Alastair Mayer’s T-Space Blog

Okay, the headline may be a bit over the top. My daughter just finished her final open water dives for her SCUBA certification. (She took the course through her high school as last semester’s PE requirement, how cool is that?) I was out there to watch part of that. I used to be a pretty avid diver myself, and logged maybe 150 dives (don’t have my logbook handy for the exact number) before I stopped bothering to log them. Deep, night, cave, wreck, ice, reef — I’ve done most of it except mixed-gas, which wasn’t an option for sport divers in my day. But it’s been a while since then.

There hasn’t been much in the way of dive-related science fiction, unless you count some of Clive Cussler’s novels as SF, or James Cameron’s movie The Abyss. That’s changed some in recent years, with the likelihood of oceans under the ice of moons like Europa, and Alastair Reynolds and others have set interesting stories there. Certainly any terraformed planet is going to have oceans and lakes, with all kinds of exotic flora and fauna. (By the way, to get a real feel for just how alien life can be even on Earth, take a look at the marine invertebrates, sponges, worms and the like that live in our oceans — sometimes it’s hard to tell the fauna from the flora!)

Watching my daughter’s class gear up for their dives got me itching to get back in the water again, so I just signed up with a local dive store for a skills refresher (my doctor’s already signed off on it). That’s next weekend. The last time I was in SCUBA gear was over 15 years ago, in a neutral buoyancy tank at Space Camp (the UAT, Underwater Astronaut Trainer); I’m looking forward to this.

The DASFA meeting was fun, and the signing Sunday at Who Else! Books for Footprints went great! About 25 to 30 people showed up, including Colorado authors Connie Willis, Carrie Vaughn, Mario Acevedo and Ed Bryant. Sure it was mostly for my co-contributer Jim Van Pelt and because they know the bookstore owners, but it was still a thrill to have them in the audience, and to meet with them afterwards. And I finally have a copy of Footprints in my hands.

On Tuesday I finally finished up some requested revisions for a short story and sent that back, and now I’m back to getting a novel in shape to put on the market.

Yesterday and part of today I spent time putting up more bookshelves in the basement and unloading boxes of books (from one and two moves back) onto them. It looks like I’m going to run out of shelves before I run out of books at this point. I love books, but it’s starting to get out of hand.

Oh, and Happy Birthday, Fiona!

This evening I’ll be a the monthly DASFA (Denver Area SF Association) meeting (community room of the Whole Foods Market at 1111 South Washington Street in Denver; meeting time is at 7:00 PM), to help launch the Footprints anthology. Better-known author James Van Pelt, who has the lead story in the book, will also be there. It should be fun.

Tomorrow, July 19, Jim and I will be at Who Else! Books in Denver, for a signing of Footprints (copies will be available at a discount price). Refreshments and copies of Van Pelt’s other books will be available. This is also a sneak preview of Who Else’s new digs, they are in the process of moving from the old Denver Book Mall to the new Broadway Book Mall, at 200 So Broadway. We’ll be there at 3:00 — it will be the FIRST signing ever at the new book mall. Their number is 303-744-BOOK (2665). Come on out.

No, the world probably doesn’t need yet another writer blogging about how to write, perhaps much less a writer just beginning to selling his fiction. But since the idea popped into my head a couple of days ago, the voices there won’t shut up about it, so I’m going to have to commit pedagogy. (And if you don’t know what that last word means, please look it up. First lesson for writers: expand your vocabulary. You’re reading this in a browser, it’ll be easy.)

Now, I do have some qualifications for this. I’ve been paid for both my fiction and non-fiction writing (the latter pays better, by the way), so even though I don’t do it full-time, I am a professional writer. I’ve also done time (however briefly) as an editor, slush reader, and critiquer. I’ve read literally thousands of books, possibly more than ten thousand, and thousands of short stories. And that’s to say nothing of the perhaps millions of words I’ve read and written on various online forums over the past 25 years (yes, long before the web).

So. Much of what I say, especially in the beginning, will apply both to fiction and non-fiction writing, although my focus is going to lean to the former. My approach is going to be a little different from what I’ve seen elsewhere. The order in which I’m going to present topics will be (as best I can) the order in which an editor notices them when they get your submission. At each stage, if you blow it your manuscript will be rejected, which could mean that they never get to page two, let alone the end of your piece. (Yes, there may be exceptions to this, and people win the lottery too, but you shouldn’t plan on either.)

The first piece, on guidelines and formatting, will be up in a day or so. Stay tuned.

I have three words to say about this movie: go see it.

Okay, I have a few more words. Sam Rockwell’s acting (as Sam Bell) is superb, they get the science right (if you give them the basic premise), and the plot turns in ways you might not expect. (I was expecting twists, and knew some of the basic premise from what I’d read about the movie, but I was still surprised — pleasantly so.)

Moon is one of the most intelligent SF movies I’ve seen in a long time, without the largely incomprehensible (if you haven’t read the book) ending of, say, 2001: A Space Odyssey. (There’s an obvious homage to 2001 in Moon‘s set design.) I hope the movie makes a bundle, that might encourage more like it.

If you’re looking for them, there are trivial nits to pick, mostly due to the fact that we still can’t film on location on the Moon. But spending a few tens of millions to fake Lunar gravity wouldn’t have added anything to the story, and in fact they do get the gravity right in a couple of outside scenes and where Sam is comfortably carrying something that would be heavy on Earth.

In the Denver area it’s playing at the Mayan, where you can enjoy an adult beverage while you’re watching, as well as at the Westminster Promenade. As they say, check your local listings. (It’s rated “R”, apparently for language because Sam uses the f-word a few times when he’s understandably stressed out. If they’d wanted a PG-13 rating it wouldn’t have been difficult, but it’s not exactly a “summer action flick”.)

Like I said: go see it.

Reader John Murphy, in a comment to my page on Neutron Star as detective fiction, asks about anthologies of SF detective fiction other than single-author collections. While I can think of several of the former, for multiple authors only Dann and Dozois’s anthology Future Crimes comes immediately to mind.

I’m sure there are others; I vaguely remember at least one collection of science-fictiony Sherlock Holmes stories. Any suggestions?

Last day at FiestaCon/Westercon. I’ll be heading to the airport in a few hours, but before that there are still a couple of interesting panels, including one on alien languages with Stan Schmidt and Juliette Wade, and a meeting with Beth Meacham, Executive Editor at Tor.

I hope everyone had a great 4th of July; I did. It’s been a lot of fun. I met a couple of people I hadn’t seen or heard from in years, in one case since the old BIX days (hi Henry! hi Rick!), plus the usual fun of meeting someone for the first time who turns out to have several connections with you that you were both unaware of. Since this is my fourth day of the con I’m feeling a little shell-shocked (but in a good way). I hope this is more or less coherent. I intend to come back through these last two posts and fill in some links. Stay tuned.

As I write this it’s early Friday evening in Tempe, Arizona.  The convention is definitely ramping up from yesterday, as more people arrive for the weekend.

Which is by no means to say that it’s been boring, far from it.  So far I’ve had some great conversations with Stan Schmidt, editor of Analog; author Michael Stackpole; Tor editors Patrick and Theresa Neilson Hayden; and fellow Denver author Dave Boop.   I’ve made a few interesting new contacts and met a fellow participant of the Kris and Dean workshop a couple of weeks ago.   And the weekend is just getting started.

Of course there are also the costumers (and the cosplay), the gamers, the media fans, science panels (I’m heading off to a panel on the Lunar Reconaissance Orbiter in just a minute) and more.  Great con.   Giving me some ideas for MileHiCon this October, too.  (Rose asked me to help out with science programming.)

If you’ve never been to a science fiction con (not to be confused with something like Comic-Con or StarFest), and you have any interest in reading fantasy or science fiction, you should find a local regional con and give it a try.

Coming up in a few weeks I’m scheduled as a speaker at the July 18 DASFA (Denver Area SF Association) meeting. (Their web site is somewhat dated, but the meeting time/place info is still correct.). The next day (July 19), I’ll be at Who Else! Books in Denver, signing copies of the Footprints anthology. Better than that, fellow (and better known) Colorado author James Van Pelt will also be at the signing, he has a story in Footprints too. (Jim may also be speaking at the DASFA meeting the evening before, I’m a bit fuzzy on the details.)

Before that, I’ll be going to Westercon (aka FiestaCon), the big western regional SF con in Temp, Arizona over the July 4th weekend. I’m just a con-goer at this one, not speaking, but I’m looking forward to seeing some old friends and meeting new ones. I’ll be cleverly disguised as myself, if you see me feel free to step up and say hello.

Today was a good news day, although those of you who aren’t writers or aspiring writers might not think so. First I heard from Joni Labaqui of the Writers of the Future Contest, to let me know that my entry for second quarter of 2009 was a Semifinalist. While not a Finalist, one of the group of eight stories selected for final judging and selecting the three winners, semifinalist is still good and earns a written critique from writer KD Wentworth, who does the preliminary judging. There’s a list of the other semifinalists, finalists and honorable mentions on Joni’s blog. Congratulations to all!

The next bit of good news was like one of those “good news, bad news” stories. In the afternoon mail I received a personal note from Stanley Schmidt, the editor of Analog, regarding a story I’d submitted to him. He said it was well written and that he personally enjoyed it (the good news), but because of the nature of the story (a technical problem in a research lab) it might not be sufficiently engaging even to Analog readers. So, not a sale, but when the editor of one of the (if not the) highest circulation SF magazines, who has been editing it for over thirty years, says he likes your story, that’s good news. Especially if you’re, like me, still an aspiring writer.

Speaking of aspiring writers, I got back last week from the trip out to Oregon. Part of it was family vacation, part of it was to attend a workshop given by Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Katherine Rusch, both professional writers and editors. Fellow attendee Brad Torgersen blogged that it was “the most important weekend [he’d] ever spent”. I’m inclined to agree. If you’re just starting out in the writing business — and you want to go at it full time rather than as a hobby — you owe it to yourself to check out the next Kris and Dean Show. They’re offering it again in September.