One Word Interview with Randy Lindsay

Today, we welcome Randy Lindsay, author of the LDS speculative novel, The Gathering. Welcome, Randy!

You've been set down in the middle of your latest book. Weapon of choice?
Faith

Amazing answer! I had never thought of faith as a weapon before, but yes.

What one trait do you have in common with your main character?
Doubt

I think all our characters reflect the deepest parts of ourselves.
 
What historical figure would you most like to have lunch with?
William Shakespeare

Love it! Can I come too?
 
We are holding a banquet in honor of your awesomeness. What are we serving for dessert?
Ice Cream

A man after my own heart.
 
What fictional world would you most like to live in?
Narnia

See? There you go again. Just what I would have chosen. :)

Thanks so much, Randy!

Randy Lindsay is a native of Arizona. From an early age, his mind traveled in new and unusual directions. His preoccupation with "what if" eventually led him to write speculative fiction. According to his wife, "everything is a story to Randy." And it is. The Gathering is his first novel, but he has been published in a variety of science-fiction and fantasy anthologies. He lives in Mesa with his wife and five of his nine children. If you want to find out more you can check out his website at RandyLindsay.net.

Robert Williams didn't expect an early honorable release from his mission, but upon his return home, he sees the reason for the surprise decision. Unemployment, rampant violence, and frequent food shortages have put the United States on the brink of another civil war. As the threads of society unravel, the Williams family must adapt to drastic changes as the long-foretold gathering begins to take place.

One Word Interview with Sarah E. Seeley

Today, we have Sarah E. Seeley, author of Maladaptive Bind for a Halloween-themed One Word Interview. Welcome, Sarah!

Trapped in a monster movie! Which character are you?
I would be Evelyn from The Mummy. She's honest, smart, a little bit clumsy, and she totally cracks me up.

Heehee. Good choice.

What quality do you have in common with your main character? 
I'd like to think I have Angela's determination to face and overcome my inherent character weaknesses for the sake of my (future) children.

 That is an excellent quality to possess.

What historical figure would you most like to have lunch with?
I'd love to have lunch with Charles Darwin. I think we'd be good friends. 

Interesting! I'll bet you two would have a great conversation.

The little goblins are coming Trick-or-Treating. What candy are you handing out?
Mwahaha. Probably the first thing I'd hand out are the full-sized boxes of Jr. Mints that have gotten hard since we bought them as movie contraband a year ago. Then I'll hand out the good stuff (gotta save the best for last, right? Make sure there's enough bite-sized Twix and Snickers left over as an excuse to eat them myself). You can blame my dad for these tactics, haha. Just kidding. I'll probably mix a couple of NEW random bags of goodies of no particular preference. That just sounded way too boring by itself, so I thought I'd make it a little more intriguing. Although, I'll probably still swipe a few treats for myself... ;-)

That was more than one word, but I'll let it slide. I always swipe a few treats for myself. How else am I going to get any?

Alone in a haunted house! What's your must-have item?
I feel I must have my cello. Nothing keeps the ghosts and ghouls at bay like good music.

I never would have thought of that, but it's perfect!

Thanks so much for joining us in the writing chair today, Sarah. Have a happy Halloween!

Sarah E. Seeley is a speculative fiction writer who worked with dead sauropods and ancient odonates while acquiring her BS degree in geology from Brigham Young University. She hopes to study more dead things in the future and contribute to scientific discussions about what makes life on Earth so amazing. In the meantime, she explores the bright side of being human by writing dark fiction.


Angela Thornley doesn’t know why she’s still alive. When park rangers found her, she couldn’t speak or move, let alone remember what the serial killer, “The Man,” did to her and her husband before he buried them alive. At least, not until she hears the social workers talk about putting her five-year-old son, Blake, in a foster home and she feels his little fingers slip from her hand.

Determined to function so she can protect and care for her son, Angela works hard to unlock and heal the dark memories of her kidnapping buried deep in her subconscious. But her journey leads to unsettling discoveries about the darkness she harbors in her own soul. Due to an unknown combination of genetic and traumatic triggers, Angela is beginning a rapid, painful transformation. The anger that kept Angela alive is also driving her to dangerous thoughts of retribution on the man that killed her husband and broke her spirit.

Soon, Angela begins attacking innocent victims she believes are “The Man.” As she struggles to cope with her transformation, she must determine how far she is willing to go to protect her son and avenge her wounded psyche before she becomes the very sort of monster that bit her.

Maladaptive Bind, is an LDS psychological thriller with a speculative twist, available as of October 3, 2013 in paperback on Amazon and electronically just about anywhere ebooks are sold.

Out of the Comfort Zone

Well, I survived teaching at Write Here in Ephraim. I think it went pretty well. I felt like I was talking too fast, and didn't know if I made sense half the time, but the people attending seemed to like it all right. I think. That was my Science Fiction and Fantasy class. I took a lot of what I said from the Writing Speculative Fiction posts I did. Only one person came to my Finding Time to Write class, but she and I had a nice discussion.

It was good for me to get outside my comfort zone like that and stretch myself a bit. I think I learned more about how to make a presentation interesting and how to get people involved. I'll do even better next time.

Another stretching moment came this week when I submitted my second novel (a sequel to Defenders of the Covenant) and she politely asked me to cut it by 20k words if possible. Really? 20,000 words is a whole lot to come out of a novel! But I want to see it published, so I am taking the challenge. Yesterday, I started hacking. And hacking. And hacking. It got it down by 26K! That should give me the room to add what I need to put all the pieces back into a coherent whole again. You know what? I think it's going to be a better novel for it.

What have you done to step outside your comfort zone lately?

Writing Speculative Fiction: Part VI--In Conclusion

I'm going to do a series of posts on speculative fiction for a class I'll be teaching at an upcoming writing conference. Hope you all will find some value here!
I admit I'm biased, but I think speculative fiction is one of the funnest genres to write in. It allows you to stretch your imagination to the limits. To dream up every possibility and even every impossibility. Speculative fiction can take to the ends of the universe and back again, or to places that exist only in our dreams. You can ride a dragon, travel through a black hole or talk to a centaur. It's a versatile genre too. You can write romances, mysteries, thrillers, adventures, historicals and more that all fall under the speculative fiction umbrella.

Perhaps the reason that I love spec-fic so much is that it gives us a chance to view the human condition through a completely different lens, and in reading about beings and places entirely different from our own, we gain insight into who we are and what it means to be human. So I say, "Long live speculative fiction!"

What are your feelings about speculative fiction? Why do you love it?

Read: Part I--What is Speculative Fiction
Read Part II--Difference Between Science Fiction and Fantasy
Read Part III--Rules for Writing Speculative Fiction
Read Part IV--Exposition 
Read Part V--World Building

Writing Speculative Fiction: Part V--World Building

I'm going to do a series of posts on speculative fiction for a class I'll be teaching at an upcoming writing conference. Hope you all will find some value here!

I think we can safely define speculative fiction as fiction about the world as it isn't. As it might be. Not the world as it is. That makes world building so crucial. You want to create a setting that is believable, consistent, and so richly detailed that your readers will feel like they are actually there.

You need to know the geography, the history, the culture, the customs, the rules that govern the technology or the magic. The symbols that speak to the people you have created. The way the air feels. The way it smells. The way the light falls. In other words, you need to create every detail for yourself so you know the world as well as you know the world you live in.

There are many different ways to go about creating your world. Draw maps, draw pictures, create models, write down descriptions... Really, anything you can think of. My favorite method is to daydream about the world, all the irrelevant bits that won't go into the story, until I feel like I know the place well enough. Use your imagination and have fun. This can be one of the most enjoyable parts of writing speculative fiction.

A word of caution, though. Readers don't need or want all the details that you have created. In fact, too much description of the world gets boring pretty fast. You have to pick and choose which details to include. Those which will drive the story along. Those which give the reader enough of a taste of the world that they'll be able to fill in the gaps with their own imaginations. Little details go a long way.

Really, I think world building is a large part of the appeal of speculative fiction. It's wonderful to be able to dwell for a while in a new or far-off place, or even somewhere close to our own world, but just different enough to give us a whole new perspective.

What are your favorite world building tricks?

Up next: Part VI--Conclusion

Read: Part I--What is Speculative Fiction
Read Part II--Difference Between Science Fiction and Fantasy
Read Part III--Rules for Writing Speculative Fiction
Read Part IV--Exposition

Writing Speculative Fiction: Part IV--Exposition

I'm going to do a series of posts on speculative fiction for a class I'll be teaching at an upcoming writing conference. Hope you all will find some value here!

Exposition, or the explaining of things, is a tricky part of any genre, but with speculative fiction it presents some unique challenges. You've created a whole new world here. There is so much that the readers won't know about it and need to understand in order to get the story, right? History, customs, culture, magic systems or advanced technology, not to mention all the back story that brought your characters to the point where the story starts.

You may think it's necessary to dump all this information on your readers right up front, so you can get the story going once they're up to speed. Not so. You must resist the urge to info-dump on your readers. Nothing kills a story dead quicker than opening with a bunch of exposition and no action, characters, nothing.

There are better ways to handle this dilemma. I've discussed some of them in a previous post, if you'd like to see some specific ideas. It's a fine line to walk, though, because you also don't want to leave your reader with too little information to figure out what's happening. You have to learn the art of dropping in tidbits here and there, like bread crumbs on the path. As I mentioned before, speculative fiction readers like to discover these things for themselves without having it spoon fed to them. It has to be handled with finesse, and the best way I know of to learn how is to read a lot and to practice a lot. The more spec-fic you write, the easier the exposition becomes.

Do you have any favorite techniques for imparting information to the readers?

Up Next: Writing Speculative Fiction: Part V--World Building

Read Part I--What is Speculative Fiction

Read Part II--The Difference Between Science Fiction and Fantasy

Read Part III--Rules for Writing Speculative Fiction

Writing Speculative Fiction: Part III--Rules for Writing Speculative Fiction

Of course all the normal rules for good writing apply to speculative fiction (and you can read about those rules here if you like), but there are some others to consider if you want to write science fiction or fantasy--and all their myriad sub-genres.

Know Your Audience: Okay, this one applies to all writing, too. When you are writing speculative fiction, you need to understand that your audience is bright, curious and looking for something to ignite their sense of wonder. They like to figure things out for themselves rather than have it handed to them. You should not talk down to your spec-fic audience. They hate that. You have to go easy on the explanations of things or they'll get irritated and stop reading. I'll go into the handling of exposition in more detail in another post.

 Know What's Already Out There: I suppose this is true for any genre also. You need to know what's already been done in the speculative fiction world so you're not just rehashing old ideas. Of course, there are never really any new ideas, but you have to give those ideas your own fresh perspective and you can't do that unless you know what perspectives have already been done to death. Reading speculative fiction, and lots of it, is basically the only way to accomplish this.

Internal Consistency: When writing speculative fiction, you're going to create a whole new world, or perhaps it will be our world, but with a different set of rules. Your world must be consistent with itself, or your readers will hate you. Your technology must function the same way all the time. Your magic must operate by the same set of rules all the time. Your readers have to willing suspend their disbelief, and it is hard to do that if your world doesn't abide by it's own set of rules. World building will also be the topic of a near-future post.

So, any other speculative fiction rules I might have missed?

Up next: Writing Speculative Fiction: Part IV--Exposition

Read Part I--What is Speculative Fiction?
Read Part II--The Difference Between Science Fiction and Fantasy

Writing Speculative Fiction: Part II-The Difference Between Science Fiction and Fantasy

I'm going to do a series of posts on speculative fiction for a class I'll be teaching at an upcoming writing conference. Hope you all will find some value here!

 As you can see from my last post, speculative fiction covers a wide array of genres. Today, I'm going to focus on what are, in my opinion, the two main branches of speculative fiction, science fiction and fantasy. The two have some similarities and some differences. Let's take a look at each.

Both sci-fi and fantasy deal with the world as we don't know it. In other words, they both speculate about what could be different from our known reality. At it's simplest, difference between the two is that sci-fi deals with aliens and spaceships, fantasy deals with wizards and elves. That's an oversimplification, but it does work.

Science Fiction deals with science and technology. What could possibly be out there that we just haven't developed or don't know about yet. I've heard many times that science fiction has to have some aspect of science so intrinsically tied into the plot that if you remove the science, you have no plot. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is the oft cited example--perhaps the world's first science fiction novel. That is true, if you want to give a strict definition, but I find a lot of leeway in most novels that clearly fall into the science fiction realm. If it's set on another planet, deals with aliens, takes place in space, deals with technology or society of the future (or even an alternate past), then it's sci-fi in my book.

Fantasy deals with magic of some sort. It's not considered scientific or technological. It's a power that usually only certain people possess. Fantasy can be set in medieval times, modern times, or even in the future, on Earth or some other world entirely, though usually the world is more like an alternate earth than another planet out in space somewhere. That's not a hard and fast rule, though. This is an art after all, not a science. ;) Fantasy often deals with non-human creatures who are native to the earth/world of the story--not aliens from somewhere else.

Of course, there are many flavors of both sci-fi and fantasy, and many times the two are blended and can be hard to separate or classify. To me, that is one of the strengths of speculative fiction. It's inclusive. It's adaptable and it's fun!

Next up: Part III--Rules For Writing Speculative Fiction

Read Part I--What is Speculative Fiction?

Writing Speculative Fiction--Part I: What is Speculative Fiction?

I'm going to do a series of posts on speculative fiction for a class I'll be teaching at an upcoming writing conference. Hope you all will find some value here!

Speculative fiction, according to Wikipedia, is: "an umbrella term encompassing the more fantastical fiction genres, specifically science fiction, fantasy, horror, supernatural fiction, superhero fiction, utopian and dystopian fiction, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction, and alternate history in literature as well as related static, motion, and virtual arts."

In other words, speculative fiction is the type of fiction that speculates about something contrary to our known reality. Speculative fiction answers the question, "What if?". 

What if we had faster-than-light space travel?

What if aliens visited Earth?

What if magic were real?

What if dragons existed?

What if a natural disaster destroyed civilization as we know it?

The possibilities are limitless, once we willingly suspend our disbelief. I think that's why I love reading, watching and especially writing speculative fiction so much.

What are your thoughts on what constitutes speculative fiction?

Up next: Part II: The difference between science fiction and fantasy