LTUE, current WIP, and other assorted updates

So even though I haven’t been too good about blogging this past month, I have been busy writing. Besides the short story in my last post, I’ve been steadily revising Star Wolf, formerly titled HEART OF THE NEBULA. It took me a while to get back into this story, but I’m fully involved in it now and it’s coming along nicely.

So far, I’ve only been revising through about 2k words per day. I’m hoping to push that up to at least 4k words, though, which means that I should finish it in the first week of February. I definitely want to get it done before LTUE, because there are other projects I’m anxious to get working on, especially Sons of the Starfarers. I want to launch that series this summer, but I still have to write books 2 and 3 … gah! Must … write … faster …

In other news, I recently got my schedule for LTUE. It looks like I’ll be on 5 panels this year, including on one with Eric James Stone and Dave Farland. Am I feeling imposter syndrome right about now? Why, yes, thank you for asking. :p In any case, here’s what the schedule currently looks like:

Thursday, February 13, 2014

4:00 pm — Being a Foreign Speaker
6:00 pm — Planet Building

Friday, February 14, 2014

12:00 pm — Writing Romance

Saturday, February 15, 2014

12:00 pm — ePublishing Short Stories
6:00 pm — Starting the Next Project

I’m definitely excited for this year’s symposium! Orson Scott Card is going to be there, as well as Brandon Sanderson, Dave Farland, LE Modesitt, and pretty much all the regulars (except for Howard Tayler–I heard he’s not coming). I’ve also got a bunch of long-time writer friends who will be there, many of whom are on panels of their own. It’s going to be big this year, and definitely a lot of fun!

In other news, a couple of days after posting about my goal to travel to the Czech Republic, a job landed in my lap that seems like the perfect way to save up the money. It’s with Google Fiber, and involves escorting technicians to the various utility huts scattered throughout the city, opening the doors for them, and sitting around while they do their work. With luck, I’ll be able to get a fair amount of writing done while I’m on the clock. And even though it’s an on-call position that might only go 10 or 20 hours some weeks, I’ll be paid for the full 40 hours (and not at minimum wage).

I have no idea how the job will work out yet, but it seems like a great opportunity to save up a lot of money while still having plenty of time to write. We’ll see how it goes.

In other news, Brothers in Exile is out with my first readers right now. One of them already finished it, which kind of shocked me. If they don’t find any major problems, I’ll go ahead and write the next one, hopefully finishing it before the end of March.

Sons of the Starfarers is going to be another novella series like Star Wanderers, but I’m going to go a bit longer on the individual books, like around the 35k to 45k word range. The omnibus editions will be in groups of three, so books I-III for the first omnibus, IV-VI for the second, VII-IX for the third, etc. I’d like to go to at least nine books in this series, though it could certainly end up going longer. I only have a very loose idea of where it’s going, but it feels like nine books at least.

That just about does it. Right now, I’m up to my knees in Star Wolf, so that definitely takes priority. But I definitely want to get back to Sons of the Starfarers, so I’ll try to finish it as soon as I can. If only I was one of those writers who could knock out 10k words every day … maybe someday. In the meantime, I’ll just keep plugging along as best I can.

Later!

Operation SB #2: The Open Source Time Machine

Title: The Open Source Time Machine
Genre: Science Fiction
Word Count: 3,247
Time: About 10 days

I felt really good after finishing this short story. The last line in particular surprised me, which is always a good sign. I think this story is going to go places.

The idea for this one actually came about 4 months ago. I imagined an inventor trying to convince a bunch of investors to fund his time travel development project by calling on his future self to appear to them. He fails–his future self never shows up–but after the meeting has ended in failure, he goes home and finds his future self waiting for him there. Why wouldn’t he go back in time to help himself get the funding to develop his project? That was the core idea that became this story.

I wrote out a couple of pages of that one before getting frustrated and trunking it. Then, about ten days ago, I broke my operating system (Ubuntu) and had to upgrade/reinstall it three times before it would work again. For Linux users, that’s kind of like a rite of passage. It was frustrating, but also kind of awesome because of all the stuff I learned from it. Open source technology is really, really cool.

Around the same time, I read Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age by Douglas Rushkoff. Fascinating book, especially if you’ve got a job/lifestyle where you spend +50% of your waking life in front of a screen. Rushkoff is a technology theorist, and this book is about all the subtle ways in which computers, social media, the internet, and other modern technologies can be used to manipulate us if we aren’t careful. His ideas are brilliant and his perspective is fascinating, so his book definitely got me thinking about things.

With both of these things on my mind, I went for a long walk while taking a break from my writing. Short stories were also on the mind, since I was wondering what I should write about for the month of January. The old time travel idea popped up, and everything just sort of melded together until I had the story.

I wrote the first half of it the next day … and then sat on it for a little over a week. I’m not sure why I did that–maybe I was just nervous about screwing it up or something. By far, the hardest part about writing is getting out of your own damned way. Yesterday, I finally buckled down and forced myself to finish the thing, and it actually turned out pretty well. Took the whole day to finish it, but it’s finished and that’s what’s important.

So after touching it up this morning, running a spell check and tweaking a couple of relatively minor things, I put it out on submission. That’s two stories I have on submission now: “The Infiltrator” got rejected from Clarkesworld, but it’s out at Analog now so we’ll see how that goes.

I think my short form is getting better, though there’s still a lot of room for improvement. I’m going to start running these stories through Kindal’s writing group, even though I’ll put them out on submission as soon as they’re finished. The feedback will be useful in writing the next one.

No idea what the next short story is going to be about. Maybe I’ll go through some of my old story idea notebooks and see what comes together. Or maybe a story will just come to me, and I need to position myself so that I’m ready to capture it on paper when it comes.

We’ll see. In the meantime, I’m very pleased with this one.

Looking for a new title

So I’m about a quarter of the way through the revisions for the next Gaia Nova book, currently titled Heart of the Nebula. The thing is, the story is changing a lot in the revision, to the point where that title doesn’t really make sense any more.

This tends to happen with most of my longer books. The original working title for Genesis Earth was THE WORMHOLE PARADIGM. Desert Stars started out as HERO IN EXILE, switched to WORLDS AWAY FROM HOME, then simplified briefly to WORLDS AWAY before finally settling on its current tile. Bringing Stella Home is actually the original working title for that book, but it briefly changed to MERCENARY SAVIOR before switching back again. The only novel of mine that hasn’t had two or three different titles is Stars of Blood and Glory, but that book was unusual in a number of ways.

In fact, Heart of the Nebula has already gone through one title change. It started out as “Into the Nebulous Deep,” not the most inspiring title but definitely accurate (perhaps even mildly spoilerific). I thought about changing it to “Into the Heart of the Nebula” before shortening that to the title it has now.

Anyway. For reasons I don’t really care to get into, I need a new title for this one. Here are some of the ones I’ve come up with so far:

  • STAR WOLF
  • THE LONE WOLF OF THE NEBULA
  • HOPE OF THE FREEDOM STAR
  • LEGEND OF THE FREEDOM STAR
  • EXODUS OF THE FREEDOM STAR
  • LONE WOLF OF THE FREEDOM STAR

I really like the words “wolf,” “legend,” “exodus,” and “freedom star,” but I’m not sure how to combine them in the best way. I’m kind of partial to STAR WOLF, just because it’s shortest, but LONE WOLF OF THE FREEDOM STAR has a ring to it that comes closest to what I’m shooting for.

Those are my thoughts for the moment, anyway. What do you guys think?

Another overseas adventure?

About a year ago, I blogged about how I need to get out of Provo before I went stir-crazy. Well, it’s been a year, and I haven’t gone anywhere yet. My love/hate relationship with Provo has mellowed out a bit–I’m not as anxious to get out as I used to be–but still, it would be good to change things up and go on another adventure.

This time, I’m thinking quite seriously about going to the Czech Republic. My sister is working to become a certified genealogist, and she keeps a fairly intensive blog on Czech family history research. If I were to go over there, I’m sure she would have all sorts of fun places for me to check out–places where our ancestors used to live. She’s already contacted a fifth cousin of ours, descended from the side of the family that didn’t emigrate, and she has a lot of other contacts over there as well. It would be an amazing life experience to live and travel over there.

Until now, every time I’ve gone overseas I’ve been a part of some sort of program. Even in Georgia, where I didn’t speak the language, didn’t know anyone, and barely knew anything about the country at all, the TLG program still had a fair amount of support infrastructure for us to fall back on whenever we ran up against a wall. I suppose I could find a similar sort of program in the Czech Republic, but that’s not what I want to do. This time, if I do go over, I want to go over on my own.

I’m still kind of on the fence about this, because it is kind of a big leap from where I am right now. But I’m earning enough with my book royalties that I could probably support myself on that income alone. From what I’ve heard, living costs in Prague can run as low as 450-600 USD per month, though most expats spend more in the 800-1200 USD range. That’s certainly doable. If I don’t need to take a TEFL job to support myself, why should I? Better to spend that time writing and/or seeing the country.

Of course, without making any concrete plans, this is still just a crazy dream. So here’s what I would need to do to make it happen:

  • Save up for plane tickets and a reasonable cash reserve, at least 150% the cost of a ticket back to the states. It looks like tickets to and from JFK and Prague run about $1,500, so I’d probably have to save up at least $4,000 (not including what it would take to get to New York from Utah).
  • Look up the rules for getting a visa, housing contract, insurance, etc (my Slovakian friend tells me that health insurance in the Czech Republic is mandatory).
  • Connect with the expat community online and figure out what the support network would look like. This would include stuff like couchsurfers, Kate’s contacts, the local church community, etc.
  • Learn some basic Czech, starting with the alphabet.
  • If possible, figure out some sort of housing arrangement in advance. Better yet, find a travel buddy.

I think those are all the big ones. And honestly, they’re all fairly doable. The hardest one would be to save up the money, but if I can find a short-term job on top of my writing that pays fairly well, I could do it in a few months. Since I plan to attend LTUE and Westercon this year, I probably won’t go overseas until mid-July at the earliest.

So yeah, that’s what I’m thinking at this point. It’s definitely something to work toward, and I think it could be another awesome life changing adventure. What do you guys think? Is there anything glaringly obvious that I’m missing? Got any tips or advice? Please share–I’m definitely open to feedback and suggestions!

So what should I work on next?

Now that Star Wanderers: Deliverance (Part VIII) is published, I’m back in the position of trying to figure out what to write next.  Usually, I just do this on my own, but this time I thought I’d run it by my readers and see what you guys have to say.  Here are the options:

Heart of the Nebula — This is a direct sequel to Bringing Stella Home.  It follows James, Lars, Stella, and several new characters as they struggle to keep the Colony from falling apart following the collapse of the New Gaian Empire.  This one is mostly a space opera story, with lots of action and political intrigue.  It also explores the wolf/sheepdog analogy that Danica brought up in Bringing Stella Home, with Lars’s rebuttal.

Mercenary Savior — Another Gaia Nova novel, this one showing the origins of Danica Nova and her band of Tajji mercenaries.  I’ve got a lot of ideas for this one, though I’ve only written the prologue so far.  This is going to be a military sci-fi story, with lots of action, lots of violence, and (hopefully) a few heart-wrenching moments as well.  Danica, Roman, Mikhail, Artyom, and several of the other mercenaries will appear in this one.

Empress of the Free Stars — Yet another Gaia Nova novel, this one a direct sequel of Stars of Blood and Glory.  It brings back Princess Hikaru, now the Empress of Shinihon, and shows her struggle to ensure the safety and freedom of her people in the face of a Federation that is fast transforming into an autocratic, totalitarian empire.  Colonel Webb is at the heart of the political intrigue in this one, and the stakes are as high as they’ve ever been.

Sons of the Starfarers — This is the spinoff series I’m writing to follow up Star Wanderers.  It takes place in the same universe as the Gaia Nova novels, except a thousand years before, and will eventually show the origins of the Hameji and tie all of these books together.  This is the one I’m most excited to write, as it brings back a bunch of characters from Star Wanderers and puts them into some interesting situations.  Hopefully, it will have the same stuff that made Star Wanderers so great while adding a bit more action/adventure stuff into the mix.

Edenfall — This one is the sequel to Genesis Earth, and the second book in what will eventually become a trilogy.  Basically, about fifteen years after Michael and Terra settle down on Icaria, a military expedition arrives from Earth, shattering the idyllic life they’ve made for themselves.  They try to convince the military people that there is no alien threat, but before they can do that, the ghost ship comes back, throwing everything out of balance.  This story is mostly from the point of view of Estee, Michael and Terra’s daughter, whose whole world is changed when the other humans appear.

Lifewalker — I’ve mentioned this one only a couple of times on my blog, but everyone who’s read the first chapter tells me that they want more.  This one is a completely different project from anything else I’ve done.  It’s a post-apocalyptic tale told from the point of view of a man who lives out his natural life where everyone else is infected with a disease that kills them at age 25.  After the first chapter, the he starts down the ruins of I-15 with a bible, a bicycle, and a copy of Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn, searching for the mythical city of light known by the forefathers as Lavegas.  Little does he know, that place is now populated by cannibals.

The Sword Bearer — An epic fantasy about an ancient brotherhood of sentient swords who pass down the knowledge and skills of each bearer down through the generations.  The brotherhood has been broken, and the few swords that haven’t been lost have driven their bearers insane to the point where they’re now amassing an army to conquer and enslave the whole world.  The only sword who hasn’t gone down that path is the one prophesied to be wielded in the final battle to defeat this great evil, but it hasn’t taken a bearer for almost a thousand years–that is, until a curious young tavern girl from the mountains accidentally stumbles upon it.

Those are pretty much all the major options.  I have a couple ideas for other books, but nothing that I’ve really started.  Even though I have my preferences, I could go almost any way depending on what you guys want to read.  So if there’s one or two that you really want me to work on next, feel free to let me know!

STAR WANDERERS: DELIVERANCE (PART VIII) is now available!

SW-VIII (thumb)Well, guys, it looks like I’ve gone and published another book! Star Wanderer: Deliverance (Part VIII) is now live on Amazon, Smashwords, and Kobo, and will soon be up on Barnes & Noble, Sony, and the iBookstore.  In the next couple of months, I’ll probably put it up on Google Play and DriveThru Fiction as well.

This is the eighth Star Wanderers book, and more or less brings the series to a close.  That doesn’t mean that I’m finished with this universe or these characters, though.  I plan to bring a lot of them back with Sons of the Starfarers, a spinoff series that will follow Mariya’s brothers, Isaac and Aaron, as they fight to keep the Outworlds free from Gaian Imperial domination.  That series will also tie everything in with the Gaia Nova novels, and show the origins of the Hameji.  So be sure to look out for those!

Also, I’m happy to report that the print editions of Outworlder (Part I), Fidelity (Part II), Sacrifice (Part III), and Homeworld (Part IV) are now available on Amazon!  Each costs about $5, and is between 75 to 100 pages.  The print versions for Dreamweaver (Part V), Benefactor (Part VI), Reproach (VII), and Deliverance (Part VIII) will hopefully be out before the end of the month!

A note about the print editions: I’m currently using the same covers as the ebooks, with the generic NASA space art.  However, I recently made an agreement with Derek Murphy of CreativIndie Covers to redo the book covers for the entire series.  This includes the print versions, so once I have the new covers, I will replace them and the old versions will be unavailable.

If you want the best looking print book, it’s probably best to wait.  Derek did a really awesome job on Part I: Outworlder, and I expect that the rest of the covers will be just as stunning.  However, since there’s only going to be a limited number of the original versions, there is a chance that they might become more valuable if these books really take off.  I can’t make any promises about that, since I really have no idea, but if you would like to get the original versions, they will only be up for a couple of months as I gradually replace them.  I will have matching versions for each book in the series, though, so if you want to collect a complete set with the original cover art, you’ll definitely be able to do that.

That just about does it.  As always, thanks for reading!

Resolutions and such for 2014

Yes, I know this post is a couple of days late.  Yesterday I was busy publishing Star Wanderers: Deliverance (Part VIII), though, and the day before that I was on the train, and today I had to renew my vehicle registration … enough!  On to the resolutions.

1. Publish something every 6 weeks.

One thing I really need to get better about is publishing new work.  So this year, I’m going to do my damnedest to follow a regular publishing schedule.  I don’t know what I’ll be publishing, exactly, but I have a pretty good idea, and surprisingly enough it actually works out to a lot less work than you’d think:

  • WEEK 1: SW-VIII: Deliverance (already done)
  • WEEK 7: SW V-VIII:  Tales of the Far Outworlds (the second STAR WANDERERS omnibus–basically, I just need to write the Author’s Note and get a cover, since the stories have already been written).
  • WEEK 13: Science Fiction from A to Z (a book version of last year’s A to Z blogging challenge, released just in time for this year’s A to Z, for which I’ve already thought of an awesome theme).
  • WEEK 19: Heart of the Nebula (rough draft already written, just need to rewrite/revise).
  • WEEK 25: Sons of the Starfarers Book I: Brothers in Exile (already written).
  • WEEK 31: Sons of the Starfarers Book II: ??? (this one I still have to write).
  • WEEK 37: Sons of the Starfarers Book III: ??? (also need to write, but both of these are novellas so they shouldn’t take too long).
  • WEEK 43: Open slot–maybe I’ll publish Lifewalker in this slot.
  • WEEK 49: Sons of the Starfarers Omnibus I-III (just in time for Christmas).

Of course, this is all just a tentative schedule–I could definitely change it depending on which stories you guys want me most to write.  The point is that it’s doable–surprisingliy doable.  I might even break the schedule once or twice to release a surprise project, depending on how things go.

Then again, I might need the extra writing time in order to finish my second resolution, which is:

2. Write at least 2 short stories per month and submit them to traditional markets.

In other words, Operation Short Blitz.  Since I’ve already outlined my goals and objectives for that one, on to resolution 3:

3. Read a book every week

Or at least 50 books before the end of the year.  This is a recurring one that I’ve never quite been able to do, but I really need to read more, so I figured I’d bring it back.  It’s also a good excuse to get more active on Goodreads, which I’ve been meaning to do for some time.

Now for some non-writing related resolutions:

4. Keep a detailed weekly personal journal

I’ve kept a journal off and on since 2nd grade, but in the past few years I’ve been really lax about it.  My excuse was that the blog counts sort of as a journal, but that’s not really true, because there are things in my life that I would never want to talk about publically on this platform.  At the same time, I’m not a teenager anymore–I don’t need to keep a super secret diary stashed beneath my mattress in order to cathartically vent my hormones and thus maintain my sanity.

So for this year, I’m going to completely redo the way I do journal writing.  Instead of free-writing, I’m going to keep it deliberately structured.  Instead of writing it only for myself, I’m going to write it for the benefit of my future kids and grandkids.  I’ll include some private stuff in there, but nothing I wouldn’t mind being read years later.

Honestly, I still haven’t figured out exactly what I’m going to do for this goal, but I plan to at least write in it every week.  In any case, it makes for a good Sunday project–not just writing in it, but figuring out exactly where I want to go with it.

5. Get to the point where I can run a mile ever day.

Writing is a sedentary activity, and I definitely need to get out and be more active.  My grandpa got fit and lost a lot of weight later in his life, and one of the things he told me that was key was to run a mile a day.  Currently, I can’t quite do that–I tried that about a month ago, and I pulled something on the third day that put me out for about a week.  But it’s definitely something I can work up to.

My brother-in-law is a runner, and he advised me to start by walking.  Walk at least a mile a day for a week, then the next week walk two, then the week after that walk for most of the days but throw in a running day somewhere in there.  Gradually work up until you’re running more than walking, then soon enough you’ll be running every day.

So that’s what I’m going to do.  I’m starting out with the two-mile walks, since the one-milers are way too easy.  Maybe I’ll hike the Y a few times before I start running, just to build up muscle strength.  And when the snow melts, I’ll definitely be climbing some mountains.

What I’d really like to do is get a treadmill desk.  Those things are expensive, though, and there isn’t much room for them where I’m currently living.  In any case, the best resolutions are the ones that don’t require a huge monetary investment or a massive shift from your current lifestyle, since those are the ones that are most likely to get done.

And just for the heck of it, here’s a crazy impossible stretch goal:

6. Finish hiking the 7 peaks.

Those of you who have been following me for a while probably remember that last year, I made only one resolution, and that was to climb four of the seven peaks here in Utah county.  Well, I only got to two of them: Spanish Fork Peak and Santaquin Peak.  And guys–they were amazing!  Real adventures.  Santaquin peak especially was just spectacular–without a doubt, the most perfect hike of my life.  But then things got busy and I never got around to hiking the other two, blah blah blah lame excuses.

So this year, I want to revisit that goal, and since four is a lame number to stop at, I figure I’ll just shoot for all seven of them.  It’s going to be tough–Cascade Mountain is a beast, and from what I’ve heard, Lone Peak has some cliffs that are especially harrowing–but by golly, I’m going to do it!

And if I hike Mount Timpanogos this year, maybe I’ll finally break the curse that is keeping me trapped here in Provo.

In any case, those are my resolutions for 2014.  What are yours?

SW-VIII: DELIVERANCE coming out in January

SW-VIII (thumb)So when I left for family vacation in Iowa last week, I thought I’d put the cover files for Star Wanderers: Deliverance (Part VIII) in my dropbox folder.  It turns out, I didn’t–it’s still on my desktop back in Provo.  Since I don’t get back until late on New Year’s Eve, that means that it won’t be coming out until January.

Sorry about that, guys!  I hope you don’t mind the wait.  Everything else is coming along fine–if all goes well, I should be able to hit “publish” on January 1st, with the print version coming out later in the month.  The print versions are already up for most of the other books in the series, though Amazon hasn’t linked to all of them yet.  When they’re all up, I’ll post the links here on this blog.

Christmas has been really great this year.  I’m here in Iowa with my whole family–mother, father, sisters, brothers-in-law, niece, and nephews.  The kids got a bunch of new toys and have been playing with them all week, while the rest of us have been reading, chatting, cooking, and playing lots and lots of Settlers of Catan.  That’s more or less the family game now.  I’ve won two rounds so far: one with the 5-6 player expansion, another with 4 players on the old board (which is hard!).

I didn’t have much on my Christmas list this year, but I did get something I’ve needed for a long time–a new laptop computer.  I’ve been using an Asus eee PC since 2008, and it’s held out extremely well, but 1 GB of RAM just isn’t enough to cut it anymore.  Plus, the battery and adapter are both generic replacements, and if I try to charge the battery while the computer is on, it switches from wall-power to the battery and back again every second or so, which is annoying.

My new machine will be an Asus X200CA, with 4 GB RAM, a touchscreen, and an 11.6″ screen.  I wanted to keep it small, so I’d be able to use it as a travel machine.  It comes with Windows 8, but I ordered a 128 GB solid state hard drive to replace the one that it comes with, so I’ll be installing Ubuntu on it instead (probably 13.10).  I’m a little bit nervous how that will work with the new UEFI, but from what I can tell it seems that Ubuntu should work fine with it.  I’ll just go in and turn off secure boot before I replace the hard drive, so I can install the new OS from USB.

My roommate just got a solid state drive for his operating system, and now his desktop boots up in about six seconds.  Hopefully, it will be the same once I get this machine up and running.  128 GB isn’t a whole lot of space, but it should be plenty for all my writing needs.  I want to get out of Utah and do some traveling in 2014, so that’s going to be important.

That’s just about it from here.  There’s something cooking downstairs and it smells delicious, so I’d better get going.  See you guys later!

Midichlorians vs. the Philotic Web, or a new dimension to Brandon Sanderson’s first rule of magic

I got into an interesting discussion today with my brother-in-law about science fiction & fantasy, specifically about whether explaining something too much takes away from the sense of wonder that is so critical to those genres.  It started out with a discussion of Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace, which (surprisingly) he actually kind of likes, and eventually got on to Brandon Sanderson’s first law of magic.

I was trying to explain why The Phantom Menace was so broken, and after hemming and hawing over various things came to the midichlorians.  That, more than anything else, threw me out of the story.  By explaining the Force in such a banal, insipid way, it undid all the magic of the previous trilogy and completely sterilized it.  There was no sense of wonder after that point–explaining the Force completely killed it, just like over-explaining any magic system always kills that sense of wonder.

… or does it?  Because there are quite a few wonder-inducing magic systems that get explained in great detail.  Take the Philotic Web, for example.  In Xenocide, Orson Scott Card explains, in great detail, how the physics behind the ansible system works.  And yet, by doing so, he increases that sense of wonder to the point where Xenocide is one of my favorite of his books.  Why?  Because it introduces a bunch of implications that lead to even more questions, more mysteries.

With The Phantom Menace, of course, that isn’t the case–the midichlorian thing is basically a clumsy ass pull that fails in the magic department just as hard as Jar-Jar Binks does at comic relief.  But it doesn’t fail because it over-explains things, it fails because it explains the magic in a way that doesn’t allow room to explore the implications.  As much as I hate to admit it, Lucas could have pulled off the midichlorian thing if the implications had been relevant to more things in the story than just a simple plot point.

This is where Sanderson’s first law comes in.  Basically, Sanderson’s first law states that there’s an inverse relationship to how well the magic can induce wonder versus how well the magic can advance the plot.  In order to advance the plot through magic, you have to explain how the magic works to some degree, and that’s going to take away from the sense of wonder.

But as we’ve just shown, that isn’t always the case.  Sometimes the sense of wonder gets even stronger the more the magic gets explained.  This is especially true in science fiction that follows the one big lie approach, where one thing (wormholes, reactionless drives, time travel) is truly fantastic and everything else more or less follows the laws of physics as we understand them; in order to maintain the suspension of disbelief, the story is basically forced to explore all the implications of the magic, often to great detail.

In other words, explaining the magic isn’t always like building a wall–sometimes, it’s like building a door.  Yes, it lays down a boundary that closes off the imaginative spaciousness that a story really needs to convey that sense of wonder, but if the explanation leads to new questions–new mysteries–then that sense of wonder can be maintained.  Instead of walling the reader in, it throws the reader into a maze with countless secret chambers to explore.

The relationship between plot-based magic and wonder-based magic is not linear, as Brandon Sanderson’s first law implies.  Rather, there’s a second dimension that has very little to do with his law, and learning how to traverse that dimension is key to maintaining the sense of wonder in any story.

I haven’t figured out a pithy way to explain all this yet, but I’m going to, hopefully within the next few days.  If you guys have any thoughts on the subject, please feel free to share.  I’m definitely interested in hearing your perspectives on it.

Thoughts on sequels and the Desolation of Smaug

hobbit2-finalposter-fullSo last week I saw the new Hobbit movie, The Desolation of Smaug, and I really, really liked it … right up to the ending.  Why?

BECAUSE IT RESOLVED NOTHING!!!

Okay, sorry for the spoiler (though you probably should have guessed there would be spoilers in a post like this).  There’s going to be more in this post, so if you haven’t seen the movie yet, read on at your own risk.

Overall, I thought the movie was pretty good.  The action was fun, the fantasy elements were very well executed, and Benedict Cumberbatch was excellent as the voice of Smaug.  My only real hangups (beside the ending) are relatively minor, such as the impossible physics of Thorin’s luge run down the river of molten metal, or the fact that all of the gold ever mined in the history of the Earth would not fill a tenth of the stockpile in Erebor (seriously, all of the world’s gold would only fill a cube about 20 meters to a side … so maybe half of that big statue they melted at the end?).  Oh, and I thought the politics of Laketown were simplified to the point of caricature.  That was actually a fairly big issue for me, though I suspect the third movie will either make it or break it.

But all of those are dwarfed (no pun intended … okay, maybe a little) by the movie’s biggest flaw, which is that IT HAS NO RESOLUTION.

Seriously, none of the half-dozen subplots resolve in any meaningful way.  The one that comes closest is that love affair between the elf woman and the dwarf, since I guess she kind of saves him from his orc wound.  But he doesn’t even regain consciousness, which means that they aren’t even really reunited by the end.  And as for the other storylines … well, Smaug is still alive and about to burn Laketown, Gandalf is a prisoner of Sauron, Bard is a prisoner of that fat guy who wasn’t ever in the book and the dwarves still haven’t taken Erebor.

I understand that the middle installment in a series can’t resolve everything, but I still think it should resolve something.  Take The Empire Strikes Back, for example.  It ends on something of a cliffhanger, but there’s still enough of a resolution that it stands very well on its own.  Han Solo is frozen in carbonite, but Leia, Chewie, and the droids have escaped to safety.  Luke hasn’t defeated Vader, but he has learned something that completely changes the relationship between them both.  The Rebel Alliance hasn’t won yet, but they have gotten away from Hoth without being completely decimated by the Empire.

The Empire Strikes Back is not just part I of The Return of the Jedi–it stands on its own as a complete story.  It bridges A New Hope and Jedi by showing the tragic failure of Luke Skywalker to defeat Vader, rescue his friends, and become a Jedi.  By the end of the movie, he’s a very different person than he was at the beginning.  Could the same be said of Thorin, Bilbo, and the Desolation of Smaug?  Not really.

I suppose I have to be a bit cautious here, since there are those who would say that I’m guilty of this myself.  I’ll freely admit that I’ve written a few cliffhanger endings, most recently in some of the Star Wanderers stories.  However, I always try to resolve something, so that each book can stand at least partly on its own.

In Fidelity, for example, Jeremiah and Noemi haven’t found a home yet, but they do have one to work toward.  It starts with their arrival at Oriana Station and it ends with their departure–everything that they need to do there has been done.  In Sacrifice, the language barrier, cultural misunderstandings, and Jeremiah’s own personal shortcomings converge until he’s more or less forced to leave Noemi, at least temporarily.  It’s not a feel-good ending, but it is a resolution of sorts.  And in Reproach, Mariya comes to the horrifying realization that she’s destroyed everything that she was hoping to build.

I guess the key to bridging a series in such a way that the sequels stand on their own is to keep the individual conflicts and subplots distinct, especially the internal and external ones.  For example, I thought that The Unexpected Journey had a much better ending, not because the overall plot was resolved, but because Bilbo had transformed from a homebody to an adventurer.  The internal conflict had a satisfying resolution, and the growth arc had more or less come full swing.  The Desolation of Smaug could have done that with Thorin, and in some ways it seemed to be trying, but by the end it just fell short.

So am I going to see the third movie?  Well, yeah, so from a Hollywood perspective, I suppose the movie was a success.  But I’m not as excited for it as I was for Return of the Jedi.  And the lesson I’m taking from this is that cliffhangers are good, but you’ve got to deliver at least some satisfaction–you’ve got to resolve something.  Otherwise, people are going to feel cheated.