How Do You Know If You've Written A Classic Part 2 - Spock's Katra by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

 How Do You Know If You've Written A Classic

Part 2

Spock's Katra

by

Jacqueline Lichtenberg 

Here is Part 1 in this Series about writing a "classic."
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/02/how-do-you-know-if-youve-written.html

This Part 2 is an Interview of sorts done for an online Star Trek 'zine.  I wrote it because, on Facebook, Kirok L'stok ( his pen name), messaged me asking for a contribution to a planned e-zine to be posted here
http://tupub-books.blogspot.com.au/

The posting date for the 'zine was Sept 8, 2015.

Here's what he asked:
---------quote---------------
I write under the pen name of Kirok of L'Stok, head of publishing for TrekUnited and editor of our irregular fanzine, Personal Logs, previous issues of which can be found on our website at Tupub-books.blogspot.com.au. Our latest 'zine, 'Spock's Katra', will be a celebration of the life and influence of Leonard Nimoy as a man and Spock as a pivotal character in Star Trek. I've put out a call for new fiction and short stories and I'm going to illustrate it, in much the same way as our previous issues, with fan art.

In our mundane world, Leonard Nimoy's death means we will never see him play Spock again but, through the magic of fan fiction, Spock will never truly die. Through the work of the fans whose lives he touched, we can share a resonance of his legacy, the TV episodes and movies that captured our hearts and minds. Is it a vanity to think that our fan produced fiction could equate to the Vulcan Katra, the essence of their being that outlasts their death? Perhaps so, but it is a pleasant fantasy to think that by putting pen to paper, or more likely fingers to keyboard, we can bring Spock to life, along with McCoy and Scotty, and that the original crew of the Enterprise can continue their adventures for as long as Star Trek fans remember them.

Could I impose on you for your thoughts on what gave the character of Spock, and by extension the chemistry of Kirk, Spock and McCoy, such universal impact on fan fiction? Was it something about the characters or storylines and settings of Star Trek, did it fill a niche that was opening at the time for depth of character or perhaps address a burgeoning appetite for science fiction? Your opinion, as a professional with roots that intertwine with the very beginnings of Star Trek fan productions would be invaluable.

We would be delighted to publish anything from a paragraph box-out to an article and will send you a copy of the draft for your approval before release. If you feel that you can't help us, that's perfectly understandable and please accept my apologies for intruding on your time.
Thank you for your contributions to Star Trek fandom.

-------------end quote------------

This was sort of like the usual interview questions I get from time to time, but lots of new things had been happening, and I had come upon many new insights into the dynamics behind Star Trek's odd success.

I have been asked questions like this many times, and every time I give a different answer using the same material, laced with new and different observations.

This year's high-impact Event for me was the loss of Theodore Bikel.

I've written about him in this blog previously:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/01/career-management-for-writers-in.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/12/theme-character-integration-part-5-fame.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/02/marketing-fiction-in-changing-world.html

I got a phone call while in the midst of writing this essay saying he had passed away.  He had been doing public appearances just a month prior.  Not only did he appear in classics.  He was a classic, all by himself.

I became a Bikel fan via his folk music recordings, had them all on vinyl, bought them again (it's a lot) on compact tape for my car, then bought them ALL OVER AGAIN on CD, and now have bought them all over yet again on MP3 for my phone.

He was also a fabulous writer.  He wrote the dust-jacket copy for his vinyls, did various articles, and I think best of all, his autobiography.
http://www.amazon.com/Theo-Autobiography-Theodore-Bikel/dp/0060190442/

He did a lot of audiobook recordings, but apparently never recorded his own autobiography.

But Theodore Bikel was primarily an actor, and his IMDB page is huge.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000942/

I even own an Amazon Prime streaming copy of one of his earliest movies, Fraulein, in which he sings a "Russian Gypsy Song" written just for him in that movie.  The following Variety Obituary notes that he's had another song written into a Broadway Play just so his character would have a song.

They had cast him in a musical as a character who didn't sing!  He was an actor's actor.

http://variety.com/2015/film/news/theodore-bikel-fiddler-on-the-roof-star-dies-at-91-1201544826/

Theodore Bikel spent a huge amount of his time touring in Fiddler On The Roof.  I saw him do it at Dinner Theater, and elsewhere, portable sets that fold up into wheeled boxes, lots and lots of vibrant energy, great singing.

Most people know him from Fiddler which is starred in on Broadway -- also The King And I -- but for me he's a folksinger who could bring all kinds of cultures to life, even if you didn't understand the language.

That's the essence of science fiction -- connecting with cultures you do not understand via art.

So it's not surprising that most Star Trek fans remember him from the film, The Enemy Below, which was the inspiration of one of the all-time favorite Star Trek Episodes, Balance of Terror, the one in which we first meet the Romulans and note the similarity to Vulcans.

So later, Theodore Bikel was cast as Worf's adopted human father, and it made such good sense!

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000942/

He passed away just as I was writing this explanation of why Spock was such a powerful Character he walked off the screen and into the real lives of countless viewers who weren't even science fiction fans (to begin with, anyway).

And you all know we lost Leonard Nimoy this year, as well.

All of this has me thinking about Classics -- what makes a classic?  How do you create a Classic?  How do you know if you've done it before you even first send it to an Agent?

And can you make any money writing Classics?  Most of the really famous writers of the far past whose works we study in school today died as paupers.  Classics generally have little value to the contemporary audience they are created for -- but they become more popular with time, and out-live their creators.

Star Trek appears to be one of those.  My question is, of course, will Sime~Gen also be one of those?

While I was thinking about this, the request for a contribution to an online fanzine issue about Spock and Leonard Nimoy came to me via Facebook from Kirok of L'Stok.  Here is what I wrote for http://tupub-books.blogspot.com.au/


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      When Star Trek was first aired, after Gene Roddenberry’s long struggle, and the Network demands to eliminate the female First Officer because it was not plausible that men would take orders from a woman (I kid thee not!), Spock filled two dramatic positions.

      That one Character had to represent both the Resident Geek role and the Not-One-Of-Us-But-Our-Boss role (i.e. the female role of Number One had been folded into the Spock-half-alien persona.)  Originally, Spock was demonstrably emotional but Number One (the female) was not.  That would have been an entirely different series!

      The combined Figure was given all the dimensions of a real person, a Character, by the brilliant portrayal Leonard Nimoy brought to the role.  Time will tell if he created a Role, or just a Character.

      A “Role” is a fictional figure that can be played by other actors.  King Lear is a “role.”  Actors hatch the ambition to play such a role.
      Spock is in the process of becoming a Role, though “classic trek” may be a thing of the past.

      A “Role” has a “spirit” – the writer creates the etching of a Character but the Actor gives that etching 3-D life, 3-D printing as it were.

      The Character, barely formed, dropped into American consciousness and like a spark on dry tinder, lit a fire.  Mostly it was the female viewers who ignited in discovery of new vistas.  But a lot of men saw how they could embark on a life of achievement – and just incidentally attract women of achievement.

      I was among the women who caught fire from Spock, but I was different from the average viewer.  I was a lifetime science fiction reader, at the threshold of launching a career in science fiction writing.

      I knew what I wanted to write because I knew what all the men (and a few women using male bylines) had done wrong.  I knew that if I could just do it “right” I could drop a spark into dry tinder and ignite a forest fire of ambition among my readers.

      I didn’t get the chance to do that because Gene Roddenberry did it first.

      But he was hampered by the “rules” of Network television.  Even today, rules like that constrain the creativity of TV Series producers, and there are business model reasons for that.

      But this constraint was almost immediately seen by the fans who had become ignited by Spock – and other Characters, and how they fit together into a Crew.

      Gene Roddenberry always said that Kirk, Spock and McCoy were each a fraction of his own personality.  That’s why they work as an ensemble – together they make one whole human being, but factored apart, they make comprehensibly simple what is ordinarily hidden within human complexity.

      Star Trek was, and for decades continued to be, the only science fiction on TV.  Other shows tried to repeat that ignition of fans and failed.  They had no idea why they failed.  They thought it was the science fiction that ignited the fans.  So they produced Westerns set in Space and called that science fiction, and had no clue what they’d done wrong.

      Meanwhile, the fans became a Wild Fire, spreading and spreading.  Ruth Berman and Devra Langsam, long time members of active and organized fandom (yes, fandom is not what the newspapers portray it to be), decided to go where no fan had gone before.

      Traditionally, fan publications (fanzines, magazines by and for fans who were members of organized fandom) published non-fiction about science fiction books, writers, conventions, and general activities that members of organized fandom participated in.

      Ruth and Devra each decided to create a ‘fanzine’ to contain FICTION, and articles that might have been published inside the fictional universe.  Like traditional fanzines, these publications had a Letter Column (LoC) section where fans could talk to each other about previous issues.  All on paper.

      And so the wild fire spread and spread.

      Ruth Berman’s ‘zine was T-Negative (Spock’s blood type) and Devra Langsam’s was Spockanalia – all the trivia about Spock.  They were the first ‘zines.

      Think about that.  A character in a TV Series held in vast contempt by the general public “sparked” the two first science fiction fanzines to contain fiction.

      The whole “Mary Sue” type of story originated in T-Negative which also published my Trek alternate universe, Kraith.  Spockanalia was editorially designed to stick closer to established cannon and create within Roddenberry’s own vision.

      Jean Lorrah – much later the author of sizzling hot best-seller Star Trek novels from Pocket that are still in e-book availability – co-authored a Star Trek Fan Fiction short-story that was published in Spockanalia, which is how she came to my attention.  I came to her attention when a friend of hers sent her my first published science fiction novel, House of Zeor.

      Jean went on to write the Night of the Twin Moons fanzines (about Sarek, Spock’s father) and then to write for the professionally published Star Trek novels at the same time she and I were writing and selling novels in my series, Sime~Gen.  It’s all connected.
      Here is a page describing the Trek Connection behind everything Sime~Gen:

      http://simegen.com/history/startrek.html

      That Spark that flew off the TV Screens into our living rooms and set everything aflame could well be considered “Spock’s Katra.”

      The fictional character inhabited us, and millions of other women, who created fiction by the millions of words, created conventions where the printed ‘zines could be sold to each other, created artwork, sculpture, costumes, created and created.

      That Creative Spark ignited a firestorm, and for the first time ever, caused a cancelled TV Series to be revived.  Worse, it was a much derided, disregarded, maligned, and sneered at TV Show because it was science fiction which is only for kids because they’re gullible enough to believe that non-sense.

      The question always asked is “why” did Trek ignite a firestorm because people in the biz want to duplicate that magic.

      To answer that question, I originated the project that eventually became the Bantam paperback Star Trek Lives!   One of my objectives among many was to explain to Hollywood what they had really done by putting Trek on the air, and why it worked.  Gene Roddenberry loved the Star Trek Lives! book project and wrote the introduction to it when it was finally sold.

      Long story there.

      Mostly I focused the book on The Spock Effect by detailing who the fans were and what they did under the impact of discovering the Spock Character.  That discovery was called Spock Shock, because it left people glassy-eyed.

      That “Effect” is what eventually became termed Spock’s Katra, the feeling of having Spock inside you.

      The book Star Trek Lives! was formulated and written long before the coining of the term Katra: the Soul, the Spirit, the very personal Identity that can remain as an organized entity after the body is dead.

      The “Effect” that the Character Spock had on the dry tinder of women who had never had exposure to science fiction they could personally relate to (because the only science fiction Manhattan would allow to be published was for boys, not even for men) was explosive.

      They responded to what I had seen as missing from the field of science fiction.  In a word, “Relationship.”  In a word, “Romance.”  In a word, “Intimacy.”

      So while we were researching, sending out questionnaires, collecting Star Trek fanzines (within months, there were literally hundreds of publications, once non-science fiction fans got hold of the Idea of T-Negative and Spockanalia). I was also writing the beginnings of my Sime~Gen Series.

      Let me set the record straight.  My first story sold was a Sime~Gen story, and it was sold in 1968 to Fred Pohl, who eventually bought Star Trek Lives! when he had moved from the Magazine industry to the Book Industry.

      I was a professional, selling science fiction writer before I ever wrote my first Star Trek fanzine article (for Spockanalia) or my Kraith Series for T-Negative.  Most newspaper articles about me say I “came out of” Star Trek fandom.  That’s not true.  Star Trek, Star Trek Fandom, and I all came ‘from the same place’ – the place where Gene Roddenberry acquired Spock’s Katra.

      So, after selling my first story, and launching the Star Trek Lives! project, I created a statement of what the difference is between traditional (for teen boys only) science fiction, and the unique contribution to the field of science fiction that I could bring.

      I eventually dubbed that unique contribution, Intimate Adventure.  I called it the “Lost Genre” because it is a pattern that turns up everywhere, and no publisher would group these novels together and put a genre label on them so everyone who loves Intimate Adventure could buy with confidence.

      Here is a link to two articles, one FOR THE SCIENCE FICTION READER, and one FOR THE FEMINIST READER, describing what I had noticed as missing from science fiction.  I named a lot of novels published subsequent to Star Trek’s fame that illustrate the influence Trek had in creating Intimate Adventure.

      http://www.simegen.com/jl/intimateadventure.html

      Intimacy across the human/non-human Gulf is the spark that lit the Trek conflagration.

      The Katra, later invented for Vulcan culture, depicts the ultimate Intimacy as it can be ‘carried’ by an intimate to its peaceful resting place.  What service could be more intimate or more demanding of heroics?

      The invention of the fictional concept Katra is a result of something I helped create – a “feedback loop” between fiction creator and fiction consumer.

      Historically, writers just wrote and publishers or producers just guessed what their market wanted.

      When Star Trek fandom flashed into a conflagration, these decision makers noticed, and had access to samples of what the consumer really wanted from them.

      Kraith Collected (which had 50 contributors) was seen around the Star Trek offices at Paramount, dog eared and well read.  And it wasn’t the only one.

      Today, the professional decision makers can just drop in and read any fanfic posted online.

      Sales statistics and viewer numbers are fast and accurate, via our electronic data collection – all of which technology can be traced back to men and women who were fired up by Star Trek, often by Spock and his expertise with a computer.  We’re still inventing Trek equipment – the transporter, warp drive are all being worked on.

      So the ripples of Spock’s Katra spread and changed the way the world of fiction distribution works as well as the daring-do of work-a-day scientists.

      When we were researching for Star Trek Lives! we didn’t know that was going to happen.  We just knew that Everything Had Changed.

      The change that I thought was most vital, and most important for the future of humanity thousands of years hence, was the shift in the definition of Science Fiction to include Intimate Adventure.

      Of course, when we were writing Star Trek Lives! (1970-1974) we didn’t know we’d win.  But we knew that Gene Roddenberry had given us Spock, the main tool needed to explain to women why it is that science fiction is the most important art-form ever created.

      When we meet up with real Aliens “out there somewhere” we have to establish Relationships across that conceptual Gulf.

      The Spock Character is a fictional alien.  The whole Vulcan Culture is fabricated out of Gene Roddenberry’s take on Humanism as a life philosophy.  I.D.I.C. is the Vulcan philosophy I wrote about in Spockanalia in a fictional-article titled Mr. Spock On Logic.  My explanation of “Infinite Diversity In Infinite Combinations” was not Gene Roddenberry’s (we hadn’t yet met in person).

      What I said in that article, and in the subsequently written Kraith stories was that Logic Is Beautiful, and Beauty Is Logical.

      Aesthetics and Logic are not two separate things, nor even two sides of a coin, nor even reflections of each other.  They are THE SAME THING.  Just one thing.

      When you experience Beauty, you are experiencing Logic.  When you experience Logic, you are experiencing Beauty.  They are inseparable.  That is a non-human, and very Alien concept.

      Roddenberry’s personal notion of Spock and Vulcan culture were struck me (when I found out about it during interviews) as way too mundane to be science fiction.

      That is probably the reason Star Trek, and Spock, sparked the appeal to a wider audience that science fiction generally commands.

      Roddenberry’s Vulcans just weren’t alien enough to suit me, so I created a Vulcan for Kraith that is truly Alien – non-human, defying all the imperatives of human Nature.

      http://www.simegen.com/fandom/startrek/kraith/

      I used that concept of Logic Is Beautiful as the invisible, underlying theme of Kraith.  It is one of the cornerstones of the worldbuilding (meticulous science fiction writer style worldbuilding) behind the Kraith Series.

      Simultaneously with writing the Kraith Series, I was also writing Star Trek Lives!  Well, some weeks I’d work on one, some weeks the other, but all this was interwoven into the fabric of a life raising kids and founding a career.

      The career I was founding was professional science fiction writer, and the second professional fiction project I undertook was a Sime~Gen Novel.

      Remember, I had set out to add something new and unique to the field of science fiction, but Gene Roddenberry beat me to it.

      So now my job was to explain what he’d done with Spock, and how to do it again, on purpose, so Hollywood would begin to produce lots and lots of TV Series I would love to watch.

      In order for my explanation of what GR had done to be taken as valid, I had to duplicate the Spock Effect.  I had to create a new Spock.

      I had to use my notion of Intimate Adventure, my lifelong immersion in the field of science fiction, my degree in Physical Chemistry (minor in Math), my conviction that humanity is in for huge trouble if we don’t learn how to Bond with Aliens, and prove that I understood what had happened with the Spock Character’s explosive popularity.

      I needed to write a novel with a “Spock” type character that would make Spock fans write fiction in my universe.

      But which universe? I had many possible series outlines on file.  But I had sold that one story, Operation High Time.  I knew that universe backwards and forwards, and it came to me that one of my Characters was indeed Spock.

      In the Sime~Gen Universe, Reincarnation is real.  In other words, souls are real.  So is telepathy, telekinesis, etc etc, a whole panoply of psychic abilities are real, and some of the characters have those abilities.

      The Sime~Gen timeline I had mapped out in the 1970’s already spanned thousands of years of future history.  To write the novel that would prove my theory of the Spock Effect, I just had to pick an Incarnation and a particular time in the historical development of my Sime~Gen Interstellar Civilization and write a novel about that Incarnation of this main character.

      GR sold Star Trek as “Wagon Train To the Stars” (Wagon Train was a record-setting, long-running Western TV Series), and I knew that. Fandom knew a lot that the general public and journalists didn’t.

      At the time, there was little science fiction set in the horse-and-buggy technological level of the Old West.  By running back along my timeline from the year my first sold story was set within, I found a Historically pivotal Event with plenty of conflict and Western Adventure, that involved one of the Incarnations of my Main Character’s Katra.  That Character, Rimon, Del Rimon, Klyd, Digen, Klairon is a version of Spock.

      So I wrote the novel, House of Zeor, about Klyd Farris, to prove The Spock Effect.

      The timing of publications came out just barely even, so that House of Zeor is a tiny footnote in Star Trek Lives!

      I bought a few boxes of the hardcover Doubleday edition of House of Zeor and sold them to Spock fans active in Star Trek fandom on a money-back guarantee.  I sold 60 copies to that sub-set of Trekdom on that guarantee (at the time, the price of that hardcover book was the cost of several gallons of gasoline) and never had one returned.

      During that time, all of a sudden, fans started sending me fan letters with questions about the worldbuilding behind the Sime~Gen Universe.

      I answered at length, and eventually started publishing as a kind of carbon-copy fanzine.  Very quickly, a fan stepped up to do an actual mimeo fanzine, we called Ambrov Zeor, and before I knew it we had fans writing fanfic in the Sime~Gen Universe.  At one point there were 7 Sime~Gen ‘zines – some just non-fiction, some letters only, and several with fiction, letters and articles.  The two longest running have their contents now posted online for free reading, and there’s lots of new material online, too.

      With the spontaneous generation of Sime~Gen fanfic, I had proven that Sime~Gen had the “whatever it is” that Star Trek had.
   
   That element is Spock’s Katra, the soul of Spock, the Intimate Adventure that soul pursues.

      My original definition of Intimate Adventure is that you take an Action Adventure story, and replace the “Action” (fist fights, war, combat, violence) with Intimacy, (not with sex, but with emotional honesty) and you get Intimate Adventure.

      In Intimate Adventure, the heroic courage the main character exhibits is on the field of Emotion, not the field of Combat.
      In Intimate Adventure Logic and Emotion are not walled off from each other.  Compassion is Logical.

      That first novel, House of Zeor, also had a career parallel to Star Trek’s.  It was in print continuously for 20 years (unheard of in genre fiction, but especially in science fiction which was usually in print for about six weeks).  Then House of Zeor came back into print in various forms, and now it’s in a new print edition, audiobook and e-book as well.

      But meanwhile, my second novel in the Sime~Gen Universe, about another Incarnation of that same character, several centuries later in the era of digital telephone dialing, won my first Award.

      As I was writing that novel, Unto Zeor, Forever, Jean Lorrah’s review of House of Zeor came to me on the fannish grapevine.  I wrote back to her, and she sent me a story she had written in my universe, creating a wholly new setting in a different geographical setting, with different characters.

      Meanwhile, I sent Jean the manuscript for Unto Zeor, Forever, and she sent it back with extensive rewrite notes, most of which I incorporated into the final draft.

      We printed her Sime~Gen story in the fanzine Ambrov Zeor, and she sent another.  In those days, to get a free copy of a ‘zine (sold for printing and postage only, but still very expensive) you had to contribute something, so if you wanted another writer’s sequel to their story, you had to contribute a story of your own.  So Jean did some stories about these Sime~Gen characters she had created and their Householding Keon.

      And then we met at a Star Trek Convention and she handed me the outline for a full length novel set in the Sime~Gen Universe.
      She was already a professional writer, and it showed in her work so far.  I took her outline to Doubleday, and a few months later we sold it to hardcover publication, and later mass market, and now with all the others in new paper and e-book editions.

      Her first professionally published novel is titled First Channel, and is about Spock’s Katra in the form of Rimon Farris, centuries before it was Klyd Farris in my first novel, House of Zeor.

      She wrote that story because Rimon Farris wouldn’t quit nagging her to tell the story of the First Channel, and how the reality of his life differed from the legend I had cited.

      On the strength of having a hardcover novel published, she got a full professorship.  She is an English Professor with a specialty in Chaucer and noted for identifying the Shaman Archetype.  She has identified Intimate Adventure as a Plot Archetype (like The Hero’s Journey).

      Thus started a partnership that has woven warp and woof of the Sime~Gen Universe fabric to include an Infinite Diversity In Infinite Combinations.  It’s not easy for a Chemist to collaborate with an English Professor.

      After many novels, we incorporated Sime~Gen as a separate entity and bought the simegen.com domain where we host the previous fanzine stories plus millions of words of fanfic created just for online publication, and secured copyrights and trademarks.

      After the 12th Sime~Gen novel came out, the publisher (now Wildside Press) asked for a volume of fan-written stories.

      That anthology is titled FEAR AND COURAGE, was edited by two fans, has 14 writers, and contains many stories newly written for the anthology.

      Fans have also compiled a Sime~Gen Concordance slated for publication probably end of 2016, fairly well patterned on the original Star Trek Concordance by Bjo Trimble.

      In a way, this anthology publication is comparable to the moment when Pocket Books and Paramount bought A. C. Crispin’s Yesterday’s Son – which was I believe the first time they had contracted with an unpublished writer for a Star Trek novel.

      Yesterday’s Son is about a son of Spock, and time travel.

      I know about this novel because A. C. Crispin, the author who went on to write Star Wars and other film spinoff novels, brought me the manuscript (you guessed it, at a Star Trek convention) to ask if it was good enough to sell to Pocket.

      I took it home, read it, wrote her a list of stuff she had to change to conform to the “formula” demanded by Paramount and Pocket (yes, they had a guidelines sheet they sent out to professional writers they chose, just the way Romance publishers did.  I had a copy, but there was no way she could get a copy at that time.).

      I didn’t expect to hear from her.  But she made the changes, polished up the ragged edges where the changes had to be made, and sent it back to me.  It was perfect.  I offered to agent it to Pocket. We signed a contract. I hand carried it into the office in Manhattan (I lived near), and they bought it.  It hit best seller status, and the uproar about how much better it was than the previous books set Pocket and Paramount on a new path.  People who write for the love of the material attract readers who read for the love of the material.

      As I said, Yesterday’s Son is about Spock’s son.  Do you see the connection?  Kirk is the “star” but everything that changes the real world is rooted in Spock’s Katra.

      So why is that?  What does Spock add to standard science fiction that causes the real world to erupt?

      It’s not just that he’s sexy.  Lots of characters are sexy and they don’t change the real world.

      It’s why he’s sexy that matters.  Which leads to the question of what sexuality actually is, where it comes from, and what it means for humanity.

      Science Fiction is about the effect of technology derived from basic science on people, humans and otherwise.

      Most basic science discoveries start a few decades before the discovery.  The start is always some innovation in Mathematics.  Math is a language, and you need it to describe and talk about reality.

 Once people discuss (intimately) using the newest Math to describe something, innovation happens.  Discovery happens.  Math is the key.

      It’s all very boring, abstract, logical.

      Remember the TV Series Numb3rs?

      Old fashioned science fiction from the 1930’s and 1940’s tried to keep the emotion out of the logic of Math.  That’s futile, to coin a phrase.

      What I wanted to add to science fiction as a field was the emotional dimension – the science of emotion, the logic of beauty, the “math” equivalent of the language in which to discuss emotion.

      I’ve barely scratched the surface of that project.  Here’s what I’ve got so far.
   

      Kabbalah is the math of emotion, the math of human bonding.

      I set out with my first story and first novel to depict the connection between logic and emotion, but just illustrating it in a whopping good story and leaving the reader to figure out what it all means to them, personally.

      I learned writing craft techniques as I went along selling novels and stories.  Each novel I’ve done illustrates a different craft technique.  But I knew, from my first studies of fiction, that telling a good story is what writers do.  It’s up to the reader to interpret the meaning.

      Or as Gene Roddenberry taught me, in countless hotel rooms and convention hall greenrooms where we interviewed him for Star Trek Lives!, good fiction asks questions but doesn’t give answers.

      So I didn’t set out to give answers, but to ask questions.  Fans have answered my questions by writing their stories, their original characters, into my universe.

      Here’s my biography and bibliography
      http://www.simegen.com/jl/

      Or find the novels of Jean Lorrah and me on Amazon:
      http://astore.amazon.com/simegen-20

      And here’s where I blog on writing craft, a co-blog with a number of widely published Romance writers:
      http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/

      Simultaneously with the various incarnations of Star Trek in film and TV Series, we’ve seen the rise of the field of Fantasy.

      At the same time, mathematicians and theoretical astrophysicists decided that it was so improbable that another planet existed out there somewhere with the characteristics of Earth that we may as well not bother looking.  Established science voted against the existence of exo-planets.  As usual with science, they eventually reversed that opinion.

      Also, theoretical physics pretty much nixed the idea of traveling to the stars because it would be impossible.

      Then a whole new generation grew up inspired by Trek movies and reruns.  They gathered evidence to the contrary, so that now we have orbital telescopes mapping exo-planets and galaxies moving in formations, all with new math theories sparking particle physics experiments like the Hadron Collider.  We have identified the God Particle, the Higgs Boson, and are in hot pursuit of anti-matter, (Trek’s fuel supply for starships) identifying an anti-neutron.

      First the math, then the discoveries, then the technology.  We’re on the way to the stars.

      But during those decades when science said, “Forget it,” the fiction field that burgeoned was Fantasy.

      The worldbuilding included parallel universes, alternate realities where Magic prevailed over Physics, and vast visions of demons, angels, discorporate beings, Ghosts, Vampires, Werewolves and other shapechangers, all taken from every mythology humanity has created.

      All of these genres and sub-genres have something in common.  They are written by and for people who are searching for some kind of comprehensible description of “all reality” that makes sense in their daily lives.  A Unified Field Theory of Emotion.

      Most of the stories involving demons, angels, supernatural creatures, Vampires, shapechangers are the same stories often told of First Contact with Aliens from Outer Space.

      Our interest in these other sentient species is to make friends, enemies, conquests, vassals, or trading partners.  In other words, we seek Relationships with The Other.

      The form and dynamic of that Relationship is infinite in combinations.  But in general, the readership thirsting for these stories cannot abide the concept that humans are alone in creation, as science was saying during those years.

      The more mundane stories center on the intelligence evident in other animals on this planet – dolphins, Bonobos, dogs – we see sentience everywhere.  Now that we’ve seen other planets somewhat like ours, and found life in the caldera of sub-sea volcanoes as well as under the antarctic ice, we can’t imagine that there isn’t another species out there that we can relate to, trade with, and learn from.

      We’re still trying to figure out what a human being is.

      For many of those leading the charge into this strange future, Spock was the first Alien they ever met.  And Roddenberry’s idea that Logic and Emotion are two different things often prevails because it seems so reasonable.

      Since that dichotomy between Logic and Emotion is such a widespread assumption, science fiction (or fantasy) has to explore the opposite notion, that these two things are really the same thing.

      The way fiction explores a notion is to build an entire fictional world around that notion, letting that world evolve aliens, then bringing them into conflict with humans.

      I did that to create my second award winner, Dushau, which won the Romantic Times Award, the first Romantic Times Award given for a science fiction novel.  It is about a Romance between an Alien Soul incarnated in a human body (not knowing she’s alien), and an Alien so long-lived he remembers her, but doesn’t recognize her katra until the third book in the series.

      That book would never have sold, and would never-ever have garnered the attention of Romance Readers and been voted excellent, had it not been for Star Trek, Star Trek fan fiction, and a whole new generation trying to understand human nature by looking at ourselves from the Alien viewpoint.

      All across the Romance Genre, across Westerns, across Mysteries, across International Intrigue, throughout the world of genre fiction we have evidence of how viewers’ enjoyment of Star Trek created a demand for different views of what makes Spock so fascinating.

      Or perhaps those views have the same origin as Spock, which Gene Roddenberry often said came from adventure Radio Shows of his youth.

      Here is a free ebook, very short, giving an extremely condensed history of the brand new field called variously Science Fiction Romance, Paranormal Romance, Fantasy Romance
.
      http://www.thegalaxyexpress.net/2015/06/free-ebook-brief-history-of-science.html

      Here is the booklet free on smashwords.com
      https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/548258

      It seems the idea of combining science fiction and romance genres became popularized via Star Trek fanfic.  Because the hybrid genre was based on a common experience, watching Star Trek, sharing those fanfic stories allowed people to talk to each other in a language they had in common, Trek.

      Like Math, a fictional universe is a language.  The language has to come first, then the discoveries, then the applications.

      Like Math, and computer programming, fiction has created many languages, most of which are now being used to discuss “the human condition” the Unified Field Theory of Emotion, via online fanfic where writers reincarnate TV Series Characters into various original universes of their own.

      Star Trek fanfic created text based narrative from a TV Series.  Meanwhile, Trek films were made, and as computers became more Trek-Universe-Like, Star Trek Games were created.  In fact, we now have Trek fanfic done as live-actor streaming episodes, with some participation by original Trek professionals.

      Thus the intangible spiritual energy we might term Spock’s Katra has dispersed into our real world and saturated every medium of expression, music, podcast, TV Series, DVD, film, comic, graphic novel, videogames and more media to be invented.

      And in the wake of that vibrant effect, Sime~Gen has become contracted to a videogame company now hard at work taking Sime~Gen from cold text to visual media.

      So whatever it is that sparked so much creativity via the Spock Effect is still soaking into mundane reality and changing the world.

      I have described, to the best of my current ability, how all this works, in a series of books on the Tarot from the Kabbalistic point of view.  I first encountered Tarot at a Star Trek convention, and for many years taught the subject at Trek and SF cons.

      I came to understand Tarot from the perspective of Kabbalah and the Tree of Life.  Tarot is no good for predicting “the future” but it is dynamite at worldbuilding.
      I call the series volumes on Swords and Pentacles, Tarot Just For Writers, and you can find them for Kindle, here:
      http://astore.amazon.com/simegen-20
  In the upper right, browse by category box, click Tarot.  Or the combined volume of all 5 books:
      http://www.amazon.com/Not-So-Minor-Arcana-Books-ebook/dp/B010E4WAOU/
   Free on Kindle Unlimited.

      The overall series title is The Not So Minor Arcana because it is for intermediate Tarot students who want to go beyond the Major Arcana and understand arcana such as the origin of Spock’s appeal.

      Spock’s appeal isn’t about sex, but about Soul and Relationship, about the archetype behind humanity.  In Kabbalah that’s called Adam Kadmon, the First Man, Adam who was neither male nor female before Eve was separated leaving only Adam.  This could be the origin of the concept Soul Mate, two halves of a whole.

      The science fiction romance genre is powered by the incessant search for the nature of Humanity.  That’s why Roddenberry gave up Number One, the female First Officer, to keep Spock.

      He knew the only way to get perspective on “the human condition” was to view us from outside.

      No two Star Trek fanfic writers see the same thing when looking at us from Spock’s eyes.  Each, however, adds something vital to our understanding of humanity.

      Much later, after Star Trek was an assured success, Roddenberry allowed the establishment of Spock’s Katra – delineating the dual nature of Vulcans as a non-material matrix allied to a material body.

      The Katra survives the death of the body, and seeks its rest among its ancestors, even if it must be carried in a human for a time.
      This dual nature – material and non-material – shared with Vulcans is key to understanding Spock’s immediate appeal.

      The Spock Character appealed to creative women, highly intelligent women, who were not science fiction readers because there was no science fiction for women because science was too hard for women to understand.  We all know that women can’t do science or command starships crewed by men.  But those viewers already imagined a world where they did anything and everything.  When they saw that world depicted on a TV Screen, they recognized it.  And they recognized Spock as the kind of man who would seek Intimate Adventure with them.

      Many women who had never written fiction before were compelled by this fictional character’s dual nature of body and soul to tap their own creativity.  They could envision the power of the Soul Mate, the eternal nature of identity.

      When Spock touched off their creativity, these women liked themselves better and went on being creative.  It’s the most amazing thing!  Creative men were attracted to these women, and now we have a third highly creative generation reshaping our world, proving the Higgs Boson, stalking the anti-neutron, postulating evidence for string theory and mapping the shape of the universe, maybe inventing the Sonic Screwdriver and the Light-saber.

      Watch this animation
      http://www.upworthy.com/we-already-knew-the-earth-was-not-the-center-of-the-universe-but-now-we-know-exactly-where-it-is

      My current theory, (tomorrow another theory will arise, as usual) is that what humans and aliens from outer space will have in common is that dual-nature – body and soul, body and katra.  Everything else is a wild card.

      Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations.

      We have a lot of writing to do!

      Jacqueline Lichtenberg
      http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
   

Seizing "Snippets" And World Civilization

The Authors' Guild is disappointed that the Second Circuit Court of Appeals did not view as infringement Google's activities in copying books without permission, and publishing and distributing those permissionless copies to libraries, and publishing and distributing significant chunks of those books to all the world without permission or compensation.

https://www.authorsguild.org/industry-advocacy/2nd-circuit-leaves-authors-high-and-dry/

I wonder why no greater sink was raised about the definition of "Snippet". Surely there ought to be a legal definition.  In my opinion, four consecutive pages is no "snippet". It could be the bulk of an author's explanation of or insights into a topic.

In an earlier blog post, I recounted what I found when I tried to do my daughter's homework reading assignment from "World Civilization" without buying particular edition of the book that was the course requirement.

Most of what I needed was on Google Books. The rest, and indeed the entire edition of World Civ was available for free thanks to linked Google Searches that led me to a Russian pirate url.

Some musicians support the Authors' Guild, as they should. What would happen if all "snippets" of any copyrighted work are free to seize and monetize?  What if it were legal and transformative for Google to host a site that allows anyone to study "snippets" of the world's music to see if it contained "information" relevant to their needs ?  Is that YouTube?

Why are judges today so easily persuaded that art, literature, music, photography, movies and more ought to be seized and shared?

My best,
Rowena Cherry

The Language of Beasts

Many legends and fairy tales include stories about heroes who gain the magical ability to understand the speech of animals, such as Siegfried with a taste of dragon's blood. The wish to communicate with the animal kingdom is a perennial human desire. When I was little, I thought my cat, Midnight, understood me, and I tried to interpret her meows as words.

Have you heard about the Bowlingual Voice, a dog collar invented in Japan that claims to translate dogs' barks into verbal expressions of their feelings? It supposedly expresses five different canine emotions. Experts are skeptical:

Bowlingual Voice

According to specialists in dog behavior, you can probably interpret your pet's mood more accurately by watching body language than by using this device.

C. S. Lewis suggests that if animals could talk, their conversation would be dull, because they would do nothing but "talk shop." They would be interested only in practical topics such as food, mates, rivals, and territory. Interestingly, though, his talking animals in Narnia aren't like this, probably because the creatures granted the power of speech by Aslan also gain human-level intelligence.

The author of WATERSHIP DOWN creates rabbits who have language among themselves—with a limited ability to converse with other animals, but no comprehension of human speech or vice versa—yet plausibly think and act the way we can believe rabbits would. On the opposite end of the literary "talking beast" spectrum, the animal characters in WIND IN THE WILLOWS, although sharing their world with actual humans, are essentially people in animal shape, with a few token nods to their ostensible species such as mole's underground home. (Mr. Toad, on the other hand, lives in a luxurious mansion.)

Vivian Vande Velde's humorous story "To Converse with Dumb Beasts" riffs on this fairy-tale trope. The protagonist, a game warden named Kedric, saves an old woman from an enraged bear. She rewards him with a magic acorn that enables him to understand the languages of animals. When he first realizes it actually works, he's excited. He soon learns, however, that the woodland creatures don't have much to say. Birds constantly announce, "My tree," "My branch," and sometimes "Bug!" Butterflies keep up a running commentary of "sip, sip, now I'm fluttering, now I'm sipping nectar...." Squirrels and chipmunks either chortle in delight as they play or mutter obsessively about the coming winter (seven months away) and the need to store up nuts. The creatures of the wild have one-track minds; they "talk shop" and nothing else. Kedric thinks that surely his pets, being more intelligent, will carry on more interesting conversations. The dog barks, "My house!" and "My master!" In scatterbrained canine fashion, he repeatedly asks whether Master loves him and begs Master to play with him. Meanwhile, the cat coolly demands food. To his dismay, Kedric discovers that while he can understand his pets, they still don't understand him. The dog wonders whether Kedric's strange behavior means he's sick. The cat speculates that if their master gets sick enough to die, they can eat him. Finally he runs out of the house, screaming in frustration.

The dog laments, "Doesn't Master love me anymore?" The cat answers, "Don't worry. He just went to find better food."

Maybe we're better off imagining what our pets are thinking, rather than actually comprehending it.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Theme-Character Integration Part 8 - The Executive Decision by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Theme-Character Integration
Part 8
The Executive Decision
by
 Jacqueline Lichtenberg 

Here is a post listing the parts of the Theme-Character Integration Series:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/07/index-to-theme-character-integration.html

I've often pointed out that the most popular fiction is based on some element "ripped from the headlines."

The part you "rip" from the headlines is the THEME.  You can't copyright theme, and nobody can sue you for your theme (at least not in the USA at the moment.)

They can sue you for much other content, but not theme.  Theme is what you are saying, the statement about life, the universe, and everything that you are making.  Theme is where you define what a human being is (and is not) and what it takes to be an admirable example of a human.

Theme is where you address issues such as the reality of Souls, Soul Mates, and Romance, the attainability of the Happily Ever After, the chances for real success in the real world by doing whatever your characters do.

Character is where you address esoteric variables such as the criteria by which we make decisions, and how our decisions impact the events that surround us.

Character is where you address such things as what it takes to "deserve" success, romance, love, life and maybe luck.

Character is where you depict the never-mentioned, never-explained worldbuilding you have done.

In depicting Character, you are showing-not-telling the Spiritual Laws of your fictional universe as well as the Physical Laws.

The Character-Arc is created by the impact of external Events (plot) upon the Character to create Story.

In real life, character impacts events and then events impact character until, by your teens, you are thoroughly embedded in "a life" that is very hard to break out of.

You have become "someone" -- you have an Identity, and that Identity is conveyed to others by what you're majoring in, what after-school-jobs you may have, what you read, watch, or what Games you play.

People find it hard to tease apart their Identity into "plot" and "story" -- and often attribute to outside influences that which is innate.  "I got fired because this Boss guy was a crook and a liar."  "I didn't get hired because I'm not a blond Caucasian."

Whatever happens in life, it's not related to what you, yourself have done.

See my series of books on Tarot Just For Writers titled The Not So Minor Arcana.  Esoterically, what you feel emotionally and what you think inside your own mind or how you choose to phrase your opinions, to whom you speak and about what, is a causative force you emit into the world.  It splashes back on you with multiplied force, in the form of Events that seem to "happen to you" rather than be caused by you.

The Artist's job is to reveal the form and function of that connection between intangible, private emotion and external events that just seem to come at you.  The Artist writing fiction depicts the reason why Characters do or do not "deserve" what happens to them.

There are objective rules built into the structure of Reality that determine what deeds cause what Events in real life.

The problem is humans are not objective creatures.  So we all have different perceptions, and thus different ideas of what the connection is between how we feel and what happens to us.

What is "my fault" -- and what is "not my fault."  For what am I to blame?  Or for what do I get "credit?"

There are endless variations on answers to those questions, so I'm presenting here one of the touchstones of modern life, an attitude shared by a majority of your readers.

It is the place of emotion in our society, and the appropriateness of where, when and how to express that emotion, how to label it, how to name it, and how to convey your character by that utterance.

Such utterances are called dialogue or worded thoughts, and they are a powerful writing tool for showing-not-telling the nature of a Character.

Here is an example from "real" life (OK, politics and email newsletters are not "real life" but they are headlines you can rip.)  Ponder the text of this email newsletter, the subject matter which is Planned Parenthood and its funding sources, and how a single spurious (unnecessary) word depicts a real-life-celebrity-figure.

BTW, this newsletter in no way distinguishes Ben Carson from any other Presidential Candidate.  They all let their hirelings phrase things this way because they assume all the general public accept emotion as the proper basis for decision making and action.

Think about this and do some meticulous worldbuilding to illustrate your opinion on where Emotion fits into the Decision Making process, and how actions taken out of an emotional motivation propagate into the world around the Character.

It's a diagram of the connecting links that make Romance and the HEA ending plausible -- or not.  Create several such diagrams,  from this plot-kernel found in a headline.

-----------------------------------------------------

I subscribe to a LOT of political and otherwise Newsletters from Far Left to Far Right - lots of "dubious" sources and trustworthy ones, just to see the contrast in how an Event is presented.  I got a   mailing back in July that explained illustrated a stark point about characterization.

It was from Presidential Candidate Ben Carson.  It said:
-----------QUOTE-----------
When I saw the video last week of a top Planned Parenthood official discussing the sale of aborted baby parts, I was so enraged that I started a petition calling on Congress to cut off all of their taxpayer funding.

In just one week, it's now been signed by over 200,000 people across America.

Now there's a second video. This time, it's of a Planned Parenthood official joking around about her need to make enough money from the sale of aborted baby parts to buy a Lamborghini.
----------END QUOTE---------

Think about how that portrays his Character.  Do you see what I see?

The mailing starts:
When I saw the video last week of a top Planned Parenthood official discussing the sale of aborted baby parts, I was so enraged that I started ....

ENRAGED?  Really?  Should a President decide to do (or not do) something in the midst of rage?

What if an executive is so immature that he only acts if someone else fires up his EMOTIONS?

That's not, how I'd portray a character I wanted readers to believe was capable of handling a management position.

This was probably written by a young flunky who has no clue what "executive" means, never mind what a President is hired to do, but Carson chose and hired this flunky, maybe even approved the message.  If you were writing his Character as a winner in a Presidential race, would you portray him this way?

Would you let readers know that he apparently has no clue that rage is inappropriate in a chief executive making life-or-death-decisions.  Or what if he discovered what the flunky had wriitten and handled the flunky -- write that scene.  Remember dialogue is mortal combat and the actual subject is rarely reflected in the vocabulary.

Then consider our real world.

Could our fiction be whittling away our good sense by glorifying characters who act out of emotion, not good sense?

It's hard to believe a Hero Character could have approved this message.

The real-world Ben Carson is a surgeon, and a good one.  Surely he wouldn't do surgery because something enraged him?  Would your fictional Character take action in a moment of rage?  If so, what would that Character "deserve" as as back-blow from that rage?

Newsletters do not allow you to write back and ask, "enraged" ??? Really??

But suppose you had a Character who did have direct access to write back.  What would that email or text say? (Think deleted Hillary Clinton emails, maybe Lois Lerner emails.)

So create a CHARACTER who is applying for an executive position and is turned down because a) a third party portrays him/her as acting out of emotion or b) he/she actually acts out of emotion or c) having acted out of emotion, can/can't handle the blow-back.

What did that Character think, feel, or do previously, perhaps in his/her teens, to "deserve" either getting or not-getting that executive position?

Answer that question and you have defined a theme that is ripped from the headlines.

Here's another article on Ben Carson describing a stump speech he's doing that pivots on emotion. Study the reasoning inside this speech.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/10/12/the-part-of-ben-carsons-national-press-club-speech-that-hardly-anybodys-talking-about

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Have You Been Pirated?

If you have been impacted by copyright infringement, you have an opportunity to fill in a survey put out by the copyrightalliance.org.

No one except the copyright alliance lawyers and editors will read your answers, but if you write something quoteworthy, you may be quoted.

How do you protect your work?

The White House is currently developing a strategic plan relating to copyright enforcement. To assist the White House with this plan, the Copyright Alliance will be sending its comments and recommendations to the White House and we need your help.

As individual artists and creators, your voice is a vital part of this conversation, and we’d like to hear from you. If you’ve encountered problems with copyright enforcement, send us your story. Please explain in detail:

·      the type of problem(s) (e.g., type of work pirated, website it was/is being pirated on);

·      any actions you took to stop the problem;

·      whether your actions had any effect; and 

·      whether and how these problems may have affected your ability to create new works and/or your business or career more generally.  

We’d like to include your story in our letter to the White House, so that the Administration understands clearly the challenges faced by individual creators like you.

 To submit your story, please go HERE.

http://copyrightalliance.org/WHSurvey

 Thank you!

The Internet of Things

Cory Doctorow discusses the Internet of Things, a term I hadn't come across before. This blog post on that topic has a link to his article in LOCUS on the same subject:

Dear Internet of Things

This concept refers to all the personal gadgets that collect information about us and transmit it to companies that compile such data—e.g., medical implants, GPS systems in cars, prisoner-tracking ankle cuffs for house arrest, etc. The process is usually claimed to be for our benefit but is often not under our control.

Doctorow proclaims that human beings should be "sensors, not things to be sensed." He makes an interesting distinction between the Facebook model and the e-mail model. With the former, the content source controls what we can see. With the latter, we decide for ourselves what we want to receive, block, respond to, or store. Not surprisingly, Doctorow advocates the e-mail model for the Internet of Things.

The main direct exposure to this kind of thing I've had is the "smart meter" recently installed by our local electric company. Smart meters keep the power company informed of each customer's energy use so there's no need for a meter reader to visit each house in person. Some members of the public viewed smart meters with alarm when they were introduced (more for concerns about radiation than about privacy, from what was reported in the news) and chose to opt out, a process the electric company discourages, naturally. Personally, I thought the advantage of having the energy provider know instantly when and where power failures occur outweighed any hypothetical drawbacks. No more ordeals of being the last remaining block in the neighborhood with no electricity after a storm and wondering if the company has forgotten our existence! We also have an intelligent thermostat, intelligent enough for two-way communication with the provider, anyhow. During heat waves, the electric company can remotely cycle off our air conditioner for brief periods (with our prior permission, and we get small discounts on electric bills for participating). Then there's the cable company, which can sometimes remotely reboot our TV set-top boxes if we're having an intractable problem—far preferable, in my opinion, to waiting for a repair technician all afternoon.

Consider how much information we already allow to be collected about us, for the sake of convenience (through credit card use and online purchases, for instance—think of cookies, without which our browsing and shopping experiences would be much less smooth). The important thing, as Doctorow suggests, is that the future of these magical devices and systems should be steered so that they serve us rather than vice versa.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Depiction Part 12 - Depicting Rational Fury by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Depiction Part 12
Depicting Rational Fury
by
 Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Here's the index post for this series on Depiction:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/04/index-to-depiction-series-by-jacqueline.html

Last week we looked at The Flicker Men, a brilliant but purely science fiction novel.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/09/reviews-19-by-jacqueline-lichtenberg.html

Not much in The Flicker Men depicted the emotional tangles that drive human relationships and therefore govern (or fail to govern) the movements of large numbers of humans.  There is, however, a great deal of emotion, and psychological truth underlying the actions of the characters.  A solid, Happily Ever After Love Story, or a genuine Romance, could have changed all those events.

For example, if the main character had been living an HEA with wife and children, with brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, family reunions, weddings, birth celebrations -- if his life were peppered with events that held deep emotional significance on the positive end of the spectrum, then when he discovered the truth behind the structure of the Universe, that this universe is just a holographic representation created by another Universe's scientists, then he wouldn't have quit his job and destroyed his life with alcohol and drugs.

Yes, his self-destruction is "realistic" -- but it is not real in an HEA universe.

What if you take The Flicker Men premise, and add the dimensions of human emotion we deal with in the Romance Genre -- that is, take a pure science fiction novel about the impact of a dark discovery on an unstable man who stands alone -- and redesign the Characters so that they interact and bond in a psychologically healthy way?

We live in a new world, with the advent of smartphones and social networking.  People growing up today will have a different idea of what a healthy relationship is and how to meet people, how to present yourself (you don't have to comb your hair before posting your first tweet of the day), how to share and thus dilute an emotional reaction.

Look at how people vent fury at a Flight Attendant or Grocery Clerk by posting vitriolic commentary, or embarrassing pictures, or scorning certain businesses by name.  And those are mostly people who grew up before smartphones.  What will the next generation think of as "healthy" psychology?

We are already seeing hints of what is to come in the entertainment media and the news media -- and in government, the military, even schools, college campuses, strip malls, everywhere decisions have to be made so that lots of people can move on through and get their objectives accomplished.

Accomplishing Objectives is what the Hero of the story does.  If your main character does not accomplish his/her Objectives, you haven't found the character whose story you are telling.  You are avoiding conflict by viewing events from another perspective than the one confronting opposition.

One neat way to re-align your thinking into that of a story-teller is to sit down with the Book of Psalms and just read it right straight through.  Most of them are by King David, a Warrior King, and most of what he discusses with God is all about Enemies, his own enemies and God's enemies.  It's all about Enemies, not about King David at all, and therefore it is about enmity in general and how to deal with it.  Then go read through the Book of Kings, the stories of the Kings with their ups and downs, just blitz through it and don't regard it as "scripture" but as a simple template for the perpetually repeated story of humankind.

So after soaking up these classic psychological attitudes of the template of the Hero Paradigm, read through some of my posts on Targeting A Readership --
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/10/index-to-targeting-readership-series-by.html
and how necessary it is for a writer to understand the world the reader lives in, and to incorporate that understanding into the worldbuilding deep inside and underneath (invisible to the reader) the rip-roaring just-for-fun story you are telling.

You've found the point in your main character's life where his/her story is happening.  You've found the beginning point of that story, where the Character first confronts or stirs up the force that will oppose the Character's moves to Accomplish Objectives.

You've found "the stakes" -- what will happen if the Objectives are not accomplished.

Now you have to DEPICT how the Character who is living through this rip-roaring good story actually feels about Accomplishing the Objective, about what they think will happen if they don't, about what alternatives exist, about what alternatives the Character might generate that don't yet exist, and how to go about attaining an objective that does not yet exist with tools that do not yet exist.

In other words, the Hero of the story is the person who does not "do all I can" but rather creates new abilities.  We see the yearning for this by the general readership in the popularity of the Meta-Human, Super-Hero stories on TV, and especially in fanfic even in mundane genres like the TV Series White Collar fanfic.

Look again at how King David generates new situations beyond his ability to create.  He prays.  He explains his situation to God in terms he knows God uses.  On the validity of his understanding, David then suggests what God might do, or what objective He might allow. (smite my enemies; smite your enemies).  Then look in the Book of Kings for what happened on the battlefield.

In Depiction Part 11,
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/06/depiction-part-11-depicting-complex.html
we looked at depicting complex (galaxy sized) battlefields.  And we discussed the galaxy sized battlefield with the added dimension of Time in reviewing the famous Romance writer, Jean Johnson's Theirs Not To Reason Why Science Fiction, Galactic War Series (which has spinoff novels we will be discussing.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/09/reviews-18-by-jacqueline-lichtenberg.html

Now look at the world around you.

You can do this real-world survey from various points of view rapidly and efficiently with the app or browser version of http://flipboard.com  -- it is a news aggregator.  Apple is launching a new News Aggregator, and there are many others around, but I am currently using flipboard where you can subscribe to a multitude of international news sources.  Just reading the headlines is instructive -- stop and read a full article or two with awareness of its source, compare the same Event covered by other sources, notice the commentary posted on blogs (yes, you can subscribe to blog feeds on flipboard), and get an idea of what "the world" looks like to your Target Readership.
You can follow my news item selections here:
https://flipboard.com/@jacquelinelhmqg

Soon, you'll be making your own magazines.  The point of making a magazine (for a writer) is to collect stories to read in juxtaposition while putting yourself into the mind and emotional framework of people you'd never voluntarily associate with.

Now, to depict a Character who is the Hero of their own story, but not necessarily Heroic by nature, you have to depict the ups and downs, the contrasts, in the Character's emotional life.

Most new writers will insert long paragraphs of multi-syllable words telling the reader all about how and why this Character feels this or that, maybe including the Character's early life story (how they were abused as a child), and go on and on about why the Character feels as they do.

Seasoned writers do it in dialogue one-liners, maybe half-a-line with lots of empty space on the page.

Here are a few posts discussing dialogue, its creation, and its use in plot-character integration:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/06/plot-character-integration-part-1-34.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/05/index-to-theme-plot-integration.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/09/do-your-lovers-live-hea.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/07/toystory-3-analyzed-for-beats.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/10/dialogue-as-tool.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/02/expletive-deleted-tender-romance.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/12/villain-defined.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/02/expletive-deleted-tender-romance.html

Yes, we've been at this topic a long time, but it is literally endless.  Every time "the world" changes, every year that new young readers take up a genre that had been "too old" for them, the details of how to write great stories change -- but the essence of the framework, the techniques, do not change.  They have not changed since Shamans told history over the campfire.

Study this image.  It is THE LOVER'S QUARREL done in "show don't tell."

That image shows how to write dialogue.  Characters, like real people, don't talk about what they are talking about.  That, in screenwriting (see Blake Snyder's SAVE THE CAT! screenwriting books), is called "off the nose" dialogue.  You execute it with lots of white space on the page -- the empty space speaks volumes.

Dialogue is all about communicating.  It is not real speech transcribed.  It is point of view, conflicting subjectivities.

How a Character speaks, and how the Character speaks differently to different Characters, depicts the Character's character.

Dialogue is the writer's tool for convincing the reader that this Character whose story is being told is actually a perfectly level-headed, rational, sane person who totally understands what is TRUE (not "Truth" in that diagram but one of the shadows of Truth.)

The trick you play on your readers, the wink-and-a-nod agreement between you and your reader, lies in convincing the reader that you, the writer, know "Truth" -- all sides of it -- but understand how the Characters you are following each see only part of the truth, and the shadow of Truth that they see is True.

How do you resolve a conflict between True and True?

Also remember humans don't generally change their minds about what is True because they lose an argument.  Once the heat of the moment is over, they look again and see what is True -- and it is just that, true, therefore since it is true it can't be false!  So they go back to their old way of thinking.

Here's an example "ripped from the headlines."  Internet Security is a huge issue in your reader's world.  Since it is a huge issue, politicians have leaped in to offer to solve your problem for you (which is their business model in action).

So we have an internet supporting the "world wide web" (and a Dark Web run outside the purvue of Government).  The Internet was built via a few Universities connecting mainframes in order to share research.  It attracted graduate students who wanted to play Star Trek games, and set about improving the connections.  Off across the Atlantic, brilliant contributions created the foundation of what we call today a "browser."

All of this was created by well meaning, good people who couldn't think like criminals to save their lives.  The absolute most wrong-doing any of them might have been guilty of would have been pre-empting the credit line on a paper nobody but peers would ever read.

For years, that was the sort of person who used email and the internet.  Then commercial interests swept in to make a profit, and on their coat-tails came criminals, and after them came true nefarious actors.

Now governments want to make laws outlawing the "dark web" or outlawing encryption.

As with guns, law-abiding citizens will not have encryption but the outlaws and government-sponsored-hackers from our Enemies (think King David) will have unbreakable encryption.

Legislators want to make laws that say that software manufacturers have to leave 'a back door' in all their software so that government can break into anything (given a court order.)

The argument is that without being able to stealthily penetrate widely-used email or blog, social network software, and the backbone servers of the Internet, they can't protect the population from Terrorists.  That's TRUE.  Look at that diagram carefully.  It's true, but is it truth?

The FBI or CIA or whatever it's called in your country is probably saying what is in fact true  -- that they can't break the encryption the Enemies are using. (think King David; think Hero).

We have tasked "government" and thus the law-makers with the Objective of "keeping us safe" and defined "safe" as NO POSSIBILITY OF HARM EVER.  We are not "safe" if we feel (rationally feel) that there exists a finite possibility that we might be harmed in some way.

Is that a "heroic attitude?"

Is it a rational attitude?  Can you depict the rationality of a Character who has that attitude?

OK, now consider King David, and creating impossible alternatives that suddenly come to exist. Today we call King David's attitude, "thinking outside the box."

So let your Character who rationally chooses the objective of "no harm can be threatening my cyber-life at all, ever. I am safe online," discover another True thing, a different shape.

Again, think dialogue and white space.  An argument doesn't have to use the vocabulary of the subject matter. Innuendo and inference speak much louder.  Go watch The Godfather, or read the script.

For example, your Character discovers that the software that provides this "safety" makes his computer run unacceptably slowly.  Understanding the problem, he wants to buy a faster computer, but can't because it costs too much.  Only the very rich can afford smartphones or computers that have enough capacity to run the Government Mandated version of ordinary software.

Lets suppose that the Government backdoor lets the government snoop into your stuff, but at the same time, as a trade-off, actually does prevent malware, viruses, worms and whatever comes next.  Remember, this is science fiction, so a couple of absurd concepts have to be made plausible.

But the price is slowing hardware, or only the rich can afford to function at full speed in this new world.

Or take another situation.  Suppose the government mandated anti-encryption measure leaves you wide open to anything hackers want to do to you.  But the government mandate does allow your paltry level of hardware to run at a good speed.

Take one of those scenarios, or create a different one, and let your Main Character whose story you are telling get out of High School and come up against the Cyber-Security Problem.

Now, some Characters would major in Law and become politicians.  Others might go into Computer Science.  A few might major in Divinity and become Preachers.  Still others might major in Criminal Psychology.  Then there's the drop-out who creates Facebook or Microsoft.  A few might major in Literature and become writers.

Pick a Character, let his/her Enemy steal his Identity, or perhaps send him/her into the Witness Protection Program.  Now what?

If this is a science fiction romance book you are writing, you can go research the Cyber Security field as a whole, all the way back to its origins, and perhaps the psychological origins of the concept Security, and re-think it.  Perhaps you want to use a galactic setting, and introduce Alien Ideas about what constitutes cyber-security.

Consider, for example, re-defining "the problem" (again, think King David and generating impossible options such as "smite my enemy.").

The problem is there is an Enemy who has done you damage.

Unlike King David who voluntarily goes to a Third Party (God), here a Third Party comes along and offers to solve your problem for you, convincing you that it's their job to solve your problem.

You welcome that Third Party's solution, and pay the requested fee.

The Third Party's solution is to pepper your life with obstacles, making everything you do slower and more difficult, so you won't do anything that might let your Enemy harm you.

Meanwhile, the Enemy that is your problem has their path smoothed and sped up.

Since so much of your money went to paying your Third Party protector, and so much of what's left of your energy is expended overcoming the obstacles the Third Party created in your life to protect you, you therefore have very little left to fight your Enemy.  You are now an unarmed, sitting duck etched against your Enemy's horizon.

Note that Kind David prayed to his Third Party to smite his enemies, pledging that his Enemies were also Enemies of the Third Party.  King David requested help from a carefully chosen Third Party, made alliance, and was thus able to smite Enemies.

The Enemies felt that smiting, severely.  The target of all that output energy was the Enemy, not King David, who fought most of these truly forlorn battles before he became King and thus took over "the government."

If your Main Character is a Hero, his/her "Security" does not consist of being disabled before Enemies by Friends or Hirelings.  "Security" means Friends and Hirelings focus their smiting upon the Enemy, not upon the Main Character.

Since, in your reader's real life today, Cyber-security is accomplished by hampering the reader's ability to function without touching the reader's Enemy (hackers), you have an excellent chance of engrossing your reader with a tale of a world where the characters representing the reader's Enemy get the brunt of the smiting.

This happened when Google crowd-sourced spam filtering.  Just take a look at your spam folder on gmail.  Very seldom does a spam get through to your inbox.  At one point, it was 300 spams to 1 genuine email.

Email users' rational fury was redirected by Google's crowd-sourcing data-mining to target The Enemy, whereupon The Enemy got the brunt of the smiting.  Since a few spams still get through, and there are still a trusting few who click where they should not, spammers still try to bring down the Internet Backbone by overloading it with spam messages -- and they somehow make a profit.  Or it is possible they are paid by foreign governments to make running Internet Backbone Servers more expensive -- with the objective of bankrupting the more advanced countries.  Enmity.

Google didn't punish the recipients of spam, but let the recipients pour out their fury on the spammers.

Right now, your readers are feeling the government pouring out its fury (we must have access to your everything in order to protect you) on the readers of websites rather than on the disruptors (hackers) of web-services, web commerce, and reader privacy.  

In our real world, we practice a principle, "Don't blame the victim."  In the case of cyber security, the smartphone user, the web browsing public is the victim, but the only solution being offered is to punish the victim, hamper the victim with privacy restrictions.

Think outside the box.  Suppose, your Aliens' idea of cyber security was to equip every victim with the ability to strike back at any intruder with lethal force?  Suppose any hacker who penetrated a server had his/her equipment blow up in his face?  Suppose the target of all efforts at protection was the Enemy, not the enemy's target.

OK, that isn't possible with today's hardware, software, and the whole psychology that created our Internet.  Think King David.  Think about an Ally that can do miracles.

That Third Party, that Ally, is the "Game Changer" you insert into your Worldbuilding.

Fury that your Main Character directs at his/her true Enemy will always seem rational.

Fury misdirected at the proponent of a different version of "Truth" (see the image above) that, while different, is still true, will not seem rational.

Your Hero may have irrational moments, and in those moments do things that later cause plot-complications, and serious trouble, but to be the Hero, your Character must fix what he/she has broken or ruined.

The Hero can't remain a Hero in the reader's eyes if the Hero spews vitriol or rage at another Character's TRUE facts without searching for that central figure that joins the Hero's True Facts to the Antagonist's True Facts -- thus revealing "The Truth" to both of them.

If both Hero and Antagonist are "rational" and furious for rational (true) reasons, then discovery of "The Truth" at the center of things will make them Allies, friends forever, possibly a Bonded Pair living Happily Ever After.

If one or the other clings to what is True because of Enmity for the other, the Fury will continue in a fight to the death.

The one exhibiting irrational fury is the one the writer has to kill off to give the reader "closure."

The Hero must win through to an unrestricted field where life can be re-created freehand, reflecting the Hero's own will, a field shared only with those the Hero chooses.  That is one defining parameter of the Happily Ever After -- the ability to choose, personally and without restriction, who does or does not share your living space, how large that space is, and what it's shape is.

That means choice of profession, lifestyle, associates, and how loudly you play your music.

The writer can convince the reader of the rationality of a character's fury simply by allowing that fury to arise only against restrictions imposed by an Enemy or a Confidence Operator pretending to "protect" by "restricting."

"Happily Ever After" means you don't have to protect yourself, or pay someone to protect you, because your Enemy has been smited out of existence, and anyone with the power to harm you is your ally.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Invisible Hero

Invisibility is a great ingredient for science fiction, and for implausible action movies.

James Bond had an invisible car. Harry Potter had a cloak of invisibility. In my earliest book (Forced Mate) one of my spaceships had a virtual invisibility mode. Many science fiction movies and series have "cloaking", which is explained in various ways. Or not explained.

I'm considering paint.

A few weeks ago (maybe more), I read about fish that see colors that humans cannot see. It was in a DISCOVER magazine article.

In the last couple of days, I've been pondering how a heroine who does not know that she is not human, but an alien djinn might describe a hero whom she can see, but no one else can. Obviously, he is a color for which there is no name in the human language.

I want a type of blue, because there is an English phrase (for depression) "blue devil". Owing to my sense of humor, which is a bit blue, too, I considered her thinking that he is the color of urine trails in a public swimming pool.... but I was reluctantly censoring myself, because that is just not Romance.

Today, I saw this:
My thanks to Houzz.com and to Rhiannon L. Crane

Backyard Birds: Create a Home for American Kestrels

"The American kestrel can see ultraviolet light. It enables them to locate the urine trails left by voles..."

So, should my heroine see urine trails?

My best wishes,
Rowena Cherry

Doing It Over; Water on Mars

This past weekend, my husband, my sister, and I attended our 50th high school reunion. (Technically, it was her 50th. Our three graduating classes, which happened to be consecutive, held a combined celebration.) Aside from touring our old school and observing how the building has changed (they have a swimming pool adjacent to the gym—WE didn't have a pool) and peering at name tags in search of people I knew, I was reminded of the movie PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED. The heroine, at her 25th reunion, travels backward in time to her high school years, fainting in the present and waking up in 1960 as her teenage self with her adult memories. She tries to change her future for the better, incidentally affecting her friends' futures, and avoid what she regards as the mistake of marrying her husband. Of course, she ends up rediscovering why she fell in love with him in the first place.

If you could go back to do your life over, would you? A while back, in discussion group at our church a woman around my age made a remark about wishing our children or grandchildren could have the kind of childhoods we did. I retorted that I certainly would not wish that on them. Not only because I had a mainly unhappy childhood and youth, but for the less personal reason that in most ways I think the present has so many advantages over the 1950s and early 60s. People often say things like, "I wouldn't do that if you paid me a million dollars." Well, for a million dollars, I MIGHT consider living the 1950s over again, but not for less. On a personal rather than cultural level, the prospect of correcting the mistakes of youth is tempting. But suppose in trying to smooth your path and improve your future, you accidentally made things worse? Even if you had the power to "put right what once went wrong," should you yield to the temptation? "Not even the wise can see all ends." (The protagonist in Stephen King's time travel novel who voyages into the past to prevent Kennedy's assassination returns to his own era to discover that his heroic deed has produced a horrific dystopia.) In hindsight, I recognize that my stumbles and wrong turns contributed to getting me where I am now. In trying to undo the mistakes, I might erase the good stuff too. Also, I'm not sure how I'd feel about becoming a teenager again with full knowledge of my forthcoming adult life. We often say we wish we knew then what we know now. But imagine being trapped in a child's or teen's body with an adult's mind and memories. You'd have the comfort of knowing things would eventually get better as well as the perspective of knowing the teen years won't last for the eternity they felt like the first time around. On the other hand, you'd have to put up with the powerlessness of being underage and all the Mickey Mouse restrictions of adolescence in full knowledge that they're Mickey Mouse. You'd have only a limited opportunity to make any effective use of your adult knowledge. I think I'd go nuts.

And in news of general SF interest, you've probably read about the apparent discovery of liquid salt water flowing on Mars now:

NASA Announcement

Not in distant past epochs, but right now! How exciting to contemplate the possibility of present-day Martian life raised by this discovery. Earth life includes some organisms (e.g., certain bacteria, algae, and fungi) that flourish in high salt concentrations, called "halophiles." So why not expect similar life-forms on Mars? And what about Martian life in the past? It's fun to speculate that eons ago the Red Planet might have harbored intelligent beings with an advanced civilization. As their world died, maybe they retreated to underground cities, where the remnants of their population still dwell, deliberately hiding from our probes. I don't think I've ever come across a novel on that premise.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt