Guest Blog: Architects of Abandoned Cities by Chandler Klang Smith

Steven Millhauser’s novella “August Eschenburg” concerns itself with an inventor of performing automatons – a groundbreaking forefather in a field of entertainment that was in short time surpassed by animation and the movies. Historically, Eschenburg’s art form represents the road not taken by popular culture, but for Eschenburg himself, clockwork is the lens through which he sees the world, the only means of communication that can convey his secret heart. A life in which he ceases to build automatons is without meaning or passion. I find figures like this character fascinating, poignant, even haunting. What happens to a person who thinks in a dead language? What happens to an artist whose art form goes out of style?

In a way, my novel poses this same question about the American circus. Set in the 1960’s, when traveling shows of this kind had long since seen the heyday of its relevance, Goldenland Past Dark concerns itself with two characters for whom the big top is the essential forum for personal expression. The first, Dr. Show, is an impresario past his prime, driven on by ego and delusion even when it becomes clear that the public will never resuscitate the corpse of his career. The second, Webern Bell, is his protégé, a talented and damaged young man with a questionable grip on reality, who finds the emotional landscape of his life only navigable through the surreal clown acts that come to him in dreams. Both characters find peace only in the center ring, but tastes and trends leave them alone in its spotlight, performing for no one. The title of the novel comes from both men’s spiritual home, an abandoned amusement park called Goldenland that they visit one dark and lonely night – a place of faded laughter, long forgotten by most, created decades earlier by a famed toymaker named Kingsley Golden. Walking among its dilapidated rides is like entering the ruined civilization of another man’s mind.

As a fiction writer in the era of glimmering tablets and effortlessly streaming virtual immersion, I wonder if I too am the tyrannosaur offspring of an extinct world. I suppose only time will tell.

Chandler Klang Smith is a graduate of Bennington College and the Creative Writing MFA Program at Columbia University, where she received a Writing Fellowship. She lives in New York City. Goldenland Past Dark (ChiZine Publications, March 2013) is her first novel. Learn more about her at www.chandlerklangsmith.com, or find her on Goodreads at www.goodreads.com/Chandler_Klang_Smith.

Guest Blog: Killing Them Quietly by Ian Rogers.

When asked to describe the type of stories in my debut collection, Every House Is Haunted, I tend to pause and try to think about how exactly I should phrase my response.

It would be easy to say the book is a horror collection, but it wouldn’t be entirely accurate. Yes, some of the stories could be classified as “horror,” but not all of them. Some are thrillers or mysteries with a supernatural bent.  One of them, “The Tattletail,” about a kid with a pet demon, would even qualify as young adult.

I prefer to call Every House Is Haunted a collection of dark fiction, which is still a copout of sorts, but it’s also the only way I can describe the ground covered in the 22 stories that make up the book.

This is not to say that I shy away from the horror label. I’ve seen some authors blow a gasket when someone has dared to call them a “horror author.” You’d think they’d just been told they smell bad. Which makes sense, I guess, since those writers who avoid the horror label tend to do so because to some readers it does have a kind of stink on it.

I don’t mind calling myself a horror author, and I certainly don’t mind if someone else refers to me in that way. I’ve gotten over the urge to follow it up with: “Oh yes, I write horror, but not that kind of horror.” By which I meant pointlessly gory horror, with two-dimensional characters and the kind of plots (I use the term loosely) that are more interested in the body count than telling any kind of story.

Although I consider myself to be a fairly big Stephen King fan, when it comes to my own work, I often cite authors like Shirley Jackson and Charles L. Grant as influences. Grant especially with his brand of “quiet horror,” eschewing the “gore for the sake of gore” tales that made up so many books during the horror boom of the 1980s. Which is not to say that I don’t like the occasional gory story. But that doesn’t mean these tales can’t be executed with a certain sense of style. Take, for example, the work of Clive Barker, one of, if not the best, writer of graphic horror fiction.

Grant is also the one credited with using the term “dark fantasy” to differentiate between his brand of “quiet horror” and the gorier variety. While I appreciate Grant’s need to distance himself from those stories, “dark fantasy” is not a term I’d use to describe my own work, mostly because “dark fantasy” is an actual genre to some people, usually referring to tales of high fantasy (knights, wizards, dragons, etc.) with a strong horror element.

I think “quiet horror” is a much better term, both in general and to describe the stories in Every House Is Haunted. After all, when it comes to haunted houses, whether it’s Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, or a “real” one featured on an episode of Unsolved Mysteries, what better way is there to describe the horrors that always start out so innocuously.

At least the horrors start out quiet. The screaming comes later.

Ian Rogers is a writer, artist, and photographer. Every House Is Haunted (ChiZine Publications) is his first collection. A second collection of stories, SuperNOIRtural Tales, featuring supernatural detective Felix Renn, is forthcoming from Burning Effigy Press. For more information, visit ianrogers.ca.

Website - everyhouseishaunted.com
Twitter - @onemoreshadow
Facebook Author Page - http://www.facebook.com/supernoirtural

Guest Blog: Inspiration: When the Chafe Point Strikes a Spark, or what made the idea for a story into the maverick signature for a series by Janny Wurts

Janny Wurts is the author of numerous successful fantasy novels, including the acclaimed Cycle of Fire trilogy and The Wars of Light and Shadow series. She is also co-author, with Raymond E. Feist, of the worldwide bestselling Empire series. Her skill as a horsewoman, offshore sailor, and musician is reflected in her novels. She is also a talented artist, and illustrates many of her own covers.


A writer doesn’t draw their explosive ideas from the comfort zone. Passionate fire is more likely to flare from the stacked deck of discontent, and the vivid disappointments encountered amid the shattering experiences of life. How better to escape, as a middle child, from two older brothers who were bigger and stronger, and two younger sisters who tended to tattle when the tastier adventures involved a foray into the forbidden? And where better to stray off limits with safety, than to immerse in a work of fantasy? I gorged on faerie tales and mythology, since fantasy then was not as widespread, or as readily available.

Then, didn’t the stereotype grate on my nerves, that over and over again the ‘hero’ was a blond, always handsome and tall, and the bad guy  was the sardonic sneak, inevitably with dark hair? And didn’t it sting, for a young brunette reader, that this profile carried over into movies, cartoons, and at times, even, to prejudice in real life?

I can honestly say that ranting annoyance seeded the original story concept: that the Wars of Light and Shadow would take this maddening, blinded cliché and stand it upside down with a vengeance. Oh, I’d play with the irony – the pretty, charismatic blond HERO-type would appear to hold all the right cards – but with two sides of the argument involved from the start, the little, introspective ANTAGONIST-type would in fact take the readers’ sympathy by storm.

Although the cookie cutter type Quest against a Dark Lord was prevalent at the time, I chose not to write my epic story in cast iron form. Along with the irritation just listed, Tolkien’s world building had set the bar. First thing I set off to build an original world, the history and the setting. Too young to have experienced enough, for me, this also involved biting off an enormous chunk of life experience: I embarked on exotic travel, offshore sailing, period re-enactment –  ‘the epic’ became the excuse to experiment with every possible sort of fun to lend the action a facet of realism. I went overboard – literally – determined to bring the epic battles up to a benchmark standard. This involved research in depth, studying war and tactics from about the Roman era up to the point where gunpowder changed everything. Within the world just created, with about five interlocking approaches to magic, the various periods had to be ‘mixed and matched’ to fit a place and time that is not our earth. I watched movies, spent late nights chatting with historical war gamers, energized on enthusiasm, Earl Grey Tea and sugar high from Coca-Cola.

Then came The Moment – the spark – the life-changing crucible of experience that threw every concept I thought I had into meltdown. I attended a screening of a documentary film on the Battle of Culloden, re-enacted and shot in black and white, and depicted with all of the layers of ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ romance, stripped off. No flinching from the horror, as a small, ill equipped band of Scottish clansmen stood in the mud and sleet, being ripped apart as artillery fire pounded them down, from uphill, while their commanding officers failed to give the order to charge. I went into that dark theater naive with conviction, and came out in a head-spinning state of upheaval and shock. Sad to say that nothing in my life had prepared me for the gristly reality that is war.

All the worse, because overlaid on the facts I’d acquired, the horrific realities of The Battle of Culloden Field in fact were no different than any of the other armed encounters I’d studied (Roman era up to the emergence of gunpowder). History as taught in our classrooms was too often glossed over with sanitized lies. The news depicted by papers and networks became exposed, at one stroke, as grotesquely biased and over simplified. Movies, entertainment, and worst of all, epic fantasy  perpetuated the distortion: war as told by the victor and glorified as a heroic endeavor inculcates the concept that might makes right. How tidy, that bloodletting causes are made clear, that one side is ‘wrong,’ the other is ‘better than’ and that the world’s sorry inequities find a just redress.

Left out of the picture: the misery, the brutality, the sheer bloody havoc that repeatedly solves nothing at all – that the winners of any conflict at arms had either: superior numbers, superior tactics, better weapons, or sheer dumb luck. The justifications that survive tell us nothing about what each side gave their lives for. We examine all too little from multiple viewpoints, take little stock of the cultural misunderstandings, and too often choose to turn the blind eye to the inequities never redressed, but glossed over until the nuance got steamrolled with death and ruthlessly eliminated.

Chafe point met spark with an impact that exploded every concept I had in the making. I have never again regarded the news, or a story, or a work of entertainment the same way. Life shifted to a quest to seek understanding, with recognition that right and wrong have many angles of view. Differences are messy, and the  entanglements offered by ideologies fall far short, and truth is not absolute, but many-faceted. Nine volumes later, from Curse of the Mistwraith to Initiate’s Trial, the Wars of Light and Shadows still stretches to sound the heights and the depths. To explore the qualities that comprise a hero, then shift angle, and encounter the very same virtues precipitating a downfall. Balanced thought is about embracing change, and continuously expanding awareness. I can hope that this series, now two volumes from ringing in the finale, continues to break the polarized concept of black and white. That human beings are both good and bad, light and dark, expansive and fallible, selfish and altruistic – and above any other thing, richly inventive.

A series written over decades of life is bound to accumulate other chafe points along the way. Today’s fashionable penchant for grim-dark dystopia surely has sparked a personal backlash. I prefer the stance that loss of hope is ‘the enemy’ rather than the foibles and fallacies of human nature. Let Athera be a world where you might want to live, filled with causes that, but for the grace of knowing multiple sides of a conflict, will not flinch from difficult questioning of the pat answers. May the tables be turned, not once, but many times, and as a last flip off to the laziness of quite a few of my respected peers – let me never EVER rely on the cheater’s tactic of cliffhangers!

Guest Blog: Seeking the Distant Hills Within by Daniel A. Rabuzzi

This month ChiZine Publications (CZP) published my second novel, The Indigo Pheasant, the sequel to 2009's The Choir Boats. The characters in both books concern themselves with finding a place outside our maps, a place called Yount. Whether they satisfy their longing is something I will let readers decide for themselves. In this short essay (thank you again Charles for inviting me to guest-post at Bibliophile Stalker), I will instead talk about my own search for Yount. You can decide for yourself whether I have succeeded in overcoming what Baudelaire named "that fever which grips us in moments of chill distress, that nostalgia for some land we have never seen."

I began to seek Yount in 1969, when I read The Hobbit.  I was just old enough to hear the first cold voices bidding me leave what Ursula K. Le Guin (speaking of Sleeping Beauty) calls “the wilderness within.” One is thrust out of Faerie and the path of return is barred by briars that grow to the sky. For long years I did what we all do: I worked in the Here and Now, gaining experience of the practical sort, and sticking (for the most part) to the quotidian and conventional.

The melody of Yount never left me. I have worked all my life to keep my passport to that realm, to explore just a little more. Bits of Yount cropped up in the notebooks and folios I filled from 1970 forward with stories, maps, and drawings. I have held with me specific lines of dialogue and descriptive passages since college in the late 1970’s. For as long as I can remember, I have woken up before dawn to scribble down the vestiges of dreams, and drafted stories late at night and on the weekends.

Then, one Saturday in May of 2002, suddenly and without any plan whatsoever I wrote parts of what are now the first two chapters of The Choir Boats.  No one was more astounded than I was when Barnabas and his calicosh vest appeared in the counting-house on Mincing Lane, followed by the laconic Sanford…and then Tom, my dear Sally, and soon the mysterious Maggie. 

“Why now?” I wondered, and I wonder still.  I have decided Barnabas and the rest of the McDoons came knocking when they did because I had gained four nephews in the 1990’s (a fifth joined us in 2003).  As the King says to Smith of Wootton Major, some gifts are not for keeping, but must be passed on.  My nephews­ and their fathers (my brothers)­ all know something about Yount.

In the beginning and in the end (regardless of what we do in between), our stories to one another matter most.  From the shortest but most powerful story - ­ “I love you” - ­to the Mabinogions and Mahabharatas, the Kalevalas and Sundjiata Keitas and Shahnamehs that define nations.  Jean Rhys put it best:  “All of writing is a huge lake.  There are rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.  And there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys.  All that matters is feeding the lake.  I don’t matter.  The lake matters.  You must keep feeding the lake.”   

Telling a story is a humbling exercise, especially when the teller is the smallest of droplets hoping to feed the lake. The story informs you that it is ready but that you are too slow, too weak, too confused to capture it.  The author never measures up to the story’s expectations.  Even our greatest storytellers acknowledge that they are capable only of presenting us with a fragile approximation of an underlying original.  To take just one example, here is Jorge Luis Borges:

“No one can write a book.  Since
Before a book can really be
It needs the dawn, the dusk, centuries,
Arms, and the binding and sundering sea.”

The McDoons found me but their story is elusive.  Imagine strangers appearing in your living room.  More than that: strangers who aren’t really strangers, but who claim to be kin, who know more about you than you know about yourself, who make themselves free with your larder, and who then order you to find out what comes next.  That’s the slightly sinister part, that you are compelled to discover and capture the story.  The path is a dangerous one.  Margaret Atwood says all writers “must descend to where the stories are kept.”  Seamus Heaney, writing about violent epiphanies, blood, and shards of bone, enjoins us to:

“Lie down
in the word-hoard…
Compose in darkness,
Expect aurora borealis
In the long foray
But no cascade of light. …
Come back past
Philology and kennings,
Re-enter memory…”

So I descended and found the gate to memory.  I hope you will join me as together we pass through the gate, to find ourselves back home at last in the place Octavio Paz describes:

“Willow of crystal, a poplar of water,
A pillar of fountain by the wind drawn over,
Tree that is firmly rooted and that dances,
Turning course of a river that goes curving,
Advances and retreats, goes roundabout,
Arriving forever:
The calm course of a star…”

Or, as Frodo experiences it at the very end of the trilogy: “…the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.”

One big lake (a sea really, binding yet sundering), many different rivers and streams.  One Yount, many names, many roads."

photo: © Kyle Cassidy, all rights reserved

Biography: Daniel A. Rabuzzi studied folklore and mythology in college and graduate school, and keeps one foot firmly in the Other Realm.   

ChiZine Publications published his first novel, The Choir Boats: Volume One of Longing for Yount, in 2009, and in 2012 brought out the sequel and series conclusion, The Indigo Pheasant: Volume Two of Longing for Yount.  

Daniel's short fiction and poetry have appeared in Sybil's Garage, Shimmer, ChiZine, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Abyss & Apex, Goblin Fruit, Mannequin Envy, Bull Spec, Kaleidotrope, and Scheherezade's Bequest.  He has presented at Arisia, Readercon, Lunacon, and the Toronto Speculative Fiction Colloquium. He has also had twenty scholarly and professional articles published on subjects ranging from fairy tale to finance. 

A former banker, Daniel earned his doctorate in 18th-century history, with a focus on family, gender and commerce in northern Europe. He is now an executive at a national workforce development organization in New York City, where he lives with his wife and soulmate, the artist Deborah A. Mills (who illustrated and provided cover art for both Daniel's novels), along with the requisite two cats.

Novel preview links:

The Choir Boats: http://chizinepub.com/media/choir-boats/TheChoirBoats-Preview.pdf

The Indigo Pheasant: http://chizinepub.com/media/indigo/indigo_preview.pdf

Book page links: 

The Choir Boats: http://chizinepub.com/books/choir-boats.php

The Indigo Pheasant: http://chizinepub.com/books/indigo-pheasant.php

Daniel's web site: www.danielarabuzzi.com

Daniel's Twitter: @TheChoirBoats

Deborah's web site: http://www.deborahmillswoodcarving.com/

Guest Blog: Kingdom and the Human Soul by Anderson O’Donnell

 

First, I want to thank Mr. Charles Tan for offering to host a stop on the Kingdom blog tour. As an indie author, I am the mercy of readers and bloggers, so every opportunity I have to talk about my work is precious. Again, thanks Charles!

And since Bibliophile Stalker focuses on speculative fiction, I’m going to talk about the most, well, speculative aspect of Kingdom: the idea that there is a gene for the human soul.

Biological Transmitter

Rather than presenting the human soul some sort of eternal manifestation of the self—a supernatural spirit that survives our physical demise—Kingdom explores the idea that the soul is a biological radio transmitter. And, as a transmitter, this gene is always working to receive a signal—a divine transmission. Now, the exact nature of this transmission is a little difficult to define: it’s not a message, but an apprehension that there is something else there. Its rather areligious: Kingdom’s vision of the soul does not correspond to any specific theology or even a specific God. Instead, it looks back to the beginning—the very beginning—when man and his Creator were still one.

Every culture has a myth about “The Fall,” or the event when man discovered he was a being separate from his Creator. Kingdom imagines the soul is the last remnant of the original connection—something like a postcard from Eden. The effects of a fully functioning soul gene are tangible, though far from obvious. It allows us to taste those sweet moments when the world feels as though it’s aligned and everything else around us fades away and we are aware that there is something more, something we cannot express, something even the most talented wordsmiths and poets have trouble describing. But it’s undeniably there…it’s something divine, something that’s larger than anyone or anything.

And this taste, this reminder, does marvelous things to the human brain, things science is only just beginning to understand. That’s why, when the signal starts to fade a bit, you can feel that something is wrong, that something is missing—that there’s a void you can’t quite put your finger on even if, superficially anyway, you’ve got all your fucking ducks in a row. So people look for substitutes: materialism, drugs, working 20 hours a day, etc. Most of the time, these substitutes, while inflicting long-term damage to the soul, to the ability of this genetic radio receptor to apprehend the divine signal, work well in the short term. On the other hand, there are people who have zeroed in on this signal; men and women who have managed to submerge the ego and get back to that Edenic unified state, to the time before the Fall when man and the divine were one.

Replicating the Soul

As this critical gene’s function is impossible to replicate (due to its preternatural origin), KINGDOM considers what would happen if mankind bioengineered human beings with a non-functioning soul gene; in essence, if we created a human being completely severed from this divine transmission. The results, as readers of Kingdom will see, aren’t pretty.

Anderson O’Donnell’s debut novel, Kingdom, is available now at Amazon (paperback and Kindle).

Guest Blog: Oops I got History in my Fantasy (again) by Tansy Rayner Roberts

The huge recent success of steampunk has done a lot to show that fantasy fiction, even the most traditional and epic version of the genre, doesn’t have to draw purely from medieval European history, its social structures and its cultural detail.  It’s been great fun to watch the New Victoriana taking over fantasy as a genre, replacing tunics with bustles, and dragons with airships.

Though of course, we can always have dragons AND airships, which is even more fun.  We’re also getting our fair share of magical Regency, with empire-line gowns, the marriage market and Napoleonic dragons.

Using the first half of the 20th century as your historical touchstone has its difficulties.  I didn’t realise how difficult it was, of course, until I was in the middle of trying to do it.

One of those finicky world building details most likely to drive authors completely up the wall is whether we use conventional Earthly names for objects or creatures in fantasy worlds, or new words.  Of course, pretty much all the words we use have Earth derivations, and some readers (and authors) are more picky about them than others.  This is where medieval vocabulary often gets a pass, because there’s something more familiar about chatelaines and knights, paladins and princesses.

But what about the word Flapper?  One of my beta-readers protested at me using that particular word in my manuscript, because it felt like such an Earth-based term to her.  But I stuck to my guns largely because there were so few places in the book where I could drop in elements to evoke the 1920’s rather than pre-industrial historical snippets.

The Creature Court trilogy is a mash up of historical influences from various eras, but I was very firm on wanting to give it that early 20th century flavour.  But it was only very late in the writing process that I let myself include aspects of industry - Victorian style sewing machines, for instance, and trains.  So the best way to convey the 1920’s influences were through fashion, music and other cultural details, and the vocabulary of my characters.

Music was the hardest, of course.  Ever tried describing jazz in words without using the word jazz?  I tried, though I think I ended up just using the words from our world because, you know.  We have words for a reason, and sometimes the only way to access the connotations you need are by using the most obvious word.

Costume was easier for two reasons: my protagonist was a dressmaker, and saw the world through clothes; but also the magical underworld of the Creature Court was heavily reliant on appearances and theatrical presentation to augment status, which meant that I was totally justified in describing every single outfit. I talk more about my approach to the costuming side of the Creature Court over here.

I know that many people have come out of the Creature Court books having not particularly noticed the 1920’s aspects of the world building, and it works fine without being aware of that.  But if you read the books and don’t come away at least with a visual image of Livilla looking like the quintessential 1920’s vamp flapper in the red dress with sharp black bobbed hair, I’m not doing my job right!

For tone and voice, I fell back on an old writing trick that has proved greatly reliable in the past: I read fiction from the era I wanted to evoke.  You can only learn so much from factual books, but fiction is brilliant for the details they take for granted, and the casual vocabulary that their characters drop on the page.  It can influence the author almost on a subconscious level, and while I never applied the same rigour to my research as Mary Robinette Kowal (who only uses words in her Regency magic series that she is certain existed in Jane Austen’s lifetime) it can have a most pleasing influence.

I developed this particular technique quite by accident - I re-read Pride and Prejudice while writing my first novel, and there’s one scene that never quite recovered from all the unexpected formal diction and curtseying that suddenly arrived in my prose.  Later I thought, aha!  I can use that power for good, not evil.  It doesn’t work, of course, for historical eras where there are no extant novels.  But you can't have everything. 

There are many tiny world building details and dialogue tics in the Creature Court that came about because I was reading Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford novels, and even if that wasn’t the case, it’s not like time reading those authors would ever count as wasted!

I have nothing against the medievalist tradition in fantasy fiction (though I do rail rather against the faux-medievalist tradition and the overwhelming use of the less interesting aspects of medieval history in some fantasy fiction) but I am flying the flag for other historical periods to become just as powerful and influential.  We’ve made a good start with the Regency and Victoriana, but what about the neglected history periods of the world?  Where is our Egyptian steampunk, our Sumerian YA, and our 1950’s urban fantasy?

History is fun, but it’s more fun once you start adding werewolves to it.

Seriously.  Try it for yourself.

Some of my favourite recent historical mash up fantasies:

Kat, Incorrigible by Stephanie Burgis - middle grade regency romp with magic
Soulless (and sequels) by Gail Carriger - Victoriana comic urban fantasy
Temeraire (and sequels) by Naomi Novik - Napoleonic dragons
Shades of Milk and Honey (and sequel) by Mary Robinette Kowal - Regency romance with magic
Cold Magic (and sequels) by Kate Elliott - epic Afro-Celtic post-Roman fantasy with Regency icepunk, Phoenician spies and trolls I AM JUST REPORTING THE FACTS HERE.

But I'm sure many of you can make your own recommendations...

This post was written by Tansy Rayner Roberts for her Flappers with Swords Blog Tour.

Tansy’s award-winning Creature Court trilogy: Power and Majesty, The Shattered City and Reign of Beasts, featuring flappers with swords, shape changers, half-naked men and bloodthirsty court politics, have been released worldwide on the Kindle, and should be available soon across other e-book platforms. If you prefer your books solid and papery, they can also be found in all good Australian and New Zealand bookshops.

You can also check out Tansy’s work through the Hugo-nominated crunchy feminist science fiction podcast Galactic Suburbia, Tansy's short story collection Love and Romanpunk (Twelfth Planet Press). You can find her on the internet at her blog, or on Twitter as @tansyrr.

Guest Post: Are Bad Endings Good? by Guy Hasson

Are bad endings good?

Most authors would say ‘yes’. Even more would-be authors would say ‘yes’. When I was in my early twenties up till my early thirties, I would have said ‘yes’, too.

When you’re just starting out, you feel like you have a responsibility when you write. You want to fix the world, change the world, teach your readers and audience the truth so many are blind to. You want to shine the light of truth into the eyes of people who have consciously or unconsciously pulled the wool over their eyes.

When you make sure your book or story has a bad ending, you’re also telling your readers that not everything is good in the world. You’re telling them in a way that penetrates to their emotions that the world they live in is harsh and that happy endings are not guaranteed the way they are in Disney movies or most Hollywood movies for that matter. Sure, you may lose a considerable percentage of your readers if you consistently provide endings that are bad for your heroes, but the idealist in you insists that at least you told the truth to the people who listened. In some way, in some very small way, you helped change their lives and made the world a slightly better place.

When you make sure your book or story has a good ending, the idealist in you says, you’re telling your readers that there’s no reason to get off the couch and be active to change things for the better. No, happy endings are all around. You leave your reader satisfied, and so he’s less likely to become active for being unsatisfied. In giving the readers good endings, the idealist in you insists, you’re helping to keep the status quo. And that’s not your job as an artist.

But then years of experience come in. And they show you that the effect your powerful stories have is nill. Powerful political statements? Even those who agree with you quickly forget your brilliant reasoning. A year later, they forget what it was they agreed with. Showing truth to readers? Your truths are forgotten and the readers continue to live their lives of lie and wool pulling.

In truth, nothing you say sticks.

Oh, no, that’s not true. A few things do stick. If you make your readers laugh, they’ll remember you forever. If you make them cry, they’ll love you forever.

But let’s not talk about how your readers feel about you, let’s talk about whether something sticks that changes your readers.

If you give your readers an explosion of imagination, it will stay with them. Even years later, they’ll remember that they’re capable of more imagination than they normally use. They’ll return to your stories or books and read them and then play with their own imagination. Giving imagination to people takes them outside their box and in some way, in some small way, makes their world a better place.

Next: If you give your readers new experiences, they’ll remember that there is more to their world than what they experience in their normal lives. They’ll want to experience more, which leads to a specific kind of excitement, and one that spreads easily from man to friend. In some way, in some small way, you made their world (and the world at large) a better place.

Lastly: If you give your readers an explosion of emotion, they’ll remember that they’re capable of so much more emotion than they’re feeling. They’ll know that the color red is redder, that beauty can be more beautiful, that anger can be more powerful, that love can be unbelievable, that a loss is almost too great to bear, and so on. They’ll know that there’s more, and some of them will seek out that more at the expense of dreariness, drabness, and sameness. In some way, in some small way, you made their world a better place.

So are bad endings good or bad? Are good endings bad or good? As in most things in life, experience teaches us that it’s not the end that matters, it’s how you get there. If you got there through an explosion of imagination or through letting the readers live through new experiences, or if you’ve given your readers an explosion of emotion, then you’ve done good, and helped change and influence most readers’ lives in some small way. The ending really doesn’t matter.

One last thing: I have a new book out. It’s called Secret Thoughts. Check it out. It’s an explosion of imagination, new experiences, and emotion: http://www.apexbookcompany.com/apex-store/secret-thoughts/

Guy Hasson
Homepage: http://guyhasson.wordpress.com/

Guy Hasson is an Israeli writer, playwright, and filmmaker. His fiction is predominantly written in English, whilst his stage and film work is written in Hebrew. He is the author of two books published in Israel-a short story collection and a short novel-and he wrote and directed the science fiction feature film Heart of Stone in 2008. He is also a two-time winner of the Israeli Geffen Award for science fiction short stories. You can find more of his work in the anthologies The Apex Book of World Science Fiction and Apexology: Horror.

Guest Post: HED: Must-Study Sci-Fi: The Battle at Carkoon (Return of the Jedi) by JC Hutchins

JC Hutchins, author of 7th Son: Descent, will be guest blogging for today. He sent clones of Boba Fett to take over.


Hi there. I'm J.C. Hutchins, a sci-fi novelist and unapologetic Star Wars geek. I'm obnoxiously old school in my love for the franchise: I barely tolerate the Special Editions, I believe that bounty hunter Boba Fett is deader than disco (gobbled by the mighty Sarlacc, and not a "survivor" as the post-trilogy books claim), that Han most definitely shot first, that CGI Jabbas are buzz-killing bad juju, and that midichlorians are a mighty peculiar way to measure the power of the Force.

And for the love of Palpatine, lightsabers come in only three colors: blue, green and red. Purple? Bah!

I love the original trilogy. As a storyteller, I study the original trilogy. I think George Lucas and the original series' writers did a masterful job of first building a solid stand-alone narrative in A New Hope, and then figured out a clever way to extend the series into a trilogy, with compelling character arcs for several of its characters. Star Wars is certainly science fiction, but in many ways it doesn't feel like SF ... mostly because nearly every aspect of the tale has a familiar present-day analog. Religion, swords, fascism, fighter planes, lovable rogues, surly sidekicks -- it goes on and on. If only all sci-fi could be so accessible to the masses!

As a novelist, I watch for how other tale-tellers excel. In the case of Lucas and Star Wars, it's in three key areas: effectively using an ensemble cast, telling subplot-powered parallel tales with that cast, and pacing. This may be best represented in the showdown on the desert planet of Tatooine in Return of the Jedi, as Luke Skywalker and friends fight above the Sarlacc pit, a hole that likes to eat people.

If you're a writer, there's lots to learn from in that scene. I know my use of ensemble cast, pacing and action in my human cloning thriller 7th Son: Descent is highly influenced by lessons learned from this bit in the flick. I dare not do a shot-by-shot breakdown (though I've studied it that closely), but I'll share some relevant beats within the sequence so you might glean some wordsmithy value from it, or appreciate it a bit more as a viewer.

We'll start with a conversation between Han and Luke, who are held prisoner aboard a spiffy air-speedboat, traveling to their doom. Han, fresh from his carbonite block, says that his temporary blindness seems to be ebbing. Luke says he has a plan. Foreshadowing.

Meanwhile on his pleasure barge, sluggy gangster Jabba the Hutt is flirting with Princess Leia, who's chained to his throne (much to the chagrin of feminists everywhere, including myself). We've seen him give that chain a good yank or two before this sequence, so we're clearly aware that it's there. Boba Fett is presumably nearby, looking cool.

Cut to droids C-3P0 and R2-D2. Threepio, ever the selfish diva, frets that he and Artoo might be destroyed after Luke and friends are executed. Artoo replies with a series of confident bleeps: he's certain things will work out. That's more economical foreshadowing -- and the viewer doesn't pay it much mind, as the tease hails from a chirping trash can.

Finally, the air skiffs carrying Luke, Han, Chewbacca and an incognito Lando pull into position above the Sarlacc. Luke warns Jabba to free them, or else. (He's done this several times before this scene, in fact.) The villain gives a predictable chuckle, and tells his toadies to kill the prisoners. All hope is lost.

At this point, we've got three parallel stories happening here: the droids, Leia and Jabba, and Luke and friends. We don't know it yet, but the foundations of what's to come have already been built. From a craft perspective, it's all over but the shoutin'.

Tubas blare. Luke gives R2 a salute from the air skiff's plank. He performs a Force-fueled backflip, and -- boom goes the dynamite! -- R2 launches a lightsaber, which Luke catches. Plot point payoff! Luke slices and dices, and frees his comrades.

Of course, fatty Jabba won't stand for this. He belches orders to take out the air skiff. Cannons fire, and Lando finds himself swinging above the Sarlacc, screaming for help. Ever-cool Boba Fett soars to the skiff. Luke is off to take care of another threat -- a second air skiff filled with Jabba flunkies.

The scene has now diverged into four parallel stories: the droids, Leia and Jabba, Luke on the second skiff, and Han, Chewy and Lando.

Han takes out Boba Fett by accident. (I know Fett fans wail at this -- an undignified death! -- but I've always been cool with it.) We cut to Jabba, who's wigging out, blubbering like a baby. In the confusion, Leia uses the slave chain to strangle the gangster. Pow! Another plot point payoff! A death rattle for the ages!

Back to the outside battle: Things just got worse for our heroes, thanks to cannon-fire hailing from the floating barge. Lando's slipping closer to the hungry Sarlacc's maw. Han is dangling upside-down from his skiff's edge. Chewie, the ever-faithful sidekick, is saving Han's bacon by clutching to his feet. Luke leaps from the second skiff to the barge, to take out that troublesome cannon.

Luke eliminates the cannon threat. Lando is nearly gobbled by the Sarlacc, but Han -- with some much-needed humor -- rescues him. Pow! His eyesight was getting better! The tide is turning, because the music tells us so.

Now we start to see the storylines coalesce: Artoo has met up with Leia, and frees her from her chain. Threepio, whose eye was being eaten by a muppet, is also rescued by Artoo. The trio make their way to the sundeck of the barge, where Luke is still duking it out.

Within seconds, we've gone from four parallel stories to two. Pretty cool.

In one of the few weaknesses of the sequence, Luke tells Leia to aim the barge's supercannon at the deck itself. (I consider this a weakness since this laser-howitzer, while visible during the action, wasn't sufficiently foreshadowed.)

But wait! The droids fall off the barge, into the sand below. Up to three parallel stories again!

The cannon fires, Luke and Leia swing to the air skiff via a magically-appearing rope (another weakness, but if we can buy into a talking slug, I guess we'll buy this), where they meet up with Lando, Han and Chewie. Back to two parallel stories. They pick up the droids as they flee the flaming barge, which brings the team back together into one unified narrative.

And then -- in what I consider the coolest explosion in the entire Star Wars series -- the big barge goes kablooey. The second act of the movie begins.

See what Lucas & Co. did in that scene? They gave several protagonists something to do -- or something to react to -- split them up, efficiently foreshadowed the plot twists, effectively cut to each unfolding narrative to remind the audience "what" was happening "where," and then brought the characters back together through well-established character behavior (and some fortuitous circumstances). And it ends with a big fireball, as all great stories should.

Oscar-winning writing, it ain't ... but it's a damned good representation of how writers can deftly juggle multiple storylines, build conflict, and keep characters faithful to their established behaviors. If you're a storyteller yourself, check the Battle of Carkoon sequence when you're struggling with narrative. There's some spiffy lessons to be learned in those six-and-a-half minutes....