Georgia – Page 2 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Trope Tuesday: Forbidden Zone

For the next few Trope Tuesday posts, I’m going to pick apart some of the tropes I’m playing with in my latest WIP, Sons of the Starfarers. One of the things I love to do when brainstorming a new story is to use tvtropes like a menu, finding the tropes that best fit my story ideas and combining them with other tropes to get even more ideas.

It’s not often hard to spot the forbidden zone in a fantastical world. Perhaps it has an ominous name (bonus points if it has the word “doom” in it), or perhaps there’s some sort of sign saying “do not enter.” Either way, this is definitely a place where no one goes, and no one is supposed to go.

Of course, you can pretty much guarantee that the main characters are going to go there. It’s like the forbidden fruit: the very fact that it’s off limits makes it more alluring. If genre blindness is in effect, someone will probably make the mistake of saying “what could possibly go wrong?”

There are many reasons why the zone may be forbidden. Perhaps it’s a death world, where the characters will soon find themselves running for their lives. Perhaps it’s not quite so dangerous, but once you go, you can never come back. Or perhaps all the warnings were lies, and the so-called forbidden zone is actually the place that the characters needed to get to all along. If that’s the case, then the mentor was probably a broken pedestal or the Svengali.

In any case, the forbidden zone definitely lies in the realm of adventure. Depending on how soon or how late in the story the characters go there, it may lie just on the other side of the threshold, at the bottom of the belly of the whale, or at the very heart of the character’s nadir.

The Mines of Moria, the Toxic Jungle, Area 51, the Elephant Graveyard, and the Fire Swamp are all classic examples. In C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, Earth itself is a forbidden zone to all the other inhabitants of the solar system, which is why it’s called the silent planet.

In real life, there are plenty of these as well. Just look at the DMZ on the Korean Peninsula, or the fallout zone around Chernobyl. When I was living in Georgia, Abkhazia was off limits to the TLG volunteers, meaning that if you went there (and the Ministry of Education found out about it) it was grounds for immediate firing. Of course, that only encouraged some of my TLG friends to go there even more–remember the forbidden fruit? Others waited until their contracts were over and practically made a tour of the many forbidden zones of the Caucasus, including Nagorny Karabakh, which one friend described as safer than Philadelphia.

I’ve toyed with this trope in my own work, but never too explicitly. The best example is probably the alien ghost ship from Genesis Earth. It’s not exactly forbidden, since there’s no one around to tell Mike not to go there, but Terra definitely doesn’t want him to go. Earlier in the same book, she forbids him from entering her workspace in the observatory, which leads to some complications and a major reveal when he inevitably does. In the Gaia Nova series, the Outer Reaches qualify as a forbidden zone, since the only people who live out there are murderous barbarians like the Hameji.

In my new series, Sons of the Starfarers, the first book starts out with a forbidden zone–a derelict space colony, where everyone has died of an unknown cause. Since the nearest settlement is light-years away (and because Aaron is perhaps too curious for his own good), that’s where Isaac and Aaron go. What they find there propels the rest of the book–and quite possibly the rest of the series.

Check back next week for more!

Last chance to get my books 50% off on Smashwords!

Hey guys, just a heads up that tomorrow and Wednesday are the last days to get all my books 50% off on Smashwords for the annual summer sale. Everything is under $2.50 USD, and the $.99 stuff is free! That might seem like a pretty steep discount, but I actually earn as much from each sale as I would for a trade paperback sale if my books were traditionally published, and I don’t mind passing on the savings to you.

Also, my friend and fellow writer Ben Keeley did a blog post about our low-key backpacking trip up Rock Canyon, so if that interests you, you can check it out on his blog. That rattlesnake was pretty freaky! Good thing he was about as eager to get away from us as we were to get away from him. We didn’t climb any mountains on this one, but we did find a gorgeous campsite on the side of a steep ravine. I definitely want to go camp there again sometime.

I’m taking it easy as far as the writing goes, but making some progress on The Sword Keeper. A lot of it right now is gathering ideas and reviewing what I’ve written so far (eleven chapters, or about 50k words). The first chapter requires some changes, but the rest I’ll probably let stand as it is and pick up where I left off. Once I’m fully immersed in this story again, I think the rest will come quite readily.

In the meantime, here’s a video of Mariam Elieshvili singing “ჩვენ ახლა ერთურთს,” chven axla erturts. I have no idea what the lyrics mean (something about looking for love in each others’ eyes), but Mariam’s voice is amazing and I think I may have a small celebrity crush on her. All this Georgian music definitely puts me in the mood to work on The Sword Keeper, kind of like how all that Arabic music helped me to write Desert Stars.

… and now I want to go back to Georgia. Again. :'(

No new books this month, but the next few should be stacked.

I’m working on Star Wanderers: Deliverance (Part VIII) right now, and it’s coming along swimmingly. Where the other novellas are pretty much character dramas in a space opera setting, this one is more space adventure with the character / relationship stuff under the surface. It’s all about Mariya and Lucca, how they meet and end up falling for each other in some very extreme circumstances. I think they crash-land on Zarmina in chapter 3, and things just get crazier from there. Today, I wrote a scene with some giant reptilian bird-monsters, and I think I pounded out 1,000 words in 20 minutes.

So yeah, I’m having a lot of fun with that. The next one I’m going to publish, though, is Benefactor (Part VI), and I still have to do a lot of revisions on that one. So it probably won’t be out until next month sometime, probably closer to August–I want to make sure it’s as good as I can make it. But since the first draft of Reproach (Part VII) is already finished, it (hopefully) shouldn’t be much longer than that for it to come out, maybe in August. And Deliverance should come out soon after that.

For now, my goal is to finish Deliverance this week, and start the revisions for Benefactor immediately after that. It would be awesome to get these books out in July > August > September, though it might be more like July > September > October. Definitely, I’ll have Part VIII out before the holidays, perhaps even Part IX or X as well.

In the meantime, I just started typesetting the print edition of Stars of Blood and Glory and set Desert Stars and Genesis Earth for expanded distribution through CreateSpace. There’s been some interesting developments in print-on-demand in the past few months, which may make it possible to get my books in bookstores through that venue. I still need to do some research on that end, but I do want to get the print versions out there at least. My first priority, though, is definitely writing.

There’s been a great deal of interest in my Star Wanderers ebooks, not at blockbuster levels but certainly more than I was expecting. And it’s growing, too–June is already my best month ever sales-wise, and most of the reviews have been quite positive. If the momentum keeps up with the next few books in the series, I might (might!) be able to go full-time before the end of the year. Worldcon 2013 is definitely looking like a possibility, and if I can find some friends to room and/or drive down with, chances are good that I’ll be going.

So yeah, thanks for all your support and interest! This has been my dream for a long, long time, so it’s really gratifying to see it finally within my grasp. I definitely don’t take it for granted, so I will do all I can to write more and better stories for you guys. My goal is to write more than a hundred novels & novellas, and I’m already on track to do so!

I’ll leave you with this video from Georgia, which I still miss almost every day. Man, I need to find another place that I can fall in love with as much as I did with that country. A small part of me wants to say “screw it all” and go back … in any case, here’s the video:

Naxvamdis!

Author’s Note for THE JEREMIAH CHRONICLES

Here’s the author’s note at the end of Star Wanderers: The Jeremiah Chronicles. It’s the only content in the omnibus that isn’t available anywhere else, and I don’t want my readers to feel like they have to buy something they’ve already read in order to get it. And if you do want to buy it, there’s a link in the sidebar over there. ———–>

I put an author’s note at the end of every ebook I publish. It adds a little bit to the progress bar, which can be annoying for readers who expect “the end” to come at 100%, but I think it’s good to briefly tell the story behind the story. It’s certainly something that I would enjoy reading at the end of some of my favorite books (especially the ones by David Gemmell!). Whether you read them or whether you skip over them, it’s a feature I plan to keep in every ebook I release.

So, here it is!

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One of the questions writers get asked the most is ‘where do you come up with your ideas?’ Honestly, that’s probably the hardest question to answer. Orson Scott Card said that everyone runs across at least a thousand story ideas each day, and a good writer will see maybe three. To that, I would add that it might take years before you realize that you’ve seen them.

The idea that eventually grew into Star Wanderers probably came to me the first time I saw Serenity. At the beginning of the movie, there’s this long continuous shot that shows the space ship from the hangar bay doors to the cockpit. I don’t even remember what the characters were talking about, I was just mesmerized by that shot. For weeks, I dreamed about having my own starship like the Serenity, where I could escape the stresses of college and lead an adventurous life out among the stars. I still daydream about it to this day. Having my own starship and piloting it to places where I can be free and independent is one of my greatest recurring fantasies.

Another major catalyst for the idea that became this story was the Lombardo translation of Homer’s Odyssey. The Odyssey is perhaps the most famous epic work of all time, but the Lombardo translation struck a particular chord with me because of how down-to-earth and accessible it is. Instead of some stodgy 19^th century translation that passes for cruel and unusual punishment in some high schools, this one made the story come alive. I was first introduced to it in a Western Civ class in college, but enjoyed it so immensely that I picked up a copy over the summer of 2009 and read the whole thing.

As I read it, I couldn’t help but notice the potential for a science fiction crossover. What if the sailing ships were starships, and the oceans the vastness of space? The islands would be like planets, with their strange and exotic cultures, and travel from world to world would be as arduous and difficult as it was for Odysseus to return to Ithaca. A new form of paganism would emerge, one that worshiped the stars and planets just as the Greeks worshiped the rivers and trees. The starfaring people would be as hardy and self-reliant as the ancient Greeks, and as antagonistic toward the more civilized Coreward peoples as the Aegeans to the Trojans. Most importantly, though, the starfarers would feel a sense of powerlessness as they faced the unforgiving vastness of space, just like Odysseus as he braved the wine-dark sea.

I actually started writing that novel in 2010, and got about a hundred pages into it before moving on to the revisions for Bringing Stella Home. Later, I trunked it, but the basic world-building stayed with me as I continued to expand the Gaia Nova universe with Desert Stars and Heart of the Nebula.

The final catalyst for Star Wanderers was the love story from one of my favorite Westerns, Jeremiah Johnson. My college roommates introduced me to that movie my sophomore year, and just like Serenity, I spent the next several days daydreaming what it would be like to be a mountain man. I went to college in Utah, so the frontier landscape where the film was shot is very familiar to me (in fact, I’m writing this author’s note from Slide Canyon just outside of Provo). But the love story—that was the best part. An accidental marriage from a cultural misunderstanding that blossoms into something touching and wonderful, in spite of the language barrier—by far, that was my favorite part of the whole movie.

All of these ideas were bouncing around somewhere in the back of my mind for years, but it wasn’t until 2011 that they all came together. I had graduated about a year and a half before, and was working a number of low-skilled temp jobs, trying to make ends meet as I grew my writing career. I was between projects, trying to work on Edenfall (sequel to Genesis Earth), but nothing was coming together and I just felt very frustrated.

One day, as I was lying on my bed daydreaming for the umptieth time about escaping this planet on my own starship, the thought “what would Jeremiah Johnson look like if it were set in space?” came to me. It was like a supernova exploding in my mind, illuminating my imagination with the power of an exploding star. For the next half hour, I worked through all the details in my head—the famine backstory of Megiddo Station, the Oddysey-like far-future space setting, the wandering lifestyle of the mountain man turned starship pilot. And then, once I’d replayed it half a dozen times in my head and worked myself up to a fever pitch, I rolled out of bed and wrote the first chapter of Outworlder almost exactly as it now stands. The rest of that novelette came just as readily, and in a couple of weeks I had a finished draft.

As a young single guy in my early twenties, I tend to think about love and relationships a lot. I think it’s a myth that women are somehow more interested in romance than men—we just express that interest in different ways. At Worldcon 2011 in Reno, Louis McMaster Bujold said that women tend to write about love and life, whereas men tend to write about love and death, and I’ve found that to hold very true, at least in my own writing. Perhaps that’s why it was so easy and natural to come up with the backstory that put Noemi on Jeremiah’s starship. The rest, with the pregnancy, the polygamy issues, and the baby at the end, all came naturally as I wrote things out. I was originally going to have Noemi miscarry about halfway through Fidelity, but realized almost immediately that that wasn’t going to fly. Once I realized that the natural ending of the story arc would be the birth of their son, everything else just came together.

My goal from the beginning was to write something that I could submit to the Writers of the Future contest. For that reason, I kept Outworlder fairly short. However, when I got to the end, I realized that there was still a lot of story left unwritten, so I decided to follow it out. I’m more of a novel writer than a short story writer, so it was natural to structure the overall story arc in that way. At the same time, I really enjoyed the intimacy of that first novelette, and the way that the shorter structure allowed me to focus on one or two characters and their relationships with each other. Those were all considerations that pushed me into following the novella format, as well as the chance to experiment with publishing a series of shorter works.

Fidelity and Sacrifice were a lot more challenging to write, in particular Sacrifice. Part of this was because I was still trying to figure out where the overall story arc was going, and part of it was because some of the subject matter (such as polygamy) seemed pretty unconventional for a science fiction story. But after taking a couple of short breaks to work on other projects, I managed to push through it, eventually getting to Homeworld which came much more easily. I’ve always been better at endings than at middles, and I went into Homeworld knowing that it would conclude Jeremiah’s main story arc.

As I was working on the later parts to the Star Wanderers series, I moved to the Republic of Georgia to teach English for a year. That had a tremendous impact on how I wrote the language barrier between Jeremiah and Noemi, mostly because my experience was quite similar. I didn’t accidentally marry a Georgian girl (though there are one or two who I still miss sometimes), but when I showed up in the airport in Tbilisi, I didn’t speak a word of Georgian and knew almost nothing about the people or the country. Needless to say, it was quite an adventure. The stresses of living in a foreign culture did slow down my writing a bit, but I managed to get it back by the end and finished Homeworld before coming back to the States for the summer.

When I first started publishing the Star Wanderers series, I saw it as a sort of side project that I would do before getting back to other projects. However, this series has proven to be more popular than any of my other books, so I’ve decided quite happily to expand it. The Jeremiah Chronicles contains the full story arc for Jeremiah, but there are a lot of other characters who I want to explore, and the novella format is perfect for that. If you have any in particular that you’d like to revisit, feel free to shot me an email at joseph [dot] vasicek [at] gmail [dot] com and let me know. I love getting fan mail and do my best to respond to it, so any comments would definitely be appreciated.

If you’ve just discovered Star Wanderers and would like to keep up with the newest books in the series, you can get them for free by signing up for my mailing list. Whenever I release a new Star Wanderers story, I put out a two-week coupon code to get it for free on Smashwords and send the coupon code out to my subscribers via my email newsletter. That way, you don’t have to feel like you’re spending too much once I have fifteen or twenty ebooks out. I figure that if you enjoy these stories enough to sign up for the mailing list, you’ll probably tell a friend or post a favorable review, so I’m happy to make my new Star Wanderers releases available for free.

I hope you enjoyed this omnibus! If you did, please consider posting a review or sharing it with a friend. Every little bit helps, and the more people discover and read this series, the more stories I’ll be able to write. My goal from the beginning has been to make a living telling stories that I love, and it looks like Star Wanderers might actually make that possible.

In the meantime, don’t be a stranger—you can find me on Twitter (@onelowerlight), Goodreads, or Facebook (Joe Vasicek), but the best way to keep up is to follow my blog, One Thousand and One Parsecs. I’ve been blogging since 2007 and plan to keep it up for the foreseeable future. You can also find links to all my books there, on all the major sites where they’re published. And of course, if you want to sign up for my mailing list, you can find the sign-up form on the sidebar.

That’s just about it. Thanks for reading! It’s readers, not writers, who really make a story come alive, and at the end of the day the greatest honor is simply to be read. So thanks for taking a chance on this one, and until next time, I hope to see you around!

Cooking adventures and an awesome webcomic

So I have a bunch of ideas for blog posts I’d like to write, and I’ll probably get around to them eventually, but I thought I’d drop a line now just to let you all know what I’ve been up to. It’s been a pretty good week, with some decent progress on the current WIP (Lifewalker) and some other random stuff that may be of some interest.

First, Lifewalker. It’s coming along quite well. I’m averaging around 2k words a day, so more of a leisurely pace than a white-hot creative heat, but not too bad. It’s kind of turned into a post-apocalyptic Western, mostly because I can’t write about southern Utah without the landscape taking over. This video should give you an idea why:

At the same time, the character’s voice really seems to be taking shape in a way that I like. He’s kind of drifting right now, but the way he writes about it is very much like an old man reminiscing on the course of his life, lingering on the regrets as well as the triumphs, with some rather wistful commentary on each. This is really a character that I can just pick up and run with–the story is practically writing itself.

It’s not just the voice, either. Random stuff is just finding it in–powerful stuff that makes the story awesome. For example, just in the last chapter, the characters were holding a meeting to see what they should do to rescue some of their friends who had been kidnapped. Out of nowhere, one of them pulls out a skull from a human baby, with beads and feathers dangling from it like some sort of totem. He brought it out to show that the people who’d attacked them were not just normal bandits, but cannibals from the Nevadan wastelands, which put them in a whole new category of badassery. Stuff like that comes out of nowhere every time I write, and it’s awesome.

I’ve had a lot of time to write, though I don’t feel I’ve been using it all productively. Still, I’m on track to finish this thing by the end of the month, which will be extremely gratifying.

In the meantime, I’ve been experimenting a lot with cooking and gardening. Just planted some tomatoes in 3-gallon ice cream buckets (with dirt instead of ice cream, of course), and those are growing nicely. It’s fun to have something to water in the morning, and when they start to yield fruit, I’m sure it will be awesome as well.

But I’ve also been experimenting with the old Egyptian kushari recipe I picked up after the 2008 study abroad. It always seemed to be missing that one thing that would make the other ingredients come together and achieve that delicious synergy. Well, I think I’ve found it: chickpeas and cumin, with maybe a touch of vinegar. It might not be 100% authentic, but when I cooked it this time with that stuff, it tasted heavenly.

So this weekend, I’m going to try to perfect the recipe, something I’ve been wanting to do for years. I’ll try cooking the rice in chicken broth, and adding more onions and garlic with maybe a little tomato. Also, coriander–I know that coriander and cilantro are basically the same plant, but I think the coriander will go with this better than cilantro. Also, it helps to fry it with a little oil after taking it out of the refrigerator, rather than sticking it in the microwave. I haven’t had a microwave for over a year, and I think I actually prefer cooking without it.

Speaking of food, my roommate’s sister’s roommates dropped off a bag full of crap from their kitchen, since they’re moving out for the summer. We’ve been having an interesting time combing through it–found some pretty good stuff, actually. One of the more useful things is a bag full of buckwheat, which is AWESOME because kasha was one of my favorite dishes in Georgia. Kasha and lobio–delicious!

So yeah, I’ve had food on my mind a lot this week. If things work out, maybe I’ll post a recipe or two. Kushari is delicious, cheap, filling, and healthy–a winning combination if ever there was one. Kasha is pretty simple, but that’s what makes it so great–a simple, hearty food that leaves you feeling warm and whole.

Besides cooking exotic foods, I’ve also been reading a lot of Freefall. I discovered it just last week, and I have to say, it is awesome. One of the better webcomics I think I’ve ever read. Like Schlock Mercenary, it’s a space opera comedy romp, but where Schlock kind of turned dark in recent years (which I’m not complaining about, don’t get me wrong), Freefall has still stuck to its happy-go-lucky roots. And just like Schlock Mercenary, the humor is not only entertaining, but often wonderfully insightful.

But by far, the best part of the story is how compelling the characters are. My favorite is Florence Ambrose, an artificially bred Bowman’s Wolf who is kind of a human-wolf hybrid. She’s one of only 14 members of her species, and the corporation that created her considers her more as property than an individual. She’s got all these biologically programmed safeguards that force her to obey direct human orders, no matter how ludicrous–but the only way for her species to survive is to convince the corporation that Bowman Wolves are profitable, so that they’ll make more (the whole 50-500 rule and all that).

Somehow, she becomes the engineer of the Savage Chicken, a down-and-out starship captained by the infamous Sam Starfall. Sam is basically a lazy, larcenous alien squid who wants nothing more than to steal everyone’s wallet and become famous doing it. At first, it seems like a horrible combination–Florence is basically a good, honest person, who wants to do good work and please everyone. But as the story goes on, the two develop quite a rapport, and start to rub off on each other.

Florence helps Sam to clean up and get his act together, and Sam helps Florence to learn ways to get around her difficult situation vis-a-vis her safeguards and lack of free will. More importantly, Sam helps her to stop feeling guilty long enough to recognize that doing the right thing sometimes means breaking (or at least twisting) the law.

As if that weren’t enough, there’s the whole cross-species romance angle between Florence and the biologist who rescues her back in one of the earlier subplots. As you might expect, it gets really lonely being the only Bowman’s Wolf on the planet–especially when the other 13 are frozen in cryo, on their way to a world several light-years away. Florence knows that she needs to do what she can to propagate the species, but she’s also got some emotional needs that demand to be satisfied now. Winston is kind of similar, a lonely parasitic biologist on a frontier terraforming project with only 40,000 humans and a 40-60 male-female ratio. Except for the whole cross-species issue, they make a really good couple. I’m riveted to find out what happens next!

So yeah, if I had to sum it up: good, honest, likeable person + insecure future + social limbo + unsatisfied emotional needs = really compelling story. Plus, she’s half wolf–how cool is that? What I would give for her incredible sense of smell…

In any case, it’s getting late, and even though tomorrow is Saturday, there’s a bunch of stuff I want to do tomorrow so I’d better cut this short for now. See you later!

U is for Universal Translator

In science fiction, whenever two characters from different planets or different alien races have to interact with each other, they almost always speak the same language or have some sort of universal translator that magically makes them able to communicate with minimal misunderstandings. This is especially common in Star Trek, though it happens in just about every franchise involving a far-future space opera setting of some kind.

I’ve got to be honest, I think this is a cheap plot device that almost always weakens the story. As a writer, it’s tempting to have something like this so you don’t have to deal with any pesky language barriers, but when you do this, you remove a major potential source of conflict, thus violating the rule of drama. Also, you make your fictional universe feel a little less grand, your aliens a little less alien. After all, if everyone can perfectly understand each other, then there must not be a huge difference between Earth and the far side of the galaxy.

There are some times when having a universal translator allows you to broaden the story and focus on other conflicts. For example, if some sort of interstellar legislation is under review in the grand galactic council, you can’t spend all your time focusing on basic communication difficulties.

However, if this is the case, then you can usually overcome the language barrier through other means–a galactic lingua franca, for example, or translation tools that may or may not misfire on occasion (much like Google Translate). Of course, if you’re writing a comedy like Galaxy Quest (or parts of Star Control II), then falling back on a universal translator is forgivable. But if you’re going for believability and a sense of wonder, this trope isn’t going to do you any favors.

While linguists and technologists have been working on translation programs for some time (and admittedly making some significant breakthroughs), I’m extremely skeptical that we will ever develop a perfect universal translator in real life. If we do, I expect we will have to develop a sentient AI as a prerequisite, since the nuances of language are so inseparable from the things that make us human.

Here’s how translation services like Google Translate work:

They amass an enormous database of language material by scanning websites, newspapers, and other documents.
They analyze this database to look at word combinations and frequencies, observing the likelihood that any one word will appear in combination with any others.
They compare these combinations and frequencies with those in other language databases to match words and phrases.

This data crunch method of translation works fairly well for simple words and phrases, but it falls apart in the more complex grammatical structures. I see this any time I try to use Google Translate with an Arabic source. Arabic is an extremely eloquent language, with all sorts of structures that simply don’t work in English. One mistranslated word can completely change the meaning of the entire text, and even when it works, the technically correct English translation sounds as if it’s full of errors.

The methodology also falls apart for languages that are too small to have much of an electronic database. The Georgian language is a good example of this. It’s spoken by only about 4.5 million people worldwide, most of them in the country of Georgia, which is predominantly rural. Internet access for most of the population is very limited, and most Georgians who do communicate online tend to use the Roman or Cyrillic alphabets more often than their own. As a result, Google Translate for Georgian is utterly useless–seriously, you’re better off just sounding out the letters and guessing at the meaning. There are some other sites like translate.ge that try to fill the gap, but they seem to rely on actual lexicons, not databases and algorithms.

All of this is between entirely human languages that developed in parallel on the same planet–indeed, languages between human cultures that have traded and shared linguistic influences for thousands of years. What happens when we encounter an alien race whose biology makes it impossible for them to make human-sounding noises? Or an alien race that communicates through smell or electromagnetic impulses instead of sound? What happens when humanity is spread out across hundreds of star systems, each of which periodically becomes isolated from the others for hundreds or even thousands of years? When our definition of human is stretched so thin that we would not even recognize our far-future descendents as anything but alien?

There is so much wasted potential whenever a science fiction story falls back on a universal translator. Case in point, compare Halo I, II, and III with Halo: Reach. In the first three games, the Master Chief’s universal translator enables him to hear exactly what the enemy Covenant troops are saying. This is great fun when you’re chasing down panicked grunts, but it tends to get old after a while. In Halo: Reach, however, the human forces haven’t yet developed a universal translator, so everything the Covenant say is in their original language. All of a sudden, the game went from a hilarious joyride to a serious war against aliens that felt truly alien. That one little change did wonders to the tone and feel of the entire game.

Needless to say, you won’t find a universal translator in any of my books. In Star Wanderers, the language barrier is the heart and soul of the story–it’s a science fiction romance between two characters from radically different worlds who don’t speak the same language, and yet overcome that to develop a strong and healthy relationship. In Sholpan and Bringing Stella Home, Stella knows a language that is fairly similar to the one spoken by the Hameji, but there are still words and phrases that elude her. This detail is critical because it impedes her ability to understand and adapt to the Hameji culture, leading to some major conflicts later in the book.

As someone who’s lived for significant periods of time in Europe and Asia and learned languages very different from English, I can say that the language barrier is not something that we as writers should avoid, but something that we should embrace. There are so many interesting stories that can be told when two characters don’t speak the same language. Please, don’t be lazy and write that out of the story through a cheap plot device! Let your aliens be truly alien, and your worlds and cultures so fantastic that we can’t help but feel hopelessly lost in them.

A Letter From My 2013 Self

So shortly after writing up my last blog post, I got an email from myself marked December 27, 2013. How freaky is that?I don’t know if it’s a glitch or a feature, but apparently in 2013, you can use gmail to send messages back in time.

In any case, the letter is pretty interesting, so I thought I’d post it. Here it is:

Dear Joe,

Well, it’s been an interesting decade so far, hasn’t it? Not a bad time to be alive–and that’s going to be even clearer by the end of 2013.

Right now, you’re still in the Republic of Georgia, anxious to get on that flight and head back home. Don’t be. You’re going to miss that place, even though it’s hard to feel that way right now. Your time there has changed you a lot more than you realize, though it’s going to take most of the year for you to figure that out.

You’ve picked up some bad habits, mostly from the other expats. Swearing is one of them. Clean up your language–it’s not going to do you any favors, especially back in Utah. Personal hygiene is another. Just because you could go for days without showering back in Rokhi doesn’t mean that you can get away with it in the States.

Money issues are on your mind right now. That’s good. You’ve learned how to be extremely frugal in the past two years, and that skill will serve you well. Don’t be afraid to get a crap job–that’s actually one of the best things you can do right now. The economy hasn’t improved much since you left, but if you look in the right places and speak with the right people, you’ll be able to make ends meet without too much trouble.

Remember, your writing career should be your main focus. Don’t go chasing after the dollar. You’ve experienced a taste of success in the last few months, and you’re going to taste it again. It comes in spurts, though, so be prepared for that. You’ll figure it out–in fact, you’re already most of the way there. Just remember to keep your butt in that chair, and you’ll be all right.

By the way, you really should spend more time on your business plan. Don’t just use it as motivation to write something else–that stuff is actually important. In Georgia, you can get away with winging it, but not in the States. That’s going to take some getting used to as well.

Your biggest anxiety right now is your supposed lack of self-discipline. That’s actually not as much of a problem as you think. After spending a year in Georgia, you might feel incapable of working another honest day in your life, but that feeling will soon pass. In fact, 2013 is going to be a very productive year for you. All that self-discovery is going to pay off in a big way soon. So don’t worry about it so much, and remember, you haven’t written your best book yet.

Perhaps the most important thing about your year in Georgia is that it really lit a fire under your butt. You know what I’m talking about. If you can travel alone to a foreign country, you can work up the courage to ask her out. No, I’m not going to tell you who. You’ll know her when you see her. But you may have to trim the beard. Just sayin’.

You won’t spend the entire year back in the States, but when you do go overseas again, you won’t be alone. No, I won’t tell you who you’ll go with, or where. Some surprises are better left unspoiled.

There’s more I could tell you, but that’s enough for now. You’ll figure things out on your own, same as you always have. Hope for the best, plan for the worst. Follow the path of least regret.

Joe

A Letter To My 2011 Self

Dear Joe,

Well, 2011 has been an eventful year, hasn’t it? It sure didn’t feel like it when you were down in the trenches, but now that it’s over, you’ve got to admit, you sure came a long way.

You’ve discovered a lot of things about yourself since January. In your quest for economic security, you’ve learned that you’d rather work for yourself as a freelancer than be anyone else’s employee. You took the plunge and self-published, something you thought you’d never do (and yes, it’s okay to call it ‘self-published’–the stigma will be dead in another year). You attended your first Wordcon, made a couple of cross-country road trips, worked a ton of crap-jobs just to make ends meet, and now you’re on your way out of the country to try your hand teaching English. It sure seems like a lot, doesn’t it? Just wait. Next year is going to be just as full of changes, though it won’t always seem like it at the time.

I know, I know–cut to the chase and give me some advice already. Well, looking back on what you’re going to go through in 2012, here’s what I have to tell you.

First, don’t stress out so much about the whole self-publishing thing. You’ll figure it out all right. No, I can’t say whether you’re going to hit the turning point before the end of the year. In fact, that’s not even a healthy way to look at it, so stop thinking about it that way. Follow the slow growth model, and don’t angst about sales or price points so much. Keep your butt in that chair, because writing new words is still the most important thing you can do.

Don’t beat up on yourself so much for failing to meet your ridiculously high goals. You’re going to write a novel in the next six weeks, and the rest of the year is going to be a struggle. Right now, you place too much emphasis on your daily word count. Relax a bit, and don’t be too hard on yourself. You’ve still got a lot to learn about your own creative process, so take the time to figure it out.

By the way, you totally rock the beard. Growing it out was a great idea, no matter what your sisters told you back in 2010.

About your upcoming excursion to Georgia, the best advice I can give you is to remember what Spencer told you back in 2008. Adventures are like stories–they each have a beginning, a middle, and an end. You’re going to experience all of that in the next year. No, you probably won’t write another travel journal. Most of your experiences are going to be too personal for that kind of thing anyway. You’re going to accomplish all of your goals, though, so don’t worry–things are going to be just fine.

The most important thing you can do is keep yourself grounded spiritually. I know, I know, that’s always the most important thing. Well, it’s especially true now. Where you’re headed, you’re not only going to be the only Mormon, but the first Mormon to live there. Sundays are going to be a struggle. Everyone is going to think you’re crazy because you don’t drink. You’re going to make wine, though, and that’s going to be an interesting story for your friends back in Utah. Just be sure to keep doing the things you know you should be doing, and everything will turn out all right.

You’re going to love teaching English. Oh, you won’t love everything about it, but it’s something you’re naturally good at, so don’t worry about that. Just try to listen to your Georgian co-teachers and be more considerate of them. And don’t worry about the language. You’ll pick it up pretty quick. Just realize that Georgian verbs are impossible to conjugate unless you’re a native speaker.

I could tell you what your biggest mistake is going to be, but I think it’ll be better if you go ahead and make it. Just be sure to hope for the best, even as you plan for the worst. Follow the path of least regret, and you’ll make some really awesome memories–not to mention some truly amazing friendships.

At this point, I’d tell you you’re on the right path, but that isn’t exactly true. There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ path for you right now, but you’re on a good one, so keep it up and see it through to the end. You’ll be glad you did.

Take care!

Joe

Hello internets! I’m back (sort of)

So today I said goodbye to my village and moved out to Tbilisi, where I’ll be spending the next week. It was emotional. My host mom cried. It was raining, too, which pretty much reflected the way I felt. Goodbyes are tough when you’re going halfway around the world.

The last few days have kind of been like a slow-motion whirlwind, a sort of in-between state where I’m not really rooted where I am, but I’m unable to go anywhere else. Unfortunately, due to some poor planning on my part, I don’t fly back to the States until the 31st, so things are probably going to continue like that for a while.

Well, there are worse places to be stranded over Christmas than Tbilisi. There’s still a lot in this part of the country that I haven’t seen, not to mention the city itself. For about $9 a night, I’ve got a roof over my head and a comfortable bed to sleep in, as well as regular internet. Also, with all that free time, I should be able to get a lot more writing done.

So yeah, when I’m not busy writing or exploring, I’ll definitely be more active here on the blog. I’ve got a couple of new years-ish posts lined up, and I’ll probably come up with something Christmas-related for Trope Tuesday. Life day, perhaps? We’ll see.

In any case, it’s getting late and I’m exhausted. Good night.

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.