Open Hatch

Archive for the ‘Science Fiction & Fantasy’ Category

As I have finished my first science fiction short story (in screenplay format, and adapting it to narrative–and I will probably expand it into a feature-length narrative), I’ll be attending the following sessions at this symposium. Maybe. Multiple lists are up in the air–one or the other.

LTUE 2012 Schedule

Thursday, February 9, 2012

9:00 AM:
-Marketing and Publicity–what can you do?
(Jenn R. Johansson, Bree DeSpain (M), Elana Johnson, Lynn Hardy, Chris Schoebinger)

10:00 AM:
-What Exactly Does an Editor Do, Anyway?

(too late for those as I post this!)

11:00 AM:
-Queries and Pitches
(Lisa Mangum, Kirk Shaw, Donna Milakovic (M), J. Scott Savage, Chris Schoebinger)

Noon:
-Ebooks–A good way to get published?

-Collaborating with a family member-
1:00 PM
-Writing for LDS markets
(Tristi Pinkston, Lisa Mangum, Berin Stephens, Laura Bingham (M), Chris Schoebinger)

-Making a Book Trailer
(Paul Genesse, Heather Monson (M), Dan Wells, Angela Corbett, Lani Woodland)

Friday, February 10, 2011

9:00 AM:
-Military on Military SF
(Roger White, Steve Harmon (M), Brad R. Torgersen, Zachary Hill, Jeffrey Meeks)

10:00 AM:
-Monsters and Mormons

11:00 AM:
Main Address: James A. Owen

Noon:
-How to write a good short story
(Eric James Stone, Suzanne Vincent, Kathleen Dalton-Woodbury, Heather Frost, Dan Willis (M))

1:00 PM
=Military Characters and how a military unit works in the real world
(Jeffrey Meeks)

2:00 PM
-Art Tools of the Trade

3:00 PM
Military Strategy, technology, and operations in a complex world environment

(Jeffrey Meeks)
4:00 PM

-Local Publishers
5:00 PM

-Effective Book Signings: How to get people to come to your book signings.
6:00 PM

-You’ve Written Your Book–Now What?
(Laura Bingham, Kirk Shaw, J. Scott Savage (M), Jennifer A. Nielsen, Chris Schoebinger)

-Writing Query Letters
(Elana Johnson)

-Book Bombs: How to make an Amazon.com bestseller
(Randy Tayler (M), Robison Wells, Larry Correia, Stacy L. Whitman, Michaelbrent Collings)

Saturday, February 11, 2012

9:00 AM:
-Accomplishing Your Goals as a Writer (Brandon Mull, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Fablehaven and Beyonders)

-Dave Wolverton Reading

10:00 AM:
-Free Books Are Worth Every Penny: A discussion on the revolution in nemedia publishing and its impact on the craft of professional writing. New models of publishing explored. Why the point is no longer about being published … but about being READ.

11:00 AM:

-Writers on Writing:
Four bestselling authors talk about their theories of writing which do not apply to you and the fact that you should simply stop thinking and start writing. [my snarky re-caption. I may ditch this session.]
(Dave Wolverton (M), Brandon Sanderson, Tracy Hickman, L. E. Modesitt, Jr.)

Noon:
- The Book of Jer3miah and the Power of Transmedia Storytelling [I may ditch this session. Excel has shown bad marketing/release sense.]

“Preparing Creative Kids to Create”
1:00 PM

-Writing Cross-Culturally: Mistakes to Avoid, or, How to Avoid Cultural Misappropriation.
(Stacy Whitman)

2:00 PM
-Plots, Subplots, and Foreshadowing
(Bree DeSpain (M), J. Scott Savage, Brandon Sanderson, James A. Owen, Stacy Whitman)

“The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Books for Youth”
(Patricia Castelli, Marilee Clark)

-Book Covers–what separates a beginner from a pro?

3:00 PM
- The Published (and aspiring) Author’s Toolbox: Learning skills for networking, blogging, social media, and self-promotion. This workshop will teach principles and give you a chance to practice skills to integrate networking, blogging, social media, and self-promotion into your professional life without being the person who annoys and without pulling you out of balance with yourself.
(Sandra Tayler, Mary Robinette Kowal)

-Space travel without warp drive
(Laura Swift Lind, Roger White, Brad R. Torgersen (M), Dan Lind, Bill Housley)

4:00 PM
- The Published (and aspiring) Author’s Toolbox: Learning skills for networking, blogging, social media, and self-promotion. This workshop will teach principles and give you a chance to practice skills to integrate networking, blogging, social media, and self-promotion into your professional life without being the person who annoys and without pulling you out of balance with yourself. (Continued)
(Sandra Tayler, Mary Robinette Kowal)

Breaking into Hollywood
(Dave Wolverton)

The following video explores my 3D visualization of the first scenes from the classic text adventure, ZORK.

Here are a few screen captures from a CCS64 emulator run of the game, showing what I derived this art from, as well as why I still consider this game a classic (the game’s response to a command to hit a table with a knife, for example).

The house was modeled by myself this weekend, with furnishings and weapons from the Google 3D Warehouse. As the version number implies, this is unfinished. This animation was exported from Sketchup (using the lagarith lossless codec, then converted to .avi encoded with Xvid, using VirtualDub).

I’ve been playing through an old favorite of mine, the game EARTHBOUND, with my very young son, reading everything to him (and he likes the game very much). As I’ve been playing I’ve grabbed screen shots of what reminds me why I love the game. This is a gallery of those screen grabs.

[svgallery name="EARTHBOUND-screens-I"]

What I love about the game:

• It is the story of four children who conquer Giygas, the Cosmic Destroyer.
• Japanese wackiness. As you can see from the gallery, it is full of good-natured, daffy characters.
• It is incredibly musically versatile, prolific, expressive, and in my opinion, beautiful. Here is the track for your home.

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• The ultimate, world-saving weapon in the game is prayer. This is combined with the work of knocking back into their senses anyone or anything that has gone wild or insane (such as a Rowdy Mouse or Insane Cultist). Or, if they are a mortal enemy (such as a lil’ UFO, Spinning Robo, or Starman), destroying them.

Last night we (my wife and I) watched Season 4 Episode 9, entitled THE HUB, on DVD. This episode in particular was tremendous – but the whole series is.

There has not been one single episode in four seasons that has disappointed me.

My wife came “on board” late – she was updated of goings-on by watching the (funny) “What the frak is going on?” trailer – which you can watch at that link.* She thought the whole show would be trite, based on this trailer – no, the trailer is designed to be funny, but the show has real moral complexity and depth. If you lack time, I’d just watch that trailer and jump in to season 4 – but the show is very much worth watching from season 1.

My only criticism is minor – which is that they overuse the show-invented curse “frak” (hey, guess what that means??!)- where, agreements that loosely comparable military culture may be rich with curses aside -I think invented curses and lingo rarely (if ever) work well in fiction.

Hmm.. two technical complaints. Many of the actors are with The Mumbles – you need closed captions to understand them sometimes. And a dying Cylon prayed, and cried out “Heavenly Father..” (!!) and the closed captions did not transcribe it!

*I regret to advise FireFox users that I have never gotten the video player at that link to work in FireFox – only in Internet Explorer.

This screen grab is straight from the source. Well. Loaded in an emulator.

What? You don’t know what this is? Put down the x-box controller and look it up!

Every room and scene in this text adventure painted clear, vivid images in my head.

I will paint them. Starting with this.

After I do other things..

At BYU’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Symposium this January (which I was very delighted to attend), Orson Scott Card gave two addresses. The first was a main address seeking to answer this question:

“Why are Mormons over represented among emerging Science Fiction and Fantasy writers?”

That phenomenon has relatively recently emerged in the history of Science Fiction and Fantasy writing – this has been going on long before Stephanie Meyer’s now great fame (and her work certainly counts as fantasy and science fiction). As an example, the Writers of the Future Contest is a blind contest (I’ve personally dreamed of entering since a teenager – and gee golly, I’m a Mormon! – but I’m still sitting on the seeds of ideas which are germinating) – none of the judges know the identities of entrants, and every year a disproportionate number of winners of the contest happen to be Mormons.

Card’s second address was entitled “Science Fiction as a Valid Literary Genre”. To introduce it he said that every year, articles come out in either Atlantic, or Harper’s, or New Yorker about, as he puts it, “.. why Science Fiction sucks.” In this speech Card completely shredded (in my opinion) the snotty, self-absorbed triteness (my words) of literary fiction and most of all literary fiction writers which the aforementioned magazines (and also elitist literature programs at universities) apparently encourage. I have audio recordings of both speeches, which are both very enlightening, entertaining and to me even moving – but unfortunately my recording of the latter is cut off too soon. However I have a full, cleaned up recording of the former speech, which I here present. Strictly I may not have any authorization to do this, so I’m not giving a download link for this recording, and I want to seriously advertise the symposium and the proceedings; if you like this, you’ll probably like Card’s other address and anything and everything else at the symposium, so please: watch BYU’s web site for news on next year’s symposium, and releases of the proceedings from previous years. Email them via the “contact” link at that page and ask them what’s up and when the proceedings will be published.

Meanwhile, here’s my audio recording of Card’s main address. This is just over 47 minutes.

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When I went to see REVENGE OF THE SITH, there was a trailer before it that made me repeatedly gasp, tremble, and say “Oh MAN! oh MAN!” A person next to me kept turning and looking at me like I’m from another world. Well.. I spent some time in my youth in this world. Going back to it is very, very exciting, and it looks like they are actually doing a job worthy of the material.

I am SO excited about this.

This behind-the-scenes bit is also very interesting.

Also.. I prefer to expect every film to be awesome, because when I find a film that is awesome and I was expecting it to be, it’s ten times more awesome. For the rest of them, meanwhile, I’m more conscious of what dissapointed me, since I allowed my hopes to exist prior to dissapointment.