Today, my story “Iron Out Of Vulcan” releases in the anthology Battling In All Her Finery from Mad Scientist Journal! Accompanied by twenty other tales of awesome warrior women (and who doesn’t like those), it is a tale of post-alien conquest apocalyptic survival. Short version, of you liked Furiosa, you’ll love Scout.

And just for your enjoyment: an excerpt:
I rode between two drum-fed National Guard .50 caliber machine guns mounted in a plexiglass ball-turret, mounted on the back of a microbus shell welded over the bed of the six-wheel Ford F550. Again, I peered through the iron crosshairs at the black speck in the distance.

Definitely a motorcycle.

“We have a friend,” I called through to the cabin. “Watch for IEDs.”

“Oh, sure; I’m on it,” Mina deadpanned. But she signed to Eric, which was good enough. Paul moved forward, too. It was a standard trick. Make your target watch you, and they might miss your roadside bombs. Best way to take us out, unless they had spike-strips.

“Who is it, Scout?” asked Mina. “Not Them, I take it?”

“She’d be swearing more,” Eric grunted.

“I don’t know,” I said. Not Them. A gang out of Chicago or Dallas, maybe. The remnant of a Mexican drug cartel, perhaps. The bandidos had tried taking Criptown from us last summer. Cost us a lot of good Crips and ammo we couldn’t spare.

Some thought we shouldn’t call the place ‘Criptown.’ Worried it might scare potential recruits off because of the old gang name. As if any of them had got out of the cities before the nukes hit.

I looked back at the cycle. We could only hope that cycle-boy’s friends would decide Vulcans weren’t worth the carnage.

I looked at the empty road ahead. Somewhere out there, a radio had called for us. Was it a trap? Some Vulcans had disappeared. Maybe this cyclist’s friends had set us up. Or maybe someone else had. Or maybe – just maybe – the signal was genuine. It was a chance we would have to take, if we could find them.

We needed people desperate enough to live free.

I just realized that I never followed up on the post from June about my story about Space Marine Midwives (In Space).

It has been sold to Amazing Stories, and will appear in the next issue releasing mid-November. I was in the second-to-last issue of Amazing Stories when it folded in 2000, so I find the symmetry especially pleasing to find myself in the second issue of its next incarnation.

The story that will appear is called “In The Republic Of The Blind,” and is a twist on H.G. Wells’s better-known work set on a long-forgotten colony where the formerly disabled preserve their own cultures.

One of the things that truly sucks about Fans of Anything is that they all have their ideas about what constitutes “Anything.” It’s not a soluble problem: without passion, you don’t have fans at all, and with passionate love of what they like comes equally passionate hatred for what they don’t like.

Science-fiction fans, especially the book-reading ones (yes, there are non-book reading ones… sort of… shudder) really love to bag on movies for getting space combat “wrong.” Just to take some examples not at random: 1) you would not be able to see beam weapons in space. 2) Human reflexes would be almost useless in space combat because computers would fight so much faster. 3) Weapons would strike from so far away that enemy ships would be invisible to the eye, and 4) Therefore dogfighting starfighters are stupid.

And let’s admit one thing right off. If you’re writing super-hard SF, and restricting yourself to tech we can build today or are planning to build tomorrow (see Niven and Pournelle’s Footfall for an epic space-battle scene of that type) then you’re pretty much right on all counts.

But the problem is that the same things are said of works that utilize gravity drives, hyperspace, force shields and any number of other things that move the fiction completely into the Space Opera subgenre. To which I reply: are you KIDDING me?

Look, folks, you can’t have hard science-fiction and space opera at the same time. You can sure as hell enjoy both: I do. But if you’re going to complain about spacecraft maneuvering like airplanes and ships hitting each other from visible ranges, then let’s be honest and complain about EVERYTHING. Let’s have no warp drives, no magic shields, no acceleration compensator fields, no antigravs, nothing.

And for cripes’ sake let’s not pretend that space opera is worse LITERATURE. One of the finest works of SF Literature in history is Dune. The novel that decided that guns would be obsolete because of personal body shields that would bring back a form of feudalism, and as a side note wiped out computers because of a religious war. Or we could look at The Left Hand Of Darkness that posits a branch of humanity that have evolved a sexual mechanism that hasn’t been seen in any known species more advanced than… what? Frogs?

No, if you want to make your Space Opera work, then make it work. Just don’t be stupid about it. I can outline a way to make manual starfighter combat plausible right now. It involves a lot of handwavium, but it’s not hard.

Imagine for a moment that humanity has developed the (what could I call it?) the Yamamoto Field. The Field’s generator can be carried by a fighter-sized craft. The Field has the following qualities:

1) It’s impenetrable to E-M radiation except for visible light. Any other form of radiation is absorbed or passes through is refracted around it. Its radius when activated is at least a half-mile.

2) The Field also prevents computers and other delicate electronics from functioning inside it. It scrambles their circuits. Only simple mechanical calculation devices can aid the human pilots.

3) The Field deflects incoming objects directly proportional to their velocity and inversely proportional to their mass.

So, now I have a Field that’s going to protect our fighters from targeting computers, guided missiles, and high-velocity mass-drivers. It provides no protection from lasers, but you’re going to have to fire those pretty much with the Mark I Eyeball assisted with passive lenses. Since the Field can also be mounted on capital ships, they will have much the same problems. Granted, nuclear weapons might be brought in to solve those problems, but larger Fields might nullify that threat.

Now, it’s possible that I overlooked something in the design of the Yamamoto Field. It’s possible that one of my commenters will gleefully point it out to me. But I trust the point is made: a piece of tech COULD be plausibly designed to bring back WWII Fighters In Space. You might not like that story. You might not want to read that story. Which is fine; there are poor lost souls out there who don’t like Dune.

But it doesn’t mean it can’t be a good story.

I’d just like to take the time to note that an old story of mine, about an emotionally-damaged bride getting married with the aid of some mind-enhancing technology, is out this week in MIND CANDY TOO ed. Alvin Mullen. These days, not many anthologies are good enough to rate a sequel. This one was, and I’m in it.

I think it’s safe to say that the most popular story I’ve written is “When The Fleet Comes” (which you can buy at the link to the right for only $1.00). It was for months the best-selling short story for Digital Fiction Corporation, and for all I know, still is.

“Where do you get your ideas” is a classic question to writers that has become a cliche, and most of us respond with something like “where don’t you get ideas,” because seriously, they’re everywhere. Contrary to many assumptions, writers never run out of ideas. They just run out of ways to execute them properly, which is a lot harder. But this one, I remember.

So many of my ideas for writing stories seem to come from me being tired of reading the same old plots again. The core of the story — that the Earth is destroyed — is a very old one, going back arguably to religious prophecy. But those stories always seem to end in one of two ways: humanity escapes to a new world and/or achieves revenge on its destroyers, and starting anew as masters of their own fates (When Worlds Collide, Titan, A.E.) or it’s entirely a memento mori tale (On The Beach, I Am Legend).

And yet history is replete with the stories of people whose tribes were almost wiped out, leaving them with no home to go to, no new frontier within their reach. The Native Americans, the Tibetans, the South Vietnamese, and too many others to count were left with the choice to live under an alien dictatorship, or to flee into exile and live with aliens. And they had to go on, and build new lives in cultures that would never be theirs, and preserve parts of themselves to pass on to their children, knowing that it would never be more than parts.

There was no one moment that inspired me to write the story. I just wondered how people from my own heritage might deal with the loss of their entire social and cultural framework. And so I considered Sean, the orphan adopted into alien culture, never really considering “his” people to be his. And I considered Amanda and her father, George, trying to, in their own way, continue the human race on an alien world, and finding their own, flawed answers to the question, what is important? What do we remember? What do we do to survive? What makes us… us? They do it by turning inward, but also by accepting a grim necessity. And I also considered Sean’s alien wife, Ajna, and her well-meaning naivete that hurts him, but nevertheless holds a degree of insight into his pain.

In any case, it seems to have spoken to more people than anything else I’ve ever written, and I think this is one of the things I really value in the SF I choose to read: the challenging of the dichotomies that are so often presented. The cry, “Victory or Death” echoes down through the ages and is a popular theme, but what happens when the first is out of your reach and the second seems unthinkable? If you are one of those who read the story and enjoyed it, I can only say, thank you for showing me that I am not alone in considering these things.

I just sold a story about Space Marine Midwives with Disabilities to a pro market magazine (announcement of which one when contract is signed).

This should teach us two things about “originality.”

1. No idea is so completely bizarre that it should be cast aside as unworthy  of being published.
2. Since the GENESIS of this story was actually a Call For Submissions (for an anthology that as far as I know, never even opened to submissions. Yeah, um, really should have gone on to that if you wanted this story, guys) that SPECIFIED “Space Marine Midwives,” there is no idea so completely bizarre AND original that no one has thought of it already.

In other words, “Originality” doesn’t matter a DAMN as long as it’s good writing and doesn’t FEEL like a retread.

The rest is up to you.

A continuation of yesterday’s post.

Write Every Day (L): I cannot overstate the importance of writing on your novel every day. It builds a momentum up that is easy to sustain, much like running down a shallow grade. Gravity helps you. But if you stop, you have to overcome your inertia again and it’s a lot harder.

Don’t Give Up When You Fail To Write Every Day (L): You will fail to write every day. At some point, something is going to come up that will (more accurately, “that you will allow to”) keep you from writing. There will be something with the kids, or your wife, or your job, where you will come home and say “I just can’t.”
And the worst thing in the world you can do is throw up your hands and say, “Well, I failed. I guess I don’t have what it takes” and pitch a fit about it. Get back to work the next day and go on. Make up for the lost day if you can. If you can’t, oh well, you lost a day. Keep going.

Do Not Agonize Over Shit You Will Fix Anyway In The Revision (L): This may be the most important piece of advice that I implemented, having learned it from Steven Barnes. And I resisted it for a long time. My reasoning was, “If I know what to fix now, I should fix it. I’m going to have to fix it anyway, and this way I won’t have to revise as much.”
Well, as I have said to my own students before, “That is very compelling and sensible reasoning, which is nevertheless wrong.” Okay, but why is it wrong?
It’s wrong for four main reasons:
1) The process of going back and revising kills your momentum. Part of what encourages you to keep going is seeing how much you’ve done. It’s a reward that your animal brain really gets off on. So the faster you go, the faster you go. If you kill that momentum, you slow down HARD. And unlike the tortoise, slow and steady really does not win this race, because…
2) What you’re really doing is replacing errors that you can see with ones you can’t. They’re going to creep in there anyway, and they’ll be harder to see when you DO go back and reread the manuscript. I always thought that it made more sense to fix the errors NOW than to go back later because if I didn’t, I’d be building later chapters on earlier crap, and it would all have to be fixed. There’s some truth to this* but what I didn’t realize is that it cuts both ways.  You can also come up with a solution near the end of the book that fixes things you screwed up earlier, only because you “fixed” it earlier, that new solution doesn’t work and you have to go back and fix your fix. Which is now HARDER because…
3) When you go back and revise, you will, if you’re any good, produce tighter, neater prose. That’s a good thing. But having to revise that is harder, because its so well done. So essentially, you end up throwing out TWO drafts and writing two more to replace finished prose with finished prose, rather than throwing out ONE draft and writing two more.
4) Finally, going back and revising isn’t fun, so you try to avoid it, and this means you have to fight the urge to agonize over everything. What is this character’s name? What is the name of this gadget? What is the name of this country? How exactly does the gadget work. I need to research to see if that’s plausible. And you’re stuck in a mire of Getting Everything Right The First Time. Right now my manuscript is filled with people named [NAME], and notes like [LET’S GO BACK AND MAKE JEREMY’S PARENTS HAVE A RUN-IN WITH HIS MOM] or [I’D KIND OF LIKE JAEL TO DO SOME SORT OF THEATRICAL TRICK HERE TO DEMONSTRATE FALLING IN LOW GRAVITY, BUT I DON’T WANT TO WORK OUT THE MATH RIGHT NOW.]

So that’s how I did it. Obviously ALL these techniques may not work for YOU, the reader (especially the outlining), but this is the advice I wish I could have read and understood twenty years ago. I hope it helps.

By the way, if you’re interested in more from Steven Barnes, who knows a LOT more about all this than I do, you can find the Lifewriting group here.

*There are some cases where you really want to go back and revise right then, but they’re really on the order of making a huge change to your basics. Like, “I want this character to be a 78 year old man rather than a 16 year old girl,” or “I think we should set this on Enceladus rather than on the Titanic.” Anything less than THAT, leave for revision.