Space Opera Tropes: the Precursor race. Here to stay?

It's a literary tradition in science fiction that when Hollywood and video games start regularly using a trope that's been around for ages, then it might be time to move on from that trope.

Thanks to Prometheus and Halo, a lot more of the mainstream public is now familiar with the Precursor race trope. For those who watch what's left of the History Channel, it also known as "God is an Astronaut."  The trope evolved to explain (in a retcon fashion) why so many alien races on the screen -- and in books -- have two arms, two legs, communicate with their mouths, and are basically humanoid except for the addition of fur, scales or other bits of Hollywood makeup.

And it's much less cynical to explain that aliens seeded the universe than to admit to convenient writing and tiny budgets.

But as audiences get more savvy, there's been an uptick in  this trope is a nod to the hard science fiction. It helps explain why we can interact with the aliens  — and that we all advanced our technologies at the same rate. And just to further clarify, when I say the same level of tech I mean that the gulf in technologies and sciences are close enough that one can eventually reverse engineer from the other.

Without a precursor race, pure science says the odds of us meeting a race that both resembles us AND shares the same level of tech is near nil. It's much more likely our neighbors will be vastly different, incomprehensible. Their technology will also be on a completely different level than ours. There will be no contest for the side with the better tech. On the other hand, it's much easier to live in peace with a species that shares no common resources or even knows that you exist. ... Until they accidentally wipe you out or vice versa.

The tropes of Space Opera have popped up to help tell a certain style of story to a certain audience. Over time, those tropes have evolved to keep the genre going.

For example, Old Man's War explained that FTL was actually dimensional jumping and terraforming in Firefly explained one climate planets.

You can do Space Opera without FTL (synchronized cryosleep) as in the Lockstep novel. But then again, Altered Carbon tried to have Space Opera without starships (broadcasting downloaded personalities) and that came off more as cyberpunk.

So at this point, the PC trope might be here to stay just like Starships, FTL and big laser guns.

Sound check, check, check. Audiobook time.

I’ve been quiet for a couple good reasons lately. In addition to shooting out a raft of short stories out into the unforgiving world of the slush pile and creeping along with my YA novel, I've been experimenting with audiobook short stories (audioshorts?) by laying down tracks for Small Town Nights.

Here's a sample:

Luckily my buddy Ebony Jones, who has like one of the coolest real life names that I know of, did all the heavy lifting when it came to the directing and sound. I, on the other hand, was just happy to put my old broadcasting skills to use.

But every format has its own quirks, as I found out:

Pick a story that plays to your strengths -- and your limits. If you’re not the sort of person who can make up voices, find a story with only one narrator or a third person omniscient. If you're doing a story with local flavor and your natural accent add ambiance, go for it.  Small Town Nights is an example of that. It was a narrated piece where my Midwestern/Southern accent fits perfectly, once I ham it up.

It’s ten times easier to do straight narration than voices. The real challenge is when you have to come back to the studio the next day and match those same voices again. It’s harder than you think, especially when you the voices in your head are different than the ones come out of your mouth. … Even worse when the voices in your head are telling you to smother peanut butter on your chest. … I’ve had my meds, I promise.

We wasted a good half hour because I was thinking of Sean Connery, when I was really speaking like Deckard Cain. Which is fair, DC is a SC rip-off.

Even if you wrote it, rehearsal is good. Even if the writing is spot on, there’s going to be some hidden tongue twisters in there.

But being your own script-writer is great. Sometimes things that read great on the page suck when read out loud. I’m not saying that the original was bad, but in performing a piece that’s already driven by narrator I found some spots that needed more flavor -- as compared to polish. Soon, future versions of the epub Small Town Nights will have these changes.

Reformat your work. Avoid splitting a paragraph between pages. It will minimize breathing sounds and kept you from absently mindedly turning the page -- and thus reduce the amount of splicing for your sound guys. An aside here, sound guys are going through what’s already happened to Graphic and Web Designers. Since the ease of open source software and the Internet has demystified the technology somewhat, clients new the field have unrealistic expectations and expect rates lower than the industry standard. e.g. They expect a pro to “cut and paste” tracks together for $9 an hour and do it all in under an hour. 

That’s like asking me to draw an owl. You’ll get a stickman owl. Ask an artist to draw an owl:

But we both know how to put pencil to paper. The first clue maybe that the artist is going to use a charcoal pencil while I use an H2.

Home offices/studios have their challenges. Airplanes, motorcycles and thunderstorms can give you retakes or postpone a session, plan according.

The most important part though, is have Fun, as you experiment and create your own audiobook.

Never let anyone tell you that your idea is not cool enough to publish

Frankly, I wish I had thought of this one. Kud-effin-os.  Just proves that if you do something with enough talent and panache, you can get it published. 

And to prove my point, the Tor.com blog goes into how the cover needed to convey the right amount of menace and not fall into kitsch. If that was my book cover, I'd be hyped.

On the other hand, it doesn't hurt when  you can get GRRM to say it's "Game of Thrones."

Frankly, if anyone else had said that, I'd take that with a salt shaker.  Does anyone think that the statement "Game of Thrones" is now an overused descriptor? For TV, it seems to mean genre TV with cutthroat politics/soap opera. For books, cold  mean almost anything like, "regular fantasy," "grimdark" or even "Our PR maven has no clue."

10 Things Writers Should Know about the business side of writing.

Chuck Wendig's blog is always good for shaking the proverbial writing tree and seeing what hits the ground. This week's entry by the talented Kameron Hurley reminds us that all publishers, epub or traditional, are seeing the biz differently than you. They see it literally as a business and your book, and you by extension, as a  product and a method of marketing.

If they don't see you that way, they won't be a publisher for long.

With that in mind, I've got some quick rules of thumb for you about publishers and your writing career. There are always exceptions to these, some of which prove the rule.

1. A Writer's Vision is for marketing copy only: If you talk about your vision -- as in how a publisher doesn't get your "vision" or your genius -- it's a clue that you don't get   that a novel is a collaborative project. A good editor and publisher can be a godsend on cutting the chaff to make your book a leaner, meaner storytelling machine.
2. Copy Editors edit, Editors advocate :  When you meet an editor at conference or con, you'll meet your story's champion. They will try to do their best for the story, not you, your story. So while that means they might go to bat for the story against the publisher, they'll also go to bat for the story against you if you insist on keeping things that distract from the focus of the story.
3. Self-Publish? Congrats you're a publisher: Back in my early days, it was hard enough to wrap my head around the idea that proofreading wasn't done by editors -- they've got enough to handle (advocating, profit/loss statements, finding more quality stories). They hire copy editors to handle the proofing. And you should too. If you can't afford one, find a volunteer. Same goes for covers and probably marketing as well.
4. Volunteers take their sweet time: There's that old adage that you can have two out of three things when working on a project, either fast, cheap or good. If you're getting a volunteer to help  (especially  people you shanghai in with promises of "exposure.") then prepare for them to take their time. They have lives and are doing you a favor.
5. Consider yourself on a 10 year plan: If you look up any "New" Writer's award, you'll find a good decade of practice and exposure behind them. Some wrote in fanfic, or advertising or in other fields like RPGs or non-fiction. You are in for the long haul buddy.
6. Writing may always be your part-time gig: There's more and more scuttlebutt that the days of a full-time novel writer maybe coming to a close, or that it's reaching a long nadir of sorts. I say this not to discourage, but to help brace you for the long slog ahead.
7. Paid writing is paid writing -- if that's what you want: You may find that if you really want that writing lifestyle, you'll have branch out in ways that keep you at the keyboard, but not necessarily doing what you dreamed of. Fiction novel writing is one of the toughest gigs to get and there's more luck involved than most people are willling to admit. Non-fiction, advertising, how-tos, pretty much everything pays better with more frequency than a novel. 
8. Business 101 is not Ethics 101: And Ethics 101 is that doing something legal is not the same as doing something that's ethical. As Ms. Kameron Hurley can attest, read your contracts and assume that publisher's know you're going to fight that boilerplate contract that tries to have you sell all of your rights in perpetuity for $500. Or that if you're an artists that negotiates doing your own book cover, then get paid for it as a separate item, otherwise you just did work for free.
9. Don't write for the market, but that is the harder road: You're going to write your next novel for a minimum of two years, maybe more. You have to love what you're doing or you're lose steam. Sometimes what you think is cool isn't a slam dunk for the marketeers, and that's all right, but know you've got an uphill battle (Says the guys who is trying to pitch a Weird Western.)
10. Live more, read more, write more: Seeing how real people live and interact, seeing how other writers tackle the same stories as you do and seeing yourself improve will help you inch closer to perfecting your craft.
11. Bonus Round! Read and write out of your comfort zone: Creativity is like a body that needs food and exercise. And just as eating and excising the same every day short changes a body, the same goes for your writing. Try new things and stretching yourself, you may discover unexpected inspiration and new tricks.

Now go fourth, my writing comrades and write!

The road less traveled, or maybe more traveled than not

Good ol' Chuck has another guest blog by Tom Pollack about how to juggle this crazy career we call Part-Time Writer. (Don't call it a hobby and don't call yourself "aspiring" just write, damn it!)

I'm blogging about it, so I must have a few thoughts myself on the subject. Consider them more of an extra table of goodies to Mr. Pollack's buffet of ideas. 

Plan Your Time

Beyond Planning your time, steal time back when you can. Be a complete klepto when it comes to pens/pencils, paper and your downtime. Instead of whipping out your smartphone and making Angry Birds angrier, jot down a few sentences .

This does two things; inch you closer to your weekly word count and trains you to jump into writing mode faster. Not only will have less guilt about a slow day when all those extra sentences got you over the hum, you're more likely to skip that thirty minute Internet "warm up" on io9.com if you've learned how to write a romance scene in a frigid, noisy airport.

Stick To Your Plan -- But Don't Let It Turn You Into an Asshole.

I think Tom is close to something here, but missed a bigger truth to writing. The truth that a writer pretty much a paradox who in one moment has to lock themselves in a oubliette, pull a rope to close the top and write in utter solitude and in the next moment is in the middle of humanity, seeing it for all of its wonder (and terror.)

'Cause in order to write characters that make your readers empathize with the human condition, you have to see, hear and taste that particular condition for yourself.  And you can't do that chained to your laptop. 

Enjoy It

You have to, or it will burn you out faster than roman candles duck taped to gas cans. This not only goes for the writing part but also the "go forth among humanity" part as well. 

Perhaps the best way to think of it is this way: Most people have to have their own children before they rediscover the wonder in life through the eyes of their little ones.

But as a writer, you always have to have your inner tyke on tap.

Yakity Yak, Here's some feedback

The great speech recognition experiment is done.

And in the end it wasn't so great. The software worked for a while and the diction was close enough that it greatly helped my output for a while.

But at some point, the software's accuracy went downhill instead of improving. Worse yet, the mircophone that came with the software didn't want to synch up with the program half the time.

So what started as something that was close enough to remind me of what I had original intended, became a slog of rewriting that had me seriously wondering if I had really gained any ground. And despite my best efforts, I was missing more typos than I was catching.

When my writing workshop mates reported that my last submission was a new low point grammar wise, that was the final straw.

So now it's back to the slower, more silent, typing and handwriting efforts of the past.

How much "exposure" do you need?

It looks like Showtime should have had a different pitch for their latest contest. Instead of promising graphic designers exposure at an upcoming boxing event, they should have labeled it a free vacation package.  That might have gone over a bit better. Or the designers who are boxing fans would be more inclined to say yes.

Though to be fair, this is an ad/PR firm working on Showtime's behalf. I'm guessing more PR than ad company.

Let's look at that email and Mr. Cassaro's response.

I'd have a few "Qs." (It's cute when ad people try to be hip.) How long are these spots? How prominent will my contact info be on these spots and at the MGM Grand? Yeah, I get exposure on the social media, which might include some decision makers for various companies that might be client material (who now know I will work for "contests.") But who do I get real face time with?

The answers are pretty pat here. The only real exposure will be on social media, which is a crap shoot (pun intended) and where it really counts at the MGM and on broadcast the answer will be "They will see your art only, no contact info. What you are asking for is almost like an ad." Well, PR/Ad firm, that is what your pitching me right? I've gotta leverage the most out of it.

Because working as a creative is a business at heart and, when you're lucky, a business with heart, but you have to make savvy decisions about your "exposure." Because frankly, it's a wash most of the time in any business.

I've seen all type, sign makers, marketing firms, and even contractors get taken in with a big client who promises "exposure" and to put your name out there if they are happy with the end result.

And then somehow it never works out.

You've put the client is now in a position of real power and they'll abuse it like crazy. Mostly by making countless changes to the project that you take the hit on to keep the client happy. You'll realize those hits have put you in red too late.

Ask the VFX companies hows that working for them.

So I'll wrap up with this classic bit from a classic curmudgeon. It's relevant.

The price of growing up ...

is seeing all of your childhood heroes pass away.



May his family find the solace they need in these trying times.

Yep. That's pretty much how Starbucks is.

http://pvponline.com/comic/2014/07/27/game-of-thrones

When that urge to be a "Starbucks" writer hits me, I gotta look at the time. If it's past 5pm, forget it. The 7-person knitting circle has taken all of the comfy leather chairs.

I don't make this stuff up, honest.

Three bags of hurry up and wait

Well, that took a bit longer than I thought it would.

The prize aspect of a writer is discipline. You got to keep your butt in the chair and keep plugging away. Even when you’re staring at a screen that says “Uploading your ebook now.” That’s not so great for my ADHD.

My plan to e-publish was two-fold. The first was to provide several short stories so that potential readers could have more content to choose from. The second was to spread my distribution among the big three -- Amazon, Nook and Smashwords.

But if you have 7 shorts that essentially means you’re uploading 21 stories. I should have thought out that math earlier. So my plan to do a massive upload in one day turned into more like a week. Technically, I could have done it in a day, but I would have gnawed off my arm by the end of it, and learning to type with one hand is a bitch.

At this point, the experience of it all is a bit blurry (having a cold that week didn’t help). But from what I can remember …

For any of the three e-publishers:

·         They will want your tax information: It’s the price (or payment) of doing business. If you haven’t incorporated yet, they will take your social security number in lieu of your tax ID number.

·         If you have the  .doc file and a short story, you’re all set: it’s savvy to learn how to set up your formatting and TOC for your novel in Calibre or Scribe. If you have a .doc (not .docx) file, though, all three publishers have online conversion tools that should work for short stories.

·         Each company has different cover sizes and they change without notice: Do your homework on the covers.

·         For all the talk of how traditional publishers want to straightjacket you into a marketable niche, the genre labels for these companies are mostly either generic or what’s trending. If you happen to have a post-apocalyptical Science Fantasy short in the vein of Vance’s Dying Earth, good luck with that getting lumped into Science Fiction, Apocalyptical, and Adventure. And the Fantasy genres will only touch on Epic, General or Contemporary/Paranormal.  If you’re lucky, you could find Steampunk. Unfortunately, the pull-down menus for these are clunky. I’ll get to tags/labels with each publisher.

·         And no matter the publisher, if you have more than one book online, then you probably aren’t going to be happy on how you have to drill down in the reports to see what’s really going on with the sales numbers. That’s for just 7 stories. I can’t imagine what hoops the writers who have dozens of stories have to jump through to understand their data.

·         A “Same entry as last time” for things like author, publisher and price would make the process much less of a time suck.

·         Have a “cheat sheet” of your blurbs, tags and author bio handy to do a lot of cut and paste

Now for the individual guys:

Amazon:

You sly, sly dogs. I’ve already said that Amazon tries to make themselves a convenient one-stop shop for an author. They allow you to use Styles from Word to set up the formatting for TOC and offer a gallery of customizable book covers. However, then they’ll try to tempt you to go exclusive with them. (But do you really want only one company holding all the cards at the end of the day?)

Amazon only allows 7 tags for your product and offer limited genre choices. The biggest positive is that I saw one or two instant sales -- but then afterwards, nothing.  My cynical side wants to think that Amazon has a slush fund for buying the first copy of a writer’s work. If they can keep you hoping, then you’ll keep putting out content.

Not that I have any proof of such a silly idea. Maybe I should just pat myself on the back that I got lucky day one.

Uploading takes forever and you can’t really go on to the next project as you wait. The whole process happens over several different screens.

The actual publishing of your ebook takes 24 hours.

Nook:

Nook doesn’t offer you a free cover, but they do try to make themselves your browser-based word processor/Scrivener project manager. If you have any bold or italics in your document, you’ll have to go back and add them in via the Nook system.

I seem to remember this one was the most clunky to work with, though they seemed to have the most flexible system for cutting and pasting your tags in.

Again, uploads take forever and it seems that you take chances if you try to skip to the next project. You have to go through several screens related to different silos (price, audience, actual upload).

The upside is, they publish your ebook in a few hours.

Smashwords:

How I hate and love you.

Smashwords had the only single upload screen process, which was great, and the process actually invites you to upload something else as your ebook is translated in any format you need. Neat.

But SW has the most proprietary system for formatting your work (which at the very least means including a copyright that names your submission a “Smashwords Edition.”) For example, Their Word TOC system works off Bookmarks, not Styles and other odd bits.

->TL:DR Read their handbook. It will save you from a lot of grief later.

Even though the actual upload is painless, it take days -- yep days – for a story to go live. It makes me imagine that they have a light-starved gnome locked in a server box, reading every upload by the light of a candle and a Sega Genesis.

I still believe enough in my strategy that I’d do it again. But in the future, I’ll be adding individual stories and remember that I have to multiply my efforts by three.  

’Cause as an ebook author, there’s no such thing as bulk shipping.

Help a Franchise Fiction Brother out.

Do you like Star Trek, Farscape, and World of Warcraft? What do these three things have in common? A great writer who's in a bit of a pinch.

A Master of Franchise Fiction,  Keith DeCandido, selling and signing a lot of out of print stuff to make ends meet until the next set of projects pay off.

I've personally met the guy and he's a great person. Give his Facebook post a check and see if there's something you'd love to have on your shelf.

Ohhh. Amazon you sly dog ...

There has been a seismic shift in e-publishing in just the last few years.

A. The paperback market has been shrinking, not just on the consumer end, but the distribution end as well. thanks to big box stores who have been very busy in trying to drastically narrow the selection of paperbacks a consumer sees on the shelf at all.  There used to be a top 10 national bestseller list in every genre, mostly because each region had its bestseller's list and that was aggregated into a national list. Now, realistically, there are only three top sellers in each genre because these stores don't want to mess with regional sales. They want one easy list to buy from.

B. The technology has finally caught up to make self-publishing very easy.. I spent a bit of time learning how to work programs like Calibre, only to find out that now I don't really need them. Amazon, Smashwords and the Nook now do the Word Doc converting for you.

C. Who hasn't heard of the woman who has made $30k in one month off of Bigfoot erotica. ... That's not a typo.

That's offered up some good things. With anecdotes like that, several professional writer's organizations are getting ready to approve bylaws that allow ebook authors to join. To see these organizations go from naked skepticism to embracing epublishing in a few short years is amazing. It's like watching a behemoth turn a pirouette on a dime. 

As for probably the worst part, now that's easier to upload your book and there's little shame in doing so, you might as well do it.

Right?

Along with about several other million other writers, aspiring writers and Baby Boomers who decided that they want to be writers during their retirement years. 

Despite all that, Amazon's stayed on top of it all with their bag of tricks. Going beyond the mobi. conversion tool, they've kept switching things up and delivering on promises that  make it worth your while to be exclusive with them, including being their part of their Amazon Prime library. 

There's also Kindle Worlds to entice established authors with the promise of "free money" for letting fan fic writers publish-- and profit share -- their efforts in the world of their favorite author. (Oddly enough, now some fan-fic writers are grumbling that they their hard work -- in someone else IP, shouldn't be "taxed."*)

Update: The Vampire Diaries franchise author, L.J. Smith, who was kicked offer the series is now using Kindle Worlds to get back into the series that she put on the map. 

It makes Amazon really tempting as your one-stop publishing shop, which has been their savvy goal from the beginning. The minor miracle here has been how they've stayed on target for so long. 

Makes me wonder what their next step is.

*So we gone from fan-fic writers being grateful they don't get cease-and-desist letters to some how thinking they should be the sole beneficiary of work they based on someone else's world. A world that took an author, an agent and a publisher, years to develop and grow. Just saying.

The infamous triangle

They say there are three choices you get in every project, Fast, Cheap, or Good. Pick two.They also say that the last 10 percent of a project takes up about 80 percent of the time working on that project.

I'm discovering that writing pretty much holds to these rules. In the past couple of months, my goal of getting 7 short stories and one mini anthology out has slowed to a crawl since I've picked Cheap and Good. My great friends and family that are helping me do some final editing are all great volunteers who are doing this on their off time. So things are moving, but slowly. 

In my experience, I'd have to say that people like playing book critic. When these were just Word Docs on my computer, I had to reach out to find some volunteer editors. Once I slapped a nice ebook cover on it, people have been asking me to take a peek and "offer some advice." Maybe next time I'll get the cover done first and then write a story. Hey, it worked for the old pulps.

But hopefully soon, we'll be done and then these little stories will have to fly on their own out on the great winds of the Internet.

Say it agian?

So I'm trying something really new this time.

I was in the store, and I noticed that the Dragon speaking software for only like $30, which also came with a microphone set. 

In the past, dictation software, while out of my price range, has been appealing to me for a few reasons:

• I have a few learning disabilities that drastically slow down my output and technology has been a big help in the past.

•  I've always noticed for my personal writing has two phases.

• A crazy creative phrase where I'm pacing back and forth on on the floor thinking about my story and what's happening next. Sometimes I ramble to myself or repeat lines of dialogue to get an ear for how it sounds. It's when I seem to be my most imaginative. Call it my right brain jazz.

•  But then I'd sit down in my brain seems to stop when I have to meet with my fingers to type. Call it my left brain OCD.

I've also been trying to go for a new method where my first draft is all rough output to be corrected later as I go through Draft 2, Draft 3, Draft 4, etc. But I getting too distracted by all the wiggly red lines under the poor spellings, the bad grammar, etc. Distraction Free Writing Software used to help with this but then I discovered that most of the free versions of this sort of app let you get back to the Internet with Alt-Tab.

Oh Internet, you cruel, cruel mistress. Why must you tempt me so. But apparently, it's harder to be tempted by Io9,com  when you're pacing the floor and talking to yourself like you're used to having padded walls.  (Man, I need to get a longer cord for this microphone.) 

So I decided to grab the Dragon software and see what would happen. Now I admit I'm keeping my expectations are very very low. As long as the software can dictate my long run-on sentences with some accuracy so I can get back to tweaking them later with silly things like punctuation or the correct homophones, then we'll be walking in the right direction. 

It's going to be long road before I get this thing to do a better draft than that. Thanks to my hours of voice to text over my phone, it doesn't sound so weird to say "period" at the end of sentence, but anything more than that kills my focus right now.

At first blush, seeing as how using this setup on Day 1 got me almost 1000 words for my novel in an hour, I'd have to say that it was worth $30.

Side note: The first draft of this article was written totally in Dragon speaking software. There were changes, trust me.

World building: Painting on a big blue marble

There's a lively debate going on when extraneous world building crosses the line. For a lot of writers, the process of creating the world is trial and error. So it's not clear in the first draft what's an additional details that you'll eventually have to cut. And when do those snippets go from from being a safety net to mentally chasing your tail.

The wildly imaginative and wildly talented China Miéville has said that you should only come up with details that enhance your story (though his earlier breakout, Perdido Street Station, went past that bar a couple of times) and that if you find yourself creating a whole separate novel as a gazetteer, then perhaps that’s more your thing.

Zelazny  and his Chronicles of Amber were a big influence during my college days. Even though he wrote in a tight, noir style, he created universes made from scratch. Sometimes those details became relevant to the plot and other times it was just create a sense of how varied the multiverse can be.

Zelazny’s worlds felt lived in yet, I get a vibe that Zelazny did a lot of world building by the seat of his pants. I’m sure that a lot more world building got left on the cutting room floor, but there are still plenty of back story hinted that made one feel as if Amber had existed before you opened the book and that it would still be there even after you finished the story. He had no fear in putting things that turned out to be red herrings and  intriguing back stories.

Of course, he wrote his books in a different time. With every thing living forever on the Internets, where fans can comb and cross reference every bit, I think that stifles authors a bit these days and some might fear that every bit and bobble has to be accounted for.

A pitch perfect example of this has been Star Trek. Twice the creative teams felt that they needed an out (Temporal Cold Wars and Alternate Realities) to "reset" over 40 years of canon to get the elbow room to tell new stories to both old -- and new -- fans. 

I'm pretty sure that a lot of fans disagree with that, but when it happens twice, what does that say? Sure there are fan-creators out there who mine the old material to make some great amateur films that have set a new bar, but those aren't coming out at real pace to match a TV show. And in the end, they only have to please themselves.

And that's usually the fan I identify with more, not the type to nitpick on the details, but to use their own imagination to fill in the gaps with their own stories. That's the place where fan fiction and fan art began in that time when it took months to wait for the next book or movie. A time where if we wanted more and couldn't wait, we made it up as we went along. 

I don't mind admitting it, that's where I started too.

And now this cute little owl

I enjoyed South Florida's Ren Faire and this little fellow was part of a falconry exhibit.

This fair was not as fun as they had been in the past, though, because of two reasons.

My long-time friend who volunteered for Ren Faire every year moved away. I missed her and getting to hang out with the "Players." Didn't feel the same this time.

They changed the layout so you must walk past a good chunk of the vendor booths and the food court before getting to most of the shows and ... more vendor booths. I'm going to browse through it all anyway, I'd like to take in a show or two first, thank you.

Still fun, just tiny bit of bittersweet (about the size of this owl) sprinkled in for flavor.

L

Marvel Studios has a lot riding on GotG

Already, the experts are calling Guardians of the Galaxy a gamble because it's based on a property that's pretty much inside baseball for the comic book crowd. But it isn't Marvel Comics that's making these movies, it's Marvel Studios.

And if that company wants to stay in for the long game, they have to come up with more than just tentpole movies supporting huge spandex and leather tents.

So at first, you'd think that GotG would be a bigger gamble because if--if-- it hits big then SF fans be served up with another Firefly/Farscape/Han Soloesque dish at the Disney franchise buffet. And I'm sure a lot of others would agree. 

Then you got to realize that this is almost a  low-hanging fruit for the studio.

Quick trivia question: Which of these two movies, Road to Perdition, a gangster movie, or A History of Violence, another gangster movie, is based on a comic book? Trick question – Both of them are based on comic books.

And with Marvel Studio's access to Marvel Comics 75-year old library of IP, there won't be genre that Marvel Studios couldn't shoehorn into their production schedule once they break out of that "superhero movie company" stereotype.

Go far enough down the road and I can see a future where Marvel Studios executives are ironically embarrassed to talk about those old cheesy 2-D super hero movies.

For that really long game, though, I can see Marvel Studio hoping that in the year 2074 there will be two kids on their first date sitting down to share their ocular implant data feed to see a romantic comedy that has zero superheros or SciFi in it. (the more things change, the more they stay the same). 

And as those kids see the opening credits stream by, they'll think that it odd that Marvel's logo has that "flwip-flwip-flwp" sound and maybe they guess it represents an image app shuffling those images inside the words.

'Cause you know what's a comic book?

L

Reading between the lines: YA is the new PG-13.

I've seen a lot of authors lean towards YA these days, or at least start to dip their paws in it. For genre writers with an established audience the pressure to "switch" to YA, brought on by their publishers and agents, is immense.

Since a lot of their current fans are genre readers, who can be pretty loyal to a writer, some writers might feel like their missing a chance to build their base by just making sure their next protagonist is a teen and female.

That's an epiphany I had the day I got lost in the Barnes and Noble YA section thinking that I was in the SF/F section. I really couldn't tell the difference.

The next epiphany slapped me in the face when I went Christmas shopping at Target. There , the only "adult" SF/F books in the fiction section were Game of Thrones and The Hobbit -- basically the two biggest media tie-ins of the season. The rest of the fiction pile for grown ups was the usual stable of names that echo throughout the big box store book departments across the nation -- Patterson, Cussler, Brown, Grisham, etc.

The YA section, however, was nothing but genre stuff, mostly science fiction or fantasy. The fantasy was in all sorts of flavors -- epic, urban, paranormal, etc. The SF was well represented by post-apocalyptic, but the space opera subgenre was absent.

I'm going to detour here into Hollywood, where genre movies have taken off. Well, to be more precise, it's been PG-13 genre fair that Hollywood is in love with. Poor Robocop.

Why? PG-13 is the Holy Grail of ratings since it reaches the demographic of 13 to 43. But, that attitude might change after this year.
So it occurred to me that YA fiction has now become the unspoken code word in both the Showbiz and the Publishing Biz as "Money making PG-13 material that's already been been market tested with solid book sales."

I could take some sort of affront to the implication that genre fiction isn't "adult fiction" unless it's a multi-million franchise media tie-in. But frankly, you have to pick your battles to keep your sanity, and as long genre fiction is represented by quality writing, I'm not going to complain ... too much.