Maybe I’m old-fashioned. Some pundits are now saying that email and email newsletters are dinosaurs due for extinction. I disagree with them. I subscribe to many email newsletters—mostly ones for regular news, science news, causes (environment and wildlife preservation are big ones), new books, and news about other authors and their books. I read them at my leisure, often at night on my Kindle. While email newsletters might be going out of style a bit, I still like them—let’s face it: tweets can’t be too newsy because they’re too short.

I didn’t have an email newsletter for a long time, but I started meeting many readers who (1) don’t read blogs or use other social media, and (2) want to follow what’s happening in reading, writing, and publishing from my viewpoint. #1 is key: they wouldn’t see my blog newsletter (it’s been a feature on this blog from the very beginning). #2 is important because many readers are older and read a lot, but they don’t want any encumbrances beyond email. So I decided to have both types of newsletters.

My email newsletter subscribers have two basic advantages. While there is always some overlap between the two versions, email subscribers get the information first, often a week ahead of time or more.

Email newsletter subscribers also and exclusively receive news about sales of my books. In every issue, I offer at least one of my ebooks for a discounted sale price on Smashwords. That presumes they read ebooks, of course. (There are various reasons why I can’t offer print books at discounted prices.)

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It comes in two forms: we meet them out there, or those out there come here to Earth. In any case, the theme is ubiquitous in old sci-fi. I’m not sure how much it’s used today. Recent discussions in the media of UFO sightings (remember, UFO only means “unidentified flying object,” not an ET’s vehicle, in spite of NY Times crosswords’ clues) might increase tales about first contact. Who knows? So it might be worthwhile to study how believable such tales can be.

Both versions have the problem that “out there” means the vast reaches of intergalactic space…and beyond. I’ve already discussed this in a previous post. Either version means someone, either an ET or human being, has to travel so far that it’s hard to get our minds around what the distance is. But let’s assume that it can be done, that two groups, ETs and humans, could somehow get together for the first time and have a chat. Why would they or we want to do so?

For humans, we could say that it might just be curiosity or the challenge. That’s why people who know nothing about climbing want to climb Mt. Everest—even why those who do so attempt the climb. That’s why people decide to visit all the continents after they retire. And that’s the scenario for the colonization of Mars in More than Human: The Mensa Contagion. But would that be enough to go to the stars?

Today isn’t 1969 or just before. I never bought into the competition with the Soviet Union to motivate the space race. Most people I knew didn’t. What motivated us was answering the question “Can we get to the moon?” We didn’t care about US pride or international politics. We were motivated by the challenge. Today one sees many people who even think going back to the moon is a waste of money. And the Pentagon certainly wouldn’t support that—all they probably want to do is put up more spy satellites, or sneak in a few satellites with nukes on them. And private industry just wants comsats and so forth where they can make lots of money. We’ve gone from sublime curiosity and meeting abstract challenges to greedy profit-making.

Sure we have a few visionaries like Elon Musk, Richard Branson, and their ilk, but not even the general public supports space research anymore, unless NASA can do it on a shoestring budget. And the politicos take this attitude and run with it. Budget cuts are crippling the space agency, as they are most scientific research.

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I probably don’t do enough of them because I haven’t found one I really like yet. Although my headshots appear in many places on the internet and in my books, they all look staged. Just below is my most recent one, which seems very staged (first pro shot). One of my first, with sunglasses, makes me look a bit like Tom Clancy. With my glasses off, my kids used to say I looked like Kris Kristofferson.

I think authors have a tough time with photos because a lot of us are nerdy introverts and not eager to project a public image in the photographs or otherwise. I still think a real headshot is better than some iconic doll or flowers, though. People sometimes want to know more about the authors they’re reading, the face behind the words as it were.

I just finished upgrading and updating my website, more to get some new book covers in, but that recent headshot is there too. (The job was done by Monkey C Media, my website gurus—thanks to them, the old website hangs in there.) That photo might put fear into a young adult reader interested in A.B. Carolan’s books, but hopefully they will learn I don’t write horror stories (and neither does A.B., and he doesn’t have a headshot—his icon in some places is a leprechaun, which suits him just fine).

An author’s promotional efforts bifurcate into two marketing areas: (1) personal branding, and (2) promoting her or his books. Fiction authors often forget #1 and focus on #2. #1 is an obvious goal for “experts” in something who write about it—the personal brand is what markets their non-fiction book(s)—so they worry about it. Even some fiction writers are better known for their personal brands—their fiction becomes an afterthought after they start making more money giving advice to other authors like “Just do what I say in my marketing books, and you’ll become a NY Times bestselling author.”

Unfortunately most fiction authors have to deal with both #1 and #2. I’m new to Twitter, but from the very beginning I didn’t want to spam the Twitterverse with ads for my books. I try to let readers and the #writingcommunity know who I am with pithy comments, retweets, and so forth; hopefully some of them help authors too. I also poke a wee bit of fun at the publishing business with my #daffynitions and try to motivate everyone with quotes from famous authors that I particularly like. I also “like” similar things other authors post but rarely their book ads (I read most of them, though, if that makes them feel any better).

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It’s hard for anyone to get their head around how far away the stars are. The nearest, Proxima Centauri, is 4.243 light-years distant—a light-year is the distance traveled by light in a year, going at 186,000 miles per second!

Three Sol-like real stars (i.e. like our sun) are where the Human colonies of New Haven, Novo Mondo, and Sanctuary are located in The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection (a three-novel bundle from Carrick Publishing). In A.B. Carolan’s Mind Games, the main character visits two of those colonies, plus a much-changed Earth. The stars, 82 Eridani, Tau Ceti, and Delta Pavonis, respectively, are about twenty light-years from Earth. They’re G-type stars like our own. I started writing about these colonies around 2000, so I didn’t know if there were real Earth-type planets in those faraway solar systems. I still don’t.

Today scientists have discovered many real extrasolar planets. Some are in the zone where liquid water can exist, so a sci-fi writer today might choose one of those as a setting for a story. The stars I chose are still good ones, but if scientists find they have no planets or none are in that sweet spot relative to their parent star, I’m toast.

In addition, we now know some stars have a huge Jupiter-like planet in that sweet spot. That’s not a bad setting either because a planet like that can have a large moon that’s like Earth, full of life. Such is the case of Hard Fist, a satellite of Big Fellow, and where the action of A.B. Carolan’s The Secret of the Urns takes place.

When I began writing the books in the trilogy bundle above, no one knew if any stars besides ours had planets. At least now we know planets are ubiquitous. Three of my four fictional ones I’ve mentioned had life before Humans arrived. That might be less likely than being in that sweet spot—if water exists, it doesn’t mean life does. Both our moon and Mars have some water, for example, but no observable life.

Statistically it’s likely that life exists out there. It might not exist very close to Earth, though, as it does in my fiction. I’m thinking of an active biosphere, of course. Even Mars might have some life. And it’s unclear how long Earth will continue to have a biosphere unless we recognize the dangers of climate change. CCDs (that’s “climate change deniers”) are trying to get everyone to believe their lies.

Let’s consider some possibilities A.B. Carolan, in his short story “Harvest Time” two weeks ago in honor of Brian Aldiss, considers one possibility that’s also at the end of the first novel in the collection named above—a long-range starship. Its propulsion system, yet to be determined, would apply a constant acceleration and then a constant deceleration to arrive at the target star. Humans aboard might be in cryosleep or stored as frozen embryos, or even in banks of frozen sperm and ova, and the colonists could be woken at the end of the trip and nurtured by robots. Things could go wrong on the journey, as in A.B.’s short story.

Any attempts at organizing a galactic empire, or even a trade union like ITUIP (“Interstellar Trade Union of Independent Planets”), a la European Union, would require faster communication between planets than that provided via long-range starships. Faster-than-light travel (FTL) was invented by sci-fi writers for that purpose. Many old stories talked about hyperspace; Star Trek had its “warp drive”; and my stories have ships traveling through the metaverses provided by some esoteric theories from particle physics, superstring theories to be precise, as considered in yesterday’s short story “Shipwreck.” It all boils down to skirting Einstein’s theory of relativity by leaving our universe where the speed of light mentioned above limits all velocities.

Humans haven’t been around too long, geologically speaking, and have wondered what’s out there for even less time. The way things are going, we won’t be going out there anytime soon, no matter how organized we become to do it. Some wonder if what’s out there will come to us. Either way, the distances covered will truly be a star trek. And all that’s still in the realm of sci-f for now.

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Comments are always welcome.

More than Human: The Mensa Contagion. Amazon reviewer S. D. Beallis called it “broad in scope and cautiously optimistic.” Amazon reviewer Debra Miller said she “was reminded at times of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy.” Both comments indicate the epic nature of this one novel where an ET virus creates Homo sapiens 2.0, and then the new humans colonize Mars. Available on Amazon and Smashwords.

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

Some literary wags consider this equivalent to “genre fiction” and look down their noses at it, while they prattle on and on about boring “literary classics” that high school English teachers use to torture their students. I prefer “popular fiction” as a descriptor because many avid readers actually flock to it in order to entertain themselves and learn things about the world as well—past, present, and future.

I don’t particularly like the word “genre” either. Today genres are only key words used to classify books, and these books exist to entertain. And, to rebut the wags, many of them treat themes of universal relevance for our times, unlike many “literary classics” where the reader is lost unless s/he knows the themes relevant at the time the literary classic was written.

Of course, pop fiction books fill a wide spectrum of quality. I’m an author, but I have a problem determining quality. I buy a book and am disappointed when it turns out to be a dud. Popularity correlates poorly with quality sometimes.

Amazon considers books just like any other product they sell, and we buy books with very little information about them. (How many book buyers use the “peek inside” feature? I do.) In their defense, though, they ignore whether a book is a “literary classic” and just let the publishers or authors do the labeling. They treat Jane Austen just like Isaac Asimov.

Pop fiction is big. It’s what most read for the most part, erudite academics and classicists being the exceptions. It never stops surprising me. There’s the good, the bad, and the ugly, and occasionally there’s the excellent. All of those descriptors are subjective, which is part of the fun: readers can talk about pop fiction books and how they react to them.

Maybe I’m old-fashioned. I’d rather sit in my recliner with my bit of Jameson and read a good story than watch some ridiculous TV show with scripts written by young scriptwriters who can’t write anything good because they know nothing about life. As a speed reader, I get through a book quickly. The good stories make me want more; the bad ones leave me thinking, “Why did I bother?” (That assumes I finished it, which I always do when reviewing.) And during the reading, I’m transported to other situations, even strange worlds, travel that only requires that recliner and Jameson whiskey (the latter might be a cup of Earl Grey tea if it’s a British-style mystery).

As you can tell from the “Steve’s Bookshelf” web page at this website, or from my book reviews, I also read non-fiction. I use information contained in those books too. For example, Isaacson’s Leonardo da Vinci was a resource for my new novel Son of Thunder, not for Leonardo, but for the Florentine setting he lived in, which Sandro Botticelli shared.

But I read a lot more popular fiction. I always have—sci-fi, mystery, and thriller stories mostly, the books I couldn’t get enough of as a kid…and still can’t. Now I’m also writing pop fiction books, telling my own stories.

***

Comments are always welcome.

More than Human: The Mensa Contagion. Amazon reviewer S. D. Beallis called it “broad in scope and cautiously optimistic.” Amazon reviewer Debra Miller said she “was reminded at times of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy.” Both comments indicate the epic nature of this one novel where an ET virus creates Homo sapiens 2.0, and then the new humans colonize Mars. Available on Amazon and Smashwords.

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

[Note: This can be considered a continuation of last Thursday’s post.]

Arthur C. Clarke’s quote is a good way to start this article: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This is more than a glib remark from an old sci-fi writer. It is an important statement about technology.

Imagine a caveman from Earth’s prehistory holding a smart phone. He can’t call anyone and no one can call him, but he can hit a video replay icon, see the video unfolding, and drop the phone as if it were black magic. (He might react the same way with a mirror, of course.)

If we can’t explain something, we call it magic…or something fancier to make our ignorance more palatable. That’s how the phrases “dark energy” and “dark matter” came into existence—physicists are very inventive about hiding their ignorance. I don’t think they’d consider themselves in the same class as Ugh the caveman, but I don’t see much difference sometimes—Clarke probably wouldn’t either. (Of course, I could be wrong. For years I thought the Higgs field was just a mathematical device to generate spontaneous symmetry breaking in the electroweak theory of Salam and Weinberg.)

Dark energy and dark matter express our ignorance about how to explain certain observed phenomena, though. It’s a bit different when we consider phenomena that seems to be more blatant about contradicting known physical laws. There’s magic in the extrapolation of the former needed to create good sci-fi stories. That magic differs from that used in fantasy stories. The boundaries are fuzzy, though, between these two situations.

Paranormal activity—the use of psi powers—has been featured in fantasy and sci-fi stories for a while. Unlike dark energy and dark matter, which was invented to “explain” some observed phenomena, paranormal activity has never been observed. That amounts to a double whammy against it.

Like time travel, I haven’t included psi powers very much in my sci-fi, in spite of a long-standing tradition of sci-fi authors of using it as a plot device. I generally consider psi powers to be more in the realm of fantasy. Yet in the three books of The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection, I include psi powers as a plot device, and in Sing a Zamba Galactica, the second book, I consider time travel. Let me fall back on Mr. Clarke’s quote, though, to put both back in the hard sci-fi realm in order to assuage my guilt.

A.B. Carolan’s new book Mind Games goes farther. We have robots, but the androids go beyond commercial robots available today—these don’t exist either. So what does A.B. do? He writes about trying  to give androids psi powers. And he plops this down in the hard sci-fi universe I created.

Considering the aforementioned collection, I suppose he’s justified. The story is another sci-fi mystery for young adults where the main character Della wants to find out who murdered her adopted father. He had always told her to hide her powers, but she needs to use them all to solve the mystery.

Is this sci-fi or fantasy? Maybe those labels don’t matter. The main question might be: Is it a good story? You can read it and tell me via your reviews or emails.

I generally prefer a scientist’s approach in my sci-fi writing, taking known science and extrapolating it far beyond where a practicing scientist might go (any extrapolation is always dangerous), without contradicting current knowledge. Maybe the psi powers in A.B.’s book and my own are more an application of Clarke’s point of view than J.K. Rowling’s, more akin to physicists dark energy and dark matter and an expression of our wonder and ignorance about what might be true. Not fake science, just wild extrapolation far beyond what’s now known so that the science just seems like magic. Is Ugh the caveman smiling?

***

Comments are always welcome.

The Last Humans. Penny Castro is on a forensic dive off the SoCal coast for the LA County Sheriff’s Department. When she surfaces, she finds her fellow deputies and a witness dead from a virulent contagion. Follow her adventures as she struggles to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. Available in ebook format on Amazon and Smashwords and all the latter’s affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc) and in print on Amazon and in your favorite local bookstore (if they don’t have it, ask them for it). This novel was published by Black Opal Books. Visit their website to see a treasure trove of great reads. Support small presses and their authors.

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

My first experience with a computer was with a CDC 3600 (the now defunct Control Data Corporation), a powerful machine in its time but not much good for word processing—typing a story onto punch cards? No way! I was working odd hours during the semester and full-time in the summer at an R&D outfit located not far from the UCSB campus. Until that time and even a bit beyond, I took notes and wrote short stories and bits and snippets on almost any media, from unfinished lab notebooks to paper napkins.

How we write, i.e. the physical process, makes no difference for the final product, the story we tell. Some writers might still write their stories out longhand with pen and paper. I always liked pen better than pencil because I hate eraser crumbs, and I can see what I scratch out and maybe use it later. If you still write in that fashion, more power to you. I still do it occasionally.

Authors write their stories in a multitude of ways. As a reader, I don’t much care about how they do it. That doesn’t affect my enjoyment of their stories. As an author, I have my preferences, and they often change.

I’m also a fan of efficiency. I have authored a few books. I couldn’t have written them without some efficiency in my writing process. The typewriter always helped a bit. Two of my writing skills are speed reading and touch typing. The first allows me to quickly scan what I’ve written, much as a reader would when deciding to buy a book; the second allows me to write it in a speedy fashion. Some authors still use their old typewriters. (I remember a Tom Hanks documentary about them—the typewriters, not the authors who used them.)

Word processing software on a personal computer is the most efficient. It was a bit primitive on my first computer, the Radio Shack Color Computer, but software advances in pace with hardware. I never used Word Perfect—it seemed unwieldy—and MS Word always tries to be too many things (I rarely use all of its features). But word processing packages always provide tools that make my writing efficient, content editing as I go.

And word processing software facilitates the editing process. MS Word’s “Track Changes” is a bit flaky at times (one has to tame that left review pane before it crashes MS Word), but it’s an essential tool for editing in the end game. Before I even get there (or an editor does), I use the search feature to find and eliminate all my bad quirks. I do this even before sending an MS to beta-readers or first editors.

I’ve never found authoring packages like Scrivener attractive. I’m a pantser, writing by the “seat of my pants” and rarely using an outline. Those authoring pages almost always require some kind of an outline, and that puts a straitjacket on my storytelling abilities. Other writers might have found otherwise.

The title of this article is key. Writing is a process. The more authors can make it a process, preferably an efficient one, the more they can focus on what’s important, telling a good story. Process does not destroy creativity; it makes it more efficient. The process isn’t the story, but it’s what gets the story out to our readers.

That said, I wrote this article on a note pad with a pen. I often do that as I watch network news or CNN. When the news slows down or goes to commercials (a hurrah for PBS News Hour!), I create blog posts. All just part of writing!

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Comments are always welcome.

Rembrandt’s Angel. How far would you go to recover a Rembrandt stolen by the Nazis in World War II? Inspector Esther Brookstone, of the Art and Antiques Division of Scotland Yard, will provide one answer to that question. Paramour and Interpol Agent Bastiann van Coevorden tries to keep her safe in her quest to recover the painting, but the duo uncover something much more sinister—a vast conspiracy that threatens Europe. Available in ebook format on Amazon and Smashwords and all the latter’s affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc) and in print on Amazon and in your favorite local bookstore (if they don’t have it, ask them for it). This novel was published by Penmore Press. (A sequel titled Son of Thunder is about to be published.) Visit their website to see a treasure trove of great reads. Support small presses and their authors.

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

Time travel is barely mentioned in Sing a Zamba Galactica (second novel in The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection); faster-than-light (FTL) travel plays a key role in unifying the planets of near-Earth space into ITUIP (Interstellar Trade Union of Independent Planets). If that doesn’t sound strange enough, consider that both time and FTL travel are linked in that trilogy by similar physics.

The star systems of the first three Human colonies were reached by old interplanetary rigs that took around a hundred years to travel there at sublight speeds. Only after first contact with ETs on the planet New Haven in the 82 Eridani system did two physicists, one Human, the other ET, come up with the foundations for an FTL drive.

While time travel was mentioned in an oblique way in Sing a Zamba Galactica, and later in the Moliere-like farce “The Apprentice” (short story in the speculative fiction collection Pasodobles in a Quantum Stringscape, Volume Two, available as a free download—see my “Free Stuff & Contests” web page), I tend to avoid the topic. It’s rarely well-handled, even ignoring the many paradoxes that often occur in a plot (both of the previously mentioned stories avoid them).

If authors want to transport readers back to the past, steampunk might be the better option. It’s a subgenre of sci-fi or fantasy (the line, as is often the case, is blurry) that in general asks the question, “What would the world be like if recent important inventions were actually made in the past?” In other words, steampunk is alternate history, and that’s a clue for treating time and FTL travel correctly (i.e. without paradoxes or contradicting Einstein).

I learned about the “Many Worlds Theory of Quantum Mechanics” when studying the origins of how Professor Feynman came to quantize classical fields, the electromagnetic field in particular. Some people, even physicists, associate his quantization technique to what are now called Feynman diagrams, simplistic shorthand for studying a series of terms that contribute to the answer. That is too simplistic.

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To get them, you have to be a “popular author”; one way to become a popular author is to get them. That’s a vicious circle many authors face—maybe not those outside the NYC area, but in my case….

What do I mean by “gigs”? Not the usual rock-group or jazz-group meaning, but traditional ones for authors—book signings, lectures, discussions, and so forth. I’ve done a few, but not as many as I’d like to do. Why?

One basic reason: We live close to NYC, so the Big Five authors dominate the gigs in the area. They live around here too. And more than fiction writers—Hillary Clinton had a book signing at a local bookstore for her last book (she lives in NY state). Both the Montclair Literary Festival and the Montclair Film Festival have also been taken over by celebs (Colbert’s wife runs the latter). Bookstores have waiting lists for book signings. Therefore I take a stealthy approach and try to do gigs Big Five authors would think were beneath them. It’s tough, though. In other words, I’m still stuck in that vicious circle.

None of this is the fault of readers, mind you. The celebs will draw people who don’t even read much—video game players and viewers of streaming video, for example. But avid readers are usually happy to have a conversation with an author, anywhere, anytime. I meet them on park benches relaxing during a walk, in doctors’ waiting rooms, at theatrical and music functions, and so forth—that’s why I always carry business cards with me.

Recently I gave a card to a fellow. The next time I saw him, he said, “Hey, you’re the real deal. I’m going to read some of your books.” Maybe, maybe not. But there was a definite interest.

And that’s the crux of the matter. By living where I live, I’m close to many activities and meet many people. I just have a hard time finding gigs.

“What about conferences, or book tours?” you might ask. Again, some Big Five authors monopolize them. Cost is a factor—attendance fees and per diems, respectively, and the cost of hotels. Anyone can go to the International Thriller Writers conference in July. No hotel for me; it’s in NYC. I could go in by bus or train. But ITW charges an arm and a leg to attend. Until I have a blockbuster book, having the money to do that isn’t in the cards (or maybe it is—blackjack at an Atlantic City casino?). And I can’t see that meeting a bunch of other thriller authors would be much fun or benefit when I prefer to meet readers.

Maybe I’d be better off moving to Maine near Stephen King and becoming more of a recluse (avoiding the author’s fate in Misery, of course). Or maybe I just should keep writing my stories and forget about gigs.

The ones I’ve done have been fun, though. I had no long lines stretching out the door like the celebrity authors, but I bet I had more time to meet and greet readers one on one, two ordinary people with one just happening to be an author.

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Comments are always welcome.

The Last Humans. Penny Castro is on a forensic dive off the SoCal coast for the LA County Sheriff’s Department. When she surfaces, she finds her fellow deputies and a witness dead. Follow her adventures as she struggles to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. Available in ebook format on Amazon and Smashwords and all the latter’s affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc) and in print on Amazon and in your favorite local bookstore (if they don’t have it, ask them for it). The book is also available at the publisher, Black Opal Books.

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

I use them: liquors, hotels, and so forth. They’re all part of the plot, unlike the Starbucks cup in a recent Game of Thrones episode. The reason? They go a long way in satisfying Tom Clancy’s maxim that fiction must seem real.

Mystery and thriller writers often avoid this because they don’t want to be accused of endorsing or criticizing something real (both can lead to negative reactions from readers; the latter can lead to lawsuits). Avoiding them and using only fictional names goes a bit too far, though. The reasons given aren’t valid if the author is neutral or positive, although a positive remark might upset a reader who hates the product or place. Tough!

I say that because characters who express opinions about real products and places are human beings who have a right to express them (even I might disagree with them!). And the products and places are there in the real world, so why can’t characters refer to them like everyone else?

In The Last Humans, I never mentioned the country responsible for the apocalypse. I focused more on main character Penny Castro’s post-apocalyptic struggles. In the sequel, the reader will find out what that country was, but it has been changed by the apocalypse too. That’s part of the story.

You see, real products and places evolve too, just like characters. There are some places that are static for many years, or even throughout the characters’ lives—Yosemite Valley, in the case of Penny Castro’s adventures. But even those evolve, especially considering the characters who frequent them.

Most fiction has a mix of real and fictional. Rembrandt’s Angel contained places I’ve been too, for example, and places I made up. It even featured a real, missing painting! We satisfy Clancy’s maxim if it all seems real. Much of the sequel to that novel, which follows Sandro Botticelli, the Renaissance painter, and St. John the Divine, moves between real places but fills in the history of what the characters did there, which is fiction. It also creates new old places in the sense that I took liberties and created them within the real historical settings.

Products are a bit trickier than places. There’s no problem when I write about havenberry wine (from the planet New Haven in the 82 Eridani system)—see the new book Mind Games—that’s sci-fi, and a reader has no idea whether he would like it or not. And the ETs who make it won’t time-travel back to sue me if they don’t like what I say about it!

Contemporary products can present problems, though. I adopt the same policy as I do with real characters. If I am neutral or say something good about a product, the company that makes it won’t sue me. Why would they? And readers will just have to live with what the character who expresses her or his opinion about that real product states in the prose. In fact, the latter ties in nicely with minimalist writing because, if the product is real and well known to readers, they become participants in the story, whether they like the product or not. Minimalist writing is all about involving the reader.

With the caveats mentioned above, I can see no negatives for using real product and place names in your prose. So use them in your fiction to make it come alive. If you worry about legal repercussions, consult a lawyer!

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Comments are always welcome.

Mind Games. You know A. B. Carolan as the writer of The Secret Lab and The Secret of the Urns. Those novels are sci-fi mysteries for young adults (and adults who are young at heart). In Mind Games, A. B. tells a new story that’s set a bit farther into the future than his first two books. Della Dos Toros is a young girl with psi powers living in the Dark Domes of the planet Sanctuary. Her adopted father doesn’t let her use those powers, but she must do so to find his killer. This story about ESP and androids adds another action-packed novel to the ABC Sci-Fi Mystery series. Available in both print and ebook versions.

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