Who Owns the World? A reaction to Kindle Worlds

As you probably know by now, Amazon has announced that they will be launching a new Kindle Direct program called Kindle Worlds.  Fan-fic authors can submit their work in one of the official licensed worlds and if accepted will find their work for sale on Amazon.com.  Along the way, Amazon gets all kinds of benefits and perks and young fledgling authors who have been writing fan-fic for fun or for practice can now add "for profit" to their reasons for doing so.

John Scalzi, who himself is brilliant in all things writer-advocacy, has a great post up where he dissects the actual agreement.  I'm going to spring board off of that myself here.

Spring boarding off of this there is one fundamental underlying question:  Who owns a world?

Repost: These are Terms that Do Not Exist

This is a repost from last year.  After watching the dust up over Gay Marriage in the Supreme Court and having read more than a few blogs discussing it, I thought it was worth sharing again:

Lately I've been playing a lot of Star Wars: The Old Republic.  It's scratching a lot of itches for me.  It's a solid WoW-Clone MMO with all the features you'd expect and a solid, reliable, and recognizable interface.  The story is top notch and if you play a Sith you get to have a rocking British Accent.  Unless you're undercover in which case you're supposed to sound like you're from the American Midwest.  Personally, I'd like to find that planet where you sound like you're from Boston*.

At any rate, I was looking up stuff on line related to a recent twist with my newbie operative when I came across a fascinating quote:

After a user expressed concern that Bioware had "disallowed" the use of the terms "gay" and "lesbian" on the boards in a thread titled "GLBT discrimination in forums?" a Bioware forum moderator dropped in and posted this: 

As I have stated before, these are terms that do not exist in Star Wars. 

Thread closed.

Clip vs Mag

Some time ago I had the chance to get some first hand experience with firing a hand gun, the point of which was to have the experience to more accurately write the scene in Mind the Thorns where Regan defends herself from a band of hunters. It was a good experience and I think that it enriched my story telling.

For Bastion I have been networking with a mix of "experts" to get things right in the particulars given that all of my characters have such wide ranging backgrounds. But this also creates its own dilemmas.

Specifically, what do you use to load a gun? A clip or a magazine?

Write what you know, Again

Some time ago I talked about the importance of knowing what you're writing about.  At the time it was to reference my trip to a gun range to fire a hand gun for the first time.  After all, if I'm going to write it, I should know what it's like so I can capture that for my character.

Which also reminds me that I probably should get back over there and squeeze off a few bursts out of AR-15 or so.

So, as I've mentioned my latest project is to write something that blends "Fighting back for our planet after the Alien devastation" and "We are all that is left of Humanity".  I want it to be para-military based but that means that in the backstory of my characters there will probably be some military experience.

And aside from having memorized FM22-5 (or what ever its new designation might be), I really don't know that much about the military.

No Genre Fiction For You

Here's the truth about writing genre fiction:

Frankly, no one new to writing should do it.

When I was in college I took creative writing class. It was an entry-level course in the English department. Something like English 140: Intro to Creative Writing. When we got our first assignment, the professor made it clear that she did not want anyone writing genre fiction for her class. If she wanted us to write a love story, she wanted it set in the real, modern-day world, with real, modern-day characters. No alien space scapes, no historical sailing ships. Just two people dealing with a problem.

Likewise, sometime after college, I became involved through my girlfriend at the time, now my wife, on a website for new artists. She had been active therefore sometime and invited me to join. Artists would submit their pictures and they were open to critique from others. And as you critiqued other’s pictures people would follow links back to your page and critique yours. It also had an incredibly active in Email list-serve. Advice about how to become an artist flew around fast and furious. The most common thread among the emails was the debate of whether or not a fantasy artist should go to art school. The prevailing opinion among starting artists was that art school was a waste of time and energy because all they did was make you draw oranges and bottles and useless things. If you were going to do nothing but draw dragons for the rest of your life why did you need to spend hours and hours drawing a cube? It was a waste of time wasn't it?

Mind the Thorns Reflections

Here I am, 100 posts on Fictional Omens, and 20 chapters of Mind the Thorns and I'm feeling very contemplative.

It's been a very interesting run so far on both counts but mostly I want to think about Mind the Thorns and how that has played out as time has gone on.  It was an experiment, to be sure, and one that I'm proud to have engaged in.  Quite a few things worked, a few did not, and for the most part I feel like my writing has done nothing but improve in the time I've worked at it.

Which, before I get into the nature of Regan and the dangers of trying to write something as immersive as a reader-directed novel, I want to talk about.

Writing is work.

Casting for Stories

One of the things that always struck me as very sophomoric with writing was the "Cast List" for a piece of fan fiction or story.  If a writer wants the reader to conjure up a specific mental image for a character, then it's their job to provide that image in the prose itself.  And to be honest even that task is not easy.

In writing FantastiCon, I had an exchange in the first chapter that provided a very indepth description of a walk on character.  Allison was at the desk of her apartment complex with a random, unnamed other woman.  I then went through everything the random girl was wearing and contrasted it with Allison.  Then Allison walks off and we never see random girl again.

This drove my wife nuts.  She got a full paragraph treatment to a character she never sees again, one that doesn't even get a name.  So why did I do it?

Dangerous Democracy

A common trope in future sci fi is that Mankind will evolve into a perfect democratic state. There will be a grand Imperial Senate that decides all things in great democratic fashion, or that all the planets of the galaxy will unite to a common pursuit of peace and justice and the Federation Way.

The bad guys in all of these scenarios are the totalitarians, the monarchs, the emperors. When power rests all in the hand of a single Supreme Chancellor they are evil, wicked, corrupt or some combination therein. It is the role of the heroes to fight against this tyranny and prove that the individual with his democratic ideals is the true way forward.

Even Firefly, great speculative fiction that was, presented the unifying force as “the black hats” and the rebellious Outer Rim Browncoats as holding true to this democratic ideal. We really don’t know what passed for law and order on these border planets, only that the Alliance wanted to bring them all under one government, presumably a repressive evil one. Never very well pursued on the show, we really don’t know what kind of government the Alliance had. It could have been a democratic republic just like the Union of the 1860’s, forcing its repressive will on the slave states of the South.

But this is where current events start to show the cracks in this ideal, the marks of tarnish at the borders of the otherwise shiny exterior.

Where's Chapter 2?

For the weekly short story contest over on Goodreads last week I wrote a story about Mercy Lyons called "The London Kiss." In this story I establish that it's a military tradition with the Royal Space Navy for crew to be drawn at random to go "ashore" first and kiss their sweetheart after a tour of duty. (Because I'm also thinking about having it published it's not posted here, yet.) It's a fun story that shows some character background, allows me to engage in some world building, and see what happens.

But a friend read it for me and then immediately lamented "But I want to read chapter 2! I like the vignettes, and the back story, but when do we see more of the novel? Do you know how hard it is to sleep at night not knowing what happens now that the ship is all but adrift in space with only a handful of officers remaining and no active guns? I wasn't this sleep deprived since I babysat my sisters quintuplets who were all at the age of 2 months."

Okay, so I kind of paraphrased a little there.

Creating a "Real" subculture

For the Weekly Short Story Contest over on Goodreads I decided to take a stab at doing a story for the Queen's Fury universe in which my novel is going to take place. I want to keep developing the world and force myself to think about the various ways the races interact, as well as some back story on Mercy Lyons, how she interacts with others and what kinds of events would have landed her a place on the bridge of the HMS Diamondback where she finds herself thrust into the role of captain.

But rather than really focusing on Mercy I've been instead putting a lot of creative energy into the development of one of the races of the Royal Commonwealth of Worlds, the Hartishians.

Hartishi Prime is a jungle covered world and home to what are known in less polite slang as "space elves". They feature green skin, white hair and rows of sharp meat-rending teeth. Yes, these elves are strict carnivores. So much so, in fact that they cannot digest plant matter.

They are also intended to be a compliment to the Oresmen, dwarf-like men and women who have, for generations, populated the high gravity mining colonies. I admit that I like the play of elves and dwarves in fantasy and I don't see any reason to exclude them from science fiction. After all, isn't Spok really just Elrond in pants?

But where I'm getting stuck is coming up with a believable culture for the Hartishians.

Fear of Success

I know this sounds like an odd fear to have.  Who wouldn't want to make a mint on their creations?  Why would I be at all concerned that anything I write, from the Queen's Fury to Fantasti*Con go on to the level of achievement known by The Hunger Games or Twilight?

It's a fear of the road to get there, that road being the amorphic label "Young Adult".

Especially as I'm not writing with the target audience of "12 year olds".

Never heard of a Surge Protector?

I am blessed with many friends who are willing to be subjected to test reading my works in progress.  I am currently agonizing over the first chapter of my Sci Fi Epic for which I not only want to nail down Chapter 1 but I'd like to spend some time working on character sketches and short stories related to it.  I very much would like to get a teaser up to show off the world I'm building as well as get some buzz going even though publication is, at the least, a year or two, or three away.

While reading through the first 10 pages he sent me back a message:

Grin, and I'll get over the exploding console trope.. that has always seemed like such a design flaw  why are there no surge protectors in space? 

And honestly that's a rather fair complaint.  Why is it that in all space fictions, we seem rather okay with star ships coming without basic 20th century safety technology?

Would it smell as sweet?

A friend lamented that once she knew she was having a girl, she had no idea what to name her.  I quipped on her Facebook wall that naming a baby isn't really that big of a deal.  After all, it's not like that name will be with them for their entire lives and then end up engraved in stone when they die, right?

I realize that naming a character is a somewhat less significant life event.  After all, until published, my characters only exist in my mind, and even after the first book is printed, they don't really interact with too many people.  Plus, names can change throughout the writing process, and finally it's just a character, right?

Chapter 1: Take 1

So Sunday I finally got some time to sit and write.  Mrs. Osterman was off to the Dog Show with some friends from her old job, Xander was up north with his grand parents, Kaylee was ~finally~ asleep, and my lesson plans for the next few weeks were more or less ready to go.  It was time to start pounding away on the next great epic space adventure, a coming-of-age story following a young Ensign in Her Majesty's Royal Space Navy rise to Captain of an 8th rate ship of the line.  Or some rate ship of the line.  Maybe.  I haven't quite decided how big that ship is yet, relatively speaking.

But I got to pound on the keyboard, introduce you, dear reader, to Ensign Ippa Kiatta, her fren-emy Lt. Cordean Morthi, work on a sketch of the Hartishian race (a bit like elves with overly large almond eyes, and extremely long pointed ears) and do a proof of concept with hyper-linking key terms to the Codex of information in the back of the book.

You see, one of my grand designs for this project is to have the novel itself, and then have an additional extended encyclopedia of the world available with the eBook edition which will be hyper linked to relevant sections.  That way if you want to know more about the gunnery controls, or about a character, there is addtional information just a click away.  And then with your back button you can get back to the story itself.  Or depending on your eReader, back to where you left your mark.

Here's what I found as my day of writing went on:

How hard is it to drive a star ship?

At the heart of it my next writing project is going to be a Trek inspired novel.  Plain and simple, I fully intend to introduce to people an epic space fiction closer to Star Trek than Star Wars.  However, I also want to personalize as much of the story as I can, as well as the world in which it takes place.  I could, quite easily, steal the command structure that has become part of the common geek lexicon of Starfleet.  Operations, Security, Science, and Command divisions, each with their own department heads and so on.  And of course when you get to the top of the command chain, regardless of why or how you got in, you are considered a Command officer and put on the red shirt.

These are terms that do not exist....

Lately I've been playing a lot of Star Wars: The Old Republic.  It's scratching a lot of itches for me.  It's a solid WoW-Clone MMO with all the features you'd expect and a solid, reliable, and recognizable interface.  The story is top notch and if you play a Sith you get to have a rocking British Accent.  Unless you're undercover in which case you're supposed to sound like you're from the American Midwest.  Personally, I'd like to find that planet where you sound like you're from Boston*.

At any rate, I was looking up stuff on line related to a recent twist with my newbie operative when I came across a fascinating quote:

After a user expressed concern that Bioware had "disallowed" the use of the terms "gay" and "lesbian" on the boards in a thread titled "GLBT discrimination in forums?" a Bioware forum moderator dropped in and posted this: 

As I have stated before, these are terms that do not exist in Star Wars. 

Thread closed.

With a wave of the hand... it works

One of the challenges you face when you world build outside of reality is the challenge of "how does that work"?  Gene Roddenbery famously answered the question "How do the transporters work?" with the answer "Very well, thank you."

As I work on the next project I am trying to sort out how many alien races I want to have, how much of this universe is "Human", and of course, how they're able to transverse space quickly.  Already I've started to consult with friends who are learned in "rocket science" as to how well my efforts to explain how FTL technology is going to work and how FTL Communication will be done.

Another aspect of this world is the development of a race entirely of female robots.  This creates particular challenge in that I want to avoid the "What's it mean to be human?" characteristic that defined Data on Star Trek: TNG while at the same time not letting the race become regular women who just happen to be robotic.  As someone with some training in programming, I am also trying desperately to avoid thinking about how hard some of the specific subroutines and behaviors would be to program.