Archive for June, 2019|Monthly archive page
World-building for fun and profit
This is a reprint of an article I wrote last month for my local romance writers’ newsletter, so it’s mostly for writers.
Worldbuilding is the gentle art of making stuff up to create a believable reality that isn’t necessarily the one we live in. You might think, “Oh, I write contemporary small-town romance, I don’t need worldbuilding.” Unless you want to annoy real people in a real small town, you need world building.
It begins with reality and then turns left once in a while where reality turns right. How far left is up to you. In the early aughts, I wrote a (very bad) ghost-story novel. Most of it was set in a Queen-Anne style house in Seattle (allegedly), but part of it was set in the small town of Ahsahta, Idaho.
Now there is no Ahsahta, Idaho—there’s an Ahsahka, but that’s not my town. My town was a combination of Horseshoe Bend, Cascade, and a little bit of McCall. A mountain town, not too far from the capital city, with a good airport and some empty commercial buildings. A little down on its luck but scrappy. The name is from Ahsahta Press at Boise State University (yes, with the blue Astroturf and also a remarkably good English department), which at one time claimed it was a Native American name for mountain sheep.
It’s only in one or two scenes, but I knew exactly what downtown looked like and could have drawn you a map, compete with a few house and storefront elevations, because I realized this small town was a setting I could use again, and it would become a nice little theme connecting stories in a series. Of course, I haven’t written another book in Ahsahta (yet), but I know it’s there.
Place is only one aspect of world building, though. Culture (religion, race relations, economics, etc.) is another big one. In Blade’s Edge, I made a point of the technological society being metric, polytheistic and patriarchal while the non-technological society used Imperial units, worshiped a single (female) deity, and inherited from mother to daughter.
In another series I’m working on, I had to think about capitalism after humans leave Earth. Heavy, deep stuff. What I came up with—the “cartel” system—was a combination of multinational corporations and constitutional monarchies of a sort. Different than what we have now, but…based on what we have now.
Consider HP, one of my inspirations—I’ve never been an HP employee, but I’ve worked there on six different occasions in the past thirty years. And it has two name lines: Hewlett and Packard.
And yet another aspect you need to look at is language. Since I write science fiction romance, one of the things I was poked about early on was swearing, which I found puzzling. They weren’t upset because there was swearing, but they didn’t like the actual words used.
Now, I’ve always figured language evolves, so whatever you’re reading from a thousand or 1,500 years in the future is translated into current dialect, even if it’s set in the same “language.” But once I went through the process of deciding what would be bad, really bad, and the equivalent of the f-bomb to people who routinely traveled in space (rip, rust, and dust), I stopped getting the dings.
So world building can be as small as a word or two, or as big as a new socio-economic system. Now go make up things to bring your worlds to life.
The Strike Force Anthology
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: New Book, publishing, writing
Leave a comment I have three intertwined novellas about the Strike Force, the off-Earth military branch that keeps order in the wilds of the Sol system. Seven years ago, There was a big fight between the owners and the employees of Ganymede Mining Consortium. The Strike Force was called in to keep peace, and the big confrontation on Ganymede ended in disaster — the artillery system malfunctioned and shelled the base: the hospital, the quartermaster corps, and all the immersed strikers in the electronic warfare company.
The cyber specialists were the only survivors, and only some of them — our three heroes went through years of regeneration and repair, and they’re not entirely human anymore. What do you do when you come back from the dead? Well, eventually, if the right woman shows up, you fall in love while trying to do something else.
Preorder or Buy it here: Strike Force Cyber Warriors
Here’s the description:
They were strikers who fought from the Sol system network – hackers, gremlins, psychops, ghosts in the code.
Then they were called in as peacekeepers when the Ganymede Mining employees revolted against the company, but a friendly fire hardware malfunction shelled their bodies. Luckily, they weren’t at home at the time, and their bodies could be repaired.
Years later, they’re sleepwalking through life either in the service or retired from it, and a few good women…wake them up, while helping them solve the mystery of the root cause of their (temporary) deaths.
Open Mike at Club Bebop
Travertine Garcia is dead broke and Luna City’s air tax is due in the morning. She turns to her last hope, the open mike at Club Bebop. After a perfect performance in deep netdive, she flatlines and owner Joe “Glitch” Bannister has to get her to life support while she reintegrates. She’s everything he didn’t know he needed, a deep-dive performer with an ancient-tech interface who can’t carry a tune outside the net.
When the Blue Dragon gang kidnaps her while he’s off chasing down a rumor about the Ganymede conflict that got him temporarily killed, Joe’s ready to fight for the woman and the club; but it’s going to take both of them to save the venerable stage and each other.
Getting Lucky
Lucinda “Lucky” Burbank, multibillionaire Luther Burbank’s only heir, is broke and stuck on the moon, working two menial jobs to pay air tax and occasionally eat and look for evidence her stepmother arranged her late father’s accident.
Alexei “Sasha” Davidoff is babysitting Club Bebop and investigating the vid clip that might show the Ganymede Incident’s first stage. Someone else is in the archive, but he/she/it runs; he finally corners it in the Bebop office and it’s Lucky Burbank, who he sort of had a brotherly crush on while his body was rebuilding.
It’s going to take both of them together—with some help from Ganymede’s ghosts—to solve the mystery of what caused the friendly fire disaster seven years ago.
Kindness of Strangers
The last thing Chandra Ramasamy remembers is the burn of a bullet hitting her chest after hitting the escape pod eject button. Now she’s in a net-avatar conference room with a military officer telling her she’s been in bad cryosleep for seven and a half years.
Can she piece together what happened after her memory stopped and help him figure out what killed him and his soldiers? Well, the MarsCorp thugs didn’t quite manage to kill her seven years ago, and now she has the Strike Force on her side. He’s a little stiff, but deep down he’s a gooey-hearted mother hen. She can work with that, particularly if she can help take down MarsCorp as payback.
