Feedback Needed!

Hi everyone!

As those of you who follow my personal Facebook page will know, I'm looking at revamping my social media presence as an author. As such, I'd like some feedback from you - yes, you, dear reader!

Some of you will read this blog on my personal Facebook, others on my author's Facebook page. Still others may read it directly from my website. I'd like to ask you take a couple extra minutes to read the below, and respond in the comments (on Facebook or Iveyink.com).

Please at a look at my website as a whole, but particularly focusing on visuals* and on the My Works page: https://www.iveyink.com/myworks (*The photo currently on the About Me page is a place holder and will be replaced sometime in the next couple months, but what colors I'm wearing will likely remain the same.)

1. What are your initial impressions?

2. Do you think the color scheme suits what you know of my personality?

3. Do you think the color scheme suits the stories on the My Works page?

4. Having read the stories, please suggest a couple adjectives or genres to describe my style.

5. Any other thoughts and feedback you'd like to offer!

Thanks, everyone! Hopefully this will provide some much-needed thought as I "tell the story of my story" online.

Future Tense

When I was in middle school and high school, I went on a medical thriller binge.  I think it started because of how much I liked Jurassic Park.  I read all of Michael Crichton's other books, and then started looking for similar authors.  Robin Cook was another one I read a lot of.

I had gotten it into my head that these were Science Fiction.  Some of them - Jurassic Park, and a Robin Cook novel about an alien invasion, definitely count.  I wouldn't understand that what I was looking for was more accurately a science/medical thriller until I was actually working in a library.

Aside from Jurassic Park, the only book I read from this period that stands out in my memory is The Plague Tales, by Ann Benson.  (Below is the review I wrote for it rereading it as an adult for my library's quarterly genre review.)

One interesting thing about this book, which took place in part in the then-future of 2005, was that the world was recovering from a global epidemic.  Air travel had been restricted - those “lucky” enough to be allowed to fly were subjected to full-body latex suits, diagnostic tests involving the drawing of blood upon landing, and, if resisting the latter, arrest.

I actually hadn't really given the "future" setting of this book much thought until I saw an article yesterday entitled "I Just Flew and it Was Worse Than I Thought," accompanied by a picture of two airline passengers in full respirator masks (for what it's worth, the article is from early May* and the accompanying photo was somewhat misleading).

*And who would have ever thought “I’m not gonna bother reading this 5-month-old, out-of-date article?”

But it also made me think about some of the assumptions made.  It seems that 20+ years ago we had more faith in how we would handle a pandemic - and specifically how willing people would be to comply with fairly stringent restrictions.  It's some food for thought.

Grocery Shopping on Mars

Every time I go to the grocery store now (which is a non-negotiable only one day a week trip), I think about the changes to my routine.

I plan what I'm wearing carefully - I wear pants with a lot of pockets so that I can take my wallet, phone, keys, and hand sanitizer without taking a purse.

I check my equipment before I pull out - do I have my mask? My hand sanitzer? My wipes?

I think about my "safe zone" - anything in the passenger seat is clean. I take my sunglasses off and put them on the seat before I put my mask on and get out of the car.

I think about my decontamination procedure when I get back to the car - what have I touched? What needs to be wiped down?

When I get home, I think about the "clean" zones and the "hot" zones. I hang my decontaminated keys by the door. I put my phone and wallet in a pre-arranged spot on the counter (on top of the old grocery list, which will get thrown away like the paper table liner at the doctor's office). I don't touch the dog or the baby. I take my shoes off. I wash my hands. I put the groceries away. I wash my hands again and wipe down the phone and the wallet. I change my clothes - it all goes in the dirty clothes hamper, not to be touched for several days. I wash my hands again before I touch Jason or the girls.

And, yeah, it's still weird and new. But I'm also starting to get used to it. I actually like the one-way aisles at the grocery store - it's easier to go around people.

Elianna may be getting used to it, too. We had exterminators come on Friday. They were wearing masks with ventilators - full lower face with big canisters on either side. Elianna, who is 10 1/2 months old, waved at them cheerfully, rather than reacting with fear. One of the exterminators (after getting over how giddy he was that our baby was waving at him) commented that this might be normal for her generation. Maybe. Maybe this "new normal" is the way it's gonna be for a while.

I try to think of it as an excursion on a strange new planet - we have to go out for supplies but we also have to be cautious about what might be in the atmosphere. Because when we have settlements on other planets - and I imagine that someday we will - safety protocol, quarantine procedures, decompression, decontamination, and other procedures that may still be a glimmer in a sci-fi writer's eye will be the norm.

History and Science Fiction

A few months ago, Jason and I watched The Terror on AMC.  It's a show based on a novel that speculates what might have happened to a British voyage to the Arctic in the 1840's.  The two ships, The Terror and The Erebus, become trapped in the ice while trying to find a navigable passage through the Arctic ocean.  At first, no one is really concerned.  They have planned for this possibility.  They have enough supplies for a journey of several years, and many of the officers have been on other arctic expeditions.  The time between episodes of the show can be months, in universe.

In one episode, the captain's wife and niece are concerned because no one has heard from the ships in a year.  The powers that be brush it off.  This is a journey that was likely to last 2-3 years, best case scenario.  Remember, we're talking about a journey of thousands of miles (traveling from England to Asia over the Arctic and then back by way of more southerly routes) during a time when a fast ship traveled at about 11 mph.

This was also a time when communication traveled no faster than a ship or a train could travel; the telegraph was a relatively new invention and, just like cell reception today, you can bet that the remote arctic islands the ship was passing would not have had telegraphs or telegraph operators.  News of the expedition would have been along the lines of a ship returning to port and reporting that they had encountered the other ship months before.

We have gotten to where we are so used to instant communication - phone calls, emails, texts - that it's baffling and mind-blowing to think about having to wait so long for news.

But, this setting of being so isolated, so lost, of taking years to get to your destination, and of news and updates taking months or years to get back home, got me thinking about science fiction.  And when I say science fiction, I mean a certain type of science fiction.  I don't mean that in the far distant future, or the far distant pass sci-fi where we have faster than light travel and instant communication.  I mean the "near" future science fiction, the science "fiction" that we are almost (or even already) capable of.  

I'm talking about The Martian, where if you get stuck on a planet, it is months or years until help can get to you.  I'm talking about Contact, where it takes 27 years for a message to travel from one planet to another.  That idea of being out by yourself on the frontier, with only what you have with you to get by if there's an emergency, fascinates me.  

I write historical fiction.  But I also itch to write frontier sci-fi.  I need to read more sci-fi, and more science, before I do.  But I do think it's interesting how certain historical periods can lend themselves so well to a genre that a lot of people would think are on the opposite end of the scale.

Under the SF Umbrella

Yesterday one of my friends and former library coworkers posted an interesting article about some fun, genre-blending weirdness.  
https://bookriot.com/?p=140163

It got me thinking partly about how my stories often don't fit into neat little genre boxes, and also about the genres I enjoy reading.  I like reading or watching stuff that crosses and blends genre lines.  Often it has an element of Fantasy, but I have also found that I prefer stuff that goes beyond Fantasy.  Some of my favorite books and movies are Historical with fantasy elements, or Magic Realism, or Urban Fantasy, or Science Fantasy.

Those may seem like disparate genres, if you also don't enjoy genre blending like I do.  Let's examine these a bit.

I will be talking about genres and sub-genres that fall under the Speculative Fiction - or SF - umbrella.  Speculative Fiction is fiction that asks, "what if?"  I don't mean "what if the president's plane was hijacked" or "what if there was a murder on a train."  I mean where the "what if" refers to not just the characters and the situation, but also how the world works.  What if we could clone dinosaurs?  What if a little boy discovered he had magic powers?

First, let's talk about the most familiar ones - Science Fiction and Fantasy.  In terms of simple definitions, Science Fiction is fiction that takes place in a world that has technology we don't currently* have, while Fantasy takes place in a world where magic or magical creatures exist.

*"Currently" being the operative word, as many classic examples of Science Fiction technology have come to pass.

Those are the quick and easy, black and white definitions that separate pure Fantasy from pure Sci-Fi.  But what about Star Wars?  Star Wars, to me, sits right on the boarder between Sci-Fi and Fantasy; there are spaceships, robots, and laser weapons, but there are also people with powers that would be called magic in any other setting, as well as the theme of fate and destiny, which are common elements in Fantasy.  What do you call this?  Is is Fantasy?  Is it Science Fiction?  Some people call it Space Opera (for its epic scope) - I like to think of it as Science Fantasy.

Some of the other sub-genres that fall under speculative fiction are Urban Fantasy, Steam Punk, Magic Realism, Alternate History, Dark Fantasy, Weird West, and probably dozens of others that either I don't know about yet, or are so new and few that they don't have a name yet.

Urban Fantasy is also sometimes called Modern Fantasy.  Despite the "urban" in the title, it doesn't have to take place in a city; just in the "present" where people go about their day to day lives, but there are magic elements.  The subway is run by goblins.  All the utilities rely on water and fire gods to stay functional.  The veteran cop is paired with a rookie who is also a werewolf - he's a great tracker, but has a problem with being rough on perps.

Steam Punk is another one that doesn't nestle neatly into one genre or the other, but rather oozes between the lines.  Steam Punk picks up where Jules Verne and H. G. Welles left off and says, "forget all the scientific advances made after, oh, say, 1860 or so" and runs with it.  Is it historical Science Fiction?  Is it Alternate History?  It's a little bit of both.

And speaking of Alternate History... For a long time you would find Alternate History labeled either as Science Fiction or as Fantasy, based on how the world became "alternate."  Did someone invent a time machine or fly through a black hole and has now gone back to an alternate timeline where the Spanish Armada was not defeated by the English?  Or is it a case where  dragons emerged from the earth during the industrial revolution, wreaking havoc and changing the course of history?  In many cases, alternate history has neither a fantastical nor a science fiction element, but rather simply takes an event or person, and changes it in such a way that history didn't follow the course we know - What if Hitler was accepted into art school and became a successful and famous artist?  What if Elizabeth I married Ivan the Terrible?  It's stories like these that I think made people start thinking about Alternate History as its own genre rather than an offshoot of either Sci-Fi or Fantasy.

And what about my books?  I have two that I am working on that "need"* a genre.  One of them I could probably call Magic Realism - it takes place in what feels like a real-world historical setting, except that the characters discover powers that come as a surprise to them; magic is not widely practiced or known in this world.  The other is harder to put my finger on.  I could call it Historical - except that it's not.  It's in a world that I made up, based on late ancient/early medieval Britain.  Nothing more magical than coincidence happens in it.  I personally like the idea of calling it "Artificial History;" it is a period piece, even though it's a period that I made up.

*When I say they need a genre, what I mean is that once I'm ready to publish, I will need a quick phrase to use to pitch the book to editors, publishers, and potential reader.

But maybe by the time I finish one or both of the books and go to publish, there will be a better term out there to describe them.