IDEAS ON TUESDAYS 423

Each Tuesday, rather than a POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAY, I'd like to both challenge you and lend a helping hand. I generate more speculative and teen story ideas than I can ever use. My family rolls its collective eyes when I say, "Hang on a second! I just have to write down this idea..." Here, I'll include the initial inspiration (quote, website, podcast, etc.) and then a thought or two that came to mind. These will simply be seeds -- plant, nurture, fertilize, chemically treat, irradiate, test or stress them as you see fit. I only ask if you let me know if anything comes of them. Regarding Fantasy, this insight was startling: “I see the fantasy genre as an ever-shifting metaphor for life in this world, an innocuous medium that allows the author to examine difficult, even controversial, subjects with impunity. Honor, religion, politics, nobility, integrity, greed—we’ve an endless list of ideals to be dissected and explored. And maybe learned from.” – Melissa McPhail.

F Trope: magic to summon someTHING

Current Event: http://www.spellsofmagic.com/coven_spells.html?coven=6&slist=54

Ruby Yilmaz and Liam Kaya sat side-by-side, skimming through websites. Liam muttered in Phasa Thai.

“English, Liam. English! While we’re here, we’re supposed to be practicing our English,” whispered Ruby. English was her birth language even though her parents had emigrated from Thailand to Australia before she was born and they spoke Phasa Thai at home. “It’s the language of physics!”

Liam grunted and said, “If you want my opinion, then the English isn’t going to be the language of physics much longer – that’ll be either Mandarin Chinese or Hindi.”

Ruby grinned and continued to scan the articles they had to read for the Intro to Physics in the 21^st Century class they were taking together this semester. She sighed. What she’d RATHER be reading was articles on ancient magic.

“Look at this,” said Liam.

Ruby leaned over. While she was glad the lettering was English, she rolled her eyes at the site name, “Conjuring Made Easy”. She whispered, “You’re supposed to be reading the articles updating the CERN discoveries!”

“Hey! How do we know magic is supernatural? What if it’s manipulating the laws of physics as we don’t understand them?”

Ruby rolled her eyes and went back to reading. Let Liam waste his time. SHE wanted to move to some rich country someday – like China – and get a real job as a physicist! She wanted to be in on the Chinese dream of establishing a colony on the water world orbiting Alpha Centauri A – what the Chinese called Nán Mén Èr – and what they’d begun hollowing out an asteroid to reach.

“If magic is bogus, then why don’t we print this spell and go over to my place?”

Ruby rolled her eyes again. It wasn’t that Liam wasn’t good looking – it was just that he was quite certain that she found him attractive. The fact was that she had her eye on a certain very tall, very blonde, very, very shy Swedish young man in their physics class...

Liam said abruptly, “I know you’ve got it in for Elias, but I just want to see if this magic stuff actually works.”

Ruby opened her mouth to deny her attraction to the Swede’s light-skinned, elven looks, then closed it, considered, and said, “All right. BUT…” Liam’s look of delight froze on his face. She continued, “There’s no messing around and we get back to work after you’re done summoning whatever it is you plan on summoning.”

“I’m thinking I’m going to conjure up something that understands the laws of physics AND can explain them to me.”

She laughed and, gathering up her books, followed him out of the library. By the time they reached the dorm, however, it was threatening rain. “I’d better get going to my room…”

“That would be dumb! You live two kilometers from here. You’re sure to get caught out in the rain if you leave now – and you don’t have any tunnels you can duck into. Just stay the night. My roommate won’t be back. He’s busy sleeping with his latest boyfriend down the hall.”

Ruby made a face then said, “I’ll come up, but I’m not guaranteeing I’ll stay. If it’s not raining, I’m going home.”

Liam nodded and once they were firmly settled into his room and he’d pulled up the website again, he said, “All right. This summoning spell doesn’t seem to be too hard to pull off.”

“No blood of a virgin required?”

He snorted, “I’m NOT pricking my finger to bleed for a magic spell again. We’ll have to ask the guy next door.”

Ruby gasped, smacked him and laughed, saying, “Well THERE’S a silver lining to these rain clouds!”

Liam was silent, then muttered something that sounded almost like Phasa Thai. Lighting flashed and thunder rumbled to shake the window pane of the dorm room. Ruby scowled, focusing her attention on a particularly complex abstract regarding proof of the Higgs boson they’d discovered at CERN.

She was hunched over her computer when Liam screamed…

Names: ♀ England, Turkey; ♂ England, Hopi

Image: http://www.skyscrapernews.com/images/pics/6255CaernarfonCastle_pic1.jpg

Slice of PIE: Teen Humor Combatting the Grim Plans of Adults…

Using the Program Guide of the World Science Fiction Convention in Dublin, Ireland in August 2019 (to which I will be unable to go (until I retire from education)), I will jump off, jump on, rail against, and shamelessly agree with the BRIEF DESCRIPTION given in the pdf copy of the Program Guide. The link is provided below where this appeared on page…

You Have To Laugh: Humour in Young Adult Speculative Fiction

What with all the struggles of growing up, finding love, saving the world, and overthrowing dystopias, YA literature has a lot of serious business to take care of. But laughter is an outlet too. Is there room for laughter in YA? What kinds of humour do you find in the genre, how are they used, and is there a generation gap when it comes to what’s funny anyway?

Gail Carriger: YA and A author; well-known.

Ellen Klages: YA, A, historical fiction, SF, F author; well-known.

Sarah Rees Brennan: author; well known.

So – lots of experience here; lots of fun, I’m sure. I’ve never read any of these writers, but I DID order WHITE SANDS, RED MENACE by Ellen Klages from my local library.

However, what I do see is that all of them take speculative fiction aimed at young adult readers seriously.

I do, too. Several published stories target young adults – “Skipping School”, “Biking Mars”, “Prince of Blood and Spit”, “Invoking Fire”, “I Need More Space!”, “Fairy Bones”, “Peanut Butter and Jellyfish”, “Penguin Whisperer”, “Mystery on Space Station COURAGE”, and “Test”. But none of them are specifically humorous.

Not that I can’t make teenagers laugh. I do often as both a teacher and a counselor. But the stories above, while there may be funny moments, don’t actually wield humor as a weapon to break through the armor most young adults build around themselves to protect their growing hearts.

And, yes, I DO believe that.

I’ve got several UNpublished stories that lean more heavily on humor than others – “Alien Swimmer From Otter Space”, “An End To Faerie”, and “Not Quite Blue Boy”.

And while many, many, MANY speculative fiction writers who attempt to writer science fiction lean heavily on slaughtering teens for sport (THE HUNGER GAMES, THE WHITE MOUNTAINS trilogy, the MOON CRASH quartet, and many others), some OLDER science fiction found humor a different lens through which to view the future – not that the SITUATIONS were funny, but the characters have a “snarky”, hopeful outlook rather than resigning themselves to either revolution or destruction.

Heinlein’s HAVE SPACESUIT, WILL TRAVEL is one such. THE EVER EXPANDING UNIVERSE series by Martin Leicht and Isla Neal are newcomers to writers who deal with hard teen problems with humor without resorting to mass slaughter or using teens to solve the world’s problems. READY PLAYER ONE by Eric Cline is another novel that, while it has its dark moments, has a streak of rough humor running through it.

While SF is difficult to write, and given the current “adult view” of adolescents, there’s very little to recommend them to the general reading public, and when teachers and reviewers hold up examples like the dystopian novels I listed above, teens take them in (reading ones do, anyway) and absorb the image adults have of them. (I’ve ranted on this before and most other writers shrugged and said I was making too much of a big deal about it…but everyone who commented was…um…an adult. You can read the rant here: http://www.sfwa.org/2012/07/guest-post-when-did-science-fiction-and-apocalypse-become-interchangeable/).

What young people need is tools to deal with any future they discover. Right now, those futures seems to mostly involve them giving up. What you don’t find is teens rising to meet challenges on other worlds, meeting other intelligences, and forging alliances – nope, that’s for “adult professionals”. It’s also true that middle and high school young people are frequently victims, I have seen countless students rise to meet profound challenges.

I rarely see that resiliency reflected in the SF produced “for them”. In fantast, I see the same thing – HARRY POTTER for instance. The Hogwarts students were the victims of two adults who secretly and overtly manipulated them to reach their own goals. While some adults stood up for the young people, they were mostly swept aside by the more “important” adults. In the prequel movies FANTASTIC BEASTS, the same thing happens to Credence Barebone…

At any rate, my idea for a collection of published and unpublished short stories called MOVING OUT: Tales of Teens Who Left Earth Behind To Explore the Universe! As I noted above? Several of those stories showing those young people making FUN of the universe and the adults who seek to control them. As always, there might be one or two adults who actually CARE about young people, but as always, they remain few and far between and have to watch out for the “important adults” who are watching to see who tries to thwart their desires.

Program Book: https://dublin2019.com/whats-on/programming/programme-schedule/

Image: https://rlv.zcache.com/im_not_weird_im_limited_edition_quote_teen_humor_postcard-re5cab0336e204fc2a984140ac0143556_vgbaq_8byvr_540.jpg

IDEAS ON TUESDAYS 422

Each Tuesday, rather than a POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAY, I'd like to both challenge you and lend a helping hand. I generate more speculative and teen story ideas than I can ever use. My family rolls its collective eyes when I say, "Hang on a second! I just have to write down this idea..." Here, I'll include the initial inspiration (quote, website, podcast, etc.) and then a thought or two that came to mind. These will simply be seeds -- plant, nurture, fertilize, chemically treat, irradiate, test or stress them as you see fit. I only ask if you let me know if anything comes of them.

SF Trope: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DepopulationBomb

Current Event: http://www.rfdtv.com/story/34096878/metabiotas-top-five-epidemic-risk-factors-for-2017

Ngozi Adeyemi sighed and sat back from the scanning electron microscope. She said, “This machine…”

Ibrahim Eto'o Fils held up one hand, then lowered it, knowing it might be offensive as he said, “I know. It’s ancient. I’d rather have a QTM. But the Chinese aren’t exactly handing them out to West African disease researchers.”

She shook her head. “I was educated in England, worked for seven years at the CDC in Atlanta, and chaired the International Society for Infectious Diseases for six years. I’m not just a ‘disease researcher’!”

Ibrahim held up both hands in defense. “You won’t get any argument from me, Doctor Adeyemi. It’s been a privilege working…”

Ngozi brushed him away, “Save the flattery for someone who’ll believe it. You’re as skilled as I am and you’ve been here longer. We have work to do – and two of us may be the only ones who can accomplish it.” She paused. “When we finally tracked down the initial outbreak of the AIDS virus; and finally eradicated Ebola, we got cocky.”

“We didn’t,” Ibrahim said as he settled onto his lab chair. Another wave of his hand and his virtual computer screen materialized over the lab bench. “We know what we’re dealing with here. Climate change cooled Sahara and brought rain it hasn’t seen for over a thousand years. We’re afraid it’s also reactivated extinct pathogens.”

Ngozi sighed. “That’s why I came home. There’s something going on up north – it feels like a disaster waiting to happen. But there’s no proof,” she gestured at the SEM. “We’ll never get it if we have to work with stone knives and bear skins!”

Ibrahim grinned, “Thank you so much, doctor! These are the tools I used to earn my doctorate!”

Ngozi let herself lean forward until her forehead rested on the microscope’s control panel. “No offense intended, Doctor Eto’o Fils. It just frustrates me. We conquered hundreds of diseases with tools less complex than this, but I’m less afraid of disease than I am of attitude.”

Ibrahim puffed a laugh and said, “We thought we had climate change under control – and then it flipped from warming trends to cooling trends and wild solar weather.”

“We can’t control attitudes the way we can control viruses and bacteria – a few antivirals here and a vaccination campaign there. It’s this damnable community attitude.”

“That’s why I came back to Lago. So many western doctors think curing the common cold by fighting it with a molecule-evolving mutation smart drug signified that they’d claimed the Grail.”

“Monty Python and the Holy,” Ngozi said.

“I take it you experienced the movie?”

She sat up and gave him a sad grin, “With both English and American friends. You’d be startled how different their responses are.”

“How so?”

She shrugged, “I can’t quantify it. The movie was identical, but the two groups of people – all who’d seen it dozens of times – laughed at totally different places and repeated totally different lines. And I  laughed at different times from both of them! It was embarrassing both times!”

Ibrahim sighed. “We need to get back to work. I’ll get back online and see if can’t at least get a virtual QTM to work for us.”

She called up the next slide and got to work, muttering, “If we can’t beat this now, it’s going to go global in ten months.”

He shot her a look and added an emphatic plea to his email just before he sent it.

Names: ♀ Nigeria; ♂ Cameroon     

Image:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/01/Ariane5_VA221_liftoff2.jpg/220px-Ariane5_VA221_liftoff2.jpg

WRITING ADVICE: Leaving My Mark On the World #1 – What Mark Do I Want To Leave On the World?

In September of 2007, I started this blog with a bit of writing advice. A little over a year later, I discovered how little I knew about writing after hearing children’s writer, Lin Oliver speak at a convention hosted by the Minnesota Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. Since then, I have shared (with their permission) and applied the writing wisdom of Lin Oliver, Jack McDevitt, Nathan Bransford, Mike Duran, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, SL Veihl, Bruce Bethke, and Julie Czerneda. Together they write in genres broad and deep, and have acted as agents, editors, publishers, columnists, and teachers. Since then, I figured I’ve got enough publications now that I can share some of the things I did “right”.

While I don’t write full-time, nor do I make enough money with my writing to live off of it...neither do all of the professional writers above...someone pays for and publishes ten percent of what I write. When I started this blog, that was NOT true, so I may have reached a point where my own advice is reasonably good. We shall see! Hemingway’s quote above will now remain unchanged as I work to increase my writing output and sales! As always, your comments are welcome!

I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to write on this morning. I had a bunch of scattered thoughts, but then found myself drawn to my own advice – the posts I’ve made that I kind of clumped together into the “What Went Right With…” essays.

The published pieces cover decades of writing – the earliest published piece (that wasn’t a sort of shot-in-the-dark like a piece I wrote for a local student magazine called LITTLE BIT when I was seventeen) is from the June 2000 issue of ANALOG Science Fiction and Fact.

Then there was “bit” of a lull that included an acceptance from a magazine called ANTITHESIS that folded before they were able to publish it…the story was called “Dogie” and while I still have a typewritten copy, it’s far from publishable in any sort of pro market.

As for the others, if you look left and scroll down to Professional Publishing Credits, you’ll find a list of those stories that have found homes. Under that you can find stories that are still available online or that I’ve posted on an adjunct to my regular blog called The Work and Worksheets of Guy Stewart (http://theworkandworksheetsofguystewart.blogspot.com/).

So, as illustrated over there, I’ve had forty-one stories published; I’ve commented on eighteen of them, poring over what I thought made them successful sales. Some have garnered positive reviews online; one got a “review” in the form of a fan letter! I’ve even thought about collecting and self-publishing all of my YA/children’s science fiction in one place; and I’d probably do both published and unpublished work. Of the stuff over there, most of them are stories with adults as main characters.

What I’d like to do is begin to distill my own “wisdom”; at least distill my own experiences and reflections as I try to not only duplicate what I did to get published, but to figure out if there are themes in my writing. I’ll start with what I seem to have done right in my published stories.

The first thing I notice is that every story has something of me in it. That seems obvious as I’m the one who wrote it; but what I MEAN is that every story has something I’ve wrestled with as a person – either a young person or an adult.

For example, my most recent story, “Kamsahamnida, America” deals with aging, self-image, and self-confidence. Larry Henry (besides my envisioning him as a black man, but that’s beside the point) is a “…bitter, sarcastic, old man with no descendants whatsoever…” While I have descendants (two NextGen; three grand) I have been known to be bitter and sarcastic. And I’m competitive. Maybe not as much as Larry, but I absolutely worry about the legacy I’ll leave when I die. Larry goes to the Moon in a new space race sparked by the South Koreans landing a human on the Far Side of the Moon, hoping to create a legacy…

Let’s go back farther: “Fairy Bones”. A bitter, sarcastic old woman wonders about the legacy she’ll leave behind after she dies. When she – with the help of a deeply sarcastic teenage grandson – discovers fairy bones in owl pellets…

“Mystery on Space Station Courage” in which a young girl (the artist envisioned her as black and while startled, I was delighted!) struggles with the death of a friend and how to move forward without becoming (from the viewpoint of an adult, so she doesn’t THINK of this) sarcastic and bitter…

In “A Woman’s Place”, a sarcastic and bitter ex-husband goes into danger, forcing his ex-wife, whom he must work with, to rescue him – and become a mythic figure in a series of stories and a novels I’m writing.

Are you sensing a pattern here?

Better still, are you seeing what I’m seeing? My characters struggle with the kind of legacy they’ll leave behind once they are gone. The fact is that, I not only struggle with that myself, I intentionally direct my students to the same issue. Dozens, maybe even hundreds of times, I point to a small “handprint” I have pinned to a bulletin board in my office with an image similar to the new icon above, but simpler. (I may take a picture of the one in my office, so we'll see!) and I ask the student, “What kind of mark do YOU want to leave on the world?”

I ask this of myself, I ask it of the rest of the world. Because the issue is relevant to me, it leaks into my stories; because it’s an important issue, its importance lends import to the story. Others wonder the same thing, and so, (perhaps) that’s why my stories started to sell when I finally figured out what drove me.

References: (my catalogued stories at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database) http://https://i.pinimg.com/originals/80/1b/a1/801ba1454f3169e80e12557791df7125.jpgwww.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?12973

Image: 

IDEAS ON TUESDAYS 421

Each Tuesday, rather than a POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAY, I'd like to both challenge you and lend a helping hand. I generate more speculative and teen story ideas than I can ever use. My family rolls its collective eyes when I say, "Hang on a second! I just have to write down this idea..." Here, I'll include the initial inspiration (quote, website, podcast, etc.) and then a thought or two that came to mind. These will simply be seeds -- plant, nurture, fertilize, chemically treat, irradiate, test or stress them as you see fit. I only ask if you let me know if anything comes of them.

H Trope: Spiders

Current Event: http://money.cnn.com/2013/10/17/autos/toyota-spiders-airbag-recall/

Nanami Ng stared down at the steering wheel of her Driver’s Training car and said, “I heard like, all of these cars got recalled.”

The driver’s trainer, Marcus, looked up from his tablet computer and said, “What?”

Lan Cai leaned forward from the back seat, sticking his head between them. “Wasn’t it spiders or something?”

“What?” Marcus exclaimed.

Lan turned to Nanami and said, “Yeah. They were like sucking all the gasoline out of some car – like wasn’t it a BMW or something?”

Nanami said, “Mazda, and they didn’t drink gasoline. That would be stupid.”

“What would you know about stupid? You can’t even pass the bio test without writing the answers on your hand.”

Nanami blushed deeply, though mostly just her ears turned red. Marcus said, “Get driving! We don’t have time to waste on stupid Halloween stories.”

“It wasn’t a Halloween story! It was real?”

Lan turned to look at Marcus and said, “Hey, Nanami might not be able to test herself out of a paper bag, but...”

Both of them pushed him back into the back seat and Marcus said, “Your opinion stinks as bad as your breath.”

Nanami laughed as she pulled with jerky pedal pumping out from in front of the school. Marcus said, “You haven’t spent much time practicing, have you Nanami?”

“My dad won’t drive with me! Our car was in the garage! The battery was dead! I was so busy with school!”

From the back seat, Lan sat with his arms crossed over his chest. He muttered, “More like you were too busy lip-locked with the bf.”

“You’re just jealous!” Nanami shot over her shoulder. The car screeched to a stop just before she ran over four ninth grade girls. “I didn’t hit the brakes!” she shouted.

“Good thing I was watching, then, wasn’t it?” Marcus said, making a mark on his clipboard. “That’s the second time this week I had to use the brake. One more time and you’ll have to take a two week break and then start all over again.”

“That’s not fair!” Nanami and Lan exclaimed together.

Marcus looked back over the seat at Lan, then across at Nanami. He said, “I don’t make the rules. I just enforce them. If you two want to file a grievance, start talking to the camera.” He gestured to a spot just above the read-view mirror. A red dot glowed there, recording their words and actions.

Scowling, Nanami edged ahead slowly as a car behind them laid on their horn. She got out to the side road and drove to the stop sign, rolling slowly to a halt. The car behind them honked again. She opened her mouth to comment, then closed it, rolling forward. She was driving past the playground, suddenly tense as a couple of little kids playing on the swings jumped off and started chasing each other. The kids ran toward the houses, away from the road and she was so busy watching them that she didn’t see the car stop at the light. Marcus slammed on the car’s brakes. “That’s it,” he said. “Let’s go back.”

Nanami looked at him and despite the car behind them that started honking. She stuck her fist out the window, flipped them off and then stomped on the brake, then kept stomping on it as she shouted, “Just practicing! Practicing stopping! See! I’m practicing.” She stomped harder and harder, screaming. “Practice! Practice! Practice!”

“Calm down!” Marcus said. A sizzling sound came from the dashboard, like something was on fire.

“Sounds like squirrels are in the engine,” Nanami said.

All three of them were staring at the dashboard when the ashtray popped  open and a dozen red spiders came out, followed by more and more and...

Names: ♀Japan, Singapore; ♂ Vietnam, Taiwan

Image: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2-arXKTiwzTybeiZ-IjR8P9j_aP2vqKXJulRCqqk_e42EoyXriDrQffp-dV_b96wQqLf5Y-M9XYpYkS4Lpz0PJvQcjGfHXS3M8QSPWCq9l9UURqlah0AR2TAlNeS4yX_NR2arOLIZVuY/s1600/2212_1025142570.jpg

POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAYS: Me, “A Pig Tale”, and My Father’s Alzheimer’s – An Unexpected Sygyzy

NOT using the panel discussions of the most recent World Science Fiction Convention in Dublin, Ireland in August 2019 (to which I be unable to go (until I retire from education)), I would jump off, jump on, rail against, and shamelessly agree with the BRIEF DESCRIPTION given in the pdf copy of the Program Guide. But not today. This explanation is reserved for when I dash “off topic”, sometimes reviewing movies, sometimes reviewing books, and other times taking up the spirit of a blog an old friend of mine used to keep called THE RANTING ROOM…

I don't usually write things that can easily be cross posted between my two blogs -- Guys Gotta Talk... and Possibly Irritating Essays (maybe one other?), but it happened this time. The two parts of my life coincided and so here you go...

A study published by the National Institute on Aging, indicates that recent research identified a gene in a huge family that codes for early onset Alzheimer’s. A woman from a family whose “genetic data from a Colombian family with more than 6,000 living members”…found that those “who carry a rare gene mutation called Presenilin 1 (PSEN1) E280A, have a 99.9% risk of developing early-onset Alzheimer's disease.”

While this is one of those “sad-but-true” stories, the woman in question didn’t develop Alzheimer’s symptoms until she was in her seventies. Sad again, and true…BUT…the members of her family who had the odd gene combination without exception developed Alzheimer’s symptoms WHEN THEY WERE IN THEIR FORTIES.

It's a rare condition, and again, sad-but-true; but the research team didn’t let the story lie. They tested her and found that where you and I and all the rest of the humans in her family had a single gene called APOE3 Christchurch (APOE3ch) gene variant she also had two copies of it. She was the only one – and she was the only one who didn’t have early onset.

What does this “magical gene” do? According to the study (gibberish first, then I’ll translate the doctors) “…the APOE3ch variant may reduce the ability of APOE to bind to certain sugars called heparan sulphate proteoglycans (HSPG). APOE binding to HSPG has been implicated as one mechanism that may contribute to the amyloid and tau protein deposits that destroy the brain.”

First, APOE stands for APOlipoprotEin. The “lipo” part means “fat”. That’s the middle of this thing. It is a protein associating with lipid particles, that mainly helps with the transport of fat between organs blood plasma and liquids between cells called “interstitial” (just a fancy word for “the place in between”). It’s a very important component of blood plasma and it’s involved in fat production, conversion and clearance. All food things. The problem comes when APOE accidentally hooks up with sugars called heparan sulphate proteoglycans (HSPG). The research seems to point to this hook up as suddenly stopping the APOE from moving the fats around and instead helping to form plaques and tangle deposits you read about that eventually destroy the brain of an Alzheimer’s patient.

OK – all that is said and done. You maybe understand this line of research better.

At any rate, on to an eerie happening in my own life.

I had a science fiction story published in ANALOG about 20 years ago called, “A Pig Tale”. In it, my main character is experiencing a crisis – but she doesn’t realize that her father is as well.

In a really strange turn of events, I wrote this story long before my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s; even longer before I found out about it and became the secondary caregiver for both Mom and Dad (they were in an assisted living facility, then moved into Memory Care); I was the contact, transportation, and eventually the one who arranged Dad’s funeral when he died a few years later than Mom, and pretty much a different man than he was before Alzheimer’s began to whittle away the personality that defined him.

So, if you’d like to read the story, the link is below. If not, that’s fine. But I’ve been thinking about doing another story set at the same time; different character (maybe), but take a look at the issue from “the other side”, after making my way through the experience my parents had.

Who knew that the fictional drug in my story was going to be the object of a billion-dollar search.

Story Link: http://theworkandworksheetsofguystewart.blogspot.com/2018/05/a-pig-tale-by-guy-stewart-analog.html

Resources: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/11/191104112803.htm,

Image: https://thesprucetunnel.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/syszygy-today.jpg

IDEAS ON TUESDAYS 420

Each Tuesday, rather than a POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAY, I'd like to both challenge you and lend a helping hand. I generate more speculative and teen story ideas than I can ever use. My family rolls its collective eyes when I say, "Hang on a second! I just have to write down this idea..." Here, I'll include the initial inspiration (quote, website, podcast, etc.) and then a thought or two that came to mind. These will simply be seeds -- plant, nurture, fertilize, chemically treat, irradiate, test or stress them as you see fit. I only ask if you let me know if anything comes of them. Regarding Fantasy, this insight was startling: “I see the fantasy genre as an ever-shifting metaphor for life in this world, an innocuous medium that allows the author to examine difficult, even controversial, subjects with impunity. Honor, religion, politics, nobility, integrity, greed—we’ve an endless list of ideals to be dissected and explored. And maybe learned from.” – Melissa McPhail.

Fantasy Trope: Low Fantasy (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LowFantasy)

Current Event: http://codecondo.com/what-the-distant-future-is-going-to-be-like-infographic/

Somokene shielded his eyes from the blood-red dome of the Sun as it set and said, “The new star does not fade with day. You know what that means.”

Squatting on the bare, rounded boulder, Bardinanda sniffed the air and said, “Yes. It means you need to bathe.”

Somokene shook his head, “Be serious, Sister!”

“I am always serious, Servicer.”

He squatted as well in the lee of the boulder. A cold wind blew from the south, off of the glacier wall that fenced the entire equator of the World in. It was impossible to go farther north or south without paying the exorbitant fees of the Ice Lords. He said, “It means that the end is nigh.”

This time Bardinanda laughed outright. “Which end is this, brother?”

“You know as well as I do.”

“But I love to hear you say it. It makes me appreciate history.”

He sighed as he unfolded a heat cloth and anchored the four corners with the plutonium disks he carried. They had decayed to inertness and he had carved and polished the ancient reactor core slices himself. Incised on the surface were his logograph and Bardinanda’s. He tapped the cloth and it glowed red. He held out his hand and a moment later, she placed the aquapon gently in it. Far heavier than it looked, it was a gate into their food trough hidden on the other side of the World in Uluru. He set it on the cloth and said, “This is the one thousand, four hundred and sixty-ninth End Time; one million, three hundred and ninety-six thousand, four hundred and twenty-first Year since the founding of Human civilization.”

Bardinanda sighed and slithered down the boulder, flat, splayed feet gripping the rough surface. Patting Somokene’s bare head, she said, “You know that despite the fact that Endless Ending is a tenet of your faith, eventually it will be the Last End Time.”

“There is a sect that believes that, yes. I don’t belong to it, but I have studied it.”

She nodded, running slender fingers over the sensitive skin of his head. They both shuddered. Nodding, she turned her back on the setting Sun and said softly, “Then perhaps you are the best one to judge me when I say that I believe the Last End Time has come upon us and I am the Harbinger and you are my Prophet.”

Names: ♀ South American (Barbara, Diane, Fernanda); ♂ Chewa/Igbo

Resources: http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/doomsday-preppers/articles/endless-food-systems-fish-powered-aquaponic-gardens/

Image: http://www.skyscrapernews.com/images/pics/6255CaernarfonCastle_pic1.jpg

WRITING ADVICE – Lisa Cron #12: Always Something At Stake Forcing Your Character to DO Something, ANYTHING!

In 2008, I discovered how little I knew about writing after hearing children’s writer, Lin Oliver speak at a convention hosted by the Minnesota Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. To learn more – and to satisfy my natural tendency to “teach stuff”, I started a series of essays taking the wisdom of published writers and then applying each “nugget of wisdom” to my own writing. During the six years that followed, I used the advice of a number of published writers (with their permission) and then applied the writing wisdom of Lin Oliver, Jack McDevitt, Nathan Bransford, Mike Duran, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, SL Veihl, Bruce Bethke, and Julie Czerneda to an analysis of my own writing. Together these people write in genres broad and deep, and have acted as agents, editors, publishers, columnists, and teachers. Today I add to that list, Lisa Cron who has worked as a literary agent, TV producer, and story consultant for Warner Brothers, the William Morris Agency, and others. She is a frequent speaker at writers’ conferences, and a story coach for writers, educators, and journalists. Again, with permission, I am using her article, “A Reader’s Manifesto: 15 Hardwired Expectations Every Reader Has for Every Story” (2/16/18 http://blog.creativelive.com/essential-storytelling-techniques/)

Point number twelve from the article linked above, is that “the reader expects that there will be something crucial at stake in every scene, continually forcing the protagonist’s hand.”

“…everything that happens…challenge[s]…the pursuit of her goal…every single scene – including subplots — [is] part of the plot problem’s cause-and-effect trajectory…in every scene…something integral to the protagonist’s quest [has] to be at stake…forcing her to make a hard choice…[in order to] change…how she sees things…forc[ing]…[her]…to struggle internally…cost her emotionally…learn[ing] as a result…chang[ing] her…[and] alter[ing] her plan[s].”

Yep, that’s a summary of the step, but I’m going to use it as a tool, so I had to make it and “active” tool because I’m going to use it on a story that I love but have been unable to sell.

In the story, “Weather Witch and Mole Man”, Larry Vyett, the Weather Witch of Palmer Station, and to begin with, his “goal” is to run away from the town and his job. I know, it’s an old, old story, probably with roots in Twain’s first historical novel, THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER; though likely even older than that. The question here as I wrote the story, is that it was never clear.

When Larry Vyett and Sami Skipper finally get down to the important question, I’m SEVENTEEN pages into a twenty-nine page story:

“You’re happy with what you do here?”

Ouch. Not fair, but I said, “I’m not happy, but Mom made a commitment to stay and I kept her promise as long as I could.”

“Your mom is dead. She wouldn’t know if you left or if you stayed,” she said. When I turned to snarl at her, both her hands were up. “My dad is dead, too. It’s my choice to carry on his job.”

I shook my head, “This isn’t my choice, though. I don’t have to come back. I don’t know if I want to come back.”

“You just said…”

“I don’t know what I want to do!” I couldn’t help it. I was mad. At Mom for raising me here and then making me stay. At Palmer Lake for expecting me to keep doing what Mom did and for never telling her that they appreciated her. At Sami for showing up. At myself for not being able to make a simple decision. “I want to see what the Companion is up to.” I jerked my chin up, “I’m going up to send out boonose and see if I can make the spysat do what I want it to.”

This is all fine as motivation, but I haven’t set up any kind of real problem for him to overcome. Cron used an interesting word here, “quest” when she noted, “…something integral to the protagonist’s quest [has] to be at stake…”

The definition of a quest is, “a long search for something that is difficult to find, or an attempt to achieve something difficult; [examples] “Nothing will stop them in their quest for truth.”; “She went to India on a spiritual quest.”; “She does aerobics four times a week in her quest to achieve the perfect body.”

It’s not a trivial word. It’s not just a vague disgruntlement with life in general. It’s specific. Like the “Quest For The Holy Grail” or the Indiana Jones movies ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Jones), the main character should have strong feelings and be driven to do something antithetical to the direction his or her life has taken up to that point.

I suppose – I just realized this! – that the story should begin at a profound ethical decision being forced on the main character by circumstances. The quest is a long search for something difficult to find. In “Weather Witch and Mole Man” – which is a great title! – I have Larry and Sami become buddies in the span of a very few pages. I can’t make his life that easy. They have to fight and struggle and MAYBE come to some kind of common ground.

In fact, that’s exactly what I did in “Road Veterinarian” – again though, it happened too fast. Stories that get awards (the popular one, like to Hugo) oftentimes present a totally new idea in an entertaining way. DUNE by Frank Herbert has been called the most popular SF novel of all time. Greg Bear’s “Blood Music” looked seriously at the advent of nanomachines used for medical purposes. Even FRANKENSTEIN or The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelly, the parent of science fiction, had at its foundation a profound concern about how electricity might be used to unravel the moral foundation of humanity by allowing almost anyone to “create a human” by stitching together parts of dead people and reanimating them by electricity; which itself came from experiments done “in the middle of the 18^th Century” (approximately 1750, though there is a woodcut from 1780 showing the set up), experiments with something called “medical electricity” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luigi_Galvani), that caused the limbs of dead animals to jump at the touch of a battery current. Shelly’s FRANKENSTEIN was published in 1818 following, it notes here, a sort of “ghost story competition” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein).

At any rate, “a quest” is what should drive EVERY story. How does my writing stack up to that? It doesn’t at all in “Weather Witch and Mole Man”. Maybe in “Kamsahamnida, America”; it’s been a while since I read any of my stories, but after starting “A Pig Tale” (my first short story sale to ANALOG), I can see why Stan Schmidt liked it. It started very strong: “Damp, cool air carried the words clearly. Rachel Sheffield said, ‘We’re splitting, Dad. I know you don’t like it, but…’”

Clear conflict; she’s getting a divorce; then her dad tries to kill himself; then she illegally uses an experimental drug on him…her hand is forced along by choices all the way. “The Last Mayan Aristocrat” starts strong – even the title hints at high stakes, and the first sentence carries it through subtly, without smacking the reader in the face: “She knew it was going to be a bad day when Kish, the last high priest of the Maya, was already on his step, panting, waiting for her.”

What about stories in submission? “May They Rest” and the “Panhandlers”:

“Tiviifei Jones straightened, no longer leaning on his cane as the gMod platform sank to the ground. The Human Cemetery and Memorial was still, cool, Earth green, and vast. A final resting place for ten thousand, four hundred, and eighty-two Weldon colonists slaughtered by invading aliens.”

“My sixth Side-By-Side Partner Ride saluted one of the panhandlers standing on the intersection island and said, ‘You became a teacher to “help people”?’ He guffawed. ‘I could name a thousand things that would have been a smarter move than that!’”

OK – I’m pretty satisfied. “May They Rest” is in a style similar to that of Clifford D. Simak, a fellow Minnesotan. As a young adult, I’d dreamed of one day driving out to his home and introducing myself. I was crushed when he passed away in 1988, less than a year after my wife and I got married. All that time, wasted…Stan Schmidt agreed that it was in a style similar to Simak’s, what I eventually discovered was called “pastoral speculative fiction”. “Panhandlers” hinted at the conflict, though it wasn’t specific. Of the two, I think “May They Rest” had the stronger beginning; it also deals with anger, abandonment, and end-of-life issues (like “A Pig Tale” did.)

So, maybe I have learned this lesson. Only time (and editorial response!) will tell.

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