Category Archives: Writing

Tesla’s Stepdaughters: Tacos and Hot Dogs

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Tesla's StepdaughtersOne of the little details in Tesla’s Stepdaughters is a little Freudian reference that I just couldn’t help myself from throwing in.

Tesla’s Stepdaughters is a sci-fi story set in an alternate world where men and women have been segregated from one another for more than forty years. Women live much as they do today, while men are collected in enclaves in the far southern tips of Africa, South America, and Australia. This is a result of germ warfare (in their WWI) that eradicated the majority of men in the world.

Part of the story involved the characters buying street food. The men, living in South America and not liking anything German (because German scientist caused the germ warfare) would never have adopted hot dogs, like they did in the US. So I had them eating tacos. I was going to have the women, living in what is essentially our world, eating hamburgers, but then I realized the Freudianism of it all. With hot dogs and tacos frequently used as euphamisms form male and female genetalia, I just couldn’t resist making those the dominant fast food varieties.

Tesla’s Stepdaughters: Music

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Tesla's StepdaughtersOne of the things I’ve learned (I hope) is that even though you go to a great deal of trouble to create the details of a fantasy or sci-fi world, you shouldn’t go showing it off unless it benefits the story. I think this is one of the weaknesses of His Robot Girlfriend that makes me want to rewrite it.

There is a pretty large amount of detail about the Ladybugs and their music in Tesla’s Stepdaughters, but I tried to use only what I needed to be descriptive. In editing, I cut back on the details of their concert playlists. However, I created WAY more detail than is shown in the book. I created every album of the Ladybugs career, every song on every album, who wrote each song, and who played what instruments on those songs. I posted the details long ago on the blog, and if anyone is interested I’ll post them again. I even put it out there in ebook format, but I took it down, as I didn’t want people to be disappointed that they weren’t getting a story.  I’ve put it in as an appendix in the back of the latest ebook editions of Tesla’s Stepdaughters.

 

Settings: The Maxxim Mansion

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Astrid Maxxim and her Hypersonic Space PlaneAstrid 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.

In Astrid Maxxim and her Hypersonic Space Plane, the Maxxim family begins a refurbishment of their home, breathing new life into it and making some modernizations.  Maybe this is me, trying to rebuild those glorious houses from my past.

Technology: His Robot Wife

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A Great Deal of PatienceWhen 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, but I thought it was pretty clever. Then the iPad came out and made my original idea 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 my characters 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.

Right now, I’m in the midst of writing A Great Deal of Patience. My plan is for this to be the first full-length Patience novel.  Keep an eye out here on your computer or your texTee for more updates. Thanks.

Settings: Maxxim Industries

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Astrid Maxxim and the Electric Racecar ChallengeOne of my favorite settings is Maxxim Industries in the Astrid Maxxim books.  It is 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.

Motivations: Astrid Maxxim and the Electric Racecar Challenge

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Astrid Maxxim and the Electric Racecar ChallengeI had planned for the fifth Astrid Maxxim book to be the Electric Racecar Challenge all along, and had built up to it in the previous books.  As I was writing Astrid Maxxim and her Hypersonic Space Plane, I came across an article about a woman who had suffered amnesia in an auto accident.  I decided that it was how I wanted to start the next Astrid book.  It would be quite a shocker opening.

I wrote the first two chapters and then got sidetracked writing His Robot Girlfriend: Charity.  I got back to Astrid and then got sidetracked again, first writing a few new chapters of Kanana the Jungle Girl and then writing the entirety of The Price of Magic.  At that point, I looked back at the Astrid book, which was about half done, and thought “get to it!”

Even after all that, I ended up with everything but the last chapter done and got stuck.  I don’t really know why.  I knew what I wanted to write.

One little thing I’ve been playing with is that each last chapter of an Astrid book is named for a Shakespearean play.  I was stuck with this book until I suddenly realized that I could name the rival race car the Cheetah Tempest.  There you go!

Motivations: The Price of Magic

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The Price of Magic - NewThe Price of Magic, Senta and the Steel Dragon Book 7, was set up in book 6.  Reading through them, they really feel like parts one and two of a story arc, although that wasn’t quite the way I planned it.  I wanted it to be a bit more open-ended.

The Price of Magic was much easier to write than The Sorceress and her Lovers.  It’s probably the longest book that I’ve written straight through without stopping.  I had just finished His Robot Girlfriend: Charity and started in on Astrid Maxxim and the Electric Racecar Challenge, stopped that and wrote a bit on Kanana the Jungle Girl.  Finally, I set all that aside and jumped back into Birmisia and Senta, and it seemed like that was what I was meant to be writing.

Perhaps what made it so much fun to write was that I was dealing with Iolana Dechantagne Staff as a fourteen-year-old.  I seem to be making a career of writing about teen girls– between Senta in The Drache Girl and Astrid Maxxim.  In any case, I really enjoyed writing Iolana’s portions of the book as well as Tokkenoht’s.  She had not been one of the primary characters up until this point.

When I finished, the pieces of the next book just fell into place.  I sat down and wrote out a very complete outline for it.  I’m kind of itching to get started on it.  As usual, this story will follow five characters, two of them we know, but have not seen the world from their point of view before.  Another has been a primary character, but not for several books.  Mostly I’m excited because there are lot’s of “oh my God!” moments for long-time readers of the series.  I’ve mentioned the title before– A Plague of Wizards.

Motivations: His Robot Girlfriend: Charity

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HRG CharityI had been working on an outline for the next robot book, which I planned on calling His Robot Wife: A Great Deal of Patience.  While I was doing that, I came up with a plot line that I wanted to write about.  This probably grew out of my frustrations with writing Kanana the Jungle Girl, which I had been trying to finish, but couldn’t quite, and which also had a similar plot line woven into it.

I could have written this plot in any number of ways– made it an entirely new story or a space opera story.  Knowing that people were clamoring for a new robot book, I decided to go that way.  Of course the story didn’t fit with Patience and Mike, so I created Charity and Dakota.  I decided to throw a bit of the back story that I had been working on for A Great Deal of Patience, along with a cameo by Mike, and there is a quick little book.  As I mentioned the other day, it took me only forty-two days to write.

Now I’m working on A Great Deal of Patience.  It has changed a lot, because much of what I had originally planned was in Charity.  That’s really working out well, because I can move the plot along without having to worry about doling out background tidbits.  The story has to be able to stand on its own though and I think it will.  Both Dakota and Charity will appear in the new book, especially Charity, as this is a much more robot-centered story and less human-centered.  Watch this space for more information on the upcoming book.

Motivations: Astrid Maxxim and her Hypersonic Space Plane

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Astrid Maxxim and her Hypersonic Space PlaneIt’s a funny thing.  I had started and stopped writing Astrid Maxxim and the Antarctic Expedition several times, but by the time I was done, I was just hitting my stride.  I immediately started working on Astrid Maxxim and her Hypersonic Space Plane.  The previous books had hinted quite a bit about what would be in this book and I just continued on.

This was without a doubt the quickest I had ever finished a book.  I started the rough draft August 24, 2014 and finished it September 13th.  Twenty-one days inclusive.  The very next day, I started on His Robot Girlfriend: Charity, It took forty-two days, exactly twice as long, but still pretty quick.  A big part of this is probably because I just finished a second twelve credit graduate program at SUU, and I hadn’t been able to write much during those months.

The cover for the book went through half a dozen drafts as we got just the right spacecraft and image of Astrid.  Though not created at the same time, this cover and the one for the upcoming Astrid Maxxim and her Outpost in Space fit really well together.

Motivations: Astrid Maxxim and the Antarctic Expedition

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Astrid Maxxim and the Antarctic ExpeditionWhen I first wrote Astrid Maxxim and her Amazing Hoverbike, I set for myself a loose expectation that I would write one Astrid Maxxim book a year.  I had written the first in 2011 and the second in 2013, so I was already a year behind.  By this time, I was half finished The Sorceress and her Lovers, and really needed something light to clear my head.

I had always planned to take Astrid to the Antarctic.  There were many reasons for this.  First: Tom Swift (my inspiration) had gone on such journeys.  Tom Swift and the Caves of Ice, and the Tom Jr. story: Tom Swift and the Caves of Nuclear Fire.  Second, I had hinted as much with Astrid’s discovery of the dust-covered chest marked “Antarctic Expedition” in Astrid’s basement.  Finally, the Antarctic is a timely location, with the subject of climate change so much in the news.

I wrote a chapter or two and then set the book aside, while I worked on His Robot Wife: Patience is a Virtue.  Then I returned and wrote a bit more, only to put it aside to work on The Sorceress and her Lovers.  Once the other book was done, I returned to Astrid.  Somewhere in writing this book, I got off my outline and ended up with a couple of chapters two or three times longer than I had intended.  I went back, edited them down, and renumbered chapters, but in the end, it was still off.  This book has only 17 chapters while the others have 19 or 20.

This book works better as a part of the overall series than it does as a single volume.  Lately, sales of this book and the other Astrid Maxxim books are really taking off, which makes me very happy.  While written for teens, I think it holds up pretty well, and adults might find some nostalgia in here, as I do.

One final note.  Matthew Riggenback at Shaed Studios did the cover, as he has all the Astrid Maxxim books.  We had more trouble with this one than any of the others.  We had a hard time finding an Astrid in cold weather gear.  The first few versions looked even more like they came from a fashion magazine.  Then we had a great background picture, but to get our girl in, we had to cover up either the snowmobile/sled or the base camp.  In the end, we covered up the base camp, which is too bad, because it really looked pretty cool and perfect for the story.