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scifi

A Journey of Growth

January 25, 2019 By kireland Leave a Comment

By J.D. Huffman

A reaction I commonly get when I tell people I have written novels is, “I could never do that. I wouldn’t even know where to start.” It may not come in those exact words, but the sentiment is a recurring theme. There’s an implied assumption that writing a book–or undertaking any serious creative endeavor–is something a person is born knowing how to do. But that’s just not the case.

I’ve told this story plenty of times elsewhere so I’ll offer the short version here, in the interest of getting to the larger point. I started writing stories as soon as I learned how to pick up a pencil. My early efforts were about what you would expect from a 7 or 8 year old. I mimicked what I saw and read, so it was mostly Star Trek ripoffs and fantasy tales. When I got into comic books as a teenager, those influenced me, too, especially in terms of developing interconnected stories with lots of characters. I spent years in an online community, writing fanfiction with dozens of others in a shared story universe. This was an extremely messy and sometimes contentious endeavor, and it’s hard to say if the results were any good, but it was very useful practice in terms of both long form writing and collaboration with others.

My earliest stories were aimless, even nonsensical. Characters appeared and disappeared almost at will. Story threads were introduced, then quickly dropped. Both heroes and villains were hilariously overpowered. Themes? Motifs? Character arcs? What are those?? Of course, I learned about all of those things in time, at first from my schooling, and later through practice. In a lot of ways, reading other books is good practice. It’s said that reading is the most important part of writing, and it’s true. It’s necessary to know what others have done, to learn what to do, and decide what you don’t want to do. It is fair to say that I have been just as influenced by works I don’t want to emulate as those I do. Given the genres I tend to write in, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I like to read science fiction and fantasy, though I will read almost anything.

The question still goes unanswered, though: how did I figure out how to write a novel? Writing short stories is one thing. Unfocused collections of vaguely related passages don’t constitute a novel, either, unless you are a particularly brilliant writer (which I am not). A novel, regardless of its genre or style or the intentions of the author, needs structure. Like building a house, if you go into it without a blueprint, your end result won’t hold up.

When I went to college, my focus was not on writing but on computer science. I didn’t take any creative writing courses or anything of that nature. My trajectory might have been very different if I had. But software is what pays the bills, and I opted to keep writing as a side effort. It was in 2008 that I made my first real attempt to write a novel. The first iteration of Totality had been (mostly) written a few years prior, but this was done more as a lengthy collection of quasi-episodic stories, instead of an intentional novel. So, I was ready to try something different–to write a novel in the traditional sense. Despite my previous advice, I didn’t go into it with a solid plan. I had a premise. I had characters. I knew the initial crisis they would be thrown into. Beyond that, I had no idea where things would go. Luckily, the first act of a novel is a perfectly fine place to flail around for a while and figure out where you’re really going. If the characters are confused, it’s OK for the reader to be confused along with them. That was my reasoning, at least. Over time, a real story took shape, with the requisite rising action, climax, and denouement. Most importantly, I finished it. I had a beginning, middle, and an ending. I had written a manuscript.

I felt accomplished! Regardless of whether the final product was any good, I had written a novel, which I had not done before. I had made attempts. I had written long-form stories, and stories meant to be read as a series, but not an actual novel. In retrospect, it was completing this that gave me the confidence and morale to do it again–and again, and again.

Is that it, then? Is that the secret? For me, it was. Just sticking with a novel long enough to complete a first draft told me I was capable of it. Still, that sounds vague, doesn’t it? What did writing a novel actually entail, on a day-to-day basis?

As I mentioned, I started with a premise and characters. The characters were based on people I knew. I had their permission to drop them into this story, and they all had fun reading it, I think. A premise can be anything, too–just something to get the ball rolling, even if it’s not the main crisis or focus of the story. I tried to write a little bit every day. If not a full chapter, I would try to complete an entire scene, at a minimum. As these characters went off in different directions, I had to think about where they were going and how it might all lead back toward a central climax and conclusion. This was the fun part! It’s like solving a puzzle. I had characters in various situations, with varying motives and personalities, all facing their own dilemmas. How could all of those come together in a unifying manner to give a satisfying climax and conclusion to the story? Solving this puzzle obviously varies a lot from one story to the next. In my case, I started outlining the rest of the story, one chapter at a time. This let me figure out where each story threat would progress, always keeping an eye toward converging them. In the end, it worked out pretty well, and I didn’t deviate very much from the outline I put together about a quarter of the way through writing.

That entire experience laid the groundwork for the novels I have written since. I wrote another in 2009, then 2011, then 2012, and then I embarked on the Totality rewrite in 2013. Each time, I took a similar approach, refining the processes of developing characters, building outlines, and designing stories. I also made a concerted effort to read more books, many of which offered inspiration and insight into my own efforts. It’s fascinating to watch yourself pick up turns of phrase, ways of structuring chapters, and different ways to develop and humanize your characters. I think all writers have things they can learn from one another, and it’s an excellent way of pursuing your own growth.

What’s most important to realize is that there is no end goal. There is no finish line. A completed novel might be a sprint, but it’s just one leg in an endless marathon. It’s really about persisting, and committing to improvement. Nobody wakes up one day with a finished novel, or even the knowledge of how to write one. What you can wake up with is the determination to get started, to continue, to see it through–and to remember throughout that what you create doesn’t have to be perfect to be worthy. What’s important is to keep creating.

Filed Under: Authors, News Tagged With: J. D. Huffman, publishing, scifi, writing

ERRMAGHURDMERSHEDPERTETERS!!

October 25, 2018 By kireland Leave a Comment

Hello-hello everyone!

We’re back from Imaginarium 2018 where Moirae Publishing had a successful debut! As a result, we’ve signed on another author who will be joining Lilye in our romance section with an erotica short story about soft BDSM and Taekwondo.

Coming SOON:

Touched by Death, a romance-adventure between Dinah and Hades in the Greek Underworld. After a car crash that ends her life and wrecks her voice, Dinah finds herself at the banks of the Styx. Can she dodge the machinations of an unknown enemy, or will she fall pawn and victim to this long-game revenge plot? After all, no one does Petty like the Greek Gods!

This November, we will be at CONFUZION in Muscle Shoals AL with our sci-fi line including the Natan Fleet Show series 1-3, and book one of TOTALITY. Come see us at our booth and receive a gift! Make sure to give us the password and you’ll get a prize! “ERRMAGHURDMERSHEDPERTETERS!!” 

We have also lined up an interview with the lovely Trysh Thompson, an experienced editor and acquisitions manager for a small publisher. This will be posted on the 5th of November. We’ll be focusing on what to do AFTER you’ve got your first draft written.

 

Do you have a book and want to be published?

Our submissions are open right now!

What we want:

  • Scifi, YA or older, with a diverse cast including POC, disabled, alternate gender, aliens, or anything out of the ordinary.
  • Romance including POC and/or disabled characters.

PLEASE note that these requests of POC/Disabled/whatever should be characters in the story, not the entire story revolves around them being this. The story comes first, but we like to see inclusion. Representation matters; these people exist, so have them exist in your stories too.

Filed Under: Books, News Tagged With: author, fantasy, romance, scifi, writing, young adult

Writing Process by J. D. Huffman

September 9, 2018 By kireland Leave a Comment

Some people recently expressed to me an interest in learning how I write these novels (and how I write novels in general, I suppose). Having gotten through outlining the next book (Zero Avalon), I now have some time to elaborate on my process.

I don’t think anything I say here will be particularly novel (pun intended), but I hope I can demystify the novel-building process for people who still find it intimidating, as I once did.

The Beginning

Every novel starts with an idea. It could be one or two sentences. You just need one. For the Totality series, I actually began with a very simple idea: what if, in the future, humanity is besieged by demon-like entities which can overtake and control human bodies?

But an idea, in and of itself, does not make a novel. So, the next step is to start building elements that will enable you to flesh out a novel. What I will not do here is explain the extremely simple basics of a story. You should know what a premise is, that most stories have structure in which events build to a climax, followed by a resolution and conclusion. I don’t think I need to cover that here.

I also want to take a moment to express that this is my process. This is what works for me. If you are not a meticulous planner, if you prefer to write without a net (so to speak), that is completely fine and valid. This advice is for people who find themselves stymied by a lack of planning, who find the whole idea of writing a novel too imposing and don’t know where to begin.

Some might tell you that, to start with, you should focus on character, or plot, or theme–that one of these is supreme and must be the foundation for your book. In my experience, what’s important is to pick one as an initial angle of attack and run with it. You will ultimately need all three, but it helps a lot to pick one and build from there.

Character

Unless you are writing an unusual, experimental novel, you will need at least one character. Since you should have a basic idea for your novel in mind, start developing characters that will help you explore that idea. Think of characters who might have interesting or unexpected reactions to your premise. Think of characters who might be profoundly changed by such a premise. Build characters that suit your initial idea, and then build some more that you aren’t sure what to do with yet–you can think of these as “alternates” that you can throw in when you want to mix things up a bit. This obviously raises the question of how you build characters. Well, take from what’s around you: your own experiences, your friends, your family, and other people you may know about. Don’t make carbon copies of people you know, of course, but it’s fine to develop characters after real people. Just make sure to put your own creative stamp on them!

Plot

Again, unless you are doing something highly unconventional, a novel has to go somewhere. Circumstances at the end of the book should not be the same as circumstances at the beginning.

If you have not developed your characters yet, that’s OK. Think of a narrative suitable to your novel idea. Where could this premise go? How would it begin, how would it end, and what would happen in the middle to move it from A to B? Interesting stories don’t follow obvious paths, but it’s fine to take the obvious route when initially developing your plot. You can fix this later. But what you should end up with at this stage is a brief–perhaps paragraph length–description of where the story begins, where it goes, and where it ends.

Theme

One of the things that makes a story powerful and memorable is theme. A lot of people seem confused or intimidated by theme, but there is no need to be. For one thing, theme often develops organically from the basic elements of your story. Theme is just whatever your story is about over and above what the text explicitly communicates–it is subtext. It’s a broader message that can be intimated from the story as a whole. It is commentary on the human condition, or whatever topic the novel focuses on. For instance, the Totality series develops multiple themes:

  • The human impacts of civilization-wide disruption
  • The nature of self and identity
  • The alienating nature of leadership
  • The difficulties of impactful choices where there are no good options

And that’s just a sampling. These are likely to emerge as you work on the story, so don’t worry if you don’t think of any right away. Or they may crop up easily from your original idea!

Once you are armed with at least basic versions of your characters, plot, and themes, you can start outlining the novel itself. I recommend keeping documents for each of these elements, by the way, so you can keep track of all your notes.

Story Treatment vs. Outline

At this point, you have a decision to make. Depending on how confident you feel in what you’ve developed, you can move straight on to a chapter-by-chapter outline, or you can pause and work up a story treatment instead.

A story treatment is a notion I have essentially stolen from the world of screenwriting. Often times, before a screenplay is written, a writer will come up with a scene-by-scene prose description of the entire film. This is used to sell the idea of a script to a studio without having to actually write the entire screenplay up front. When it comes to writing a novel, this can be a useful method to flesh out your story beat-by-beat, one step at a time, but without worrying about where your chapter breaks will be. A film treatment is usually a bit long–thirty to eighty pages. Personally, I have benefited from writing treatments that range ten to twenty pages.

As a practical matter, the treatment does little more than describe the story one event at a time, describing situations, scenes, character actions and reactions, and so on, from beginning to end. Mingled within may be notes about why a specific action or event is significant, or what it may be foreshadowing about future events. Since the treatment is for your own use, it’s entirely up to you what information you put in it. But its purpose is to make you think logically through your story from one end to the other.

Outlining

Outlining can be one of the most challenging parts of planning a novel, but once you do it, you will never be at a loss for where your story should go next. Whether you’ve already written a story treatment or just want to dive right into the outline, the process is essentially the same. Create a new document where you will store your outline, then start a numbered list. For #1, describe how you introduce your novel and what happens in the first chapter. Then move on to #2, describing your second chapter. Do this until you have reached the end of your story.

This brings up obvious questions. How much should happen in a single chapter? As a rule of thumb, my approach to each chapter (apart from the first and last) is to a) pick up with whatever crisis or important event concluded the last chapter, b) respond to and/or develop that event, then c) lead into or introduce a new, complicating event on which the chapter concludes. Now, one could easily see that this is essentially a “thriller” model of narrative construction–that each chapter basically picks up from a previous cliffhanger, allows events to unfold, then ends on another cliffhanger. You don’t have to do things this way, and ending chapters on quiet notes can be highly effective and even essential. But this model allows you to pace your novel in terms of action transpiring on a consistent chapter-by-chapter basis. And that is the key word: pacing. Your novel should unfold at a clear and consistent pace, so readers feel momentum and sense that the story is going somewhere.

Now, your first pass at the outline may be very simple. Each line might be one or two brief sentences about where the chapter opens, what happens, and where it leaves off. As you work through the outline, you may find yourself detecting holes in your story logic, or events which don’t flow well into each other. Or perhaps the story feels too linear, as if everything is simply happening too easily. This is the value of outlining! Make note of these, but don’t worry about them until you have a complete outline from start to finish. Then, go back and read each chapter description in your outline. If you don’t feel a consistent rhythm from one chapter to the next, if you don’t feel tension building up to a climax, your readers won’t, either. Change that outline! Hack it to pieces if you have to. If you get halfway through reading it and realize you don’t like the back half of the story, throw it out from that point and rebuild the rest of the outline.

You may end up making three, four, five, six passes at it–possibly even more. Just keep revising the outline until you are confident you know the flow of your story. You know the major events, you know why they are important, you have a structure that can be readily identified as an introduction, rising action, climax, resolution, and so forth. This outline will be the skeleton of your novel.

Character Arcs

Here we come to something of an aside. An inherent risk to outlining is that you become entirely plot-focused, moving characters from event to event without consideration for the characters’ own motives, desires, and reactions. Ideally, you have been thinking through these as you’ve outlined, but perhaps you have inadvertently turned your beloved characters into mere chess pieces that you move around the board as your story demands. If you suspect this may be the case, I recommend a dedicated outline pass for character arcs. Bearing your major characters in mind, think about who they are and what they are like at the beginning of the story, and what they are like at the end. Have they changed at all? Have they had transformative experiences? Have they learned anything? Have they been damaged, traumatized, even killed? If they come out of the story pretty much the same as they entered it, is that really something anyone would care to read?

This character arc pass may disrupt your intricately-plotted outline, and that’s perfectly fine. Good characters should do that. They should mess up your plans and do things you don’t expect, but which are consistent with their personalities, histories, and motives. If you don’t know how a character would react to a particular situation, think on it until you do. Have conversations in your head with them until they have a clear and distinct voice and you feel that you understand them.

Character arcs are a bit like themes in that they often emerge organically from the underlying structure of your story, and may even develop unintentionally. This is fine, too. Real people often don’t know how they would react to a situation until they encounter it, and the same can hold for storytelling, as well.

My recommendation is that, after completing your outline and doing a character arc pass, if you still don’t understand your characters and how the events of the story affect them (and indeed, how they drive and affect the events of the story, themselves) then you should do more passes on the outline until you feel more confident in that understanding.

Writing the Book

Well, now there’s nothing left to do but write the book! You know your characters, you know your plot, you may have an idea of your themes. You have a strong outline, possibly a story treatment. Now comes the hard part: actually writing a book.

Truth be told, there is no secret to this. It is ultimately a matter of discipline. I have participated in National Novel Writing Month for a number of years, which has been good motivation for putting words down. You can use whatever best motivates you. My personal writing ritual is as follows:

  1. Set down a specific time each day for writing. Block out at least an hour.
  2. Throughout the day, give at least some thought to what I will be writing today, so I don’t feel completely lost once I’m sitting at the keyboard. (If you have a dull or monotonous job or no job at all, you can use that time to think about your story!)
  3. When the time comes, I pull out my laptop, put on some music (usually something ambient or at least without lyrics, as I find them distracting), and launch WriteMonkey. (I recommend using any distraction-eliminating full-screen text editor.)
  4. I set my goal for the day (usually the 1667 words called for by NaNoWriMo) and start writing until I reach the goal, and then continue until I feel I am at a stopping point. I hate leaving off in the middle of something really interesting!

It’s easy to get stuck and worry about the specific words you are using to tell your story. Remember: none of this is set in stone. You can always change it later. What matters most is getting words down–any words–to tell your story. Get it done, start to finish. Work on it every day, or at least set aside time on a very regular basis, such as several times a week. Personally, I try to stick to a weekday schedule, giving myself the weekends to recharge and think through what’s happening next.

If you have what amounts to a 100,000 word novel idea, write about 1800 words for it a day (that’s less than the length of this post!), and do this five days a week, you will have a rough draft completed in less than 12 weeks. That’s not even 3 months! Once you have a rough draft completed, you can work on editing and revising, although many people look for professional help with that (and there is certainly no shame in doing so). Everything beyond the first draft is outside the scope of this post, however, so I will have to end it here!

Outro

I hope this post has been informative and enlightening. I’ve done my best to describe my own approach to novel writing. Above all, the most important thing is discipline. You have to keep working on it, day after day, even when you don’t feel like it, or when you feel like it’s going nowhere, or it’s bad, or you’ll never get it published, or no one will like it, etc. etc. etc. Virtually all writers experience these intrusive thoughts of self-doubt. They don’t mean you suck or that your story is bad. Push past them and keep writing. You can do it!

Filed Under: Authors, News Tagged With: author, interview, J. D. Huffman, scifi, young adult

The Importance of Being Well-Researched

September 2, 2018 By kireland Leave a Comment

Why should I research? It’s a fantasy novel, everything is made up anyway. 

What should I research? There’s no such thing as hyper drives.

***

Research for writing isn’t just scientific, or library work. It is also important to research social structures, and people watch. Research lends an element of reality to your fiction, anchoring it into a solid idea that your readers can hang on to while they suspend disbelief about everything else fantastical going on in your setting.

For example, if your characters are riding horses and you don’t know the first thing about taking care of a horse, jumping on and off their horse like they’re driving a car, leaving it anywhere they please and expecting it not to have moved… Your lack of knowledge shows and any reader who has a basic understanding about horses will be offended and thrown out of the book. 

Anyone who DOES know horses will put your book down in disgust. A horse is an animal with its own brain and motivations and not all horses are exactly the same. They will react to different stimulus different, some horses are shy, some are bold, some are extremely food motivated.

Same goes for cars. You know not to leave the keys in the ignition or to leave it unlocked on the side of a busy street. You know that you can’t drive on a flat tire. Your character doing all these things without acknowledging the consequences of them in your story will make people irritated at you, not your character for being dumb. If your plot depends on the character getting from point A in the city to point B in the city and they have to take a special mode of transportation, look into how that works.

This isn’t to say that you need to be an expert on everything horse-related in order to have horses be in your book for 0.5 seconds. However, having a basic understanding of what horses eat and how people take care of them would ground your fiction with enough realism that your readers will be able to forgive you the goat horns and bat wings on your main character.

If you are writing a historical fiction, look up fashion of that time period. Having women dressed for a different century than what you established in the narrative is a good indication that you don’t really care about the story or the reader enough to bother. If you haven’t researched your time period, its not really a historical fiction…

Are you writing space fantasy? Even if the technology doesn’t exist now, knowing what we currently have will give you an idea on how to explain the technology of the future. Maybe certain franchises didn’t explain how Warp Speed actually worked, but they did understand that stars are far apart and that fighting in space is a 3D affair. They kept a sense of reality in that there is some kind of work that must be done to maintain your equipment. You can still dramatize, but having that underpinning of reality will make the story hold up better in that second or third read.

Research doesn’t have to be a big involved thing either. It doesn’t have to be done at a library or on the internet. Personal experiences are a kind of research as well. If you don’t know how people work or understand them, its impossible to write believable characters. An example of this would be a white person trying to write people from a different culture. If you only know people from that culture as what you’ve seen on TV, you will end up with “Hello my name is Apu, welcome to Seven-Eleven.” The character would be nothing but stereotypes as viewed from a white perspective. This will alienate any readers who aren’t white. Not everyone who reads fiction is white. It is completely okay to write characters you don’t actually identify with or as, but make them people and not just cardboard cutouts by doing some research on how their culture influences them.

Further example is writing characters who are much older than the author. Adults can act childish from time to time, but to have all of them acting that way all the time is annoying to read. Adults grew up in different circumstances. When you don’t know that home computers didn’t become a thing until the late 1970’s and you have adults acting weird about logging into a computer, you’re missing a frustration that is universal. You weren’t born knowing how to write or read or drive a car. Imagine not learning those things until you’re in your twenties and being asked to do them without getting any instructions first. They don’t get computers because they were already adults when computers became a thing.

This extends to writing characters that aren’t the same gender or sexual orientation as you. Making them act stereotypical will offend your readers. Researching what events led to that character becoming who they are now will add a realistic depth that makes them not only more understandable but more likable, even if they’re the antagonist. Most importantly, this makes them more memorable.

Write what you know and when you don’t know it, go find out.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: fantasy, scifi, writing, young adult

Meet the Staff: Adele Owen

August 19, 2018 By kireland Leave a Comment

Adele Owen is the Sr. Editor for Moirae Publishing, who also writes articles for Yatta-Tachi and is working on multiple manuscripts of her own. She has also published an interview with Thomas Astruc, the writer of Miraculous Ladybug.

She is still proud of her Girl Scout Gold award, and the fact that she participates in NANOWRIMO every year. She studied at the University of North Texas for a degree in English before switching to Southern New Hampshire University to major in creative writing.

She loves anime, reading, and her cat. Her favorite genre to read is fantasy, with a splash of young adult romance. 

She can be found on Tumblr, posting writing prompts, and Twitter. 

Filed Under: Authors, Bios Tagged With: Adele Owen, fantasy, interview, scifi, young adult

Meet the Staff: K. E. Ireland

August 5, 2018 By kireland Leave a Comment

K. E. Ireland is a writer, but also the Managing Director of Moirae Publishing. She created the company with Clockwork Joker and Lilye Kerryna in order to bring to life more books they were interested in reading. 

She went to the University of Alabama in Huntsville, graduated with a Bachelors in Technical Communications, and has independently published three books in her young adult scifi series; The Natan Fleet Show. She has further books in the series planned, as well as multiple other projects unrelated to the struggles and plight of Vathion Gannatet. One of her projects is Danger Around Mount Pallin; a Webtoon she is writing the script for, Clockwork Joker is in charge of art, and Dance of Thorns is in charge of coloring. 

Ireland has several loves, including her cats, her house, and her quiet time. Often times she can be found asleep, covered in cats, or on Tumblr, covered in cats. On occasion, Ireland can be convinced to draw sketches of things, but her passion is writing first and foremost when it comes to expressing herself creatively.

She has chosen to re-publish her existing books under the Moirae Publishing name, and is on the look-out for other interesting stories that might be passed up by larger brands.

Her personal website is www.keireland.com, and while she has a Twitter and Facebook account, she’d rather be reblogging cat pics on her Tumblr. 

Filed Under: Authors, Bios Tagged With: author, interview, K. E. Ireland, Natan Fleet Show, scifi, young adult

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