Getting Your Geek Style on with Badali Jewelry! The Story Behind the Makers

If you’ve frequented the dealer’s halls of conventions such as San Diego ComicCon, Gen Con, Dragon Con, and more, you might be familiar with Badali Jewelry. If not, well, I’m here to show you what you’ve been missing!

Badali is a geeky jewelry company owned and run by a family of…you guessed it, nerds like you and me. If you peruse their website, you’ll discover they are a licensed creator of Lord of the Rings jewelry. They also make pieces inspired by the books of some of our favorite authors, like Gail Carriger, Jim Butcher, Cherie Priest, Peter V. Brett, Patrick Rothfuss, Kevin Hearn, and more! These are not rip-off copycat pieces like some other companies (illegally) make. All Badali’s are licensed and official.

One of Badali Jewelry’s most popular pieces is the One Ring of Power from JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Here’s a look at how these rings are made:

It’s really fascinating to watch the care with which each of these pieces is made. If you follow Badali Jewelry on social media, you can also see little behind the scenes peeks at their processes as well. These are not mass produced pieces—each is made by hand and because Badali is a small business, everyone who works there seems to have something invested in every piece. It’s a joy to listen to them talk about the stories behind the different pieces of jewelry, and their unique appreciation of each. Everyone there seems to love books and nerdy pop culture, and they have made themselves a great part of the community.

Nenya, the ring of Galadriel

One of my favorite things about Badali Jewelry is their wide range of prices. There is something there for every budget, and even individual pieces have various options to help make them affordable. For example, Nenya, Galadriel’s ring from Lord of the Rings, is available in different metals, with different stones, etc. so you can pay anywhere from $79 to $2900, depending on what options you choose. Not only that, but if there is ever anything wrong with a piece you purchase, their customer service is incomparable, and they are caring and personal with their communications.

The Badalis know their geek culture, and include the background of many of the pieces on their website. They explain why they designed pieces the way they did, and where the pieces are mentioned in a book, if they are replicas. You can tell they really care about their work.

Here is Paul J. Badali, the President and Master Jeweler, talking about his journey to creating these wonderful pieces, including the One Ring of Power:

I read "The Hobbit" for the first time in 1967 as a junior in High School. It was the first book I had ever read in its entirety on my own. I was a very poor reader and it took lots of time, effort, and commitment on my part to read the entire book.  Tolkien's style and the content of The Hobbit captivated my interest and I was compelled to persevere. I now read well and could fill a large trunk with the science fiction and fantasy novels I have since read. The reading of The Hobbit that first time was a turning point in my life. I have been shaped and molded by that first experience with JRR Tolkien in very real ways.

I went on to read The Lord of the Rings™ while attending college from 1969 - 1971.  Later I read The Silmarillion™.  40 years later, here I am a jeweler crafting The Ruling Ring and other officially licensed jewelry from fantasy novels.  In searching for a name for our first daughter in 1975, I suggested Lothlorian.  My wife liked the sound and idea, but shortened it to Loria (loth LORIA n). So even my first-born child’s name was inspired by J.R.R Tolkien, and is proud of it by the way.

Growing up I was a nature boy.  In 1956, at age 5, I found my first crystal at a landfill near our house.  I had never held a crystal before.  I still remember the joy of holding it, the magic of discovery and the thrill of possession. The finding of that first crystal gave me a love of crystals and minerals as well as the thrill of finding treasures in the earth. I have been an avid rock hound ever since. I know exactly what Bilbo felt when first he picked up the Arkenstone.  I love finding things in the earth.

In 1970, I noticed an acquaintance doing some Lapidary work, cutting and polishing gems.  An hour later I had just completed cutting and polishing my first gemstone, a tigereye.  In 1974, I learned to silversmith so that I could create my own settings for the stones I was cutting. I continued my study of jewelry design from 1975 through 1977.  I opened my first jewelry store in 1975. I graduated in 1978 with a BS in Zoology and Botany and taught junior high science and high school biology for 7 before coming back to the jewelry business.

As a jeweler, being highly influenced by the writings of J.R.R Tolkien, it was inevitable that I would one-day craft The One Ring™ of Power. I had always wanted a replica of the ring.  I probably made my earliest attempts in 1975 or so; crude attempts to be sure. I set about to make it in a serious way in 1997, with several unsatisfying results.  I finally produced a flattened style I deemed good enough in 1998. In 1999, the ring was further refined to the rounded comfort fit style that we currently offer.  I contacted Tolkien Enterprises, now Middle-Earth Enterprises, and negotiated licensing rights so that I could make and sell The One Ring.  That license led to our other licenses with fantasy authors over the years.

Some have asked why would anyone want an object of abject evil like Sauron's Ruling Ring; created to enslave all of Middle Earth under his dark tyrannical rule.  While that was the purpose for which The Ruling Ring was created, that is not what resulted, nor the only thing The One Ring represents.  I feel the ring is a symbol much like that of the cross to Christians.  The crucifix is in all reality a symbol of the greatest evil done in this world, but instead it has become a symbol of the greatest sacrifice ever made to rid the world of a great evil.  I feel that the One Ring is a symbol of Frodo's willing sacrifice of his life to rid the world of a great evil.  It is also a symbol of the bonds formed within the Fellowship's journey and their struggles to overcome evil.

Does not the struggle to overcome evil bring out the best and the worst in us all?  I believe that as the central object of The Lord of The Rings series, The One Ring also represents all that is good and true in Middle Earth.  To me it represents Bilbo's plain straightforward manner and pluck, Frodo's tolerance, patience, and bravery, Gandalf's wisdom and commitment, Galadriel's beauty of soul and kindness of heart, Aragorn's patience and strength, Sam's constancy, loyalty, and humility, and the good in many others who had part in the quest to unmake the evil.   It represents the sacrifice each was willing to make for the greater-good, the finest of human motivations and emotions.  It is a moral and ethical if not an almost religious symbol.  It reminds us that right will always triumph where good people refuse to tolerate evil, and that one individual can make a difference.  It is a talisman of hope and faith.

My jewelry is very much a reflection of who and what I am. Tolkien's writings have had a profound influence on my thoughts, my feelings, my likes, and my desires.  I have been molded by life to be the man who would one day craft The One Ring of Power. 

If you haven’t seen Badali Jewelry’s work yet, it’s the perfect time! They are currently having one of their biggest sales of the year through February 28th. Why not check them out?

Melanie R. Meadors writes about goblins, science, magic, superheroes, and other nerdy things in her short stories, novels, comics, and games. She has edited multiple anthologies, including Knaves, Hath No Fury, and the upcoming Tales of Excellent Cats: A Monarchies of Mau Anthology. She is the co-director of the Gen Con Writer’s Symposium, which takes places every August in Indianapolis, IN, and she is the lead editor and senior publicist at Mechanical Muse, the game company that produces The World of Aetaltis. She is a blogger and general b*tch monkey at The Once and Future Podcast. You can learn more at melaniermeadors.com 

When Everyone Tells You You’re a Witch, You Eventually Try on the Hat--Guest Post By Shelley Sackier

Please welcome author Shelley Sackier to the Once and Future Blog! Her new young adult fantasy book, The Antidote, is out today from HarperCollins. Full of magic and mysticism, it’s a tale both teens and adults alike will enjoy, so why not grab a copy?

When Everyone Tells You You’re a Witch, You Eventually Try on the Hat

By Shelley Sacker

I don’t feel well, I’d whispered just loudly enough for my own ears to register.

I reached out for the wall beside me, steadying quivering knees, and felt my hand slide southward until it came to touch the floor. I wrapped both arms around my bent legs. In this custodial cocoon, I closed my eyes and searched for a thread of clarity as a new anchor of support.

Another sound my ears captured—their scattershot proficiency even further impeded by the thump of my resonant heartbeat—was a half growl, half moan, also coming from me.

I spoke again in a whisper, directing my words to both recently and long-passed female relatives, If you all think this is funny, I will find a way to make you pay for your merciless amusement. Leave. Me. Alone.

I looked up and scanned the room. It was rich with excavated artifacts—urns, beakers, swords, and tools, skins, sketches, baubles, and bowls. Relics unearthed from the very ground I stood upon—or hunched over, as it were.

The Kilmartin Museum was perched atop a small ridge that ran along the edge of Kilmartin Glen—a stretch of prehistoric sites through the valley of a tiny village in western Scotland. It was here I was suddenly sinking with the feeling of lassitude—which I’m certain brought a smirk of self-congratulations to many of my female ancestors, as the words they shared with me when alive were of the variety that would bring great alarm to most, but were banal and eye roll-worthy to me during my youth:

You’re an old soul—you simply can’t recall your past lives. The tarot cards show this.

Open your ears to the goddesses, don’t put up such walls to their speech. 

You are but a vessel—and willing or no, your spirit is an empath and draws the needful toward you.

I’d believed none of it. But partly wished it were true. They believed all of it. And impatiently waited my surrender to their truth.

I’d come for research—to resurrect not only the tangible details I’d need for my story, but the perceptible ones as well. One provided a sense of touch, the other, palpable only by the mind. Many storytellers find that if one can stand in the spot where the tale unfolds, and utilize all one’s senses, countless doors of creativity swing open with ease.

The problem I was encountering was not so much the onset of malaise but discovering that the long-distance travel had not shaken the long buried voices of my own dead relatives—those who regularly muttered around me—and they now intermingled with the voices of those I wished to hear more clearly and singularly. 

The book I was writing steeped within a warm soup of Celtic mythology and village mystics. The book I’d just finished was fraught with warring witches and fear-filled kingdoms. Death snaked its way through both narratives, just as my familial undead featherstitched their presence uninvitingly through more of my calendric cycle than I wish were true.

Their calls—which were clearly an unmistakable theme in both books—repeatedly stressed, You are one of us. Do not be deaf to the obvious and inevitable. 

And although I may have purposefully shut out the opinions my more eclectic family members layered on, I have never been deaf to great books, as they speak to me with more than mere words. They leave countless overarching impressions. When you are the reader of any story, the author prays they have cannily articulated some message to you, and you leave feeling moved by the experience. When you are the author, you hunt for that affecting message. It is oftentimes a slow sweeping away of debris that reveals the structure: the bones, the skull, the spine. 

And standing in a multi-roomed hut, jammed with primitive curios, or upon a battlefield, the acrid smoke charred deep into the soil, or beside a cairn, the stones heavy with the grief of thousands of tears, I can barely pick out the tone of my own long ago voiced youthful complaints as I stymie the growing sound of history’s vocal barrage.

I’m not like all of you. I’m my own person, I’d said to some auntie, eyeing me with pity through the wisps of the exotic smoke from her cigarette.

She’d shaken her head. You see it wrongly. You are not tethered to this hallowed ground with an anchor, but rather a tube. One that can act as a channel.

She is right. There is a hurricane of chronicles waiting to be heard. And countless times in my life I have been in the right place and present at the right time where the valves have twisted open. At these moments, I am usually caught unawares and overwhelmed. 

Fighting off a chorus of narrators, rich with the urgency of untold tales is akin to skittering down an icy, rock-laden hill. You will not come out unscathed. 

As writers in any genre will affirm, there are myriad ways to quilt the patchwork of a story together: spending months or years in a library while pouring over reference books, chronicling dream journals and cherry-picking threads of a narrative from within it, ferreting through new innovation and discovery via disrupters and thought leaders we interview. The list is endless. 

But there are those that believe the stories are omnipresent, ubiquitous as the air we draw for each breath. And within our breath is the breath of others. Our task is to tap into the substance of it, the elements within it. We simply unveil that which keeps it muffled from others’ ears.

I had no inkling I would be a teller of tales one day, that I would find a snug fit of comfort stretching beyond the bounds of everyday humans and attempt to build worlds elsewhere. And for an unfathomable amount of time I stubbornly resisted seeing one of those inhuman worlds as it was repeatedly illuminated by others who believed they held access to it and wished to hand me a key. 

Those experiences—the ones where I’ve been flooded with the emotions, or voices, or thrumming vibrations that did not belong to me specifically—have more often than not, not been welcome. I don’t know why they appear. Maybe those women are right. Maybe I am an empath. And welcomed or no, some unseen fingers may continue to twist open that wheeled handle despite my trying to plug the spigot. But lately … lately I have wondered why I would willfully eliminate a source of inspiration or guidance. Why would I dismiss a muse as it sits staring into my face, or whispering into my ear? 

So for writing’s sake, for the enrichment of story, I will try on the hat—to see if it fits. Fits like a child’s head, warmly embraced within the arms and bosoms of women long passed, but refusing to be forgotten. 

Shelley Sackier is the author of The Antidote, a YA fantasy that Kirkus called an “exciting magical mystery that will have you rooting for your favorites and questioning whom you can trust in this vast cast of characters.” Visit her website at www.shelleysackier.com.

About The Antidote:

From the author of The Freemason’s Daughter comes a lush romantic fantasy perfect for fans of Everless!

In the world of healers, there is no room for magic.

Fee knows this, just as certainly as she knows that her magic must be kept secret.

But the crown prince Xavi, Fee’s best friend and only source of comfort, is sick. So sick, that Fee can barely contain the magic lying dormant inside her. She could use it, just a little, to heal him. But magic comes at a deadly cost—and attracts those who would seek to snuff it out forever.

A wisp of a spell later, Fee finds herself caught in a whirl of secret motivations and dark pasts, where no one is who—or what—they appear to be. And saving her best friend means delving deeper into the tempting and treacherous world whose call she’s long resisted—uncovering a secret that will change everything.

Laini Taylor meets Sara Holland in this lavish fantasy from lauded historical romance author Shelley Sackier!

Writing Small: The Devil Is in the Details, by Clay Sanger

Clay Sanger has been writing fantasy on the darker side for some time now. I’ve had the pleasure of publishing a couple of his short stories in my anthologies, including the upcoming Knaves. His long-awaited debut novel, Endsville, is now available from Crossroad Press. It's a dark fantasy novel featuring occult gangsters operating out of Los Angeles who, in order to recover a huge amount of money stolen by a hostile sorcerer, go through an adventure rife with betrayal, violence, and black magic. Be sure to check it out!

Clay joins us today to talk about how the devil is in the details of a story, and how to hone in on those small details to make the book have a big impact. —Melanie

Cut the stuff readers tend to skim. Keep everything else. Sounds simple, right? But deciding what the key details are in any story versus all the other the stuff that tumbled out of your brain and onto the keyboard isn't a simple magic trick. In fact, it's downright painful, and more than a little slippery.

Which details truly matter? The answers to questions like that always sound so simple at face value. It's the details that make the reader engage with the story. The ones that make the reader feel and connect.

So which ones are those? Well, there are the explosive, awesome moments in any story that stick with us. But no matter how big the story, there are only so many of those. So what keeps the reader reading? Invariably, it's the small things. And writing small is the real magic trick.  

You can hit me with 3 pages of narrative describing, in wide-angle shots, the apocalypse visited upon your fictional city, and I might hang with you for a paragraph or two. But my eyes will soon glaze over, and I'll have to fight the urge to skim. But give me a one-liner about a little girl's half-burnt red shoe laying on the side of the road as your lost city blazes in a storm cloud of ash and brimstone in the background, and I'll likely remember that little red shoe forever. That half-burnt, discarded shoe will tell me more about what's happening in your world in one or two sentences than paragraphs of wide-angle shots of crumbling buildings and falling skies ever will.

It's the small that gives readers the emotional connection to the story. It's the bite-sized details that are properly scaled for us to wrap our brains around that stick with us and make us feel. For most of us, we don't feel the big. We feel the small. The burnt red shoe. The hastily spray-painted words Here There Be Dragons scrawled across the side of an abandoned car. The dog-eared paperback book the lost old man is clutching in his hand as if it were his last possession while the world burns behind him. 

Not to say a grand sweep of the narrative camera can't raise the hair on the reader's arms if used sparingly and timed well – because, oh boy, it sure can – but paragraph to paragraph, page to page, what resonates with most readers, what gives them the feel of the moment, is the small.

Step one of the magic trick is write the small. Step two is knowing when to repeat it and when to quit. 

Ten small details heaped on top of one another are not ten times better than one small diamond. In fact, it's probably the inverse. It's likely to be about one-tenth as effective. You might certainly write those ten little smalls into the draft. But when you're going back through and making your editing passes, you need to decide which one or two to keep. Then kill the others along with the rest of the darlings. Writing small is incredibly powerful, but it's quickly diluted by misuse.  There are endless details you can write into your story. But which ones stick? Which ones really ring and chime? Do those. Skip the rest.  

Fantasy and science fiction are especially rife with avalanches of smalls. For me as a reader, that's usually not for the better. If obsessing over every button on every vest and every platter at every feast is what draws you in, so be it. But my entire face goes numb and I start skimming until one of those buttons or one of those platters becomes meaningful in some way. There's a real disconnect between quantity of detail and quality of detail. Quality detail is meaningful. Engaging. For me, anything less probably belongs on the cutting room floor.

One of the most useful questions I ask my beta readers is "Please tell me whenever you start to feel the urge to skim." Why? Because they're a better judge of that than the keyboard monkey who wrote it (me). I pay special attention to any points in the story that made my readers feel impatient about moving ahead. Then, with any luck, I go fix them.

So why do readers start to skim? Let's discard the more common causes like clunky, poorly written narrative. That's its own problem, and it's not really relevant to the matter at hand. Artfully written prose can induce the urge to skim just like trash on the page can.

Readers feel that urge to skim because they've become disconnected from the story. Essentially, they're bored. Their mind is starting to wander because it's been too long since the author gave them some kind of hook.  Generally speaking, those hooks are tied to emotion – some strategically placed detail that caused the reader to feel something meaningful. Something that caused a spark in their brain or struck an emotional chord of some kind. When done successfully, those hooks tend to be small and well-paced. Frequent without being piled on top of each other.

You can lay down an awful lot of words without resetting the hook if you're not careful. A knack for writing small helps you avoid that. What is the little thing that made the reader feel? Focus on that and turn a scrutinizing eye to the rest. Can't find one in the last few paragraphs? If it's not there, then it's as critically absent as the wheels missing from a car.  

Holding a reader's interest is an exercise in writing small, doing it well, and doing it repeatedly. Their engagement in your story is a like passing a helium balloon down a line of people from hand to hand. It will float away if someone in the chain loses their grip. 

Your story only has a handful of big things to drop on the reader, no matter its length or complexity. Crowning moments of awesome can't carry a story all by themselves. The big things might have been great. But if the author neglected to write small along the way, they probably failed to keep the reader engaged. 

It's the meaningful smalls that lead your reader from big thing to big thing in your story. Like stepping stones across a river, they allow the reader to happily navigate between your highlights. Skip them, and the reader's attention is going to fall into the drink and get swept away. And once you lose it, it takes more than a magic trick to get it back – it takes a miracle. 

Clay Sanger is a professional technogeek by day and a writer of fiction and whatever else strikes his fancy the rest of the time. A life-long lover of all things wild, Clay spent much of his early adulthood wandering the four corners of the country in search of the weird and wonderful, the dark and the light. As chance would have it, he found them. The rest is a tale yet to be told. After meandering far and wide he returned to his native Ozarks where he lives with his dazzling wife, their sons, and a menagerie of mythical creatures both real and imagined. You can learn more at www.claysanger.com

A Little Mythology Goes a Long Way, by Dan Rabarts

Please welcome author Dan Rabarts to the blog today! He is going to tell us a little about using mythology in our fiction, and why mythology continues to resonate with us even in this age of science. Be sure to check out the new book Teeth of the Wolf, which he co-authored with Lee Murray! It the second book in the Path of Ra series, which started with Hounds of the Underworld.

Down here in New Zealand, we live on an unlikely strip of land between an ocean and a sea, on a planet which exists in a tiny fraction of a void between eternal heat and eternal cold, where life has taken hold and refuses to let go. It is little wonder that our ancestors looked up at the stars, the sun, the moon, and wove the mystery of those lights in the sky into folklore. They put names and stories to the celestial faces, just as they named the rage of the ocean, the howl of the wind, and the black embrace of the beyond. 

Ra, the sun. Marama, the moon. 

Tangaroa, god of the sea. Tāwhirimātea, god of the winds. 

Hine-nui-te-pō, goddess of night and death.  

Mythology predates science by thousands of years. It has been with us since we first heard the rumble of thunder and imagined gods roaring at each other among the clouds. Fear of the unknown has been part of our collective subconscious for longer than civilisation has stood, and will be with us long after it has fallen.

 So even when science, that inevitable and inexorable juggernaut, continues to reveal the workings of the universe one quark at a time, we cling to our myths like we cling to life in this fragile strip of the solar system. Our mythologies were our explanations for all the forces at work around us which we did not understand. Now, as we learn how vast the universe truly is and how alone we are in it, those mythologies remain our security blankets, the persisting hope that something greater watches over us. That the fact of our existence is not so unlikely, and that we are not so very, very alone in the dark. 

This idea, the persistence of mythology and how humanity has an innate power to give a sort of life to that in which we are willing to believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, is a key element in The Path of Ra, a supernatural crime-noir thriller series co-authored by myself and Lee Murray. In Hounds of the Underworld, scientific consult Penny Yee refuses to buy into her brother Matiu’s insistence that there is a dark force at work behind the murders she is investigating. As long as she can explain the bodies piling up as the doings of a criminal mind, she can accept any atrocity with scientific clarity. But in Teeth of the Wolf, the second book in the series, when the evidence starts to mount that not everything can be rationalised away, and that the shadows Matiu is always jumping at may indeed be something that all Penny’s science and logic cannot explain, Penny tastes doubt for the first time.

In the writing of The Path of Ra series, I’m very lucky to work with Lee Murray, who brings a sense of rationale and reason to the story through Penny Yee. Lee works hard to drive the science in our science fiction/dark fantasy/crime-noir mash-up, while Matiu insists that the things scratching at the inside of the walls are not rats, nothing that can be so easily explained away. This conflict between the logical and the weight of the mythological lends the books a constant tension, between the need to make sense of the madness the world is falling into, and the need to hold back the faceless, inexplicable dark. It’s a powerful dynamic, and a testament to the success of the co-author relationship that this tension sustains both the story and the characters. Matiu brings the monsters; Penny explains why they simply can’t actually be there.

Science will keep on solving the riddles of our existence. It will continue to drive the changes we are making to this world, for better or worse. Science has given us, in equal measures,  space travel and space junk. Global travel and global pollution. A knowledge economy and the age of internet trolling. Nuclear energy and nuclear weaponry. Climate change and the means to combat it, if we have the will. 

Science will, in time, become our new mythology, the making and the breaking of civilisation. 

But as long as we hear voices in the dark when there is no-one there to speak, we will cling to our deeply-ingrained beliefs in the unknown, the unknowable. As long as we can cast a light into the shadows and the shadows swallow that light, we will continue to fear and revere our gods and monsters.

Dan Rabarts is a New Zealand author, editor and podcast narrator, winner of four Sir Julius Vogel Awards and two Australian Shadows Awards, occasional sailor of sailing things, part-time metalhead and father of two wee miracles in a house on a hill under the southern sun. His science fiction, dark fantasy and horror short stories have been published in venues such as Beneath Ceaseless Skies and The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk. Together with Lee Murray, he co-edited the award-winning anthologies Baby Teeth - Bite-sized Tales of Terror and At The Edge, and co-writes the Path of Ra series. His first solo novel, Brothers of the Knife, kicks off the grimdark-yet-madcap Children of Bane fantasy series (Omnium Gatherum). Find out more at dan.rabarts.com.

Making Sure Your Story Actually Has a Plot

People who have attended one of my workshops over the past few years have probably heard me refer to “goblin pirates riding space sharks” as an example of what not to do. It’s like the gift that keeps on giving, and even though it’s a real-life example that was paid for with blood, sweat, and tears, I feel like the experience was FULL of lessons that I both learned and share with others. And today I’m going to draw once again from that seemingly failed book, because at the core, there’s one question I could have asked that might have prevented lots of pain and suffering. And that question is:

Is this a real book? Or is it just a cool idea, or a collection of cool ideas?

Now, mind you, I did ask myself this. In fact, I went through and did what I thought was the process of plotting out the whole book, scene by scene. I wrote 80k words—how could I do that if there wasn’t a plot?? Plus, I’d written books before. So it’s not like I didn’t know what I was doing, right?

Then I went to pitch the book. I love pitching books in person, even though it can be a little nerve-wracking beforehand. I’ve done it several times. This time felt different though. So I went to lunch with author Bradley P. Beaulieu, someone who is not just a friend, but someone who I think really gets this stuff (and you should totally check out his Patreon, he gives a TON of good advice there). And I told him I was kind of feeling more petrified about pitching this book than I should have been, but I couldn’t explain why. He did what any good friend would do: He asked me the hard questions. By the end of lunch, I knew I was in really, really big trouble.

Mind you, I still went forward with the pitch. I’m not a quitter! But… I started to get the idea that maybe I was having such a hard time figuring out my pitch because I had no idea what my book was about.

Sure, I could go scene to scene and describe what happened. But what was my story ABOUT? Why should people sympathize with my characters? What was the heart of my story? I knew I SHOULD be able to ask that question…but I couldn’t (I didn’t admit that at the time to anyone, but I’m pretty sure it was obvious).

I pitched the novel to Josh Bilmes, who is a fantastic agent and honestly, handled it like a champ. He asked for some pages, but I knew he was just being nice—it was pretty damned clear this book was broken in SOME way. He probably knew right away what was wrong, but I was still somehow convinced…maybe I really sucked at pitching. Maybe I just wasn’t good at expressing my idea… I sent him my first 20 pages, and he sent me back a lovely personalized rejection.

I was a bit sad, even if I wasn’t surprised, so I did what you do and went to my BFF for consolation. And like a true friend…well, he was pretty blunt.

“Well, why didn’t you just add space sharks in there along with the goblin pirates and space ships and penal colonies and coming of age and father-daughter reunion and deep sea monsters and magic-that’s-science…?”

After telling him to go f*ck himself, I sat down and thought about it. And…well, shit. Hidden in his wise-assed remarks was some sagacity. Namely…

I had all kinds of cool shiny stuff in my book. But it didn’t take the place of an actual plot. My characters traveled and did stuff, but really, WHY?

Well, just like the chicken, of course. To get to the other side of the world. But WHY? Well, because my character had something to prove. WHY? Because no one likes her. Because she doesn’t fit in. Because…Because… she has daddy issues. And there are goblins and a giant octopus! Did you see the giant octopus??

Thank God, Mr. Bilmes did not get to the giant octopus part.

See, the thing is, everything that was wrong with the book could all be traced back to that big question. WHY? And at the point where I couldn’t answer that question anymore, I knew things were broken. My answer to “why” ended being, “Well, if there is all this cool shit in this book, how can a reader NOT like it?!” The answer to that is simple: If a reader can’t connect to your protagonist in some way, no matter how much cool shit there is in your book, they aren’t going to be engaged. I had a lot of good ideas, but I was missing a plot to connect to the reader, a plot that would make everything in the book have a reason and that would give the reader a reason to keep turning pages (other than, “OK, EVENTUALLY something is going to make sense here…”).

How can you make sure your book has a central plot and is engaging to readers, and not just a collection of cool ideas?

Well, asking yourself “why?” is a good place to start. Why are my characters on a quest? and go from there. Be specific. “Why is this one particular character on a quest to find this PARTICULAR thing?”

One way to help with this is to look at your story in terms of GMC—Goal, Motivation, Conflict. What is your character’s Goal—specifically. Not just, “My character wants to be loved.” By whom? What does this love look like? Can she touch it? If not, you need to look really hard at that goal.

What is her Motivation for wanting that specific goal? Why does she want it and not something else? Why is that the only thing that will satisfy? A way to twist it a little is to ask, why is SHE the right person to want that goal?

And then finally, what is the Conflict? What gets in the way of your character getting the goal. This needs to be something strong enough to sustain a whole book (or whatever length fiction you are working on). Can it be cleared up with a conversation? Then it’s not a strong enough conflict. Why is this the worst opposition your specific character can face? What is it about THIS conflict that makes it the RIGHT conflict for this character, for this story? What does your conflict look like? Sure, a book can be written where the antagonist is “society” or some vague concept…but are you at that point as a writer where you can do that? What is the visual representation of this concept, that readers can identify? In most genre fiction, the antagonist is defeated at the end. What does that LOOK like? How will readers know the defeat has happened?

Now, you can BS your way through this and answer the question, “What is my story’s GMC?” and think you have an answer. This is why you need to be really specific. Push the boundaries. Don’t settle for the easy answers. No, really, why DOES your character want to prove themselves? This will help you come up with your character’s backstory, and will make events in your story make sense. Being specific will also help make your character sympathetic, because readers will understand why they are going after this goal, instead of just going along for the ride to see what happens. Having a really strong motivation will deepen your character and make them real. And it will be clear to the reader why they are reading the book, why they SHOULD read the book.

The other thing having a strong GMC will do for your story is give it a razor sharp focus, so you as the writer will know exactly why everything is there, why everything is happening. You’ll be able to tell when things go off the rails if you can’t say, “How does this scene direct my protagonist to her goal?” or “How does this feed her motivation?” or “How does this get in the way of her specific goal?” If you can’t answer those questions about the scene, then it might not belong in your book.

Limiting the events and scenes of your book to those that only directly feed your main character’s GMC will make it very hard for those extraneous ideas that just seemed cool to take over the story. Because readers want more than just embellishment. They want to go on a real journey with your characters that matters. They want real stakes, they want real reasons they can relate to for going on this quest. They want to know WHY. And if you can’t answer that…how can anyone else? This is how I found out my book was actually just a collection of actions and reactions without a really core element of “why does this matter?”

Of course this isn’t the only way to make sure your book is on track and has a point, but it’s a starting point if you’ve found yourself stuck. And authors don’t always ask themselves these questions at different times in their process. Some will get a crappy first draft out and then try to identify what the point of it all is. Some will start doing this before they get a single word on the page. It all depends on you and what works the best in your process so YOU can get your book written.

Further reading:

GMC: Goal, Motivation, and Conflict by Debra Dixon

Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight Swain

Melanie R. Meadors writes about goblins, science, magic, superheroes, and other nerdy things in her short stories, novels, comics, and games. She has edited multiple anthologies, including Knaves, Hath No Fury, and the upcoming Tales of Excellent Cats: A Monarchies of Mau Anthology. She is the co-director of the Gen Con Writer’s Symposium, which takes places every August in Indianapolis, IN, and she works as an author publicist. She is a blogger and general b*tch monkey at The Once and Future Podcast. You can learn more at melaniermeadors.com 

Never Going Home: World War I With an Eldritch Twist

Matthew Orr has been a freelance writer since 2010 and co-founded Wet Ink Games, LLC in 2015. Recent role playing credits include Rifts World Book 36: Sovietski from Palladium Books and CAPERS from NerdBurger Games. In 2018 he served as a reader during the 200 Word RPG Challenge. He earned degrees in history, art and education from University of Louisville. Here he tells about one of the newest projects he’s working on, Never Going Home, an Eldritch-type horror game set in World War I.

Just in time to mark 100 years since the end of the First World War comes a new role playing offering from Wet Ink Games. Never Going Home: World War Occult Role Playing is set on battlefields twisted not only by the new weapons of the period, but by horrible whispers from beyond the veil of worlds. Expanding beyond their first game line into completely new territory, Wet Ink Games built the game on top of artist Charles Ferguson-Avery’s World War Occult project. Ferguson-Avery’s art depicts soldiers hunkered in trenches, preforming magic rituals, and facing off against inhuman threats. In every image the soldiers wear gas masks, obscuring their own humanity. Everything about the art serves as a meditation on the monstrousness of war. It is a setting ripe for creating stories of desperate survival.

One way to think about table top role playing games is as collaborate storytelling exercises with guidelines set by the rules. The rules for Never Going Home can be broken into two main parts. First, preforming typical RPG skills like “shooting” or “knowledge” as well as pulling off magic spells, called “whispers” in the game, requires rolling a few D6 equal to training in the skill. A five or six on a die is a success and the number of successes needed depends of the difficultly of whatever a character is attempting. Once the dice land, players manipulate them with the character’s attributes of Brawn, Smarts and Guts. Attributes can buy an additional dice for the roll, re-roll, or increase the pip count of a die result. Succeed of fail, something always happens, which players get to narrate. Weapons offer more options for dice manipulation after the roll, while magic is more powerful but is much more risky.

The other aspect of game play is the use of playing cards. Players have a hand of cards from the start of play and collect more during play. These cards represent their character’s memories, but there is constant pressure to give up cards to gain benefits. They can trade sets of these cards in to increase their skills, attributes and whispers or they can use them for healing. Player must also collectively discard at the start of each mission to meet the special conditions of the Journey. Each card given up represents the loss of little bit more of the character’s humanity. In addition to everything else, players have to balance the goals of character survival and group success. At some point characters will have gained enough power and given up enough of who they are, they will simply not come back from their mission. Characters disappear, possibly to become the horrible creatures which threaten the survivors in the next mission. The game is called Never Going Home for a reason.

The game is raising funds on Kickstarter now. In addition to the book itself, there are custom dice and playing cards designed by the game’s artist on offer so you can play Never Going Home with components designed to hit all the same horror notes. The original art book of World War Occult, which features both black and white and color images as well as poetic text fragments is also available through this campaign if you missed out on it earlier this year. Beyond the base game, once the campaign starts reaching those stretch goals, Wet Ink Games have lined of a squadron of indie roll playing game industry regulars to help them create a variety of missions to challenge play groups.

Check out the Never Going Home RPG on Kickstarter now!

Do We Belong Dead? A Guest Article by Dan Stout

On page and on screen, we love to see monsters wreak havoc. They rampage and destroy, tear and rend. Their simple existence threatens our lives, our worlds, even our sense of self. But for makers of monsters, it can be a trick to strike the right note with our creations. To get there, it may help to ask: do these terrifying figures see themselves as monsters?

Imagine a spectrum with Dracula, Hannibal Lector, and the cenobites from Hellraiser on one side, embracing their nature and delighting in preying on the weak. On the other is the Wolfman and the Hulk, humans fighting to keep their darker side constrained. And in the middle is the place where monsters deny their monstrous nature: the realm of the misunderstood and misunderstanding. 

This middle is where we find Frankenstein’s monster, Edward Scissorhands, Bad Ronald, and Michael Douglas’s character from FALLING DOWN (1993). (Think of his scene on the pier, looking befuddled and asking Robert Duvall’s policeman, “I’m the bad guy?”)

Sometimes, the monster is only monstrous when perceived through human eyes. The Amphibian Man in THE SHAPE OF WATER (2017), for example, is gallant and charming, and it's clear that the real villains are his human captors. Guillermo del Toro’s work often embraces the monstrous, as does the work of Tim Burton. Edward Scissorhands and the Amphibian have a great deal in common in the way they address the status and soul of the outsider. This is true of both the physically different characters and the “normal” people who embrace them. 

But while Edward Scissorhands is self-aware, other monsters are self-deluded. BAD RONALD (1974) is an example of a monstrous character who believes himself to be the victim, unable to accept responsibility for his own actions. Ronald conflates an imaginary narrative to justify his series of progressively violent assaults (in the book, Ronald is far less sympathetic, and his actions significantly more malevolent than in the televised film.) 

Some works, such as 30 DAYS OF NIGHT (2007), feature both soulless monsters and relatable, human characters who harness the strength of the monstrous but turn their back upon the destructive nature that power brings, showing us that all hope is not lost. In other works, the monster’s self-image changes or shifts. In THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935) the monster believes that his hopes of finding happiness were delusional, uttering his famous line, “We belong dead.”

Wondering how audiences perceive these figures, I reached out to other lovers of the monstrous and horrific, and the members of the TV Terror Facebook group [https://www.facebook.com/groups/tvterror/] responded with a collection of monsters and their preferences in specific monstrous flavor. One interesting point that came out was that there are also monsters that exist wholly separate from our imaginary spectrum. Godzilla and his kaiju breather are forces of nature, similar to their dark reflections: the other-worldly Lovecraftian entities. All of them exist and go about their business, indifferent to our world and our conception of them as monsters. Natural monsters and mythological creatures tend to fall into this range as well. (For a look at drawing monstrous inspiration from facts, check out Lee Murray’s entry on the Once and Future Blog: Monster Fiction. )

All this comes together in multiple stories that I've been working on. In my contribution to the ONCE UPON THE LONGEST NIGHT anthology, I was able to explore the archetypal roles of Vampire and Hunter and ask what the concepts of right and wrong mean when both sides believe they're doing the right thing? Similarly, my novel TITANSHADE explores what sets people apart physically, culturally, and economically. Each of us exists on many axes, and we all see ourselves as outsiders on at least one of them. Not that this self-examination takes away from the action and romance of the stories—rather, if done well, it adds a depth an nuance that makes the rest of the story that much more enjoyable.

I believe that this is the great calling of Story. Well-told fiction blurs the line between “The Other” and the “Us”, strengthening understanding and pushing back against hate and paranoia. Whether our monsters are sympathetic or villainous, a successful story hinges on an act of empathy between the reader and at least one character. And when characters we empathize with make bad decisions, it causes us to reflect.

If we look at monsters and see our own beliefs and behavior, we’re forced to ask: Are we the monster? Is it us that belongs dead?

ONCE UPON THE LONGEST NIGHT is now on Kickstarter! A collection of novelettes that combine vampire mythos and romance with sacred symbolism and magic of the winter solstice. 

Dan Stout lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he writes about fever dreams and half-glimpsed shapes in the shadows. Dan's stories have appeared in publications such as The Saturday Evening Post, Nature, and Mad Scientist Journal. His debut novel Titanshade is available for pre-order from DAW Books. To say hello, visit him at www.danstout.com.

Escapism, Writing, and Life: A Guest Article from Linda Robertson

I know Linda Robertson from a lot of angles in the writing world. I helped with her publicity when her book Jovienne first released, she’s been a guest at the Gen Con Writer’s Symposium a couple times, and now, she is one of the great writers whose stories appear in the anthology, Once Upon the Longest Night: An Anthology of Vampire Stories. Vampire mythos and romance couple with the magic of the winter solstice, this book is not to be missed! It’s currently on Kickstarter, so if you want to help this book happen, head over there and back it!

In this article, Linda talks about escapism! I hope you enjoy. —Melanie R. Meadors

***

Everyone knows that reading can be a gratifying escape. Immersing yourself in the adventures of fascinating characters or in a gripping other world gives your mind something to do instead of scrolling through social media’s endless opinions and memes, or links to watch another handful of commentaries that rehash the ‘story of the moment’ with new voices. A book, a warm-blanket, and cup of cocoa at hand, can provide a much-needed respite from the overwhelm of reality.

Of course, reading is not the only means of escape. Some folks go to the gym or meet up to shoot some hoops with friends, while others gather for a dinner out or serve as a volunteer in their community. Some folks simply get that freezer pizza out of the oven and hit play on Lord of the Rings because watching Frodo and Sam again provides a comfort equal to hanging with old friends.

   “Humans had built a world inside the world, which

reflected it in pretty much the same way as a drop

of water reflected the landscape. And yet... and yet...

   Inside this little world they had taken pains to put all

the things you might think they would want to escape

from — hatred, fear, tyranny, and so forth. Death was

intrigued. They thought they wanted to be taken out of

themselves, and every art humans dreamt up took them

further in.”

― Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters

Reading was something I enjoyed from a young age, but looking back, it is evident that when seeking escape my mind turned to writing. This increased as a mother of four boys, because playing in my made-up world where all the control was mine was like a mini-vacation on Fantasy Island. De plane! De plane! However, my boys are mostly grown now – only one high-schooler is still in the house. I’ve grown and changed as much as they have, coming more firmly into my own via the challenges and triumphs of raising those young men, and these soft but jaded eyes see the world differently. Being headstrong and finding my own way through the late 80’s to arrive in the present so close to fifty is one thing. Helping my progeny find their way through the new millennium while learning to step back in the face of their own headstrong ways, has been quite another thing. 

So, it’s no surprise that the escapism I once found in writing has changed.

    “Hence the uneasiness which they arouse in those who, 

for whatever reason, wish to keep us wholly imprisoned in 

the immediate conflict. That perhaps is why people are so 

ready with the charge of "escape." I never fully understood 

it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple 

question, "What class of men would you expect to be most 

preoccupied with, and hostile to, the idea of escape?" and 

gave the obvious answer: jailers.” 

― C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature

In recent years, nerves and anxiety about many things, personal and business-wise – i.e. reality – kept me restless, non-productive, or inactive entirely. Sitting still and focusing became more difficult than it should be. Largely for that reason, the work to be done on the seventh Persephone Alcmedi book loomed like Poe’s pendulum swinging over me, hissing at my lack of progress. 

Then, the opportunity to write something for the Once Upon the Longest Night Anthology came along. 

It was not a novel, so the commitment felt smaller and doable. While the theme was similar enough to my body of work to give me confidence, the strong romantic element required a shift that held some challenge.

It was a perfect distraction.

Charissa Weaks, who envisioned this anthology and lead the charge, coached me through my ignorance of the romance genre and the predictable flaws in my first draft. She helped me see another way to shape a tale, I embraced the challenge before me. I learned much from that process and am quite proud of my story, Blooded. Being included in such an impressive line up is a thrill – the Once Upon the Longest Night anthology truly has so much to offer!

   “{…every form of fiction} can be a safe place you go, like

going on holiday, and it can be somewhere that, while

you’ve escaped, actually teaches you things you need to 

know when you go back, that gives you knowledge and 

armour and tools to change the bad place you were in.” 

― Neil Gaiman

With renewed hope – and a fire I promised myself I would keep kindled, my work on Persephone’s seventh installment resumed. I have found myself asking, ‘How do the main characters find the strength to keep stepping up to the plate after all I’ve thrown at them already?’ And an exploration of those lesser characters who are still on the stage has begun, assessing who has something more to give, but haven’t yet. ‘Why not?’ I wonder, ‘What is their tipping point? What bad thing has to happen that makes them step forward and say, Enough!’

I blame my personal life for these questions. There are things afoot where I have an expectation of extended family stepping up to, as Samwise put it, “share the load.” After searching through my characters for someone with the skills to be important in the #7 story arc, it is clear that I am rehashing and reexamining my real life through this other lens in the world where my control is absolute.

Escapism by writing has become therapy for those aspects of life I wish were different but cannot change. Viewing a different fantasy situation with theoretic and applicable similarities, then gauging all the possibilities and motivations the other characters bring to the table, has helped me find not only distance from the overwhelm of the real situation, but a means to work towards satisfying resolution.

Happy reading, writing, or however it is that you spend your ‘escape’ time.

  “There is nothing more to be said or to be done tonight,

so hand me over my violin and let us try to forget for half

an hour the miserable weather and the still more miserable

ways of our fellowmen.”

― Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Five Orange Pips

Linda Robertson is an internationally published author with seven novels in two separate fantasy/speculative fiction series. She also has a handful of short stories to her credit, and four more in four separate anthologies coming over the next year. Also a musician, she composed and produced an orchestral score of original music for her most recent novel, Jovienne.  www.LindaRobertson.com 

Learn more about the Once Upon the Longest Night anthology here:

https://onceuponanthologies.com/

Facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/onceuponanthology/

Check out the backer options at the official kickstarter page here:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/onceupon/once-upon-the-longest-night-an-anthology-of-vampir?ref=discovery&term=Once%20Upon%20Anthologies 

Time Meddling, Doctor Who, and the Vikingverse!

Ian Stuart Sharpe’s new book, The All Father Paradox, is like a Norse love child of American Gods and Doctor Who! Please welcome Ian to Once and Future, where he explains the connection. And be sure to check out The All Father Paradox, book 1 of the Vikingverse series!

MONK: Mischief? No, no. A master plan. A master plan to end all master plans. 

DOCTOR: Oh, is that so? 

MONK: The whole course of history changed in one single swoop. 

DOCTOR: By wiping out the Viking fleet? 

MONK: Exactly, Doctor, exactly. Of course, obviously, I don't have to remind you that the main reason William the Conqueror won the Battle of Hastings, was because King Harold had to march to Stamford Bridge and defeat the Vikings first. 

DOCTOR: So you plan to save him the journey? 

MONK: That's right. Precisely. A fresh army, no desertions. Why King Harold will kick William back to Normandy before knows what happened. It's quite a plan, eh?

The Summer of 1965. William Hartnell’s original Doctor Who confronted Peter Butterworth’s Meddling Monk over a dastardly plan to rewrite the course of English - and therefore World – history. Arrive in Northumbria. Position atomic cannon. Destroy Viking fleet.

The writer of the episode, Dennis Spooner, had great success writing for Thunderbirds, The Avengers and even Remington Steele but it was his story The Time Meddler that really changed the paradigm of Sci-Fi TV as we know it. A gag in the previous story, The Chase, had been that Daleks were responsible for the disappearance of the Mary Celeste. In The Time Meddler, Spooner made the whole plot revolve around actual historical events, the battles of 1066 becoming a backdrop for a contest of wits between the Doctor and his opponent (Trivia fans might like to know that the serial also represents the first time that another member of the Doctor's race, not yet identified as the Time Lords, appeared).

My own novel, the All Father Paradox, features a similar plan to rewrite history, although in my case, to the benefit of the Vikings.  Any alternate historian has to find a suitable POD or Point of Divergence, and with the closeness of the subject matter (“Omniscient Being Meddles with Time”), I was intrigued as to how much thought had Spooner had put into his “master plan to end all master plans”. Would changing the timeline in September 1066 really make a huge difference?

Let’s evaluate the first premise, that the Battle of Hastings was lost because Harold had to defeat the Vikings first.

Harold’s ascent to the English throne as Harold II had taken place just a few months the events in this episode. The new king had hardly begun to enjoy his rule when he was faced by enemy invasion: the famed Viking Harald Hardrada landed in the north, marching in collaboration with Harold’s rebel brother Tostig.  No sooner had Harold won a stunning victory at Stamford Bridge, which left both Hardrada and Tostig dead, than news reached the English king of a second invasion, this time in the south, by the Norman Duke William “the Bastard”. Harold raced from Yorkshire to Sussex to meet the challenge and the armies clashed at a site known to this day as Battle.

William’s defeat, and death, was certainly a plausible outcome even if the Monk hadn’t interfered. Hastings was an unusually long-lasting and hard-fought battle, with two evenly-matched armies. Harold was an experienced general commanding battle-hardened soldiers, and unlike the Normans, who were isolated in hostile territory, he could have expected reinforcements as further Saxon troops arrived from Yorkshire. Remove the long march from the equation, and, assuming the Monk had a plan to deal with rogue arrows, the POD is very plausible.

The next question is why the Monk wanted to make Harold king. The plan was altruistic, it seems. The Monk states that Harold would be a good ruler. “There wouldn't be all those wars in Europe, those claims over France went on for years and years. With peace the people'd be able to better themselves. With a few hints and tips from me they'd be able to have jet airliners by 1320! Shakespeare'd be able to put Hamlet on television”.

What, then, if it had been Duke William’s lifeless body stretched out on English soil, not Harold’s? Had Harold survived and won, would he be celebrated today as one of England’s greatest warrior kings, on a par with Richard Lionheart and Edward I?  Would we be talking of King Harold the Great, and the great dynasty of the Godwinsons?

The English language would be different, certainly, shorn of French influence – much more Norse in tone and content. And it is true, England as a whole would have been much less focused on continental Europe and countries like France and Spain. As in Canute’s time some fifty years earlier, the nation would have been a part of the Scandinavian political sphere. Harold’s sons would have intermarried with Nordic princesses, rather than French heiresses like Eleanor of Aquitane. Ironically, having eliminated the Viking fleet, the Monk might have given birth to a Great North Sea Empire, with the resources and appetite to explore far off Vinland, discovered just decades previously by Leif Erikson. 

But the peace the Monk hoped for might still prove elusive - King Harold II after Hastings would have faced dangerous enemies and rivals – not least the young Edgar, a grandson of the earlier king, Edmund II Ironside, and so a direct descendant of Alfred the Great – with a strong claim to the throne. And because Harold had been excommunicated by Pope Alexander II, who supported the Norman cause, had the Godwinson’s remained on the throne, there’s every likelihood that the relationship between England and the Catholic Church may have strained to breaking point far earlier than the 16th century. The Monk would have to meddle further to ensure that 1066 was not a short-lived triumph, riven with civil war and religious strife.

It is ironic that, considering the Monk was trying to advance England, without King William’s conquest we might know much less about the country and its people. The single greatest store of information about 11th-century England, Domesday Book, was made to record the victor’s winnings. King William had a blank slate – he created a new aristocracy that owed everything to him and delivered new laws to the ancient land. 

If there is one lesson to be had from all this meddling in time, it is that it is hard to see all of the repercussions.  As we learn in the All Father Paradox, time isn’t a river, flowing from one place to another. It is a great, eternal ocean, lapping on all our shores at the very same time. Like ripples emanating from a single, solitary drop, the waves will roll through history.  A really effective Time Meddler starts at the source…

About The All Father Paradox:

What if an ancient god escaped his fate and history was thrown to the wolves?

Churchwarden Michaels thought it was just a run-of-the-mill crazy old man who stood in the graveyard, hellbent on studying the 1,000-year-old Viking memorial there. But when things start changing and outright disappearing, Michaels realizes there is more to this old man than meets the eye. Now, Michaels finds himself swept up in an ancient god’s quest to escape his destiny by reworking reality, putting history—and to Michaels’s dismay, Christianity itself—to the Viking sword. In this new Vikingverse novel, storied heroes of mankind emerge in new and brutal guises drawn from the sagas:

A young Norse prince plots to shatter empires and claim the heavens...
A scholar exiled to the frontier braves the dangers of the New World, only to find those “new worlds” are greater than he imagined...
A captured Jötunn plants the dreams of freedom during a worlds-spanning war...
A bold empress discovers there is a price for immortality, one her ancestors have come to collect...

With the timelines stretched to breaking point, it’s up to Churchwarden Michaels to save reality as we know it...

About Ian Stuart Sharpe:

Ian Stuart Sharpe is the CEO of a tech start up. As a child he discovered his love of books, sci-fi and sagas: devouring the works of Douglas Adams, J.R.R. Tolkien, Terry Pratchett, and George MacDonald Fraser alongside Snorri Sturluson and Sigvat the Skald. He once won a prize at school for Outstanding Progress and chose a dictionary as his reward, secretly wishing it had been an Old Norse phrasebook. He lives in British Columbia, Canada.

Doctor Who! New Trailer, Mean Tweets, and More

I don’t know about you, but I am SO EXCITED about the new season of Doctor Who, starting on October 7th. And yes, I say that every time a new season comes up, but seriously, this is the first season where we will have a FEMALE Doctor in the form of actress Jodie Whittaker.

A new trailer has just been released, which has a definite mixed reception. And no, it’s not just because of the feminine Doctor. It’s because of the MUSIC. What is up with that? I felt like it just distracted from the otherwise epic scenery of the trailer. Why not have some form of the theme music or some dramatic symphonic stuff? Meh. But even with the music, the trailer has me pumped for new episodes.

It will come as no surprise to fans and members of the science fiction and fantasy community that the new Doctor has had to face some serious criticisms for the mere fact that she is a woman. Well, OK, let me rephrase that—there has been criticism. I can’t use the word “serious” to describe man-babies crying because someone got girl in their fandom. But yes, here, in the twenty-first century, there still exist people who think that girls can’t do things as well as boys can, or that by putting a woman in a role, it “ruins it.” To be honest, I rather look forward to losing them as part of the fandom. It will certainly make things more enjoyable for the rest of us. And…how can you claim to be a fan of something so weak that it gets ruined by putting a woman in it? That’s pretty lame.

Stylist Magazine had Jodie read some of the nasty (and not so nasty) tweets about the new Doctor, and it’s pretty amusing.

When Jodie Whittaker's role on @bbcdoctorwho was announced, the internet had something to say about it. Here's her reaction to some of the best (and worst) responses... @bbcpress pic.twitter.com/ScMRlh37Ty

— Stylist Magazine (@StylistMagazine) September 19, 2018

Of course, my favorite one, which echoes my thoughts exactly, is this:

What about you? Are you looking forward to the new season, the new Doctor, and new adventures?

Melanie R. Meadors writes about goblins, science, magic, superheroes, and other nerdy things. She was part of the dual degree program for physics and astronomy at Northern Arizona University until she discovered that her evil super-genius powers were useful for writing fiction as well. She is a blogger and general b*tch monkey at The Once and Future Podcast. You can learn more at melaniermeadors.com 

The Elusive, Inspirational Soul – by S.E. Lindberg

Please welcome guest author S.E. Lindberg to the blog this week!

For most artists, including writers, the act of creating attempts to capture and share some emotion, or conversely, evoke an emotional response from an audience. Often, we draw inspiration from our past experiences, traumatic or enjoyable, to deepen the impact. As a scientist, I find the entire transaction of emotions oddly inspirational and terrifying. Feelings are ubiquitous, but cannot be measured objectively; they do not seem to adhere to any law of conservation like energy or mass obey (is there any limit to sorrow or joy?).

Could we better our craft if we knew how emotions flowed from an object (fine art or prose) to a person (or vice versa)? Let us examine the sources and sinks of emotion: our souls. In playful art, this is quite easy to simulate; heck, consider the soul-currency for crafting in From Software’s Dark Souls videogame series—if only we could see as the undead do! In real life, studying the soul is harder.

Many ‘Renaissance Men’ were inspired to find the soul while the art of anatomy flourished. The prevailing Church did not permit the dissection of innocent believers, so criminals or ‘sinners’ were often studied. Bodies were considered divinely sacred and were thus difficult to obtain; acceptable corpses could not be refrigerated, so one had to work fast. Nor were there cameras or video to capture the observations, so artists and alchemists convened in the dissection theaters to document the microcosms of life.  Leonardo Da Vinci provided detailed notes along with his drawings (from The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci. Oxford World's Classics, 1998):

 "I have dissected more than ten human bodies, destroying all the various members and removing the minutest particles of flesh which surrounded these veins, without causing any effusion of blood other than the imperceptible bleeding of the capillary veins. And as one single body did not suffice for so long a time, it was necessary to proceed in stages with so many bodies as would render my knowledge complete; this I repeated twice in order to discover the differences. And though you should have a love for such things you may perhaps be deterred by natural repugnance, and if this does not prevent you, you may perhaps be deterred by fear of passing the night hours in the company of these corpses, quartered and flayed and horrible to behold; and if this does not deter you, then perhaps you may lack the skill in drawing, essential for such representation..." p151

 Da Vinci determined that the senses were linked to a ‘common sense’ that led to the brain. But no actual soul was discovered. He yielded the goal of managing the soul to religion.  Below, from his treatise on painting, he spoke how the artist must deal with this and impart the soul into its subjects otherwise: 

"A good painter has two chief objects to paint, man and the intention of his soul; the former is easy, the later hard because he has to represent it by the attitudes and movements of the limbs.” p178 

Anatomical artists had to grapple with documenting macabre scenes of opened bodies while remaining 'artistic'.  For the dignity of the specimens and to satisfy the surgeons' needs, artists often found harmony by posing their subjects. Perhaps most famous are Johannes de Ketham's Fasiculo de Medicina (1491), Andreas Vesalius's De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543), and Leonardo Da Vinci's notebooks (1500). The contemporary Bodies: The Exhibition continues this controversial tradition of displaying the dead artistically.

 With the most promising connection to our souls being the senses, it follows that the next great promise of discovery came when optical technology allowed scientists to see new worlds. Pioneering microscopists had to draw their observations. In 1664, Robert Hooke published a large treatise entitled Micrographia or Some Physiological Description of Minute Bodies, containing an encyclopedia of detailed drawings of his microscopic views. In his preface, he explains to the reader that optics have enabled a spiritual quest: 

“… by the help of microscopes, there is nothing so small, as to escape our inquiry; hence there is a new visible world discovered to the understanding.  By this means the heavens are opened, and a vast number of new stars, and new motions, and new productions appear in them, to which all the ancient astronomers were utterly strangers.”

The soul has never found, however.  Despite ‘the opening of heaven’ with microscopes, the soul still eludes us.

 Ernest Haeckel (1834-1919) was another famous artist-scientist fascinated with the aesthetics of nature and the elusiveness of the soul. His 1904 set of lithographs Art Forms in Nature brilliantly exhibit his obsession with the symmetrical beauty of biological microstructures, and his extensions into comparative embryology brought him controversy. He argued this in his support of his own monistic religion that scientific adventures continually uncovered the beautiful designs inherent in nature (monism generally supports that ‘body and soul’ are one connected entity, not separate as many dualistic religions profess): 

“The remarkable expansion of our knowledge of nature, and the discovery of countless beautiful forms of life, which it includes, have awakened quite a new aesthetic sense in our generation, and thus given a new tone to painting and sculpture. Numerous scientific voyages and expeditions for the exploration of unknown lands and seas, partly in earlier centuries, but more especially in the nineteenth, have brought to light an undreamed abundance of new organic forms... affording an entirely new inspiration for painting, sculpture, architecture, and technical art.”

In 1900, Haeckel published his scientific, spiritual book Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the Nineteenth Century in which he explains his monistic philosophies.  He shares elegant philosophy on the soul's lack of participation in the "Laws of Substance" (conservation of mass and energy); below, he discusses how many related the nonexistent soul to that which is tangible:

“Thus invisibility comes to be regarded as a most important attribute of the soul.  Some, in fact, compare the soul with ether, and regard it, like ether, as an extremely subtle, light, and highly elastic material, an imponderable agency, that fills the intervals between the ponderable particles in the living organism, other compare the soul with the wind, and so give it a gaseous nature; and it is this simile which first found favor with the primitive peoples, and led in time to the familiar dualistic conception.  When a man died, the body remained as a lifeless corpse, but the immortal soul ‘flew out of it with the last breath.’”

 Indeed, the many myths of preserving a dead man’s soul, or gaining its powers, is pervasive. The notion of relics is common across cultures and time. It assumes that the soul is a contagion remaining attached to the body postmortem. Hence, the power of a Saint could be absorbed if one obtained his or her bones; this gave rise to the theft and desecration of many crypts and catacombs. Many crypts remain with the bodily relics on display. The crypt of Saint Munditia of Munich and the Vienna Imperial Crypts are fine examples. Other famous examples include the shrines of Capuchin monks in Rome and Palermo, Sicily (>6,000 bodies) and the Kostnice 'Church of Bones, Kutna Hora, Sedlec Ossuary, Prague (~40,000 remains).

Alas, we cannot study the soul directly yet, but the journey is inspirational. H.P. Lovecraft summarized our human condition best in his opening to “The Call of Cthulhu” (Weird Tales, 1928):

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age…”

S.E. Lindberg resides near Cincinnati, Ohio working as a microscopist, employing scientific and artistic skills to understand the manufacturing of products analogous to medieval paints. Two decades of practicing chemistry, combined with a passion for dark fantasy, spurs him to write graphic adventure fictionalizing the alchemical humors (primarily under the banner “Dyscrasia Fiction”). With Perseid Press, he writes weird tales infused with history and alchemy (Heroika: Dragon Eaters, Pirates in Hell). He co-moderates the Sword & Sorcery group on Goodreads.com, and invites all to participate, and regularly interviews authors on the topic of Beauty in Weird Fiction.

Monster Fiction: The Fact Is, Well, Facts Help--by Lee Murray

Please welcome guest author Lee Murray to the blog today! Lee writes fiction about monsters. Here she discusses how one might use facts from the real world in their monster-y tales!

When it comes to monsters in contemporary fiction, one of the biggest tasks of a writer is to achieve that magical nirvana we call suspending disbelief. We have to breathe life into our monsters and make the reader truly believe that such a being could exist. Happily, for me, I live down under in a country where monsters are part of our everyday dialogue. No, I’m not from Australia where there are cantankerous blue-headed birds who could eviscerate you with a single swipe, kickboxing roos, snakes that can turn doorknobs, and spiders the size of your face. Don’t even get me started on their drop bears. Instead, I’m from further south, in New Zealand, a country which has none of the monstrous creatures of our neighbours. Okay, so that isn’t quite true. We do have the poisonous katipō spider, a tiny fellow in a batman suit who lives under mouldering driftwood, but who is so shy that I think I’ve only seen one in my entire lifetime, and yes, we have some largish wētā-beetles who can get rather ornery if they’re disturbed, some not-so-nice jellyfish, and the ubiquitous wasp. Although, these creatures don’t exactly have kaiju-esque proportions. I can see you thinking how I must be really stretched for monstery inspiration down here in the land of the long white cloud. And you’d be wrong. We have an entire menu of wonderful monsters to choose from.

Take the poua-kai, for instance. Polynesian peoples, including New Zealand’s Māori, still tell stories of these enormous bird-monsters with their glossy black and white plumage, green wingtips and a blood-red crests. Swift and deadly, the man-eating poua-kai is said to have swooped from the air at speeds of eighty kilometres an hour (50mph), smacking into its prey with the force of a small truck, before plucking them up in their razor-like talons. So, it was exciting when, in 1871, Julius von Haast described an extinct species of eagle, the largest known to have existed, which had been previously been discovered in a South Island marsh. With a shortened wingspan adapted for its forest habitat, the Haast eagle (also known as Te Hokioi) was a raptor capable of taking down the mighty moa, a now-extinct flightless bird which stood over three metres (10ft) and could weigh up to two hundred and fifty kilos (550 pounds). Claims that this monster could carry off people occurs frequently in the oral histories of the Māori people, convincing accounts which were also recorded by several European scholars, including Governor George Grey. In recent years, Japanese geneticists began extracting DNA from moa remains with a view to resurrecting the species, a notion that one of our local politicians suggests could be achievable within the next fifty years. Not wanting to wait that long, I wrote a time travel adventure for children, BATTLE OF THE BIRDS, a “my-first-monster” story that pits the gentle moa against a ferocious Te Hokioi antagonist in a battle for supremacy playing out a millennium ago between New Zealand’s flying and flightless birds. 

Then there are the magnificent taniwha, perhaps the most famous of our local monsters. Typically associated with bodies of water, these legendary creatures take various forms including dragons, whales and sharks. Often touted as guardians, they are also thought to have been fickle and proud creatures, sometimes luring people to their deaths and eating them whole. Over time, Māori historians and storytellers, have used the term as a metaphor to describe a powerful chieftain, one who is not to be trifled with. Today, in their role as guardians, taniwha still impact on our local affairs and development.

But the existence of these lizard-dragon-serpent monsters isn’t just the stuff of legend and metaphor, not since palaeontologist June Wiffen discovered fossil evidence of theropods in the Te Urewera forest back in the 1970s. Hard scientific evidence that T-Rex-like monsters once roamed these lands. In fact, since the first Taine McKenna adventure, INTO THE MIST, was released, the New Zealand government has funded a two-year search for further fossil evidence in the Ureweras ‒ the novel’s setting. The results of the study are expected to be reported shortly. But what about those giant lizard taniwha that Māori chieftains warned Captain Cook about during his third voyage to the country in 1777? Don’t those sound a lot like our national taonga-treasure, the tuatara (a Māori term meaning ‘peaks on its back’)? It’s interesting that the tuatara shares a classification with no other species. What if a larger Sphenodon existed in that same forest where other therapods are known to have roamed? Let’s just say that some of the connections, I uncovered in my research are so compelling, I’m not sure I’d recommend walking New Zealand’s famous Waikaremoana track without a military escort!

In INTO THE SOUNDS, my most recent Taine Mckenna thriller, I called again on Māori histories of the taniwha, this time in its sea serpent form. It should be remembered that Māori mythological tales aren’t simply stories, but deep-seated cultural beliefs. They are integral to our identity as a people, and as such any use of these accounts in story must be treated with sensitivity and tact. However, what’s fascinating is that so many of the stories about kraken are supported through oral histories of other cultures, historical accounts of encounters with kraken, and actual scientific observations because colossal squid do exist and can be found in the Southern Ocean. While writing INTO THE SOUNDS, I took a research trip to New Zealand’s National Museum, Te Papa, and observed the only colossal squid specimen in existence, which (despite having shrunk) weighs just under five hundred kilograms (1100 pounds) and measures approx. five metres (15 ft) in length. A female, this squid is the biggest scientists have preserved to date; but it’s possible that larger ones exist... For a storyteller, the temptation was simply too great.

It’s easy to dismiss the legends and stories as being just that: cautionary tales to teach and entertain. But where do these stories come from in the first place? Is it that people have conjured up fictions that have later been found to be true, or are they empirical truths immortalised in fiction and mythology? For a storyteller, the blurry line between hard fact and best-loved fiction is where story possibilities abound and any connection to fact, even a tenuous one, can help to suspend our readers’ disbelief and create credible living breathing monsters. Because, when it comes to monster fiction, the fact is, well, the facts help.

Further reading:

https://www.independent.ie/world-news/asia-pacific/maori-legend-of-maneating-bird-is-true-26566198.html

https://www.stuff.co.nz/science/81779686/scientists-and-tuhoe-to-hunt-dinosaur-fossils-in-the-urewera-range

http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-Bes02Reli-t1-body-d4-d6-d2.html

https://www.tepapa.govt.nz/about/past-exhibitions/2018-past-exhibitions/colossal-squid

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=3002585

More about INTO THE SOUNDS:

On leave, and out of his head with boredom, NZDF Sergeant Taine McKenna joins biologist Jules Asher on a Conservation Department deer culling expedition to New Zealand’s southernmost national park, where soaring peaks give way to valleys gouged from clay and rock, and icy rivers bleed into watery canyons too deep to fathom. Despite covering an area the size of the Serengeti, only eighteen people live in the isolated region, so it’s a surprise when the hunters stumble on the nation’s Tūrehu tribe, becoming some of only a handful to ever encounter the elusive ghost people. But a band of mercenaries saw them first, and, hell-bent on exploiting the tribes’ survivors, they’re prepared to kill anyone who gets in their way. A soldier, McKenna is duty-bound to protect all New Zealanders, but after centuries of persecution will the Tūrehu allow him to help them? Besides, there is something else lurking in the sounds, and it has its own agenda. When the waters clear, will anyone be allowed to leave?

About Lee Murray:

Lee Murray is a multi award-winning writer and editor of fantasy, science fiction, and horror (Australian Shadows, Sir Julius Vogel). Her titles for adults include the acclaimed Taine McKenna series of military thrillers (Severed Press) and supernatural crime-noir series The Path of Ra co-authored with Dan Rabarts (Raw Dog Screaming Press). Among her titles for children are YA novel Misplaced, and best-loved middle grade adventure Battle of the Birds, listed in the Best Books of the Year 2011 by New Zealand’s Dominion Post. Dawn of the Zombie Apocalypse, the first book in a series of speculative middle grade antics will be published in 2019 by IFWG Australia. An acquiring editor for US boutique press Omnium Gatherum, Lee is a regular speaker at workshops, conferences and schools. She lives with her family in New Zealand where she conjures up stories for readers of all ages from her office overlooking a cow paddock.

Speculative Fiction as Resistance, by Jason Sizemore

Please welcome guest Jason Sizemore! He is the son of an unemployed coal miner in a tiny Kentucky Appalachian villa named Big Creek (population 400) where fought his way out of the hills to the big city of Lexington. He attended Transylvania University (a real school with its own vampire) and received a degree in computer science. Since 2004, he has owned and operated Apex Publications. He is the editor of five anthologies, author of the short story collection Irredeemable and For Exposure: The Life and Times of a Small Press Publisher, a three-time Hugo Award loser, and an freelancer. He can be found on Twitter at @apexjason.

One of the goals of the Do Not Go Quietly: Victory in Defiance anthology is to add to the tradition of speculative fiction functioning as an effective way to embrace resistance and reject tyranny. My co-editor (Lesley Conner) and I want to entertain while we inspire. We want to educate while we encourage you to stand up. It’s an important balance, but achievable.

The Kickstarter to fund Do Not Go Quietly is active until September 9th. Please consider backing our ambitious project.

In the spirit of Do Not Go Quietly here are five stories that I feel exemplifies quality short fiction that also has something important to say.

“Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™” by Rebecca Roanhorse (Apex Magazine, issue 99)

Full disclosure. I edit Apex Magazine and published Rebecca’s story. But the work has won the Hugo and Nebula Awards so I’m comfortable suggesting it. It’s a sharp critique of stolen culture and stolen identity. Author Rebecca Roanhorse’s darkly funny and chilling story will leave you reconsidering the nature of authenticity and the other.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The New Englander Magazine, 1892)

Gilman’s story is a near-perfect piece of horror fiction. It’s female protagonist falls deeper and deeper into insanity due to a gaslighting husband, an inherently misogynist medical doctor, and severe isolation. Is the protagonist really sick? What the heck happens at the end of the story? It’s all masterful composed and symbolically portrayed by the titular wallpaper that fades and cracks over time.

“The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson (The New Yorker, 1948)

Many will consider this an obvious example. However, I don’t believe there has been a period of time since its publication that this story hasn’t been relevant. Jackson’s story reflects the danger of inaction, of complicity when you blindly (intentionally or not) follow mob reasoning.

Think about the culture that exists now. Our president leads bullying campaigns via social media mobs. But Trump isn’t the only one duplicit of such actions. It is easy to cast that first stone and unleash a pack of angry online followers.

From McCarthyism to social media justice. Shirley Jackson saw it all coming. She stood up, but we have failed to heed her warning.

“Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorn (The New England Magazine, 1835)

I first read this one a few months ago in an anthology of Gothic fiction. It is set during the Salem witch trials and is a direct challenge against the New England Puritanism of the time. At least that’s how I read it (interpretations vary). Read it yourself and come to your own conclusion!

“Paskutinis Iliuzija (The Last Illusion)” by Damien Angelica Walters (Interzone, 2013)

Damien Angelica Walters is a writer of singular skill. She’s one of the best at drawing out heartbreak and loss I’ve encountered. In this story, she uses the bond of a father and his little girl to show the unnecessary cruelty of war. “The Last Illusion” hits me every time I see an image of a family separated I think of this story.

Do Not Go Quietly is now on Kickstarter! Head over and pledge your support for this amazing collection of stories from some of the best authors in the genre!

Mythology in Modern Fiction: How to Make It Your Own, by Annie Sullivan

Please welcome guest author Annie Sullivan to the Once and Future blog! Annie is the author of A Touch of Gold, a new novel both teens and adults can enjoy from Tor Books. 

Mythology is not an easy subject to tackle, especially when you’re dealing with Greek mythology, just because of the sheer number of individuals and backstories and myths. When I set out to write my debut young adult novel, A Touch of Gold, which is about the cursed daughter of King Midas, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. However, there are ways to work mythology into your current novel without it feeling heavy-handed, outdated, or overwhelming. 

1. Do your research. 

Find out what you want to include and why. Is this an all or nothing situation where you have to take the entire mythos, or can you pick and choose a few characters to add to your text. 

In A Touch of Gold, I kept quite a bit of the Greek mythos, making mentions to characters like Poseidon and Triton that we never meet. This made the mythology feel more robust without having to add more characters. 

2. Are you altering characters? 

Decide early on whether your characters will stick exactly to their original stories or if you’re going to add/change elements about them, their histories, or their plots. 

Discover who your character is and if you can fit them into your story with small alterations. If you can’t, then you may need to create a new mythos for your world instead of using an existing one. In my book, I took some liberties with characters like Dionysus, making him a darker, more chaotic character because it enhanced the plot. 

3. Make it fully-formed. 

Make sure your mythology has threads throughout all aspects of the society you create. It’s going to affect what people value, how they worship, their rituals, their sayings, their enemies, and so many more elements in your characters’ lives. 

Throughout A Touch of Gold, people uses phrases like, “Triton take us.” These phrases act as a reminder of the world in which the readers find themselves and adds to the mythology. Make sure you include small details to make the world come to life. 

4. Be careful with all-powerful beings. 

One problem that it’s easy to run into when dealing with mythos and gods is having characters that could easily solve all your characters’ problems with a flick of their wrist. Give your powerful god-like creatures either reasons not to help, don’t have them interact with the characters at all, or find another way to make sure they don’t become a convenient solution to every setback. 

In my case, the gods were the ones who created the problems, so they weren’t going to just come along and fix everything. If anything, they added more tension because you never knew when they’d show up and make things worse. 

5. Magic must be consistent. 

If your mythos has magic, make sure you know who has it, where it came from, who can wield it, and how it can be used. It’s really difficult to have a world where just one person has magic (unless they’re the last of their kind.) Convince the reader your magic system is real by making it be believable and applicable across the entire society you created. 

In A Touch of Gold, the gods have power, and they can give powers (usually in the form of a curse) to humans. However, different gods have powers over different things, so their abilities differ. 

These are just a few ways to make sure the mythology you’re creating reads well and stays consistent throughout your work. Overall, have fun, don’t be afraid to play with the characters and the world to make things more interesting. 

About the author:

Annie Sullivan is the author of A Touch of Gold. She grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana, and received her master’s degree in Creative Writing from Butler University. She loves fairytales, everything Jane Austen, and traveling. Her wanderlust has taken her to every continent, where she’s walked on the Great Wall of China, found four-leaf clovers in Ireland, waddled with penguins in Antarctica, and cage dived with great white sharks in South Africa. You can follow her adventures on Twitter and Instagram (@annsulliva) or on her blog: anniesullivanauthor.wordpress.com.

STAR WARS: CLONE WARS RETURNS!!! With a catch....

Holy cow, have you folks heard?? At Comic Con International, it was announced that after five years, the animated Star Wars series Clone Wars is getting a revival to complete the series after it's cancellation in 2013! That's right, there will be twelve new episodes of Clone Wars, which will supposedly answer a lot of questions fans might have had, such as, "What the heck happened to Ahsoka in those years between Clone Wars and Rebels?

So what's the catch?

Well, if you really want to see the new episodes of Clones Wars, they won't be on Netflix or even Amazon right away. You'll have to subscribe to Disney's new digital subscription streaming service. There also is no specific release date, the series just having been announced as part of the Star Wars: Clone Wars anniversary panel at San Diego Comic Con. 

The episodes themselves look interesting, and I'm excited to see them--no one was a bigger Clone Wars fan than me. Can I afford to watch them, though, if I have to subscribe to yet another streaming service? That remains to be seen, and kind of feels like a cheap shot. 

You can see the trailer for the new episodes here:

Melanie R. Meadors writes about goblins, science, magic, superheroes, and other nerdy things. She was part of the dual degree program for physics and astronomy at Northern Arizona University until she discovered that her evil super-genius powers were useful for writing fiction as well. She is a blogger and general b*tch monkey at The Once and Future Podcast. You can learn more at melaniermeadors.com 

Cataclysmic Impact on Younger Uranus Explains Tilt, Temps

A team of international scientists centered at Durham University, UK, has done research suggesting that a giant collision by an object about twice the size of Earth caused Uranus to tilt on its side and might also explain why the planet is so cold.

These astronomers did the first high-resolution computer simulations showing varying massive collisions with the ice giant planet to try to figure out how the planet might have tipped onto its side. Via these simulations, they found that a massive object, probably a protoplanet made of rock and ice, smashed into Uranus about 4 billion years ago during the solar system's formation, and likely the caused the planet's tilt.

“Uranus spins on its side, with its axis pointing almost at right angles to those of all the other planets in the solar system. This was almost certainly caused by a giant impact, but we know very little about how this actually happened and how else such a violent event affected the planet," says Jacob Kegerreis, a PhD researcher at Durham University's Institute for Computational Cosmology. “We ran more than 50 different impact scenarios using a high-powered super computer to see if we could recreate the conditions that shaped the planet’s evolution. Our findings confirm that the most likely outcome was that the young Uranus was involved in a cataclysmic collision with an object twice the mass of Earth, if not larger, knocking it onto its side and setting in process the events that helped create the planet we see today.”

But if such a violent collision occurred, how did the planet manage to keep its atmosphere? In other occurrences, such a collision would have caused the planet's atmosphere to be spewed off into space. The simulations explain this by showing that an impact object striking at an angle, a glancing blow, could have enough strength to change Uranus's tilt, but the planet would still maintain it's atmosphere. 

Such a collision could also explain the formation of Uranus's rings and moons. When the big smash took place, rocky and icy matter would have been jettisoned from both the bodies, and this matter would have been captured by gravity into orbit around Uranus. Eventually this matter would coalesce into moons, and may have altered the rotations of any pre-existing moons Uranus had.

Uranus isn't just tilted onto its side. Its magnetic field is off-center, as well, and if the collision caused lumps of rock to form lopsided within the planet, it provides a reasonable explanation for this. 

Image via NASA/Hubble

How can a collision explain Uranus's extremely cold temperatures? If debris from the impactor formed a thin shell near the edge of the planet's ice layer, it could trap the heat emanating from the planet's core. Because the heat is prevented from escaping, the outer atmosphere would not be affected by it, and this can explain the super cold -357 degree Fahrenheit temperature of the outer atmosphere (as a comparison, Neptune is further from the sun than Uranus is, and its lower temperature is -360 degrees Fahrenheit, with it's average temperature actually being warmer than Uranus's at -353 degrees [via Cal Tech/Cool Cosmos]).

Luis Teodoro from  the BAER/NASA Ames Research Center, who co-authored the research paper, says, "All the evidence points to giant impacts being frequent during planet formation, and with this kind of research we are now gaining more insight into their effect on potentially habitable exoplanets.”

All the findings of the Durham team's research can be found in paper "Consequences of Giant Impacts on Early Uranus for Rotation, Internal Structure, Debris, and Atmospheric Erosion," in The Astrophysical Journal.

You can learn more about Uranus on NASA's website!

Melanie R. Meadors writes about science, magic, superheroes, and other nerdy things. She was part of the dual degree program for physics and astronomy at Northern Arizona University until she discovered that her evil super-genius powers were useful for writing fiction as well. She is a blogger and general b*tch monkey at The Once and Future Podcast. You can learn more at melaniermeadors.com 

'Star Wars: Ahsoka' Gives Fan-Favorite Character Spotlight She Deserves

As a huge fan of the Star Wars: Clone Wars series, I enjoyed watching Ahsoka Tano grow up as a Jedi Padawan, apprenticed to Anakin Skywalker. I really liked seeing Anakin through her eyes, and also seeing how Anakin himself developed because of his relationship with her, his struggles and his slow, inevitable descent to the Dark Side. Seeing the Jedi order and their rules and views from the eyes of an apprentice was a valuable way to see how events in the future could come about. By the end of the Clone Wars series, however, Ahsoka fans were in for a heart-wrenching ride, as things began to fall apart with the Jedi order and as Anakin went further and further to the Dark Side because of it. Anakin became a truly sympathetic character in part because of Ahsoka's presence in the series. But her role in the series ended on a low note, faced with betrayal and lies and deception, being stabbed in the back by the entity she had most faith in. Of course, without getting too spoilery, Ahsoka fans are offered a boon in Star Wars Rebels, but there is a huge gap where we are wondering, what on Earth happened in the years between Order 66 and the birth of the Rebellion?

E.K. Johnston answers some of these questions in Star Wars: Ahsoka. 

Ahsoka takes place a couple years after Order 66 happens, after the birth of the Empire. Ahsoka has grown up, but is the same character with visible influences of her Jedi Masters Anakin Skywalker and Obi Wan Kenobi. Johnston manages to capture Ahsoka's personality well, from the quips to her self-dialogue. Post-Jedi Ahsoka still has a connection to the Force, but it's become dangerous--deadly--to use the Force now that the Empire is actively hunting Force-users down. Still, Ahsoka is on the side of good, and the plight of farmers on a planet where she tries to hide out for a while becomes too much for her to bear. She tries to help them resist the Empire's encroachment on their moon, but in doing so, exposes herself as a Force-user and puts herself and others in danger because of it. The book follows Ahsoka on her path of self-discovery, to find what role she is to play in this new world after the fall of the Jedi. 

Part of the point of this book is for Ahsoka to be alone. For her to reach out in the Force, and for the first time in her life, to not feel the presence of her former masters and friends. We do, however see some familiar faces and have a connection to the larger world of the Rebellion, and we can see the gears turning of the events that will lead to the story lines in Star Wars: Rebels. 

This is a young adult book, and I think younger readers will enjoy seeing how Ahsoka comes into her own, grows up into her own person with goals that matter to her, without just following orders that are given to her. Her struggle between taking care of herself and just surviving versus helping others do the same is genuinely portrayed, and a lot of the themes presented in the book are very timely for today's youth. Toward the end of the book, Bail Organa comments on Palpatine's actions and ploys, saying, "He kept us so busy jumping at shadows, we didn't realize which of the shadows was real." It's not just fictional rulers who do this, and I find that Star Wars in general, especially with the Clone Wars series, does a good job at portraying how evil can get the upper hand, how governments can be manipulated, how people can be tricked and betrayed by their own leaders. 

Fans of Clone Wars and Rebels will find this book to be an excellent addition to the series. Fans new to Ahsoka will enjoy this tale of self-discovery and re-awakening. Ahsoka is a character many readers will relate to, and she is captured extremely well by E.K. Johnston.

Melanie R. Meadors is a writer of fantasy stories and comics, her work most recently appearing in the anthologies Champions of Aetaltis and Kaiju Rising II: Reign of Monsters. She is the co-director of the Gen Con Writer's Symposium and the publisher at Outland Entertainment.  Melanie also edits anthologies, including Hath No Fury, Knaves: A Blackguards Anthology, and Tales of Excellent Cats: A Monarchies of Mau Anthology, which is set in the world of the popular role playing game, Pugmire. She is a content editor and publicity specialist at the RPG game company Mechanical Muse, and has written game settings for the RPGs Tiny Dungeons 2e and Tiny Frontiers 2e. She is a blogger and general b*tch monkey at The Once and Future Podcast. You can learn more at melaniermeadors.com 

COMICS REVIEW: Marvel's Star Wars Kanan Series

I'm a big fan of the Star Wars Rebels series, and recently finished watching it. Kanan Jarrus is one of my favorite characters of the series, and while we get some teases about his background in the show, we don't really learn much beyond that.

That's where this comic comes in. In the two volume series, Star Wars Kanan, The Last Padawan, and then in First Blood, readers learn Kanan's backstory, and how he went from being cocky Jedi padawan Caleb Dume to the Kanan Jarrus we came to know and love in Rebels.

The story is framed within a storyline from the Star Wars Rebels timeline, where we can see connections between Kanan's past and present. While the comic stands alone, I think readers could benefit from knowing the characters of Rebels beforehand, both to know who they are and to feel a stronger connection with them. The story is fast-paced and because I already knew Kanan from Rebels, I was instantly engaged. I often don't like backstories, because so often the characters are obnoxious in their youth, but with Kanan, the writers did a good job straddling the line between portraying a young character who still has a lot to learn with a character who will grow up to be responsible for his crew/family and who will play an important role in the rebellion. Even the one line that usually drives me nuts, "Don't call me kid!" leads up to a really emotional and poignant moment, where Kanan/Caleb says, "Don't call me kid. Not anymore." I also appreciate reading about young people who fight for what they believe in, who grow into heroes. 

This is an exciting and at times, emotional read that is an excellent addition to the Star Wars story. We learn more about characters we love (and hate), and are introduced to new characters who ties storylines together. Highly recommended for readers both teen and adult!

Melanie R. Meadors is a writer of fantasy stories and comics, her work most recently appearing in the anthologies Champions of Aetaltis and Kaiju Rising II: Reign of Monsters. She is the co-director of the Gen Con Writer's Symposium and the publisher at Outland Entertainment.  Melanie also edits anthologies, including Hath No Fury, Knaves: A Blackguards Anthology, and Tales of Excellent Cats: A Monarchies of Mau Anthology, which is set in the world of the popular role playing game, Pugmire. She is a content editor and publicity specialist at the RPG game company Mechanical Muse, and has written game settings for the RPGs Tiny Dungeons 2e and Tiny Frontiers 2e. She is a blogger and general b*tch monkey at The Once and Future Podcast. You can learn more at melaniermeadors.com 

Gwendolyn N. Nix on What Inspired 'The Falling Dawn'

Gwendolyn N. Nix is the author of The Falling Dawn, a fantasy novel about a celestial warrior named Eos, who is charged with the task of finding a sacred book in order to stop an all-out heavenly war. She joins us as our guest today in order to talk about some things that inspired her to write this book!

Halting a heavenly civil war wasn't exactly what The Falling Dawn's protagonist, Eos, had in mind when she was swept up on a quest scouring the oceans for a holy book, but books are exactly the tools I expected to mine for all my inspiration while writing the Celestial Scripts. Luckily for you, dear reader, this won't be a laundry list of research books. I realized I had a lot of things that influenced The Falling Dawn besides the stacks upon stacks of lore I accumulated—whether it be in an aesthetic sense or for world-building.

1. Angels: Celestial Scripts in Art and Legend by Jacqueline Carey  Okay, maybe just one book. I found this gorgeous book while researching angelic lore and it was monumental in shaping some of the characters and themes of the novel. Beyond being the gateway drug that eventually led me to the Kushiel's Dart series, I spent hours pouring over the snippets of myths that led me to craft Rahab, the Master of the Oceans, who holds secrets ultimately dire to Eos' plight. Not only did the book explore the classic commonly-known stories, it hinted at the apocryphal texts—sending me further down the rabbit hole, desperate for more. The artwork elevated my perception of what an angel looked like—beings with wings, sure, but also as massive sublime giants, terrifying to behold, monsters crafted from fire compared to us humans, creatures of clay. 
2. "Ghost Love Score" by Nightwish One of my favorite songs of all time, "Ghost Love Score" premiered on the album Once by the symphonic metal band, Nightwish. It's a ten-minute ride full of a beautiful orchestra, operatic vocals, and grinding guitars and whenever I hear the flutes trill at the end, I get all tingly. Whenever I hit a writer's block, I'd give my brain a dose of that song and it felt like my creative side lit up with lights. It captured the aesthetic of how I wanted The Falling Dawn to be—layered with complexity, legends, and at its heart, an exploration of love and the lengths people and creatures will go to keep that love. 
3. The Little Mermaid I've been told I'm more of a Belle Disney princess—you know, the books, the library, it makes sense—but I'd always loved Ariel. Her passion, her collector's tendencies, and even her recklessness became something I admired and incorporated into Eos' character. That red-haired spitfire went after what she wanted and she even had the adventuresome free spirit to boot that took her where those under the sea would never go: the surface, the sea witch's lair, even into a shipwrecked Spanish galleon where great white sharks hunted. Yes. I might have a degree in marine biology and yes, I've studied and swam with sharks, but for a good long time before all that I hid beneath the covers when that great white peered through the glass as Ariel marveled over her dinglehopper. Let's just say that oceanic fear and fiery spirit are recognizable traits within The Falling Dawn.  
4. Resurrection It's a broad word to geek out on, but the idea plays a heavy role in the Celestial Scripts. One of the basic tenants of Eos' world revolves around resurrection. Her soul was at the beginning of the world and would be at the end of it. Yet, as she discovers the strength of her unknown powers, she meets a secondary entity—a creature that gains personality, autonomy, and vitality—who is somehow tied to her. Could this creature be a split-personality entity, a past self, or even a future rendition of Eos? I love the idea of recycled souls, but find the aspect downright terrifying. How much of the you in this lifetime remains? Can that facet of the resurrected spirit that is wholly you somehow live on and break off from its original resurrected soul? Questions abound and The Falling Dawn seeks to answer them. 
5. The Coast There are two places that embody The Falling Dawn to me. The first was Makoshika Park in Glendive, Montana where on a family vacation, we were caught in a huge thunderstorm. Caught between the thunder and the rain, the golden streaks of lightning looked like falling angels. The second is a piece of beach along the Long Island Sound where I saw a group of smooth, rounded mossy boulders that looked like a pod of whales rising gently the distance. Both these scenes became heavy visuals that influenced The Falling Dawn and if you keep an eye out, you'll find them. 

About The Falling Dawn:

Stopping a heavenly war isn’t exactly what Eos Azzapardi had in mind when Enoch, scholar and mentor, wiggles his way into her heart and fills her head with gods and angels. He sweeps her on a quest for the Lost Book of Raziel, a book containing all the divine secrets of the god Adonai. Enoch plans to use the Book to stop an imminent civil war between angels in Heaven and release the imprisoned Watchers, an angelic sect who fell from grace because they loved humans. 

After a chance meeting with the prince of the realm, Ciriacus, who reveals he is one of Enoch’s disciples, Eos realizes she must find a balance between obeying the demands of her newfound family and coming to terms with what Ciriacus and Enoch require of her. As jealousy deepens a rift between Eos and Ciriacus even as a prophecy threatens to encompass them both, Eos discovers she has an uncanny ability. Using her gift has consequences, specifically heralding the arrival of a split personality entity named Madame Decay. Madame Decay transports Eos’ mind into an underworld similar to Enoch’s Hell. There, she learns that there is more than one god at play, and sparks fly between her and a psychopomp of death.

When Enoch’s faith begins to border on zealotry, Eos discovers he plans to trade the Book for the Watchers’ salvation, while using Eos as a bargaining chip to seal the deal. Hurt from this revelation, Eos seeks revenge by attempting to sully her soul, all the while uncovering that her unexplainable powers stem from the secrets of her bloodline. As Enoch manipulates her to his own ends and the angels begin to fall, Eos realizes that she must make a choice: fall in line with Enoch’s demands, or lose what little soul she has left to the machinations of Madame Decay.

About Gwendolyn N. Nix:

Raised in the wilds of countless library stacks, Gwendolyn N. Nix has forged her skills in writing and science in the shark-infested waters of Belize, by researching neural proteins, inducing evolutionary pressures in green algae, and through the limitless horizons of her own imagination. A born seeker of adventure, she saw her first beached humpback whale on a windy day in New York, met a ghost angel in a Paris train station, and had Odin answer her prayers on a mountain in Scotland. Her short fiction appears in The Sisterhood of the Blade anthology. The Falling Dawn is her first novel. She lives in Missoula, MT. Find out more at www.gwendolynnix.com.

You Like Me Because I'm a Scoundrel: Guest Post by Alana Joli Abbott

Alana Joli Abbott is co-editor of the new fantasy anthology KNAVES: A Blackguards Anthology, now in it's final days on Kickstarter. She is also the editor in chief at Outland Entertainment. Here, she talks about the allure of scoundrels in fiction. If you like rogue-ish characters, be sure to check out the Kickstarter for KNAVES--lots of awesome rewards available, and only a couple days left to claim them! The Once and Future Podcast host Anton Strout will have a story in there, and O&FP blogger Melanie R. Meadors is co-editing with Alana! Plus, there will be stories from Mercedes Lackey, Maurice Broaddus, Anna Smith Spark, Cat Rambo, Shanna Germain, and many more!

I remember watching Phantom Menace in the movie theater wondering what the movie was missing. There was awesome Jedi action (and way better choreography than the original trilogy). The music was fantastic. Tatooine looked pretty much the same, and pod racing was pretty nifty. (It was even more fun as a segment in later Star Wars video games.) But there was some core element of Star Wars I felt was just absent.

It didn't take me more than a few times watching it to realize that what the film didn't have was Han Solo.

I don't mean Han Solo literally. What I wanted was a loveable rogue. (You'll note that I found a TV Tropes link for the character type--that's how common it is.) It's all well and good to have the earnest hero in the center of things. That's kinda their job. But there needs to be someone around with a smirk and a wink and a hard edge—a little too cynical to believe in the mythic importance of everything around them (even if they're later proven wrong). Sometimes it's their job to undercut the narrative, to give it a little breathing room so the audience can laugh. Pretty typically, their witticisms are the ones people leave the theater quoting. They're not in this story for the higher mission of the plot. They're in it for some selfish reason.

But not really. Because when the chips are down, they show up to help save the day.

Or, actually, they don't.

Even though I grew up with the Han Solo type of scoundrel, and grew into the Malcolm Reynolds kind of scoundrel (as a freelancer, "I do the job, and then I get paid" became a mantra for me), I've developed a bit of a taste for the varied palate they can offer. Around the time I was loving Firefly, I was also reading Steven Brust's "Vlad Taltos" series. Which centers on a character who is, effectively, a crime lord in at least a portion of his novels. He's an assassin. He's not a nice man. But he's affable, the kind of narrator you want to follow on whatever mission it is he's undertaking. And, even when it's not really the right thing, you want him to win.

I followed Mark Henry's "Amanda Feral" series, which is narrated by a zombie socialite. Who eats people. Sometimes they're not even bad people, it's just that she's a zombie, and. Well. It happens. And while the whole experience of hanging out with Amanda is kind of like being a spectator to a train wreck, it's a glorious spectacle.

More recently, there's Marvel's Loki, whose Road Movie-like dialogue with Thor was the best thing about Thor: The Dark World. Never quite knowing what side Loki is on is a big part of his appeal—but, even moreso, that he's ambiguous with charm. If you want to talk about a fan favorite character—I think it's probably a safe bet that there's more fan fiction about Loki on the Internet than any of the Marvel heroes. (I'm not going to actually go count them, but I stand by my suspicion.)

And while characters like Kate Daniels and Curran Lennart from Ilona Andrews's "Kate Daniels" series are absolutely the heroes—they've got a bit of a edge on them as well. Kate, a former mercenary, private investigator, and also the daughter of one of the universe's big evils, isn't always good at playing nice. Curran, who for much of the series is the leader of all the shapeshifters in Atlanta, creates a code for his own people, but doesn't always play nicely by the rules of non-shapeshifters. They're a pair for whom the default response is to hit the problem with a sword, and to do so with a gleeful, maniacal smile that makes bystanders scared for their lives.

Fantasy and science fiction thrive on the morally ambiguous characters who can reel you into their stories and make you want them to win, even when they're the bad guys. While I'm no psychologist, I suspect there's something cathartic about rooting for the scoundrel. When you're part of a community (a family, a town, a nation), it's important to follow the rules—but it's not always fun. Diplomacy is hard. Sometimes just getting along with other members of your community is hard.

Rooting for the guy who doesn't have to follow those rules? Sometimes, that's exactly what we need. In all the varieties possible.

As Han says, "There aren't enough scoundrels in your life."

Alana Joli Abbott has been an editor for eighteen years, working on a variety of projects including biographies, news articles, reference books, role playing games, and fiction. At Outland, she has served as co-editor to anthologies, including Kaiju Rising II: Reign of Monsters.

Alana is the author of the novels Into the Reach, Departure,and Regaining Home, the interactive multiple choice novel apps Choice of Kung Fu, Showdown at Willow Creek, and Choice of the Pirate, and she has written for the comics including Cowboys and Aliens II and Ithaca. Her game writing has been featured in Steampunk Musha, the award winning Serenity Adventures, and Dungeon and Dragon magazines. Alana has visited ancient ruins around the world; sung madrigals semi-professionally; and earned her black belt in Shaolin Kempo Karate.