I watched the pilot and second episode of the new sci-fi offering Terra Nova the other day. For the uninitiated: our world is royally screwed and barely habitable about a hundred (ish) year from now. Technology has surprisingly only-sort-of come to our rescue, in the guise of a "crack in time" that allows us to send people and objects 85 million years into an alternate past (note the key word "alternate" there - it's code for "now we can make up whatever the hell we want, and put Jurassic and Triassic creatures in the Cretaceous period. Woot!". It's a very special form of Handwavium.) So we recruit the best and brightest to send on a one-way trip back to live with dinosaurs in the hope that it''ll inexplicably help those stuck back on Pollutions R Us.

Because that totally makes sense.

No writing games this week - too frantic preparing for Paris. But I do have two great posts for you (okay, one's a podcast, but it's still a "post".)

One - on your author-voice(s) and your character's voice(s): what they are, how to find it (or cheat at it, if you're struggling), how to know you've got one, and how to protect it once you have one.

Two - a podcast on "the Hollywood Formula" over at Writing Excuses (a great running series about all manner of writing, especially spec. fic). Don't cring at the word "formula", this is actually a great breakdown of how the major emotional arc works between characters in a story, and it's a great tool for getting to the crux of creating an emotionally satisfying arc.

I've been trying to learn French recently. Well, more accurately, I've been trying to cram French recently - I have a trip to Paris coming up, which I've known about since March, and in fact even had the French-learning software since March, but being a writer it was absolutely necessary to procrastinate until weeks before I'm due to leave, despite my promise to myself that the next time I went to France I'd make sure I could speak the language. And even, oddly enough, despite the fact that I actually enjoy learning languages. Writer's logic.

I'm using Rosatte stone, which is great for learning nouns and verbs and adjectives like colour and number, but absolutely terrible for the more subtle nuances of language like pronouns, abstract verbs (or abstract anything), grammar, possessives, and anything other than vocab, really. You're shown a picture of a girl holding a pen, and given a phrase. You repeat the phrase. You can even match the phrase to the picture later on,or similar pictures, based on your ability to recognise the word 'girl' and 'pen', but you have no way of knowing what it was that phrase actually says. A girl and a pen? The girl's pen? A girl with a pen? A girl has a pen? The girl likes her pen? No idea. It's down to how you've interpreted the image. They then try to build on this complete absence of understanding, and you end up with an extremely superficial grasp of the language. I spent an entire chapter lesson thinking they were trying to teach me present and past tense, when in fact they were teaching negative nouns.

I've taken to having Google Translate open on the other screen. New phrases are typed in, I see what they're trying to teach me, and we go from there. This pretty much violates their notion of "natural language learning", where you learn by being immersed in the language - it's never translated back to your native tongue, you work purely in the learned language. But static images really can't convey abstract concepts like possession vs use vs proximity, and these concepts are crucial to language.

I don't know if I really have a point here, other than that I think it's fascinating just how complex our communication has become. We have concepts that cannot be reliably expressed in any other form. And yet, there still exist languages that have no number words, or no pronouns, or no measurement of time, distance or count - because the people using that language have never needed it. There's a school of thought that language controls our thinking, because thoughts need to be expressed in words. I find that a flimsy argument in some respects - it certainly is possible to think without words, and the connections between ideas are far faster and more efficient when you don't slow them down to force them into language. But there is the notion that as a culture, there are entire notions that are left behind if they're not catered for by your language.

I've run into the issue once or twice. At times, when I've been utterly exhausted or running a dangerous fever, I've had episodes where I have woken and my brain's reality check had gone for lunch. My theory is that some sections of my brain were still "alseep", and I had no idea what was real, what was out of memory or imagination. I couldn't remember my name, my life, or even that it was impossible for there to be a spaceship outside my bedroom door and the toasters to be having a revolution and siding with the vampires. The notion of 'me' was entirely gone, I was just a floating experience, scrambling to make sense of things with absolutely no compass for what was possible and what wasn't.

It is extroadinarily difficult to communicate this notion of depersonalisation using a tool that assumes the speaker has some form of identity. I say "I felt" but there was no 'me'. There was a focus of experience, but no personality inside. I couldn't remember what it felt like to be me - I couldn't even remember that I was supposed to be able to feel that way. Like a blank slate, but a slate that still cares for its own existence, and is resolute that no damn toaster is going to feed it to a vampire, spaceship or none. We can't rationally discuss entities that experience this. Just like those Amazon tribes can't discuss how many animals they hunted, or how old they are, or where they were last winter.

Perhaps that's one of the points of science fiction - to find the concepts that we haven't needed to talk about yet, so we can stretch our language to fit them.

This weekend I cooked my first steak in my new place. Just as I was about to take the steak from the pan, the smoke alarms in the kitchen and the two rooms adjoining the kitchen sounded off. Mad scramble between preserving dinner and preserving eardrums aside (man those things are loud), I was rather taken by the idea of an earsplitting alarm to tell you that your steak is done.

So, the writing exercise: your own version of a steak alarm - take an everyday invention (like the smoke alarm) and twist it sideways. You can make it as useful or comical as you like. Now write a story utilising your invention.

One step further - what are the farreaching implications of your invention? For example, if earsplitting alarms are used to notify people of dinner, how would we communicate more important information, such as (for example) your house is on fire?

The final days of Nano draw to a close, and I'm spectacularly behind. I've even forgotten to update the Nano counter on the page (though a quick glance reveals I was only remembering to do that once a week anyway.) As so often happens (in November especially, it seems) life intervened. But that's okay - as I said last week, focus on what you have achieved. I have an extra seventeen thousand words that otherwise I mayn't have written for several more months, a good notion for where the novel is actually going, and I enjoyed feeling part of the community of people who were attempting this. The many tweets from Nano-ites all over the world were great to read - this was the first year I'd tried Nano as a tweeter.

Congratulations to those of you (I've heard there are quite a few) who made it over the line, and equal congratulations to those who didn't - you still wrote something that you mightn't have otherwise, and that is, after all, the whole point.

A quick review of Nano's wordcount scoreboard puts Melbourne at #19, with a total of  20 million words, well ahead of many US and European cities (and countries!) with a much greater population than ours. Not that it's a competition. But hah! Fantasy has also clocked 471 million, more than twice the wordage of the next highest genres (Young Adult, at 227 million, with SciFi not far behind at 210 million).

Of course, for a lot of the world there's still 48 hours to go, so rankings may change, but I feel a certain pride that my city and genre are so highly represented amongst people writing an arbitrary number of words to see if they can.

There are a lot of other points of view on the process of worldbuilding. Since my brain is utterly beseiged by end-of-semester madness, I thought I'd share some with you.

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment. It is, however, getting to the stage where it's rather silly to link posts individually, so I'm just going to link to the tag lookup result here.

I think my post publishing dates have gone skewiff, here, but anyway.

What's for lunch?

We have settled convicts living mostly-underground on an iceworld gathering phosphorescent light and guarding their sun. They are, at some point, going to get hungry, and their local environment is not (necessarily) going to be especially forthcoming with edibles.

Typically, Earth'sfrozen areas aren't abundant with life; while some plant life may survive, almost no animal life stays there permanently - and the few that do are generally just hanging on until a warmer, more fertile period returns. Even with adaptations, (and especially considering some of the adaptations life here will need to survive the gamma rays) it's unlikely this planet is going to be teeming with life like a rainforest. So what can our inhabitants eat? 

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment. It is, however, getting to the stage where it's rather silly to link posts individually, so I'm just going to link to the tag lookup result here.

Where'd you lot come from?

Last week, our inhabitants became settlers from another world, which brought up a whole lot of new questions - namely, what the hell are you lot doing here, don't you know that thing's gonna blow soon?

So, the most interesting thing in my Google Reader this week was the development of an 'e-skin' for robots that enables a sense of touch. There's a faily detailed article on the breakthrough here, but the potential leap forward in robot and cyborg technology is astounding.

In other, quite unconnection thoughts, Nathan Bransford has an excellent post on the problem of initial ideas, where we tend to hold too tightly to an initial idea instead of allowing the work's central concept to evolve as the work progresses. Robert Jackson Bennet has an interesting post discussing the difference between 'genre' and 'literature', and touching briefly on why each is so nonsensically snooty about the other, making gap-bridging near-impossible. Though I think he may have done well to examine some authors who've been bridging the gap for decades, such as Atwood and LeGuin (and indeed most spec fic "Masters"). But still - good points, thoughtfully made.

And I want to share a Chasing Ray post on a book that I, honestly, haven't read yet and hadn't heard of until this post, but the premise behind it is fascinating me, so I intend to find and read it in the near future. The book is The Thief of Broken Toys (Tim Lebbon), and it's (apparently) a story that builds fear and horror not out of gore or violence, but sadness. Which, for me at least, is an instant "I have to see how he's done that!".

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment. It is, however, getting to the stage where it's rather silly to link posts individually, so I'm just going to link to the tag lookup result here.

Meet the natives

Or rather, not natives.

As we've examined before, the life-expectancy of our star means that anyone who lives here either underwent fantastically rapid evolution, or moved in for reasons of their own.

Yesterday spelled the end of Aussiecon, the 68th annual world science fiction convention, held in Melbourne this year. Sunday night was the Hugo award ceremony, which actually had a tie for the main event - Miéville's The City & The City and Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl tied for Best Novel. The rest of the Hugo award winners are listed here.

AussieCon runs this week, Thursday to Monday, with about a bajillion panels on everything from fantasy cities to cyberpunk feminism. I've gone through the program, marking the panels I want to attend (and wishing that I had a few shared-mind clones to see the ones that clash), and wondering how the whole process is going to work for people who can't take an entire morning off to register tomorrow... eek. Ah well.

In actual news, Wylie's lost his fight against Random House for the ebook rights. The rights return to Random House - a strong reminder to read your contracts carefully for which rights revert when and why.

Jessica at Dystel and Goderich muses on intellectual property vs creative commons. There's long been the argument that IP exists solely to protect a wealthy nation's ability to make money at the expense of poorer nations. While the argument's obvious with pharmaceutical companies, it also covers authors' copyright. While I'm a strong advocate of copyright, there does seem to be an issue to resolve, here.

Joe Konrath is musing on some of the possibilities that self-publishing grants in terms of creative control - releasing different versions of books, for example, or revitalising the 'choose your own adventure' style of novel into a more literary concept. I'll admit, I'm intrigued by the notion of playing with the format like that.

Henry Baum gives us a brief impression of his day on Kindle Nation - complete with supposed SNAFU by Amazon. Amazon disabled his buy-button in the middle of the promotion because Kobo had undercut the price of the book in a way that wasn't in Baum's control. Mini-Macmillian-dummy-spit all over again.

And on a completely unrelated note, because someone asked me the other day: Nathan Bransford explains to us what 'High Concept' actually is - and it's not what it sounds like.

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment. It is, however, getting to the stage where it's rather silly to link posts individually, so I'm just going to link to the tag lookup result here.

Let there be light

So our world is ice, with heat and safe living areas forged from volcanic tubes and tunnels. Our people live mostly underground, venturing out only during the night when the sun's gamma rays are hidden.

Outside, they'll be able to see a little by the moonlight, most of the time. And they may even borrow a few tricks from the Egyptians, using mirrors to reflect moonlight down into the tunnels. That's not much light to see by, however.

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment. It is, however, getting to the stage where it's rather silly to link posts individually, so I'm just going to link to the tag lookup result here.

A short one today, because it's now that time of semester when my brain starts melting from answering student questions and resolving staff problems.

Heat

Our ice-world is volcanic, but it's still going to be uncomfortably cold to live on. While our inhabitants can huddle near volcanic vents and lava beds, heat is still going to be scarce - fire is difficult to create on an iceworld, and wood requires venturing up to the surface anyway, so our inhabitants are either going to have to have a technological adaptation to ward off the chill, or be physically adapted to deal with it.

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment. It is, however, getting to the stage where it's rather silly to link posts individually, so I'm just going to link to the tag lookup result here.

Lay of the land

I don't know about you, but I'm rather sick of maths-y mathsness for the time being. So no more maths for the moment at least. We have an ice-cold world with a super-long year and three moons, and people are going to need to live somewhere.

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment.

The sixty-fourth day of Fentebruary

 Our slightly-larger-than-earth ice planet rotates around its deadly start once every 120 years, while its three moons - a small dark, medium red and large white - loop around once every 426, 1150 and 5840 days respectively. We have four eclipses, occuring every 1380 days (dark-red), 7008 days (dark-white), 18396 days (red-white) and 22075 days (triple eclipse). That's earth-days, by the way - 24-hour rotations. We could change the day length (planetary rotation's more or less whatever you want it to be - it's dependant on how fast things were going when the planet was formed, and tidal locking stuff, so have at it. Anything up to about 96 hours is okay- after that, the temperature fluctutation between night and day gets too extreme. Also keep in mind the faster your rotation, the more volatile your weather.) but we've already got complicated things here, let's keep it simple.

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment.

Over the moon

Our bigger-and-heavier-than-Earth planet orbits around its deadly star every 120 years. That's a looong time to wait for Christmas - almost two generations. It'd be nice if they had something else to look at in the meantime.

Satellites are important to a planet's health and not just from a spiritual or aesthetic perspective of the inhabitants. Orbiting satellites help prevent tidal locking - a planet being stuck with the same side always facing its sun, the way the moon always faces the same side to earth. A planet that's tidally locked to a sun will fry on one side and freeze on the other, becoming rapidly uninhabitable. Satellites also help protect a planet from passing comets and asteroids, by influencing the gravitational pull or even providing a physical shield (if we're lucky).

With a solar year of 120 years, I'd like to add a couple of moons in there - it'll help break up that 120 years with varying kinds of eclipses and alignments. And besides, multiple moons is a great ingredient for inventing religions and cultures.

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment.

Planetary plans

So our planet is orbiting around our super-hot, super-short-lived, super-deadly blue star once ever 120 years, far enough out that it's largely made of ice. Or it would be, assuming there's water. There doesn't have to be. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

How big is this planet? What's the gravity like? Do we have huge creatures loping gracefully through a moon-like bound, or short, squalid inhabitants hugging the surface? Are there metals? How thick is the atmosphere?

Some of these are going to be decided for us by the fact that we're orbiting a blue star. Blue star radiation isn't just deadly to DNA, it also breaks molecular bonds in a process called photodissociation - blue stars steal your planet's free oxygen from its upper atmosphere. Without free oxygen, there's no life-as-we-know-it, no fire or civilised technology. So we're going to have to do something about that.

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment.

Starting with stars

I like blue stars, they're problematic. They're too hot, too big, too short-lived, and emit so much deadly-to-DNA UV radiation that they make the Australian hole in the ozone layer look like a giant lead umbrella. Problems are good - they force you to be creative with your solutions, give you opportunities for inventiveness and originality. Problems are the antidote to lazy worldbuilding.

Blue stars only live a few billion years - no where near enough time to get an intelligent life form off the ground. Consider that our planet's about four billion years old, and homo sapiens only started appearing, at the earliest, four hundred thousand years ago, it means anything smart enough to think about the sun in their sky isn't going to have the chance to do so for long. Even your longest-lived blue star will be threatening to go nova when your native species have just begun metaphorically crawling. Which means either we'll have a native species with a really big problem, or a some settlers for whom such a star was either ideal, or the best they could get. All three of those sound promising as starting points.

It's often been quoted that the main difference between us and [insert monstrous invader of your choice] is that we bury our dead. It is, for some reason, something that we identify as a key factor of being human - that we have a ritual to honour and mark the passage of our friends and kin.

Animals don't bury their dead - with the exception perhaps of elephants, few animals die in such a peaceful fashion as to allow it. Usually, nature takes care of the basic process, and the dead are someone else's lunch. If you're being hunted by lions as a matter of course, it makes little sense to risk your whole herd in order to perform a ritual for a member who's no longer there. 

It's a recognised luxury, however - whenever the dead start to outnumber those who are left to bury them, rituals tend to go out the window. Consider the mass graves during the plagues (and that was at a time when the law decreed the dead had to be dealt with for the survival of everyone else). Any horror movie or video game will show you - dead left where they lay signifies total social panic - a regression back into our animal values - survivalist rather than social. 

What your society does with its dead speaks volumes. Their mythology and religion is laid bare by the basic rituals (or lack thereof) that mark important life moments - birth, death, marriage or mating, entering adulthood.