Zoom Reading: December 7th, 2022, 5:30 PDT

To celebrate the release of Crooked Vol. 2: A Sci-Fi Crime Anthology, I’m going to be hanging out live with some of my fellow authors on December 7th for a live Zoom reading! Join me and my fellow sci-fi crime authors Andrew Sweet, Mark Niemann Ross, Greg Dragon and William Burton McCormick to hear some delightfully dastardly tales, shoot the breeze about science fiction and crime stories, and maybe discover a new author you’ll love. 

Register for the live Zoom reading on December 7th, 2022, 5:30 pm Pacific Standard Time: Register for the Zoom Reading

Buy Crooked Volume 2

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Hello everyone,

I’m excited to announce a new page feature on the Expansion Front, the Galaxy Gallery! Check out the page and the first gallery entry at the link, or read on for more context on the project.

I’ve long been a fan of sci fi art and artistic imaginings of aliens such as those represented in the art of Wayne D. Barlowe and other talented sci fi artists. After many reader requests for illustrations of the aliens featured in the Expansion series, I decided it’s high time to embark on an artistic collaboration that will give life to the Expansion Universe through the lens of sci-fi art.

I will be commissioning diverse artists to create both sketches and full-color illustrations of the major species populating the Expansion Universe. I will announce when new entries are up on the site via this blog and on social media, so make sure to follow me on here or on my social channels below.

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Hi readers! This is a quick post to let those of you who follow my blog know that Accord of Shadows (Expansion Series #3) will be released in March 2021. Be sure to follow me on Twitter, Facebook, or my website for the actual release date, which I’ll announce soon.

While you wait, you can check out an excerpt from Chapter One on the book’s page here: https://wp.me/P5XNa4-7O

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Redrafting Your Novel

A blank notebook and pen next to a cup of coffee with decorated latte art.

For National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) 2020, I redrafted the fourth novel in The Expansion Series. This is the second time I’ve redrafted a novel from scratch. I thought it was time to write about a process few writers talk about, but almost all of us go through at some point in our development.

Writing is hard. Beyond the common examples brought up to support this statement — the mental effort and practice required to develop your prose, character and story into something not just “good enough” but actually good—something other people might actually want to read— there’s another aspect less talked about, for reasons that will be obvious. 

The casualties along the way. I don’t just mean your early trunk novels that will never see the light of day. I mean the earlier drafts of novels that you fully intend to publish. 

I mean the total redrafts. 

Total redraft — are there any two words more likely to send a shiver up writers’ spines?

My editor is also one of the people I love most in the world. That’s probably a contributing factor as to why, when he recommended I redraft my third novel, I didn’t recommend he jump head first into a lake. But I was tempted. 

I’d thought my third novel was okay: I just had to tighten the structure, update some characterizations; how much had I really changed/grown as a writer in the intervening years since I’d finished it? 

A lot, as it turned out. Enough that my “okay” draft had become a soggy, tedious mess. And I was faced with a decision. Which brings me to: 

How do you know when to abandon a project, and when to redraft? 

Hindsight can be a wonderful thing. Sometimes you look back at a project that needs to be redone from scratch and realize it’s not worth doing. Maybe it doesn’t work because the premise is too flawed, you’re not the right person to tell it, or your interests and concerns have changed from when you wrote it. 

But what if, like me, you are still invested? What if you care about the story and believe it’s worth telling? 

Then it’s time to buckle up, because this is where writing gets hard. 

What redrafting asks of you

I recently read Dean Wesley Smith’s short book Stages of a Fiction Writer, in which he attempts to describe the four stages fiction writers go through as they develop in their careers. I didn’t agree with all his points, but one thing stuck out that felt true in my own experience: as a writer develops their craft, they go from caring about the prose— the actual words on the page—to caring about the story those words convey.

This might strike the average reader (or reader-writer) as odd. After all, isn’t the prose the lifeblood of written fiction, the medium through which the writer constructs the story? 

To which I say, yes — but focusing on writing good prose without building a solid story structure to hold it up is like building a skyscraper without a foundation. The result in either case is disaster. 

Redrafting forces you to look past the actual words you wrote to the supporting structure (or lack thereof) underneath. To successfully redraft a novel, you need to understand its structure: what works in the story, what doesn’t, and how to fix it. Redrafting is what finally made me understand that revising a scene doesn’t mean fiddling with the prose until it reads prettily. It means knocking out a wall, adding a new window, sometimes ripping down the entire building.

Words in this metaphor are your materials: you used them to build the first version of the scene, but to make it stand you have to demolish them and rebuild with new materials. There will always be more words. 

Redrafting also makes you reimagine what the story could be on a macro level. Writers often talk of the terror or the blank page, but writer’s block can attack just as fiercely when staring at the full page. It’s easy to get hung up on the previous version of a novel as the way it “should be”, because that’s the draft that currently exists.

I sometimes call this “but that’s how the story goes” syndrome. The way I combat it is to think of the earlier draft as practice or proof of concept and tell myself nothing is set in stone. The book isn’t published; it isn’t even a book yet. It’s a drafting board, a playground where I’m free to bounce ideas off each other and discover a new life for the story. 

That’s the final point I want to make. Redrafting your novel gives you freedom. It can be incredibly freeing to let go of the old draft, of “how the story goes”, and begin afresh. 

You might just find a whole new novel waiting for you.

I want to hear from you! Have you ever redrafted a novel, or are you redrafting one right now? If you participated in NaNoWriMo this year, how did it go?

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How I won NaNoWriMo while working full time

Image by <a href="https://pixabay.com/users/mohamed_hassan-5229782/?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image&utm_content=2409314" srcset=mohamed Hassan from Pixabay” width=”300″ height=”259″>It’s that time of year again when thousands of writers worldwide try to crank out 50,000 words (sometimes an entire novel, sometimes a solid foundation for one) in 30 days. I won’t be doing NaNoWriMo this year because I’m not at the drafting part of my writing cycle. I participated in NaNoWriMo 2018, and it’s that experience I’m going to write about, because it was the first year I won NaNoWriMo while working full time.

When NaNoWriMo rolled around last year, I was working a day job – the kind of 9-5, full-time gig I haven’t had in years, and had never seriously tried to write around. I was, honestly, terrified: I’d been hired in May of 2018, and in my first few months on the job had drafted nothing. I’d done no work of any kind on a piece of fiction save for a few small copy edits on Shadow Game, my Expansion Universe novella written the year before. I’d dreamed of the stability and focus that having a reliable paycheck could give me, but at the same time I was wondering if I’d made a devil’s bargain: would working full time permanently sap me of the energy and free time I needed to write?

NaNoWriMo would be the acid test. I was due to start work on the third novel in my Expansion series while Alliance of Exiles was with my developmental editor. If I could manage to write the first 50,000 words of that novel in 30 days while working full time, then having the coveted day job didn’t have to mean putting the brakes on my writing career.

The short version? I did it. I’m going to share three strategies that helped me win NaNoWriMo while working full-time.

1) You have to have a plan. As an organization, NaNoWriMo promotes giving in to your unfettered creativity during the month of November and following your draft wherever it takes you. This is great for brainstorming, but not so great for writing a book–even a first draft. To win NaNoWriMo, especially when work and other responsibilities compete for your attention, you have to have a plan.

I started planning my NaNo novel in October, starting with the very basic plot arcs for each major character, and working my way down to outlining scenes in the rough order I planned to write them. I found Dan Harmon’s story circle to be enormously helpful in developing those plot arcs in a short amount of time.

I also planned around the NaNoWriMo challenge itself: I stocked up on tea and snacks, chose some easy, big-batch recipes so I wouldn’t be stuck cooking when I should be writing, and decided what reward I would get for each 10,000-word milestone. I was introduced to the concept of milestone rewards by author and vlogger Rachael Stephen in her invaluable NaNoWriMo prep series. For every 10,000 words I wrote, I’d get myself a little something: a fancy coffee, a game app, a T-shirt I’d been coveting. It was a surprisingly simple way to keep motivated, on track, and accountable during what can sometimes be an interminable slog.

2) Technology is your friend. Accord of Shadows was the first novel I wrote entirely in Scrivener, an app designed for writing longform works. It’s no exaggeration to say Scrivener’s powerful organizing and time management tools helped make it possible to do NaNoWriMo while working full time.

Scrivener has three levels of granularity: the binder, where individual scenes are organized and which displays your actual draft; the outline; and the corkboard. Both the outline and the corkboard let you look at your entire work in progress from a bird’s-eye view, while the binder displays your notes and synopsis for any currently open scene. You can even open up notes while staying in Focus Mode. If I needed a reminder of my plan for the scene or a detail I didn’t want to omit, I could open the note to remind myself and then keep on writing without exiting the window.

Scrivener also helped me cut down the time I took to start writing. Rather than creating one long continuous document, like Microsoft Word does, Scrivener creates individual documents for each of your scenes and organizes them in a column on the side of the drafting space. You know how when you close and reopen a document in Word, it takes you back to the beginning? Scrivener’s scene binder structure means you can click on the scene you were last working on and take up where you left off–no scrolling required. I also invested in the Scrivener app for iOS, a lean but still robust mobile version that syncs with the desktop program. Getting the sync to work was a bit of a learning curve, but once I figured it out the Scrivener app was a game changer: I’d open it on my phone and write during snippets of free time throughout the day, and then sync that work seamlessly into the draft.

3) You have to be flexible. It helps if you can hold two contradictory thoughts in your brain – plan rigorously, but be willing to change that plan up. You may have to apply this to both your schedule and your draft. I originally planned three writing sprints of 500, 500, and 700 words throughout the day. I was going to get up half an hour early, at 6am, to give myself time in the morning to write, do the next 500 words at lunch, and then the final 600-700 after dinner.

I am not a morning person. After the first 4 days of getting up at 6, I was tired, irritable and having trouble concentrating on both my work and writing. I decided to switch my wake-up schedule back to 6:30 and write more after dinner to make up for losing that initial block of time.

Being flexible can apply to your manuscript, too. I started drafting Accord of Shadows while Alliance of Exiles was still in need of developmental edits. As a result, some of the necessary characterization wasn’t in place for the third volume. My editor had shared with me that a particular character needed to be more antagonistic in both the second and third book, but without having done that work in Alliance of Exiles, it was proving impossible for me to write that character in a way that felt realistic, fluid, and like it agreed with what came before. But rather than stall out on the draft, I put that plot thread on pause and worked only on its parallel thread, where the work that came before felt more solid.

For writers like me who have a day job, NaNoWriMo is all the difficulty of making room for creative work distilled into 30 days of pressure-cooker production. By having a plan, making judicious use of technology, and being flexible when my initial plan warranted, I was able to win NaNoWriMo while working full time, and prove to myself that my day job need not stand in the way of my writing.

Have you participated in NaNoWriMo while working full time? How did it go? What helped you find the time and energy to write? Share your strategies in the comments!

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Women’s Book March: Binti by Nnedi Okorafor

I’m challenging myself to read only novels by women and femme people for a full year, from March 2019 through March 2020. Read this post to get the full story!

This time I read Binti by Nnedi Okorafor! I’d heard a lot of good things about Okorafor’s writing, and especially the Binti series of space opera novellas, so I was excited to finally read it for the Challenge. However, my experience was a bit of a mixed bag.

The title character, Binti, is a member of a future version of the Himba tribe, a real culture residing in the desert of Namibia. She’s also a mathematical prodigy and the first of her people to be invited to attend Oomza University, a planetwide university dedicated to learning and discovery. However, her route there takes her through regions controlled by the Meduse, sea jelly-like aliens who have been locked in a stalemate with the dominant human culture, the Khoush. When Meduse invade her passenger ship, Binti must use her wits, resourcefulness, and ability to connect with the aliens to survive long enough to get to Oomza Uni.

Binti typifies that sense of pleasurable disorientation that comes from being dropped in medias res into an unfamiliar cultural and historical context. The world of the novella has not only diverged from ours in time, but is also being told from a point of view that I don’t often encounter as a white Western reader. I didn’t know about the Himba tribe until I read this story, and it’s wonderful to see Okorafor’s speculation about how the Himba might embrace and perfect certain technologies — such as the astrolabe, a kind of communicator/ galactic Google maps/personal database — while maintaining other elements of their traditional culture.

However, Okorafor’s very inventiveness gets a little out of hand when it comes to uniting the worldbuilding with the plot. Objects and concepts central to the plot are not explained, and as a result the story’s twists and resolutions feel a little convenient. Take the astrolabe: my description above is my best guess as to what it does, but its function(s) are never clearly established. Likewise, Binti is supposed to be a master harmoniser–a skill crucial to her establishing communication with the Meduse–yet just what a harmoniser does is never explained.

It’s clear that Binti is the tip of a very big iceberg of a fictional world that Okorafor has put a lot of a loving effort into creating. I wish more of that world and its workings had been revealed on the page.

Already read Binti? Let me know what you thought in the comments!

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Women’s Book March: No Man of Woman Born (Rewoven Tales) by Ana Mardoll

I’m challenging myself to read only novels by women and femme people for a full year, from March 2019 through March 2020. Read this post to get the full story!

This time around, I read a collection of reimagined fantasy short stories by Ana Mardoll!

I’ve been a longtime Twitter follower of Ana Mardoll, but this is my first time reading xer fiction. This is also the first book by a publicly nonbinary author I’ve featured in the Challenge. Mardoll identifies as genderqueer in her profile and answers to she/her and xie/xer pronouns; to be respectful of that I’m going to use both to refer to xer.

In her introduction to No Man of Woman Born, Mardoll lays out the inspiration behind the collection: despite a deep love of high fantasy, xie noticed that traditional high fantasy and fairy tale narratives exclude people like her: genderqueer, nonbinary, transgender, bi-gender, and other folks whose genders don’t match those they were assigned at birth.

No Man of Woman Born asks a deceptively simple yet simultaneously subversive question: what if the classic gendered prophecies of high fantasy were fulfilled by someone with an identity outside the prescriptive gender binary?

The collection’s title is, of course, a reference to the famous Shakespearean prophecy, “No man of woman born shall harm Macbeth”. The stories in this collection are each built around such a prophecy, seemingly insoluble within the bounds of the gender binary. While Shakespeare found his workaround in the form of a Caesarean section, Mardoll’s characters show such paradoxes to be failures of perspective, language, and worldview that exclude their lived experience — until the prophecy’s fulfillment reveals the truth.

As in real life, their gender identities are an essential part of their stories, but not all of their stories–as Mardoll says in the intro, “these characters aren’t special because they’re trans, they’re special and they are trans.” In the best tradition of high-fantasy adventure stories, the characters within these pages are resourceful, inventive, brave, and compassionate. I thoroughly enjoyed reading their adventures and will definitely be checking out more of Mardoll’s books.

Already read No Man of Woman Born? Let me know what you thought in the comments!

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Women’s Book March: The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal

I’m challenging myself to read only novels by women and femme people for a full year, from March 2019 through March 2020. Read this post to get the full story!

No matter how much I love the radical scientific extrapolations and handwavium of space opera, sometimes I get a craving for rigorous, technical hard science fiction–the kind whose calculations have been checked over by physicists for accuracy. The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal is that craving satisfied and wrapped in a gripping alternate history tale that pits sexism and racism against an overwhelming need for humanity to work together to escape ecological catastrophe.

When a huge meteorite destroys Washington D.C. in 1952, it sets off a series of climatic changes that could render the Earth uninhabitable in mere decades. Elma York, a computer and a former World War II pilot with the Women’s Air Service Pilots, is working for a nascent NASA when the disaster hits. She and her husband Nathaniel join the International Aerospace Coalition, or IAC–part of an accelerated, international effort to establish viable colonies in space. Despite her and other women’s vital contributions to the space program’s efforts to put a man on the moon, the IAC resists allowing women to join the astronaut corps. But Elma’s desire to go into space is so strong she won’t rest until she and every qualifying woman has a chance to.

There’s so much I loved about this book: rigorous science, a richly imagined alternate history, and a main character whose trials, successes and growth had me glued to the pages. Elma is determined, smart, and does her best to help other women in similar positions as herself. At the same time, she struggles with sometimes debilitating social anxiety, as well as prejudice due to her gender and Jewish heritage. Yet she also has her own blind spots regarding how she has benefited from whiteness, especially at the beginning of the book. Part of Elma’s growth in the book involves gaining awareness of the racist systems that affect the Black and Asian women on her team, and trying to use her privilege to get their voices heard, too.

It’s equally inspiring, and often harrowing, to watch her deal with her anxiety as she gains fame as the “Lady Astronaut” and circumstances conspire to place her in the spotlight.In a society in which people with mental illness often have their symptoms belittled or are encouraged just to “push through” them, it’s very heartening to see Kowal treat anxiety disorder as a condition deserving serious consideration and one that is possible to live with given the appropriate treatment.

Give this book a shot if you’re into alternate history, hard science fiction, and well-developed female characters of diverse backgrounds!

Already read The Calculating Stars? Let me know what you thought in the comments!

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Women’s Book March: The Creative Fire by Brenda Cooper

I’m challenging myself to read only novels by women and femme people for a full year, from March 2019 through March 2020. Read this post to get the full story!

My last Women’s Book March read for July is The Creative Fire by Brenda Cooper! This book explores what might happen if a revolution of the proletariat broke out on a generation ship traveling between the stars. Ruby Martin is a young “gray” (so named because of their gray uniforms), one of the repair and maintenance workers on the generation ship The Creative Fire.

According to Cooper, Ruby is loosely based on Eva Perón, the wife of Argentinian president Juan Perón and a political leader in her own right. At the beginning of the story, Ruby is prepared for a life of drudgery repairing robots, with no possibility of moving to other levels. Her one creative outlet, singing, seems like it will only remain a pasttime until a shipwide emergency throws her in with Fox, a “blue” from the higher levels and a music producer. Ruby seizes the chance to go to the blue levels with Fox, where for the first time she sees the chance to be a voice for her people.

Although the premise drew me in–generation ships! Art as a vehicle for revolution!–I ended up feeling decidedly lukewarm on this book. The story left too many questions unanswered, including why The Creative Fire began its multigenerational journey in the first place. There is a single comment made about collecting samples from other planets to bring back home, and that the grays are revolting in part to ensure they receive an equal portion of the payout for the samples when they return. However, we never learn what these samples are, what makes them valuable, or even what form the payment on their return would take.

Of course, we’re reading a novel here, not a cargo manifest. I wouldn’t have minded the lack of backstory if the main story were compelling. Although Ruby starts out with a clear motivation to improve life for her people, her arc gets a bit muddied when she actually begins to acquire fame as a singer. This could’ve been a solid growth arc in itself if the revolution’s stakes and costs had felt more urgent and immediate. However, the events Cooper chooses to focus on don’t put the reader in the thick of it: we spend more time hearing about the pitched battles and coups than witnessing them firsthand. Additionally, a persistent lack of sensory details made me feel like I was watching a televised version of this revolution instead of being there.

To its credit, The Creative Fire makes me want to learn more about the life of Eva Perón. Perón did much in Argentina to improve the lives of working families and women, and has been memorialized in fiction before in the musical Evita.

Already read The Creative Fire? Let me know what you thought in the comments!

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Women’s Book March: vN: The First Machine Dynasty by Madeline Ashby

I’m challenging myself to read only novels by women and femme people for a full year, from March 2019 through March 2020. Read this post to get the full story!

Madeline Ashby’s vN is one of the gnarliest, most biological takes on humanoid machine intelligence that I’ve come across. What do I mean by “biological”, you ask? After all, isn’t that a contradiction in terms when we’re talking about synthetic humanoids? Take a gander at the book’s back cover copy:

Amy Peterson is a von Neumann machine – a self-replicating humanoid robot. For the past five years, she has been grown slowly as part of a mixed organic/synthetic family. She knows very little about her android mother’s past, so when her grandmother arrives and attacks them, young Amy wastes no time: she eats her alive.

The humanoid vN of Ashby’s universe are a synthetic lifeform that grows, matures and eventually reproduces in direct proportion to how much nourishment it receives. Amy has been kept small by being fed a restricted diet of synthetic food, but as a result she’s constantly hungry. With the much larger meal of her granny onboard, she quickly matures to an adult size just as the world starts treating her like an adult: public footage of the attack reveals that in Amy, and Amy alone, the failsafe that prevents vN from harming humans has stopped working.

She finds herself on the run, from a government that wants her threat contained, from her mother’s murderous sibling androids, and from her granny, who has survived as a partition on Amy’s memory drive and emerges to fight her for control of her body and destiny.

The concept of the failsafe owes its roots to Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, specifically the first one: A robot shall not harm a human, or through inaction, allow a human to come to harm. Indeed, there are many loving references to other works of robotic fiction, video games, and anime throughout the book, from Bladerunner to Silent Hill to Neon Genesis Evangelion. I found these subtle enough to be appreciable if you get the reference, without requiring it to enjoy the story.

vN is more than a referential simulacrum of geeky nostalgia, however. At its heart it is a deeply interesting and human story about what it means to truly be able to give consent and make your own choices when your very programming (or genes, social conditioning, etc.) is urging you to act, feel, and believe a certain way, and to support interests that aren’t necessarily your own.

Already read vN? Let me know what you thought in the comments!

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