Category Archives: Writing

My Favorite Bits: Astrid Maxxim’s Mansion

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Astrid Maxxim and her parents live in a mansion in Maxxim City.  It is three stories high and huge, with an observatory, a laboratory, and a music room on the unused third floor.  Only a part of the first and second floors are used, the former having a series of unused rooms where servants were once housed.

The inspiration for this mansion comes from two sources.  The first is the house that my grandparents lived in when I was born.  It was a huge, two-story house made of red brick, that had been built over a hundred years ago as a hotel.  About forty years ago, my grandparents sold it and it went through several owners.  A few years ago, it was gutted so that it could be rebuilt, but the owners apparently ran out of money.  When I visited it last, it was just an empty hulk.  The other day I looked for it on Google Earth and found only an empty lot.  I have often dreamed of this house, all the way back to when I was a kid.  Back then, in my dreams, it often appeared as being much larger than in real life.  In recent dreams, it is always in decay.

The second inspiration comes from just a few miles west of the first, in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  I used to live in a crappy apartment building next to the freeway in Tulsa.  This was back when I attended second grade a Paul Revere Elementary School.  Across the road from my apartment was a row of stately mansions.  A school friend of mine lived with his mother in an apartment above the garage behind one of these large, lovely homes.  I believe his grandparents lived in the big house.  I remember going inside one time and seeing a sweeping staircase like something out of Falcon Crest.  A few years ago, I took my kids on a trip through Tulsa, looking at all the places from my childhood.  The row of beautiful old mansions was gone.  Paul Revere Elementary School was gone.  The crappy apartment building I lived in– still there.

Newest Version of His Robot Wife Now Available.

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As I write this, the newest updated version of His Robot Wife is now up at Smashwords and Amazon.  By the time you read this, it should be available for download at all ebook retailers.  On the information page, it says Revision 8-8-12.

On a related note, I am cruising right through the draft of Patience is a Virtue, but I’ve been adding a lot to the original outline– so much that I had to go back and create a new outline.  The result is that this book will probably be much longer than either of the two previous books.  His Robot Girlfriend was 39,000 words, His Robot Wife was 28,000.  Originally I planned the new book to be close to His Robot Girlfriend, but now the outline calls for 64,000 words.  Of course, as I mentioned, usually my drafts get shortened during revision.  But now you know part of what is taking so long.

My Favorite Bits: The texTee and other Technologies

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When I wrote His Robot Girlfriend in 2008, there was no iPad yet.  There was a Sony Reader and an Amazon Kindle, and I imagined them replacing books, so I gave Mike a texTee.  I don’t know how I came up with the name.  Then the iPad came out and made me look kind of lame.  So when I wrote His Robot Wife, I updated the texTee and made it more advanced than an iPad, with a voice activated interface.  Along comes Siri, and I’m outdated again!

One thing they don’t have in my robot stories is a computer.  One of my ideas was that computers just don’t exist anymore as standalone items.  They have computers in everything.  People use texTees (Tablets), wriTees (word processor and more), and vueTees (televisions).  The vueTees have (according to the story): interactivity, inscope (don’t know what that would be), Infinet connections, and threed (probably something like 3D).  They also use t-pods (advanced ipods maybe) and something called an andTee.

I just added the andTee so there would be something that nobody knows about today that they have in the future.  I remember reading the cross-time novels by Harry Turtledove.  In those books, the people of the future have video games and music and something called a fasarta which is never explained.  Maybe the andTee and the fasarta are the same thing.

As I write this, I’m finishing up chapter four of Patience is a Virtue.  I’ve really got a groove going now, but what I’ve written is a lot more than is in my draft.  My books usually get shorter in revision, but this might well be the longest of the three books so far (not too surprising since the others are so short).  Keep an eye out here on your computer or your texTee for more updates.  Thanks.

The Young Sorceress Characters: Kafira Kristos

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As mentioned before, Kafira Kristos is the stand in for Jesus in Senta’s world.  Religion is a problem for most fantasy books.  Writers usually shoe-horn a polytheistic religion into settings like the Middle Ages.  It just doesn’t work.  Of course if you use Christianity, you risk the fury of people who think you might be impugning their religion.

The idea for Kafira was in part out of this necessity as a writer.  I needed a religion and a founder of that religion, but since the story takes place in a world not too unlike our own early 1900s, it wouldn’t have worked with a Greco-Roman type mythology.

I was also thinking once, that assuming Christianity were true, and life exhisted on other planets, would Jesus have appeared on each of those other worlds, or would they have their own unique messiahs.  I decided on the latter for the story and to make it a bit more interesting, made that messiah a woman.  It adds a whole new meaning to “Mother Church.”

Kafira was a Zaeri teacher before she was known as the daughter of God, and so caused the same kind of split between Kafirite and Zaeri that we have between Christain and Jew in our world.  This of course was part of the basic fabric of the story I wanted to tell.

My Favorite Bits: Maxxim Industries

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I enjoy reading my own books.  I guess most authors do.  I’ve been blogging, and still am, about characters in the various books, but I thought I would start writing about all my favorite “bits” that I’ve put in my books– events and people inspired by things that happened in my life, things meant to illustrate a character that someone might have missed, and inside jokes (some there for the reader and some just for myself, until now).

My first item up is Maxxim Industries– the home of Astrid Maxxim’s lab and workshops.  Maxxim Industries has two inspirations– Swift Enterprises in the Tom Swift Jr. books, and Disneyworld.

In the Tom Swift Jr. books, Tom worked on the grounds of Swift Enterprises, a four mile square (as opposed to four square miles) complex of factories and airfields and laboratories.  Since Astrid is a Tom Swift-like character and the story is essentially my take on that type of book, she needed someplace similar.

I remember being fascinated by Disneyworld when I watched Walt Disney talk about it on TV when I was little.  Disneyworld, unlike Disneyland, is not just a theme park.  It’s basically an entire county in Florida (80,000 acres) run by the Walt Disney Company, with theme parks sure, but also private residences, a Disney police force and Disney fire department, and undeveloped land.

I wanted something more like Disneyworld for Astrid– some huge county-sized place, dotted with installations, so I sat down and mapped out 180,000 acres of the southwest, in a nondescript part of an undisclosed state.

The Young Sorceress Characters: Saba Colbshallow

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Saba Colbshallow wasn’t going to be a major character when I originally outlined Senta and the Steel Dragon.  Most of his part was going to be another character.  Originally, he was a minor character, who was there to step and fetch, son of the cook.

When I got to writing The Drache Girl, I just decided to use him rather than the character I had originally intended.  That he became a police constable in that book was largely due to the fact that I was watching the British TV show Hamish MacBeth at the time.

Saba’s big parts are in book 3 and book 5, so for book 4: The Young Sorceress, he appears in his role as a moon orbiting around Senta’s planet.  He almost comes to be an antagonist for her, and I struggled a bit to make sure that didn’t happen.  If they had come at odds with each other too much, it would have adversely affected my plot for book 5.

The Young Sorceress Characters: Senta

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Time to get back to looking at characters, this time from The Young Sorceress.  I won’t be giving any spoilers… that is, if you have read the previous three books (and probably book 0).  If you haven’t read any of them, then spoiler alert.

Senta, the main character in the series, is the first to appear in this book.  I wanted to let the reader know right away that Senta wasn’t the same as she was two years earlier in The Drache Girl.  She’s much more powerful and has a much more complicated relationship with those around her.  We see right from the start that things are not going well with her boyfriend Graham or her mentor/guardian Zurfina.  In addition, her somewhat more than friends relationship with Saba Colbshallow is troubling because since the last book, he has gotten married.

Senta faces challenges in this book that she hasn’t faced before and is different than the tension that happens in the next book as well.  When I get to talking about her in The Two Dragons, I’ll explain that a bit more.

 

The Politics of Global Warming

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I’ve been re-editing His Robot Girlfriend, making quite a few changes.  The changes are all relatively minor.  Though I’m tempted to rewrite the whole thing, I’m not doing it.

Over the years I’ve seen several reviews that renounce my politics because of what I’ve written in His Robot Girlfriend.  I was never sure what politics they were talking about, but I sort of thought it might be about gay marriage– because there is a sort of analog of gay marriage in the human/robot marriage of Mike and Patience.

Only recently did I realizet that what most were talking about was the issue of Global Warming.  When I wrote the book, I didn’t realize that it was even a political issue.  Global warming just seemed to be a fact that scientists generally agreed upon.  I knew that some people believe scientists are involved in some sort of global conspiracy, but then I knew some people don’t believe we landed on the moon and some think the world is flat.  But since I was writing a science fiction book, I took global warmin far beyond what I thought at the time ever might come to pass, just to make a better story.

In the years since I wrote the book, I’ve come to believe that I may have underestimated the effects of climate change.  If I were to write it today, I might have them living beneath tinted domes.

 

Motivations: Astrid Maxxim and her Amazing Hoverbike

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One day I was standing in my living room looking at the row of yellow spines on my collection of Tom Swift Jr. books.

In the summer of 1969, I discovered Tom Swift Jr. among the possessions of my Uncle George, who had died the year before in Viet Nam.  I started reading them and was hooked.  I was hooked on Tom Swift, on science fiction, and on reading.

So that day, looking at Tom Swift, I thought, “that’s the type of book I should write next.”  I wanted to capture the same feeling of excitement and innocence that I found when I read Tom Swift Jr., but I wanted to update the stories and make them my own.  I sat down and created the setting and the characters, and made a list of inventions that stories could be built around.

Two things that I always had trouble with as a reader of Tom Swift.  First, time never passed.  Tom was always 18.  The second, his inventions never seemed to change the world, no matter how innovative and revolutionary they were.  I decided that Astrid’s would.  I still plan to write one Astrid book a year for the next few years.  After that, well, we’ll see.

More Motivations: Brechalon and The Voyage of the Minotaur

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A few weeks ago, when I was talking about my inspirations for The Voyage of the Minotaur and Brechalon, I forgot one– an important one.  One of my biggest inspirations was the movie “Zulu” staring Michael Caine and Stanley Baker.  This great movie was particularly evocative for me when I wrote the battle scenes at the end of The Voyage of the Minotuar.  I played the theme music while I wrote.  I think Terrence and Augie Dechantagne owe a bit to Stanley Baker and Michael Caine respectively.

I gave a major hint in Brechalon about my inspiration, as one of the characters is Colour Sgt. Bourne.  Another Colour Sgt. Bourne plays an important part in Zulu and the calling of his name is one of the most often repeated bits of dialog.  Second only perhaps to “fire at will.”