Image by Brenda Clarke , via Flickr Building other worlds, and entire planets, is one of the perks of being a SFF writer. I’m often asked, incredulously, how I even start with the worldbuilding process. My response: With a little bit of magic and a little bit of science. First Concepts In Madison Lane and the Wand of Rasputin I began with the idea of a contemporary teenager (armed with an iPhone!) landing in a Renaissance-era-like world. When one of the plot twists turned out to involve quantum physics, I decided what I had here was Earth’s twin planet separated at “birth” but still quantum-entangled with Earth. I named it “Ground”. Time and Relative Location in Space (a.k.a. Cosmology) Even though Madison Lane involves time travel, I decided that the sequences taking place on Ground would be occurring in contemporary time. Except that Ground is not as technologically advanced as Earth. Why? The answers to that question led me on a rabbit trail of worldbuilding. Let’s ...

Photo by Peter Dutton , via Flickr When it comes to fiction, rules and limits almost always inspire me. And I’m not talking about grammar rules. My first manuscripts were crime novels written for adults, and I wrote without restriction, free to pepper my dialogue with swear words exactly as I heard them spray from my characters’ mouths. Then I rediscovered tween/teen and young adult fiction. And, before I knew it, a bubbly teenager stepped into my writer’s brain and rattled off a fantastic story I couldn’t wait to get down on screen. But I’d have to curb the curses if I was writing a book for kids. Easy enough, surely? Except, sixteen-year-old boys don’t go around saying “drat” and “darn” when something goes wrong. It was an interesting writing challenge to imply, but not actually specify, strong language. Another (self-imposed) limit was that none of the main characters could die. Again, it sounds simple enough – but it removes a lot of easy tension and conflict. More creati...

This post was first published here on January 28, 2013. Every plot hinges on a central question. Posing the question at the beginning of the tale and answering it at the end is sound story architecture. Does that task make your head spin? It shouldn’t. It’s as easy as choosing a story skeleton. Let’s explore a few examples. 1) The Romance skeleton poses the central question: Will they or won’t they end up together? The answer had better be yes or a satisfying equivalent. The girl can find out guy A isn’t what she wanted after all because she found guy B, but this is not the genre for an I’m okay on my own ending. That story uses the Literary (or Women's Fiction) skeleton. Romance readers want passion and fulfillment and are very disappointed if they don’t get it. 2) The Mystery skeleton poses the central question: Who did it and will they catch him? The answer is yes . The criminal may escape at the last moment to torment the detective another day, but the case t...

Setting is a character. It can be a friend, foe, or antagonist. It lives and breathes. It can set the tone and atmosphere. It can create obstacles or remove them. The last series I wrote took a year to research (pre-written-history Greece). I took some liberties with it, given there is no documentation. My current novel is set in Victorian England and will involve a vast amount of research. Yes, I am a glutton for punishment. There are a number of ways to approach the setting for your book. Contemporary settings and real locations are probably the easiest, but that does not let you off the hook when it comes to research. 1) You can use a real place. This requires that you research the place in question. You can use Google maps as a start or visit the town if you want to be precise. It gets trickier the further from home you go. If you choose a foreign country, you need to thoroughly research it to get the feel for how the people think, operate, dress, speak, and mo...

Many of you may still be recovering from Labor Day, so I'm offering you a chance to sit back and read an excerpt from my Blessing or Curse Collection . Some stories end happily, others not. Some characters are nice, others are not. Today's particular short story, called Who'll Mend This Broken Man , is about how a wife copes with the heartbreak of her husband's Parkinson's Disease. Over eleven years ago I watched my own mother suffer from this debilitating disease, and it's something I'll never forget. Excerpt: Ah, the wonderful love they’d shared. Why must it end this way? “Diego, eat,” Consuela Morales said, holding out a spoonful of puree to her shrunken, wheelchair-bound husband. His dry parched lips remained obstinately shut, his gray eyebrows furrowed. He wanted to die and she didn’t blame him. God help her, sometimes she wanted him dead too. Till death do us part seemed a long time to live with half a man. Placing the spoon into the jar with a...

The Blessing or Curse Collection , a sequel to my thriller, Forever Young: Blessing or Curse , is now available. This collection contains five short stories, about five very different types of people who take a pill to be young again. Instead of dwelling on the thriller aspect, the collection focuses on how the choice to take an experimental pill impacts not only the lives of the test subjects, but also that of their spouses or significant others. The only thriller mention comes toward the end of the collection in a very short bonus section in which the villains from the first novel plot their next moves. Since not everyone might like to read all the stories, I'm also offering a choice to read one or more separately. Catch a glimpse of the covers in the panorama below. What the stories are about: Who'll Mend This Broken Man - Desperation forces Consuela to order the Forever Young pill to cure her husband, Diego, from Parkinson’s Disease; but is the cure really a curs...

We continue with our story seed featuring Dick, love interest Sally, bossy Jane, jealous Ted, and the meteor streaking toward earth. We have gowned it as a Romance. We have twisted it into a Thriller. What else can we do with it? We can apply the Literary skeleton and explore the theme that relationships are vulnerable to unexpected blows. The impending meteor strike could be real or imagined, past or present. The tension it creates, or the mystery that surrounds it, tests the bonds of the people involved. Threatening situations can bring out the best or worst in people. The central question becomes: what life altering decision will Dick make and how will his life change? He can decide to walk away from his chosen career, stay or leave an unsatisfying relationship, or come to terms with the fact that you can’t save everyone, especially from themselves. We can take it on a Road Trip. Dick, Sally, Jane, and Ted travel to the crash site. What they find when they get there isn’t the...

This month I'm exploring names and their uses in writing. Today, in particular, I'd like to focus on names of places.  Whether you realize it or not, what an author chooses to call the name of a place does have an effect. It can be a way to steer a reader to or from a particular genre. Kat and the U.S. Marshal  by Celia Yeary is one example of a Western romance, accurately set in Old San Antonio, Texas. Of course, there are exceptions to any rule and any genre. What comes to mind is the movie, Cowboys and Aliens , a surprising, yet successful combination of Western and science fiction, set in the 1873 Arizona Territory, yet featuring a strange combination of aliens, spaceships, Apaches, outlaws, a gold mine, and more. For the most part, though, you want to stick with the name of a location that makes sense. For example, it wouldn't do to name a city Chicago, when the story actually takes place in England, or in a time period before America was even discovered.  The...

The Science Fiction and Fantasy subgenres are very often blurred, and, if you don’t set out with the intention of deliberately writing one or the other genre, it can be difficult to categorise a story that has elements of both genres. Science Fiction Science Fiction – which is shortened to SF, not “Sci Fi” – is used to describe hard- to medium-core science-based fiction. The science forming the background of the book can be hard science, such as nuclear physics, quantum mechanics, chemistry, biology, geology, genetics, robotics, etc – or it could be a soft science like psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc. Whatever the science discipline referenced, it forms a large part of the plot process. The current laws of the discipline must be followed, or, if broken, there must be an explanation for the fictional possibility of breaking or bending the laws. Sci-Fi Sci-Fi is the fun version of Science Fiction. Sci-Fi can play with concepts that would never be possible based on our ...