Space Travel for Writers

Five basic rules for space travel in science fiction. Sci-fi writers probably know these already, but I'm still surprised how often they're ignored.

(The NRI, or Nerd Rage Indicator, is an estimate of how likely you are to get flak for breaking a given rule. 1 is the least likely (e.g. that guy who runs your local comic shop cares, and only that guy). 5 is the most likely (e.g. Wil Wheaton and John Scalzi publicly destroy your sci-fi cred)).

RULE #1: There is no sound in space. Sound means fluid (air, water, etc.) vibrating against your ear drum. No air, no vibrations, no sound. This happens more in movies than novels, but you should still be aware of it before describing that "bone-shaking explosion that ripped the skies."
NRI: 1 (as important as it is, most people don't notice until it's brought to their attention, especially in prose).

RULE #2: Astral objects are really, really, really far away from each other. The moon is 384 megameters (it's a thing!) away. At our very fastest, it takes us 10 hours to get there. Not so bad? Try Mars. At the same speed, it would take 2 months to get there at best. Jupiter? Almost 2 years. The nearest star system (which may not even have planets)? More than a century. Mostly this means your spaceships either need fuel and provisions for the whole trip, or they have to go really, really fast. The latter, though, raises other considerations (see Rules #3 and #4).
NRI: 5.

RULE #3: Spaceships can't travel faster than the speed of light, no matter how much we want them to. Unless science is wrong, it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate an object to the speed of light. There are ways you can mess with this (see Rule #5), but you should at least give a nod to the rule before doing away with it.
NRI: 4 (I figure Wil Wheaton can't complain too much since the biggest violation of this rule is Star Trek's "warp speed").

RULE #4: If you travel fast enough, you have to deal with the weirder effects of special relativity. In particular: time dilation. Effectively, the closer you get to light speed, the slower time moves for you. So if you fly to Jupiter so fast it only takes you 2 days, then decades will have passed back on Earth (and probably faster spaceships will have been built, which is pretty interesting in itself).
NRI: 3 (Star Trek totally ignored it, and most people have a hard time getting their heads around it. I'd say you're 50/50 for getting flak on it).

RULE #5: You can bend the rules, even make them up, but you must be consistent. Wormholes, hyperspace, jumpgates, folding space--these are all viable (and mostly-scientific) methods of faster-than-light travel. The details are entirely up to you, but once you make up the rules, don't break them. If you use a jump gate to get from Earth to Epsilon Eridani in five minutes, you can't say later, "It'll only take three hours for the Eridanis fleet to come through that gate and destroy us all!"
NRI: 5.

A lot has been done already in science fiction, which actually makes things easier for you. You don't have to explain jumpgates or wormholes much to include them. But even if you don't explain them to the reader, you need to know what's behind them. Not the science, necessarily, but the rules that govern it.

Are there any rules I missed? To the comments!

What is Your Work Worth?

There's an interesting article here on why Zoe Winters upped her self-published e-book prices from 99 cents to $4.95. The bottom line (though you should read the whole thing) was she felt the low price attracted readers she didn't want--readers who expected low-or-no prices, and who weren't really the kind of loyal fanbase that grow a career.

Personally I think this is a smart move, but there's been some debate. The arguments seem to be of two general camps: (1) Don't you want to sell as many copies as possible? (2) Don't you want to get your work to as many readers as possible? Both sound reasonable, but let's take a closer look.


SELLING AS MANY COPIES AS POSSIBLE
Makes sense, right? The more copies you sell, the more money you make. Well, anyone who's taken a HS economics course can tell you that's not exactly true. By that logic, you should sell your books for a penny apiece (or free!), but you'd have to sell 500 copies just to buy a Happy Meal. If you managed to sell 10,000 copies a month, it might cover your electric bill. It is easier to sell more copies at lower prices, but there is a point below which it's not worth doing.

Zoe mentions this in the article:

When I sold 6,500 ebooks in June 2010, that was around $2,300. Well, most people can’t live on that, especially after you take out Uncle Sam’s cut.

I’m not saying that everybody or even most indies will be able to make a living anyway, but if it’s your goal, 99 cents might not be the way to go. You only have to sell 677 ebooks in a month to make that same $2,300 if you are selling at $4.95. . . . the math just doesn’t favor 99 cent ebooks for anyone hoping to make a living.

REACHING AS MANY READERS AS POSSIBLE
But what if your goal isn't money? What if you want to reach readers? What if you want to build that ever-elusive platform, so you can sell more books later?

It reminds me a lot of a debate about a year ago when John Scalzi blasted a magazine for paying fiction writers 1/5 of a cent per word. A lot of people felt like he was shutting down "the little guy's markets." As though aspiring writers needed low-or-no-pay markets to break in, work our way up, and build us a platform.

Scalzi's response (paraphrased): If your work is good, then it's worth good money. If your work isn't good, then giving it away for cheap isn't going to make it better, nor will anybody notice.

In the original article, Zoe noted that the 99-cent buyers were largely people looking for bargains, or who hoarded books intending to read them "later." These buyers placed as much value on the books as they had paid for them. Because they paid little, they also paid little attention. These are not readers who will remember you, who will watch for your latest novel in the Kindle store, who will tell their friends they have to pick up your book.

But what if they do? What if your book is so good it rivals Dan Brown and J.A. Konrath, regardless of the price? If that's the case, why the heck are you selling it for 99 cents?! Seriously, if your work is that good, isn't it worth more than that?


WHAT MATTERS TO YOU?
I'm assuming, of course, that what matters to you is earning a living. If you write for the love of writing, then sell for whatever the heck you want.* Otherwise, you have to ask yourself what your work is worth to you. There may be a point at which 99 cents makes economic sense, but I'm not sure.

It takes me a year or more to finish a novel. If people don't want them (and so far, they haven't), I'd rather figure out why and get better, not spend my time promoting a mediocre work for a couple hundred bucks. My opinion: if $4.95 a book isn't selling very much, write better, not cheaper. Don't settle. Your time is worth more than you think.


* Though if you write just for the love of it, why are you selling at all?

A Thousand Ideas in an Hour

(Remix)

In Orson Scott Card's Characters and Viewpoint and How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, he this thing he calls A Thousand Ideas in an Hour. It's a fun exercise and a great way to get past writer's block. The idea is this. Starting with whatever idea you have, ask these three questions: How? Why? What result?

For example, you've got a princess locked in a tower. How did she get there? Why is she locked up? What happens as a result? Every answer is a branch. Some branches will end quickly, others will lead you into the rest of your story. Toss in a little, "What could go wrong?" and toss out anything that feels too cliche, and you've got yourself a story.

I did this once with a class of highschoolers, and it was their favorite part of the class. It went something like this:

Let's start with something simple. Give me an occupation.

Teacher.
Banker.
Lifeguard.
Swimmer.

Okay, let's go with the banker. What could go wrong at a bank?

It could get robbed.

Sure. I don't think we need to ask why yet, so how might this happen?

A man walks in with a gun and asks for money.
Some men take the bank hostage.
Someone blows up the safe.
Someone inside the bank robs it.

Okay, great. Let's go with someone inside the bank. Who could do that? Who's inside a bank?

Bank tellers.
Security guards.
Managers.

How could one of these folks rob the bank?

The guard could let other robbers inside the bank.
The teller could grab some money off the counter when nobody's looking.
The guard could raise a false alarm and, while everyone's distracted, go into the vault.
...or take money off the counter.
...or take money from someone's pocket.

What about the security guard. Why would he do that?

He hates his job.
He's been planning to rob the bank for months/years, and got hired so he could do it.
He needs the money for his daughter's operation.

Around here we had to end the class, but you get the idea. Leading the discussion, I tried to follow paths that sounded more original and had more conflict potential, but any of these answers could be turned into an interesting story with some more work.


Try it out and see what you come up with. Better yet, tell me how you brainstorm to get past writer's block.

Monopoly, Problems with

You may be aware that I like board games. So it may surprise you to discover--especially if you're not into the euro-games--that I don't like Monopoly. I mean I really, really dislike this game. This post is about why it's just not a good game. Objectively.

If Monopoly is like your FAVORITESEST GAME EVAR, I apologize. To each his own, and all that. But I'm still going to tear it apart.

That's a lot of freaking Monopolys

The Lack of Meaningful Decisions. Much like in fiction, games are made interesting by meaningful decisions--choices the protagonist (in this case, you) makes that affect the outcome of the game. In Risk, for example, you must decide where and how to allocate your forces, while in Candy Land you just do what the card says.

Monopoly is closer to Candy Land, unfortunately. There are decisions to be made, but they are few. Do you buy the property you landed on or not? Do you buy houses/hotels? And of course, how do you get your brother to give you Boardwalk in exchange for Baltic and Waterworks? With the exception of property trading, these decisions are usually non-decisions.

Unbalanced Gameplay. Rents begin at $2-50 (in our version), which, with your starting cash of $2,000, is negligible. Rents only get interesting around 2 or 3 houses (which is why "Do I buy houses?" is a non-decision: if you have spare money, then yes). The problem is the rents of 4 houses or a hotel is HUGE on most properties, and it costs no more to get there than to get to 2 houses. All it takes is for some sap to land on your hoteled Indiana Ave once to cripple them. Which leads to the third problem...

The Long, Slow Crawl to the End. So he lands on your hotel and loses all his cash and most of his houses. That's okay, he can still come back if you land on his properties, right? Well, no. He had to sell his houses, so the rent he gets from you now is (as I said) negligible. Certainly not enough to afford your four-figure rent and--whoops!--he landed on it again.

Game over? Well, no. He still has houses to sell, properties to mortgage, math to do. He has to wait until ALL his resources are gone. Why? Because them's the rules.


Of course house rules can mitigate some of this, but Parker Brothers is so convinced of the goodness of their game (or maybe just the money they can make from it), that they haven't changed the rules in decades (or God-knows-how-many Intellectual Property-opoly versions they've made). In fact, they've made it worse recently by adding a computer that knows nothing about your "rules."

So what do you think? Is Monopoly a good game and I'm just missing the point? Enlighten me.

Don't Knock Outlines 'til You've Tried Them

I freaking LOVE outlining. I know a lot of writers like to wing it, and there's nothing wrong with that, but don't knock outlining until you've tried it. That's all I'm saying.

Everything you love about winging it is what I love about outlining. It has the mystery, the discovery, the excitement of uncovering a new story, getting to know new characters. I love the random scenes that pop into my head like a movie trailer. I love sketching those scenes out, then figuring out the plot points that connect it to the other ones.

Outlines are fast. It takes me months to finish a first draft--usually over a year. But I can sketch out a world and an outline in less than a month.

Outlines give me faith the idea is sound. The plot may change during the draft, but at least I know it won't crap out halfway through. You can't paint yourself in a corner if you start with a plan (well, you can, but it's a lot harder).

My inner editor is not involved. See, he thinks all those dialog and scene snippets I'm writing will never make it into the final work. Also he's confused by roman numerals.

And despite popular opinion, outlining does not suck the fun out of the draft. Not for me, anyway. The scenes I'm excited about outlining are the ones I'm most excited to write in the draft. What slows me down are the parts I didn't plan for.

If writing by the seat of your pants works for you, then by all means keep doing it! But if you've never planned ahead before, give it a try. You might be pleasantly surprised. If it helps, you can think of it like a first draft, but with bulleted lists instead of paragraphs.

Whether you outline or not, what do YOU love about your process?

Waterworld and Other Worst Case Scenarios

I learned some interesting things in the aftermath of the Rule of Cool post. In particular, did you know the underwater future of Waterworld can never happen? Shocking, considering one of the main messages of that (stupidly expensive) film was: "If we don't take better care of our planet, this is what will happen."

In order for the world to be entirely, or even mostly, covered with water, sea levels would have to rise over 8 kilometers.* But if all of the ice in the entire world melted, sea levels would only rise about 80 m. At worst, the Earth would go from this:

To this:**

Interesting. Devastating. But not world-destroying, which, really, is what I was hoping for.

So what's an inspiring author (who wants a world covered entirely in water) to do? Here are some possibilities:

• Fantasy World. It's not Earth, so who's to say how much ice may or may not have melted to drown the civilization underneath?
• Ice Meteor. An asteroid made entirely of frozen water crashes into the planet, and then melts. Such a meteor would have to have a radius of 900 km (about a seventh the size of the moon) to contain enough water, and that kind of meteor collision would have other consequences. But we're talking thousands of years in the future anyway, right? A crater the size of Australia wouldn't be a big deal by then.
• Shrink the Earth. Theoretically, if enough internal pressure were released such that the Earth shrank, the existing water would be enough to cover the globe. Of course the very act of releasing that pressure, combined with whatever catastrophic event triggered the release, would probably wipe out life on Earth anyway.
• Science Is Wrong. This is my favorite one to fall back to. Science is not often wrong, but considering how much we don't know and those times science has been wrong before, it's always possible. Maybe the Earth is filled with water that comes to the surface. Maybe there's more ice underneath Antarctica than we thought. Who knows?

I'm not saying I'm going to do any of these to my world, but it's fun to think of the possibilities. Speaking of which, this list of risks to civilization is all kinds of awesome, especially for those of you considering post-apocalyptic scenarios that are scientifically possible.


* The metric system is just better, sorry. Do your own conversions.

** The map isn't entirely accurate. The program that generated it just uses altitudes, so places like the Caspian Sea wouldn't actually get bigger like they do in the picture.

5 Twitter Tips I Don't Like (and 2 I Do)

I have kind of a love-hate thing with Twitter. On the one hand, I've gotten to know some awesome people because of it. Because of my random comments to people, I've found crit partners and even read a soon-to-be published trilogy.

On the other hand, it's too much. Too many people to follow. Too many links to click. Too many tips to "maximize" Twitter. With that, I give you FIVE TWITTER TIPS I DON'T LIKE:

1) When someone follows you, follow them back. An effective way to boost your numbers, but I don't know if it's the best way to use Twitter. When I see someone is following 1,000+ people, I wonder what their "follow" means (aside from, "Please follow me back so I can look more popular").

At some point, all those people you follow become just white noise. I realize there are lists to manage the tweets you keep up with, but eventually your "All Friends" list becomes meaningless because you're only listening to the lists you've made yourself.

2) Stop following inactive accounts. Apparently there are tools for this, but I don't care if someone I follow isn't active. I'm almost grateful! The folks I unfollow are the ones who clog my Twitter stream with tweet after tweet that I don't want to read.

3) Join Twitter chats. I was on IRC back when the internet was just a baby, and while I met some interesting people and learned interesting things, I also wasted a lot of time. Chat rooms--even useful, focused ones like #yalitchat--are attention suckers (and that's without the complex processing required to figure out who is responding to what). I say: "Use, but use with caution."

4) Personalize your Twitter background. Honestly, I don't even notice what people's backgrounds are. When I decide to follow someone, I look at what they're saying and what they add to my Twitter stream.

5) You have to interact with people. It's called "social media" for a reason, right? Well, yes and no. I love having conversations with people, but I'd hate to think people were unfollowing me just because I didn't talk to them (I'm trying to manage life too, you know?). Some people don't use Twitter for conversation at all, it turns out. They use it for (gasp!) news and information. Who knew?


I think I'm just rebelling against the idea that you "have to" do anything on Twitter. None of these are bad things, and they'll definitely get you followers. But followers are not readers. Though to be fair, here are 2 TIPS I'M A FAN OF:

1)  Be interesting and/or funny. It's cool with me if you just listen on Twitter, but if you're going to speak, try to write something people want to read (even if it's just a couple people--that's cool, too). Helpful tip: A list of random people with an #FF or #WW tag is not interesting.

2) Learn to do the previous tip in 140 characters. This is more of a writing tip than anything. When I started trying to write things for Thaumatrope, I discovered all kinds of words and characters I didn't need. You don't have to abbreviate, or use 'u' instead of 'you' (in fact, I wish you wouldn't). You just have to use the same economy of language you're supposed to have in a novel.

Also, Twitter is a great place to craft that one-sentence pitch of your story. If you can tweet it, you can promote it!

Enough out of me. How do you use Twitter? What tips have you found useful (or not)?