Fantasy Worlds not Set on Earth.

 Fantasy world settings do not have to be on planet Earth. Non-Earth settings have the advantage that you don’t have to explain why we don’t have dragons or elves on Earth in our own time— they can be exclusive to the off-world setting. Yet if your fantasy planet happens to have been settled by Earthmen, you can have cultural influences from any desired Earth culture. 

One fantasy world that is not on Earth is the one in the Game of Thrones series by George R. R. Martin. Since that fantasy setting is a world where winter can last for years, it’s clearly not on our Earth. But further explanations for the setting are not given, perhaps because none of the characters know it. Or maybe they do know more but they are too busy committing incest or killing their fathers in the privy to think about it.

Another fantasy world on another planet is Darkover, created by the late writer and child abuser Marion Zimmer Bradley. One of the books in the series clearly tells the story of how Darkover was settled by humans on a crashed colonization spaceship and cut off from interplanetary human society for a long period of time. The planet was supposed to be a metal-poor world, but they did have enough to produce swords for all.

In the Valdemar books by Mercedes Lackey, her world, Velgarth,  is also another planet, but the inhabitants of Valdemar and neighboring countries seem to be human enough. The major difference is that magic and ‘mind-magic’ are real, and there are strange creatures like kyries and gryphons. There is nothing about Velgarth that is explicitly extra-terrestrial— it could just as well be understood as Earth in a prehistorical period, as in the Conan the Barbarian setting.

The question for writers of fantasy is this: should your world be on another planet or on Earth of the past or future? Much depends on what elements are in the story you want to tell. In Game of Thrones, the long winters are a threat hanging over the characters which might be hard to survive. Those winters require a different planet. While the stories in Mercedes Lackey’s series could just as well take place on a world that clearly is the Earth of the past. 

A story idea I am working on now has conflict between two different groups of Earth colonists— the Northmen, who are Christians and mostly of Germanic and Celtic stock, and a later settlement of Southern European origin who have been given a cultural framework based on ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt. Beyond their world are the Starmen— mysterious people who send down selected livestock and young humans who are a genetic improvement on what the two colonist groups started out with, and also some replacement parts for certain machines, such as the ansible (interplanetary radio) which keeps the Northmen’s bishops and patriarch in contact with the pontiff on Earth.

The reason I want this to be another planet is the mystery of the Starmen who are sending down things and people to the planet for unknown reasons. The Northmen are interested in discovering more, while the southern grouping, the Cornelians, think they are the wisest people because of their mastery of Greek philosophy and so there is nothing they can learn, either from the Northmen or the Starmen. 

One thing to keep in mind in plotting your own fantasy world is that if all your characters are from that world, no one can contrast certain things with the way they are on Earth. For example, we know that Game of Thrones is set on a different world, but we don’t know if that planet is larger or smaller than Earth, or if the gravity is different or if the day is longer or shorter. The characters don’t know that so we don’t know it. 

The essence of fantasy fiction, though, is to have human-relatable characters. If your characters are really just glowing balls of light, like the Organians on Star Trek, it may be hard to tell stories that humans can relate to. In Mercedes Lackey’s books, there may be characters who are kyrie or gryphons, but most of the characters are human like us. Which is why her books work so well for humans.

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Symptoms of a Depressed Writer.

 

As you may or may not know, I have Asperger Syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder. Depression is a common comorbidity with Asperger Syndrome. ‘Comorbidity’ is medical talk for ‘some other damn thing that’s wrong with you.’ (Other comorbidities I have: high IQ, Star Trek fandom, and cats.)

The funny thing about me is that my first symptom of being depressed is that I don’t know that I’m depressed. I used to go to this good therapist, and he’d tell me when he thought I was depressed and I’d say, um, yeah, I have been thinking about death all the time lately, and I HAVE had flashes of thought about me hanging myself from the barn loft. (NOTE: I would never actually do anything suicidal, I am afraid of dying and going to hell. Many suicides don’t go to hell, but what if I suicided and wasn’t insane enough to be non-guilty? I’d have all of eternity to think about why suicide was a bad idea.) 

In my writing life— being depressed doesn’t give me writer’s block or anything. I’m actively writing most days through the worse of it. But I’m not getting anywhere. I write a blog post in my Scrivener and don’t post it.  I work on my WIP and write a new version of Chapter One every day. I get brilliant ideas for a new WIP to replace the old one, but don’t have the energy to even complete a first chapter or work on it a second day.

Another symptom is low energy. I need energy for a lot of things— I have to do my household stuff, cope with things I can’t cope with like human contact or government paperwork, I have to haul water buckets around, do dishes and laundry by hand, and fun stuff like that. I have to work on my blogging and my other writing. I have to try to interact with other humans even when those other humans don’t seem to want to. And I have to take my blood sugar and my ketone readings every day. And I can’t do that when I’m depressed. I have a mini-calendar to write down my blood sugar and such things in, and I haven’t done it for a few months until a couple days ago. (My blood sugar is still excellent, in the normal range— Keto really helps.)

When my depression is kind of bad, things flash into my brain like flinging my body against the nearest wall. I have no impulse to actually do it, but that’s my symptom. 

I also think of sad things. When my mom was still alive and I’d call her, I’d think there were a limited number of times left that I’d be able to talk to her. It would pop into my head that I would now never be able to go to the places I once dreamed of going— the Great Lakes Shipwreck museum, Scotland, or Pitcairn Island. 

Life looks more dystopian when you are depressed. Yeah, life is pretty dystopian these days whether you are depressed or not, but when you are depressed everything feels worse. Now, maybe if I had to call an ambulance they WOULDN’T slap a face-muzzle on my and demand I submit to a fake injection or get dumped off on the side of the road, but when I’m depressed I wouldn’t count on it. 

Your depression experiences may be different from mine, and that’s OK. I’m kind of weird, anyway. But think about the possibility you are getting depressed sometimes. If you are, you will have to find a way to deal with it. Remember, seriously depressed writers may not be able to write well, and suicided writers can’t write at all. Don’t let your fictional characters down!

QUESTIONS: Have you experienced depression? What were/are your major symptoms? How did depression affect your writing? What helped you cope with depression?

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Darkwriting: Beginning.

Most of us are familiar with terms like plotters and pantsers. A plotter is a writer who writes an outline first, a pantser is one who does not.

Dean Wesley Smith, who has had over 100 books of his published, calls pantsing ‘Writing into the Dark’ in his book of the same name. He says a lot of professional, published writers write this way. He says things like outlining are done in critical voice, while writing must be done in creative voice, with critical voice well out of the way. 

How do you write, as a ‘darkwriter?’ The plotter has the security of a sheaf of outline pages to clutch. What about the other folks?

What you need is some sort of idea. An idea about character, or setting, or situation, an idea about a conflict, a first line or a title to the project. Something like that.

This idea can come before you start to write, or it can pop into your head when you sit in front of a blank screen. 

Once you have an idea, you start typing. Fast, without engaging your inner critic. You need to do this in creative mode. Don’t let your critical voice ruin everything by nagging you about various ‘writing rules,’ things like foreshadowing, conflict, the ‘hook,’ character ‘representation’ (having enough token minority characters.)  Just write!

The down side of writing into the dark is that the first chapter you write won’t be perfect. You are exploring your idea, going where it leads. In chapter three or chapter five or wherever, you may find you need to change a few things. Sometimes this can be done by fixing— changing just the part that needs changing— adding or removing a character, for example. Sometimes you may want to redraft— write the chapter from memory, with the needed thing included.

In my current WIP, I did some redrafting of early chapters, and then I realized where the story was going, and started redrafting the whole thing. I have now redrafted those chapters and can move forward. 

One thing I added was a villain character, instead of having the opposition to the hero-character come from many different persons and forces. This makes the story more focussed. And makes a solution to the problem more realistic. 

Have you tried ‘writing into the dark?’ If you have always obediently outlined, but always bogged down and had real problems finishing the project, perhaps you would do well to try it. Stephen King describes once getting a sheaf of colored paper, and typing a first sentence about a gunslinger and a dark man. I believe the fellow may have done rather well with that project. Without an outline.

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FOR FURTHER READING:

Dean Wesley Smith: Writing Into The Dark: How To Write A Novel Without An Outline.

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Patriotic Characters in Your Fiction.

 

The Christian writer C. S. Lewis said something about patriotism once. Something along the line of it being better than individual selfishness but not as good as loving the whole world.

Of course, he didn’t know about the modern globalist beatniks who love the people of, say, Kenya, while knowing nothing about them, and sheds tears about how they are all starving and living in grass huts. But their next door neighbor who has kids, goes to church, and won’t take an experimental shot that has proved not to work, they just wants to die quick.

I looked up the word ‘patriot’ in a thesaurus recently. It was an old thesaurus from 1961, but the words for ‘patriot’ tended to be words like ‘jingoist,’ never anything positive. 

Every nation has patriots. A nation couldn’t function if it didn’t have some loyal citizens. In any country, Nepal, Taiwan, Germany, Belgium or the USA, people who dislike their country enough to hope that some cooler country will just march in and take over are not the best of citizens. 

Different nations have different issues at the heart of their nation. Right now in the US, patriotic citizens want the borders closed so the immigrants will be legal, and at least checked to see if they are wanted criminals in their own country. This would also make human trafficking and drug smuggling harder to do. 

In many small nations, just speaking their national language is a patriotic issue. In Ireland, for example, the Irish language has died out in most areas. It is being taught in schools, but for now it doesn’t seem like they are going to revive Irish the way the Zionist movement revived Hebrew as a language in daily use.

Small nations have it tough. In Europe, many small nations with their own language teach two foreign languages to all school children. Interestingly, it is in just those small nations that the Esperanto movement is the strongest. They would rather learn one easy language that isn’t theirs to communicate with foreign people than the system we have now.

Other patriotic things are literature— translations of books from English often outsell original books in native languages, perhaps because the authors get globally well known. Songs in English are on the radio. In Germany, when I was there, there were German bands that did translated versions of popular songs, but they weren’t as cool as the original. But there were some people who preferred original German songs.

National dress is another thing. Most people globally wear Western dress. Traditional dress as everyday wear just doesn’t happen any more, now that most clothing is sewn by Third World labor. But in many parts of the world, people who can afford it get Sunday-best versions of national dress for special occasions. 

Patriotic people do different things to show they care about their country. In the USA, we fly American flags a lot. I was surprised when I went to Germany and saw the German flag so rarely. Why, back home I had cut a German flag out of a magazine to paste on the paper cover of my German text book. I am sure many foreign countries have patriotic issues most of us wouldn’t know about.

My current WIP, The Language of Space, features three Hungarian characters, a brother and two sisters, that are patriotic Hungarians. Their problem is that in the near-future world they live in, the Chinese nation dominates the globe, because the dominate space. Educated people in countries like Hungary have to start learning the Chinese language at an early age. The Hungarian university where the brother teaches gives most lectures in Chinese, since Hungarian students often don’t have the vocabulary to understand university level subjects in their native Hungarian. The brother seems to be lecturing in Hungarian only because he is such a patriot, but the reality is that because of a mental block he finds himself unable to learn Chinese. And so his career is threatened because only people who can speak Chinese can go into space to visit the asteroids he lectures about. 

Do you have any patriotic characters in your fiction? Do you depict them in a positive light? How do you see patriotism in fiction?

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Why Writers & Bloggers should create Social Media groups.

Yesterday I was time-wasting on Twitter and saw a post by a ‘social media expert’ on how to start a Facebook group to promote your ‘brand.’ She included writers among those ‘businesspeople’ who should use that technique. Not one word was said mentioning that people get banned from Facebook all the time— even Gays against Groomers got permabanned. I’m locked out of my old account for not bowing down to the great god Facebook Protect and handing them my phone number. 

There are groups on some of the alternative social media. The two I know about are MeWe and Gab, and both have groups. 

Groups, said the social media guru, should be about something related to your ‘niche.’ If you are a writer, you could found a group, not for writers, but for book lovers, perhaps book lovers in your genre. (The group will promptly become filled with desperate writers wanting to fill your group with book promos.)

Bloggers should make a group about their blogging niche. If you blog about travel, start a travel blog, if you blog about science fiction, start a science fiction blog. 

The difference between MeWe groups and Gab groups is that when you post to a Gab group, your post automatically goes to your timeline, unless you do some privacy setting thing I don’t know how to do. The advantage of this is that even when you are in a small group, all of your followers see your post from your timeline, and they know what group you posted in. So you can grow the value of your personal Gab account and grow your value as a group member with the same post, without doing anything about it.

MeWe is different. IF you keep your privacy setting to ‘public,’ you can share your posts from the group back to your timeline, but you have to make the effort to do it. If your group post was shared from another source into the group, attempts to share it will only share that original post, without the tag that it came from your group or any comment you wrote about the post. 

Both MeWe and Gab are smaller communities than Facebook or Twitter, but the members are more loyal to one another, at least when there are no big differences of opinion. You may need to work on your main account— post your blog posts, book links and interesting or pithy words of wisdom there, before going off and starting your own group.

Before you start your own group on your alt social medium, join a few groups of interest on various topics. When you find a few you really like, ‘adopt’ a couple groups. Post regularly in those groups. Comment on other people’s posts. Be friendly and encouraging. Pretend like you are assisting the admin/group founder. I had a pair of groups of my own on Facebook for years. I learned a lot about what to do to encourage groups along. It’s hard work. 

Think through what sort of group you want while you are participating in other people’s groups. If there is a group out there that is just right for what you would want to do with a group of your own, and you are allowed to post things that you would like to post there, you may decide to delay starting your own group.

On MeWe, all groups might have group ‘chats.’ I personally don’t like chat, and in an Esperanto-language group I was in on MeWe, a lady in the prostitution industry used the chat to promote her business— in English! You can disable group chat, and when your group has grown enough for you to recruit a few moderators, you can add it back if group members want to. As leader of your group, you should check in on the chat daily— answer some questions as well as check for abuse of the chat by prostitutes.

The purpose behind starting or participating in a social media group is the same behind using social media generally— it is to gather a group of people who like your perspective on things, how you write in short doses, your ‘you’ in general. These people are your prospective tribe members. The ones who actually buy your books or read your blog posts, especially if they do it more than once, are your tribe. Be true to your tribe! Cherish them. Put up with their eccentricities as they put up with yours. 

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Will the US have a Civil War soon?

 

There is talk in some circles of a US Civil War. The divisions are deep enough— one side thinks they are fighting For-Real Nazis they must cancel, the other thinks the other side is baby-killers and child mutilators and groomers. But there is one problem with a modern Civil War.

At the time of the American Civil War, there was a division between states. Northern States had abolished slavery already, and many people were ardent advocated of abolishing slavery. Many southern people didn’t think slavery was particularly compatible with American freedoms, but they didn’t want slave-owners beggared because of pressure from the North. 

Now, we don’t have state divisions like that. In each state, there are blue districts in big cities and university towns. Government schools with unionized teachers spread blue doctrines to children in all states, and so the blue hordes think the older generation will die out and they will own the nation. The same way they thought, after the Roe v. Wade decision, that in a few years all the prolife people would have died of old age, and no new prolife people would come along. They didn’t plan on the prolife generation.

Rural and smalltown people, and businessmen in all places, have embraced a more practical, conservative and red way of life. You can’t run a cattle farm, for example, if you think two cows or two bulls can produce a calf together. A real businessman doesn’t want to alienate his customers to meet the ever-changing demands of the homosexual pressure groups. 

Our idealogical enemies live among us. Many of us have to shop at ‘woke’ corporations to get what we need. ‘Woke’ people need to buy food grown by ‘Nazi’ farmers who don’t agree with ‘woke’ doctrine, who are too busy farming to spend hours online to figure out what ‘woke’ doctrines are this week.

People have to fight for what they think is right, but not with weapons or cancel culture. We have to live with one another. That means at least trying to talk to one another. Which gets harder by the day, as the propaganda levels rise.

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Personal Update:

Life is tough for me— as those who follow me on social media may know, I am on SSI disability due to Asperger Syndrome, and the SSI disability program seems designed to maintain folks in a destitute state.

Worse, my mother passed away earlier in the year, and I relied on her to help me with certain practical things. Without mom, there are practical things just not being dealt with, and I am fearful of admitting my inability lest I lose all control over my life. I need a little help, not a ‘caregiver’ making decisions for me I can’t live with.

I am working on a story called ‘The Language of Space,’ about a Hungarian scientist who wants to go into space in spite of his inability to learn the Chinese language used in space missions. Luckily for him, he has a poet-sister who can help.

I have had a hard time with internet access, among other things, this past year. When I got back, I found that Wordpress had gotten difficult to impossible to use, and it was getting picky about what browser I was allowed to use. My preferred browser is Brave, but I have been willing to use others. But Wordpress wants me to download the newest version of browsers, even though my old computer and my limited internet connection can’t handle that. So I went back to Blogger— also owned by the enemy, but at least I know how to use it. 

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After Facebook Ends....

 

Facebook, I have read, is in decline. I have been using it since early in my blogging/writing life. I have long-term friends there, I have family members there. The family members were important to me. Because I have Asperger Syndrome, social interaction— even with my own blood family— is not an easy thing. I can’t just pick up the phone and call a cousin, niece or aunt that might be annoyed by my call and long for me to hang up quick. By connecting on Facebook, I could see what they were posting, put positive emojis on it, maybe comment once in a while. And they could comment on what I posted. 

But now Facebook’s newest annoyance, Facebook Protect, seems designed to get rid of unwanted users by demanding either you give up your phone number to them— and I do not trust them with my phone number— or do other things many people won’t be able to do. I once thought if I lost internet access I could go to the local library and check in on my Facebook and other things there. But Facebook is purging people that poor.

I used Twitter when I had my Wordpress blog, because Wordpress can be set up to post to Twitter automatically. Now Wordpress has become less usable to the point I had to leave, I am having to post my blog post links by hand. I do have some friends there, but mainly for me Twitter is a way to drive true fans to my MeWe and Gab pages or my new blog. 

I believe that the ‘Big Boys’ of social media, Facebook and Twitter, are starting to fade. Both revealed themselves as willing to meddle in a US election by banning a sitting president from both sites without reason, both began censoring information about the plandemic they didn’t like and other topics, so that many users were confronted daily with censorship in the form of ‘information’ links added to posts.

I conclude that many of the folks that stay on Facebook and Twitter do it only for their friends there. They resent Facebook and Twitter even as they use them.

We are in an age when writers and bloggers are going to have to be thinking about being on multiple social media. There is a risk here. Just as MySpace went under, alternate social media can go under. Gab was down for a while, Parler was down, though both came back. Others probably have come and gone for good without my notice.

Any new social medium, especially if ‘alternative,’ is a risk— you might be wasting your time. That is why I believe having a blog at the center of your efforts is good. It gives you a chance to post longer things— too long, in my case, I tend to run on. 

MeWe is my primary Facebook replacement and primary social medium. It’s a little dull, since it seems to be set up with the idea that everyone wants their posts very private. Since new MeWe users often don’t have many friends, their posts, when their privacy settings are ‘friends only,’ reach next to no one. I do #MeWeMondays — I am sure to post there on Mondays, yesterday I used that hashtag on Twitter as well as MeWe, and in general I try to put in a good effort. 

Gab is the social medium I use on #GabTuesdays . It is a bit more like Twitter in that there are all sorts there, and some users are argumentative and swear too much at other people. I soon learned to use the ‘block’ button a lot on the worst offenders. If you are a mild soul upset by confrontational attitudes, you might feel cautious about Gab. Don’t worry, I won’t dislike you if you don’t use Gab— we can always meet up on MeWe.

Truth Social is a new social medium I haven’t tried yet. I did sign up for it over the weekend, but the confirmation email never arrived. Friends I have asked said that it was mainly the same stuff you see on Gab. My main reason for joining was that a friend I liked on Facebook said she was joining Truth Social once it got launched, and I miss her. 

I was on Parler, didn’t like it much, and then it went down. If I encounter some friends who really like Parler, I may rejoin. 

In each case, the key to using any social medium is to set up your account properly— use a good profile pic, it doesn’t have to be a current picture of YOU, some people use their cat’s picture, a flag, or other image. Maybe use the same profile pic on all your social media accounts.

You also need friends/contacts. More important for the alt social media, you need people who are active there NOW. On MeWe and Gab I recommend joining groups of interest and see who is posting, post comments yourself, and friend the people you interact with. 

Make sure your account is one worth following. If you post JUST your blog post links or JUST book promos, you are dull. Share other people’s memes and posts, but also post things of your own. I’ve had some success with cat pictures, though one sourpuss on Gab criticized me for taking a picture of cute cats on a dirty kitchen floor. He can just come to my house and wash the floor himself, and then train my cats to like clean floors better than dirty ones!

The world we live in today, many people are reluctant readers. They CAN read, but many of them would rather watch a dozen YouTube videos than read one blog post or one chapter of your novel. Social media is a way to locate readers, and to coax the more reluctant readers to give you a try. 

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