combine” and shoveling wheat in silos has greatly influenced the second novel in my End War series, but that is for another day.

The storyline of my first attempt at a sci fi novel went like this: One day shortly after we got to our junior high to start the school day, metal shutters came down over all the windows and doors, and the school sank into the ground. We were told to sit on the floor near our lockers as the school descended to a massive railroad deep underground built to be used only one time. Teachers and other school leaders ran around making last-minute preparations, and a team of soldiers came running through the halls. 

Once on the railroad, the entire building began rolling south at about 10 miles per hour through a massive cave cut out of the earth for the purpose (which no one noticed happening, of course). We were told that life on Earth was about to be extinguished by some terrible event. Our school, and those of us that attended it had been randomly selected to be saved. We were going to ride the underground railroad under Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas before we were to eventually drop to the seabed in the Gulf of Mexico. From there – after various misadventures – we were going to reemerge and restart humanity. 

As I recall, I had a vague notion that in my first person telling, I was going to get hooked up with the prettiest girl in the school along the way. Go figure, right?

The story makes perfect sense. Kind of like every 7th grader’s first idea for a novel makes perfect sense.

You would think the gov’t would have picked a school on the Gulf Coast, from Houston, for instance, rather than one 1,000 miles away. But at the time this had not occurred to me. I won’t take too much blame on that count, though. Most of the sci fi books I was reading at the time were light on plausibility.

During those years I was deep into Edgar Rice Burroughs‘ science fiction books of John Carter’s misadventures on mars.

I was also reading a lot of Mack Reynolds, Arthur C. Clarke, Heinlein, and many other writers of some of the best science fiction novels of the time (another one of the best sci fi book series back then — IMHO — that comes to mind is Hiero’s Journey). And I was reading science fiction short stories in Analog, which showed up in the mail once a month. I was also swept away by movies such as Logan’s Run, Silent Running, and many other sci fi movies popular at the time.

Obviously, some of it was better than others, but as a kid, it all fired my imagination, and as I worked on my story, I realized that as a writer anything is possible. 

I also realized another issue that was more troublesome: My handwriting sucked, I was not adept at spelling, and my grammar was anything but top of the class. This was all aggravated by having to use an old, manual typewriter. I still remember the stack of pale-green paper my parents told me I could use and the joy and frustration of “whiteout“.

I only got about 10% of my sci fi novel written, and my mother still asks about how it was to end (I never figured that out). But I learned from it and began to think in terms of novels rather than short stories. 

I’d like to think Lonely Hunter will be one of the best new sci fi books of 2018, but that is a rather lofty goal, so highly improbable. However, science fiction is all about dreaming, so maybe…?

In all events, my writing has come a long way from my first attempt at a dystopian novel on green paper splattered with whiteout in a little town on the prairie.

The post The Best Sci Fi books…from Hays, Kansas? appeared first on Writing Lives...lots of them...all the time...day and night...awake and asleep...I can't control it....

This morning, while I was sitting on the deck doing some writing, our dog (Trevose — named after the street we lived on in Singapore, where we adopted her from the humane society) and a buck had a conversation through our back fence.

Moments before, a huge owl had been sitting on a limb not far above where the buck was standing in this picture. And there used to be a famiy of hawks that lived in a nearby tree, but they seem to have departed about a month ago. We have a couple hummingbird feeders, but there seems only two that frequent them. And we have a squirrel with a black head and a brown body that crosses the deck from time to time. There is a downside…

There are also more than a few mosquitoes constantly on the prowl.

We are lucky enough to live in a rural community near Lake Travis, south and west of Austin. Our home backs up to what we call around here a “wet weather” creek (it only runs when it rains and for a time after), and we have open lots on either side of us. Across the entire area, there is a lot of green space in the area. Not surprisingly, there are a lot of critters.

Several people have noted how much my upcoming Sci Fi novel, Lonely Hunter, has an “outdoorsy” feel to it, and an authentic sense of living on the land (when not in a spaceship ). The reason is that is part of how I am and how I grew up, which is is reinforced by how we now live.

Caught these guys on a video camera a few nights ago. Did not know we had another family living with us…

And the night before that, spotted this fellow…

…which kind of looks like he is from one of those goofy 1950s science fiction movies.

As a writer, one of the biggest challenges is not getting distracted. Though I enjoy our “community” of critters, sometimes it is easier to watch them than it is to stay focused on the writing that needs to get done…

The post A writer’s life… And raccoons, deer, hawks, owls and spiders appeared first on Writing Lives...lots of them...all the time...day and night...awake and asleep...I can't control it....

Aliens has long been one of my favorite Sci Fi movies. It is not great movie making, and it is not great Science Fiction. But it is a great action flick with lots of worthy special effects and various thrills. There is more than that, though, and it comes to a head when Ripley shouts out at the alien: “Get away from her you bitch!”

In this posting of the movie on YouTube, you will see a pivotal moment at about the 1:51 mark. Prior to this point, the movie has largely been about Ripley and a few stranded soldiers trying to stay alive long enough to escape the alien-infested facility. Along the way, they rescue an abandoned young girl named Newt. Ripley and Newt quickly form a mother-daughter like bond.

At the 1:51 point, Ripley is in the process of rescuing Newt when she realizes she has stumbled into what is essentially a birthing center for baby aliens. Their mother, the queen badass alien herself, is in the process of laying eggs.

What changes at this point in the movie is that it transitions from ‘just another’ evil alien movie headed to the climactic battle, to a mother-with-children vs. mother-with-child fight to the death. Two mama bears are going to do battle, and no quarter will be given.

In spite of all the gory, evil things these aliens do, it suddenly seems like aliens are people too. And it is not cool going around killing children, any children.

But this is a death match for the mother and the children, and the movie needs a brutal, final fight, which we get. It starts with Ripley’s iconic line, and in this case, “bitch” has a very literal meaning (at the 2:01 mark).

Though it is easy to forget the mother vs. mother aspect as the fight rages, at some level it makes the stakes that much higher. The setup and the realization of this plot twist elevates Aliens as an engaging story.

I use a similar (not identical) situation in Lonely Hunter. It is so much more interesting and emotionally loaded than having two men beat the crap out of each other. It seems to me that the stakes go way up when it is the mama bears going to war.

The post Science Fiction, Aliens…and Mama Bears appeared first on Writing Lives...lots of them...all the time...day and night...awake and asleep...I can't control it....