You get out of it what you put into it...

"Inspiration can come from the littlest things." -Dennis Collins.

Genrecon 2010

The mayor can poo-poo 'Star Wars Conventions' all he wants, but this reporter had a lot of fun at Genrecon 2010.  It was May 15, at Sarnia Library. Fans and writers of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mystery novels were treated to intelligent, in-depth discussions of character-building, narrative, and how to get inside the mind of a character. There is an 'ah-ha' moment in any successful writer's life, when they realize that they are capable of 'this thing called writing.' And writing is a compelling urge. Suzanne Church led the first panel. This writer of science fiction, fantasy and horror, or, 'sf/f/h,' as it's called professionally, has the look of a writer about to break out. Dennis Collins is a crime writer with a number of well-regarded mysteries. He's really easy to talk to, and honoured to give the benefit of experience to younger talents. Jeff De Luzio is a published author, and writes reviews for a number of websites. He teaches as well. Eric Choi is an aviation engineer and recently co-edited an anthology of sci-fi written by expatriate Chinese writers all over the world. That's out under the DAW Books imprint. I only got a glimpse, but I'm pretty sure that one's called, 'The Dragon and the Stars.'
There were books for sale, book signings, a free lunch, which reporters always appreciate, and at least one alien running around. I didn't get a picture because I was too shy to ask! W.S. Gager of Michigan was there to answer questions on the panel, and to outline her methods of writing. There was another interesting young fellow there, Martin Renaud. He has a series of three graphic novels out, which were five years in the making. I took a closer look. Self-published books have a kind of a bad reputation in the industry, but I was pleasantly surprised. All the art, printing, and covers looked good. 

W.S. Gager writes the 'Mitch Malone' series. She's a real nice lady, and I asked her about the limitations of the first-person narrative. "There's no other filter," she said. "There's no other point of view from which the reader can see the situation." How does the writer describe such a character physically? It's pretty hard when the reader never gets the chance to look through the eyes of another character. They're always on the inside looking out, and never on the outside looking at the outside of the main character. For that reason, arguably, most novels are written in the third-person. "Fred did this and Fred did that," as opposed to "I did this and I did that, and I did something else." Mitch Malone was a minor character when she began her first book. "I really didn't even like him, but he just sort of took over the book!" That was clearly a character of some strength. A character who takes over the writer!

The first-person thing in a story is very limiting. It also begins to sound pretty self-absorbed and narcissstic. No matter how hard the character tries to figure out what makes other characters in the book tick, they never have 'perfect information.' They simply can't see inside the other person's head. It is a completely one-sided view of the world. This is true in real life. How many times have we wished that we knew what another person was thinking? How many times have we thought we knew? And been wrong? Pretty often, I'd say.

Use of the first-person narrative can be done really well, as many critics say. But it has to be done well to work at all. At least one of the authors at Genrecon advised authors to ' re-write your manuscript twenty-five times and then burn it.' Perhaps it might be looked upon as a learning tool.

By the time I finished my very rough, first draft of a novel, I knew roughly how a novel 'could' be put together. And that's all I knew.

That's one reason why you need to keep smashing them out. Successful writers don't sit down and write a perfect, best-selling novel, exactly this much and no more. They write insane amounts of material, over ninety percent of which will never see the light of day. That's possibly for the best. The best golfers practice. Olympic gymnasts practice. Aviation engineers practice their skill daily. It's called, 'working for a living.'

Writers, if they want to be any good at all, should practice every chance they get. If you love it enough, it can be a kind of play, and play is a learning experience at any age. We're hard-wired for it, and that is simply evolution.

I got a lot out of Genrecon, but then I went there to work. It is a work ethic.It is a dream, or a goal, or something. You learn something new every day in this business. Just for example, today I learned how to clear out my cache.

The Paranoid Cat

The Paranoid Cat

by Louis B. Shalako

c2010

All Rights Reserved




“Come on people, get with the program,” called Bootsy, impatiently to say the least.
Bootsy clawed at the screen door, hoping against hope that it wasn’t too late to save them. The blue glare and the raucous noise of the television set assaulted his senses. It wasn’t usually turned up this loud. Perhaps Jane was right in the middle of looking for the dancing show and the phone had rang. Maybe that was it. Perhaps she was in the bedroom. Bootsy couldn’t hear the usual creaks and clunks of footsteps moving through the interior, but then that TV was loud.
From where he stood on hind paws, peering through the screen and around the corner and through the gap…he couldn’t see if Mark was in his easy chair or not. Dropping back down on all fours, Bootsy quickly shoulder-checked, but there was no one about except the Williams boy down the street with his dratted radio-control truck.
“Mark? Mark?” called Bootsy plaintively; urgently. “Jane? Jane? Jane, can your hear me?”
There was no reply. Hopefully Mark hadn’t taken one of the ‘little brown houses,’ which in combination with a few brewskis, made him go all rubbery-legged and sleepy-eyed. Stupid enough at the best of times, Mark was practically unmanageable at that point. Trying to get Mark to put some food down when he was in that state was hopeless. One was better off not to be stuck inside when Mark went down for the night.
“Jane? Jane?” he called again. “Are you guys in there? Where is everybody?”
Of course they were in there, and he had no time…there was no time left at all.
“Guys?” he called again in some forlorn hope that they could get it through their thick heads that this was an emergency…
What if Mark had taken one of the little blue pills? Bootsy’s heart sank, and he quickly dropped off of the porch and ran around the side of the house and up the driveway to the back yard. Skipping over the rhododendrons, and through the narcissus vines, rank with Butch’s piss-markers, Bootsy hovered under the bedroom window for a moment. His ears were cocked for any hint of the disaster which he was sure had befallen them all…but no.
Thank God, but no.
No whispers, no giggles, no heavy breathing, or gasping. No screams and slaps. No uproarious laughter from Jane, like the time they came home from the Hallowe’en party at Susan’s place, and Mark was dressed up like Mickey Mouse.
What the hell was going on in there?
With all his heart, Bootsy prayed that it wasn’t already too late.
As far as he could reckon, the pods in the garden might snap open at any time, although he hoped it wouldn’t be for another day or two.
But honestly, it was time to get the hell out of here.

Keep bashing them out...

Synopsis: ‘Horse-catcher’
by Louis B. Shalako



Ark One is returning to Earth after a failed colonization attempt. Due to the fact that they have an unanticipated 20,000 cryo-frozen colonists aboard, as well as livestock embryos, tools, implements, and supplies, they don’t have enough reaction mass for a conventional return.
Astrogator Dooley Peeters has planned a low-speed, long duration course, intercepting the predicted position of the solar system in about 12,000 years. The slower you go, the less fuel you burn. The crew is put into emergency cold-storage, and individuals are only awakened for routine maintenance duties and careful checking of the navigation programs.
Dooley has decided to use ‘mass-braking,’ or ‘gravitational braking,’ which is described by him as, “Passing a Nascar driver on the outside, beating him into the apex of the turn, and then using his brakes to slow you down.” The ‘Ice Queen,’ Captain Sandra Jensen, cuts through the consensus-building process and plays a hunch.
“Just do it,” she says, in spite of or perhaps because of a strong sexual tension that exists between them.
Poor old Dooley is really suffering. He fell head over heels for her, love at first sight, when attending a recruitment or job fair. But since she’s the superior officer, she can’t fraternize with Dooley, and as a subordinate, he’s totally at a loss for what to do about it.
Since Ark One has no way to replenish her reaction mass tanks, any fuel savings, as little a tenth of one percent, may save their lives. Anything is better than jettisoning 20,000 colonists into space and making a conventional, faster-than-light return.
The original mission was conceived as a way to save humanity. That’s because of climactic collapse, and a financial/economic crisis, which has doomed the remnants of the human race to mass migrations of peoples, wars, famine, and endemic disease.
Society has gone back to the dark ages. What is surprising is that they don’t go back to living in caves, or swinging on tree branches. After 12,000 years, they have risen again to various levels. The Kitchi-lao have water power, telescopes, and walled cities. They are experimenting with hot-air balloons for military purposes. The Pentapolis are nominally democratic city states. The cultures are uniquely human achievements. There are no aliens as such in this book. Just like present-day Earth, various peoples are at different levels of social development. I’ve simply constructed a different reality for the characters. The Kirtele are sedentary farmers, but they are also literate sedentary farmers, with a rich heritage of story-telling, songs, and political oratory. No one in the book is truly evil, or truly faultless. There are no ‘Conan-the-Barbarians’ in the book, bulging with muscles and traipsing around in S & M garb.
The Kitchi-lao Empire is just that—an empire. The Pentapolis is made up of five city-states who have banded together and outlawed war amongst themselves, and they have a ‘chair,’ instead of a president. The Kulutawas are pastoral herders, with a loose political structure; the Mittaini have a hereditary constitutional monarchy. The lakes tribes and plains tribes are tribes, the Kirtele Nation is a republic. The Spy Guild and The Brethren are world-wide organizations. The Brethren in particular are interesting due to their attempts to preserve and understand the old knowledge, and prepare for the second coming, presumably.
This is all very impressive—I’m certainly impressed—but it’s actually a very simple book. Kjarl is a horse-catcher when he isn’t busy farming. He hires Akim because Akim can read and write better than he can. Brother Raffin ministers to his flock in a loving and caring way. Talmotek of the Pentapolis goes to war to cement his hold on The Chair, and found a dynasty. Helios II knows war will come with the Pentapolis and he prepares the Empire accordingly. Mittaini Prince Nodrakis just wants to look at the cosmos through a telescope and ask, “Why?”
His mentor Tsernalik’s radical theory challenges the assumptions of religious revelation of his time and place. Princes Kvetchen and Uttaris lead their armies into the field. Everyone gets sucked into a war that is continental in scope, centering largely on the Mississipi and Ohio river valleys.
And when Ark One’s shuttle lands in the middle of a battlefield, the entire course of future history goes out the window. Simply put, I have sci-fi on one hand and fantasy—without the magic—on the other. That way all the characters in the book seem to follow a consistent set of rules. As usual with me, the genre and the plot are really just vehicles and stages for very real and very human relationships.
As a writer, I don’t much like magic for some reason, and I don’t much like heroes who can fly through the air, unless it’s presented in some ‘credible,’ believable fashion.
But if you don’t believe in magic, you shouldn’t try to write it, in my opinion. I suppose lots of people believe in their books, and for a so-far unsuccessful author, the very act of writing books is a kind of fantasy escape. We believe that we can change the future, if only our own.
Fantasies are just that, an escape from reality. The notion of the collapse of modern society, and a return to some form of barbarism, is a little too real. In the book there is a distinctly male-dominated society, and I suspect a lot of readers would object to that on misunderstanding; or philosophical grounds. In that sense, it’s not a fantasy, ‘femmes fatale’ such as Zenobia of Palmyra; or Cleopatra, or Queen Elizabeth I notwithstanding.
This book combines the best elements of fantasy with the best of science fiction, in a winning package, and it’s nice and short, which saves money on paper and ink.
My first few books were all funny. In this one I really tried to get serious and write a book that no one would have to be ashamed of—not the writer, the editor, the publisher, the seller, and not least of all, the final purchaser. I remembered that when I liked a book, I put it on the shelf and planned on reading it again, over and over in fact. I still had a lot of those books when I got flooded out a few years ago. In a sense they were irreplaceable.
In a noted opinion on the subject of fantasy, which you can view on the Science Fiction Writer’s Association of America’s website, author Poul Anderson says that a lot of fantasies fall down on historical grounds, and often even on simple, practical grounds.
Sword wounds get infected, and that sort of thing—you don’t just bind it up with a hanky. You are going to die.

My first spray-paint (digital) portrait

Can I Borrow My Tablesaw?