Author: R. Jean Mathieu (Page 3 of 21)

Philosophy (in a Teacup): Joe Gremillion

16 March, 2024 / R. Jean Mathieu

In this edition of Philosophy (in a Teacup), I sit down with author, community organizer, and NaNoWriMo leader Joe Gremillion. Joe Gremillion spends his time writing and critiquing fiction, leading local hikes, and photographing landscapes. His website, like his novel, is in perpetual development. But if you don’t mind the figurative sawdust then head over to www.joephotos.art.

Thank you for joining us! Tell us more about your book/ series/ short story work.

My sci-fi novel in development tells the story of people from conflicting ideologies who learn to see each other’s side. Pressure’s on as the antagonist exploits an ecological disaster and people’s fears. It started with a different premise — or more like a challenge. How many boring sci-fi tropes could I tweak, break, or parody? But over time it turned serious and led to some new ideas.

Why do you write speculative fiction? / What is speculative to you?

I’ve enjoyed reading about distant worlds since I was knee-high to a tribble. How would people adapt to a world whose day lasts nine hours? How do you enforce laws when everyone can vote by flying to a different planet? On an airless moon, is making air a type of farming? What are seasons like when you have two suns?

These aren’t real, or even realistic. But they’re based on contemporary physics, which gives them a connection to our world, our lives. Even better, “contemporary” is the crucial qualifier. When I started writing stories, we assumed that other stars had planets but didn’t know for sure. Now astrophysicists have a list of more than 3,000 and some are beyond anything we thought possible. Reality keeps challenging imagination.

Where do you find inspiration for your stories?

I’m an introspective sort. Many of my ideas come from juxtaposing absurd ideas and asking questions. My favorite is to play either “five steps of what if” or “five steps of why don’t.” A bit of worldbuilding from my novel began with, “what if space stations didn’t have outside walls?” I asked myself five times before coming up with a concept that did more than reinvent space habitats. It also created the basis for my novel’s premise.

“What if” and “why don’t” works for story concepts too. The Planet of Hats trope is useful in a short story or single episode, but got I tired of entire cultures defined by one trait. So one day I juxtaposed two ideas: “why don’t Klingons wear t-shirts?” Laugh if you will, but that was my first step. The second was, why don’t Klingons have self expression?” Then, “why don’t we see Klingon artists? Or plumbers? Or hair color specialists? It is a good day to dye.” Extrapolating on humorous ideas led me to create a caste-based system with unique beliefs and history from which two of my MCs hail.

Earlier I mentioned two protagonists with conflicting ideologies. This caste-based society was the second. But the more I developed the second, the more I changed the first to contrast against it. From Klingons wearing peace-sign shirts came, “what if self-expression was compulsory?”

What is your favorite sci-fi, fantasy, or horror trope? / What is your favorite sci-fi subgenre?

You may have noticed that I don’t like tropes themselves, but I have a few go-tos. The Fish Out of Water Character is always fun (and useful when introducing readers to strange new worlds). The Mentor/Apprentice or Jaded-Soul/Eager-Explorer pairs often appear in my stories. Binary stars — a classic. The Hero’s Journey is a solid framework … but lately I’ve started exploring the Heroine’s Journey too. And then there’s the old favorite: Peter’s Evil Overlord List.

What is your favorite speculative fiction book (besides yours)? / What is your favorite speculative short story?

My current favorite is Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. I enjoyed how it balances explaining science while advancing the plot; two unlikely characters who make assumptions that baffle each other; how the story unfolds using the ol’ “amnesia” plot to let the story unfold naturally.

What is your favorite unusual speculative fiction story? / What is the most unusual story or book you’ve written?

Hard to answer that with anything except The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. But there were others:

I was too young to understand Stranger in a Strange Land when I read it. It qualified as “unusual” to me at the time. Same for Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
Looking back, three books opened my eyes to unusual environments: The Integral Trees, Heart of the Comet, and Rendezvous with Rama. They’re not unusual stories, but much of my writing depends on the setting so these were influential.
The Starless Sea.
And one unusual yet notable nonfiction mention: In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language

What is the world you long to see?

Mine. I’ve slogged away at this for years. I love it and I hate it and I’ve quit it three times and it won’t leave me alone aarrrrgh.

Join Project Outreach! Joe Gremillion said so!

How do nature and your photography influence your writing?

Not much. I enjoy landscape photography but see it as a separate hobby. Although it does change my perception of the world. And the vast array of our natural world is incredible, when you think about it. How insects fly is amazing. It’s also fun to see how photographers capture different photos of the same person to tell different stories. Photography tech keeps advancing, which is often overlooked in sci-fi worldbuilding. If someone invents, say, an antigravity device, we rarely see its failed prototypes — much less offshoots, spinoffs, or surprise applications.

(What if we turned an antigravity device upside down? Would it double gravity? Imagine a gymnasium where weight lifting and aerobics were the same thing. Hmm, where’s my pen?)

So except for changing my perceptions, inspiring alien ecologies, observing human behavior, and adding dimension to worldbuilding by watching technology advance, what have the Romans done for us?

Bonus question: Novels or short stories? Which do you prefer to read? Which do you prefer to write?

Novels. Definitely. Endings are my personal antagonists, and writing novels keeps them further away from me than short stories.

Three Tools of Writing: Writing with Cadres

8 March, 2024 / R. Jean Mathieu

As I discussed in the introduction, Orson Scott Card is a terrible human being. He deserves the condemnation he’s got over the past twenty years. But he’s also the guy who wrote Ender’s Game, and, what is better, Pastwatch and “Unaccompanied Sonata.”

And he’s the guy who wrote How To Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, which is still on my shelf.

I wouldn’t trust him with my teenage daughter, but I trust him to know how to write, and keep writing.

Example stories: Mazghunah, The City Sunk, The City Risen

Among many other interesting (and sometimes dated) advice, in How to…, Card talks about what he calls the MICE Quotient. MICE stands for

Milieu
Idea
Character
Event

This isn’t, like so many others, a way to figure out what story to tell (he has other chapters for that, as do we), but rather, to figure out how to tell it. And that is an altogether subtler magic.

Because so many ideas, so many stories, can be told as any of them, and it’s up to us as writers to pick the one that best suits the kind of story we want to tell, and how we want to tell it. Let me introduce them.

Milieu

A milieu is a place, a setting. The conventional structure for this is “story begins when protagonist comes to the place, ends when they leave (or decide to stay).” All portal fantasies (including Wizard of Oz, Peter Pan, and Flash Gordon) are milieu stories. A whole lot of other stuff can happen while the protagonist is there (defeating a Wicked Witch and unmasking the Wizard, for example) but the promise the story makes at the beginning is that the end is when the protagonist either stays or goes.

Idea

An idea story starts with a question, and ends with an answer. Card cites a lot of Golden Age SF that basically romanticized the scientific method, I’ll go ahead and cite literally all mystery novels instead. No Time starts with the question, “who kills Gooch?” And although there’s a lot of fate vs. free will philosophy and a romance with his wife and a temptation with Maria, the story ends when Gooch gets his answer. Same with Sherlock. Same with that hot popular TV show about the detective/doctor/policeman confronted with a strange occurrence and tasked with figuring it out and solving the mystery.

Character

A character story, in Card’s view, is a story where the protagonist starts in one place in society and either winds up in another or gets stuck where they are. They can either be happy or unhappy about their initial place, their ultimate destination, or both. It starts when the character realizes they’re unhappy (either because their life has just been taken from them, or because they just can’t take it any more). This can be a bride who gets cold feet but ultimately decides to go through with the wedding, or a Horatio Alger hero who goes from rags to riches, or Raskolnikov going from prospective murderer to repentant sinner.

Character stories are subtle stories, and can make great subplots, too, because the story happens inside a person – how their actions and perceptions change, even if the external world does not. Many generational stories and immigrant tales, taking the family itself as the character, are character stories as they find their place in society and either accept that place or start the cycle of struggle over again.

Event

There is a rent in the world, and someone has to fix it. This can be the emergence of a Ring of Power and awakening of a dark lord, or a flood swamping the town, or the death of a patriarch leaving a power vacuum. We can learn things, people can change, but the beginning and end of the story is “the thing is broken” and “the thing is now fixed.” Characters can remain static – Card cites Indiana Jones, but ultimately his literary forebear Doc Savage is the perfect example. Someone has ground Prosper City to a halt and at the end Prosper City lives up to its name again – and Doc is the same rich globe-trotting knight-errant as ever.

The power here is that each of these frames provide different spectacles, in the French, different cadres to run the story by. Let’s work an example.

Let’s say I have in mind a Doña Ana Lucía story, where she goes to the zeppelin-cities of Lakshmi to recover the Jade Monkey from an old flame and restore it to Firstdown Colonial on Prithvi. The old flame has turned evil, and not only won’t release the Monkey, but tries to kill Doña Ana Lucía for it. However, a more dangerous enemy emerges seeking the Monkey, killing the old flame, leaving Doña Ana Lucía to avenge their death and escape with the Monkey (and a ton of regrets).

A neat plot, but it’s not really a story yet, is it?

If I wanted to play this as a milieu story, that’s simplicity itself – Doña Ana Lucía arrives on Lakshmi, conducts all her business there, cradles her dying ex in her arms, bewails the senseless death, confronts the killer, and …leaves. Circle opens, circle closes. Very useful if I want to play up how she’s a fish out of water, or take a tour of the place from the eyes of a newcomer, or maintain an outsider’s eye on the action as it proceeds.

If I wanted an idea story, the ultimate fate of the relic would remain in doubt for a long ways into the story. It would open as soon as Doña Ana Lucía asks “where is the Jade Monkey?” and end only when she lays eyes on it, over all the bodies she had to leave to get there. This would be an altogether murkier and more noirish story than the milieu version, which could be fun if I wanted to play with the relationships and ambiguous characters, and focus on Doña Ana Lucía’s intellectual prowess in cutting through all the fog and mystery to the truth behind it all – no matter who it costs her.

If I wanted to do it as a character story, I’d have her start after the Jade Monkey …but ultimately seek reconciliation with the old flame. She’d have a friend or idol decision, and likely fail it, having that moment of reconciliation only as the ex lay dying in her arms, and spend the rest of the story avenging their death to atone for the lost years they could have had together. If she gets the Jade Monkey at all, it will be a Pyrrhic victory and a bitter taste in her mouth. The focus of the story would be on the attempted reconciliation – and the vengeance to follow, with the Monkey increasingly incidental.

If I wanted to do this as an event story, the Monkey would have some kind of cosmic significance – the centerpiece of the Jade Scholars’ Hall’s museum, her museum, and she’s a laughingstock unless and until she gets it back. Or it rightfully belongs to the tribe descendant from the artist that carved it, and they are not really a people without it, and justice demands she retrieve it for them. She can romance her ex, narrowly evade death, avenge them…but the story ultimately ends when she returns the Monkey to where it belongs, stands back, and sees how the world has been put back in place.

I have written all four of these. I have written all four of these with la Doña. It takes a bare-bones plot description (and sometimes not even that) and makes it into a story, with color and shade and focus. It’s a set of spectacles, and I can take up the red ones and all appears bloodied or the yellow ones and all appears honeyed. I see different things from each view, and choose the ones I want to wear while I work this particular plot, this idea.

Take one of your own stories, one of freewritten children of a Bradbury list as breathed through Goldberg, and try on different MICE quotients on them before you parcel them out in quarters like Dent. See how many stories you can tell out of one magical noun in a list.

Next time, we’ll bring it all together.

Doña Ana Lucía Serrano y la Caja de Venuswood (cover art by Kim Schmidt, cover by Melissa Weiss Mathieu)

“Doña Ana Lucía Serrano y la Caja de Venuswood,” by R. Jean Mathieu

1 March, 2024 / R. Jean Mathieu

That’s right. After years of preparation, Doña Ana Lucía Serrano’s first adventure, “Doña Ana Lucía Serrano y la Caja de Venuswood“ is now available! Get your copy today!

The taste of her goodbye kiss lingered on Doña Ana Lucía’s lips as they threw her over the drumhead.

In this thrilling installment, Doña Ana Lucía Serrano falls into the clutches of interplanetary heiress Anni Talavalakar, whose venuswood box contains a secret that could implicate half the Six Worlds of Earth! But how are the sinister criminal Syndicates involved? Blackmailed by a mysterious figure, Doña Ana Lucía will need all her wits and skill to avoid death by a Syndicate bullet or dishonor over the interplanetary airwaves.

Will she succeed?

Can she succeed?

Find out, in the pages of “Doña Ana Lucía Serrano y la Caja de Venuswood!”

Lester Dent - the man for writing staccato

Three Tools of Writing: Writing Staccato

16 February, 2024 / R. Jean Mathieu

This is the guy that wrote all those luscious descriptions of Doc Savage’s physique.

“No yarn of mine written to the formula has yet failed to sell.”

That’s the promise Lester Dent makes, second sentence of his Pulp Paper Master Fiction Plot.

Dent’s little essay packs a surprisingly limber, versatile formula for storytelling – a bit like a slim Swiss Army knife. It doesn’t apply to everything (you can’t very well write a “two people sit at a table and talk” type of sci-fi story with it – at least, I can’t) but what it does apply to, it does the job very well, and you have a great deal of fun writing it.

If writing free is the path of inspiration and surprise, the Master Pulp Formula – writing staccato – is the path of fun.

Example Story: Doña Ana Lucía Serrano y la Caja de Venuswood (Lady Ana Lucía Serrano and the Venuswood Box)

On the face of it, it just sounds like some other guy’s Save the Cat model. Start in media res. Introduce all the characters. Show, don’t tell. In a 6,000-word story, you have to hit an action scene and a plot twist at every 1,500 words.

But, there in the descriptions of the “different things” that would be “swell” to have the villain doing for this story, there’s

“IS THERE A MENACE WHICH IS TO HANG LIKE A CLOUD OVER THE HERO?”
Lester dent

I defy you not to hear that in Howard Cassell’s voice. Walter Winchell’s at a stretch.

I got to admit, that’s what first hooked me. The lingo. The jive. That breezy thirties style.

But, underneath that, there’s a powerful engine of storytelling in here, or, rather, of yarning. Because this is a method of building the kind of story where characters act, things happen, and by the end, something large or small has changed in the world. Stories of any length, depth, or complexity. Stories like solarpulp.

To begin with, it is not limited to 6,000 words. Indeed, I’ve only rarely managed it in 6,000 words, most of the stories I write in this métier average 14,000 words. It’s the proportions that matter:

A quarter of the way in, the hero has an action-packed confrontation (suitably scaled up or down to the size of the story at hand) and a twist and setback that keeps them from finishing it then and there.
The hero gets more grief, mainly not their own fault, and gets into another conflict halfway through. And it should be a different kind – if Doña Ana Lucía drew her sword and dueled at the first quarter, let her give chase or get pinned to a firefight now.
In the third quarter, the menace grows thicker and darker, and a mirror of the first quarter twist leaves the hero with almost no hope of success. The action may retreat for most of the last quarter, but the menace and tension mount until the hero is “almost buried in his troubles,” then, and here Dent emphasizes, “the hero extricates himself with HIS OWN SKILL, training or brawn.”
After the climax, the hero clears up any mysteries and we close on a final line, “the snapper” that leaves the reader with the intended takeaway feeling.

These outlines or master formulas are only something to make you certain of inserting some physical conflict, and some genuine plot twists, with a little suspense and menace thrown in. Without them, there is no pulp story.
Lester dent

This structure applies to novelettes, too. It applies to movies – let me take Raiders of the Lost Ark:

“First line, or as near thereto, introduce the hero and swat him with a fistful of trouble.”

Indy is betrayed before we even see his face, and then repeatedly by his remaining colleagues, infiltrating the temple of the Hovitos. Then, of course, Belloq shows up and chases him out. All this in the first ten minutes.

“Hero’s endeavours land him in actual physical conflict near the end of the first [quarter]…there is a complete surprise twist development.”

The destruction of the Raven Bar (and Marion’s triumphant, angry “I’m your goddamned partner!”) comes at almost precisely the one-quarter mark of Raiders. And with Sallah and “the boss German, Dietrich” introduced less than a minute later, all the players are on stage.

“Another physical conflict […] a surprising plot twist to end the [second quarter] […] Does the second part have SUSPENSE? […] Is the second part logical?”

Sallah captured, Indy and Marion trapped in the Well of Souls by Belloq and his Nazi friends, who now have the Ark. This kicks off one of the greatest chains of action scenes in all of American cinema, the escape from the Well of Souls, the Airplane Fight, and the Truck Chase. Although the action-packing is heavy (and lesser creators than Lucas, Ford, and Spielberg at the height of their powers would have made it drag), the timing is still there – the twist that they’ve been discovered comes just before the halfway mark, the snakes just after.

“A physical conflict […] a surprising plot twist, in which the hero preferably gets it in the neck bad […] The hero finds himself in a hell of a fix.”

After the extended action sequence ending with the Ark, Indy, and Marion aboard the Bantu Wind, the conflict at the end of the third quarter is understated – it’s a suspense scene, rather than an action scene. Dietrich and his men storm the ship, take the Ark, re-capture Marion, and Indy is barely hanging on by a strap to a Nazi sub. He has to hide, skulk, and disguise himself, and meanwhile we find out they’re not going to Berlin – why not? What is Belloq planning?

“Get the hero almost buried in his troubles […] The hero extricates himself by HIS OWN SKILL.”

Indy challenged Belloq, holding the Ark ransom for Marion, but he relents, and is captured to witness Belloq’s moment of triumph. Does Indy wriggle out of the ropes and take on an entire division of armed Nazis? Well. No. He escapes the fate of those who look into the Ark by his own skill – heeding all the warnings he’s got since the pointer scene that the Ark is not for human eyes or hands and shutting his own eyes and, critically, passing this on to Marion, too. He didn’t get out of the ropes with his own skill, but he got out from the wrath of God that way, and that’s a damn sight bigger.

“The snapper, the punch line to end it.”

I don’t really have to say it, do I? The government warehouse. The Ark was lost, then found, and now, symmetrically, is lost again. Cue John Williams.And it applies to novels.

Take Dune, for example.

The first quarter conflict is Yueh’s betrayal, the fall of House Atreides, with the twist being that the Fremen are far more than anyone (even the Duke) anticipated. In the middle, we have the knife-fight with Jamis, and the revelations of the source of the spice and the Waters of Life. The third quarter, the action is Paul riding the worm and the twist that now is the time for his strike against the Emperor and the Harkonnens. The final confrontation is the knife-fight with Feyd-Rautha, the twist being that Paul has given himself to the coming Jihad. The final line is a bit weak, but the rest of the book’s strengths more than make up for it.

But in a novel, you need something more.

This wasn’t the case for Dent. Each Doc Savage novel ended with Doc much the same as he was before – the globe-trotting do-gooder, Trouble Buster, Inc., the Man of Bronze. He is unchanged for all his adventures, a bronze statue, and even when Monk quits smoking, or Ham acquires a pet monkey, or Doc acquires a cousin, it doesn’t change them. They learn nothing, for they already know all.

That doesn’t satisfy. Not anymore.

The folks over at Rampant Games, in their exhaustive How to Write Pulp for Fun and Profit, explore the pulp character arc. Building on Dent’s model, they introduce the standard pulp hero character development – the hero initially starts out seeking a false goal, start incorporating a better/truer goal, plan to go back, and ultimately commit to the truer goal in the end. This opens up possibilities. Consider Temple of Doom: Indy lights out after the Shankara Stone (for fortune and glory), discovers what’s happened to the missing children, frees them (while still collecting the Shankara stones), and uses two of them to defeat the villain who enslaved the children and returns the last to its home village – giving up the fortune and glory that would have come with it.

Now back to Dune. Paul seeks vengeance for his father’s death and his rightful place as ruler of Arrakis. He glimpses a vision of the jihad to come and the Golden Path, and works to avoid it while continuing to pursue his vengeance. But, here, Paul fails the character arc – when his son is killed, he pursues his vengeance to the hilt, rejecting the “truer goal” of avoiding all the havoc, chaos, and bloodshed it entails.

Indy’s is a triumphant pulp arc. Paul’s is a tragic one.

In any story of action, you can have the protagonist choose to embrace or forsake the higher calling that comes along in the course of pursuing their base goal. The idol, or the friends we made along the way? And many a villain putting a hero in that perilous position had a journey like that once of their own, one that, like Paul, they failed. Every sinner has a future and every saint a past, isn’t that so?

Finally, it’s not limited to just action. Romances often work to the same tempo as Dent’s most testosterone-poisoned pulps. Consider Pride and Prejudice…

Those of us who are into boys can contemplate Mr. Darcy aaaaaaall daaaaay…

…the second ball (where Elizabeth verbally fences with Darcy before he lights off for London with Bingley) and the sudden departure leaving Jane in the lurch are the end of the first quarter, Darcy’s first proposal (and the contents of his letter) and Elizabeth’s rejection are the confrontation at the end of the second, Lydia’s surprise marriage to Wickham caps off the third, and Elizabeth’s confrontation with Lady Catherine and reconciliation with Darcy round the book out. The action, here, is relational – conflicts between people and between people and their own hearts, where the “surprise per page” is in the repartee and the conflict is handled with words (or subtle gestures) and not fists.

I leave it as an exercise to the reader to consider how to apply action, twists, and climaxes to erotica.

Next time, we’ll wind it up with the last of my three tools: Orson Scott Card and his magnificent mice.

Three Tools of Writing: Writing Free

9 February, 2024 / R. Jean Mathieu

The two most influential non-fiction books on my writing career are Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing and Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. I got introduced to both in those halcyon days of my homeschooling, when I launched my first magazine and sent in my first story and won 3^rd place in the Ray Bradbury contest from seven states away. And, from that first magic hour between eleven and two in the morning, powered by Pepsis, cheese sarnies, and the Blade Runner soundtrack, they’ve always gone hand-in-hand in my mind.

Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg.

Zen in the Art of Writing, Ray Bradbury.

Both books are collections of short essays, approaching writing from different angles in each, but often singing the same hymns in new variations. Both sing of the passion of writing, of the great giddy joy of watching the words unfold onto the page. “I wind them up and watch them go!” exclaims Bradbury in his perpetually ten-year-old voice. “Set your fingers on the keys, lay your head back, and just let it flow” says Natalie Goldberg in the weary voice of a Midwestern Zen master, before enthusing about how the computer will wrap around your words so you don’t have to reset the typewriter. Both are delighted to be startled, awed by sudden insight, adherents of a mystical (dare I say Zen) approach that comes at storytelling as the prophet comes to the Divine, and like the prophet must describe the indescribable, and put into words what transcends all words.

Example stories: Hull Down, The Short, Strange Life of Comrade Lin

Bradbury comes around again and again to his lists of words – free-association and psychological outpourings of nouns and phrases. I’ve come to calling them “Bradbury lists.” Here’s one I free-associated recently:

The glass miles. The glass acres. The electric chimneys. The chimneys of the sun. The snow gardens. The gardens of the north. The inheritance. The trust. The shrinking inheritance. The trust under glass. The oncoming storm. The glass inheritance. The wildfire. Fire on the snow. Hot, Wet Canadian Summer. The slush. The broken ice. Plants or power? Guns or butter? The chimney and the arpent. The plants and the plant.

But what to do with them?

Peer at them.

Bradbury looked deep into “The Ravine,” and saw there a memory, the tickle up his back as a young boy raced home in the darkness in Waukegan, Illinois in 1928. I let my own mind flitter over “the Diction-fairy” and wondered what such a creature could be. Other times, amidst “the corals” and “the fishery,” saw “the city sunk, the city risen,” and asked, what city had it been? How had it sunk amidst the corals (as clearly it had, based on where in the paragraph it was)? And how did it rise again?

Then, something …catches. I have no other word for it. Like the dust in a nebula converging, like a child quickening in the womb, like a spark in the kindling, something catches and lives. The idea takes on life and begins to spark all on its own. I look at “the Diction-fairy” and I can hear Mom describing her to the narrator, feel the rush of childlike hope in his heart, and then it’s off to the races. And a race it is, you have to be fast to catch an idea that’s taken off in your head, get down the bones of it, sketch out the size of it, even just gently touch on the magnificent thing you have just witnessed inside your own skull.

And that’s where Natalie Goldberg comes in.

As Ray returns to his lists, Natalie returns to her pages, the freewritten stuff every morning and whenever she needs it after. You can see it in the rhythms of her (never more than a few pages) essays, the sway of her hand when she wrote them longhand into those silly 99c Tweety Bird ringed notebooks. She doesn’t stop to correct her spelling or her grammar or her diction – indeed, it’s a sign that something has broken through, something come alive, if the rush of word-idea-flow-motion is too quick to be caught by mere English. Shocking phrases jump out, stark truths that are somehow comforting for being true and naked, insights into her life or her writing.

The poet’s credo is to “write drunk, revise sober.”

This is the drunkenness.

“Writers don’t drink because they’re writers. Writers drink because they’re writers who aren’t writing.” – Natalie Goldberg

I call it “writing free.” From sitting in stillness, like a good Quaker, allowing nouns to rise, recording them on a page or a document (anything, as long as it’s blank. It’s important that it was blank) to the contemplation of one or another as they call out to me – here a memory, there a nameless sensation, there the echo of a voice I almost heard once – and watch them play off each other, catch fire, burst into sun, quicken into life, and take off! And I’m racing off after them, across Natalie’s ever-forgiving blank pages, the new living thing turning phrases and turning ideas and turning up laughter until I arrive at the end of the story…

…when a soldier’s life meant something, when it never did the first time…

…when the Song of Seikilos sings out forever from the sun…

…when the Diction-fairy turned out to be real…

…when Eli Shipley abandons Tchang to his fate…

…when the dead Dyson sphere begins to knit, slowly, imperceptibly, back together…

And I am shocked. Sometimes I laugh. Sometimes I cry. But never did I expect how that one would turn out!

And the beauty of it is, neither did anyone else.

Back in 2022, coming out of a long, dry stretch, I wrote of “angels from the Id.” When writing free works purest, finest, that is what it is. It is something that really does touch transcendence, allows me to write something greater than myself, greater than the reader. And a handful of times, it comes out perfect on the first try.

But when it doesn’t, I go and make love to my wife, read Les Misérables to my daughter, do karate, read the latest Asimov’s. And the next day, sober, I sit down to edit. There is nothing sacred about words. They can be cleaned up, moved around, refitted, if it makes the story better.

It’s just that, sometimes, when you write free…the story is sacred, and it infuses the words with a power you never held alone.

It’s almost Zen.

Three Tools of Writing: Introduction

2 February, 2024 / R. Jean Mathieu

Ringo Starr, personal hero, 1964. Seen here with Paul's grandfather. He's a very clean old man, inn'e?

REPORTER: “Are you a mod or a rocker?”

RINGO: “Er, no, I’m a mocker.”

Are you a plotter or a pantser?

A shower or a teller?

First-person or third-?

Are you a Shaker, a Quaker, a candlestick-maker?

The whole damn writing community defines ourselves by our strictures. You write fantasy, I write science fiction. She’s literary, he’s genre. Are you profic, antiship, a twit, a bookstagrammer?

Let’s us draw lines in the sand and pick a side, it’ll be great sport!

Except…

I write science fiction, fantasy, horror, and under other names, romance, Westerns, erotica, mysteries, thrillers, and men’s pulp. I take great pride in it. Each genre strengthens the others.

QUERY: Are you a plotter or a pantser?

ROSCOE: I’m all three.

Welcome to R. Jean Mathieu’s Three Tools of Writing.

Over the next few weeks, I’d like to walk you through some of the ways I write stories. I say “some of the ways,” because no two stories are the same, and because the tools are always the same. I don’t scream on Twitter how all you need to fix a bed is a hammer, or how all cabinets should be built with screws only. (I scream about other things on Twitter, thank you very much.) Instead, I look at the job, pick the tool I think is right for the job, and try it. If it doesn’t work, I’ll try a different tool – and a different way of approaching the story.

I have three tools that I come back to again and again, well-worn and fitted, after twenty-five years of constant use, to my hand. They are:

Bradbury’s lists (and Goldberg’s free hand)
Dent’s Master Pulp Formula
Card’s MICE Quotient

I’ll be going into each in detail over the following weeks, but here’s the short version.

Ray Bradbury’s free-association lists, in my mind, are bound forever to Natalie Goldberg’s free-writing notebooks. Ray conjured out of the air lists of nouns, nouns that became memories, or notions, and which burst forth into characters or conceits and finally into stories. Many of his classics still bear the stamps of their birth – “The Veldt,” “The Pedestrian,” “The Long Rain.” And Natalie Goldberg, a poet of my mother’s generation, believed in the truth of freewriting, of allowing the words to race across the page without censure from our conscious minds. Hell, I’m doing it right now. Both believed in the bones of stories, letting these hard, firm truths thrust upward and outward to startle and inspire us. And, taken together, they have written me stories that made me weep.

Lester Dent’s Master Pulp Formula is just that – a formula for writing a pulp yarn of six thousand words, applicable at sixteen thousand or sixty thousand, believe you me. It’s a formula for keeping everything in proportion – so your story doesn’t start dragging in the second quarter, or rushes unsatisfactory toward a crashing climax. And, with a sufficiently loose definition of ‘action,’ you can apply it to startling results to romance, erotica, or Westerns, too.

(And remember, per the Snowflake Method, it’s not really an interesting story until the third perspective enters the page.)

Orson Scott Card is a terrible human being – but, confoundingly, also a very good writer. He’s not the only one, not even the only one on your bookshelf. And, before I knew what a terrible human being he was, I read his book, and his method of writing – the MICE Quotient – is too good a way to write for me to thrust away. What, then, is your story? How do you frame it? Is it coming to a place? Or is it asking a question? Or fixing a rent in the world? Or struggling against your place in the world? The power here is that any one idea – a person, a place, a mere notion – can become different stories depending on which avenue you pursue, how you choose to frame it.

Here they are, three tools, three totally contradictory ideas about writing, about art, about storytelling. And I use them all.

Because each could be the right tool for the given job.

Join me, over the next four weeks, as I show you how to use my three tools for your writing job.

"Scars of Satyagraha." Cover by Melissa Weiss Mathieu.

“Scars of Satyagraha,” by R. Jean Mathieu

26 January, 2024 / R. Jean Mathieu

First time available solo, here’s “Scars of Satyagraha,” originally published in The Future’s So Bright.

Reader reviews:

“Excellent.”

“A touching tale of gender, choice, and, as Mathieu says, ‘mafia movies.'”

Whenever I skin, I go down to one of those Yoruba tattoo parlors and get a cut on my left knee, so it heals into a crescent-shaped scar. I got the original scar from some sharp black-lichen, playing footie out beyond Dangote-dome in the boy’s body I was born with. But I wear the scar now to honor my father, my Babuji, Arjun Chaturvedey. He died for his scars.

As the sun sets on Indo-Nigerian Mars, the red planet’s shadowy alleys come alive with crime and corruption. American crime, and Yankee corruption. But for Sami Chaturvedey, the daughter of an upright Brahmin judge, it’s a romantic and blood-pumping life filled with Old West values and Old West quick-guns.

That all might change for Sami when she meets Michael Cambridge, the paternal and charismatic Lieutenant of Martian organized crime – the Yankee militia.

Sami is torn between her father’s expectations for her to uphold the law and her own desires to explore the gritty world of organized crime. But as she delves deeper into the dangerous underworld, she begins to question everything she thought she knew about justice and truth – about satyagraha.

Will Sami choose the path of righteousness set by her father, or will she succumb to the allure of the Cowboy Code and its promise of power and freedom? As her loyalties are tested and secrets are revealed, Sammy must make the decision that will define who she is.

For fans of Pierce Brown’s Red Rising series, ones who’d like to see a Mars that’s a little brighter and a little nobler, “Scars of Satyagraha” will suit them like a fresh new skin. Don’t miss out on this visionary read – get it today!

Love, Death, and Mirrors, or, What Makes a Good Twilight Zone

19 January, 2024 / R. Jean Mathieu

...and the sort of man you picture introducing...the Twilight Zone.

Melissa and I recently got way into Love, Death, and Robots, which is at turns terrifying, heartening, enlightening, and blood-pounding. Every new episode is a collection of roulette rounds. Will this be a funny episode starring the three robots? Stylized CGI about sirens? A neo-noir Strange Story from an Artist’s Studio? Who knows?

That’s half the fun.

Meanwhile, I’ve seen Black Mirror. At least some of it. They all get a bit repetitive after awhile. They’re always trying to be as slick as Mad Men, as deep as Breaking Bad, and always gunning for that highest of awards in science fiction – fans who use words like “prescient” and “spookily accurate” in describing the show, as if they were John Brunner back from the dead.

In my business, you need to be at least familiar with Black Mirror and its most famous episodes (like “San Junipero” and “White Christmas”). Much like Rick and Morty, they’re sometimes-interesting takes on very familiar themes (Philip K. Dick moves, robots/AI making humanity obsolete, social currency). They’re even, I’m told, Great Television.

Great Black Mirror may be, but I don’t think it’s that good. Not as good as Love, Death, and Robots anyway.

But let’s talk about their shared grandfather: Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone.

The Twilight Zone, for those who grew up after Syfy stopped doing the New Year’s Day marathons, is an incredibly influential science fiction anthology show. Hosted by its executive producer, Rod Serling, with his patented deadpan delivery and nice dark suits, The Twilight Zone featured “One Weird Idea” style science fictions, character studies, fantasy stories, and adaptations of Golden Age sci-fi literature.

It’s one of those shows that, even if you’ve never seen it, you’ve seen it. The Simpsons regularly drew from The Twilight Zone, especially in its heyday, teaching a new generation “to serve Man,” that “there was time now!,” reminding us that the monsters are due on Maple Street, and teaching us to fear small children with psychic powers in ways Stephen King could never manage. Almost everyone knows the twists at the end of each of those episodes, and the associated iconic images: that opening, Anthony Fremont using his power, the breaking of a man’s glasses in the apocalypse, a horrible creature on the wing of a plane and an anxious man inside watching him.

This is what Black Mirror wants to be, and why it fails.

Because The Twilight Zone, like Love, Death, and Robots, has room to breathe. The Twilight Zone’s five seasons are studded with exactly the kind of chilling, prescient, haunting tales that Black Mirror aspires to, but there are also episodes about masks that make you ugly underneath, magical mirrors, and at least three about returning to childhood. There are retellings of the phantom hitchhiker, the man who visits a grave and dies, Sunset Boulevard, and “An Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge.” I lost track of how many deals with the devil there are (one of which inspired The Good Place). There’s one episode that’s a hilarious over-the-top anti-gambling PSA, for God’s sake!

All this stuff is beneath Black Mirror’s dignity – some of those plots they wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole. Part of that is British brevity – with only three hour-to-90 minute episodes per season, and maybe a special here and there, they can’t afford to waste an entire episode on a conceit like “a man sees his confident, debonair self in a hotel room mirror.” And most of the joke episodes wouldn’t stand the strain – some episodes struggled to keep the momentum going for thirty minutes, and the hour-long format of Season 4 all but destroyed The Twilight Zone for good.

But some of it is the approach. By aiming exclusively for The Twilight Zone’s top tier of memorable episodes, Black Mirror misses what made Twilight Zone great. Not every episode can be “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street,” and they shouldn’t be. I can’t imagine Black Mirror doing “Nightmare of 30,000 Feet,” “The Howling Man,” or even “Time Enough at Last.” They’d consider it “not serious enough.”

You know who I can imagine doing it?

Love, Death, and Robots.

The first three episodes, in this order, are: a gritty rape-and-revenge with Pacific Rim creatures, three robot tourists exploring the high school after humanity, and a mind-trip time-loop of two people constantly killing each other in the Kowloon Walled City. Some of our favorites include “When the Yogurt Took Over” (apparently Maurice LaMarche can do an Orson Welles impression? Who knew?), “Zima Blue” (the aforementioned meditation on the color blue), and “Ice Age” (neatly refuting the Twilight Zone episode it was clearly based on). Those are all in the first season – three radically different themes, animation styles, tones, and approaches. But they all feel like they’re part of Love, Death, and Robots, just like how “Nightmare at 30,000 Feet,” “Nick of Time,” and “A Nice Place to Visit” all feel like the Twilight Zone…as opposed to other shows from that era, like Lost in Space, Tales of Tomorrow, or The Outer Limits (which came closest but, like Black Mirror, suffers from its own demand for ironic cruelty…or just cruelty.).

Is the next episode gonna be three robots just kind of tooling around in post-human Earth? A hilarious and moving milSF pastiche? Mechs vs monsters with rednecks? Who knows? We’ll find out!

Because anthology shows need that kind of room to breathe. They need the freedom to do shitty episodes – even mediocre ones – and ones that are just straight-up strange (is there a point to “Nick of Time”? No, not really. Fun, though!). The point of an anthology, or an anthology show, is to try things out – and if you can’t sometimes fail, you’re not really trying new things, are you?

Which is why I think in ten years’ time, we’ll look back on Black Mirror as a beautiful and slightly sterile product of its time, like Lost or The Good Wife…

…and the next Black Mirror will be trying to compress all the best episodes of Love, Death, and Robots into a three hour season.

“Archives,” R. Jean Mathieu

12 January, 2024 / R. Jean Mathieu

“How are you today, Mr. Gedde?” The archivist asked. The old man in a box turned toward the sound with liquefied eyes.

“Who’re you?” He asked. The archivist sat down next to the box, in the warm morning sun coming through Mr. Gedde’s hospital window.

“Still Amir Safavi, Mr. Gedde.” He said, thumbing through his paperback. It was going to be a long visit. “Do you remember when I came in yesterday? We talked about birds.”

The old man in a box let out a hoarse laugh.

“I remember I saw a little brown and grey thing, whistling a pretty tune like a nightingale, this morning on my way to the factory.” He said, smiling. A sunlit memory, a break in the clouds that had settled on Gedde without his knowing God knows how many decades ago.

“I know, Mr. Gedde.” The archivist said. “You came home and told your family about it. They wept for joy when you said it, because it meant you had remembered something.”

And they hadn’t come to see him since. Just the archivist, making his rounds, paid to talk the old bodies and worn-out minds out of their stuck memories. The geriatric drug kept them alive, certainly, but the pseudo-Alzheimer’s still took its nasty toll. The old man frowned.

“Did I?” He said. “I don’t remember that.”

“Didn’t think you would.” The archivist said, finding his page. He wondered who was visiting his grandparents.

“A beautiful sound, rustling paper.” The old man said. “I don’t like the datalinks or the holos, some things are eternal, like books…who needs a holo about formal logic, or of Shakespeare or the Holy Bible? I remember telling Rudy he was a damn fool for buying one of those computer-bibles they had for ten dollars at the dollar store…”

“Would you like to talk about the news, Mr. Gedde?” The archivist asked blandly.

“Why bother? It all just repeats anyway, says the same thing, over and over.” Mr. Gedde said, his wrinkles massing into a scowl.

The archivist looked up, hopeful for just a moment. There was a chance, however slight, that a Rerentol patient would reverse, begin to learn anew, beat back the demon degeneration that ate at all of their minds eventually. A renaissant…

Mr. Gedde had seen centuries. If all he could see were those old centuries, like a barely-living exhibit, they’d send him off to the museums. But if he could see the present, as well as the past…

“Once, Jan switched it to the news during…one of the elections…and the man was talking about a new deal, a great society, so I took my shoe and I threw it at the screen…”

The archivist sighed, and went back to his reading.

“I wonder if she’s still sitting and staring out the kitchen door…” The old man wondered aloud. One wizened hand idly twitched at a life support cord.

“Your wife is dead, Mr. Gedde.” The archivist said, looking away from the withered body in the box. He folded his book in his lap.

The silence dragged on. It was almost worse than Mr. Gedde’s endless Grampa Stories.

“I think you might be better off that way.”

Still not a word.

“My wife, I think she’s seeing someone else.” Amir said in a burst. He clapped his knees together around his hands, steadfastly staring at the wall. “My brother. He…we live together, and she and I…it hasn’t been fights so much as we’ve been …living apart, in the same house, if you know that one. She’s going one place, I’m going another, and he seems to be where she’s going. There’s so many times they’re on the couch together watching a holo and I’m sitting off on my seiza cushion reading a book…”

He looked down at the paperback in his hands. He couldn’t make out the title any more, and he couldn’t remember.

“Do you love her?” Mr. Gedde asked.

“…Maria?” Amir said absently, lost in thought. “I…I think I did, once. I … don’t know. Any more.”

“You did love her, or else it wouldn’t hurt so much now.” Mr. Gedde said. “Remember that and hold onto it. You did love her. You’re going to have a hard time through this, whatever you do. But remember, more for yourself than for her, that you were once kind to each other, even if you can never be so again. And if you must go, go. Don’t let convenience stop you.”

Uncontrollably, a memory from her room, when they were just kids, and Maria was laughing and he pulled her close and laughed with her. The archivist and the old man met eye to eye, and the archivist saw a spark there.

“Don’t turn out like me and Jan.” Mr. Gedde said.

The archivist felt a cool prickling across his skin.

“Renaissant.” He whispered. The old man blinked, his milky eyes covered over and the spark gone.

“We had three children.” He said. “Did I ever tell you about them?”

The archivist just smiled.

“Yes, Mr. Gedde.”

“Joan and Jay, they live in Ohio.” The old man said. “And Patrick’s a go-getter in New York. We lost Simon in the Iraq war, still don’t know what for, don’t matter anymore…”

The archivist sighed. The process would be slow, and uncertain, and he would have to tell Mr. Gedde many things about 2319, and endure many more Grampa Stories…but Mr. Gedde had seen the present. And that was enough for now.

SOLARIS 223, featuring Geneviève Blouin's "The Secret Lives of Shellwomen"

“The Secret Lives of Shellwomen” by Geneviève Blouin, tr. Margaret Sankey

5 January, 2024 / R. Jean Mathieu

SOLARIS 223, featuring "The Secret Lives of Shellwomen" by Geneviève Blouin

When I saw that one of the eligible pieces for this year’s Nebula Awards was a short story, originally in French, I had to check it out. And double when I found it was published in Solaris, and even won the Prix Solaris when it was first published in 2022. It found print in English this last year in Year’s Best Canadian Science Fiction.

Best Canadian science fiction? In French? Sacré ouais!

And I am so glad I did.

This story is so wonderfully, enchantingly weird.

Geneviève Blouin (Fr.) weaves a weird little story a bit like so: The shellwomen are a kind of molluscoid mermaid – normal women (as near as I can tell) from the waist up, built like snails from the waist down. They are proud of their expansive shells, where their men and children shelter, of their warm, fleshy folds, and the milk of their breasts. Their community has a kind of fragile traditional communality – the guides of the clans are obsessed with whether they’re group-oriented enough, baskets are filled by friends and neighbors if there isn’t quite enough, they even regulate their population by trading men, shellwomen, or the poor unfortunate “slugs” (grown women with legs) with neighboring tribes. But things are afoot, and the shellwomen may have a very different future before them than the one they’ve known, caring for the children, sunning on the beach, and sheltering their clans.

Despite the title, the focus isn’t really on the shellwomen themselves, but on one of their men (or harvestmen, as they are called), Manuto. Manuto is, I don’t have another word for it, hapless – he’s a terrible leader (or “guide”) of his clan (always picking the worst assignments, because he’s too honest to maneuver for the good ones) and hidebound in his ways. He loves his shellwoman, Hina, and his children – why, his eldest daughter’s thighs are already becoming stiff and enlarged, she’ll soon form a cocoon as her foot forms! So it’s with a great deal of shock that he hears the chief advocating the rights of “harvestwomen” over the shellwomen.

Honestly, my only complaint is that the extended focus on Manuto as the main character kind of gives the shellwomen, and their secret lives, the shrift. The ending feels abrupt, and although, yes, logically all the pieces were there, it still feels like it came out of left field. This is a minor quibble, though – Geneviève Blouin is no Neal Stephenson, and the ending is still, mostly, satisfying.

The theme that emerges, on rereading the story, is this is a story about power – the power between the shellwomen and the harvestmen, the powerlessness of the “harvestwomen” (whom Manuto thinks of as “slugs,” an older and harsher word), the power of chiefs over clan guides, even the power of politicking and horse-trading, of charisma. The chief exerts charismatic power over Manuto to compromise him, and when this doesn’t work, effortlessly replaces him as guide with his brother. It only occurred to me after that the brother’s desire for a second shellwoman (because of course a new man like him thinks of collecting ‘em all, unlike his old-fashioned brother) is not long for this world. The shellwomen appear to have power over the harvestmen – after all, the harvestmen work to collect greens for their herbivorous mates, and, as the chief puts it, “all they do is watch the children and laze around all day in the sun.” – but the other side of that coin is the power to deny them their food. And the shellwomen have their own power, a real power, to counter that threat the harvestmen can hold over them. Plans within plans within plans, and all sewn up in under 8,000 words.

It feels like a strange new story that still tastes of all those Silver Age Best Ofs and paperback anthologies that I grew up. I could see this story in Dangerous Visions or something edited by Lin Carter. It gives me some hope for my own more grounded, earthy, and earnest science fiction, the stuff like “Glâcehouse,” “No More Final Frontiers,” and “The Voluntolds of America.” And yet, I could not have written anything so wonderfully, enchantingly strange as all this. Like “Rabbit Test,” this was a story that could only be written, or translated, by women.

For the folks at home, pick up Year’s Best Canadian Science Fiction, Vol. 1. If Margaret Sankey’s translation of “The Secret Lives of Shellwomen” is any indication, it really is the year’s best. And for any voting SFWA members reading this – nominate “Secret Lives of a Shellwoman.”

(right after “The Voluntolds of America,” of course)