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!
EMERALD OF EARTH has got to be the single greatest exercise in writing persistence in my long and varied writing career (see “Writing and Air Quotes” for a discussion of my writing career: http://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2016/02/writing-advice-31-writing-and-air-quotes.html).
As my kids and wife will attest, I started EMERALD twenty-one (!!!!) years ago in response to the wave of dystopian science fiction aimed at young adults. Of COURSE there has always been "dark" science fiction -- HG Wells' WAR OF THE WORLDS springs to mind! In fact, I was really and truly hooked on science fiction by the grim future in John Christopher’s THE WHITE MOUNTAINS books. Lois Lowry’s THE GIVER came when I was in high school, and Margaret Atwood’s THE HANDMAID’S TALE rose to the top NOT as teen lit, but as subversive science fiction – not for teens, but for adults who were looking for MORE after rereading the HARRY POTTER fantasies a dozen times.
Then came the deluge of the “book-to-movie” best sellers like THE HUNGER GAMES and MAZE RUNNER following on the heels of what I think of as “teen carnage” novels where, like the Harry Potter series after GOBLET OF FIRE – teens slaughtering each other and being slaughtered by evil adults became totally normal for YA fiction – because while they were ostensibly for teens and YA, adults were reading them in DROVES.
There’s been some serious research on this as well: “Why Do Adults Read Young Adult Novels?" Monica Hay, Portland State UniversityFollow, Portland State University. Department of English Publication Date 6-2019
Subjects: Book industries and trade, Publishers and publishing, Young adult literature (Abstract)
“Young adult books are widely read by adults. Through interviews with publishing professionals and a survey of 2,139 participants, several reasons were discovered regarding why adults read young adult literature.
“In the research, the most common reasons were the influence of Harry Potter and Twilight, the relatability for millennials, the social media presence of YA online, and the success of women writers in the category. Survey participants had more to add. The survey themes were nostalgia, ‘less pretentious,’ ‘faster reads,’ diversity, escapism, ‘less graphic,’ and perhaps most importantly, hopeful.” (https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/eng_bookpubpaper/35/)
So I started to look at a DIFFERENT future than the doom-and-gloom presented by some of the books even adults were reading. What if Humanity launched into a serious exploration of the Solar System? I was compelled to give my novel a title that would draw in YA readers expecting carnage in their reading. I changed it to HEIRS OF THE SHATTERED SPHERES, with the intent of writing a series. And I still WILL if sales of the first book go well. If it comes out in March 2024 like I’m HOPING IT WILL, it will be EMERALD OF EARTH.
It takes place in a future where Humans have launched into an exploration of the Solar System thoroughly and methodically. Using a hollowed out asteroid called the SOLAR EXPLORER (SOLAREX for short!) as a base, they will spend a year at each planet, probing, landing on, collecting samples, data, and answering questions without having to worry about shipping tiny amounts of material “home” to be analyzed by experts. The experts were right there.
But at one point, I thought EMERALD OF EARTH was boring and would have had a hard time finding advocacy among the more exciting titles (except THE GIVER; that was hardly self-explanatory, nor was THE HANDMAID’S TALE or even Butler’s 1979 masterpiece, KINDRED). Flashy titles had replaced subtle, so I had to do the same. I came up with EARTH ATTACKED!
Ugh. Then I tried LEGACY OF THE WOUNDED WORLDS…Worser and worser!
Finally, I resorted to something I’d never done: I sat down with a thesaurus and the “Legacy” title and found synonyms for all of the words and wrote them on slips of paper. Then I went to a table and began to rearrange them, speaking them out loud countless times until I found one title that held up under the stress of repetition.
HEIRS OF THE SHATTERED SPHERES. Instead of a single book, though, I suddenly had an idea for a SERIES.
Emerald’s story would be its own story, separate from eleven others but intertwined with them because they all live aboard the ship, , but hers would be the first of a much, much larger story. I wouldn’t have her defeating Inamma in one fell swoop. She needed to fight for her existence, so I made Inamma smarter than it had been before and more subtle.
Even more though, I needed Emerald to have “kid problems”. She needed to deal with issues every kid on Earth needed to deal with. So I gave her friend problems. She wanted them but couldn’t seem to keep them. But what began as a nebulous “I can’t get friends”, needed a firmer foundation.
As a guidance counselor, I’d started working closely with several autistic students and had come to understand them just a tiny bit. The ones I dealt with were brilliant – but challenged by the world they lived in. I realized that my growing understanding of these young people might be an aspect of Emerald that I hadn’t really developed.
Once I started to understand Emerald, other things fell into place – things like answering the question, “What do teenagers DO on a spacecraft called SOLAREX, committed to a twelve year mission?” Next time, I’ll look at the development of “school for teens in space”…
Image: From Author's File, Bruce Bethke, Rampant Loon Press
EMERALD OF EARTH has got to be the single greatest exercise in writing persistence in my long and varied writing career (see “Writing and Air Quotes” for a discussion of my writing career: http://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2016/02/writing-advice-31-writing-and-air-quotes.html).
As my kids and wife will attest, I started EMERALD twenty-one (!!!!) years ago in response to the wave of dystopian science fiction aimed at young adults. Of COURSE there has always been "dark" science fiction -- HG Wells' WAR OF THE WORLDS springs to mind! In fact, I was really and truly hooked on science fiction by the grim future in John Christopher’s THE WHITE MOUNTAINS books. Lois Lowry’s THE GIVER came when I was in high school, and Margaret Atwood’s THE HANDMAID’S TALE rose to the top NOT as teen lit, but as subversive science fiction – not for teens, but for adults who were looking for MORE after rereading the HARRY POTTER fantasies a dozen times.
Then came the deluge of the “book-to-movie” best sellers like THE HUNGER GAMES and MAZE RUNNER following on the heels of what I think of as “teen carnage” novels where, like the Harry Potter series after GOBLET OF FIRE – teens slaughtering each other and being slaughtered by evil adults became totally normal for YA fiction – because while they were ostensibly for teens and YA, adults were reading them in DROVES.
There’s been some serious research on this as well: “Why Do Adults Read Young Adult Novels?" Monica Hay, Portland State UniversityFollow, Portland State University. Department of English Publication Date 6-2019
Subjects: Book industries and trade, Publishers and publishing, Young adult literature (Abstract)
“Young adult books are widely read by adults. Through interviews with publishing professionals and a survey of 2,139 participants, several reasons were discovered regarding why adults read young adult literature.
“In the research, the most common reasons were the influence of Harry Potter and Twilight, the relatability for millennials, the social media presence of YA online, and the success of women writers in the category. Survey participants had more to add. The survey themes were nostalgia, ‘less pretentious,’ ‘faster reads,’ diversity, escapism, ‘less graphic,’ and perhaps most importantly, hopeful.” (https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/eng_bookpubpaper/35/)
So I started to look at a DIFFERENT future than the doom-and-gloom presented by some of the books even adults were reading. What if Humanity launched into a serious exploration of the Solar System? I was compelled to give my novel a title that would draw in YA readers expecting carnage in their reading. I changed it to HEIRS OF THE SHATTERED SPHERES, with the intent of writing a series. And I still WILL if sales of the first book go well. If it comes out in March 2024 like I’m HOPING IT WILL, it will be EMERALD OF EARTH.
It takes place in a future where Humans have launched into an exploration of the Solar System thoroughly and methodically. Using a hollowed out asteroid called the SOLAR EXPLORER (SOLAREX for short!) as a base, they will spend a year at each planet, probing, landing on, collecting samples, data, and answering questions without having to worry about shipping tiny amounts of material “home” to be analyzed by experts. The experts were right there.
But at one point, I thought EMERALD OF EARTH was boring and would have had a hard time finding advocacy among the more exciting titles (except THE GIVER; that was hardly self-explanatory, nor was THE HANDMAID’S TALE or even Butler’s 1979 masterpiece, KINDRED). Flashy titles had replaced subtle, so I had to do the same. I came up with EARTH ATTACKED!
Ugh. Then I tried LEGACY OF THE WOUNDED WORLDS…Worser and worser!
Finally, I resorted to something I’d never done: I sat down with a thesaurus and the “Legacy” title and found synonyms for all of the words and wrote them on slips of paper. Then I went to a table and began to rearrange them, speaking them out loud countless times until I found one title that held up under the stress of repetition.
HEIRS OF THE SHATTERED SPHERES. Instead of a single book, though, I suddenly had an idea for a SERIES.
Emerald’s story would be its own story, separate from eleven others but intertwined with them because they all live aboard the ship, , but hers would be the first of a much, much larger story. I wouldn’t have her defeating Inamma in one fell swoop. She needed to fight for her existence, so I made Inamma smarter than it had been before and more subtle.
Even more though, I needed Emerald to have “kid problems”. She needed to deal with issues every kid on Earth needed to deal with. So I gave her friend problems. She wanted them but couldn’t seem to keep them. But what began as a nebulous “I can’t get friends”, needed a firmer foundation.
As a guidance counselor, I’d started working closely with several autistic students and had come to understand them just a tiny bit. The ones I dealt with were brilliant – but challenged by the world they lived in. I realized that my growing understanding of these young people might be an aspect of Emerald that I hadn’t really developed.
Once I started to understand Emerald, other things fell into place – things like answering the question, “What do teenagers DO on a spacecraft called SOLAREX, committed to a twelve year mission?” Next time, I’ll look at the development of “school for teens in space”…
Image: From Author's File, Bruce Bethke, Rampant Loon Press
No comments:
Post a Comment