*Blows dust of blog and promptly falls into coughing fit.*

Well. Um... How's everybody been? I didn't realize it'd been a year since I'd written a blog post. So. That's a thing.

Anyway. I'm jumping in with both feet again and committing to do the A to Z blogging challenge. I did a novella in 1000 word A to Z titled installments in 2017 and 2018. It'll be no problem at all to do that in 2019, right? 

I mean I have two term papers, and a final, and classes, and AwesomeCon and... 

wooooo. Deep breaths. It's fine. I'll work up a plot today and we'll be golden.

Come back tomorrow for A is for....um....Alliteration. Yeah. A is for Alliteration. Tomorrow. Promise.

This weeks Sci-Fi Friday is brought to you by my friend Michael. You can find his regular blog here.

Lovely, wonderful Michael got me his post well on time. The fact this is happening on Sunday instead of Friday might possibly have something to do with me spending a weekend at the lake without any kind of internets.

Anyway, gorge the eyestalks.

Recently this blog discussed the flying cars that we were all promised when the future got here. This romanticized flying car future has yet to materialize though and our continued yearning for it masks an overlooked truth: no one has been promised a flying car utopia since like, the 1950s. More recent generations were promised corporate-run dystopias, which we’ve been delivered by the way. But I don’t want to talk today about flying cars or about the cyberpunk future we live in. I want to talk about something awesome.

You know what’s awesome? Time travel is awesome. I love time travel stories! When done right, they can offer an in depth look at a setting and its characters from multiple perspectives in a short amount of in-universe time.

Groundhog Day is a great, light hearted introduction to this style of story. If you aren’t familiar with the movie, basically Bill Murray’s smarmy character is trapped in a town during Groundhog Day and forced to relive the same day again and again. Not even death is an escape for him, as he simply wakes up in bed the next day.

Why does he repeat the same day again and again? How does this time loop work? Why is it centered on Bill Murray’s character? We never get the answer to these questions in the movie; and why should we? Those questions aren’t what the story is about. The movie is really about the growth that the setting forces on Bill Murray’s character and the people he meets and gets to know along the way.

Part of what I love about Groundhog Day is how over the course of the movie, you see Bill Murray interact with several minor background characters who you might not give much thought to if you saw them walking down the street, but Bill Murray has all the time in the world to get to know the personal life stories of everyone in town and so do we as the viewers.

Ultimately, that movie is a romantic comedy. What if we’re in the mood for something more adventurous? There are plenty of great stories in the time travel genre that fit this qualifier as well! To name another movie that everyone will know: Back to the Future is a perfect example of this. Marty McFly has great adventures as he tries to stop his parents from breaking up and cause him to never be born because of events that he changed when he went to the past. It’s a lovely introduction to time paradoxes and definitely recommended for anyone who wants time travel itself to play a bigger role in the stories. The characters are often wrestling with what they can change in the past to affect the future without causing unintended consequences. Another standout example of this sort of film is Looper which I won’t talk about too much here, but it follows this same sort of slightly more involved time travel film.

But finally we come to my favorite sort of time travel story: the structured time travel story. Now, don’t take that to mean that other time travel stories aren’t structured, but rather it’s the type of story that spends an (often non-trivial) amount of time laying down the rules of how time travel works before the characters go and muck things up and then either have to deal with the consequences of their actions or figure out how to work within the rules to set things right. One example of this is the 2004 movie Primer, which I adore, but it’s a very difficult movie to follow specifically because of how it doesn’t hold your hand as characters are bending the fabric of space-time to their whims. Therefore, I won’t spend more time on it other than to recommend it to you.

Another lovely example of this sort of story is Steins;Gate, a visual novel (which itself is a topic I could easily write a whole blog post about) and the inspiration for this post. In this game, a group of friends accidentally invent a time machine and spend the first half of the game experimenting with it and learning the rules of the system only to find themselves in a horrible trap of their own design.

What I find so powerful and attractive about the game is how the time travel allows for the player to go back in time and interact with other characters differently. A little insight here, provoking a reaction there, it all lends itself to the player developing an intimate relationship with each character, even those who at first seem ancillary.

Time travel stories are captivating and have so much more to offer than what I’ve written about here. If you’re usually turned off to Sci-Fi involving time travel I hope you’ll be intrigued to seek out recommendations of stories that are lighter on the time travel and bigger on character driven interactions. If you’ve never thought about using time travel elements in your stories before, then consider it as a specialized tool for certain settings that let you show similar (or even the same) events from an evolving perspective as your viewpoint character learns more and more about the plot of a story. Time travel, I submit to you all, is awesome.

Holy Crackers! I have a theme!

I know, right? That’s super unusual.

Anyway. Earlier this week I blogged about legos washing ashore along Cornwall and Devon. And it’s probably no coincidence the BBC also did a piece on what those islands of plastic are up to in our oceans. I’m sure they have just as much fun searching for content as I do.

Could you tell that was facetious?

Anyway. The standard saying is that we know more about space than we know about what happens at the bottom of our own oceans. I don’t know if that’s true. I think it might be, humans have an incontrovertible attentiveness to what’s happening up there in the sky over us, and we’re generally just–probably rightfully—afraid of deep water.

But, along with the random lego octopi, and a travelling hoard of rubber ducks, and the kind of plastic that’s working its way into the geologic record, we get things like a message in a bottle sent in 1914 that just found its way to someone. Think about that. Someone wrote a message to his family, in the early days of WW1, and it’s spent the last hundred years doing cheese knows what in the ocean.

And reading that, I can’t imagine what else is floating around down there, waiting for us to find it.

I'm trying my hardest not to turn Well Written Wednesday into "This is everything that's wrong with the slush pile."

Because seriously, there is so much wrong with the slush pile.

Anyway. We're going to talk about Oath-breakers.  Yeah, alright, I get nobody likes a liar, but that's not precisely what I mean. I mean oath-breakers in fiction. When you sit down and write, when you tell me a story, you're making a promise. Maybe it's not blood on the dotted line, but it's still a promise. 

"Hey, you. This thing I'm telling/showing/sketching out for you, it'll have a beginning, a middle, and an end. It'll have a purpose as a story--maybe not a higher one, but whatevs, it'll still be a purpose--and it'll do all the things it's promising to do before you get to the end. We cool?"

Because when it doesn't do those things? There are whole lands of failure devoted to stories who fall down on those. The kind you need a sixteen-mule-team and a magical compass to navigate. Stay away from magical failure land, storytellers. Stay far far away. 

It's not hard, just actually freaking finish your story. Finish it the way it should finish, after you've begun. Finish it like it's the last story you're ever going to tell, and it should hold up to the light of the ages, eligible for reprint in the Ancient Gazette when we're winging our way toward Andromeda Prime in a thousand year's time. 

I feel like this Sci-Fi Friday needs to be audience participation. Given the amount of content I've managed this week, I'm allowed to be a little lazy.

So, write me a tagline for the picture. Make it as silly or as serious as you like.

Unclear on what a tagline is, look at some of these. Even if you know what a tagline is, go look. Just trust me.

I vaguely recall, a couple of days ago (alright, so it was nearly a month and that's how lost I am) that I was going to stop missing days, on this whole blogging thing.

I'll wait until you're done laughing.

We're getting closer to the point where I can be honest about that giant project in the background that's eating my life. Granted, I'm relatively sure everyone who actually reads this thing already knows about it...

But we're not quite ready for launch yet, and I'm keeping quiet until we are. 

It's Well Written Wednesday and since I'm allowed to talk about writing (spuriously) I'm going to talk about what it feels like to have an 'author's' life on the internet anymore. 

There are currently, on that nifty little panel that Google gives you to pick which username you want to sign in with, eight choices. My to-do lists in Wunderlist consistently exist about a half-step away from being utterly out of control. I am either responsible for--or nearly responsible for--four blogs, three twitter accounts, probably more like twelve email addresses if you count the non-google ones, one web forum I have utterly failed at for months, and three websites. Not counting the giant PROJECT OF DOOM I'm not actually owning up to yet I've got Nano, some involvement in First Book, my own writing career, a position as the Enrichment Coordinator for my son's school, the Book Lover's Bazaar coming up in September, and another nine and a half weeks as a full-time childcare person.

Arguably, at the end of all of that I should be talking about the impending crash, should I?

But I'm fine. Not even pretending at fine, I'm actually fine. Sure, there are moments where it feels a little big. Like tonight, when I signed out of Google for a second and got slapped in the face with way more directions than I needed right then. There's a sort of constant cloud of things that haven't made it on a to-do list yet swimming around in my brain, and I'm still having dreams about the PROJECT OF DOOM that basically equate to my brain getting caught in circles because I'm spending a lot of time staring at the same information is sixty different ways. 

Someone mentioned Camp Nano, next month, the other night and I just laughed hysterically. We won't tell anyone I was laughing because it should be 'oh god NO' but I will absolutely, I nearly promise, be writing something. 

Welcome to life as a modern writer. I'm decently hopeful it's not like this for everyone.

So. Much. Work.

Literally. I have absolutely nothing useful to say today. It is 10:43 at night, I am exhausted, and tomorrow is the last day of school. Also, my to-do list is still incredibly long.

Don't worry, soon enough there will be big announcements, and all will become clear.

Also, I solemnly swear there will be a nifty, awesome Sci-Fi Friday this week, if I have to hunt down an actual robot for it.

I have a fever alright? And it was grocery shopping day, and then my husband wanted to go out for a date and...

Do you need more excuses, or does that cover it? Can I talk about Malefecent now?

I know technically it's not Sci-fi, and even if it were it wod be better suited to Wednesday... It's 10:28 on a Friday and I'm an I'll person. Take what you can get.

Which isn't going to be much. There's no adequate way for me to tell you about this movie without a seriously epic amount of spoilage. Just go see it, it's worth the ticket price. 

So...um...tie in. Right. 

Somewhere back a ways I talked about the "boo-hiss-man evil" trope in science fiction. Apparently I forgot it was a thing in Fantasy too. Or I think maybe I internalized it in fantasy. So much of that revolves around how precious the earth is I don't notice the correlations so much. Which makes me wonder if there's a more nuanced accounting in Sci-fi and I just havent found it yet. Any suggestions?

Okay, the sicky is going to bedfordshire now. Leave your comments/suggestions/fever dreams down in the thingy.

“A book's a strange thing. It's ideas, feelings. It's fragile and complicated. You can't make them like refrigerators or cars.” 
                                                                                                   ― Étienne Davodeau, Les Ignorants

I got my first professional edit letter this weekend. And I was all set to tell you about how that was going for Well Written Wednesday. Not that I had the first clue what I was going to say yet. That was the plan.

And then Maya Angelou died Wednesday.

I spent most of Wednesday and a good portion of today trying to find something to say about that, and at this point I think I'm just accepting that brevity is the soul of wit. 

She's one of a very few select writers who get credit for getting me through my teens with a manageable, almost normal, amount of angst. Someone who made me understand the power of a universal story, and the visceral reality of the human condition.

My world was a better place for her being in it. That's probably the nicest thing you can say about anyone you don't actually know.

Photo from here under this license.