IDEAS ON TUESDAYS 100

One Hundred (or so) Tuesdays Ago…

I started this post in which, rather than a POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAY, I'd challenge readers and lend a helping hand. Generating 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 continue to 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.

To celebrate this occasion – I’ll make a mash up of ideas from all three genres…and I’ll add The Western and a dash of Romance for added spice!

H Trope: Ancient tombs discovered/cursed/releases monster/mummy & fairy dust

SF: Starship Troopers

F Trope: Elves, gnomes and Halflings

Western Trope: Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman

Romance Trope: Beauty and the beast

Current Events:

Rayyan Brakus powered his exoskeleton armor up and swung down from the troop transport. Granted, he was supposed to be eighteen; granted, he’d lied about his age.

But when the InterWar recruiter had shown up at the base of Butte Vertical Village in their shiny starship, offering lots of cash and a life of adventure, Rayyan ran to place his thumbprint. His ID didn’t show that he was 16 and a half. It showed he was 22. So what if the recruiter’d said, “You bring your cat along to lick your whiskers off, soldier?”

Rayyan snorted, blowing a blot of snot on the inside of his faceplate. He reached up to wipe it away, remembered it was inside and ignore the other soldiers who laughed at him. He’d show THEM!

He clomped down the ramp, stepped to one side and stopped, scanning. A bleak place, this world. Looked like lots of dunes, dead trees and boulders – some sort of adobe village a couple klicks. Command channel blasted into his ears, “Target acquired. Mumiyah’s Cavern has been partially secured. Local resistance armed and should be considered dangerous. Squads Delta and Theta proceed with caution. Air support unavailable.”

Rayyan felt his stomach drop to his feet then sprinted to follow the rest of Theta Squad. His first live combat mission...

He wasn’t expecting the attack. He should have been, but they’d never trained against cavalry.

Horses ridden by midgets. With bazookas. Trying to kill him. “Not me personally!” he shouted into his helmet as he fired into the mob with his stunner. There wasn’t any reason to…

A female midget – sorta hot looking, he noticed before she sprayed something on his armor – swung a mass-balanced lance that glowed as it cut through the first layer physical defense then was deflected by the monomolecular fluid underlayer.

Deflecting the lance, the inertia transferred to him, her speed and weight knocking him over. Instead of a hard crash, it felt like he’d fallen on sponges. The midget on her full-sized horse, was wearing a cowboy hat and clenched a cigar between her teeth. She raised a mace and shouting, brought it down on his helmet.

****

Vesna Lobato stared down at the man wrapped in bug scales and shook her head. Polish him up a bit and he might be a good-looking boy. A bit older that her little brother, his blonde hair was snarled, the fabric body suit was soaking wet from the dissolution of the armor by her fairy dust. She was reasonably certain the dust was no longer potent, though she’d had at least ten soldiers of the hundred the Imperial Mounted Police had repelled from Mumiyah’s Cavern – die. Their skin liquefied, sloughing from the bones. The screams made her shudder.

But it wasn’t like she was fighting people. They were soldiers, impersonal, caring nothing for the cultures of the New West. They wanted only to dig out its secrets and turn them into another weapon to subjugate the worlds!

She lifted the lance to strike the youngster’s head off.

“Hold your blade, Vesna!”

“Why, brother? He’d have killed me if I hadn’t knocked him down first.”

Her brother looked down at the soldier and said, “If nothing else, we can strip out of his brain what he thinks he knows about the Cavern.”

She lifted her blade, took a deep breath and said, “I’ll stop my lance – but only ‘cause I might ask him out on a date before we magick out his brain.” She wheeled on her horse and headed back into town.

Name source: (m) Malaysia, Greek; (f) Macedonia, Portuguese

Image: http://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/thegardenisland.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/a/49/a49ed5e6-5b02-11e2-9c77-0019bb2963f4/50ee80987e6ed.preview-300.jpg

“I HATE THE NEW STAR TREK!” – POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAYS

 It’s funny.

For a franchise that has been around for nearly a half century and has had a remarkably consistent (though obviously imperfect!) history, it seems like very few people have cried “foul!” when an upstart director decides to toss the entire history into the garbage dump and says, “That’s all stupid. This is what should have happened. I know, ‘cause I’m young and as we all know, ‘Old Is Evil And Doesn’t Make Boatloads Of Money Anymore And Youth Is, As It Has Been, Always Right’.”

I know we call it a “reboot”. I KNOW Kirk and Spock are old – they’re the same age as my dad! I know “the times, they are a changing”.

I also figure it must take an incredible level of arrogance to throw out a canon and declare that you have a personal and superior vision.

However, what amazes me more is that none of the faithful have said “boo”. No one has challenged the usurper.

It reminds me of an experience I had when I was 19.

I was in my second year of college, at a place called Golden Valley Lutheran College. A friend of mine and I both lived off campus and not far from each other. We were taking a class called The Philosophy of Non-Christian Religions. Pastor John Gronli was teaching the class. He was a remarkably open and thoughtful man, not full of dark pronouncements against the faiths of others, he led us to look at the philosophies of faith other than Christian openly and honestly, while still maintaining his own strong faith in Christ.

Mike and I wanted to do something really different and outside-the-box. We found the house “church” of the religion invented and promulgated by the Korean Reverend Sun Myung Moon. The “mission” in south Minneapolis was new – “In 1975, Moon sent out missionaries to 120 countries to spread the Unification Church around the world and also in part, he said, to act as ‘lightning rods’ to receive ‘persecution.’”

We visited, playing the part of seeking teenagers, and got a copy of Moon’s book, THE DIVINE PRINCIPLE  in which he lays out his plan for the world; as well as a good interview. We then got busy reading.

What was supposed to have been a seven page paper turned into a 35-page theological treatise comparing Moon’s claim that TDP was a “new New Testament”, and that it was a completion of the “old New Testament” of the early Church. While we found that it was no such thing and the Unification Church went on to become a multi-billion dollar enterprise, we were convinced that the Moonies had simply adopted the parts of Christianity that were acceptable to the masses, gave the fatherless (of which there were a growing number) a real Dad (the Reverend Sun Myung Moon) and spoke of whirled peas…er…World Peace during “a 120-city world speaking tour. At each city, Moon delivered his speech titled ‘God's Ideal Family – the Model for World Peace’” in 2005.

Abrams has done much the same thing with the Star Trek “reboot” and we’ve swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. I am as guilty as the next Trekker (I’m not a Trekkie as I have no Spock ears, uniform or phaser (I do have a tribble, a Worf doll, a model of VOYAGER and ST:TOS ENTERPRISE, as well as the most recent addition to my ST collection – ST:TNG Pez® candy dispensers from my son and daughter-in-law) as I lined up for the movie premier with my dad, son and best male friend; as I will line up to see “Into The Darkness”.

However, I have FINALLY spoken out to express my true feelings. I HATE the new Star Trek. Then again, maybe no one will notice and assume that, like everyone, I have remained silent like sheep because this is the only Star Trek fix we’re ever gonna get and we’d best keep our mouths shut and shell out the plastic – or they’ll take the bastard child away from us…

Resource: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Myung_Moon

Image: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2CrH-IDEQGkso2OHIJ4lgQLdrBvz_n2F3lKsHDT61p_HXOHG4I0r2-anOAP6NCuROL4HuouHqrzkX5IhMyMhbDCf7SL4bcmuRvtrSqX26VD4o4wuE1_lwpPZeOfp7GR5ICfh0h_UCFgM/s1600/Star+Trek+2009.jpg

IDEAS ON TUESDAY A -- Supplemental

Sprained my wrist starting the snowblower two days ago, so won't write much for a bit. Just here to say, pick one of the OLD tropes and cross it with a DIFFERENT genre's CURRENT EVENT, mixing names and concepts.

Let me know what happens!

Image: http://www.snowblowersdirect.com/images/stories/submitted/review225_338.jpg

WRITING ADVICE: Bruce Bethke’s TWELVE STEP PROGRAM FOR WRITERS #6

Somewhere around thirty years ago, I met Bruce Bethke for the first time – when I responded to an ad in a newspaper for a science fiction writers group seeking new members. I called, then sent in an “audition story” and was invited to join the group at the ORIGINAL, original Loft Literary Center (before grant money started flowing) in Minneapolis. One of THEM reviews books now, the other published a few books and short stories but no longer writes. Bruce doesn’t write much lately except for non-fiction; he is currently executive editor of STUPEFYING STORIES, an irregular anthology of new speculative fiction, he mostly works for a super computer company as well as presiding over Rampant Loon Press. These nuggets of wisdom can be found here: http://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/a-12-step-program-for-writers/. They are used with the author’s permission.

6. We are entirely ready to let someone else take the blame for the way our last book tanked.

As I have only one book (http://www.amazon.com/Simple-Science-Sermons-Little-Kids/dp/0788012940/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1360497182&sr=8-1&keywords=simple+science+sermons+for+big+and+little+kids), it’s sorta hard to comment on this one, but I’ll do my best.

This is the book I signed away. When I sent it out to CSS Publishing in 1997, I was inexperienced and naïve. When a contract came back saying they wanted to publish the book – and that they’d give me $100 for all rights (because: “No one is really interested in children’s sermon books and we’re doing God’s Work by publishing it”), I was appalled.

I’m ashamed now that I let this company bully me into the contract, but at that point, I’d had short stories published that had disappeared into oblivion. Having a BOOK seemed to be a chance at “keeping my name out there” and after long discussions with my wife, I signed the contract.

Sixteen years have passed and if CSS had only sold ONE of my books a year, they’d have made back their investment – certainly they made back what they paid me. So my complaint isn’t that the book TANKED, it’s that I sold it for a pittance and the company has continued to sell it (presumably because they made more money selling the book than they paid out printing it). The original contract said that the rights would revert to me when they were done with it, but after querying to silence a few years ago, I gave up and figured I’d let God be the judge on the whole sorry issue.

So – I haven’t had another book published since. I have had numerous stories published, I have appeared in anthologies and contributed to a few collections as well. While I’ve grumbled that several of them haven’t really seemed to take off, I’ve done what I thought was enough to influence my tiny corner of my blogosphere folks to buy them and I promote them at whatever conferences I attend – but aside from buying a stack of them and selling them myself – I haven’t done anything more than that.

In fact, I’m not even SURE what else to do. When I consider self-promotion, the image above is the one that springs to mind. As well, numerous articles in paper and online magazines tell me to WATCH OUT and not saturate my friend lists with pleas to buy this, that or the other book.

So when it comes right down to it, while I’m READY to let someone else take the blame for why my last story didn’t hit the awards lists, the only person who SHOULD receive blame is me; and that blame should be for naiveté...

Image:  http://www.scene4.com/lesmarcott/traveling-salesmen-medicine-show0.jpg

STEAMPUNK MONKEY #10

The idea for this starts with a story I tried to write about a thieving monkey who took keys and used them to unlock its cage. That was it. The story was called BRIGHT FLASH THE MONKEY’S PAWS. It was my third or fourth attempt at writing a picture book – and it was really bad. With the advent of the genre of steampunk, I started rethinking the story. Here it is – OK, just realized that I wrote something entirely different for #5 than I thought I did. So…this is going to be where the story SHOULD have gone. If you don’t mind, ignore #6 above!

Wet Clementine looked at the bird in her hand and let it go.

The steam monkey laughed harder and pointed at her.

A calico cat of orange, white and black, walked down the street and stopped.

Wet Clementine bent and patted the cat; and she didn’t sneeze again!

Image:  http://www.matthewmeyer.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/012-nureonago-600x783.jpg

IDEAS ON TUESDAYS 98

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: auto-cannibalism

Current Event: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-cannibalism

Kari leaned from behind him while the movie in Forensics flickered on the screen in front of the class, whispering in his ear, “You know, if you bite your fingernails, the pieces will poke through your intestines and you’ll get a bleeding ulcer.”

“Shut up,” Mark hissed back at her.

Mr. Stanton looked up from the paper he was correcting and scowled at the two of them.

After class, Kari tapped Mark on the shoulder and said, “You’re the one who asked me to bug you about it.”

“Yeah, but…” he stopped talking as a pair of freshmen boys ran like elementary kids down the hall, cutting between him and Kari. It was a good thing, Mark decided. He’d almost told her the real reason he wanted to stop biting his nails. Or horking his snot or sucking the blood from a hangnail or any of the other instances of him eating his own flesh and blood. It started out as accidental. He’d been playing boot hockey over Christmas break and he’d been whanged in the nose and gotten a fierce nosebleed. Swallowing the blood to keep from grossing everyone out by spitting it on the ice had started something inside of him.

“‘Yeah, but’ what?” Kari asked when they pulled together again.

Mark shrugged and said, “I’ll tell you at lunch.”

Inside, he heard his Inner Voice say, “No you won’t. You won’t tell anyone about me. You just keep feeding me and when I’m big enough, I’ll come out and we’ll take over the world…”

Name Source: Local, Minnesota

Image: http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/thumblarge_359/12331631393wSqgY.jpg

Slice of PIE Christianity – UNIVERSAL OR ANTHROPOCENTRIC V: Did God Make SIMPLE Life Forms?

Five years ago, I started pondering this question and people have clicked on this essay nearly a thousand times, making it the single most-viewed thing I’ve ever posted. I’d like to continue thinking out loud on the issue now that I’m older and the world has changed a bit...

I was studying astronomy with my son – he’s gone back to college to finish his AA degree and then wants to move on to a physics degree – and we were discussing…oh…everything under the sun (literally!).

Paging through the book, I came to the last chapter. Since the end of the 20^th Century, you’ll find that most astronomy textbooks for undergraduates end the class with a discussion of Extraterrestrial Life.

I find this amusing because in a book filled with theories, observations and a careful delineation of the history of the science, they end on a note of Science Fiction.

After filling pages of the text with high-sounding quotes from any and every authority who can be quoted, they conclude that THERE MUST BE LIFE OFF OF EARTH.

Mind you, they offer not a single shred of evidence except for the extremely tired old saw about “Martian Meteorite Fossils”, found during the analysis of a meteorite fragment discovered in Antarctica in 1984. Most add the script quote from the movie CONTACT which is obliquely attributed to Carl Sagan: "I'll tell you one thing about the universe, though. The universe is a pretty big place. It's bigger than anything anyone has ever dreamed of before. So if it's just us... seems like an awful waste of space. Right?

A recent addition to the canon of “if there’s life here, there OBVIOUSLY must be life elsewhere!” is this: http://www.buckingham.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Polonnaruwa-meteorite.pdf (this is the original paper that all the tabloid headlines screamed from -- of course, it's from a "fringe" website and the paper isn't peer-reviewed).

Undeniably, these are shaped like the diatoms we find on Earth. The authors compare the cometary diatoms to Earth diatoms and conclude: “...that the identification of fossilised diatoms in the Polonnaruwa meteorite is firmly established and unimpeachable. Since this meteorite is considered to be an extinct cometary fragment, the idea of microbial life carried within comets and the theory of cometary panspermia is thus vindicated (Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, 1981,.1982, 2000; Journal of Cosmology, Vol,21, No,37 published, 10 January 2013 Wickramasinghe, Wickramasinghe and Napier, 2010). The universe, not humans, must have the final say to declare what the world is really like.”

A quick read of the Wikipedia entry on the Polonnaruwa meteorite under the heading, Criticism will give you a succinct review the scientific community has taken of this startling discovery. I’ve provided the link below because my purpose here is not to discuss panspermia or cometary diatom fossils.

I want to talk about WHY I believe that God has allowed for simple life on other worlds.

First, I think that Scripture supports the view that it’s neither beyond God’s power nor outside of God’s desire to create simple life forms off of Earth: “The heavens are telling of the glory of God; and their expanse is declaring the work of His hands.” Psalm 19:1

The Hebrew word used for “heavens” here would be pronounced “eshmim” in Hebrew.

According to my survey, it is a form of the Hebrew word whose Anglicized form is “shamayim”. This noun can mean several things – as all languages do when we give multiple and shaded meanings to different words – among them: “the physical heavens (includes all that is above the earth, and any given passage may include all or merely a constitute universe), and “the heavens as the abode of God (as in ‘the heavens are infinitely high above the Earth, so are God's thoughts and ways infinitely above man's ability to comprehend’).”

To my mind, God has used the things we see on Earth to reveal Himself: “For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.” Romans 1:20 New American Standard Bible (NASB)

Why would He do anything different in the rest of the Universe. It’s effectively infinite, so He would fill it with life. Why not simple life?

Despite the crazies, I believe there’s good evidence that it was an act of God to fill the Universe with simple life forms.

Can you Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Jews, Bahais, Confucians, Jains or Shintos point to a Scripture that would contraindicate God creating simple life elsewhere?

SOMEONE ELSE READ AND COMMENTED ON THIS POST. READ WHAT THEY HAD TO SAY HERE: http://scitascienda.com/tag/guy-stewart/


References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polonnaruwa_(meteorite), http://www.mainemediaresources.com/mpl_shamayim.htm, http://www.scripture4all.org/OnlineInterlinear/Hebrew_Index.htm

Image: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGqvTA77bhJPSKc0vUAWd7cOKL21SqFHL7nhQoANdJQ-5BllTNs82HSqkPLEtr7pjAhkPzgIkVpE9cjYhyphenhyphenhNzd7IK99XbbP-XIfCTQBShnTXluTpAHau9IFmDDmHzuPmJJWN0HLl5edBVi/s1600/Diatom2-1.jpg

THE RECONSTRUCTION OF MAI LI HASTINGS 46

I read the play version of Daniel Keyes’ FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON when I was in eighth grade. It has stayed with me for decades, a haunting symbol for both the overwhelming possibilities of the human intellect and the overwhelming impossibilities faced by a profoundly challenged human mind. I’ve started and stopped this novel a half a dozen times in eleven years. I want to bring the original idea into the present millennium. To read RECONSTRUCTION from beginning to here, click on the label to the right and scroll several pages back until you get to the bottom first entry – which happens to be Chapter 2...

In the front row of the church during the funeral, Job leaned over to CJ and whispered, “I can’t believe she’s gone.”

Talking out of the side of his mouth, CJ said back, “I can’t believe it’s like a million degrees in here.”

CJ’s mom gave the boys a side-long pained look and they stopped.

The service was short, quiet and small.

School had been out for four days and after the late nights and rushing around was more-or-less over, CJ had finally gone into the back yard and stood over another grave. This one he had dug himself. Him and Job had buried Butterfly Beardsley. He died the day after Mai Li and CJ had cried harder for the guinea pig than he’d cried for his sister.

After the service, Mom said, “If you boys want to leave you can. All this is going to be is a bunch of old people mourning their own dead.”

“You mean it, Mom? You gonna be all right?”

She sniffed. “I’ve handled you and your sister for the past fifteen years, I can take care of the relatives.”

Job said, “Are you gonna handle the reporters outside, too, Mrs. Hastings?”

She smiled sadly and said, “I hired lawyers and bodyguards for that.”

“I thought you hired the lawyers to sue Dr. Douchebag?”

“That,” she smiled. “But I got other lawyers to take care up us...”

CJ cut in, “They’re going to sell Mai Li’s inventions.”

Mom said, “More like patent some of the inventions – like the reading teacher, the brain-repair nanomachines, and the silicon brain.”

“Silicon brain?” CJ asked.

Mom nodded. “You remember when she started her research? When she tied all those electronic toys together, she made a sort of human brain. The lawyer company I hired will get the patents so that CJ can go to any college he wants to go to.” She smiled at Job and said, “I’ll be setting up some scholarships at Carter High School. You can probably apply for one to go to college, Job. No go before one of my old aunties starts patting your cheek.”

CJ and Job ducked out of the meeting room that was filling with people dabbing their eyes and walking toward Mom. They were outside a few minutes later. The sun was hot on their heads and they were only a few blocks from CJ’s house, so they started walking. Job said, “You buried Beardsley the Killer?”

He wasn’t sure why, but all of a sudden, he got teary-eyed. He nodded, “Let’s go. I gotta put some flowers on Beardsley’s grave.” Job nodded slowly. CJ took a deep breath and said, “You know what the French word for bearded is?”

Job scowled. They had to take a language in middle school in eighth grade and they knew that there’d been lots of pirates who were French, and their favorite flatties were THE PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN, so they figured it’d be fun. He said, “Isn’t it something like Algernon?”

CJ smiled and nodded as they headed for the house. Summer was starting and he had a lot of time to have a lot of fun. He looked at Job, said, “Race ya!” and sprinted down the street.

“Hey!” shouted Job and raced right after him.

END

Image: http://themindgarden.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/indian-sunset-with-boys-running-dan-brady.jpg?w=468

IDEAS ON TUESDAYS 97

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.

F Trope: a sorcerer who is dead but his “soul” lives on trapped somewhere

Current Event: http://www.alunajoy.com/2012-mar18.html

  

Martin Jönsson stared at the blog and said, “You’ve read this stuff?” He scratched his scruffy blonde beard – little more than rough peach fuzz

Vukosova Gavrilović, long-time friends and NOT girlfriend, smirked. She learned the Swede phrase for her buddy’s newly sprouted beard was duniga skägg. She considered teasing him, but the look on her face warned her that he probably wasn’t in the mood tonight. Instead she said, “I read it. What about it?”

“It like, says that people can soak up ancient energy and transport it from place to place!”

Vukosova shook her head. Her friend was a philosophy major – she wished him luck in finding a job as something more than an intelligent garbage collector. She was a physics major, and if her freshman grades and undergrad presentation were any indication, she may have just written herself a ticket to the Cooperative Lunar Colony Fusion Research Center after she graduated. The CLCRFC – better known by its euphemistic name, The CooL Co. FuR Center and what NASA insisted on calling ClickerFick in its press releases – was every physicists dream. Nuclear fusion was a hop, skip and a jump away from becoming practical. All they needed to do was solve one or two containment issues...she yanked her attention back to Martin and said, “We’ve been soaking up energy and taking if from place to place since the evolution of the first life form.”

He finally looked up from the screen that showed some wackoid Egyptian goddess background overlain with a the foolish ranting of someone who was certain they’d been able to imbue and ancient Egyptian site with energy sucked up in their souls from Atlantis. He said, “This is amazing! It sounds like what you guys are doing in that science class you’re taking!”

She sighed and said, “It’s called Elementary Nuclear Fusion – and it doesn’t have anything to do with storing energy. It’s about creating energy.”

He frowned then said, “I had some science classes in high school...”

“That was last year, wasn’t it?”

“Hey! Just ‘cause I’m a prodigy doesn’t mean I don’t deserve respect!”

“You were a prodigy in acting, Martin! Now you couldn’t shake a stick at an T-comp without breaking into a cold sweat!”

He stood up abruptly, snapping the cover in his computer. “Shows how much you know! I’m gonna see if I can soak up some fusion energy from...from…”

She smirked and said, “Idfu – it’s on the east bank of the Nile in east central Egypt.”

He glared, “You think you know everything just because you’re a physics major! But there’s another world out there, too. One you can’t see! It inhabits the same realm as your gravitons.”

“Gravitons are real!” Vukosova exclaimed.

“Yeah? Show  me one!”

“Well, you can’t just open your eyes and see one! You need special equipment…”

“And then can you see one?”

“Well...not exactly. But we can see evidence that gives a strong indication of the properties and the effects of...”

“So your gravitons are as imaginary as my negative Atlantean energy.”

“They aren’t the same...”

Martin turned away and stalked out of the dining hall. He stopped just before he slammed the door and shouted, “We’ll see whose god is more powerful! The trapped sorcerers of Atlantis and Ancient Egypt or the trapped gravitons of the Unified Field Theory!”

She blinked in surprise as he finished his rant and stomped away. She muttered, “I didn’t know he knew anything about the Unified Field Theory!”

Name Source: Sweden, Serbia

Image: http://assets.inhabitat.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2011/11/Cold-Fusion-Rossi-1-537x392.jpg

POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAYS: The Twenty-five Percent Ceiling

After two “no thank you” emails this week and little or no movement on my other submissions, I took a hard look at my submission/publication data. You can see it below:

2008: Accepted/Submitted = 14.2%
2009: Accepted/Submitted = 9.67%

2010: Accepted/Submitted = 16%

2011: Accepted/Submitted =  15.1%

2012: Accepted/Submitted = 11%

Average Accepted/Submitted = 13.194%

I have never sold one out of every four manuscripts that I submitted. Ever. My percentage will also be plummeting because the website that I regularly contributed to has ceased publishing.

So now what? How do I increase the number of MS that are accepted? Is there any advice on the internet? Is it valid advice? What IS my plan?

Let’s go!

Hmmm. Here’s one I can access for $24.39: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/alpsp/lp/2013/00000026/00000001/art00006, though in essence it seems to suggest that “targeting” your MS is effective. It posits that there are lots of easy things a writer can do to make their submissions more likely to be published. (I suppose the publication of their article is a case to point…)

This one’s free, and even though it’s about scholarly article submissions, points out that people submit to journals based on their perception of how large of an impact publication in that journal will have: http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/10/15/mapping-the-flow-of-rejected-manuscripts/

How about this: “The reader is given an ‘I’ or ‘eye’ in the text to escape into. If the protagonist is just like themselves, or how they’d like to be, the job’s done. It’s also the secret of a great conversation. Stop talking about you. Start talking about them. And it works in novels. Write about your reader.”

http://www.writers-village.org/writing-award-blog/how-to-romance-your-readers-and-sell-more-stories

There’s always self-publishing. Then I can say that 100% of everything I submit is published. http://io9.com/5911634/the-most-successful-self+published-sci+fi-and-fantasy-authors

Multiple hints here about what to do when you WON’T be making any money as a published writer – but not much about how to become a BETTER science fiction writer so I can sell more: http://www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com/cgi-bin/mag.cgi?do=columns&vol=carol_pinchefsky&article=015

A few hints offered here, but what it boils down to is “write a lot and send out a lot”: http://www.jamierubin.net/about/how-i-became-a-professional-science-fiction-writer/

And HERE we have a fount of endless information:

http://www.cthreepo.com/writing/laws/

Information is out there. I can mine it and so can you. What about my plan? Here goes:

GOAL: Increase manuscript acceptance beyond current levels with a goal of 25% or more.

PLAN:

1)      Target my writing. There aren’t THAT many SF/spec fic markets and that’s mostly what I write. OTOH, I also write for young adults and children. Targeting there isn’t any different.

2)     Lower my expectations. I’m a high school counselor; I like my job a lot and I will retire from it in a finite amount of time. I can write SF novels and short stories and YA/teen/kid novels and short stories in my spare time. I also teach writing in the summer.

3)     PRACTICALLY speaking, I need to increase my story output while still working on novels. I currently write about four or five new short stories a year. Can I up the word output to seven to ten? Yes. I will.

4)     Write BETTER short stories. I once decided to read the collected stories of O. Henry. He was a master, right? I never went beyond his classics. I will write AND ANNOTATE the collected stories I have, realizing that this is classic literature. I will ALSO read as many BEST OF anthologies of science fiction as I can stomach this year.

5)     I will write more short stories.

6)     I will continue with my novels – with these, I use a tactic that I learned in an article in the January 2006 issue of THE WRITER called, “Get Your Novel Written In Three Drafts” (a version of the article is here: http://www.writingfordollars.com/ArticlesDB_Display.cfm?a=360)– the most important point was “Write like a Shark”.

7)     I will begin to “Tweet” writing advice once a week to build up interest in my blog. I tried once and was defeated by the fact that Twitter doesn’t let one person have two accounts.

So – as Miles Vorkosigan has said, “No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy”, so we’ll evaluate the plan in a couple of months!

Image:

http://letters2mindanao.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/glassceiling72.jpg