Dramas aren’t the only literary works that have scenes. They naturally occur in short fiction and novels (maybe even biographies?). Authors can, in fact, forget about outlining if they move from scene to scene, not that this is necessarily recommended because other story elements are important too.

If a newbie author trying to figure out where to break the prose into chapters and sections when point-of-view (POV) doesn’t do that naturally, scenes can help make that determination. In fact, readers might get upset by abrupt scene changes within a section or chapter as much as they do with abrupt POV changes (often called “head-hopping”), so both can help authors decide where natural breaks occur. Moreover, scene changes and POV changes often go hand-in-hand: Different scene, different POV, because the scene features a different character.

Even when settings remain the same in flashbacks or back story, there’s a scene change because a scene involves time as well as space. A setting might remind a character of what happened in that flashback or back story, yet there is a change even though the setting is the same: A jump into the past in the character’s mind. This also presents two opportunities: First, to show how the character’s mindset has changed over time; and second, to provide a pause in the action.

Does this seem complicated? It’s really not. It all comes naturally the more fiction you write. Like riding a bicycle or driving a car, once learned, it becomes second nature. But that shouldn’t stop old hands from reflecting on what was just written. Even old hands can improve their prose!

There are some things to watch out for, of course. Just like in drama, what occurs in a scene needs to be meaningful. For example, a gratuitous sex scene might be an effective hook at the beginning of a story, no matter the genre, but it must mean something farther into a story.

Another example that’s a bit difficult to pull off is the scene where a character dies. An editor of Son of Thunder, for example, reacted strongly when I killed off a character whom she liked. Perhaps I should have built up to that scene in a better way? The same thing happened in Aristocrats and Assassins when a reviewer reacted strongly after I killed off a character. In the first case, I might have built up the character too much; in the second, I thought my character description was a bit more ambivalent, so there’d be no problem. Of course, both negative reactions are anecdotal and don’t represent a valid statistical sample.

Of course, both scenes could be justified by their shock value. Twists in fiction scenes, especially mysteries, thrillers, and sci-fi, can please readers like surprises from a pinata. That has value too.

Settings are often confused with scenes. The latter is a more general concept because scenes have their own plot, characters and their POVs, dialogue, and settings—they’re miniature, self-contained stories for the most part.

Authors can put drama into their stories with scenes, so the better they are, the better the drama.

***

Comments are always welcome.

Even short fiction employs scenes! My collections Sleuthing, British-Style, Volumes One and Two contains quite a few. Volume One is available on Amazon, and Volume Two can be downloaded for free—see the list on the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page at this website. (More can be found in the “Friday Fiction” archive and will eventually end up in PDF downloads found in the list.) I’m binge-reading others’ British-style mysteries, and they’re influencing my short fiction and their scenes as well as the last novels in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series. They’re a great way to learn about the milieu and culture of our friends across the pond!

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

They are rarely provided by governments now as huge conglomerates spread their tendrils around the world to strangle all competition. I’ve just considered Facebook, that online behemoth that has damaged everything from our youth to our democracies, yet is allowed to compete with other online services by swallowing them up in its evil maws. That’s one place that pisses this reader and author off. Another is found in the publishing industry.

The Big Six publishers were reduced to the Big Five when Random House gobbled up Penguin. Now Penguin Random House wants to swallow Simon and Schuster. Where are the antitrust and anti-monopoly protections?

There are two problems here for a reader like me. First, the huge publishing conglomerates emphasize hardbound, print books over ebooks because that’s where they can scam the reading public most efficiently. I hate print and avoid it wherever possible. You have to wait forever to get an ebook version for the rare good book published by one of these conglomerates, for one thing; and that rare, good book is rarely kept on my bookshelf because they’re doorstoppers that take up to much space and make the shelves sag.  I only read hard-bound books when relatives or friends give them to me, or they’re the only published version available when I write a review (those are often free, but the price tags are usually around $30—I can buy up to ten ebooks for that price, although not from the Big Five).

The latter indicates the extent of how the book-publishing conglomerates flaunt the antitrust and anti-monopoly laws. Let’s consider the last four of my reviews of hardbound books: Klobuchar’s Antitrust, Leonnig’s Zero Fail, McMahon’s A Good Kill, and Woodward and Costa’s Peril. All were free (or I wouldn’t have read them), and all are involved with one of those nefarious Big Five conglomerates, Penguin Random House, in one way or the other. This beast publishes about 15,000 books per year. Let’s ignore for the moment that most of those books, including three of the four I mention, would mostly be lost to average readers who don’t keep up on the new books. (I do, whether I read them or not.)

Klobuchar’s, published by Borzoi, which in turn is part of Alfred A. Knopf, now owned by Penguin Random House, illustrates the problem. This monster publisher is huge! Ironically, and for obvious reasons, Klobuchar mentions how big publishing conglomerates are eating up smaller publishers, an example of what she rails against in her book, making me wonder if she’s truly serious about protecting consumers against trusts and monopolies. Apparently her fat contract received because she’s a celebrity politician muted her critique; or worse, her publisher, kept her from saying too much. A bribe leading to muzzling? I wouldn’t put it past Penguin Random House.

Leonnig’s Zero Fail is the only book published by Random House in my list and not one of Penguin Random House’s imprints (unless you now call Random House an imprint of Penguin Random House?). McMahon’s A Good Kill, the only fiction in the list (it’s a thriller), is published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, one of the old publishers that, you guessed it, is now part of Penguin Random House. Finally, Woodward and Costa’s Peril is published by Simon and Schuster, another old publisher that will be consumed by Penguin Random House, unless the latter’s voracious appetite is stopped.

I don’t know if all this isn’t some giant conspiracy by the big publishing conglomerates to maintain control over the book industry. They fear self-publishing and small presses alike. They eat up the latter if they’re successful, a la Facebook. They can’t do anything much about self-publishing. Self-published authors are the ones I read most because that’s where the good books are usually found! Twenty-five to one would be my estimate. And those are the books I keep (as ebooks on my Kindle or laptop).

Of course, the Big Five aren’t the only ones playing these monopolistic games. Amazon wants to play in that space too, beating them to the punch by gobbling up Thomas Mercer, for example, which is as snooty and against self-published books as any Big Five conglomerate. Things can only get worse, and readers will continue to suffer all this monopolistic activity.

The Biden administration has sued to stop Penguin Random House from swallowing Simon and Schuster. I hope they succeed, but I fear it’s too late, that we’re beyond the tipping point, as is the case for many multinational corporate enterprises. I will continue to fight these monopolistic trends as much as I can. I might have parted with my own two small presses, but I hope they can remain independent. I doubt they will be able to do so, though.

***

Comments are always welcome.

Death on the Danube. While you shouldn’t consider this the last novel in a trilogy (as the publisher of the first two books in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series wanted—there are two more novels in the series, making it into a “pentalogy”), it represents an inflection point in Esther’s long life. In the first two novels, Esther and Bastiann are older lovers, both a bit hesitant about a twilight marriage; but they’re married in this story and on their honeymoon, a riverboat cruise down that famous river. They can’t escape their past as accomplished sleuths, though, because Interpol agent Bastiann must lead a murder investigation onboard the riverboat. For a visual preview, see the trailer. Available wherever quality ebooks are sold, and there’s also a print version.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

Mark “Sugar-Mountain” Zuckerberg, thinking he’s some kind of god in control of the internet, continues to annoy me, to say the least. From the moment I created my Facebook author page (the URL is https://www.facebook.com/authorStevenMMoore for those interested), I knew he and most of his minions at Facebook were greedy SOBs. Every post on my author page is followed by advice to reach out to more Facebook users by creating an ad! And anyone accessing that page is hit by ads as well (not mine). They (and Google as well) make all their money that way. Sorry, Mark, I won’t let you exploit me! I know you will bury my posts about my books, if only with other ads, and make my readers furious, because I won’t play your games. I don’t give a damn now. (Well, I do about my readers, but Zuckerberg can go to hell.)

I created that page because many pundits and a few author friends recommended it. Same for using the social media aspects of Facebook. All social media is similar to more insidious versions of PR and marketing whose gurus want to take authors’ money. Most of the those gurus  pay homage to the Amazon god by exclusively playing Bezos’s game (Penny Sansevieri’s AME is a prime example.) While social media has the positive of allowing me to keep in contact with some internet friends, it’s useless for book marketing. (So is Amazon. The only thing their bots did for me was to confuse two books in “The Last Humans” series, If B&N can keep them straight, why can’t Amazon? (That’s why the links in the ad below go to B&N. You won’t see many links to Amazon here anymore.)

I’ve thought many times about completely cancelling Facebook (even for my social media). Old-fashioned email seems effective enough to maintain contact with relatives and friends, fellow authors included (spam from everyone else is treated accordingly). Election meddling aside (Facebook will take anyone’s money, including Putin’s), the whole Facebook edifice is just built on sand, volcanic black sand steaming with corporate greed. No, not sand, but quicksand. One sinks into it and disappears, burning as if you just passed across the river Styx. It’s much torturous than drowning.

And what’s this about that name change to “Meta”? Sugar-Mountain says it’s short for “Metaverse.” Now I know old Mark has no real interest in physics—he probably flunked all of high school science—so I don’t buy his reasons for the name. (I’m just happy I used the string theory term “Multiverse” instead of “Metaverse” in the title for my sci-fi rom-com, A Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse). What he really means is VR, short for “virtual reality.” As much as I think Harari is a charlatan (a history prof popping off about past and future science who has no business doing so, and makes tons of mistakes doing it), he has warned us enough about VR and AI. Facebook’s current algorithms are AI—they study users and then target them with ads (which I ignore, of course)—and Meta indicates a future where Sugar-Mountain plans to turn everyone on planet Earth into a VR avatar, a conspiracy to create a worse world than the one in Neuromancer.

That famous and brave whistle-blower (I won’t mention her name, not wanting her to be attacked by crazies) has exposed a lot of Facebook’s shenanigans that I’d only suspected by observation and without solid proof that would hold up in court. The transgressions, in my opinion, are sufficient to close down Facebook and ban it for good, whatever it’s called. They’ll never learn and are too arrogant to change, especially Sugar-Mountain and his close confidents. (I’d never “lean on” one, for example; she’s luring us into that hot quicksand.)

I’ll play along with the internet’s Goebbels for a while longer until I’m so sick of Mark and his cronies that I can’t stand to use Facebook anymore. You might want to consider using my email steve@stevenmmoore.com now, though, because you never know when Facebook puts me over the edge. Or they ban me. In any case, my days there are numbered.

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Comments are welcome.

The Last Humans: A New Dawn. For a short time, the first novel in this series was the bestselling Black Opal Books’ novel on Barnes & Noble. This second novel continues Penny Castro’s adventures in a post-apocalyptic world. What remains of the US government forces Penny and her husband Alex to participate in a revenge campaign against the country that caused the apocalyptic pandemic…by kidnapping their young children! Just as thrilling as the first novel but independently readable, this Draft2Digital ebook is available wherever quality ebooks are sold (just not at Amazon, Black Opal Books, or Smashwords).

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

I’ve dissed NaNoWriMo aka “National Novel Writing Month” before. Let’s forget about the poor choice of November for this annual writing frenzy. (Thanksgiving in the US is a major travel holiday that can take out a big chunk of writing time!) That’s not an important criticism. (For all I know, authors take advantage of holidays to write, especially if they otherwise have demanding day-jobs.) No, my main criticism is that no one should write a novel in a month! Or even think they can.

So…you’re not one-third of the way through the month. Have you finished one-third of your great American novel? Maybe you have sixty thousand words in an MS Word file and even an outline for everything, but in the twenty day left, it’s almost impossible for you to turn even that into a novel. NaNoWriMo is a sprint, while writing a novel is a marathon. You’re winded now? You have seventeen or eighteen miles to go!

Having written a few novels, I have a large statistical sample that I can extrapolate to say, “The odds are against you.” I’ve never written a novel in a month. I’m lucky to finish a short fiction piece in a month! I don’t want to discourage writers or dampen their enthusiasm—after all, I’m an avid reader who’s always looking for a good story—but steady writing a bit each day over months or years is much better praxis than fits and starts for a writing project. Authors are the captains of their writing voyages, and “steady as she goes” is always better advice for a captain to follow than “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!” The latter is likely to end in a shipwreck, and the author can go down with the ship.

I have speedily written a few novels. The Midas Bomb‘s  words just spewed, page after page; The Secret Lab‘s prose went quickly too. Maybe that was because The Midas Bomb was my first mystery/thriller and I had two new characters, a crime-fighting duo, to spur my interest; and The Secret Lab was my very first YA novel with a lovable mutant cat as a main character. But that speed had consequences: The Midas Bomb required a second edition to make it better and align it with other books in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco” series; and The Secret Lab also had a second edition, a bit of makeover by A. B. Carolan to prepare for more YA sci-fi mysteries to follow.

Mind you, the first two editions of those novels were good, modesty aside, but the speed in writing and publishing the first editions left me dissatisfied. And, even with that speedy writing, I didn’t finish them in a month!

Because my writing technique involves content editing as I go, that speedy writing was due to the stories nearly writing themselves, so there wasn’t much need for content editing. In fact, self-analysis tells me that my writing speed is determined by how much content editing is required. Or, to put in another way, how well-formed the entire story is in my mind (I don’t do outlines because they constrain me).

That’s my writing technique, of course. If yours is getting a fast first draft done with editing only in subsequent drafts, I suppose it’s possible to get the first draft done in a month like the organizers of NaNoWriMo encourage you to do. But, if you do no self-editing after that month, you’re being unfair to your beta-readers and other editors who’ll read the manuscript. In fact, no acquisition editor worth that title will want to receive an unpolished manuscript. Whether self- or traditionally published, your tale will need polishing before anyone else sees it, and that’s impossible to do in a month!

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Comments are welcome!

The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection. Here’s another example of what I mean by the above post: This bargain bundle of three epic sci-fi novels, none of them written in a month, should provide many hours of entertainment for any reader interested in sci-fi. Survivors of the Chaos starts in dystopia with multinational corporations dominating both the Earth and the solar system, maintaining order with their corporate militias. First contact occurs in Sing a Zamba Galactica as friendly ETs are discovered on the third planet colonized by human beings; a further contact with more ETs is not so lucky, and some collective intelligences out there in intergalactic near-Earth space just might blow your mind. Finally, if the first two novels represent my First and Second Foundations, Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand! features my Mule, an autocratic psychopath who is out to control near-Earth space with psi armies. This bundle is a bargain you can find wherever quality ebooks are sold.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

Isaac Asimov made androids and robots famous long before the Star Wars movies did. He took some ideas from Capek’s seminal play and created sci-fi tales that revolutionized the genre, even inventing the three laws that they had to follow so people could get past their Frankenstein complex. (Mary Shelley’s monster was neither an android nor a robot, of course; today it might be called a golem or zombie.) As a tween reading Asimov’s stories (in the early days of the computer age), I often wondered how those three laws could be programmed. I still do.

But I digress. Androids and robots are only some of the elements of sci-fi. Asimov didn’t have ETs in his stories, just humans and mechanical men. (I can’t ever remember an android or robot with female characteristics in his stories, so that last is politically correct.) My sci-fi stories have both but probably more ETs (even some with matriarchal societies).

And sometimes all the fancy technical stuff, once explained, is assumed. Castilblanco talks about NYPD-issued PDAs but really means smart phones, considering the timeline of the stories in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco” series. The implant in a person’s head that allows a direct link to the internet first appears in Survivors of the Chaos, the first novel of the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection,” but it’s taken for granted in later books. And FTL travel, once discovered in Sing a Zamba Galactica, the second novel of that trilogy, is rarely mentioned again. All that tech is still there, of course, but I don’t want to bore or distract readers by mentioning them over and over.

Androids and robots appear more sporadically than ETs or futuristic tech in my stories. In my “Future History” timeline (Chen and Castilblanco start that, and it continues through many stories, all the way to the Dr. Carlos tales), some cultures have them, others don’t. There are cyborgs too (although I call them MECHs, but the “Mary Jo Melendez Mysteries” don’t fall on that extended timeline), as well as clones and mutants (the “Clones and Mutants Trilogy” is on that timeline). The ultimate distillation of all those programmable beings is the disembodied AIs that play multiple roles, some that HAL could never imagine even in his wildest dreams.

Sometimes I mix up things in new ways. In A. B. Carolan’s Mind Games (that takes place on that timeline too), I, rather he, asked, “Could an android or robot be given ESP or psi powers?” Asimov didn’t consider that, as far as I know. I don’t think any sci-fi author had ever asked that question before. I won’t give away the answer here—you’ll have to read the novel.

So…what’s my point? I think old Isaac could have had a lot more fun with androids and robots than he did, by adding ETs and other sci-fi elements to his stories. I’m not being critical. He was a pioneer, after all. But modern sci-fi authors can be like fancy bartenders, mixing and matching these elements as if they were inventing new cocktails. I’d like to think that Isaac wouldn’t constrain himself now; he’d be doing just that. Maybe he’d even be writing a few British-style mysteries too! He loved the mystery genre, even though he had very few sci-fi mysteries. (All of A. B. Carolan’s books can be considered sci-fi mysteries.)

Combining the mystery, thriller, and sci-fi genres with all their different elements is a lot of fun. I’ve enjoyed doing that.

***

Comments are always welcome.

The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection. This bargain bundle of three epic sci-fi novels should provide many hours of entertainment for any reader interested in sci-fi. Survivors of the Chaos starts in dystopia with multinational corporations dominating both the Earth and the solar system, maintaining order with their corporate militias. First contact occurs in Sing a Zamba Galactica as friendly ETs are discovered on the third planet colonized by human beings; a further contact with more ETs is not so lucky, and some collective intelligences out there in intergalactic near-Earth space just might blow your mind. Finally, if the first two novels represent my First and Second Foundations, Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand! features my Mule, an autocratic psychopath who is out to control near-Earth space with psi armies. This bundle is a bargain you can find wherever quality ebooks are sold.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

Note from Steve: Sometimes it happens that I’ll write an article that’s appropriate for both my blogs, this one and my political blog. That will usually mean the message contained therein goes beyond writing. I hope this short one resonates.

***

Okay, you’ve probably heard many renditions of this song, but Reuben and the Dark’s provides us with a different meaning of this classic. (Forget about the snippet heard on that Celebrity Cruise ad and listen to the entire version.) That Canadian group expresses almost a pantheistic love for Gaia, a primitive vision of the planet’s ecosystem that provides sustenance for all flora and fauna, including us. It’s wistful at the beginning, reminding us of how we’re damaging our only home’ but, after a glorious crescendo, becomes a celebration of how truly wonderful it is.

I’m sure that’s not what Celebrity sees in the song, but it might represent what Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) saw in his ten-minute view of Gaia from space, as many true astronauts have seen before from the International Space Station.

Thanks to the immoral Senator Manchin, champion of the fossil-fuel industries, evil will continue to be unleashed against Gaia. Hopefully he and others like him will have a special place in hell for all eternity. They deserve it. As long as such people walk this good Earth, the planet will never be safe!

It still is a wonderful world. We must vanquish the forces of evil and take care of it. That’s a moral obligation each and everyone of us has irrespective of religion or creed. Global warming, extreme weather events, and species extinction aren’t hoaxes. They’re warnings we haven’t heeded, and we and future generations will pay dearly if we continue to ignore the health of our planet.

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Comments are always welcome.

Gaia and the Goliaths. This last novel (so far!) in the “Detectives Chen & Castilblanco” series is my only novel with an environmental theme. Russian and US fossil-fuel conglomerates are the villains, environmental activists are the victims, and Chen and Castilblanco’s homicide case that begins in NYC expands to involve a conspiracy of national and international proportions. This story also highlights much of the environmental debate currently going on and has the crime-fighting duo doing their best scrambling yet! Available wherever quality ebooks are sold.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

Don’t think miracles are happening when I say that I finally found a NY Times “Book Review” issue that wasn’t better suited to paper the bottom of a bird cage. The October 24^th issue celebrated 125 years of the “Book Review,” a self-congratulatory pat on the back to the Times (I suspect no one else much cared). Still, as much as I hate the “Book Review” in general and its stupid formula to determine “bestsellers” that they guard as closely as Coca-Cola’s (and equally toxic), and their critics whose blather and twaddle serves the Big Five NYC publishers, I’m also a fan of history. (Strangely enough, I read more history than historical fiction.) Or is this issue just self-serving nostalgia? No matter; I perused this issue out of curiosity. (As an ex-scientist, this old tomcat is still curious.)

There are some old reviews, interviews, and essays in this issue that are worth noting, among them a review of Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912), an interview with Ralph Ellison (1952), and a few others. Also contained therein is the “First Bestseller List,” which, if anything, proves that the Times has consistently featured very little that appeals to my reading tastes.

But I found an essay by Kurt Vonnegut, “On Writing Science Fiction” (1965), that was perfectly delightful. (Hmm. The other two articles noted above also indicate my interest in sci-fi—Ellison wrote The Invisible Man.) Of course, I was just a freshman in college when Vonnegut’s essay was originally published, so it’s not remarkable that I missed it. I’d written my first sci-fi novel and some sci-fi short fiction before that, but I trashed the novel when I left for college; the short fiction either was packed away in boxes in my mother’s attic or lost.

Vonnegut has always been a hero of mine, mostly for his essays. A Man without a Country (on my bookshelf, both my physical one and the web page) is a classic collection of his essays—irreverent, cynical, and anti-status-quo opinion pieces, many about reading, writing, and publishing that often point out how stupid human beings can be (Einstein had the right idea there). I’m now wondering if I’d even written any sci-fi if I’d read his essay on sci-fi before starting on my publishing journey!

Like many of his essays, the one reproduced in the special edition of the “Book Review” is full of cynical commentary, most of it as true today as in 1965, if not more so, except for his laudatory comments (for Vonnegut) about ‘zines, Playboy in particular (okay, maybe “laudatory” isn’t the right word, especially for Playboy). (‘Zines now are useless for publishing short fiction, and anthologies and collections never sell well either.)

Vonnegut clearly didn’t want to be pigeon-holed as a sci-fi writer; I don’t either. In fact, I’ve probably written more mystery/thriller stories than sci-fi ones. (I’m double-counting here—for example, the “Clones and Mutants” and “Mary Jo Melendez” trilogies.) I’d like to amplify Vonnegut’s main points that go beyond the “sci-fi writer” label.

First, “writer” is too general a descriptor for what Vonnegut was, or I am. A writer can be anyone who uses language. A person writing for an ad agency or a greeting card company is a writer. “Storyteller” and “essayist” is a bit more specific yet general enough to describe what he did and I do. If you think there’s too much technology and science in some author’s stories, go ahead and call them sci-fi if you like, but they’re often just stories about human beings (or ETs)—the characters—doing some interesting and/or remarkable things—the plots. And I’d never call an essay—for example, this one—sci-fi!

So Vonnegut’s main point about storytelling is one I harp on a lot: Genres are just some key words now, among many others, used to describe stories storytellers tell. He doesn’t say this explicitly, but it’s implied and explains why he doesn’t want to be called a sci-fi writer.

In any case, I’ll keep Vonnegut’s essay around, if not this whole issue of the “Book Review.” There aren’t that many storytellers and essayists who have motivated me to tell my own stories and write my essays. Vonnegut is one of them.

***

Comments are always welcome.

Gaia and the Goliaths. This last novel (so far!) in the “Detectives Chen & Castilblanco” series is my only novel with an environmental theme. Russian and US fossil-fuel conglomerates are the villains, environmental activists are the victims, and Chen and Castilblanco’s homicide case that begins in NYC expands to involve a conspiracy of national and international proportions. This story also highlights much of the environmental debate currently going on and has the crime-fighting duo doing their best scrambling yet! Available wherever quality ebooks are sold.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

Note from Steve: Missing my political posts? This blog now only has articles about reading, writing, and book publishing. You will find the missing political posts at http://pubprogressive.com; they’re still commentaries on social issues, politics, and other topics of concern that have more to do with my concerns as a US citizen and not my writing life. Please take a look.

***

Your voice (or style) might be influenced by other authors’. How can you not be influenced if you’re an avid reader? (If you’re not, you should be!) Still, whether you’re influenced or not, if your voice isn’t more unique than not, why bother writing?

Many things contribute to that voice! The themes and plots they wrap around that you choose as an author are two where you not only stake out your territory but also can use them to appeal to different audiences. Same for narrative, dialogue, and settings. All your chosen story elements can be individualized. I wouldn’t worry too much about genres, though, because you can leave those keywords and others who insist on classifying your oeuvre. In fact, every time you think they’ve pigeon-holed you, break out and do something different! It’s best to keep readers guessing about the next book. That goes even for a series.

Consider Canadian mystery writer Louise Penny. I stopped reading her Inspector Gamache series because, like many traditionally published authors’ series, those books were becoming formulaic. Now a surprise! She teamed up with Hillary Clinton to write a thriller. (I can guess who did most of the writing.) I guess old Hillary didn’t want to be outdone by her philandering husband Bill, who teamed up with formulaic James Patterson, but I didn’t much care for either politician, so I won’t read their fiction. (A tell-all where Hillary relates why she didn’t kick Bill out on his butt would be more interesting than fiction.)

In my case, I bet some readers thought that after Rembrandt’s Angel, Esther Brookstone and Bastiann van Coevorden would just continue solving crimes involving art. Son of Thunder, however, is entirely different as three parallel stories unfold and then coalesce, with religion playing a major role. (My only previous novel where the latter occurred was Soldiers of God, but religion is treated in an entirely different way in that story.) Then Death on the Danube had Esther and Bastiann on their honeymoon cruise and something like Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express occurs.

Did you think that would end the series? No, I continued to write about those two sleuths, having them solving crimes involving art, only art was trafficked in Palettes, Patriots, and Prats. Finally (for now!), having written Son of Thunder, the book Dan Brown should have written instead of The Da Vinci Code, I wrote about a Da Vinci code! Leonardo and the Quantum Code has a mathematical physicist developing new algorithms for quantum computers that are based on ideas found in a recently discovered Da Vinci notebook.

Say what you want about the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series, you can’t claim it’s formulaic. Yeah, I know, I shouldn’t use my own books as examples, but I know them best! And this series illustrates what I mean by keeping readers (and critics?) guessing about your author’s voice.

Maybe some readers don’t like my changing voice, or Penny’s, for that matter. I don’t give a damn. I like to surprise readers! And sometimes the way a novel turns out surprises even me! I’m not the same writer I was when my first novel, Full Medical, was published in 2006. As my skills developed, my voice changed…and I’m proud of how it has changed, no matter what readers think.

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Comments are always welcome.

Rogue Planet. I often taut this as a hard sci-fi and not just another fantasy version of Game of Thrones. Now there’s a lot of hype about Dune, as the third movie based on the famous Herbert fantasy epic is about to come out. While it’s much better than Thrones, it’s a bit long-in-the-tooth…and long! Rogue Planet is a more compact story—similar swash-buckling battles between armies and a similar flawed and royal hero, but everything is set in my usual sci-fi universe that I began in The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection. Of course, you can read it independently of that trilogy. (All my novels have that feature.) So if it’s epic fun you want, try my hard sci-fi, not fantasy! Rogue Planet is available in ebook or paper format wherever quality books are sold.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

Horror stories come in all flavors, from the hilarious to the gory. Some call them fantasy, others sci-fi, and still others speculative fiction. Stephen King and Dean Koontz have made successful careers telling them, building on that genre’s founders, authors like Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and H. P. Lovecraft.

I have to confess I’m not a reader of horror, fantasy, or supernatural sci-fi. Gore doesn’t turn me on; zombies, werewolves, and vampires turn me off unless they’re comedic fellows; kings and princes doing battle with bizarre creatures give me the blahs; and magicians, leprechauns, and elves, especially evil ones, generally just give me indigestion.

I’ve read all of Stockmyer’s “Under the Stairs” series, though; it’s a wonderful mix of sci-fi and fantasy (and probably the most neglected yet deservingly trumpeted series of its type). I’ve also beta-read much of my friend Scott Dyson’s work where his truly human characters, unlike King’s, have very human reactions to horror (like Stockmyer, another neglected author in my modest opinion).

And the latter points to my problem with horror stories: They all too often get lost in the fantasy world and lose touch of their characters’ humanity. That’s one reason why I don’t write horror stories, even though they become popular this time of year: It’s too difficult for me to lose the humanity in my characters.

Sure, I’ve written a few, mostly short fiction. You’ll find most of them in the Pasodobles in a Quantum Stringscape speculative fiction series (Volume One, in particular, which is available on Amazon, with Volumes Two and Three available as free downloads—see my “Free Stuff & Contests” web page). A few other pieces of short fiction might be scattered around here and there. Rogue Planet (see below) is hard sci-fi with fantasy elements. Yes, it has a prince who becomes king, but he’s very human (meaning he has his flaws), and there seems to be magic, but it’s all techno-wizardry.

I suppose this might all come from my childhood where dressing up for Halloween was an afterthought, a bit of drudgery other kids and their parents seemed ascribed to. “Oh, isn’t he cute!” never set well with me, especially when uttered by strange grownups. And later on I was more into the tricks than the treats! Just call me the Grinch that stole Halloween, I guess.

Covid has put a damper on Halloween too. We struggle with making it safe for everyone. Most of the kids who visit us aren’t vaccinated. We get more little kids now as our neighborhood becomes filled with Brooklynn ex-pats and their little ones, and they are indeed cute (I don’t sat it!) as we have fun guessing who their parents are. The elementary school across from us usually has a Halloween parade around the neighborhood. Last year they didn’t. Maybe they will this year.

In any case, I wish a happy and safe Halloween to you and yours.

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Comments are always welcome!

Rogue Planet. I often taut this as a hard sci-fi and not just another fantasy version of Game of Thrones. Now there’s a lot of hype about Dune, as the third movie based on the famous Herbert fantasy epic is about to come out. While it’s much better than Thrones, it’s a bit long-in-the-tooth…and long! Rogue Planet is a more compact story—similar swash-buckling battles between armies and a similar flawed and royal hero, but everything is set in my usual sci-fi universe that I began in The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection. Of course, you can read it independently of that trilogy. (All my novels have that feature.) So if it’s epic fun you want, try my hard sci-fi, not fantasy! Rogue Planet is available in ebook and print versions wherever quality books are sold.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

Settings are important in fiction. They represent the stage where the fictional drama takes place. Some of mine are real; some I imagine (the ET settings are obviously creations of my imagination); and some that seem real aren’t (Google Maps and Google Earth are an author’s useful tools, though). You can have some fun trying to guess what places I’ve actually visited (probably more than you think).

Most of Chen and Castilblanco’s cases begin in NYC, which I know well enough; it’s just thirteen miles east of us via NJ’s Route 3 and the Lincoln Tunnel, but those cases often expand beyond NYC and the tri-state area to the rest of the US and abroad. I know Europe fairly well too, as well as South America, Canada, and Mexico. My travels allowed me not only to learn about our wonderful human diversity (although my home state of California has plenty), but also to learn about different places.

But what I don’t know, I can imagine. If you’re going to write fiction, you need imagination You can write non-fiction without it…maybe…but it’s absolutely necessary to have an imagination to create places you haven’t yet visited, or characters living in those places, so that the fiction seems real to the reader.

One of the most interesting places I’ve visited is Ireland. In addition to being sort of an ancient homeland (for this half-blooded Irishman), it’s just a fascinating place. It’s also where I met A. B. Carolan, my reclusive collaborator, at a place called Blarney Castle (storytelling needs a lot of blarney as well as imagination). It’s odd that it doesn’t appear much in A. B.’s or my stories (his are sci-fi tales, of course). In Palettes, Patriots and Prats, there are a few scenes, and it’s rumored that Esther Brookstone had a wee fling there with some Irishman in Kilarney, but that’s not where those stories take place. In a novella that ends tomorrow, Declan O’Hara, the main character, is from Donegal, like A. B., but maybe subconsciously I haven’t wanted to spoil lovely Eire by putting lowlifes, ETs, or androids from my fiction there?

South America figures prominently in my fiction, though; I’ve both lived and traveled there. Colombia was home base for many trips to conferences in the US and Europe where I spent a lot of time before and after such events traveling and meeting people. I had two long stays in Italy and Spain as a visiting scientist that also served as bases to tour Europe, where you can hop on a train in the evening, sleep the night away, and wake up in a new country.

Perhaps the most obvious influence of my travels on my fiction is found in Death on the Danube. The book’s plot (except for flashbacks) follows a real and wonderful riverboat cruise (without any murder taking place, of course) down that ancient waterway. It would have been hard to imagine that itinerary on my own.

Authors should take advantage of such travel whenever possible. The more real the places in our prose seem, the more our readers will feel that they are experiencing new or remembered places too. That’s all part of the great adventure readers can find in books.

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Comments are always welcome.

More than Human: The Mensa Contagion. Apocalypse and first contact are two ubiquitous sci-fi themes. I like to stir conventional themes and plots up a bit, though. Here first contact comes via an ET virus that kills at first (an apparent apocalypse that’s worse than Covid) but benignly creates Homo sapiens, version 2.0. What do these new humans do? They colonize Mars and later meet the makers of the virus, in a manner of speaking (this isn’t your normal first contact). You’ll have some fun with this one, and, like many sci-fi novels, it will make you think about possible futures. Available wherever quality ebooks are sold.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!