Originally published at Unabashed. You can comment here or there.

I love the Big Idea series John Scalzi is doing. I like reading about the genesis of an idea, how it came to be written. If I had an opportunity to show John Scalzi my Big Idea–which I don’t, since the book is not published–I might tell him that my idea has a lot to do with bringing science to fantasy. It might look something like this:

I love stories where there are invisible worlds set within the world we live in. The idea that someone is right there, standing next to you, but you can’t see them because they’re in this other place. The first time I remember thinking about that was in high school, when we were talking about the Mayan culture that just disappeared off the face of the Earth, without a trace. While everyone else was thinking drought or war or famine, I was thinking that they must have evolved into a higher state, and then transitioned into a separate reality from the physical one we can see.

Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, Neil Gaiman, Charles de Lint…there are a lot of writers who utilize the “world within a world” plot to great effect, but they always seemed to miss one important detail that I always wanted to see expounded upon: how did the invisible world come to be in the first place? Once I began wondering in that direction, the book Modern-Day Mythica wrote itself.

The story evolved from the concept of an energy mass that encircles the globe, that flows across the surface of the Earth like a river, from north to south. That energy is called the Wash. And everywhere that the Wash touches ground it forms pockets of reality within reality, some large and some small, attainable by certain doorways which are difficult to find and even more difficult to access, unless you really know what you’re doing. But to simply go that far with the idea still wouldn’t have satisfied my curiosity of how the Wash itself came to be, in order to form these pockets of reality. And that was the point where the idea became my Big Idea. The complexity of the concept is vast, but it fits perfectly within the scientific laws of the universe, if you can accept that there is one ingredient in the universal stew that remains undetected and unaccounted for: the energy of the Wash itself, which originates from a celestial body once in orbit around the Earth, when the Earth had two moons in the sky.

The implications of this are much more far-reaching than might initially be thought of: the presence of a moon that is unaccounted for, that disappeared some ten thousand years ago and is unrecorded except perhaps in some arcane hieroglyphs drawn on cave walls, could have a devastating impact on how science looks at history. With two moons, Earth’s time line could shorten considerably. Things that might take millions of years today, such as the formation of mountain ranges, might have only taken thousands of years in an environment where there was so much more gravitational pull on the planet’s surface. The tides would have been greater, earthquakes and volcanoes much more frequent…essentially, everything that science has applied to a timeline would have to be compressed into a much tighter margin, because things would have been happening so much faster than we can account for today. This is important because it enables the scenario where the ages of mammals and dinosaurs could have overlapped, and it is entirely feasible in the real world. Indeed, this is a scenario which is entirely possible, one which I do not believe can be proven incorrect. That was the essential Big Idea of the book.

But what happened to the moon, one might ask. Well, this is the point where the story leaves the plane of the real world and delves into fantasy or science fiction. The moon, a crusty, charred satellite with a surface composed primarily of slate, is the source of the energy of the Wash. Some combination of minerals and exotic materials, in an environment of intense heat (such as the core of the moon, which happens to be molten), releases the energy, which is copious enough to encompass both moons as well as Earth. This shared energy is a fuel for magic, making the impossible possible in many ways. For instance, the cocktail of energies allow for the existence of creatures on the moon in question, which could not exist in any world where magic is not possible. And furthermore, the influence of the energies allows for those creatures to migrate to Earth, lending credence to the ancient myth of dragons.

In Modern-Day Mythica, dragons are pivotal characters, striving to reach the cool blue comfort of Earth once again. But they were banished long ago, by means of a spell woven by a man, using the inherent energies of their home moon itself. For thousands of years the dragons have been seeking to undo what was done, and once were able to expose a rift between Earth and the realm to which their moon had been banished. This rift allowed the energies of the moon to once again enter Earth’s atmosphere, forming the Wash, and enabling magic within its borders.

This work is unpublished and unagented, although it is under consideration at this time. Read the first five chapters here.
Crappy cover art was contrived by myself, with a ganked photograph from here (the cover art is crappy, but the photo is pretty cool).

Originally published at Unabashed. You can comment here or there.

Suspension of disbelief is a useful tool for writers, especially to writers of speculative fiction. But how much artistic license are readers willing to allow a writer? Like most authors, I read quite a bit about the craft of writing, and I read an article sometime last year concerning the suspension of disbelief. I don’t remember where the article was from, one of the writer’s magazines, I’m sure, but in it the author stated specifically that it would be ludicrous to imagine people accepting a piece of fiction that involved humans and dinosaurs cohabitating the planet. Now, the novel I was writing at that time, Modern-Day Mythica, does not take place in the past, but some of the principles that are described in the book, things that make the amazing part feasible, depend a little bit upon the reader’s willingness to accept that humans and dinosaurs might have cohabitated the planet. So it should come as no surprise that since I read that article I’ve basically worried myself sick over it. Will the reader be able to forgive me this transgression? Ah, but there is a caveat, one which I hope will explain the how in a way that will be completely believable.

One thing to keep in mind here is the difference between fantasy and science fiction. For fantasy, especially when written in the Real World, the one in which we live, there’s usually a doorway into Another World, and that doorway is magical, it doesn’t require any exposition as to how it works, it simply is what it is, whether it just appeared, or it was created by a magician, whatever. The difference (to me) is that in SciFi, we want to know how the door works, explained as scientifically as possible.

For Mythica, as with most of my writing, my writing borrows from both genres: I like the fantasy to be explained by science, that’s why I prefer the tag “Speculative” when referring to my work. Also: when I’m writing something I want it to ring true, or possible, much as SciFi might read. For that reason I like to use modern-day (or near future) Earth for most of my settings. There are some more successful authors than me of fantasy who use modern-day settings. Authors like Stephen King, who, along with Peter Straub, wrote The Talisman, a story about a boy who travels to the “Territories,” a reality connected with ours somehow, but separate enough to be invisible unless you are among the duly initiated. But the vast majority of fantasy fiction writers write more like Tolkien, who shucked it all and created his own world to set his fantastic epic in. Nothing wrong with that, I’m just saying. Of course, those are just two examples from the many, but they are two of the most notable works of fantasy in the world. Either method, obviously, works well enough to sell piles of books. But at what point is the suspension of disbelief overpowered by the impossibility of an idea? And is it harder to write fantasy fiction based in the real world than in a fictional world? Well, uh, yeah, probably, that is, if you want it to ring true or even possible.

In my story Mythica I utilize a similar concept as King/Straub used for the Territories in The Talisman. But in Mythica, the reason for the alternate reality–the science of it–is explained. But it’s the exposition of that theme that’s got me concerned.

As science has given, modern humanity evolved into its current state about 200k years ago and didn’t populate North America until about 10k to 20k years ago. Dinosaurs, of course, were long gone by millions of years by then (unless you count the turtle and the alligator and the shark and the many other holdovers who lived through the supposed meteor strike that spelled doom for dino-nation). But me, I grew up a fan of Conan of Cimmeria and Hyboria and one of the elements I loved most was that, if you looked at the map of Hyboria that Robert E. Howard drew up for the character’s homeland, it bears a striking resemblance to our own world before the continents drifted apart, when the world’s oceans framed a single super continent we now call Pangaea:

“between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas” ~Robert E. Howard, “The Phoenix on the Sword,” The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian (2003)

That little map made the stories ring true for me, even though science tells me it was impossible, that humans didn’t arrive for millions of years after Pangaea split into separate land masses. It made me see possibility that civilization was older than we believe, and filled with magic and monsters and even swords and steel.

One of my challenges while writing Mythica was to make its unbelievable part somewhat believable, much the same as Howard did with Hyboria. I wanted you to be able to read it and believe that it might have been possible, and I believe I have, except for that one small point: dinosaurs. People can’t live alongside something that died out 65 million years ago. Can they? Can intelligent people–and people who read speculative fiction are, generally–suspend their disbelief long enough to accept that it’s possible?

My only defense for this is to say that, in my story, real-world science is inexact because of a number influential events that science doesn’t account for. For instance, the storyline in Mythica involves a once and second moon orbiting Earth. The second moon is smaller than the first moon, but it’s half as distant, so it appears to be larger in the sky. This single entity justifies so many things in the story:

1. There is no scientific proof that the moon ever existed, since it disappeared over 200,000 years ago.
2. While the second moon was in orbit, Earth was not a very happy place to live. Two satellites tugging at the Earth’s surface would have caused Earth’s plates to shift much faster than is currently believed. Mountains would have formed much more quickly, continental drift would have happened much more quickly. Volcanoes, earthquakes, storms, tidal waves, etc, would have ravaged the planet’s surface. Not to mention the fact that the planet might have been slower in its own orbit; days might have been longer, years, longer.

It is conceivable, in my mind, to believe that the second moon could have accounted for a sort of speeding up of time, even though its orbit was slower. If a geologist looks at the rate of continental drift today, she might say that it took millions of years for Pangaea to split apart. But if there was a second moon, it could have happened in thousands. Hundreds? I’m no geologist, but in my very basic understanding of geology, a second moon would have had a monumental impact on Earth’s surface. So, if our history involves an unaccounted-for outside influence, isn’t it conceivable that the dates we’ve assigned to certain events are erroneous? That billions of years of history, based on one single missing moon, could now be thought of as millions instead? It might not affect how we view the 15 billion-year history of the universe, but it might change the history of planet Earth considerably.

Furthermore, by allowing for this shortening of time (periods, epochs, eras), it would mean that that the age of dinosaurs and the age of man were a lot closer than we now believe. And it would allow that those ages might even overlap. We have no proof that a giant meteor struck the Earth to end the age of dinosaurs, all we have are theories and hypotheses. And I (of course) have no proof that a second moon ever orbited Earth. But, in theory, is that any less possible? As for the disappearance of the dinosaurs, my hypothesis on this is forthcoming…

So what happened to the second moon? Well, for my story, which is a work of fantasy, a magician banished the moon because he believed it to be the source of a specific scourge upon the planet. But there are other, scientific, explanations that we could consider. Perhaps the would-be meteor that supposedly hit the Earth struck the second moon instead and sent it hurtling out of orbit. There are other theories of a second moon, one with a distant, 770-year orbit, perhaps this moon was once in a much closer orbit. But while science has accepted the possibility, if not the probability or downright fact, of the presence of a second moon, as far as I can tell no one has investigated any possible ramifications it.

So, for my story, the ramifications (and the science world can feel free to adopt this theory :-) of the disappearance of the second moon is this: Time sped up. Yes, time, real time. Without two moons dragging it down, Earth’s orbit sped up allowing it to encircle the sun in the 24-hour timeframe we’re used to. At the same time, Earth’s tectonic plates slowed their constant grinding, causing the planet’s surface to change much more slowly. While the moon was in orbit it’s possible that a person could watch the formation of a mountain range in their lifetime.

1. Time sped up.
2. Planetary changes slowed down.

With those two factors in mind, it is conceivable that our comprehension of the passing of ages prior to the disappearance of the second moon might be very, very wrong, and that the ages of dinosaurs and people may have overlapped.

Now, have the history books been rewritten yet? Can you suspend your disbelief long enough to swallow that load of garbage? I’d be interested to know.

Originally published at Unabashed. You can comment here or there.

There aren’t many success stories out there, that’s for sure. John Scalzi, Cherie Priest and David Wellington are the few that pop to mind who’ve put their work on a website and then sold the work(s) for print. I know there are others, but they are few and far between, and the numbers of writers getting published in the traditional manner is still the steady king as far as sheer numbers are concerned.

But it’s just so hard, and I’m just so lazy, and hey, I’m 38. If I have to wait six months to get my rejection from Tor and then another six to get my rejection from (publisher #2) and then a year to get one from (publisher C) then I’ll be 40 and still sitting on my book. Worse, unagented works rarely get a fair shake, so the really real route to ramble through would be to shoot for an agent and hope she’ll sell the book. I just don’t know if I have it in me. The patience, I mean. We all know rejections are a part of the writing life; I don’t fear rejections, I just don’t want to get bored in the waiting.

It might be different if I was doing this for a living, but this is my hobby. Sure, I want to be a published author–and I am, in short stories–but it’s not like I won’t be able to feed my kids if I don’t sell this book. Having sold a few short I at least have enough confidence to say “I do not suck” with some authority. At least three editors have liked my stories enough to publish them, and one of them did so three times. Some considerations:

• The positive: Publishers will and do buy books that have been posted online. They may ask you to remove it immediately, but if they like it, and if it has any kind of readership, they’ll buy it. It’s proven.
• The negative: I’ll be missing out on the valuable editing process. Sure, some writers churn out work that doesn’t need any editing, but I’m not those writers. For a publisher to take me on she’d almost certainly have to refine my writing. I’ve got style, oh yes, but I’ve got some bad habits too, that have been hard for me to kick. I know I wrote a story that I’m proud of, and it’s something I would read myself, but then I’m invested in it. It’s my baby. You, though, you are the ones who would–or wouldn’t–read it. An editor could ease me through that process, help me fashion it to suit the market. But. But.
• The other negative: People don’t respect web-published authors. I’ve seen sites myself and sneered at my screen for having the audacity to show me a web-published author.
• The what if: I found David Wellington’s books through a BoingBoing post. David is a good writer who sold his books, which are still posted on his website. Linkage from a site like BB would be huge. Huge. But very unlikely. Their safety net intelligently requires that they read any fiction before posting a link to it, and as you can imagine, Cory is swamped with requests and isn’t accepting any new ones for the foreseeable future.

So I’ve got a positive, two negatives, and a what if. In dealing with the first negative I can only say that I would have to really focus on editing it down myself, and that if it’s a good enough story it’ll sell itself. Right? And I can edit; of the five shorts I’ve sold every one was posted/printed in the shape I submitted them in. I’m just not particularly good at it and, again, I’m basically lazy.

For the second negative I can say that when I saw David Wellington’s site I didn’t sneer. Why is that? Why does he automatically garner special attention as a web-published writer? And this was before I’d read the first word of any of his stories. Was it because I’d found it through the BoingBoing link, and therefore it was automatically presumed to be a “qualified” read? Or maybe it was because it was presented very well, with a cool dedicated graphic header. I don’t know, but something about the site said “writer” all over it, and therefore I bookmarked the link and referred back to it later. After reading some of his stuff, I found it to be very good and I gladly recommend it. So.

To self-publish or not to self-publish. All I know is I’m building the website now, and I’m dreading the prospect of querying this thing till I’m on the shady side of 90. The Down in the Cellar story will appear March 1st, so that should draw a lurker or ten, and maybe one of them would have liked The Ghost of Tom Johns enough to give my book a go. Plus, this blog is beginning to get noticed a bit more. Most of the hits bounce almost immediately away, but some of them stick around and read a page or two.

Any thoughts? Comments? Would you read it, or at least give it a try? Note: The excerpt I posted the other day was very gory; I should note here that that was one of the few examples of graphic violence in the book. I just particularly liked that scene, so I shared it with you.

Another exerpt from the book I've written. This one's more lengthy (3600 words) and appears in the book in the form of an interlude. Here's another smaller tidbit I posted a few months ago. I'd love to get some reaction to this concept I've put together:

An Explanation of the Wash and Dragons
By: Sir Allan Adam Dirkshire

The information to which I will swear in this explanation to be true has been endowed upon me by numerous methods; some dubious of which I am not proud. But, while this is information that could create hazards for myself and my family—i.e., the church has already declared much of this information heretical, the penalty for which is excommunication and death by torture—there is little I can do but let it be known. I pray that it will be received by a willing ear and stored in the repository of a faithful breast, for, as you will see, this information could kill—or save—us all.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,
God save the King. 1789
( Click to read the rest. )

I'm back. I've been working on my novel non-stop for months and it's finally finished, dropping in at 90k words. Speculative fiction, modern-day fantasy type stuff. Here's a teaser if you're interested:

( Disclaimer: It's gory )

Now I just have to figure out how or where to get it published.