I went to my own high school commencement because it was my first one. I went to my college commencement because I had family in from out of state. I blew off commencement when I earned my masters degree.

My wife was a little upset, but it didn’t change my mind. I told her that the next time I go to a commencement ceremony, it would be for her (pointing at my then 3-year-old daughter).

That day has arrived.

High school graduation is a huge day for both the child and the parent. For my eldest, it’s even bigger because her 18th birthday is on Memorial Day this year. It’s a 5-day span with huge implications and the beginning of a lot of change in all our lives.

No more fighting over whether to hang out with her friends or do her homework. That’s all on her now. No more ‘because I said so,’ because on Monday, she will legally be an adult. It becomes the ‘as long as you are living in my house and want to use my car’ arguments instead.

As the parent this time around, I see why some are controlling even after the kid turns 18. An 18-year-old is not emotionally mature. They make a lot of wrong choices, and hurt themselves in the process. They still know more than the parents, and that won’t change for a few years. But you have to let them make those mistakes so they can mature.

In the eyes of an 18-year-old, parents are still antagonists who prevent you from doing what you want to do. Age 25 is really when a child start becoming friends with their parents.

But graduation is still a milestone, one that is necessary. When you’re 18, the high school scene has been old for a long time, living at home has been old for a long time, so it really is a benchmark for change because now change happens.

My daughter will be at Arizona State University in the Barrett Honors College come August. She earned some very nice scholarships. If there is one message I want to get through to that 18-year-old head, it’s this: “Don’t screw the opportunity up.”

I don’t think she will, but at the same time, she will get a big dose of reality when she moves down to Tempe.

The post Thursday Thoughts – Graduation appeared first on Entropy Central.

Joe Haldeman reading the names of nominees for the 2012 Hugo Awards at LepreCon in Tempe, AZ.

For somebody unfamiliar with the work of Joe Haldeman, how would you describe your fiction and which story or novel do you think is the best introduction to your work?

My fiction is usually realistic in approach but fantastic in content. Best introduction to my sf would be The Forever War or Earthbound. (Ideally the entire Marsbound trilogy, with Marsbound and Starbound.)

The Forever War is probably your best known work, and the work that really established you in the field. While you were writing this book, did you know that you had something special, or did you still have some new writer angst and question yourself about plot, structure or story?

I don’t think I ever had “new writer angst.” I published the first story I wrote, and the first novel, and the first movie I wrote was produced.

Your time in Vietnam has clearly influenced much of your work and you’ve written quite a bit about it, so I’ll limit that aspect to the following: Do you think you would have been as successful a fiction writer had you not gone?

Probably not. My books would probably have been more cerebral – and so maybe might not have even been published.

Thinking about the way science fiction has evolved since Forever War was released, what do you see as positive and negative with the genre today?

I don’t read much science fiction, so I’m not really qualified. It seems healthy enough to me.

With all the changes that have occurred in the publishing industry over the past decade, how do you think a Joe Haldeman in his late twenties would approach a writing career in today’s environment?

I probably would have gone straight into writing novels, rather than working up through short magazine fiction – and perhaps wouldn’t have been as good a writer.

We have quite a few overlapping interests, so here are some “lightning round” short answer questions:

Favorite dish to cook?

Cassoulet

Telescope most likely to grab on short notice?

4″ f/7 refractor or Questar (for planets)

Favorite piece to play on guitar?

“Can’t Help But Wonder Where I’m Bound”

Best place to snorkel?

Great Barrier Reef

Best place for canoeing?

Itchatuckney Springs

Writer most fun ever for you to hang out with at a convention?

Gordon R. Dickson, R.I.P.

Travel destination you most want to visit for the first time?

China

What writers were the most influential in forming your style over the years?

Heinlein, Hemingway, Vance Bourjaily, Bester, Stevenson, Clarke, Crane, Poe, Dostoievsky

What projects do you have in the works or in the planning stages that get you excited?

The novel Phobos Means Fear

The post Wednesday Writer – Joe Haldeman appeared first on Entropy Central.

Many new writers have trouble coming up with a multi-threaded plot, and even if they do think of one, they have difficulty pulling it off. But then, if the same writer decides to go strictly linear, the potential to get stuck on a specific scene can kill a novel’s momentum. What’s a person to do?

I am very much a linear writer. My novel Rigel Kentaurus has a Y-shaped plot. Two separate story lines converge and merge into one.

I originally began writing sequentially from page 1 to page end, but it wasn’t working. Why not? I was jumping back and forth between story lines, and I couldn’t keep the two branches separate in my mind. One chapter flipped points of view mid-chapter and it remains that way now because fixing it would have required extensive revision and it also seemed to work.

Instead, I wrote one branch of the Y until the junction, then I went back to write the other branch. In past projects I’ve also left large sections of plot blank and jumped to where I did know what happened next. Often by finishing the story, you will be able to back fill because the missing events become obvious. Or you discover you don’t even need the scene.

Next time you get stuck, try jumping to a new point in the story and continue.

The post Tuesday Tips – Writing Linear or Non-Linear appeared first on Entropy Central.

Meanwhile, it’s time to start thinking about starting the next novel, Proxima Centauri, the second book in the Deep Space series and sequel to Rigel Kentaurus.

It’s not clear exactly when I will begin work on the novel. I have some plot details to work out first, and I also have some tasks on the copywriting side to finish.

I should be receiving a contributor copy of A Kepler’s Dozen from David Lee Summers pretty soon. I have a story in it called A Glint off the Glass.

The post Monday Status Report – 5/20/13 appeared first on Entropy Central.

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Gaylord Frost is a retired engineer who is restricted to a wheelchair. He perfected vacuum cracking, a technique of harvesting virtual particles as a power source. Kermit Sayman is the CEO of the world’s largest aerospace empire, the company Gaylord once worked for and still owns the vacuum cracking technology. These two men do not like each other.

Kermit has a plan to use vacuum cracking to power a relativistic spacecraft intended propel himself into the future. He seeks a time when medical advances can reverse aging, but he needs help from Gaylord to make the Amber mission happen.

Everything goes according to plan, except for one detail. The cost of vacuum cracking is an increase in entropy, and attaining a velocity near the speed of light requires an enormous amount of energy. Nobody expected stars would be gone from the universe so soon, and the crew of Amber wakes from cryo-sleep into a seemlingly empty universe of total darkness.
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The title, A Darkling Nine, refers to the nine major characters who embark upon the Amber mission. I am currently seeking first readers for this 98,000-word novel.

The post Introducing “A Darkling Nine” appeared first on Entropy Central.

Bettas are fairly popular as a fish that can be kept in a smaller than average container, but they are also famous for being solitary animals. That’s is especially true for the males. After all, they aren’t called Siamese Fighting Fish just because it’s a cool name.

I acquired a pair of crowntail bettas from a fish local breeder. I went after a pair because I had in mind to try breeding them myself. They have to be kept separated until they are ready to breed because the male will not tolerate the female in his territory if they aren’t about to breed, especially if that territory is fairly small.

The best conditions for keeping a betta is a small filtered and heated tank, but it is possible to keep them healthy in bowls. You’ll note that the betta in the photo is in a two gallon goldfish bowl. (Why keeping goldfish in a bowl is a bad idea would require a dedicated post.) You’ll get a lot of dissenting opinion from experienced fishkeepers on that point, but I discussed it at length here.

Bettas are bubble nest builders. The fish I acquired are still a little young to be breeding, so I am not even trying at this point. Also, if they do breed, I’ll end up with about a hundred cups scattered around the house to keep the fry separated from each other. Breeding bettas is not a task to be undertaken lightly.

The post Fish Friday – SAKE Fish, Bettas appeared first on Entropy Central.

Rarely do I discuss religion on this blog, and never do I evangelize. I don’t plan to change that today. Rather than look upon reverence from the perspective of the scouts, I’m going to take a different tack.

One thing that has bothered me for a long time is how people talk to, and about others, and this is particularly sore when it involves the beliefs of other people. If the religious right slams a certain group for their beliefs or behavior, this group is well within their right to be upset. The troublesome aspect comes when this group demands respect and the right to their own beliefs while at the same time denigrating and abusing the beliefs of the religious. That smells of hypocrisy.

People hold various beliefs for any number of reasons. Which beliefs are better? That depends upon who answers the question. I’d really like to see both sides of say, the gay marriage issue, debate the subject without hurling venom at the other side. This issue in particular seems to generate considerable hate.

I mean, one side of this debate claims to be enlightened while calling the other side Troglodytes. The other side claims to follow a man whose command is love thy neighbor while slamming their opponents to the status of second or third class persons. In reality, neither side typically handles the issue with grace.

I understand that many issues, including gay marriage, are deeply personal to a lot of people. A person’s faith is also deeply personal. One side often says the other is going to Hell for who they are. The other side often says only weak-minded people need a God. I don’t think either is true. A bit more tolerance in both directions would benefit everyone.

The post Thursday Thoughts – Reverence appeared first on Entropy Central.

© 2009 Roger Podva

For somebody unfamiliar with the work of Jay Lake, how would you describe your fiction and which story or novel do you think is the best introduction to your work?

My fiction is at its best eclectic. I’ve written short fiction in nearly every speculative fiction voice and style you can name, from riffing on Cordwainer Smith to Robert E. Howard, from space opera to high fantasy. In novels, eight of my ten published works are fantasy of one form or another (depending on how you view steampunk), while only two are unequivocably science fiction. So it sort of depends on what you want. MAINSPRING is the first novel in my steampunk trilogy. GREEN is the first novel in my assassin fantasy trilogy. DEATH OF A STARSHIP lays open my science fictional worldview. TRIAL OF FLOWERS is just freaking weird. And in short fiction… perhaps “The Sky That Wraps the World Round, Past the Blue and into the Black”, a short piece of medium future SF; or this year’s Nebula and Hugo nominee, “The Stars Do Not Lie”, a steampunk lost colony religious novels.

You have been an inspiration to a lot of people over the years, first with your persistence at writing and rejection for years and years before you broke in and became successful. Later, you became an inspiration in the way you handle adversity and major health issues. Would you describe what that’s like from your perspective?

Kind of weird, frankly. I’m just a guy, doing what he does. Which is of course true of all of us. These days I’m probably in some ways better known for my cancer blogging than for my fiction. I find this mildly frustrating. I never wanted to be the cancer guy. But it’s a story to tell, and it’s an important one. In any case, I can’t afford to think of myself as inspirational. That would mess me up. So I keep doing what I do.

Let’s get the inevitable cancer questions out of the way. You have put an extremely positive and courageous public face on your struggles, and have been very open, yet I’m sure you went through the seven stages like most people do. The anger, the questioning of why me. How have you been able to cope with such onerous developments and still maintain a positive outlook?

Way back in the early days of the Macintosh operating system, there was an error condition called “flipping pig mode”. That’s me. I’m more or less permanently in flipping pig mode. My entire life is like Kubler-Ross on fast spin these days. Whatever grace and courage I display is an accident of the life I’m living, not my portion of enlightenment on display. I’m not trying for false modesty here. It’s more the case that I’m fairly articulate and thoughtful even when I am in the grip of wall-eyed panic. As for my outlook, I’m actually profoundly pessimistic. With some fairly good reason to be so. I just don’t let that profound pessimism overwhelm my ability to live my life every day. I still enjoy my daughter, my love life, my friends and family, my writing. Heck, I even still enjoy my day job. Because what’s my alternative? Endless grief? No thank you.

Recently, a fundraising campaign took place for some treatment that is new enough to still be considered experimental. The goal and stretch goal were blown away, passed in the first 12 hours. Can you describe what you felt upon seeing all the crazy things your fellow writers did when the total passed their unlock level?

Oh, geeze, I was so overwhelmed by that outpouring of support. And deeply amazed. I really had no idea we’d go that far, all of you would go that far. I have felt so touched, so honored, so loved by so many people in and out of the field.

If you’ve written your last major work (and we all hope not), are you satisfied with your legacy in the genre?

Sadly, that may be true. I’m working on one more novel right now, but it remains to be seen whether I can really hit this one out or not. In any case, I am satisfied with my legacy. I’ve written some work I’m awfully proud of. I’ve won the Campbell, the Audie and Writers of the Future. I’ve been nominated for the Hugo, the Nebula and the World Fantasy Award. Along with Elizabeth Bear I originated the Campbell Tiara. I’ve taught or mentored hundreds of emerging writers, and been taught or mentored by scores of established writers. I am part of the conversation that is genre. I’ll never be a bestseller or a Grand Master, but I’m proud of my career.

Enough about that. Your home is Portland, an area with an exceptional population of SFF genre writers. Do you find being in this environment energizes your muse?

Muse schmuse. I write with discipline, damn it. However, that being said, everybody has to be somewhere. This is a remarkably pleasant part of the country and the world to live in, and writers are thick on the ground here. So, yes, it definitely energizes me. (Note I’ve been in all fifty states, and about forty countries on five continents. I have a lot of compare Portland to, and I do not find it wanting.)

You and I have both worked in the technology sector, you in marketing, me in engineering. It’s a very challenging industry that can be time-consuming and draining. How were you able to keep writing during the early years where success never seemed to come?

Discipline. What I only half-joking refer to as “psychotic persistence”. But mostly, I like writing. It’s fun for me. I am entertained by my own writing process, and I like seeing the stories emerge from my fingertips on the keyboard. Plus, working in high technology sales and marketing is not particularly soul-sucking, at least not for me, and uses different parts of my mind and my imagination that writing fiction does. This means I’ve always been able to jigsaw the day job and the writing career together in reasonably creative ways.

Your job has you traveling quite a bit. Do you get a lot of writing done on the move, or is it strictly marketing business on the airplane and in the hotel room?

I get some of my best writing done while traveling. No one calls or emails me on the plane. And evenings in the hotel room are a lot quieter than evenings at home. I love my life in Portland, but business travel is often like writing heaven for me.

We also share a love of photography, but it’s nothing like the photography of our youths. We don’t need enlargers, darkrooms, smelly developer and fixer, and no coating pennies with silver remnants in the darkroom. Do you think that some of the fun has been taken away by technology?

That depends on what you mean by fun, doesn’t it? For some people the dark room is the point of photography. I always found it kind of messy and mildly annoying at best. I like finding the shots, framing them, thinking about them. Everything else was just the necessary business of making it come out right. So digital photography has let me focus on the fun parts while taking away the bits that always felt like work. Perhaps more to the point, digital photography has enabled a generation (or two, by now) of children to learn to take good photos at an essentially zero recurring cost. Once you’ve paid for the camera, you’re pretty much done. So my daughter has become a fairly accomplished photographer simply because she’s had a camera to drag around since she was old enough to press the button.

Talk about your Aloha shirts. (I’ve been wearing them just as long, but I don’t get to many conventions, so nobody knows about mine.) Yours are famous for being screaming loud. What are your criteria for selecting a shirt and what is your favorite place to buy them?

I love trick fabrics, weird patterns, obnoxious colors. I like dissonance and glare and brightness. My two favorite sources are a web site called alohaland.com, and also a tailor I used to have custom make aloha shirts for me from fabrics I’d picked out myself. This is why I have a number of harlequin shirts, which is a style of aloha shirt I’ve never seen sold off the rack. Truthfully, I’m not certain why I’m so well-known for it. Lots of us wear them. It must be my distinctive style…

Your childhood family kept you moving around the globe as the son of a diplomat. What part of the world holds your fondest childhood memories, and are there any memories that still scare you today?

That’s a tough one. I didn’t enjoy the emotional experience of childhood much at all, but I really did like the life we led. I have good memories of both Taiwan and Nigeria, to be sure. I’m not sure I was ever deeply scared, though there were times when perhaps I should have been. The thing about being a kid is that the world is what it is. And without much media exposure (I grew up before satellite television and VCRs/DVDs had globalized entertainment so thoroughly), all I had to measure my life by was the life itself.

What writers were the most influential in forming your style over the years?

Gene Wolfe. Samuel R. Delany. Jeff VanderMeer. Robin Hobb. Lois McMaster Bujold. Half a hundred others besides, to be sure, as my reading tastes are as protean as my writing styles. But in the end, I am a total sucker for well styled prose.

What projects do you have in the works or in the planning stages that get you excited?

I am trying to finish the first draft of my alternate history Old West fantasy, ORIGINAL DESTINY, MANIFEST SIN, before I get too sick to write. After that, if I still have brainspace to write, I will do some short fiction. But that’s about it, unless I get a reprieve on the current trends in my cancer. I’m considered incurable, but I’m not yet formally terminal (as of late April, 2013). I expect that to change in the near future. It’s been a good life, and a good career, and I am nowhere near ready to go, but that’s not really up to me anymore.

The post Wednesday Writer – Jay Lake appeared first on Entropy Central.

I am very much a momentum writer. I wrote my short novel Fishpunk in 5 weeks. It doesn’t take me more than a day or two to get a head of steam, pounding out whatever my daily target happens to be, and doing it regularly. The problem comes when I reach the end of the story.

Once a novel is finished, something has to change. Either another novel starts, or revision has to begin. Which I do depends on what irons are in the fire at any given time. Inevitably, revision has to start eventually, and that is a momentum-killer for me.

Revision is hard because the benchmarks are less clear. There is less of a feeling of progress, and what progress is made tends to be inconsistent. Some sections require very little modification, and in those sections the pages fly by. Other areas require quite a bit of work, and it becomes a slog. Six pages might be a legitimate day’s accomplishment.

For me, it’s difficult to maintain momentum after the writing phase ends. I’ve found that creating a daily target page count helps to pull me through the revision process. It also helps to have some time elapse between writing and revising because it makes the material new again, almost as if somebody else wrote it. And for sure, spotting problems in somebody else’s work is much easier than finding it in your own.

In my experience, more often than not finishing revision is simply a matter of making up my mind that it has to be done and then doing it. Revision for me is less enjoyable than creation, but both jobs are necessary to produce good copy, be it fiction or non-fiction.

The post Tuesday Tips – Revision is a Momentum-Killer appeared first on Entropy Central.

Now that classes have ended for a few weeks, I intend to hammer this first pass edit out by the end of the month.

The post Monday Status Report – 5/13/13 appeared first on Entropy Central.