One Thousand And One Parsecs

A few quick updates and a new publication

Sorry, no Trope Tuesday post this week. I’m leaving Kutaisi in a couple of days, to spend Christmas in Tbilisi before flying home. Needless to say, things are a little upside down right now.

I’m still writing though. Making progress on The Sword Keeper, though not as much as I’d like. Once the school year wraps up and I’ve moved out of my village, I hope to dedicate more time and energy to it. It’s my first serious foray into fantasy, and even with all the challenges, I’m having a lot of fun with it. If you guys want, maybe I’ll post a scene or two from the WIP.

Speaking of sample chapters, Leading Edge Magazine is publishing the first chapter of my upcoming novel, Stars of Blood and Glory. It’s coming out in issue 63, which should be available any day now. It’ll be at least a couple of months until the full-length novel comes out, so if you want a sneak peek, be sure to pick up a copy.

That’s just about it for now. More later, when things are a bit more grounded. See you around!

Some thoughts on internet access, self-discipline, and productivity

As many of you probably know, for the past four months I’ve been living in a small Georgian village in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains. It isn’t as remote as some places in this country (like Tusheti, where some people still practice pagan animal sacrifices), but my internet access has been limited, especially compared to the 24/7 access I had back in the States.

I knew that coming in, and was actually looking forward to it. I had the option to buy a USB stick from the phone company that would give me service, but I wanted to experience living off the grid for a while to see if that would increase my writing productivity. Long story short: it didn’t.

In order to use the internet, I have to take a marshrutka (small passenger bus) about half an hour to Kutaisi, where the most convenient place to get wifi is McDonalds. I can usually go for two or three days without internet, but so many other things in my life (work, family, publishing) are tied up in it that it’s not a good idea to go much longer.

Since each trip takes a huge chunk out of my day, it’s become a lot harder to keep and maintain any sort of momentum on any of my writing projects. Also, cutting out the internet hasn’t increased my self-discipline at all, it’s just driven me to find different ways to distract myself.

In the end, I think I actually would have been more productive if I’d ponied up the 70 GEL and bought a USB stick from the phone company. I certainly would have saved a lot of money, considering all that I’ve spent on these trips to Kutaisi. But at least I’ve learned a few things from the experience.

First, I’ve learned that all of the high-priority things that I absolutely must do on the internet only amount to an hour or two each week. And even for most of those things, it isn’t a disaster if I put them off for a day or two. It’s possible to structure your internet time around everything else in your life, rather than vice versa. In fact, that’s almost certainly a better way to live.

Second, the enjoyment I get from recreational internet usage maxes out after about two hours. Anything beyond that, and I become something of a zombie. It’s a weird feeling when you run out of things to do on the internet, but when you realize that you don’t actually enjoy scrolling down an endless list of photos and status updates, it’s a lot easier to pull back and say “no.”

Third, you don’t need social media to sell books. I made more in book sales in the first week of this month than I did in the first quarter of this year, and my Facebook and Twitter pages are a wasteland. It might help you if you already enjoy that sort of thing, but it’s not an absolute requirement for success. Certainly, you don’t have to open a vein and spill everything.

Fourth, exercising good self-discipline doesn’t mean cutting something completely out of your life, but learning how to properly manage it. The internet isn’t an either/or thing, it’s a matter of finding and maintaining the proper balance. In the future, I plan to do what Dean and Kris recommend, which is to have two computers: one for internet usage, and one for writing.

Fifth, for me personally, it’s actually healthy to have a couple of harmless distractions available while I write. I deleted all of the games off of my computer about a month ago, and I haven’t been able to write more than a thousand words a day ever since–often, much less. Before, whenever I hit a rough patch, I would play a quick round of super-melee in Star Control II and come back to it with fresh eyes. Without that, I find myself taking my butt out of the proverbial chair and wandering around until I find something else to do, which inevitably takes more time and energy. A lot of games (Tetris, Spider Solitaire) are addicting and should be nixed, but for me personally at least, opening up something that isn’t a time-sink can actually help to keep me going.

That’s just about all I can come up with now. I’m sure there are other lessons to be had, but these are the major ones. I’m coming back to the States on the 31st, and should be back in Utah in time for LTUE and Conduit. It’s going to be interesting living with 24/7 internet access again; hopefully, it won’t be too hard to adapt back.

Trope Tuesday: Terraforming

One of the problems with interplanetary colonization is that Earth-like worlds are fairly rare (though possibly not as rare as we once thought). In our own solar system, the only other world that comes anywhere close (Mars) is a radiation-blasted desert with only the barest hint of an atmosphere and a surface temperature colder than Antarctica. To get around this problem, you can do one of two things: build an artificial enclosed environment to house the colony, or change the world itself to make it more Earthlike–in other words, terraform it.

The actual science of terraforming is far too complex (not to mention way over my head) to do it justice in this post. Instead, I’ll just point you to the Terraforming Wikipedia page as a starting point and focus on how the concept is used as a story trope.

According to tvtropes and Wikipedia, the term came from a 1942 novella by Jack Williamson titled “Collision Orbit.” The concept of changing the environment of an entire planet actually goes back much further, with H.G. Wells subverting the trope in War of the Worlds (instead of humans terraforming other worlds, the hostile Martians try to xenoform Earth to make it habitable for them). Before the U.S. and U.S.S.R. put probes on the surface of Mars and Venus, it was fairly common for writers to speculate that those planets were able to support human life, at least on a basic, rudimentary level. Once the science showed that that isn’t actually the case, terraforming as a story trope really began to take off.

Today, this trope occurs commonly across all ranges of the Mohs scale. Soft sci-fi stories (such as Firefly) use it as an excuse to have planets that look and feel like Earth. Hard sci-fi stories (such as Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars) use it as a fundamental premise, or to pose questions like “what is the ultimate destiny of human evolution?” or “how important is it to our species’ survival that we spread out beyond Earth?” Although it’s not something that we as a species have (yet) done, our present science seems to place it well within the range of the plausible, and that means that makes it fair game for any kind of science fiction.

In order to be believable, however, any significant terraforming project requires two things: resources and time. LOTS of time. We’re talking on the order of centuries and millenia here. Because of that, stories that use this trope generally fall into the following categories:

The terraforming happened a long time ago and is part of the world’s ancient (or near ancient) history.
The terraforming is on-going and directly impacts almost every element of the world’s culture and setting.
The terraforming has failed in some way, which may (or may not) make it a key element in the story conflict.

As with generation ships, the scope of this trope spans more than just the interests of a single character–it deals with the ultimate destiny of entire cultures and civilizations. In hard sci-fi stories, the planet that’s being terraformed may actually become more of a character in itself than the individual people who are terraforming it. Unless they have some form of immortality, they have little hope of ever seeing the ultimate end of it.

Of course, that almost makes the project more of a religion to the colonists than a science, with all sorts of interesting philosophical and story implications.

Why is this trope so widespread in science fiction? I can think of a few potential reasons. First, it hits on some of the key issues that lie at the very heart of the genre, such as the ultimate destiny of humanity and the ethical issues surrounding our ability to play God through the wonders of science. Also, it captures the imagination in a way that few other tropes can equal. Because the scope of any terraforming project is so vast, the implications touch on almost every key element of the story, including setting, character, and conflict.

But on an even more fundamental level, it hits on one of the key elements of any fantasy magic system: limitations. We can’t live on an alien world because the conditions are too hostile, but we can’t just wave our hands to make it Earth-like either. We have to undergo a painstaking, laborious process that could unravel at any point and throw everything we’ve worked for into chaos. We have to dedicate our whole lives to the project for dozens of generations before it will ever pay off. There are no shortcuts–none that won’t strain our readers’ suspension of disbelief, anyway. But if it all works out, then we will have created a new Earth–and how is that not magic?

Needless to say, I’m a big fan of this trope. I’ve used it in just about every science fiction story I’ve written, though I probably play with it the most in Star Wanderers. The main character of that story comes from a world where a terraformation project failed, having severe religious implications that drive the whole series. Sacrifice is largely set in orbit around a world that is midway through the terraforming process. Elswhere in the Gaia Nova universe, people build domes just as often to keep humanity from screwing over a terraformed world as they do to provide room to live on one that isn’t. After all this, though, I feel like I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of this trope. You can definitely expect to see it in my work in the future.

This Week

I was listening to the latest episode of This American Life yesterday, and at the end of the podcast, Ira Glass mentioned that this week’s episode will be themed “this week”–in other words, things that all happened in just the last seven days.

Well, things haven’t been too eventful out here in Georgia, but I liked the idea for the theme, so I decided to write up something as if it would appear on the show. Here it is:

Early Tuesday morning, before the sun rose, I woke up from a dream that I was in a faraway place somewhere on this planet. Then I opened my eyes and realized that I live in the Caucasus Mountains.

I’m an American teaching English in the Republic of Georgia, in a small village half an hour south of Kutaisi. I live in a farmhouse with a local family. The mother teaches math at the village school, her son teaches computer science and makes wine for a company based out of Tbilisi. My host mother’s sister in law also lives with us, and this week, she cooked the most delicious borscht I’ve eaten in my life. She told me she’d teach me how to make it, and I’m ecstatic.

We keep sheep, cows, chickens, pigs, a turkey, and grow about half of the food we eat. Last week, five of the chickens were eaten by a wolf, including a mother hen and three of her chicks. The last surviving chick has been struggling, so every day after school I take her out of the little cage where we’ve beek keeping her and feed her from my hand. She isn’t as afraid as she used to be, and seems to be getting stronger.

I teach grades I through VI at the village school, which amounts to about eighty kids. On Tuesday, we chopped wood for the winter. Each classroom has a small woodburning stove, and often smells like campfire smoke. It’s very warm, though–the teachers make sure of that, since cold leads to illness, and we can’t have that. The kids love learning, and I love teaching them. Every day after class, I say “goodbye,” and they run up screaming and laughing to give me high fives. I feel like a rockstar whenever I’m at school with them.

On Sunday, I went up to Kutaisi to use the internet. I use the internet maybe three times a week, sometimes four. The nearest place with reliable wifi is the McDonalds, and it takes half an hour and 1.5 lari to get there. On the way back, I chatted in the back of the marshrutka with some of the upper grade kids from my village. We sang songs by Michael Jackson, Justin Beiber, and Psy. Gangnam Style is very popular out here, and the kids think it’s hilarious when I do the dance for them at the village school.

It’s raining right now, which means that the power will probably go out soon. We have power outages almost every day, but they aren’t usually longer than one or two hours. Our water comes from a well, and our heat comes from the fireplace, where we also burn our garbage. When the rain lets up, I’ll help my host-brother cut down a few trees in the back and chop the wood.

Georgia is going through some difficult times politically right now, but we only hear about it through the TV. The country had its first peaceful democratic transition of power in October, and the new Prime Minister has been on a political witch hunt ever since. Some in the Western media find this disturbing, but my host-brother doesn’t think that Georgia has become less democratic because of it. We had a long conversation about politics on Monday night, which eventually turned into a discussion about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, since the recent UN vote has also been in the news. He told me he’s pro-Palestinian because Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank sounds a lot like Russia’s occupation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

An expat friend of mine visited Abkhazia recently and posted the pictures on his blog on Tuesday. He called it an overpriced garbage dump, and from the pictures, you can definitely see why. Piles of trash in the courtyard of the biggest Orthodox church in Sokhumi, a derelict half-sunk ship rusting in the harbor, vines crawling up Soviet-era power lines that look about ready to fall over. And yet with Russia trying to keep Georgia from joining NATO, it looks like the status quo will remain in place for years to come.

Here in my village, though, that all seems far away. So do the economic problems back home, though they’re one of the reasons why I came out to Georgia in the firstplace. On Tuesday, I met up with a British friend of mine at McDonalds and we talked a bit about what we plan to do after we get home. He’s got a job lined up for him at the school where his mother works. I asked him if things are still tough in the UK, and he nodded. We didn’t have to say anything more than that to understand each other.

I don’t have a job lined up, but I’m actually not too worried. I’m a writer with a few science fiction stories self-published online, and on Tuesday I realized that I’ve earned as much money in the first four days of this month as I earned in the entire month of March earlier this year. It’s not enough to make a living yet–at least, not by US standards–but it’s growing.

On Sunday, I published another novelette, and on Wednesday, I went back to work on a fantasy novel that I started in October. The power hasn’t gone out yet, so I think I’ll get back to writing. It’s 3:32 PM and I have the rest of the day to myself, with maybe an hour to help my host brother cut down some trees. Life is good, especially out here in the Caucasus.

At this point, I should probably post some pictures:

Chopping wood at the school. A bunch of men from the village did the chopping, while the kids carried the wood back inside.

Some of my VI and IV grade students helping out.

One of the first graders. I swear, this kid is like my biggest fan.

Some of my V graders. These kids are great.

In other news, I decided to drop my other projects and go back to writing The Sword Keeper. I think part of the problem I had before was that I was trying to go too fast, writing-wise and story-wise. This is my first time writing a fantasy novel, and I can already tell that it’s going to be a lot longer than I’d thought it would be.

Also, I took the time to draw up a map of the fantasy world where it takes place, and oh my gosh that changed everything. Maps are awesome. When I have access to a decent scanner, I’ll have to put it up.

That’s all. See you around!

Trope Tuesday: Settling the (Final) Frontier

I love stories about colonization, especially when they’re set in space. There’s just something about a small group of rugged pioneers striking out into the harsh, unforgiving wilderness to make a new life for themselves. Maybe it’s just something about my American heritage, or all those 4x games I played as a kid, but I doubt it. Ever since the dawn of time, we humans have been on the move, looking for new and better places to call home. Small wonder, then, that so many of our stories, both ancient and modern, are about settling the frontier.

Since space is the final frontier, this trope is very common in science fiction. Heinlein was a huge fan of it, but he wasn’t the only one to play with it–not by a long shot. John Scalzi (The Last Colony), Nancy Kress (Crossfire), C.J. Cherryh (40,000 in Gehenna), Anne McCaffrey (Freedom’s Landing), and Kim Stanley Robinson (Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars) are just a few of the many science fiction writers who have explored this trope in their works. In recent years, several sci fi miniseries (Battlestar Galactica, Terra Nova) have used it as a major premise as well. And of course, you have all the classic 4x games like Masters of Orion and Alpha Centauri.

Space Colonies can come in a variety of different flavors:

Lost Colony — What happens when the original colonists lose all contact with the outside universe and no one thinks to check up on them for a while. Can either turn into a story of survival or a clash of cultures, if/when they ever re-establish contact.
Cult Colony — Religion is one of the few things that will drive massive numbers of people to leave everything behind and start over in a new world. Just look at the Pilgrims for a real-world examples. In space colonies of this type, you can expect to see some extremely radical people, since the isolation of deep space tends to compound their fundamentalist tendencies. Expect these to be both weird and frightening.
Space Amish — Something of a combination of the two, except with much more primitive technology. Expect to see log cabins, horse- (or giant lizard) drawn carriages, and other tropes closer to the Western genre. Sometimes, they may be hiding a superweapon.
Penal Colony — Australia in space (ahem…IN SPAAACE!!!). What happens when the empire needs a place to conveniently exile all the troublemakers and rabble rousers. Not a place for the faint of heart.
Wretched Hive — What happens to a penal colony when the prisoners actually run the place. Like the previous type, except taken up to eleven. Or not, depending on the history and culture. Tatooine is the eponymous example.
Death World — As the name would suggest, this is not the kind of place you’d want to homestead. Anyone who does is bound to be a badass. The Empire and the Federation often recruit most of their soldiers from here.
Company World — I couldn’t find this one listed on tvtropes. Basically, it’s a planet that is owned and governed entirely by a private corporation, which expects to make a tidy profit off of the place. The colonists are basically indentured servants (since robots simply wouldn’t do) and have almost no property or rights. Expect the story to be about sticking it to the man.

These are just a few of the many possibilities that you can play with when settling the frontier. In my opinion, however, the essential elements are as follows:

The story is not just about exploring a new world, but establishing some kind of a permanent presence there.
By coming to the new world, the colonists must leave everything from their old, familiar lives behind.
The colonists must resolve the story conflict through their own self-reliance, not by waiting for an outside force to save them.

I’ve only dabbled with this trope, but it does play a role in many of my stories, most notably in the Star Wanderers series. Genesis Earth also has elements of it as well, though it’s not the main driver for the plot. It is a major factor in Heart of the Nebula, though, the (currently) unpublished sequel to Bringing Stella Home. And in my future books, you can definitely expect to see this trope again.

STAR WANDERERS: HOMEWORLD is now available on Kindle, Nook, Kobo, and Smashwords!

That’s right! Part IV of the Star Wanderers series is available for $2.99 on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Smashwords. You can also find it listed on Goodreads here. Newsletter subscribers should get the Smashwords coupon code in an hour or two.

From the book description:

THEY’VE FINALLY FOUND A WORLD TO CALL HOME—BUT FIRST, THEY HAVE TO FIGHT FOR IT.

For years, Jeremiah has wandered the stars in search of a home. With his wife Noemi about to have a baby, he thinks he’s finally found a place to settle down. The Zarmina system lies on the edge of the Outworld frontier, but together with their friends, they hope to establish a thriving new colony. The only problem is that the system is already inhabited—by pirates.

The colonists no sooner arrive than they fall prisoner to Captain Helena and her band of rogues from the New Pleiades. She gives them an ultimatum: live like slaves on the planet’s surface, or breathe vacuum. With all their dreams about to be shattered, they have to find a way to fight back. But to do so may endanger everything—including the lives of the ones they love most.

This one was a lot of fun to write. Everything from all the previous parts came together wonderfully, and the ending just blew me away. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!

This novella concludes the main series arc for Star Wanderers, but I still have a lot of stories that I want to tell in this universe. I plan to write a few stand-alone novelettes and novellas from the other characters’ points of view, perhaps expanding the series to include another arc. Part V, Dreamweaver, is already written, and if all goes well, I should write Part VI (Wanderlust) over the next couple of weeks.

That’s just about all for now. Thanks so much to everyone who has liked, shared, or reviewed the other Star Wanderers stories! I think you’re going to like this one. Enjoy!

Trope Tuesday: Space Cossacks

I’m going to take a break from the hero’s journey trope posts for a while, until I have the time to do them justice. In the meantime, let’s have a little fun.

Some of my favorite science fiction stories are the ones about a culture of nomadic starfaring people wandering the universe in search of a new homeworld. Earth is usually a half-forgotten legend, and their starships have probably seen better days. On tvtropes, the page for these stories is Space Cossacks, named after a real world culture in historic Russia that basically experienced the same thing, albeit on a terrestrial scale.

The description of this trope on the tvtropes page is so good, I’m just going to repost it here. Seriously, every one of those cross links is worthy of your click.

There is no hope and You Can’t Go Home Again. The Empire is spreading out. Even The Federation has too many Obstructive Bureaucrats. There is no way for free men to get out of the reaches of The Government and even mounting La Résistance will be of no avail.

So what do you do? You become Space Cossacks.

You flee to the border and live in a tough area where you all have to be sharp. You set up as Space Pirates or as Hired Guns or as Intrepid Merchants. Or all of these at once.

With you are various dissidents like people who feared being Made a Slave. There might be a Noble Fugitive or two, perhaps even a Defector from Decadence. You and your brave band of Fire-Forged Friends will struggle on to survive and maintain your freedom and heed no laws but your own.

One of the things that I think should qualify a story for this trope is that the society of space cossacks is just that: a community of people who share at least a few cultural bonds. Battlestar Galactica definitely qualifies, but I’m a little on the fence as to Firefly, since that story is more or less about a ragtag band of failed revolutionaries. Are the Browncoats all from the same culture, like the Kurds or the Circassians or the Ossetians, or are they just a pologlot group of frontiersmen from all over the settled worlds? Does it even matter?

In the end, I suppose it doesn’t. The spirit of this trope is a lot like that of Fighting for a Homeland: a bunch of displaced underdogs on the fringes of civilization trying to make their way in the universe. The nature of the conflict is such that by the end, they can’t help but form their own distinct subculture.

I don’t know why I love this trope so much. Maybe it has to do with the way it blends elements from the Western genre in a classic Science Fictional setting. Maybe it’s because I was born in the wrong century and naturally dream of settling the frontier. Maybe it’s because this is one of the best ways to get awesome space battles.

Whatever the reason, I can’t get enough of it, as you can probably guess from reading my books. In Bringing Stella Home, Danica and her band of Tajji mercenaries fit this trope to a T. Stars of Blood and Glory delves quite a bit deeper into their background, with Roman as a major viewpoint character. In Heart of the Nebula, the people of the Colony basically become Space Cossacks over the course of the novel. Both of those novels are currently unpublished, but I hope to put them up in the next year.

On the subject of roving bands of displaced Eastern Europeans, I listened to this Circassian folk song maybe a dozen times while writing this post:

Awesome stuff–I’m totally putting it in the soundtrack for my next Gaia Nova novel. Also, I’ll have to name a moon or a planet in the Tajjur system after Mount Elrus or something. Space Cossacks indeed!

Oh hey! Happy Thanksgiving!

Funny how holidays creep up on you when you’re in a foreign country.

We have Friday off here in Georgia, due to an Orthodox religious holiday. I’ll probably head east and check out the Stalin museum, maybe Mtskheta and Qazbegi depending on the weather. A friend of mine in Tbilisi said she’d get me a Svan hat, so if that works out, I’ll be sure to post pics.

In school today, we made the hand-traced turkeys from construction paper, with “I am thankful for…” on it. I got to tell the kids the thanksgiving story, too. I’m not sure how historically accurate it was, but they seemed to enjoy it. They also enjoyed all the stickers I gave them for their finished projects. The Nintendo stickers were the most popular.

So what am I thankful for this year? Let’s see…

Delicious homemade Georgian food. Beans, cheese, bread, potatoes, peppers, chicken, borscht–almost all of it grown right here in the village where I live. It’s awesome.
My students. Seriously, some of the awesomest kids I have ever known. Every day when I get to teach them, I feel like a rockstar. I’m going to miss them when the semester is over.
My friends and family. Even though I’m literally on the other side of the world and hardly ever have internet, I’m glad that we still keep in touch.
My readers. Seriously, it’s awesome that you guys are reading and enjoying my books. I just wish I could put them out faster.
My first year of running a profitable business. That’s right–with last month’s sales reports, I’m on track to run a modest profit for 2012. Let’s hope that this growth continues well into the future!
The changing face of publishing. Seriously, it is so awesome that for a very little upfront cost, a guy like me can sell his books across the world and find fans in places as far away as Singapore and the Czech Republic. There are so many choices, so much freedom, that it’s staggering to see how different things were just a couple of years ago. Kris Rusch said it much better than I did, so be sure to check out her most recent post on the subject.

There’s more, of course, but those are the big ones off the top of my head.

I know I missed Trope Tuesday again this week, but I wrote up a long post and then got dissatisfied with it just as I ran out of time. We’re on the magic flight stage of the hero’s journey, but I’m having trouble finding a page on tvtropes that really fits it. It’s not really a stage that I’m all that familiar with, either, so it’s going to be a bit of a challenge to figure it out. But I will, don’t worry–hopefully next week.

As far as Star Wanderers goes, I’m working on the final revisions for Homeworld (Part IV) right now. It’s going really well so far, so I expect to be finished in a week or two. After that, I just need to get it copy edited / proofread, and then it should be good to publish.

Just to tease you all, here’s the cover:

So yeah, definitely look out for that soon!

I’ve got to go, but I’ll post again when I get the chance. Happy Thanksgiving, and I’ll see you around!

Have internet, will blog

Hey guys, I’m back in Kutaisi today, so I thought I’d drop in and post an update on this (much neglected as of late) blog. Life hasn’t been too eventful, but there are a couple of things that I thought you might want to know about.

First of all, I’ll be participating in an ebook promo with some other sci-fi indie authors this cyber monday (the online equivalent of black friday). My book Star Wanderers: Outworlder is already available for free, but if you’re a fan of science fiction and free / $.99 ebooks, be sure to check it out! Here’s the link:

Also, if you check out the CURRENT PROJECTS section in the sidebar (over there ———>), you’ll see that I recently dusted off Heart of the Nebula for another revision pass. This is a direct sequel to Bringing Stella Home, featuring many of the same characters (James, Lars, Stella) plus a few new ones. I’m about midway through chapter 4 right now, and really getting into the story.

The previous drafts had some issues, but I think I’ve got a better handle on them now. I have no idea when it will be ready to be published, but I’m shooting for sometime next summer. With luck, this next revision will be finished in December, at which point I’ll send it out to my first readers and see what they think of it.

Also, I took some time out to work on meta-writing stuff, like goal setting and such. I’ll save that discussion for new years, though, since that seems like a much better time to discuss goals and resolutions. Also, it will give me a chance to refine them a bit in the intervening month. Long story short, I was experiencing a creative block due to some unrealistic personal expectations, but I think I’ve more or less worked it out.

Other than that, life is pretty good. I got to see my host family from last year a couple of days ago, when I came in late from Tbilisi and missed the last marshrutkka to my village. Called up the family, and they were kind enough to let me spend the night on their couch. Today, I said thank you by dropping by with a box of chocolates.

It was great to see them again and spend some time in the neighborhood where I lived last semester. Also: twix cookies. The market in Batoni next to ProCredit Bank is one of the few places in Kutaisi that sells them. If you’ve ever spent any significant time in Georgia, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

So that’s just about it for now. If all goes well, I should hear back from my first readers on Star Wanderers: Homeworld sometime during the Thanksgiving break. Depending on their feedback, it’ll come out anywhere between 1-3 weeks later. This will conclude the main story arc for Star Wanderers (at least, the first arc), but it won’t be the last book in the series. More on that later, though.

Take care!

Trope Tuesday: I Choose To Stay

The hero’s journey can be divided into three basic phases: departure, intiation, and return. In the departure phase, the hero receives the call to adventure and eventually leaves the familiar world. In the initiation phase, the hero passes through a series of tests and trials eventually leading up to the climax and final confrontation with the Big Bad (if there is one). But after the hero wins and receives the ultimate boon (aka MacGuffin), there’s nothing left except to go back home and share that boon with the rest of mankind.

Except…after having such an awesome adventure, he just doesn’t wanna.

Joseph Campbell called this stage the Refusal of the Return. It’s a lot like the Refusal of the Call in the departure phase, except in reverse: instead of being reluctant to cross the threshold of adventure into the unfamilar world, the hero doesn’t want to cross the threshold in the opposite direction going back home. Campbell put it this way:

When the hero-quest has been accomplished…the adventurer still must return with his life-transmuting trophy. The full round, the norm of the monomyth, requires that the hero shall now begin the labor of bringing the runes of wisdom, the Golden Fleece, or his sleeping princess, back into the kingdom of humanity, where the boon may redound to the renewing of the community, the nation, the planet or the ten thousand worlds.

But the responsibility has been frequently refused. Even Gautama Buddha, after his triumph, doubted whether the message of realization could be communicated, and saints are reported to have died while in the supernal ecstasy. Numerous indeed are the heroes fabled to have taken up residence forever in the blessed isle of the unaging Goddess of Immortal Being.

Anyone who’s ever been two years old should know the feeling. You’re at the playground, having fun, when out of the blue your mom says that it’s time to go. So what do you do? Throw a hissy fit, of course! Grab onto the cold hard steel of the swingset, and don’t let go until she drags you kicking and screaming all the way to the car.

The hero may have fallen with the new world the moment he left his home behind, but he might also have hated it initially. In stories where the hero actually does stay, this allows the author to give him a character arc: at first, he hated the new world, but gradually he warmed up to it, until by the end he was changed so much by the adventure that he decided to settle down there.

In milieu stories (see Orson Scott Card’s MICE quotient), this often manifests as Going Native, while in stories that are more plot or character driven, it’s more likely to manifest as Can’t Stay Normal. When the hero eventually comes around and goes home anyway, it frequently morphs into Stranger in a Familiar Land. The polar opposite is But Now I Must Go, though that trope tends to apply more to side characters than the main protagonist.

Ultimately, however, adventures are like stories: they all have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The hero may want it to keep on going forever, but that is not this trope. Even if the hero does stay in the lands of adventure, those lands eventually become his new home. It just can’t be avoided.

For that reason, there’s an important element of bittersweetness to this stage of the hero’s journey–one which, if done well, can add a crowning moment of heartwarming or turn the story into a real tear jerker. Or both, actually. It all depends on how invested the reader is in the story by the end. If the reader feels like she’s been right there with the hero all this time, then you can expect the tears to flow no matter which way he ultimately goes.

I pretty much played this trope straight in Genesis Earth. Most of my other books feature a Refusal of the Return moment of one kind or another, but the hero usually ends up going home anyway. If there even is a home to return to, of course. I don’t know why, but a lot of my stories are about characters who are searching for home. Maybe that’s because at heart, I’m still a wanderer. It will be interesting to see how that changes over the coming years.

The song at the top, by the way, is from Disney’s Tarzan, a movie which plays this trope straighter than most. In fact, this trope is practically Disney’s bread and butter.