short story draft: Solo Tour

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fiction, meteor mags, music, Patches, science fiction, short story, writing

Meteor Mags: Solo Tour
© 2023 Matthew Howard. All Rights Reserved.

Episode 39 in The Adventures of Meteor Mags and Patches.

Mags takes Patches and two of her closest friends on a tour of the Asteroid Belt to promote her second solo piano album, unaware that her enemies have planned to kill her.

3,900 words

Anger is a gift.

—Rage Against the Machine; Freedom, 1992.

🏴‍☠️

The cyborg gripped Timothy’s throat with cold titanium fingers that promised to crush the life out of him before it had time to flash before his eyes. The teenager thrashed as hard as he could. The back of his skull found the club’s concrete floor and was far from happy about it. He couldn’t scream, but plenty of people around him were taking care of that. If his brain had not been preoccupied with its imminent demise, he might have second-guessed just how far he was willing to go as a fan.

🏴‍☠️

Five hours earlier, Meteor Mags landed her ship on the asteroid Nemesis 128, a carbon-rich chunk of rock not wider than 178 kilometers in any direction. The corporation which first claimed Nemesis had filed for bankruptcy the previous year and abandoned all the equipment and sub-par hovels constructed for the mining families, along with the GravGens that pumped out an artificial gravity field approximating that of Earth’s. Like so many workers in the Belt in 2033, the residents of Nemesis owed their survival to a rugged determination and support from Mags.

She stepped out of her ship and planted her combat boots in the middle of a dingy, dreary spaceport. “Fucking hell,” she said. “I love what they’ve done with the place.” What light bulbs worked at all flickered incompetently and sprayed her shadow intermittently across the hull behind her in oblique angles.

Her sound engineer, Dr. Plutonian, poked his head out the door of the Bêlit. “Jesus, Mags. Do they even have enough electricity to power our equipment?”

“Leave that to me.”

Mags’ calico cat Patches bounded from the ship, pressed her ears backwards and flat against her bushy head, and howled.

Mags said, “We’ll get ’em sorted.”

The final member of her entourage appeared in the ship’s doorway. “I’m assuming this isn’t the scenic view you promised?”

“It’s one of them, Sarah. Would you help Plutes unload for a minute? Patches and I need to fill out some paperwork.”

Sarah was hardly old enough to drive a car on Earth, but ever since Mags had rescued her from being eaten by aliens in 2029 and taken the young woman under her wing, she’d formed her own band as the singer for the punk-rock sensation Dumpster Kittens, and she was no stranger to loading and unloading. “Get on it, then. We only have five hours ‘til showtime!”[1]

Mags departed with a flick of her tail and lit up a smoke. Patches followed suit, stopping every so often to sniff random objects and scratch them with her impervious claws to let everyone know she had been there.

Plutonian said, “I guess this is why we get paid the big bucks.”

Sarah laughed. The sound was brighter than any light ever seen in that decrepit port. “I always knew you were only in this for the money.”

His eyes following Mags told a different story, a story Sarah knew all too well. She was, after all, a telepath.

🏴‍☠️

Mags returned longer than a minute later and found all the equipment unloaded. “Listen,” she said. “They’ve had some problems with power, and I’m going to fix them. I need a couple hours to install our energy system at this rock’s poles. Patches is coming with the two of you as security. I can’t have my band wandering this godforsaken rock without a bodyguard. If anything goes horribly wrong, call me.”

Plutonian said, “We’ll make it to the club. Just make sure we have time for a proper soundcheck.”

Mags kissed his cheek. “I doubt anything about this tour will be proper.”

Patches leapt onto the black box containing Mags’ piano. She stretched out, licking one paw and rubbing it over one ear.

Sarah said, “Your chariot awaits.”

🏴‍☠️

The first time Timothy heard Meteor Mags in 2030, he was thirteen years old, and he pleaded with his best friend Brian to turn off the music. In the storage closet that passed for Brian’s bedroom in the dilapidated shack Brian’s parents called home, a tattered boombox blared.

Now I ain’t your little girl
Now I ain’t your toy
Your life don’t mean shit to me
Something to destroy

“You don’t like it?” Brian’s parents were both working in the mines on the same shift, and he was enjoying a rare free hour to listen to music as loud as he wanted—or at least as loud as his limited equipment could handle.

“God no,” said Timothy. “It’s bloody awful!”

“It’s Meteor Mags,” said Brian, “with these guys called the Psycho 78s.”

“It’s a lot of screaming and bashing. Can we listen to something else?”

Timothy was not yet a fan.

🏴‍☠️

The week his parents lost their jobs in 2032—along with every other miner on Nemesis when the corporation went belly-up—Timothy hardly slept at all. Unlike Brian, he didn’t have a closet to sleep in, only the couch in the scant few meters that served as both living room and kitchen. He didn’t even have room to stretch out his legs.

His parents, still on erratic sleep schedules from their mining shifts, woke him up at random hours by plopping on the couch next to him to fight over which video to watch and careening recklessly toward the end of their final paycheck by converting it to booze and cigarettes.

It was like he was a ghost, so he left the shack without saying a word. He walked alone for hours, and all he had to listen to was the music on a small drive Brian gave him. In his earpods, the Psycho 78s blasted their single Whipping Boy, with Meteor Mags on vocals. She sang about being so angry about being beaten down that you’d want to take up arms against your oppressors and keep on killing until the killing was done—or at least, that’s what Timothy could decipher amidst all the screaming and bashing.

The music wasn’t all that different from what he’d heard two years before, but it made a new kind of sense to him. He’d seen his parents turn from hopefulness to hopelessness on the cruel frontier. He’d lost hope himself and felt it replaced by a constantly churning frequency that felt like rage boiling under the surface of every minute of every day.

Somewhere in that mess of noise in his ears, he heard his rage reflected, focused, and redirected. And the fact that these people, these Psycho 78s he had never known or even met, had captured his feeling and brought it to life made him feel like maybe, just maybe, anything was possible.

Head-down in his hoodie and singing along as if no one could hear him, Timothy was well on his way to becoming a fan.

🏴‍☠️

Ninety minutes before the show, Meteor Mags checked her phone. “Bloody hell. What’s a bitch gotta to do to get a few bars out here?” She shoved the tiny black box back inside her bra and positioned the second rod on the rocky ground before her. Holding it steady with one hand, she lifted a hammer above her head. Then she brought it down, again and again, until the rod was firmly embedded in the asteroid.

Nemesis was not the first asteroid where she’d installed her free-energy system, an engineering triumph made possible by her late friend Slim’s mathematical genius and Shondra’s manufacturing expertise on Mars. But it was certainly the first hunk of space rock she’d lit up just so she could play a concert there.

Nemesis was on the first leg of her tour in support of her second solo album, 88 Light Years. And if the pathetic asteroid needed a boost, then she was damn well sure she was the one to make it happen.

As the clock ticked ever closer to showtime, Mags pounded the SlimRod one, two, three more times then slipped her hammer into a belt loop. A stolen cigarette found its way into her hand, and she knelt to flip the switch that would send a wave of energy from the north pole of Nemesis to its south pole, then back again in an endless wave that anyone with open-source equipment could tap into. And she’d made damn sure her concert equipment could tap into it.

She took a drag and let it leisurely escape her lungs below the star-splattered sky that hardly twinkled in the human-made atmosphere.

She said, “Power to the people.” A shockwave made the asteroid tremble as if from the notes of a bass guitar. The blast ruffled her skirt and caused a single lock of hair to fall over her face.

She smiled a wicked smile and finished her smoke before starting up the vehicle she had borrowed without asking from the spaceport. She was pretty sure she remembered where the club was.

🏴‍☠️

The day Timothy became a true fan, three ships from Mars landed on Nemesis. He had nothing to eat in the last five days except protein powder. He was one of the lucky ones. Many others died in the food riots following the mining corporation’s hasty exit. More had overdosed on heroin and fentanyl in their untidy hovels rather than face the future. Some died with lit cigarettes in their hands. Fires broke out and consumed what passed for Nemesian neighborhoods.

If his parents were still alive, Timothy had little hope of seeing them again. The last time he saw them was at the end of a hallway on fire, brighter than he could ever remember seeing anything before, so bright the paint peeled from the walls and bubbled like blisters. Heat choked his lungs and turned his skin red, and he fled.

It wasn’t a picture he wanted to see again, and hunger wasn’t doing anything to deaden the screams he couldn’t forget.

When the ships landed, he ran for them—just like everyone else. He didn’t stand a chance of getting close, of touching them. All around the ships was a crush of bodies, a tuneless song of shouting and weeping. A breaking of human waves.

The noise was nearly deafening. Drowning.

Timothy tried to retreat, but his feet and the ground had lost contact. A crowd surge drove him forward on a mass of elbows and grease and stink. He balled his hands into fists and used them to cover his face.

Volume challenged the crowd. It came from the middle ship of the Martian trio, a boxy ex-cargo ship called the Hyades. It looked like a semitruck trailer got fucked up on methamphetamines and crashed into a trailer park before being covered in graffiti—but a thousand times bigger.

“Listen,” said Mags.

The ship’s loudspeakers blared. The riot continued.

Mags covered the mic. “Dude, this is never gonna work.”[2]

Alonso leaned back in the pilot’s chair and threw his feet onto the console. “It’s bulletproof, tía. Just give them a minute. They’re probably so hungry they’d eat the assholes out of a chicken coop. Just talk to them.”

“Listen,” said Mags. “I brought some friends to—”

“My mistake. I think they’re killing each other.”

“Guys! I said—”

“Puta madre.” Alonso sat up and switched off the microphone. “Tía!”

“What?!”

“I got a better idea. Sing.”

She flicked her tail. “Sing?”

“Sing, you know?! Sing a song to last the whole day long? You motherfuckers’ll sing someday? Do you know what I’m—”[3]

“Count it off.”

He switched on the mic. What the Hyades lacked in aesthetics, it more than made up for in sonics.

Still, it was not Mags’ proudest moment. Fifty-three people died in the riot before the mob calmed the hell down and the people aboard the ships were able to begin distributing food, first-aid supplies, and emergency medical care.

Despite the bumps and bruises, Timothy survived. In fact, he ate better than he had eaten in weeks, even when his parents had been in charge of feeding him. At one point, he made it through a queue to a long table where volunteers handed out plastic bags containing soap, a washcloth, toothpaste and toothbrush, aspirin, and snack packs.

Timothy accepted a bag from a teenage girl on the opposite side of the table. Her long black hair had been woven into cornrows and bundled at the back into a ponytail. If Timothy’s ragged, filth-covered appearance distressed her in any way, she showed no sign—only a radiant smile followed by the words “If you need a doctor, we’re setting up a temporary facility just over there.”

Maybe, he thought, I should see someone about my burns. And all that smoke I breathed. He said, “I’m sorry, where?”

She stood to better point out the location. “Just past the—”

Mags interrupted by slamming a cooler onto the metal table. “I got an Esky full of fresh sangers, bitches! Hooooo!” She unlatched the lid, pulled out a sandwich sealed in plastic, and handed it to Timothy. “You need anything else, Sarah?”

“I was just going to show this guy where to find the doctors.”

“You okay, kid?”

Timothy recognized Mags from photos and wanted posters. She’d been singing in his earpods for days about all the things that made her sad or angry, with the insistent conclusion that she was strong enough to overcome anything life could throw at her. He stumbled over his words and failed to say anything.

Mags put her hand on his shoulder. “It’s alright, mate. Sarah will show you. Sarah? You want to take a break? I can cover this station for a bit.”

“Sure thing,” said Sarah. She climbed onto the table and slid off it next to Timothy. “What’s your name?” She already knew.

Mags and Sarah had just made a fan for life.

🏴‍☠️

Thirty-two seconds before concert time, Mags showed up with a sorely depleted bottle of rum in one hand and a hammer hanging from a belt loop on her skirt. “Sorry guys. I ran into some fans. Did we do a sound check?”

“We as in me and Sarah,” said Plutonian. “Are you ready to go?”

“I was ready three days before I was born. Let’s kill it.”

Plutonian made his way to the soundboard, Sarah got comfortable behind her keyboard and microphone, and Mags took center stage at her piano. The smuggler unleashed a flurry of black and white notes as if she were brandishing a weapon before a fight. She said, “What is up, Nemesis? How the hell are ya?”

During the cheers and applause, Mags put one hand to her forehead like a visor and scanned the crowd. “Has anybody seen my cat? No, that’s not the first song. Patches!”

The fluffy calico had made herself at home atop the bar at the back of the venue where she graciously accepted petting and ardently dissuaded anyone who tried to shoo her off her throne.

Mags said, “Oh, there you are. Tonight we’ll be playing songs from my new album, 88 Light Years. Eighty-eight because that’s the number of keys on a piano.” Again, a flourish. “But this wasn’t a solo thing at all. Put your hands together for Sarah, from my favorite band, Dumpster Kittens!”

The audience exploded in a raucous response.

“That’s right,” said Mags. “Sarah did the harmonies and gorgeous keyboard work on my album, and we got your favorite pirate-radio DJ Doctor P rockin’ our sound tonight, so give it up!”

Without further preamble, Mags launched into Gun Yourself Down, a hard-edged ballad that despite its morbid title encouraged the listener to ignore the haters and keep pushing forward.

She didn’t recognize the teenager who stood front and center at the edge of the stage, bobbing his head and swinging his long brown hair in time with the music. The last time she’d seen him, he was covered in dirt and smoke, half-burned and starved nearly to death.

In the year since Mags’ humanitarian visit, Timothy had—like so many survivors on Nemesis—pulled himself together and got on with life. He’d never found any evidence that his parents survived, nor any that they had died, and he’d struggled to cope with that ambiguous loss, never knowing if he should let himself grieve or hold onto one last shred of hope. Gun Yourself Down had become his personal anthem. He raised a fist in the air and sang along.

Then everything came to a screeching halt.

🏴‍☠️

Twenty-three minutes before showtime, a cyborg landed on Nemesis. He arrived in a small ship that did not use the spaceport Mags had encountered, and he strode through the regolith with a singularity of purpose: to destroy Meteor Mags.

Much of his body had been replaced with titanium and machinery to render him super strong and impervious to most kinds of harm. And because Mags had been known in recent years to tour with a bevy of telepathic space octopuses, he wore one of Earth’s most devious inventions: a helmet to block telepaths.

The cyborg followed pre-programmed map coordinates to the club. Asteroid dust surrounded him in a cloud that grew with each metallic footfall until he approached the door.

Two guards drew their pistols and shouted orders, but the cyborg only granted them as much attention as was required to grip their skulls and fling them away like ants in his path. They did not survive the encounter.

He ripped the door from its hinges, tossed it in the direction of the two fresh corpses, and charged inside.

🏴‍☠️

Mags had her eyes closed as she sang. The noise caught the attention of her sensitive ears. But if anyone was faster than Mags, it was her cat.

Patches leapt off the bar and bounded from tabletop to tabletop, spilling drinks and ashtrays every which way until she was in range of the cyborg. She launched herself at the monster, but he was faster and stronger than any human foe.

His backhand slap knocked Patches out of the air. She hit the concrete floor and slid backwards until she smashed into a table. Its drinks and ashtrays went flying, and the people sitting at it screamed and rocketed to their feet—as did everyone else who had been seated.

In the chaos, the cyborg stormed the stage.

Plutonian rose from his stool behind the soundboard and brought his Benelli shotgun to bear on the menace. But he hesitated to fire, because some crazy kid in the general admission area right near the stage had decided to pick a fight with the intruder.

Plutonian still had every intention of blowing out the cyborg’s brains or whatever combination of neurons and circuitry served the same function. He scrambled through the screaming and overturned tables and people smashing against him as they ran for the exits.

For the sin of interfering with its holy mission, the cyborg gripped Timothy’s throat with cold titanium fingers that promised to crush the life out of him. As the teenager thrashed as hard as he could, the back of his skull found the club’s concrete floor and was far from happy about it. He couldn’t scream, but plenty of people around him were taking care of that.

When asked about it later, Timothy couldn’t explain why he’d stepped into the cyborg’s path and confronted it. He’d think about listening to Mags’ music with his best friend Brian, and how after 2032 he’d never seen the boy again. He’d recall lonely days where he could hardly put a thought together because he was so hungry. He’d remember Mags putting her hand on his shoulder and giving him something to eat. But all those moments were merely snapshots, photographs of a life he would not fully understand until decades later when he wrote his memoirs.

In the moment, he only knew that something awful was trying to take something beautiful away from him, and he reacted without even thinking.

His valor won Mags several seconds, and that was all she needed. As the cyborg choked the young man, Mags brought a mic stand down on its head. Three times she struck in quick succession.

That got its attention, and it dropped the boy. In the half second as the monster raised and turned its head toward her, Mags grabbed her hammer and introduced it to the cyborg’s face.

Blood spurted from the wounds. The cyborg bellowed its rage and pain. Intent on Mags, it forgot about Patches—a fatal mistake.

Mags shouted, “Get through his helmet!” She and her cat had seen a similar device before, when Earth had sent an assassin to kill them at the final Small Flowers concert.[4]

Patches landed on the cyborg’s head and set her invincible claws to work. In a flurry, strips of metal flew away from the combatants. The cyborg grabbed at Patches to dislodge her and finally succeeded. He flung her away. But the damage was done.

“Sarah,” Mags shouted. “Fry his brain!”

Sarah wanted to be a nurse when she grew up. She dreamed of a life where she could help people overcome pain and lead them to healing. She was, unlike Mags, a kind and gentle soul. But she had seen what their enemies could do, and—like Mags—had reached a point in her life where she would do anything to protect her friends.

The young telepath focused on the cyborg’s exposed and all-too-human mind, and she blasted it with all the force of the rage that fueled her music in Dumpster Kittens.

The cyborg gripped both sides of its head and made a noise no one who heard it ever hoped to hear again. It crashed against the edge of the stage and bashed its face into the structure. Then it reared up to its full height, went rigid as a stone, and fell to the floor.

“Good job, Sarah! You okay?” Mags didn’t wait for a response before she was cradling Timothy in her arms. Patches and Plutonian gathered around her.

Mags said, “Hey, kid.” She set the palm of one hand against his face. “You alright, mate? Talk to me.”

There she was, his favorite singer, right in his face. Timothy coughed and rubbed his throat. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay. Mags?”

“I’m right here.”

He placed his hand over hers and held it. “Is that the best they can fucking do?”

Mags helped him to his feet.

---

[1] Sarah’s talents and courage were crucial to the crew’s overcoming a cybernetic mutant monster in Daughter of Lightning and a swarm of vicious space wasps in The Hive.

[2] This humanitarian mission happened after Mags had released her remaining octopuses on Earth, as shown in Farewell Tour and Pieces of Eight. Otherwise, they would have been happy to use their telepathic powers to pacify the crowd from the safety of the massive tank they lived in aboard the Hyades while on tour with Alonso and the space monkeys as Small Flowers.

[3] Alonso paraphrases both Sing by the Carpenters (1973) and Sing by the Dresden Dolls (2006).

[4] As told in Farewell Tour.

monolith: a poem

Tags

Monolith, poems, poetry, writing

monolith

no one remembers
when you became the immovable object
the day you became stone

enclosed in your superiority
refusing any ingress
you stood against the storm

how long has it been
since anyone touched you

have you defied entropy
and in doing so
lost the power to change

nothing scratches you
your perfect reflective glass
mirrors all that assaults you

when i press my hand to your surface
i wonder what is left inside

How to Add Editorial Reviews to Your Book Listing on Amazon

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amazon, self publishing, writing, books, kindle, KDP, adding reviews, editorial reviews

Shout out to author Jeffrey Cooper for doing the preliminary research on this one. I contributed layout and design for Jeffrey’s debut ebook and paperback this year, Foot Soldier in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: A Memoir. The memoir recounts Jeffrey’s life and work in the tech sector that made possible many of the current advancements in computing and artificial intelligence, and it’s been getting stellar reviews both on and off Amazon.

But what do you do if someone like the New York Times or Stephen King says something nice about your book, but didn’t post the review on Amazon? This is yet another time when it comes in handy to have an Amazon Author Page set up through Author Central at https://author.amazon.com/. Thanks to Author Central, you can now add these “external” reviews to your book’s listing. Here are the steps:

1. Log in to Author Central.

2. Click on the “Books” tab at the top of the page.

3. Click on the book you want to add reviews to.

4. Click “Edit book details”.

5. In “Your Editorial Reviews”, click the button for “Add Review”.

6. In the text box, type or paste the book review(s) you want to add. Make sure to attribute the review to the source. Some basic formatting options are available.

7. Click “Preview” to see how your entry looks.

8. When you’re satisfied, click “Save” to add the review.

Author Central also has a few guidelines you will see above the box where you add the review. They are good to know:

1. Reviews should consist of transcribed text from reputable sources. The name of the source should be credited after the quotation. For example, “A fantastic read.” —The New York Times.

2. Quotes from outside reviews should follow “fair use” copyright guidelines and be limited to 1–2 sentences.

3. We recommend you limit your reviews to 3000 characters. Customers might miss other critical information if your reviews are too long.

How to Order Author Copies from KDP

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books, KDP, ordering author copies, self publishing, writing

Ordering Author Copies for your paperback or hardback edition with KDP is a very quick and easy process that will only seem mysterious the first time you do it. I will show you how to get it done. First, your book needs to be LIVE on Amazon — not In Review by KDP, but fully Live. Second, you will be ordering at your wholesale cost — what KDP might call the printing cost — not the retail price listed on Amazon.

To begin, sign into your KDP Account. The first screen you see should be your “Bookshelf“, as shown below.

This might be unfamiliar territory if someone else set up your book for you like I do for my clients. So, let’s zoom in a little and see exactly where you click to Order Author Copies.

Clicking the Order Author Copies button will take you to the next screen where you will input how many copies you want. You can see this screen below.

Notice that you can order just one copy, or any other number you want, up to 999 copies. If you need more than that, then you are one fortunate author and also might need to contact KDP Support directly for help with that.

The only thing that sometimes confuses people here is the dropdown menu to select the “Marketplace of Your Order.” But it’s an easy decision. If you are in the USA, then choose “Amazon.com”. If you are in another country, pick the version of Amazon for your country. In the UK, for example, Amazon is “Amazon.co.uk”. Below, I have zoomed in to show you how easy this is.

Finally, click the big yellow Submit Order button in the bottom right corner. Then you are done with this part!

The final step is that you will soon get an email notice from KDP/Amazon that your order now appears in your Amazon Shopping Cart — the same cart where anything else you might buy on Amazon would go. Your cart is where you will pay for the order. You can also choose your shipping rate, if you want to pay more for faster delivery.

And, you can choose a delivery address. For example, if I order a book this way to send to a friend or reviewer instead of to me, I just give their address. You can also select the “Gift” option so you can add a short note to your friend, which will be printed and included in the shipment. That way, you don’t need to get books shipped to you and then re-ship them yourself; you can just “drop ship” from your cart if you want to.

That’s really all there is to it! If you want some low-cost and free marketing options you have available as a KDP author, see my post Five Easy Marketing Things to Do Once Your Kindle Ebook is Published.

ash: a poem

Tags

ash, poems, poetry, writing

ash

i hope you found your beach

you left me waiting
stirring my cauldron of memories
that will never come true

somewhere in the night
you dance on distant shores
around nonexistent bonfires

sand between your toes
sparks against your skin
moonlight in your breath

and all of it will come true

Showing Versus Telling

Tags

books, fiction, self publishing, show don't tell, writing

This post is an excerpt from my book about writing and workshopping, My Life As an Armadillo, available in ebook, paperback, and hardcover editions around the world.

When we begin our writing journey, other writers invariably advise us to “Show, Don’t Tell.” It’s easier said than done, and the terminology is to blame. After all, aren’t writers engaged in the art of storytelling, not story showing? How can we tell stories if we can’t tell anything? What does this advice really mean?

In January 2018, I took a writing course from Australian author, coach, and publisher Joanne Fedler, and she put her finger on the heart of this matter. Joanne challenged the class to stop writing about a feeling and instead write from a feeling. One of her methods involved identifying how an emotion can be communicated in sensory, physical terms. In other words, what does a given emotion look like? What does it taste, sound, and smell like? What would it feel like if we could touch it?

By describing an intangible emotion in tangible terms, we create a story where readers experience the feeling for themselves instead of simply reading a report about it. Joanne used the word “report” in her discussion about this method, and it was an eye-opening moment for me.

Consider sentences such as “He felt sad” or “Susan was annoyed”. These are reports about a character’s emotional state. They tell us information, but they don’t generate any feeling inside us. If we don’t experience a feeling, we don’t engage with the story.

Readers want to take an emotional journey, not read a report about someone else’s journey. This is the central idea behind “Show, Don’t Tell.” Telling means reporting about feelings instead of communicating them in a way the reader experiences first-hand.

Rather than “Show, Don’t Tell”, I suggest we say, “Immerse, Don’t Report.” We want to immerse our readers in a world they feel and emotionally respond to. We have several tools in our writing toolbox to achieve that goal: appealing to the senses, describing body language, and eliminating adverbs.

Joanne’s method of appealing to the senses forces us to consider how an emotion colors our physical experience of the world. Two people can observe the same event but draw totally different interpretations based on their emotional states.

Films achieve a version of this effect using soundtracks. For example, a simple shot of a sunset can elicit completely different emotions depending on the music in the scene. The musical score can make the sunset appear joyous or foreboding, triumphant or tragic.

Our emotional state affects the physical world in the same way. One person might view a bustling sidewalk full of people as an exciting opportunity to mingle with others and make friends while navigating the boundless adventure of an unfamiliar city. Another person might view the same scene with crippling anxiety about jostling shoulders with strangers in potentially dangerous territory. Based on our character’s emotional state, we can describe the same scene in totally different ways.

To practice writing about this difference, take a photograph and write about it from opposing emotional perspectives. For example, take a photo of the Grand Canyon and write about it from the perspective of a character who is excited to explore it. Then write from the point of view of a character who is terrified of being lost inside it.

In each case, refuse to report these feelings. Instead, focus on how the character’s emotional states color her perceptions of the physical environment. Do the rock formations rise triumphantly toward the sunlit sky, or do they loom like a menacing maze of stone? Do clouds grace the edges of the landscape like puffs of cotton, or do they smother the horizon in obscurity? It depends on what emotional state our character brings to the scene.

Sensation refers to the immediate response of our sensory receptors (eyes, ears, nose, mouth, fingers, skin) to basic stimuli such as light, color, sound, odor, and texture.

Perception is the process by which people select, organize, and interpret these sensations. The study of perception, then, focuses on what we add to these raw sensations to give them meaning.

—Michael R. Solomon; Consumer Behavior, 12^th Ed., 2016.

Let’s consider another tool: body language. Again, we are rooting the emotional world in the physical world, but here we examine how characters move their bodies and interact with their immediate environment. To illustrate the point, let’s discuss cats.

We can infer all kinds of things about a cat’s emotional state from observing her body language. A hunched back, fur standing on end, and a snarling face show us the cat senses a threat and has adopted a defensive posture. Rolling on her back with her belly exposed and her paws curled shows us the cat trusts us to give affection without harming her. Even the way a cat wags or flicks her tail shows us whether she is calm or agitated.

Now, let’s consider how a cat interacts with her environment. When she leaps onto a narrow ledge, we sense her confidence in her own agility and power. When she stretches out on a high tree branch for a nap, we understand she feels safe from enemies or predators in her chosen spot. When she bats her paws at bugs or streams of water, we sense her curiosity about the world, and her willingness to mess with things just to find out what they do.

Regardless of our characters’ species, we need to find ways to communicate feeling through physical action. Many writers are stuck in a rut of boring actions such as sighing, head nodding, head shaking, eye widening, and eye rolling. These have been done to death, and I am sick of reading about them. We need to find more ways to communicate emotions.

As an exercise, take a single emotion and come up with ten ways a character’s body language communicates it. Embarrassment, for example, might involve a character’s fixing her attention on the floor, shrinking away from other characters, stuttering, blushing, having watery eyes, suddenly being silent, running away, shoving her hands in her pockets, kicking something on the ground, or fidgeting with something in her hands. Which one best fits your character?

The way you choose body language immerses readers because they see an action and must derive meaning from it. This is why I don’t much care for the advice “Show, Don’t Tell.” What is most important is how we choose what to tell. If we tell the reader the facts about body language and interaction with the environment, then we trust the reader to understand character emotions without our needing to report on them.

This brings us back to the union of style and substance. If the substance of our story is emotional, we don’t want to undermine it by using stylistic choices that make it a mere report. We need to trust readers to draw their own conclusions, and I feel that treating narration like a camera is the best way to go: Use the camera to observe action, and let readers bring themselves to the story to understand the emotional landscape.

This is why experienced writers advise us to avoid using adverbs. Adverbs are a shortcut that allow the writer to indulge in a lazy lack of description. For example, consider the sentence “Susan nervously handed him the keys to the car.” What’s missing here?

We’re missing details that communicate Susan’s nervousness. Did her hands shake? Did she fumble with the keys or drop them? Did her palms sweat? Did her heart race? Any of these descriptive facts communicate nervousness and paint a more vivid picture than an adverb that reports Susan’s emotion.

By adding action and description instead of using shortcuts, we create a rich and emotion-laden world readers can enter with our characters, a world where they experience emotion for themselves instead of reading a report.

short story draft: Gods of Titan

Tags

meteor mags, octopus, Patches, science fiction, self publishing, Titan, writing

Chronologically, this episode comes before the one I posted earlier this week. It just took a bit longer to get everything sorted.

art generated by Midjourney

Meteor Mags: Gods of Titan
© 2022 by Matthew Howard. All Rights Reserved.
Episode 37 of The Adventures of Meteor Mags and Patches.

Mags, Patches, and Alonso travel to Titan to check on her errant octopus babies, only to discover their eight-armed friends have other plans.

4,500 words.

Now all you merry blacksmiths,
a warning take by me:

Stick to your country horseshoes
and your anchors for the sea.

When the gods of war come calling,
promising you gold,

they’ll take your hammer,
take your anvil,
take your very soul.

—The Longest Johns; Hammer and the Anvil; 2022.

🏴‍☠️

March 2032. From the letters of Meteor Mags.

Lonso and I had a blast partying on Isla Salida with the friends we left behind.[1] Patches did, too, but she seems to have fun no matter where we go. She couldn’t give a single fuck, so long as no one lets her dishes go empty.

I’m convinced she doesn’t need to eat anymore—or drink, or breathe. I think she just does those things because cats prefer routines, and maybe she finds comfort in familiar things that make her feel normal instead of like some kind of freak. I know what it’s like to be thought a freak. But maybe she just likes screaming at her bowls to remind everyone we exist to serve her.

It took so long to get to Titan that Lonso and I weren’t even hungover anymore. In fact, we’d had a few too many hairs of the dogs that bit us, and we were a drunken mess by the time the Saturnian moon came into view. We’d been listening to my massive collection of chanteys—what some people call “sea shanties” without realizing that every bloody chantey is a sea shanty by definition. Most of the damn things are older than me, and that’s saying something.

Lonso especially liked a tune that warned blacksmiths about working for the war machine. We listened to a bad-ass rendition in a minor key about five or six times in a row, and I knew why he liked it. Lonso was just a kid from the hood when I met him, and after the fascists slaughtered his bandmates, he got a fake identity and went to work for the interplanetary Port Authority.

Whenever he talks to me about those days, he makes a show of how he got all this awesome pilot training and combat skills, and so many high-tech toys to play with. He’s quick with a story about his drunken brawls, black-market entrepreneurship, and breaking all the rules.

But like most guys, he’s not so quick to talk about the emotional pain behind the funny stories. He doesn’t talk about how it was eating him from the inside out to be working for the man after so many years of rebelling and playing kick-ass rock. He doesn’t mention how serving the war machine and the incompetent bureaucracy that killed his friends took something away from him every day of his life.

Not that I want to paint a picture of Lonso as some sort of broken soul or wounded warrior. Fuck that noise. He’s right as rain these days. In ’29, I accidentally rescued him from all that Port Authority bullshit, and the time he spent rocking out with my telepathic octos did him some good.[2] Hell, that kid’s way more level-headed than me and far less cynical. Lonso’s happy to be alive, doesn’t sweat the small shit, and seems to make friends everywhere he goes—even in places where I’d make enemies.

But he did cry a little at that blacksmith song. I gave him a hug and another can of ale.

I’m an only child. I never had sisters or brothers. But even though Lonso still calls me tía after all these years, he’s the closest thing I ever had to a brother. I’d move heaven and Earth for that kid, even if he’s nearly fifty now. Even if he found my microphone and is drunkenly screaming along with the Dead Weather album Horehound.

Curse me for a papist. Patches is howling along with him now. She doesn’t even know the words.

What an ungodly racket.

I guess I better join them.

🏴‍☠️

Our space-bound karaoke trio had exhausted most of Jack White’s side projects and all but the last bottle of rum when we landed on Titan. The last time I’d been there with Patches and Plutes, a faction of twenty octopuses had teamed up with an object of unimaginable power we called the triglyph, and they’d merged their mental skills with its god-like abilities to terraform Titan, destroy Enceladus to get its water, and build a monumental radio from a star core and materials they found in space.[3]

Don’t get me wrong. The crazy shit they started broadcasting is awesome, and I still tune it to years later thanks to Plutes playing a couple of hours of it every day on his radio station. It’s the sound of the cosmos. But we had a bit of a misunderstanding last time, when the octos tried to dissemble me and Plutes and Patches to join a group mind and leave our bodies to die.

I don’t love any radio station enough to die for it, unless it’s the PBN. Fortunately, Patches showed those unruly octopuses who was boss, killed a few of them to make her point, and saved the day. We figured they’d be up to typical octopus things when we visited again.

We were so very wrong.

Listen, I’ve heard all the criticisms about how I should have known about this shit earlier. Get off my bloody case. I had a lot going on the past few years, and this shit on Titan wasn’t even on my radar. Why would it have been? When you have telepaths doing whatever they want, they can easily hide it from you.

We set down on the shore of nowhere, on a lake no one had ever named—not even its creators.

🏴‍☠️

The whole reason we went to Titan was that the octopuses living there had been members of the batch of genetically altered babies I helped get born and liberated back in ’29, and all the other members were approaching the ends of the lives. Lonso and I got the rest of my babies sorted on Earth, but we’d been out of touch with Titan for a couple of years. In ’32, I didn’t want them dying on me, either.

Lonso, who insisted on driving long past the point where he should have been in control of a space vessel or even a bloody tricycle, set us down on a flat spot near the beach. We came to an abrupt halt as the Hyades rocked back and forth from her off-kilter landing and settled onto the rock. I accused Lonso of trying to kill us. He pretended that was his plan.

He’s lucky I love him.

We were hardly out of the ship before the octos contacted us. It’s hard to explain what it sounds like when telepathic space octos get inside your brain. It’s like a language made of math and music, sensation and emotion. You feel yourself dissolving into that weird group mind they have. But somewhere in the center is something you still consider yourself.

I’m pretty sure it would melt your circuits and give the octos total control over your thoughts and feelings, but me and Lonso and Patches had been dealing with that shit for years. We knew who we were and what to expect.

What we did not expect was the society my errant babies had created.

🏴‍☠️

<Welcome, friends.> The octos spoke directly into our minds.

Thanks to the telepathic group chat, I knew Patches was offended they didn’t call us “mothers”. She had helped them get born just as much as I did. But she let it slide.

<We have been waiting.>

“For what?” I surveyed the sandy beach and the species of crabs, anemones, and the empty shells of lesser mollusks populating it. Strands of kelp lie strewn above the waterline. I picked up a sand dollar and held it in my hand. It was still alive. Tiny hairs around the opening in its shell struggled to bring food to its mouth. I whipped it back into the saltwater. It skipped along the incoming waves and disappeared.

Patches and Lonso were checking out stuff in their own ways. Lonso said, “Are we even on Titan? Because this beach is like the ones in SoCal.”

“They changed it.” Patches ran to my side and bared her little fangs. “They changed the entire moon. They used the triglyph to teleport some décor from the oceans of Earth so they could have a home. This is the result.”

“Trippy,” said Lonso. “Is that lake, like, real water or some kind of methane bullshit?”

“It’s water they got by destroying Enceladus. They salinated it using the triglyph to create a miniature sun on the far side of Titan—an energy source they used to fuse elements they needed to transform the atmosphere, raise the temperature, and do damn near anything else they wanted.”[4]

“Sweet,” said Lonso. He stripped off his clothes. “I’m going for a swim!”

“Lonso,” I said. “We don’t—”

But he was already in the water.

Patches jumped in after him.

From the beach, I watched them frolic and splash in water that shouldn’t even exist in liquid form that far out in the solar system. I must be getting old, because there was a day when I would have been the first one in. I stripped off my combat boots and arranged the rest of my stuff in a pile on the sand before plunging in.

🏴‍☠️

From every direction, octopuses swarmed me. Their suckers gripped my skin, and their arms embraced me. The added weight pulled me down, but upon sensing my distress, they brought me to the surface for air. Lonso and Patches bobbed above the waves beside me.

I sputtered and flung wet strands of hair away from my face. “You bloody bilge rats! I can’t breathe underwater!”

<Apologies. Everyone here lives in water.>

“How do you forget something like that? After all we’ve been through?!”

<Apologies. But we have never met before, though our grandmothers are legends among all the tribes of Titan.>

“Grandmothers? What the—” Then it hit me. Those little squidlings weren’t my babies at all, but their sons and daughters. If that were true, it could only mean one thing.

The octos followed my train of thought as fast I could think it.

<Their final thoughts were of you. As the light of life dimmed inside our parents, and we were tiny things taking shape inside our eggs, they communicated their knowledge and history to us.>

Patches had made herself at home, curled up and purring on the squishy, bulbous head of an octo who appeared perfectly content to be her throne. She let out a polysyllabic mew.

<Yes, even your languages.>

“What about math?”

<Would you like to hear our proof of the Riemann hypothesis?>

Hell. Even I hadn’t cracked that one, and I’d made a hobby of proving or disproving unsolved math problems. The Riemann hypothesis proposes that the non-trivial zeroes of the zeta function—oh, bloody hell. I’ll explain later.

I said, “Of course I do. But something like that could take hours. Maybe we should—”

<No. It’s simplicity itself.>

They sang me the solution. Objectively, it took no time at all. Subjectively, it was fucking epic. Imagine you took every Beethoven symphony and compressed them all into a single second, and you’ll have an approximate idea of what I experienced.

Poor Patches and Lonso. They got hit with it, too, and neither of them has my understanding of higher-level math. We’re lucky they didn’t get their brains burned to a cinder.

The solution itself was gorgeous. Intricate, complex, and rigorous, it involved a kind of math no one on Earth had ever seen before, even the nerds working on Monster set theory and higher-dimensional topology.

But the way the octos laid it out, from the basic premises to their surprising ramifications, it all made perfect sense. Compared to Beethoven it was, to my mind, even more rapturous—a beautiful re-imagining of how the universe works, a million melodies intertwined, a fundamental re-thinking of math itself that at first felt like gazing into the sun until you go blind. Then everything came into focus again, with crystal clarity and the last echoes of a symphony lingering in my ears.

“Curse me for a papist,” I said. “When did you come up with that?”

<Ten minutes before you landed. We sensed your approach and felt we should have an appropriate gift for our grandmothers.>

“Right, then.” They did all that in ten minutes? The Riemann hypothesis had stumped everyone for two hundred years! “I don’t even know what to say. That was—that was perfect. Perfect in every way. You should be proud of yourselves.”

Lonso looked like he had been hit by an eighteen-wheeler. I think if my babies—sorry, my grandbabies—hadn’t been holding him afloat, he would have sunk to the bottom. “Tía,” he said, “what the fuck was that? I saw fractals and crazy shapes and colors, and all this music and—”

“I’ll explain later,” I said, “but that’s what it’s like when they’ve solved a math problem.”

“I saw the music. I tasted it. That was math?”

“That was brilliance.”

“Whatever the hell it was, it was fuckin’ rad. Made LSD look like a cup of coffee.”

Patches meowed her agreement. Not that she’s ever taken LSD. Not that I know of.

But something my grandbabies said raised a question. “You said ‘the tribes of Titan’. Who are these tribes?”

<Would you like to meet them? We wanted to introduce you, but we forgot you would drown.>

“They’re underwater.”

<Yes.>

Lonso said, “Hey, I got an idea. We got some spacesuits on the Hyades. There’s no reason we couldn’t use them for an underwater dive. I mean, except for Patches. We don’t have a cat-sized suit.”

“Something tells me she’ll be fine. Baby kitty?”

She squinted at me a couple of times to show she was totally fine with the idea.

That’s how the three of us became the first mammals to explore Titan’s lakes.

🏴‍☠️

Titan had lakes long before the octos arrived. The lakes were made of liquid methane and, in some cases, ethane. Titan had, for millennia, possessed clouds that produced rain and snow, too—a complete “water” cycle like Earth’s, but with elements made from hydrogen and carbon instead of hydrogen and oxygen.

The largest of Titan’s ancient methane lakes dwarfed Earth’s largest inland, freshwater seas—at least as far as surface area goes. On the other hand, many of them were incredibly shallow, only a few meters deep. The deepest was about 170 kilometers to the bottom. All those lakes had familiar forms around them: tributaries, gullies, deltas, fjords. Some contained islands.

But the giant lake basins were not carved by glaciers. Instead, they formed from underground gas explosions, sort of like volcanic crater lakes you might have seen before.

No one could dispute the natural beauty of those lakes, but they were unfit for life from Earth’s oceans. When the octos and the triglyph had their terraforming adventure, they filled in dry lake beds and depressions in the surface with good old dihydrogen monoxide—H₂O. They also made their fusion factory work overtime to convert the atmosphere, because what’s the use of having some nice saltwater to swim in if methane is just going to rain down and poison it?

I explained all this to Lonso as we suited up and prepared for our dive. Some of it I knew from my own research, and the rest I gleaned from my babies’ group mind on my previous visit.

Soon, we were soon ready to go exploring with my little grand-mutants. The only delay was coming up with a harness and tether to connect Patches to my suit. I mean, she can swim just fine, but we decided it would be easier if she wasn’t constantly struggling to stay submerged and could just swim at my side—or, you know, be a total lazy butt while I handled the swimming.

Finally, I needed suitable weapons to strap to the suit. I had no idea what we might encounter, but I wasn’t going into the unknown unarmed. The problem was that the fingers of my suit were too bulky to handle the trigger on a standard pistol or rifle. I settled on knives, grenades, and a sawed-off semi-auto I’d modified for use with a spacesuit.

I got a machete and grenades for Lonso, and we were ready for a night on the Titanic town. We locked up the Hyades and waded into the lake where the octos waited.

🏴‍☠️

On the way down, we discovered there were way more than the original twenty octos I’d left behind. Octopuses lay anywhere from hundreds to thousands of eggs. On Earth, most of those babies are eaten by natural predators. On Titan, they had none.

Sounds nice, doesn’t it? But if nobody is culling your species, then food becomes a major problem. After all, octos need to eat, and if no one is eating you, then you either need to get smart right quick about raising food or die from starvation.

They chose the former.

As the octos guided us down through the Titanic waters, they introduced us to gardens of meat. They had become farmers of the lifeforms they needed to survive: crabs, polychaete worms, clams, and other basically brainless animals they loved to snack on.

All up and down the craggy slopes below the surface of Titan’s new seas, thousands of octopuses tended their gardens. The aquaculture extended far beyond my field of vision, beginning in the light from our headlamps and stretching into blackness that might as well have been eternal. Hunger knows no bounds.

Lonso and Patches wanted to make sushi. Not that I blame them. But I had a bit of a problem with the idea of mind-controlling every species in sight just to make them into food. I mean, it was a crazy efficient idea, but was it right?

We dove deeper.

🏴‍☠️

I checked my oxygen to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating. I called out, “Patches? Lonso?”

Lonso responded in my helmet.

Patches drifted by my side. I sensed all the seafood was making her hungry. Iridescent scales of a thousand colors dashed around us in a living rainbow constantly shifting and reorganizing into something never seen before. I reached out a hand and almost touched the beauty before it sped away.

My grandbabies explained that we had entered the zone of fish they did not eat. They had tried to teach telepathy to those fish, with mixed results. Most fish, despite their ability to feel emotion and pain, are not intelligent enough to maintain telepathy on their own.

But the octos, in the years I’d been away from them, had discovered the fish could achieve a rudimentary group mind with the proper support.

Debate about that development had gone on for some time. It would have taken you and me several years. But when you are dealing with telepathic octos, it only takes a few minutes. The speed of thought is an amazing thing.

The short version is: They left the fishes alone to cohabitate in all their colorful glory and decided against extending their telepathic gifts to the species they needed to eat. None of the octos had the stomach to grant self-awareness to their food.

Lonso, Patches, and I descended past the coastal farms and the deeper realms of those independent tribes the octopuses allowed to survive. All those organisms were known to us. Then my grand-squiddos revealed their biggest surprise.

🏴‍☠️

They presented me with a single glass bottle. Where the hell did they get glass on that godforsaken rock? It must have been something they crafted in those brief days when they had the triglyph at their beck and call to make anything and everything they imagined.

Even more mysterious was the horde of tiny microbes inside the vessel. I have better eyesight than most, but I couldn’t see them without the octos zooming in my vision and telling me just what the hell I was looking at.

Inside their little vial swam hundreds of thousands of single-celled organisms. Every one of them thrived in a methane-rich environment that would have instantly killed any organism on Earth.

Those little bastards. My octos had discovered an entirely new lifeform, and they hadn’t even bothered to call me.

“Lonso,” I said, “check this out.”

He said, “Is that methane?”

“Yeah.”

“Nothing can survive in that.”

“No,” I said, “it can’t.”

He drew closer. Patches seemed unconcerned. I guess when you can survive in any environment, evolving to survive on Titan probably isn’t a big deal.

But it was a big deal to me. “Babies,” I said, “where did you find this?”

I’ll spare you everything they told me. Cephalopods are notoriously long-winded. The short version is: Their parents discovered native life on Titan in the form of unicellular animals. Before the triglyph buggered off to parts unknown, they preserved a handful of specimens.

A tentacle full? Whatever.

Even after the triglyph disappeared, my babies reached out with their minds and contacted a million billion organisms living in the methane lakes around them. It wasn’t the easiest telepathy. Imagine trying to teach kindergarteners about calculus.

But the octos were nothing if not patient, and far more patient than I’ll ever be. They tried to connect my mind to those methane microbes, but it wasn’t really working for me. It was like trying to explain Jackson Pollock to a cockroach. Or chess to an ant.

Lonso, however, was undaunted. He said, “Micro bros, what the fuck? How long you guys been living here?”

They gave him an answer that compressed hundreds of millions of years into the present moment and just about fried his circuits. I grabbed the shoulder of his dive suit and shook it as hard as I could while screaming at him.

His eyes sprang open.

I locked my eyes on his. “Puta madre! Look at me!”

His pupils bounced back and forth for a second before he locked onto my gaze. “Tía,” he said, “we gotta save them.”

Fuck. I was afraid he’d say something like that.

The problem with the brilliant new lifeform was that it had evolved to live in methane lakes. Other than inspecting the tiny sample I held in my hand, my grand-octos hadn’t studied the animals other than telepathically, at a distance from a lake beyond the horizon behind jagged peaks and unconquerable terrain.

To make matters worse, microbes have never been the best conversationalists.

The octos worried that the long-term effect of interfering with the hydrocarbon “water” cycle would result in Titan’s first extinction. H₂O would completely replace methane in the atmosphere and bring an end to native life on Titan.

They had set out to create a utopia, but they had begun a genocide. The octos appealed to me to do something about that tragedy.

The only solution was for us to take a large supply of the methane “water” containing those organisms so I could sequence whatever crazy strands of chemicals they used instead of DNA, record their biological processes and structures, and preserve the endangered animals.

I admit I wasn’t thrilled about the idea. But Lonso wouldn’t let it go, so we did it anyway.

🏴‍☠️

Lonso removed his helmet and set it on the pilot’s seat inside the Hyades. “We can do it, you know.”

I said, “We need a way to transport a bunch of methane, cooled to a liquid state. Maybe we could convert the old octo tank?”

“Word,” said Lonso. “I got an idea.” He picked up the journal I had lying beside my bed.

“Don’t touch that.”

“Just look.” He sketched out his idea in pencil.

The diagram made a lot of sense. I spent a moment in thought with other questions. What would happen if anyone else found about this? What kind of scumbags would start going to Titan to exploit these animals? How the fuck did those things make chromosomes without any phosphorus?

“Lonso, how many hours will it take for us to build this?”

“Depends on how much Anarchy Ale we’re hiding on this tub. The real question is: How much is it worth to you to get in on the ground floor of a whole new lifeform?”

I took a seat beside him on my bed and snatched my journal from his hands. “Don’t ever touch that again. I need a lab, and a fuckton of staff.”

“That sounds like a yes.”

Patches leapt into my lap. “Fine. Will you tell the octopuses?” I brushed a stray lock of hair away from my face. “Nevermind. They already know.”

Lonso said, “It’s funny. Most people think of you as a killer. Look at you now.”

I rubbed my eyes. “Lonso, I never wanted kids. But somehow, I ended up being a mother to all these goddamn species.”

“Life’s fucked up, tía.”

“Ain’t that the truth.”

We smoked a joint then got to work.

🏴‍☠️

On Earth, stars twinkle in the atmosphere. In the emptiness of space, they stare unblinking at everything in the reach of their ancient gaze. They never flinch.

“Puta madre,” said Lonso. “That was the last of the rum.”

“Relax. We’ll be at the Jolly before you know it.”

I like it out there, in the darkness between planets. It’s massively huge—but so fucking quiet. Perfectly quiet.

Except for Lonso snoring. I thought about suffocating him with a pillow. But I’d miss him too much.

Titan faded into the distance. Saturn faded into the distance. I plugged in my electric piano and worked out a few things for the next album.

---

[1] Mags refers to the events of Pieces of Eight, which immediately precede this story.

[2] A very general summary of events in Blind Alley Blues and subsequent stories such as Small Flowers and Farewell Tour.

[3] As recounted in The Crystal Core.

[4] Mags refers to the “far side” of Titan as the one that permanently faces away from Saturn. Titan is tidally locked with Saturn, so one side of Titan is always facing the ringed planet—which appears quite a few times larger in its sky than Earth’s Moon does on Earth.

short story draft: Reborn

Tags

genetics, meteor mags, Patches, science fiction, self publishing, writing

While I work on finishing Episode 37, enjoy this draft of the much shorter Episode 38. Despite being only 2,500 words, it is an important bridge to what comes next for our criminal crew.

art generated by Midjourney

Meteor Mags: Reborn
© 2022 by Matthew Howard.
Episode 38 in The Adventures of Meteor Mags and Patches.

Mags assembles a genetic research lab in her old hangar on Vesta. Her first experiment is a complete disaster. After much bloodshed, she tries again.

As for the fish of the sea, their names dispersed from them in silence throughout the oceans like faint, dark blurs of cuttlefish ink, and drifted off on the currents without a trace.

—Ursula K. LeGuin; She Unnames Them, 1985.

🏴‍☠️

In April 2032, Meteor Mags flipped a switch and turned on the lights. Patches ran past her feet. The hangar on Vesta had stood dark and unattended for the better part of two years—but not silent. The recently re-named Planetary Broadcasting Network played over the speakers non-stop, powered by the free-energy system Mags installed on her test run in 2030.[1]

Mags turned up the volume. “Baby kitty?”

Patches scampered here and there, sometimes stopping to listen and smell the faded traces of once-familiar scents, sometimes to carve gouges in the furniture with her indestructible claws.

For a moment, the weight of memories overwhelmed Mags. Her shoulders slumped forward as she removed her glasses and polished the lenses unnecessarily. She remembered the hangar filled with the survivors of the invasion that destroyed her club, killed so many of those dear to heart, and almost ended in her death.[2]

But even in the aftermath, her crew had found ways to celebrate the fact that they were still alive. To celebrate each other. Mags recalled the impromptu drum circles and singalongs.[3]

She lifted her head and got down to business.

After the invasion, Mags protected Vesta by installing a killer satellite network built by her friends on Mars. But she had never decided what to do with the lonely asteroid. Ceres kept her busy.

The experiments she had in mind required privacy and distance. If they went wrong, Mags didn’t want them happening anywhere near a Ceresian city. The more she thought about it, the less she wanted them on Ceres at all.

With one leather-gloved hand, she brushed the dust off an old console. Mags had often bragged that her private hangar was nuke-proof, but nothing could conquer an asteroid’s constant dust. Lights flickered below her fingertips, then shone brighter as she wiped them clean. She typed instructions to check all the systems.

“Patches? Patches!”

A howl came from a far corner.

“Be right back.”

Mags returned not once but three times pushing a pallet jack loaded with stacks of crates. She wiped sweat from her brow and lined them up against the wall.

Patches, content with her scouting and marking, sprawled on the warm green lights of the console. She licked a forepaw and laid her chin on it.

Patches purred.

Mags uncrated a few things, plugged a storage drive into a machine, and lit a smoke. She raised her hands above her head. “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the new headquarters of GenetiCorp!”

Patches typed the word into a search engine on the touchscreen beneath her. She mewed.

“What do you mean, ‘It’s already taken’?” Mags frowned. “Way to ruin my big moment.” She paced back and forth, and the sharp smack of the soles of her combat boots against the floor echoed in the empty chamber. “Weyland-Yutani? SkyNet? Omni-Consumer Products Corporation?”

She interrupted Patches’ typing with a hand on the bushy calico’s torso. “I was just kidding. Those are definitely taken. Oh, well. Fuck the name for now. Scoot over. We have work to do.”

She cracked open a bottle of rum, took over the typing, and posted several jobs on darkweb.

🏴‍☠️

Four months later, the lab was in full swing. Fifty staff members had joined, all individually vetted by Mags, and paid for with the interest she was earning by loaning her ill-gotten fortune to Solana’s central bank on Ceres to be loaned out again to start-up companies.

The staff lived in newly constructed apartments built by a Ceresian company Mags partially owned. Though small and decidedly functional, the residences were posh by the standards of the asteroid belt. Mags knew the accommodations weren’t as much fun as the former club, but they got the job done.

Her net worth, by her closest estimation, had ballooned to more than seven trillion dollars, not counting the value of Vesta itself.

Not that she ever filed taxes. That was the least of her crimes.

In August 2032, on an asteroid rarely visible to the naked eye on Earth, and only then under the darkest conditions, Mags made a poor decision.

She set a hand on her lead technician’s shoulder. “Sure,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

Her staff got to work.

🏴‍☠️

Cloning is never an easy process. To grow an animal from a pair of cells or a strand of chromosomes requires a womb. At some point, the blastula becomes an embryo and needs a mother in which it can grow.

Mags’ lab workers had settled on Komodo dragons. The scientists believed the reptiles’ robust and occasionally parthenogenetic reproductive systems resembled the ancient wombs that first gave birth to the ancestors of the dinosaurs Mags intended to bring to back to life. Plus, the massive monitors tended to mate between May and August, giving birth in September. The timing seemed fortuitous.

Mags visited her dragons several times each week and joined them in their pen which mimicked the dry, open grasslands and low tropical forests they preferred. She knew she was committing an unspeakable act upon them, but she pet the fearsome beasts and spoke to them in soothing tones only they could understand. They trusted her. They welcomed her touch. They laid eggs.

🏴‍☠️

The first birth began when Mags was away. A leathery, reptilian egg cracked open, and something the solar system had never seen before shoved its face through the shell and screamed. The infant clawed the atmosphere in a rage.

The scientists called Mags. That did not save them.

They had placed an embryo cloned from Odonata’s genes into one of the dragons to see what would happen. Unfortunately, all of them saw what happened.

🏴‍☠️

Mags set the Bêlit on the rocky Vestan surface and called out, “Patches!”

The lazy calico groomed herself. Humans, she had long since decided, had a knack for turning every event into an emergency. Surely there was nothing on Vesta she could not kill.

Still, she loved her best friend. She appeared at Mags’ feet and loudly mewed while showing her fangs.

“About time,” said Mags. “Everyone on this rock is apparently dead—everyone except one malevolent arsehole.”

Patches chattered as if she had seen a bird through a window.

“You and me both. Let’s send this motherfucker to hell.”

Patches rubbed both sides of her face against the smuggler’s boots.

“Alright,” said Mags. She pressed a sequence of numbers to open the side hatch on the Bêlit. “You go first.”

🏴‍☠️

Most of the Vestan experiments had gone well. Besides fully sequencing the alien genes of the methane-based microbes Mags brought back from Titan, they showed quite a bit of promise for resurrecting Mags’ unusual space pets, including her cybernetic mantas and the reptiles she had once abandoned on Earth.

Sadly, for the fifty dead members of the laboratory, Mags had underestimated the human cost of bringing one particular alien species back to life. She and Patches encountered a monster who grew out of control with a single-minded focus on destroying everything it encountered.

The unnamed clone had been born with six limbs. It sprouted more in its personal torment. Eyes spread across its face and sprang into existence up and down its limbs and torso until they defied counting. Spasms wracked its body. It dripped with the blood of those it had killed. The flesh it had consumed fueled its growth. Already a meter and a half tall, it grew with every passing second.

Mags introduced it to a spray of .50-caliber hollow-point rounds from a Desert Eagle. Like a mosquito in a camping tent, the beast took to the air on a chaotic path and evaded death. Mags shouted, “Patches! Can you take him down?”

Borne on four diaphanous wings like a dragonfly, the monster sliced through the air and divebombed Patches. But to the cat, it was merely a game. Her claws rebuked his attacks. His violence was met with even greater violence in a white and coffee-colored blur.

Mags holstered her pistol. The Benelli shotgun slung over her shoulder flew into her hands. “Go for the wings!”

Patches launched herself into the air and shredded every part of him she encountered. A whirlwind of destruction, she swarmed over his head and dug her claws into his back. Once she broke his wings, he plummeted to the floor. Patches landed on her feet and pounced on him. She howled her triumph. The nightmare struck out with flailing limbs and sent her sprawling.

Mags stepped up with the shotgun and blasted the monster in the face and chest until she ran out of buckshot. The clone’s brains and blood and shattered carapace decorated the floor and walls. Even in death, its remnants writhed and grew new organs. Mags stomped it without a shred of mercy.

“Motherfucker!” Mags swept a sticky lock of hair away from her spattered glasses and spat on the corpse. “Don’t you ever touch my fucking cat!” She knelt and held out one hand. “Are you okay, baby kitty?”

Patches rubbed a paw across her face and demanded petting.

Mags scratched the fuzzy face. “I guess it was a rhetorical question.”

Patches flopped onto her side with no regard for the rapidly expanding pool of green blood below. She licked her fur. It made no difference to the tufts of her unruly coat. Her enemy was dead. Her friend was alive. Her bowls were empty.

Such was life.

🏴‍☠️

Mags filled Patches’ bowls and scrubbed the hangar without any help from her friends. She did not want them to know what had happened. After the remains of the alien clone were taken outside and burned to ash on the unforgiving Vestan surface, bleach water destroyed all the errant DNA in the lab. Mags mopped every centimeter of the floor three times, wiped down every other surface, swept up broken glass, patched bullet holes, and deleted several terabytes of incriminating audio and video evidence.

She collected the bodies of the slaughtered humans and Komodo dragons, stacked them on pallets as best she could, and took them outside for a proper burial attended only by her and Patches. Through her friend Solana’s bank on Ceres, Mags paid out fifty generous pensions to next of kin who electronically signed non-disclosure agreements, per the staff’s original contracts.

The process took three days, and she almost ran out of rum.

Then she posted some job listings on darkweb.

🏴‍☠️

One month later, Mags’ new employees began what they believed to be their first project. Neither Mags nor Patches disabused them of that notion. Using the cells Mags had harvested from the remains of her cybernetic mantas, they created embryos they injected into rays imported from Earth.

The scientists supplemented the mother mantas’ diets with minerals they hoped would support the development of the metallic and electric components that defined Mags’ original mantas. The animals grew not from DNA but from a similar chemical spiral that had replaced one of our mammalian nucleobases.

That unfamiliar structure was the blueprint for the clones, and the main problem for the staff was providing raw materials for construction.

The mother rays floated at first in narrow glass tubes that rose from floor to ceiling. Mags decided that was unacceptable and ordered the construction of a gigantic tank to hold them all. On more than one occasion, she dove into the tank to have words with them.

Those words were not anything another mammal would have understood. But after three years of telepathic bonding with an odd assortment of species—from the normal to the mutated, from the cybernetic to the prehistoric—Mags had become adept at talking to more animals than just humans and cats. She swam and cursed and conversed like a space-age Doctor Dolittle with a penchant for profanity.

The rays understood. They spoke to her about their lives in Earth’s oceans, gossiped about their simpleminded yet effective cousins the sharks, and spun poetry about what it was like to be a beast made of wings and cartilage. They told her secrets no mammal had ever heard, oceanic mysteries much older than humanity. They whispered legends mantas had passed down to their children since unrecorded eons, and the meaning their species had found below the surface of the seas.

Mags listened, learned, and told them secrets of her own.

Manta ray gestation takes about a year before—unlike their egg-laying cousins the skates—they give birth to live young. In September 2033, Mags and Patches attended the birth of a new generation.

🏴‍☠️

Mags stood before the massive tank. Mantas swam in oddly geometric patterns that conveyed meanings to her but not to her staff. She would explain later.

Some of the mother mantas possessed wingspans greater than three meters, but their newborn pups were much smaller. Such tiny things, born alive.

Mags said, “Come to me.”

She had not controlled a manta in nearly four years, not since she summoned them to help her during the attack on Vesta. Still, the baby mantas responded. They swam to the top of the tank.

“Come to me.”

One by one, they broke the surface and breathed air for the first time. They survived.

Mags held out her hand and beckoned them, curling her fingers toward herself until they formed a fist. “Come to me.”

One by one, the baby mantas descended and gathered around her. They swarmed in the air, swimming in the atmosphere as gracefully as their mothers swam in water.

Patches batted them with her paws, but her claws remained sheathed. As if she were gathering her own kittens toward suckle and shelter, she herded them into a ring around Mags.

Mags said, “Show me what you got.”

The shiny, silvery mantas crackled with electricity that threatened to destroy the laboratory. Lightning bolts cascaded across every surface. The employees dove for cover below their desks.

In a storm that lit up her face in a stark relief of light and shadow, a sinister smile spread across the smuggler’s black-painted lips. She produced a cigarette and lit it on the hot, sparking wing of the nearest manta.

Mags took a puff. The tip glowed as red as a dying star.

“Bloody hell,” she said. “It’s good to see you again.”

Her mantas agreed.

🏴‍☠️

“Earth,” said Mags.

“Get the fuck out,” said Celina. “You can’t conquer a planet with only a handful of your fucked-up pets.”

“No?” Mags stretched out on the bed and crossed her arms behind her head. “Watch me.”

Celina brushed her hair in a mirror and thought about that. “You do realize it’s just you against thirteen billion people?”

“Fourteen. And fuck them,” said Mags. “Their nations have been at war for thousands of years and caused more suffering than anyone can comprehend. I’m fucking sick of it.”

“So am I, magpie.” Celina set down her brush and turned away from the mirror to face Mags directly. “But we always made a lot of money on those conflicts.”

“We did,” said Mags. “We absolutely did.” She lit a stolen cigarette. “But now, we can end it.”

---

[1] See Small Flowers for the test run. The PBN was renamed in Infinite Spaces.

[2] As told in The Battle of Vesta 4.

[3] As seen in Hunted to Extinction.

Five Easy Marketing Things to Do Once Your Kindle Ebook is Published

Tags

books, ebooks, KDP, kindle, marketing, self publishing, writing

Congratulations! Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) has approved your new ebook, and it is live on Amazon! What next? What can you do now to promote your book and spread the word? Here are five easy, low-cost actions to get you started.

Disclaimer: I am not an employee of Amazon or KDP, and no one is paying me to write this. I am a freelance editor, designer, and self-publishing consultant who has explained this stuff so many times that I thought I might as well put it all in one handy reference for my customers, friends, and every other writer on the Internet. Let’s rock.

1. Get the correct link to your book. You can get the URL for your book from inside your KDP account—not just the URL for the listing in the States but in other countries, too. But many authors end up searching for their book on Amazon like a customer and copying the entire URL they get. The result is uglier than sin and full of garbage you don’t need. The actual URL is much simpler.

Here is what I mean, using one of my books as an example. If I go to Amazon and search in the “Books” category for “meteor mags permanent crescent”, then click the top search result, the URL I get is this beast: https://www.amazon.com/Meteor-Mags-Permanent-Crescent-Other/dp/B0B6XSNMV6/ref=sr_1_1?crid=O50DN9C02VR0&keywords=meteor+mag+permanent+crescent&qid=1664326036&qu=eyJxc2MiOiIwLjg3IiwicXNhIjoiMC4wMCIsInFzcCI6IjAuMDAifQ%3D%3D&s=books&sprefix=meteor+mags+permanent+cresc%2Cstripbooks%2C453&sr=1-1

Help! It’s making my eyes bleed!!! But everything from “ref=” to the very end is just garbage. If you look closely, you can see it shows the search terms I used, and other data that is useful to Amazon but is pointless to share with other people when promoting your book. The only meaningful part is this first part: https://www.amazon.com/Meteor-Mags-Permanent-Crescent-Other/dp/B0B6XSNMV6/

2. Set up an Amazon Affiliate Account. This one isn’t exactly simple, but since it involves linking to your book, we’ll cover it now. I’m not giving a full tutorial on how to set up this account, but it’s pretty easy to get started here: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/

When you are an Amazon Affiliate, you can get short links to any product page—including the one for your book—and those links identify your affiliate account to Amazon. That means if people buy your book after clicking through the affiliate link, then you don’t just make your royalty on the book sale; you also make a small commission as an affiliate. And if you share that link with people, and they share it with other people, and those people share it again… Do you see where this is going? Every time anyone in that chain clicks through that link and makes a purchase, you get a little commission.

Once you’re an Affiliate, you get a special toolbar when you are logged into Amazon, and you can use that toolbar to make short links to your book (or anything else Amazon sells). At the time of this writing, it is called the “Amazon Associates Site Stripe”, and it looks like this in an Internet browser:

Using “Get Link” and “Text”, it only takes a second to create a short and simple affiliate link to the same book I shared in Step One above: https://amzn.to/3ShU30g

Isn’t that much nicer and simpler than the others? Isn’t it nice that it earns me a little extra commission that goes on an Amazon gift certificate to fund my graphic novel addiction?

If you want something more visual for your website, you can also generate a clickable image of your book (or any other product) using the same affiliate toolbar. I would show you here, but WordPress.com doesn’t allow “iframe” code in these posts, which is what Amazon will give you to embed in your website. (If you are no stranger to website design, then you are probably already thinking, “I could just put the book cover image on my website and hyperlink that image using the affiliate URL.” And you are right.)

3. Set up an Amazon Author Page. Using your KDP/Amazon login credentials, go to Author Central and create your own Amazon Author Page: https://author.amazon.com/

You can upload a profile photo, add your bio, and add your book to that page. If you have multiple books, you can add them all so that readers can find all your work in one place. You can also add editorial reviews to your book listing, and more. [2023 UPDATE: In December 2022, Amazon discontinued photos, videos, and blog feeds from Author Pages in the U.S.A. Yes, I agree with you that this decision totally sucks.)

Plus, you can get a nicely customized URL. Here’s mine: amazon.com/author/matthewhoward which when clicked on, redirects to the actual page URL of https://www.amazon.com/Matthew-Howard/e/B00S3DYDEK

4. Promote Your Book by Buying It as a Gift for Other People. Just about every successful author you meet has done many book giveaways and sent out tons of free copies. That can be a major expense of both money and time with printed books. With ebooks, it’s much easier and less expensive.

Just go to your ebook’s listing like any other customer and click “Buy for Others”. All you need is a valid email address for the recipient, and you will be able to add a short, personalized message to the email that gets sent to them with a link to claim the gift.

If your book is 99 cents and you are on a 30% royalty plan, then you will get back 30 cents of the 99 you spend. Sure, it will take two months for that 30 cents to hit your bank account via direct deposit, but your net cost is reduced to 69 cents. (For simplicity’s sake, I have not included sales tax in these calculations.) If you are on the 70% royalty plan and your book is, for example, $9.95, then you will earn back $6.48 of your cost, reducing your net expense to $3.47.

And guess what? Your ebook gift expenses are now tax-deductible marketing expenses for your publishing business. Keep track of them and claim them at tax time on your Schedule C.

If you really want to be thrifty and ultra-low budget, you can first reduce the price from inside your KDP account to the lowest allowable price, buy a bunch of gifts at reduced cost, then change the price back to your normal retail price when you are done. Just keep in mind that each of those changes require about a day to update through KDP.

5. Consider Enrolling the Book in KDP Select for More Marketing Options. You can do this by checking a box during the initial set-up, but you can also add your book to this program later through your Marketing Manager page: https://kdp.amazon.com/marketing/manager. Enrolling in KDP Select opens up several marketing possibilities for you.

KDP Select is related to the Kindle Unlimited subscription that allows customers to read KDP Select books at no additional cost beyond their monthly subscription fee. Select pays authors for these readings out of a general fund, and how much you get paid depends on both the size of the fund and how much of the book gets read. (It’s complicated.) It probably won’t make you a ton of money, but it is a zero-cost way to gain potential readers who might tell their friends, write a nice review, or buy your other books.

Plus, once you are enrolled in KDP Select for 30 days, you can run Price Promotions as part of your marketing efforts. You can, for a limited time, make the book available for free, or make a Countdown Deal. With a Countdown, the discount starts at the maximum discount and decreases over time until the last day of the Countdown. This is an incentive for people to buy sooner rather than later to get the best deal. Currently, you can run these promotions multiple times per year.

The Marketing Manager page also allows you to nominate up to two of your books at a time as being free to read for Amazon Prime subscribers — another nice way to potentially expand your readership without spending any money. Since I have an ongoing fiction series, I like to have a couple books that make good “jumping-on points” for new readers available for free on Prime. If someone tries out one of those books for free and likes it, then they can buy more books to get the complete series or find out what happens next.

Finally, being part of KDP Select allows you to enter your book in various Amazon Literary Contests. Winning an award would certainly be a good thing for your book, wouldn’t it?

Bonus Action: If the five things I’ve discussed were easy, basic stuff for you, then maybe you are ready to take it to the next level by running an Ad Campaign for your book on Amazon. The main site for setting up an Amazon Ads account is https://advertising.amazon.com/ but if you already have a KDP account, you can skip that. Instead, just log in to KDP and find your ebook on your “Bookshelf”. There will be a button for “Promote and Advertise” that takes you to a page where you can begin setting up an Ad Campaign. (Alternately, go directly to Marketing Manager.) A basic Sponsored Product campaign for one book takes about five minutes to set up. You determine your daily budget and how much you bid for clicks, plus the duration of the campaign, so you completely control your cost.

Controlling your ad budget is especially important if you don’t have any prior experience or training with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and using Keywords for online marketing and advertising. Start with a small, limited budget so you can get some preliminary data on what works and what doesn’t. You can run multiple small campaigns at the same time, and use different keyword strategies to see what leads to sales and what doesn’t. The reporting feature of Amazon Ads is fairly robust and detailed to help you develop and refine a strategy. I’ve seen some surprising results, such as the campaign I spent more money on would generate the most clicks but the fewest sales, while a more modest campaign with different keyword targeting generated fewer clicks but the most sales. So, don’t just haphazardly throw money at your ad campaigns. Start small, get some data, and refine what works best.

Conclusion: If you’re serious about promoting your self-published book, you have so many options available through Amazon and KDP—and most of them are free or cost next to nothing. Some authors can do all this on their own, while others need to hire someone like me to handle the technical details. Either way, they are useful tools available to all KDP authors, so take advantage of them!

holograms

Tags

holograms, Patches, pirates, poems, poetry, universe, writing

art generated by Midjourney

We might be inconsequential,
but every fragment of us
contains the whole.

Every atom of our lives
holds a universe.

You and I
have always matched:

our eyes the same color,
our origins identical.

We came from nothing.
We stole everything,
and we refuse to leave.

This poem now appears in the book
Meteor Mags: Permanent Crescent and Other Tales.

volcano

Tags

birds, collaboration, poems, poetry, volcano, writing

art generated by Midjourney

Volcano

The old volcano
slowly releases her heat.
Ponds ripple gently.

Birds flock to her warmth
and nest for generations
until she erupts.

Startled birds flee to
nest on quieter islands,
remnants of raging,

sheltering their young
from the unexpected storms
brought in on the waves.

The young ones will grow
and raise their own to migrate,
exploring the seas.

This poem was written in collaboration with SisterMoon, who also composed the original poem that appears as the epigraph to The Singing Spell in Meteor Mags: The Second Omnibus. Although our 5-7-5 verse format is an oversimplification of traditional Japanese haiku, we did use the classical method of taking turns creating verses to form a longer poem.

Joining this collaboration as illustrator is the Midjourney AI, whose otherwordly imaginations you will now see adorning many of my original poems in the poetry archives.

ocean

Tags

dreams, meteor mags, Moon, ocean, poems, poetry, writing

art generated by Midjourney

OCEAN

We are small things
unlike the stars that birthed us

or the Moon who pulls the ocean
without ever touching her,

an infinite depth of azure and obsidian
swallowing dreams

dissolving them for centuries
before setting them on the shore

polished as smooth and featureless
as a mystery without end.

This poem now appears in the book Meteor Mags: Permanent Crescent.

Smashing Words Together: Lessons from My Decade with Smashwords

Tags

self publishing, smashwords, writing

art generated by Midjourney

Shout out to everyone who picked up free copies of my books at Smashwords during this July’s Summer Sale. Giving away hundreds of free copies of printed books can be a major marketing expense for self-publishing authors, but ebook giveaways are a low-cost alternative for those of us whose pockets are not as deep as those of the big boys at Penguin or Random House. This year, Smashwords made a deal to be acquired by another ebook provider, Draft2Digital, but many authors I talk to are not even aware Smashwords exists.

Just to be clear: I don’t work for Smashwords, and they don’t pay me to talk to about them. But I have been using them for years as an additional distribution channel for several reasons. I also want to cover some technical aspects of using Smashwords that authors should know before they dive right in and try it for themselves.

Increasing Your Distribution

First: While I like giving away free books in July and December using Smashwords, you don’t need to make them free. You can also set discount prices at a certain percentage of the list price, and you can use Smashwords to generate “coupon codes” to distribute to anyone you want. Although I don’t, it’s a handy tool for authors with an email marketing list or social media presence. I go with the “totally free” option because it gets dozens or even hundreds of books into the hands of new readers at no cost to me. Some of them write lovely four- and five-star reviews.

Second: While I am a big fan of Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), they’ve always had gaps in their distribution. Amazon would—for obvious reasons—prefer that ebook readers stay within the Kindle environment rather than spend money elsewhere. Many years ago, I started using Smashwords because my friend in Australia preferred getting ebooks in the Apple/iTunes environment, and she could not get my books there. I did a little research and discovered Smashwords distributed to the Apple bookstore, so I set about learning how to use them. At the time, getting distribution through additional global retail outlets was, to me, icing on the cake. I really just wanted my friend to find the book!

Since then, I’ve realized that while KDP gets my paperback books into the catalogs that libraries can use, they don’t appear to be doing the same with ebooks. Amazon wants sales money for every single copy, and they don’t seem to care about people who check out free ebooks from public libraries and the increasing network of partner sites libraries use. (For example, Hoopla partners with the Pima County library system for ebooks, including graphic novels and comics. It’s just an app you download for free and log into with your library card credentials.)

Smashwords, on the other hand, distributes to ebook outlets such as OverDrive where libraries can buy ebooks. The Phoenix Public Library, for example, now has several of my ebooks available to check out because they buy through OverDrive. While readers can check them out for free, the library does buy them, so I got paid for those sales.

Plus, Smashwords allows you to set a different price for libraries than the retail price. Some authors might feel they should jack up the price for libraries, since a single library purchase can reach a theoretically unlimited number of readers. I take the opposite approach and lower my price for libraries, because not only do I love libraries and want to support them, but I am also a relatively unknown author who wants to make it easy for libraries to take a chance on my books without risking an arm and a leg.

One final bonus is that Smashwords will create an EPUB file that you as the author can download for free. So, if you want an ebook you can send for free to friends, family, reviewers, or contests, you can just get that file and email it to them. Anyone can get a free EPUB reader from Adobe, called Adobe Digital Editions.

Technical Difficulties

While the sales, giveaways, and added distribution are great reasons to use Smashwords, you do need some technical knowledge to work with them. If you are still using Microsoft Word like it’s a fancy electric typewriter, then you don’t yet have the skills required to work with Smashwords—unless you hire someone like me to deal with it for you. Here are some of the major things I’ve encountered and overcome in my years of working with them.

First, Smashwords will accept two kinds of files. One is a completely and properly formatted EPUB file, and if you don’t know how to create EPUBs on your own, that will be a challenge. Programs such as Calibre can help, but most authors I work with lack the technical skills to deal with it—and good luck finding any classes on it. Adobe’s InDesign program can create EPUBs, but it is most often used by professional graphic designers and is about as challenging to master as Photoshop or Illustrator, for which most authors don’t have any training.

For those who aren’t Adobe experts, Smashwords will also accept a .doc file. That’s not the current version of MS Word files, which are .docx, but the backwards-compatible and increasingly outdated version of Word files from a simpler, bygone era. Current versions of Word can absolutely save files as .doc, and that’s how I do it. I work on all my manuscripts in the current version of Word, but when it’s time to make a Smashwords edition, I save them as .doc files. That process causes some changes; for example, if you formatted anything in Small Caps, it will become All Caps in .doc. So, this requires some formatting expertise to make sure everything looks right on the virtual page.

The process becomes more complex if you have images and illustrations in your books. I have run into so many problems with images not being displayed correctly after Smashwords crunches my .doc file through their converter. The only solution that ever reliably works the first time for me is to delete every single image, save the file, then re-insert every image from scratch and make sure all of them are formatted as being positioned “In Line With Text”.

Probably the weirdest image problem I ever encountered—and it only happened once—was when the converter robots kept renaming embedded image files in a .doc to something even they didn’t recognize, so then they couldn’t find them in the converted file. Eventually, I fixed it by downloading Smashwords’ resultant EPUB file, opening it in Calibre, and using a repair function in Calibre to fix the EPUB. Then I uploaded that version instead of my .doc file and, magically, it solved the problem. I’ve never seen that happen before or since.

But there are even more time-consuming design challenges with .doc files for Smashwords. I think they boil down to the fact that the robotic Smashwords converter has even stricter demands than Kindle, because you can get away with all kinds of things that make for perfectly readable Kindle ebooks but which are total failures at Smashwords.

A common challenge is the hyperlinked Table of Contents (TOC). If you have an intermediate skill level with MS Word, then you know how to link something in your TOC to a specific place in your document. That’s easy stuff. But what you might not realize is that MS Word has a tendency to fill your document with all kinds of bookmarks you don’t know about. These Hidden Bookmarks confuse the Smashwords robots and wreck your TOC, preventing Premium Distribution to other outlets. (Note: Smashwords will not tell you the TOC is broken, but instead say that the “NCX file” is bad. The NCX file is, in simplest terms, a separate TOC generated for EPUB files. But in all cases where my NCX was broken, my own TOC links got corrupted, too.)

I am not a noob when it comes to Word. I have been working with it at an expert level for more than twenty years, taken advanced college classes and corporate training on it, and taught other people how to use it. I have done things with Word that professional graphic designers have assured me are impossible—until I showed them how it was done. So, hidden bookmarks were not a mystery to me, and whenever I work with bookmarks, I make sure there is a checkmark in the little box that says, “Show Hidden Bookmarks”.

But what I did not initially realize is that the checkbox is useless if you don’t uncheck it first, then check it again. MS Word apparently needs to reset its brain with the uncheck/check process before it displays all the actual bookmarks so you can delete the garbage bookmarks one-by-one. My failure to realize this resulted in many of my more complex books being rejected for Premium Distribution, which is how you get into places like Apple and library platforms. After struggling, I contacted Smashwords support, and they helped me get a clue. These days, I know about the problem and how to eliminate it, and my books are all approved for Premium Distribution on the first try.

Bookmarks in Word are also crucially important if your book has footnotes. When I upload a compressed HTML file with footnotes to KDP, their robots automatically convert them to hyperlinked endnotes that appear at the end of the book. It’s super convenient. (How I make compressed HTML files for KDP would require its own tutorial.)

But the robots at Smashwords hate footnotes. If you’re pretty good with MS Word, then you already know that it only takes a couple of clicks to convert all your footnotes to endnotes using the References tool bar. But guess what? Smashwords’ robots don’t like that either.

It took me years to figure out a solution—even after reading all of Smashwords’ formatting documentation and watching multiple, useless YouTube tutorials about it. The solution to getting workable endnotes with Smashwords is—in the simplest terms I can put it—to create a bookmark at every place where you have a numbered note in the text, then create a bookmark at every specific endnote, then create individual hyperlinks from the note number in the text to the specific endnote, and finally create another link from the note itself back to the place in the text.

The bookmarks also need to be named with the prefix “ref_”. (Don’t ask me why; it just keeps the robots from getting confused.) So, my first note in the text is named “ref_001”, and the corresponding endnote is named “ref_ftn_001”. If you only have a couple of notes, this is child’s play. If you have, like I sometimes do, upwards of 100 notes, it’s a time-consuming, brain-numbing clerical task—especially since the pop-up window MS Word gives you to work in is roughly the size of a couple of postage stamps.

Anyway, this four-step process of bookmarking and hyperlinking will allow readers to click on a note in the text so they can see the endnote, then click on that to get back to the original spot in the text.

But what if your document already has linked endnotes because you made it in Word? Sorry, but it’s now full of junk that will confuse the robots. The actual first step that I discovered is to remove every single hyperlink in the document.

I started out doing that manually. But when I got to books with copious notes, I suspected there must be an easier way, and I searched for it online. The “easy” way turns out to be running a Visual Basic script to remove all hyperlinks. Even as a Word expert, I don’t find writing Visual Basic to be easy. Fortunately, I copied the script from someone else who was kind enough to post it on their blog. It was a lifesaver.

Now, you might not need to get that technical to remove a handful of links and insert a couple of bookmarks manually. As far as I’m concerned, that is simple stuff. But one of my books had more than 200 footnotes, and doing this manually just to get approved by Smashwords and have a viable ebook that readers could use reliably was a massive project that took hours of my time, research, and so much mouse-clicking that I’ll probably end up with carpal tunnel syndrome.

The things we do for art.

Conclusion

Do I love Smashwords? Absolutely. They got me into libraries, ebook outlets around the world, and the hands of many readers who would have never discovered me otherwise. But because I often publish books with massive amounts of images, footnotes, and complex Tables of Contents, I had serious technical challenges to overcome to achieve my vision.

Fortunately, I solved those problems. Now, I can help other authors get past them and distribute their ebooks on a global scale through channels that KDP alone cannot or will not handle.

Tomorrow, the world.

Rationality, Religion, and Art

Tags

art, atheism, fiction, God, memoir, reflections, religion, writing

art generated by Midjourney

One of the unaddressed, human problems for atheists is the concept of irrationality. While I feel that Richard Dawkins and his Foundation for Reason and Science are a good example of the intellectual trend that needs to become more widespread in America and across the globe, an appeal to humans to be completely rational faces an intractable problem. Despite our capacity for reason and rationality, we also experience life in non-rational ways.

While the scientific method often reveals an underlying order to the chaos we experience, we cannot say the universe itself is rational. Everyone knows what it is like to confront events in life that seem totally absurd. Entire movements in the world of art have sprung up to address this. No matter how much we want to believe that we could be completely rational beings, the human mind is a playground for irrational thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors.

My observations of the behaviors of others and myself in my five decades on this planet lead me to conclude that a purely rational approach to life leaves out some important aspects of human experience. I believe this contributes to the persistence of religion, even in eras such as ours where organized religion, zealotry, and extremist fundamentalism produce or justify violence, suffering, misogyny, racism, and abuse. The evils committed in the name of religious good or faith remain unshakable to this day, and those of us who have opted out of our religious backgrounds find this both sad and perplexing. How, we ask, can people continue to cling to primitive, Bronze-Age ideas that breed hate and intolerance and prevent society from progressing towards more humane and inclusive goals?

Many before me have attempted to answer this question, so let’s consider the four most common evaluations. First, humans fear death. Religion offers comfort in the face of a universe that in no way cares about any individual, by creating deities who do care. Religion offers comfort in a universe where everything we are is guaranteed to end, by creating an artificial afterlife where we can live on.

This afterlife is often posited as a form of justice which is absent from the actual universe, an afterlife where “good” people are rewarded and “bad” people are punished. In real life, horrible people get away with horrible things while kind and decent people suffer. Imaginary concepts such as heaven and hell give comfort that there is a form of cosmic justice that exists beyond this world.

Second, humans crave order. Disorder is frightening. The unpredictability of life is frightening, and humans are not alone in this fear. Consider how stressed a pet dog or cat can become if their routine is disrupted, or if forces beyond their comprehension appear to threaten them. If you’ve ever seen a pet hide under a bed during a thunderstorm, or develop oddly unhealthy habits around grooming and eating to deal with stress, then you know what I mean.

In the face of this fear of the disorderly and unknown, religion grants the illusion of cosmic order and also creates an imaginary ruler of that order, one who can set things right or who has a master plan in which we can place our trust. This non-existent cosmic ruler also imposes a moral authority that sweeps away the supremely challenging ethical task of deciding for oneself what is right and wrong—a task plagued by the same disorder and incomprehensible complexity of the world we experience. Deciding for oneself is hard. Having an authority hand you the answers is easy.

Third, humans look for agency. Part of progressing from an infant to a socially mature adult is the realization that other humans and even animals are like oneself in that they have agency. Others can make decisions and choices, have feelings and thoughts, and presumably have some kind of experience of life that is conscious in the same way that we are conscious. Empathy is when we come to consider that the experience of others is something to be respected, understood, and treated with kindness, because we can imagine that we know what that other person or animal feels. Their pain is like our pain. Their hopes are like our hopes. Their joy is like our joy. Their problems are like our problems.

But as important as this empathy toward other agents is to social cohesion in groups—from the smallest tribe to the largest nation—the human mind also seeks to find conscious agency in objects and events which simply have none. A rock or a bolt of lightning or a gust of wind has no agency, but the human mind naturally wants to believe it does. On one end of the religious spectrum, this results in pantheism where every object possesses some form of consciousness. At the other end of the spectrum, it results in monotheism where every action of every object is guided by the conscious choices of some cosmic ruler.

In the middle of the spectrum lie various gradients of these ideas. Though none of them are true or even remotely provable, their allure is the comfort that we do not live in an unfeeling and unconscious universe, but one where we might affect the outcomes of events by supplicating these non-existent agents through prayer, sacrifice, good deeds, wars against non-believers, and many other actions which do not affect the physical behavior of the universe.

Our attempts to appease the gods might make us feel better, or they might lead to atrocities, or both. They might lead us to create monuments or overcome addictions. But they do not at all affect the underpinnings of the universe. We have been fooled by our own propensity to seek out agency in all things.

The fourth and final most common reason given for the continuation of religion is that humans seek power. The first three reasons all deal with feeling powerless against the workings of the universe and circumstance: death, impermanence, disorder, moral doubt, and non-conscious objects and events. But the fourth reason deals specifically with obtaining power over other humans.

There is no greater threat to man than man himself, and no greater source of fear. Religion offers a means to control those others whom we fear, and a means to mobilize or enslave others so that we might gain more power over them and pursue more power for ourselves. Religion empowers us to tell other people what they should be doing and justifies our violence against them when they do not comply. It empowers people in leadership positions to consolidate their social power not only by telling people what to do but by setting themselves up as the authority on what constitutes right behavior for all other people—usually in some bid to expand their personal or political empire.

In other words, because the first three reasons for religion meet basic emotional needs that cannot be met by a purely rational approach to life, the fourth reason allows those needs to be exploited for personal gain and a feeling of control in a universe over which we truly have no control.

While I respect and empathize with intellectual movements that embrace rationality, I doubt we can move forward as a species until we admit that a purely rational approach will never completely meet our psychological and emotional needs. Not until we accept that some kinds of non-rational experience are necessary to our well-being will we reach a more holistic, all-encompassing way of dealing with the lives we are born into.

Fortunately, we have those means within our grasp. In my life since abandoning the religious indoctrination I endured as a child, I have found ways to give free rein to the non-rational parts of my mind through various forms of art. Through poetry, music, and painting, I have found ways to express, confront, and integrate my irrational thoughts and feelings and the absurdity of human experience so I could feel like a complete human being. I often make art more through intuition and emotion than some kind of logical process.

But I have also found there is a balance between the rational and irrational. Music involves the study of scales and chords and rhythms, and it can often resemble mathematics. Painting involves analysis of techniques and the relationships between colors. Poetry involves studying language and what it takes to convey emotional meaning through words. Every art form has some rational component.

But there are stages in the process of creating art and appreciating art where you need to get into a non-verbal state of mind and allow yourself to be swept up in and overcome by the feeling. A mathematical analysis of a concerto will never completely capture the subjective experience of being moved to tears by hearing the music.

For the past eight years, I have also been writing fiction, and it is much the same. I have spent countless hours as a writer and editor analyzing things such as character arcs, story arcs, prose style, post-modern approaches to storytelling, nuances of punctuation and paragraphs, and how to say the most in the fewest words. But at some point, you need to stop analyzing and just write, to tap into some indefinable place in your imagination and go with the feeling so that the reader can also get swept up in that feeling and experience a story from the inside.

Of all the art forms I’ve explored, fiction might be the one most like religion because it makes order out of a disorderly universe. In fiction, unlike life, everything on the page should happen for a reason. In fiction, every detail matters and is relevant. In fiction, we can create a world in which justice prevails, death is overcome, and everything that happens is imbued with meaning—a world that is not at all like the one we were born into.

Granted, many authors like to subvert those goals to make a point about reality, and I appreciate why they do it. I often do it myself. A dose of reality and unexpected tragedy still makes for a compelling story that says something meaningful about our lives. But overall, I see fiction as imposing a meaningful order on life. Life itself is often pointless beyond the biological imperative to reproduce more life. But fiction can advance any point it wants to communicate. Like religion, it takes the incomprehensibly complex unknown and makes it knowable.

And unless we admit that not everything we humans need is met by rationality and find ways to meet those needs through art, the social progress desired by the rationalism movements will not be achieved.

Meteor Mags: Permanent Crescent – now in print and ebook

Tags

books, meteor mags, permanent crescent, self publishing, writing

For sale on Amazon in ebook, paperback, and hardback editions.

The ebook is also for sale on Smashwords and other major ebook retailers.

Might be unsuitable for children and other forms of carbon-based life.

After the events of The Second Omnibus, Meteor Mags and her hard-rocking space-pirate crew confront new enemies, old rivals, and the final fate of the interspecies band, Small Flowers. Permanent Crescent and Other Tales continues Mags’ evolution from a rogue pirate to a leader with far-reaching plans, and her choices will have major consequences for the future of the solar system. This collection contains six all-new episodes totaling 57,000 words.

Permanent Crescent: The Moon is about to die, and it’s all Mags’ fault. Join a hell-raising space pirate and her indestructible calico cat as they confront a lunar death cult whose alien leader plans to take vengeance on humanity by destroying Earth’s ancient satellite.

Odonata’s Revenge: Mags faces double trouble when an alien menace and an ex-mercenary converge on Ceres to end the pirate’s life and steal her secret technology.

Infinite Spaces: Mags and her crew discover signals emanating from the depths of the subterranean ocean on Ceres and risk their lives in uncharted waters to find the source. What they find makes Mags reconsider her role in humanity’s evolution and the final fate of her universe.

Farewell Tour: A band of telepathic octopuses and their interspecies friends bring a message of liberation to the solar system one last time. Mags and Patches fight to rescue them from the forces of law and order.

One Last Night on Death World: On the last night of Gramma’s life, Mags takes her drinking at a west-coast bar to shoot pool and have fun. Between games of billiards, they discuss the future of the solar system and reminisce about their past, revealing details about Gramma’s childhood, her relationship with her piratical mother, and the development of GravGen technology.

Pieces of Eight: Mags and her friends in Small Flowers return to Earth to seek a new home for the dying octopuses, but what they find is not at all what they expected.

reflections on writing: One Last Night on Death World

Tags

billiards, memoir, meteor mags, pool, reflections, self publishing, writing

art generated by Midjourney

On the last night of Gramma’s life, Mags takes her drinking at a west-coast bar to shoot pool and have fun. Between games of billiards, they discuss the future of the solar system and reminisce about their past, revealing details about Gramma’s childhood, her relationship with her piratical mother, and the development of GravGen technology.

July 2022 Update: The story is now collected in Meteor Mags: Permanent Crescent and Other Tales. For sale on Amazon in ebook, paperback, and hardback editions. The ebook is also available on Smashwords and other major retailers.

About seven years ago, I started compiling notes for a Meteor Mags story that would take place on the last night of Gramma’s life and, through flashbacks, fill in a lot of details about Gramma’s history and how they relate to the main narrative in the series. While the series is ostensibly science-fiction, this tale was more like historical fiction.

If you’ve ever written historical fiction, you know it takes an incredible amount of research into historical fact. Otherwise, you end up with unintended anachronisms, inaccuracies, and all kinds of things any expert in your chosen time period will absolutely tear apart.

This problem almost killed my story.

Since it involves the history of billiards, I got involved in the history of France and a man named Francois Mingaud. He invented the leather tip we all now take for granted on a cue stick.

The first indication that I had serious problems was that my research turned out to be contradictory about when and where Mingaud was held prisoner, and the inaccuracy of him being imprisoned at the Bastille years after it was demolished was repeated in dozens of billiards-related websites where I sought information about his life.

I solved the discrepancy by emailing Mike Shamos, author of The New Illustrated Encyclopedia of Billiards (an excellent resource rivaled only by the work of his friends Victor Stein and Paul Rubino in the massive Billiard Encyclopedia). Dr. Shamos was kind enough to provide historical documents that set the record straight about Mingaud’s imprisonment. I am such a Wikipedia nerd that I corrected the mistakes in Mingaud’s article and included a note about why the widespread inaccuracy about his imprisonment was impossible.

That’s just one of the complications of the history I was trying to construct. Eventually, it all became so overwhelming that I relegated my story to being one of those ideas I would never get around to writing.

But last month, one of the authors from my old workshop group was kind enough to listen for a few minutes to all the reasons I had never written the story I wanted to. In the days that followed, I thought about those reasons; the chief of which was that I simply did not want to invest another year of my life researching the time period to write the novella I had planned.

As I have said many times before, being able to articulate our problems often leads to them solving themselves. I’m indebted to the author who took a few minutes to listen, because thinking about my so-called “reasons” led me to trying some narrative solutions to those problems.

I played with a few ideas, cut some scenes that were too involved and slowed the pacing, engaged a few characters to summarize events that could have filled a novel, and ended up with a short, fast-paced tale that accomplished damn near everything I ever wanted from the “sweeping historical epic” I would never get around to writing.

You can judge for yourself whether it succeeds or not.

I’ve written before about my love for various games of pool, so I have only one more thing to say about the title of this story. Years ago, I saw an infographic about the most-used words in book titles. People online ripped this thing apart as an example of the most cliché and crappy book titles.

But to me, they looked like damn good words, so I came up with several fun titles based on that silly infographic and decided to use “One Last Night on Death World” as the name of a pinball/videogame Mags would have distributed on the west coast of the USA in the 1990s as a cover for her smuggling operations. (It’s introduced in a flashback in the previous story, Farewell Tour, which fills in the early years of the friendship between Mags and Alonso.) The name also fit the idea of Gramma Margareta’s last night on Earth, so I ran with it.

What did I learn from all this? First, it helps to have other writers to talk to when you are having problems with a story. Second, you can get a lot of mileage from emailing an expert on a subject. Third, the problems you encounter when telling a story can often be solved by taking a different approach to narration and engaging the characters to solve your problems for you.

I’m tempted to add a fourth lesson about “Stop making excuses and write the damn thing”, but I can’t help but feel that compiling notes for all these years until I had a chance to bend a sympathetic ear was the right decision. It was like I had been dissolving minerals in a solution for seven years and then all of a sudden—Boom! All it took was one little grain for them to gather around and become a crystal.

In addition to borrowing Francois Mingaud from real life, this tale guest-stars Scott Safran, a young man history also remembers for his accomplishments in a game. Both of their lives play out a bit differently due to meeting Mags and her ancestors. The hotelier Jonathan Hathaway is a complete fabrication.

my childhood spider-man drawing

Tags

drawing, memoir, meteor mags, quarterly report, self publishing, Spider-man, writing

Spidey was my jam as a young Martian. I must have crafted this masterpiece near the end of the 1970s, when I was five to seven years old. Clearly, I had a lot to learn about architecture and anatomy. Feel free to mock me now for those ridiculous hands!

Well into my early adolescence, if you had asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have said, “A comic-book artist.” I designed different characters and drew them poorly, no matter how many drawing tutorials I attempted to follow. Eventually, I became reasonably okay-ish in various visual, musical, and literary art forms, but I still can’t draw sequential art to save my life — unless it’s stick figures!

Someone on Reddit suggested this could be a super-rare variant cover, so I ordered a five-dollar copy of the blank version of Non-Stop Spider-man #1 using some of the store credit I earned at MyComicShop in the last couple of months thanks to this blog’s readers. I’ll see if I can get this image printed on it.

In other news, I finished drafting episode 34 in the ongoing Adventures of Meteor Mags and Patches this week, and I had a blast writing it. It’s really two stories in one. In the “present day” of February 2032, the interspecies telepathic band Small Flowers performs their final concert in the asteroid belt. That story is spliced with flashbacks about the musical friendship between Mags and Alonso, who is the only human in Small Flowers and one of the people Mags loves most in all the solar system.

July 2022 Update: The story is now collected in Meteor Mags: Permanent Crescent and Other Tales. For sale on Amazon in ebook, paperback, and hardback editions. The ebook is also available on Smashwords and coming soon to other major retailers.

Bonus points to anyone who gets my silly Spider-man drawing printed on a t-shirt before I do. Until then, Cadet Stimpy and I remain stranded on the planet Ballknob. We had to eat what was left of the ship.

At least the voices have stopped for a while.

Chaotic Notes on Chaos

Tags

benoit mandelbrot, chaos, edward lorenz, james gleick, jeff goldblum, lorenz attractor, mandelbrot set, strange attractor, writing

The new short story I drafted this month has a brief description of something that resembles the “strange attractors” from Chaos theory, so I spent a little time refreshing my memory about Chaos. In the most general and oversimplified terms, Chaos theory is a study of how apparently orderly systems give rise to apparent disorder, and vice versa. It also involves fractals, which are fun, and they give insights into how very simple sets of rules can create enormous complexity.

The cover of the first edition.

My introduction to Chaos was the 1988 book Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick. Along with Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, which came out the same year, I read it in 1989 or 90 when I was still in high school, and it blew my mind. It isn’t a mathematical textbook but a history of the pioneers in the field and their discoveries. It lays out the basic concepts in layman’s terms and how they apply to a vast array of disciplines that study dynamic systems, from the weather and animal populations to the human body and your heartbeats. It also has a lot to say about how a revolutionary, interdisciplinary field at first met with apathy or outright resistance from the scientific establishment.

If you don’t have the time to read the whole book, you can get a brief but engaging introduction to some of the concepts in the following video from Veritasium.

A few years after Gleick’s book made inroads into popularizing the topic with general audiences, Chaos reached the masses through the first Jurassic Park film, based on Michael Crichton’s exceptionally entertaining 1990 novel. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone from my generation who isn’t familiar with Jeff Goldblum’s performance as Ian Malcom and his famous line, “Life, uh, finds a way.” On the other hand, the film didn’t do much to explain real concepts of Chaos, and probably left people with the impression that it just means “Things can and will go very wrong, very quickly.”

Little did he know he would still be a meme in the 2020s!

That’s not so much Chaos theory as it is Murphy’s Law, but whatever. Science-fiction stories are notorious for latching on to the smallest shred of a “sciencey” concept and turning it into a fantastical plot device. I’ve written before about how the term “science fantasy” seems more accurate to me, despite being outdated. From piloting spaceships through wormholes, to nanobots that can magically do anything, sci-fi is mostly bunk science: a fantasy about something science-related.

I’m as guilty as any SF author in that regard, but I did want my current story to do justice to this one bit of Chaos. The characters encounter a phenomenon that at first seems wildly unpredictable; but upon closer examination, a type of order appears. While movement is unpredictable at any individual moment, the totality of the movement falls within certain boundaries or parameters.

poisson saturne strange attractor image source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor#/media/File:Poisson_saturne_revisited.jpg

That’s the oversimplified idea behind strange attractors such as the Lorenz attractor, which is usually shown as a two- or three-dimensional graph that helps us visualize the possibilities for a set of three non-linear equations developed by Edward Lorenz, one of the Chaos pioneers who was originally trying to use computers to model weather systems. While the solutions (or iterations) never repeat themselves exactly, the graph helps us see that they all take place within a certain “shape”.

Lorenz attractor image source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor#/media/File:Lorenz_attractor_yb.svg

Anyway, there isn’t much of a point to this post, except that Chaos is fun to learn about! For engaging introductions to the Chaos-related concepts of fractals, see the following two videos.

Benoit Mandelbrot briefly discusses fractals and the art of roughness:

Dr. Holly Krieger explains the math of the Mandelbrot Set pretty simply:

A Few Thoughts on Mortality and Legacy

Tags

books, legacy, making books, memoir, writing

art generated by Midjourney

This week, I got the sad news that an author I worked with two years ago passed away. I helped her edit, design, and publish her memoir about how she transitioned out of a life of prostitution, domestic violence, and incarceration to create a non-profit organization that supports women in similar circumstances to make the same transition and build new lives for themselves.

At times, the memoir was absolutely heartbreaking to work on due to the severity of the abuse and trauma it described. But it was also an amazingly hopeful and positive book due to what she and her organization eventually accomplished in terms of helping other women in the community.

The author was also a joy to work with. I always enjoyed our conversations, and she had an unconquerable sense of humor. Even when we discussed the saddest topics or events, she always found a way to make us both laugh.

I am sad to hear of her passing, but I am glad I had the chance to help preserve her story in a book. I don’t know if other artists, authors, and musicians think about this as much as I do, but there is something satisfying about the idea that what we create will outlive us. Whether we have an important message to share with the world, or we are just making something entertaining to enjoy, we leave our mark on our society and culture. It isn’t necessarily immortality, but it is a kind of afterlife.

Years ago, another author I work with included a piece of advice in one of her books: “Focus on what you want to create.” That idea has carried me through many times of difficulty and doubt. Obstacles pile up, and it can be easy to lose sight of long-term goals when you get bogged down in dealing with the challenges of the day. But if you can raise your head above the floodwaters and focus on the legacy you want to leave behind, it puts today in a different perspective.

So, I intend to keep on writing, editing, and helping others make books. Those legacies will last long after we pass, and I am proud to have played a part in them.

Collector’s Guide: It’s My Story and I’m Sticking to It: From the Streets to Survival by Kathleen Mitchell is available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle. Kathleen founded DIGNITY House in Phoenix, Arizona.

reflections on writing: Odonata’s Revenge

Tags

memoir, meteor mags, reflections, self publishing, writing

art generated by Midjourney.

Mags faces double trouble when an alien menace and an ex-mercenary converge on Ceres to end the pirate’s life and steal her secret technology.

July 2022 Update: The story is now collected in Meteor Mags: Permanent Crescent and Other Tales. For sale on Amazon in ebook, paperback, and hardback editions. The ebook is also available on Smashwords and other major retailers.

Episode 32 in The Adventures of Meteor Mags and Patches was intended to be 33, but I got bogged down in the original story for 32 and couldn’t quite put my finger on why. As you probably know, I don’t believe in writer’s block, because you can always write something. So, I re-directed my energy into what was speaking to me at the time, and I also worked to articulate exactly what my problem was.

My recent post on why Finishing Matters resulted from gathering my thoughts on why it is important to power through completing a draft. My post on the difference between Active Versus Passive Characters arose from trying to articulate why I wasn’t happy with the original thirty-second episode.

I realized that the episode’s problem was, at its root, that I had originally conceived the middle of the story as a plot that needed to happen to my characters, instead of a plot driven by character choices. I knew where the story started and ended, but I felt like I was enforcing a plot on my characters in the middle, and that was causing friction.

So, I set it aside and focused on something that’s been simmering on the back burner for a couple of years: introducing a new rival for Mags. It’s an idea I kept returning to despite numerous attempts and thousands of words that failed to excite me. But gathering my thoughts on active characters proved to be the key. Last month, I added to my massive pile of notes on this rival by asking questions and answering them, then dropping her into situations and letting her choose the outcome. I let go of the idea that I needed her to fit into some mold, and I let her choose her own adventure.

Several scenes I wrote for her ended up on the cutting-room floor. You will never read them. But the process of going beyond notes and writing actual scenes for her revealed what really captured my imagination about her, and I enjoyed getting to know her and anticipating what kind of choices she would make. She stopped being a thing I wanted to force into a plot and became a person who could drive a plot through active choices.

Once I began letting her choices take an active role in determining the plot, she became not just easy to write but an absolute joy. In the end, it only took me about a month to write the episode featuring her, even though defining who she was had been frustrating me for a couple of years. The breakthrough came when I started treating her the way I do Mags: not as someone who life happens to, but someone who happens to life.

Also, I wrote thousands of words you will never see about her childhood, her appearance, and her motivations. We might explore those things later in the text of the series, but the important thing was that I really needed to get to know her.

I don’t need to necessarily publish words about those things, but I needed to be able to confidently write from those things. The difference between the two is the subtext an author needs to have a firm grasp on a character. Not every detail about a character’s history needs to be explained through exposition to a reader, but the author needs to know those unpublished details to create someone who feels real, consistent, and grounded. You can judge for yourself how well I did.

On a more personal note, the episode briefly includes a billiards game called nine-ball. The game will always be dear to my heart because in 2006, I joined a nine-ball league at a local pub/pool hall. I had always enjoyed shooting pool, but I was terrible at it. When I joined the league, I started practicing regularly, using an amazing book called Byrne’s New Standard Book of Pool and Billiards. It had great, practical exercises and showed how to make shots from the most simple to the increasingly complex.

A few mementos from my league days.

But learning pool from a book can only do so much, and it was through the generous instruction from other people on the league that I advanced enough to not be awesome but to at least not embarrass myself, and to win enough matches to feel a sense of accomplishment. When I played against casual players at other bars outside of league, I won more often than I lost.

The people in my league who guided me and showed me how to correct what I was doing wrong were not just my teammates but sometimes my competition from other teams I played against in matches. Despite our friendly rivalry, we were not enemies but people who enjoyed the same game and wanted to help each other improve, have fun together, and generally raise the quality of every player’s ability. For years, nine-ball league was my primary social group where I formed many friendships, some of which remain to this day. We often gathered for house parties, bar crawls, road trips, concerts, and other events.

It’s a good thing we rented a van and a driver for this pub crawl.

In many ways, it was like the writer’s workshop I founded in 2017: a somewhat random assortment of people gathering around a shared enthusiasm with the aims of both helping each other improve and having some fun along the way. In both cases, my years with the groups helped me grow in ways that would not have been possible on my own.

These days, my billiards game is rusty from a lack of practice, but I still love to play. The same is true of my guitar skills. But if you ever wonder why I write so many billiards and concert or jam scenes into my stories, it’s because they are hobbies I have loved for many years, and I can’t imagine writing about a fictional world where they don’t play a role.

Finishing Matters

Tags

self publishing, writing

One of the greatest struggles I see aspiring authors encounter is with finishing a first draft. Finishing is an important part of the craft of writing, but maybe it doesn’t get enough attention. Let’s take a closer look.

Although I will offer advice and observations, there is no big secret. The key to finishing pieces is to finish more pieces. That might sound like an obvious tautology, but it runs deeper than that. Like everything else about writing, completing a work takes practice. If you aren’t seeing your pieces through to the end, then you aren’t getting enough practice to strengthen this particular muscle.

It’s a bit like going to the gym. Imagine your workout involves doing three sets of an exercise, with some number of repetitions per set. What would happen if every time you decided to work out, you got dressed in your workout clothes, went to the gym, and did a couple of repetitions—then stopped? Maybe completing the workout seemed too challenging or boring, or maybe something else distracted you. Either way, you would get a lot of practice at getting dressed, but not the practice of completing a full workout. You’d be great at getting started, but you would not build any staying power.

Writing is like that. It’s important to keep going beyond the initial excitement of getting started so you can practice completion.

My writing-intensive courses in public policy were a huge help in this area. Every week, my classes required me to do a ton of reading then crank out several thousands of words before the week was up. I put a lot of time and energy into those papers, but I did not have the luxury of pondering them for months or years, agonizing over every word, or getting halfway done then deciding to do something entirely different. Even when I felt what I sent to my professor wasn’t my best work, I got a lot of practice going from start to finish in a very short time. Dawdling was not an option.

That being said, when a paper was on something that mattered to me personally, I reviewed my professor’s comments and criticisms and did a final round of revisions for my own benefit. Integrating feedback and critique was an important part of improving.

Finishing a draft even when it is challenging and you aren’t entirely happy with the result is still an important step because it gives you raw material to revise. It is always easier to start with something rather than start from scratch with nothing. When you have nothing, it’s easy to get bogged down in considering all the possibilities, spinning your wheels and not producing anything. But when you have something on the page, you can look at it and say, “Okay, I like this part, but this other part doesn’t work. Now I can see why, so let me work on fixing that problem.” You’ve narrowed down the infinite possibilities to a manageable revision checklist.

A friend who produces articles related to his artistic endeavors takes an interesting approach. He hires a copywriter to produce a first draft, then he completely re-writes it. He says it saves him a lot of time and effort in the early conceptual phases, and even when he is unhappy with what the copywriter produced, it’s a lot easier for him to start from a draft and be critical of it. If he sees something that isn’t said the way he would say it, that makes it easier for him to decide what he does want to say.

As a freelance editor, I often work on the flip side of that process. People might come to me with an essay or story they’ve drafted, but it has conceptual, grammatical, or structural problems and doesn’t feel professionally written. It’s up to me to “get” what they are trying to communicate, then rewrite the piece with clarity and concision. If I were assigned to draft a piece on the same subject from scratch, it would take a lot longer than the relatively short time it takes me to pull apart an existing draft and fix it.

I treat my own stories and essays the same way: Pound out a first draft, even if it’s a mess, then step back and look at it critically. If, for example, I feel daunted by the infinite possibilities of a scene in fiction, I just pick one and start banging away at the keyboard. Sometimes I get lucky and come up with something I love that simply needs tuned up and polished. Other times, I get something I don’t like at all or doesn’t quite fit, but I can articulate what about it doesn’t work. The process helps me conceptualize what would work so I can take a second crack at it.

In My Life As an Armadillo, I discussed the benefits of drafting an ending long before a story is anywhere near finished. I will just briefly reiterate here that knowing where you are headed with a story helps reduce the time you waste feeling stuck in the middle of it. When people are having trouble completing a draft, it’s often because they lack a sense of where the finish line is. It’s like trying to run a race without knowing what direction to run. You might end up running into the middle of the field, or into the stands, or into the toilets. That’s how it feels to be lost in the middle of a writing project. Do yourself a favor: Get clear on where the finish line is.

Finishing a draft, whether you love it or hate it, also positions you to get more practice in all the stages that come after: getting feedback, doing rewrites, making revisions, editing, and proofreading. You don’t get to practice those important skills if you don’t finish many drafts, and lacking practice in those areas will stunt your growth.

I have a ton of writings other people will never see, because either I feel they aren’t very good, or they ended up being something I didn’t feel was appropriate to share with the world. But finishing them gave me practice for producing the good stuff. Sometimes, people are trapped by the idea that everything they write needs to be brilliant, and they feel that if they write something unappealing, then they have failed.

That attitude is counter-productive. For comparison, consider what counts as an awesome batting average in baseball. Ty Cobb had a lifetime batting average of .366. That means he connected with the ball about a third of the time. It also means he failed to hit the ball two-thirds of the time! Do we look at that hit rate as a failure? Not at all. It’s a damn fine batting average—the highest in major-league history!

So if you write three things and two of them suck but one is a solid hit—not necessarily a home run, but something that gets you to first base—I’d say you’re doing well. Failure isn’t missing a lot of swings. Failure is not taking a swing at all.

Finally, consider that as your skills improve, nothing is stopping you from revisiting an earlier piece and improving or expanding it. I often return to something I wrote years ago and examine it in light of everything I’ve learned since I finished it. Maybe I now have a better grasp of what a failed poem was trying to say, so I rewrite it. Maybe I edit an old article to improve the quality of the prose. Some writers will even take an old novella and expand it into a novel, such as Orson Scott Card did with Ender’s Game, eight years after the short version was first published.

So, take a swing at completing a first draft. If you’re working in a longer form such as a novel, break it into smaller chunks: finish drafting a scene, then another, then a whole chapter, then the next. Keep going! The more you finish, the more practice you get with the entire process and seeing things through to completion. Over time, that practice will make you a stronger writer.

Active Versus Passive Characters

Tags

character development, self publishing, writing

art generated by Midjourney

My favorite characters to read about and write about are active characters, especially when it comes to the leading protagonist and antagonist. I’m a bit more forgiving of passivity in minor supporting characters, but even they are greatly improved by giving them some active choices. The difference between active and passive characters is simple, but perhaps it doesn’t get enough attention.

With a passive character, the plot just happens to him. He’s going about his daily life when suddenly—BOOM! Plot events arrive and sweep him up in the narrative. When the main character or hero is passive, events are largely beyond his ability to affect. I often see this in stories that are plot-driven rather than character-driven, where the author has a potentially brilliant plot that needs to happen, and the characters are forced into it.

Active characters are ones whose choices drive the story. Active characters might make smart choices or foolish ones, selfish choices or altruistic ones. Those choices carry consequences that determine the events of the narrative. As I like to say about Meteor Mags, life doesn’t happen to her; she happens to life.

That isn’t to say that active characters are always in control. One of the most fun things about active characters is when they make choices that lead to their losing control. Take Dwight in Frank Miller’s Sin City story A Dame to Kill For. Every step of the way, Dwight makes choices that determine what happens next. But he is being manipulated by a femme fatale, and we as readers know that he really should know better. He is a delusional fool, but he is an active fool, and his foolish decisions lead to events spiraling out of his control and getting the ever-loving crap beat out of him several times.

Active characters can also be subjected to unexpected events. I don’t think anyone would accuse Meteor Mags of being passive, but the super-tornado that arrives in the middle of a heist gone wrong in Blind Alley Blues is an example of unexpected plot elements showing up to mess with her. Mags’ active nature leads her to see what opportunities the disaster presents, and she makes choices that bend the situation to her advantage. Plus, the reasons the heist goes wrong in the first place all relate to conscious, intentional choices made by her and other characters. They don’t sit around waiting for the plot; they are actively driving it by pressing forward with their agenda.

I’m a fan of No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy, and its protagonist Llewelyn Moss and its antagonist Anton Chigurh are great examples of highly active characters. Moss chooses to examine the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong, then he makes one of the stupidest decisions I have ever read. Later that night, he decides to take some water to the last survivor of the deal, and that foolish decision leads to all the pain and suffering which follows. I have always found this choice a bit suspect and possibly out of character for Moss, but the fact remains that he makes it and must deal with the consequences.

On the other side of things, Chigurh is a cold, calculating, homicidal maniac who makes choices every step of the way. In his famous scene with a gas station attendant, Chigurh uses a coin toss to determine whether he will kill the attendant—a conceit that appeals to blind chance as driving his actions, even though he is the one actively initiating the situation. Near the end of the story, Moss’ young wife calls out Chigurh on this bullshit, telling him “It’s just you.” And it is just him, making choices that drive the plot.

No Country is one of my favorite novels because both Chigurh and Moss make active choices while trying to achieve conflicting goals, and nearly every event in the book is the result of these two characters working at cross-purposes.

Besides being characters who can create the dramatic intensity of an irresistible force meeting an immovable object, and intensifying our emotional investment in seeing how such brutal conflict plays out, active characters earn our empathy and respect.

In comparison, passive characters seem like people who say, “Woe is me,” and blame anyone and everyone except themselves for their problems. Sure, we might feel sympathy for these downtrodden folks, but we can just as easily feel contempt for those who don’t take responsibility for the consequences of their own actions. And if they passively succumb to their fate, they lack the initiative we expect from heroes. They might as well be the beach being pounded by the ocean with no true agency of its own for us to get involved with.

But when an active character makes choices, we respect her for doing something besides lying on her back and thinking of England while life has its way with her. We can respect her for, at the very least, trying to do something about her situation. We might not agree with her choices, and we might even see them as foolish, but we can feel invested in her attempts to achieve her goals—even when she fails.

When those choices arise from deeply held conviction, we are more likely to empathize. Peter Parker’s active choice to continue trying to make the world better as Spider-man is a good example, because being Spider-man tends to have nothing but painful consequences for his personal life. Parker’s choices often lead him to more suffering than many of us would be willing to endure, but he remains committed to trying to do good things, to protecting people less powerful than he, and standing firm as a force for good in a world threatened by evil. We not only respect Parker; we empathize with his struggle. We don’t just feel sorry for him; we feel sorrow with him. When he succeeds, we feel that success, too. We become emotionally invested.

None of what I have said should be taken as advice to abandon tight, compelling plots and write by the seat of your pants. The important point is that rather than designing plots that simply happen to passive characters, construct plots that are driven by the choices the characters make.

Characters need goals, and they need to make decisions they believe will take them closer to those goals. They also need obstacles in their path—both the external obstacles of circumstance, and the internal obstacles of personal shortcomings they need to overcome. What lies do they tell themselves? What misconceptions do they have? Even the most active character can harbor beliefs that keep her distant from her goal, even as she tries to move forward.

In my years as a workshop leader, I saw some stories about passive characters who had no clear, primal, compelling goal they were so intent on reaching that they would have died for it. They were just people trotted on stage so the plot could happen to them, and I found that I simply didn’t care. But even when presented with a story in a genre or style I didn’t prefer, I could easily get swept up in the adventures of an active character whose choices—whether right or wrong—defined and drove events. Those were the characters I came to care about and whose fates I became personally invested in.

So whether you see your stories as more plot-driven or more character-driven, realize the best stories are both: where the character choices drive the plot forward, so readers become emotionally invested in the outcome.

reflections on writing: Permanent Crescent

Tags

memoir, meteor mags, Moon, Patches, permanent crescent, reflections, self publishing, writing

art generated by Midjourney.

The Moon is about to die, and it’s all Mags’ fault. Join a hell-raising space pirate and her indestructible calico cat as they confront a lunar death cult whose alien leader plans to take his revenge on humanity by destroying Earth’s ancient satellite.

July 2022 Update: The story is now collected in Meteor Mags: Permanent Crescent and Other Tales. For sale on Amazon in ebook, paperback, and hardback editions. The ebook is also available on Smashwords and other major retailers.

Permanent Crescent was the story I worked on while also putting together The Second Omnibus, so it bears the responsibility of setting the tone for what comes next. It was fun to write and took about three months based on notes I’d compiled throughout the year.

The first scene I wrote was a nice way to open the floodgates for writing, but it ended up on the cutting-room floor. You will never read it! I also drafted scenes which got heavily revised in terms of their points of view, tenses, and even which characters were involved. Hardly any scene survived in its original version.

As you probably know, I don’t believe in writer’s block. Even when I felt unsure about what direction to take for the story, I figured, “What the hell? Let’s wing it and see what happens!” Eventually, the results of that “anything goes” approach got ironed out into a single story.

After trying things a few different ways, I settled on three points of view to tell the story: the hero, her nemesis, and my standard third-person omniscient narrator for the series. I felt multiple POVs were necessary to convey the ways in which the hero and the villain are similar in their general attitudes but intractably opposed.

By letting both the protagonist and antagonist tell parts of the story from their unique perspectives, I hoped to draw parallels between the ways they perceive their world and their situation. Some hints are obvious, such as the way they both refer to “vermin”, but with each considering the other to be the vermin. Similarly identical phrases and judgments are woven into their narratives.

Several scenes are written in first-person present tense, which I rarely use. In Permanent Crescent, my intent was to use that POV to create a sense of immediacy, to put the reader in a moment where anything might come next. In Mags’ first-person scenes, she mostly abandons her conventions from the first two omnibuses where she wrote in a journal or a letter. This time around, she speaks more directly to the reader, and her only epistolary contribution is a journal entry from 1966 where she gives relevant background about developing artificial gravity.

Getting all that sorted was a world of fun, but writing the story took me to dark places involving crime, cults, and the human (and feline) condition in general. At some point, I realized I wanted Mags to narrate a few scenes in a pulpy crime/detective style. So, I re-read the entire Criminal series to get that flavor and tone in my mind.

Permanent Crescent also reflects my feelings about the kind of urban decay I’ve lived in or visited many times in my life. The descriptive scenes about lunar cities are basically me writing about neighborhoods I’ve had the misfortune to experience. If I had to pick one song that sums up everything about that, it would be Spinal Tap’s Hell Hole.

I was a bit disheartened to discover an anime series has already blasted the Moon into a permanent crescent. It’s getting so that you can’t even blow up the Moon without someone else having done it first!

I don’t know what “Assassination Classroom” was about, but they trashed the Moon.

Finally, I should mention how hard I tried to do the actual math for launching Patches out of a space cannon. I read a ridiculous amount of articles and papers about the problem, most of which were beyond my grasp. I tried multiple times to get scientists to help me, to no avail. I even created a spreadsheet full of formulas to do the math. At last, I needed to admit I had no idea what the hell I was doing.

But one way or another, we were launching Patches from a space cannon, and we damn well did it. If anyone wants to email the solution to me, I’d be thrilled.

Rebel Girl: Notes on Writing Mags and Her Music

Tags

guitar, memoir, meteor mags, music, writing

A few years ago, I read a draft of a scene from the Meteor Mags stories to my workshop group. In the scene, our space-faring criminals turn on the ship’s radio in time to hear the DJ back-announce a few songs and say what comes next.

During the feedback session, one of my workshoppers asked, “How do you come up with all these crazy song titles and band names?”

I’m rarely stunned into silence on matters of writing, but that question hit me like the asteroid collision that killed the dinosaurs. It took me a moment to realize that when it comes to music, I might as well be from another planet than some of my writing comrades.

My answer? “I didn’t make them up. Those are all real songs and real bands! And they kick ass!”

You can find a list of all the real songs the characters in the series have broadcast, performed, or just plain argued about on the unofficial soundtrack page of Mags’ website.

I like to think those songs might be played if Mags and Patches ever get made into a film or a cartoon. Nothing could make me happier than seeing and hearing Mags perform Porcupine Tree’s Trains as a solo piano piece in the dead of night by candlelight from Red Metal at Dawn, or her brilliant, butt-naked rendition of the Hoodoo Gurus’ Down on Me with a tribe of space monkeys and telepathic space octopuses in Small Flowers.

I have always felt that when the end credits roll on Mags’ first film, the song that must destroy the theater’s speakers is Bikini Kill’s Rebel Girl.

It’s a fuckin’ barnburner.

I don’t know if Kathleen Hanna and the gang in Bikini Kill had in mind an even older song to which Rebel Girl traces its roots: a pro-labor, feminist acoustic jam by Hazel Dickens called The Rebel Girl.

Decades before Loretta Lynn’s Coal Miner’s Daughter became a country-music hit in the States, multi-instrumentalist Hazel Dickens was singing pro-union, pro-people, and pro-women bluegrass songs in a folk-music vein, advocating through music and direct activism for America’s miners. She also eulogized her brother in song after he died of black lung disease.

Born into a coal-mining family, Hazel died in 2011, and you don’t hear about her very often these days. But she loved rebel girls, and I love her for that. The social problems she fearlessly addressed nearly a century ago have not yet been solved in our country, and maybe they will never be. But music gives me hope.

Most songs on the unofficial soundtrack page have a similar bit of history behind them and a thematic or emotional relevance to the stories. They appear in the text for a reason—even if the only reason is because Patches is obsessed with gangsta rap.

But my workshoppers were right to suspect that I have been making up a hell of a lot of other songs for my imaginary bands: the Psycho 78s (named after a line in the Misfits song Horror Business), the teenage Dumpster Kittens (who are some of the nicest kids you’ll ever meet despite singing about suicide, murder, interplanetary death armies, and nuclear infernos), and the Sterile Skins (a ska-punk crossover band that filled its choruses with the British “Oi!” despite being mostly Chicanos from SoCal).

But what I’ve never told my workshoppers (or anyone else, until now) is that for every imaginary song whose lyrics appear in the series, I put together real music.

And for that, I blame Greg.

Greg was the awesomest drummer I ever had the good fortune to share a house with, and it was a unique pleasure to hear him bashing away for hours in the basement. He was in a number of ass-kicking bands whose shows I enjoyed, and we’ve kept in touch over the years despite being thousands of miles apart now.

I miss that guy.

Back in 2015 or so, I sent him a message about how I wanted my characters to have their own unique songs, not just other people’s material they referred to. He told me, “Then you need to write those songs.”

He always had a way of cutting through my apparently complex problems with straight-forward advice.

That evening, I picked up an acoustic guitar and bashed out chords for the song that appears in the episode Whipping Boy. Ever since, I have done the same for every absolutely bonkers “imaginary” song that gets its lyrics printed in the series. It’s now a fundamental part of the creative process.

Whipping boy! What’s your name?
Whipping boy! A life of pain!
Maybe you should take the cash and run.
Maybe you should get yourself a gun,
before they kill your soul. Alright!

Most of the earlier songs can be played on a standard-issue acoustic guitar using basic power chords. After all, despite teaching several aspiring musicians about music theory and performing in small jazz combos, I still enjoy a straight-forward, punk-rock approach to songs you could perform drunk around a campfire.

But a few years ago, I got a baritone electric guitar from ESP. With its longer neck length and scale, and a weight that’s somewhere between a guitar and a bass, the baritone is designed to be tuned a fourth below standard guitar tuning, with a low A instead of a low E.

I tried that tuning, but after Wo Fat convinced me that C minor is the heaviest key in all eternity—and considering my love for Jimmy Page’s open-C tuning from Poor Tom on Led Zeppelin’s Coda—I tried a low C instead, keeping the standard string intervals from a normal tuning.

As far as C minor goes, one of my favorite heavy pieces in that key is Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto. Ukrainian pianist Anna Federova brings even more life to it than my concert recording of the composer performing it.

When I ran my C-tuned baritone guitar through a Logan Square Destroyer distortion pedal, ultimate heaviness resulted: crisp treble and gut-punching bass. I bought this pedal because I am a raving maniac for the first four or five Queens of the Stone Age albums (and their predecessor, Kyuss), so I thought it might help me get closer to that sound.

It did not disappoint.

To push heaviness a little further, I sometimes keep the C-based tuning but drop the low string to B flat—just like how you would tune to Drop D on a standard guitar. That gives me a power chord on the low three strings, and if I throw on a capo, I get some stupidly heavy sounds from the ESP in a variety of keys.

I am all about truly stupid levels of heaviness. If your riffs don’t give me permanent brain damage, then you’re wasting my time!

Maybe someday I’ll produce an album of these imaginary songs. But as much as I love to sing them, we need Mags or her teenage friend Sarah on the mic—not me.

I’m no brilliant singer, though I’ve never let that stop me from performing or recording. But I often fantasize about hammering the hell out of my baritone axe while someone more talented than me takes over on vocals. I like to think we’d give Alice in Chains a run for their money.

Happy Thanksgiving, Martians! This year I am thankful for ripping riffs and brutally heavy jams, for that annoying pain I get while building up my guitar callouses again, and for music in general. It remains one of the great joys of my life.

We own the sky! And don’t you ever forget it.

Meteor Mags: The Second Omnibus. Now in Paperback and Ebook!

Tags

books, meteor mags, Patches, science fiction, second omnibus, space pirates, writing

Thanks to Vamkire Trannel for the cover illustration!

The Second Omnibus collects and updates volumes 7-10, plus two all-new stories, previously unpublished interviews, scenes, drawings, a mini-comic, and more!

In the aftermath of the disaster that nearly wiped out civilization on Ceres, a hell-raising space pirate and her indestructible calico cat get set to throw the greatest birthday party of a lifetime—until alien death rains down from the sky!

Join Meteor Mags and her criminal crew, including the hard-rocking Psycho 78s and the teenage Dumpster Kittens, as they rage against the forces of law and order, struggle to control the future of the Asteroid Belt, and confront the total destruction of their beloved home on Vesta 4. Some will live, many more will die, and nothing in the Belt will ever be the same!

In fifteen episodes of relentless anarchy, sci-fi madness, and violent revolution, the pirate crew comes face-to-face with betrayal, annihilation, telepathic octopuses, evil space lizards, cybernetic murder wasps, game-changing technologies, objects of unlimited power, and much, much more! Strap on your battle armor and get ready to rock, because the asteroid-mining frontier is no place for the faint-hearted.

What readers are saying about the series:

“A violent, feel-good space romp. An irreverent, rocking series.”

“A lot of guns and bloody battles. Fast-paced and full of action.”

“Anarchy, asteroids, and rock music abound. A great read.”

“The swashbuckling spirit and generous—but murderous!—hearts of Mags and her cohort are endearing and engaging.”

“So insane.”

578-page paperback edition or Kindle ebook

(154,000 words plus illustrations).

BUY IT ON AMAZON.