BOOKS FOR FANTASY AUTHORS XII: LAST BREATH (and STRANGER THAN FICTION)

From time to time I’ll recommend—not review, mind you, but recommend, and yes, there is a difference—books that I think science fiction and fantasy authors should have on their shelves. Some may be new and still in print, some may be difficult to find, but all will be, at least in my humble opinion, essential texts for the SF/fantasy author, so worth looking for.

In my last book recommendation, for Gordon Grice’s brilliant The Red Hourglass, I set the stage by returning to my oft-repeated point about the difference between realism and plausibility. There’s no such thing as a “realistic” fantasy story, by definition, but readers will demand plausibility. For instance, I know that dragons are pretend, but if your dragons are plausible, believable, I’m not only willing to come along with you for the ride but excited to do so. I contend that plausibility is, not entirely but mostly, a product of consistency. If your dragon can fly across a thousand-mile ocean in one afternoon in chapter one then can’t fly but a few miles an hour in chapter seventeen, that dragon will come off as “unrealistic,” not because it doesn’t follow the rules of real dragons (which don’t exist) but because it doesn’t follow its own internal rules. You get to decide for yourself how fast a dragon can fly, but once you’ve made that decision you need to stick to it, or have an interesting story element that accounts for the change, like the wizard who was riding the dragon across the ocean had cast some kind of spell that made it capable of flying faster, temporarily.

But then what about the stuff in your story, however fanciful a fantasy or far-flung a work of science fiction, that is based in reality? Dragons are pretend, but people aren’t, and unless you’ve established that the people in your story are somehow different than real people, you need to be careful that even your swashbuckling heroes have some grounding in reality. Unless you’ve made it clear, for instance, that there’s some technology or magic that allows people to breathe underwater, there’s only a certain amount of time your human characters can hold their breaths. They can only be so cold for so long, go a certain amount of time without water, and so on.

This is where Last Breath by Peter Stark makes a great addition to your library.

Subtitled, “Cautionary Tales from the Limits of Human Endurance,” Last Breath tells you in often excruciating detail, what actually happens to a person when he dies of certain causes—what it actually feels like to die.

Last Breath

I’m happy to admit that I’m a particular fan and practitioner of sword and sorcery fantasy, space opera science fiction, and violent horror, and as such I have an awful lot of fictional blood on my hands. And up until I came across Last Breath, I had to do a lot of imagining when it came to what it feels like to die, and beyond the rules of Dungeons & Dragons, how much punishment can someone actually take before succumbing to injury or other problems?

Last Breath covers a scary list of causes of death: hypothermia, drowning, mountain sickness, avalanche, scurvy, heatstroke, falling, predators, the bends, cerebral malaria, and dehydration.

Yikes. I know, right?

But if any of your characters might fall victim to anything on this list—even if you pull them out of it at the last second—you need to read this book, and re-read salient sections as the need arises.

First of all, despite its grim subject matter, the book is an exceptionally entertaining read. Outside magazine journalist Peter Stark has quite a way with descriptive prose with the factual science bits sprinkled in skillfully, as in this passage from the section on drowning:

He summons his whole concentration, like scooping up an armload of fallen leaves that want to waft away on the wind. Up, up, up. He strains up through the dark water to see the silvery surface. Up is life. Down is death.

More than actually seeing it, he senses the light again. He feels his body tossed upward. He hears swirling bubbles. White foam surrounds him. Cold air strikes his face. The roar of water fills his ears. Reflexively he exhales a great sigh of carbon dioxide. His mammalian instincts take over, and he pushes up his head like a seal pushing its nose through a hole in the ice. He breathes in. As he does, his body is tossed over into another hole. Matt’s last breath is a breathful of foam.

0 minutes, 54 seconds (325 milliliters of oxygen remaining): Matt gags on the foam as he goes down again. His larynx is in spasms, reflexively closing on the water and foam. No more water can enter his lungs. Many drowning victims inhale only a glassful or so of water, and in “dry” drownings—about 10 to 15 percent of all victims—the larynx closes before inhaling and the lungs contain no water at all.

Matt doesn’t know quite what’s happening to him. He has a vague sense of tumbling, as if he’s in a giant, warm whirlpool and helping hands are massaging and lifting him.

Or this passage from the section on falling:

He drops 30 feet in 1.4 seconds, or the equivalent of a three-story building in the time it takes to say “How are you this morning?” He has no chance to sort out the tumbling confusion of the fall, much less watch his life flash before his eyes. There is a moment’s blur of rock and sky, an instant of suspended silence. Crack! His right leg strikes a ledge. The blow somersaults him head over heels backward. He hears a sudden rush of wind in his ears, a rattle of falling stone, senses a churning whirl of blue sky and gray rock as though they were being beaten together in a bowl . . .

Suddenly it’s very quiet and he’s nowhere. He floats in the dark, suspended, indefinitely. After what seems an eternity, he hears a slowly gathering rush of sound, a clattering, like a horse and rider galloping over cobblestones toward him. He feels peppering little hits over his body, and a plonk onto his forehead. That was something real—falling stones. He’s not dead, after all. He tries to breathe. Nothing happens, as if all the air has been squeezed from his body like a spent balloon, and it requires more effort and pressure than he possesses to reinflate it. Is it worth it? So much easier not to breathe. But if he doesn’t breathe, this is the end. He will die. He wills his chest and diaphragm again, forcing a spasm of a breath, then another and another. He becomes aware of an intense pain far in the back of his chest, between his shoulder blades, as if a hand were reaching through his chest and tearing at the flesh along his spine. Just as suddenly it subsides. Panting raggedly, he opens his eyes. He’s lying on his side. He’s looking out across the valley to the rock face on the opposite side and, still well below him, the alpine meadow of the valley floor.

Scenes of imminent death in your fiction should be at least this compelling.

Last Breath is the sort of non-fiction I absolutely adore. It reads like an adventure novel with facts mixed in, and is an endless source of the best kind of information for a fiction writer. Last Breath tells you what it feels like in that awful moment, or over that even more awful span. The chapter on dehydration is particularly gruesome.

There were two things recently that made me think of this book, and reminded me to recommend it here.

First is that I’ve been slowly researching the Crusades for a historical novel I probably should have started writing by now, and I’ve got a fairly solid grasp on the dates and large-scale events, but what I’m out there looking for now are books that tell me what it was like to be alive then, and not just for kings and aristocrats, but for ordinary people. What did it feel like, smell like, sound like to be alive in that place and time? Last Breath does that, not with day-to-day life in the Principality of Antioch, but with day-to-day death everywhere, and any time. This is a must-read for everyone who might have to kill somebody, fictionally.

When (not if) you watch this movie, look for the point at which the clouds begin to move.

Which is where the second reminder came. The other day I watched one of my favorite movies again: Stranger Than Fiction. If you avoided this movie because the TV commercials sold it as another Will Ferrell goof-fest, forget those TV commercials and run, do not walk, to whatever legal source you have for watching movies and watch it. I love this perfect little movie, which recounts the story of a way-too-ordinary IRS auditor played by Will Ferrell who begins to hear a disembodied voice narrating his every move, and predicting his imminent death. It turns out the narrator is a novelist and somehow their psyches have converged. He is the character in her novel.

Before this is revealed to either Will Ferrell or the novelist, played brilliantly by Emma Thompson, we see Thompson’s novelist character writhing in the grip of terminal writer’s block. She can’t seem to figure out how to kill her protagonist, and spends endless hours imagining various forms of death. She could have used a copy of Peter Stark’s Last Breath.

 

—Philip Athans

 

FLASHES OF INSPIRATION: STEALING FROM YOUR OWN EXPERIENCE

In The Guide to Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction, I discussed a few of the many places from which you can draw inspiration for your stories: from your own life, from history, from current events, and so on. Let’s take a closer look at some of these sources of inspiration, with a few actual examples, starting with bringing into your fiction events that occurred in your own life.

Most books have some kind of disclaimer in the front of them that tells you this is a work of fiction and any resemblance to real people, events (etc.) is purely coincidental. I suppose that’s true as often as it isn’t—you do actually write purely from your imagination sometimes, and even when you end up with a character who’s suspiciously like some celebrity or political figure you weren’t necessarily conscious of that while you were writing.

But then there are the times when there’s no coincidence at all. You actually meant to base this character on George W. Bush, that character on your Aunt Sally, and the fumbling dwarf on your little brother Ralph.

If you’re writing science fiction or fantasy, it’s usually pretty easy to disguise these real people behind the various archetypes of the genre. If Bush is a dragon, Aunt Sally is a mermaid, and Ralph is a dwarf, they’ll end up feeling plenty different enough, but if you’re writing a little closer to home, those characters can get a little harder to hide.

I tend to stay away from concepting characters based entirely on real people—at least not real people I know. I want to write the best story I can, with the most lovingly realized characters, but I don’t want to alienate my friends and family in the process—or dive into the role of political pundit. Still, people I meet in real life often end up in my books, one way or another, and they often come along for the ride, with an event that I just couldn’t get out of my mind.

In my horror novel Completely Broken, our protagonist, Dave, works at a record store. So did I, when I first started writing this book. Some of the events in Dave’s experience working at the fictional Mango’s Records came right out of my own experience.

For instance: I worked for some time for a local record store chain in Chicago called Rose Records. Depending on your point of view they were lucky/unlucky or smart/dumb enough to have Ticketmaster outlets in each store. Though there was the occasional free ticket, selling tickets was a lot of work, came with a rather labyrinthine set of rules and regulations, and in a huge city like Chicago everything sells out pretty much immediately. The result was a constant stream of pissed off customers.

We did our best with what we had, but after what felt like the eighty-millionth time having someone rip me a new one because they didn’t like the rules I not only didn’t make up but didn’t like either, it was hard not to start resenting the ticket customer as much as we resented the ticket computer.

When the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago acquired beluga whales, for a few months in the early 90s it was the biggest thing in the Windy City. They sold tickets through Ticketmaster as a way to regulate the flow of people past the whale tanks, and I don’t remember a single customer who understood the process. The scene in Completely Broken where Dave helps his coworker and secret crush Trish sell tickets to the whale “show,” was drawn from at least a hundred conversations with a similar customer, with some of the dialog coming verbatim from those experiences, though not necessarily all from the same transaction.

Here’s a little of that scene from the book:

“Well,” Trish started mentally circling, “it’s not really a show.”

The woman actually scoffed. “Well,” she said, “what is it, then?”

“Umm,” Trish didn’t really know. “They do that so, y’know…”

“No,” the customer said, as if she were talking to a two-year-old, “I don’t. Why don’t you explain it to me.”

Trish was about to say something. Her lips parted. The beginnings of a breath caressed her perfect white teeth.

Dave interrupted, “It’s the way they control the number of people who go in at any one time, so it doesn’t get too crowded.”

The woman turned toward Dave and seemed to make a conscious effort of changing the tight beam of her attention to him. That was supposed to make Trish angry, jealous, resentful, or something. Trish smiled and let what she was about to say gently pass as a silent exhale. Even though the woman’s eyes were firmly fixed on his, it took tremendous will on Dave’s part not to watch Trish—the way she breathed, the part of her lips, and that little hint of a smile.

“Okay,” the woman said, her tone artificially brighter, “maybe you can help me.”

Dave forced himself to look at the woman. She was pretty enough: okay body, no tits, too much makeup. He could smell her perfume clearly from four feet, which meant she was wearing too much. Her skin was gray, though she tried to hide it with makeup. She smoked, and her eyes told anyone who cared that sometimes she cried for hours, at night, alone. She was one of an endless stream of secretaries or something. They were everywhere. Many of them from Iowa—like the Quad Cities—or Michigan. They moved to Chicago like people from Chicago move to Phoenix. All they found were harsh winters, that they really did miss their mothers, and men who treated them like what they were after all.

“Basically,” he told her, “you pick a time during the day that you want to go, in, like, fifteen minute increments, and we can check to see if there are any tickets available for that time.”

“Well,” she started—and Dave knew what was next: they all do the same thing, every last mother fucking one of them, “what time are the shows?”

It’s been twenty years, and I really am over it now, but in the day the venom that oozes from that scene was extremely personal to me. I try really hard not to be a hateful person, but spend a few years in a retail setting and it will happen to you. Working in retail is more like being a police officer than any other occupation. You get to see all the worst in people, but it’s slightly less dangerous.

Completely Broken

There are characters in this book, too, that were drawn from people I’ve worked with at various record stores, but the nature of Completely Broken meant that there were some really bad people in there, and I’m happy to say that no one I worked with was actually part of some kind of demonic death cult—at least as far as I know. The characters of Trish and Gilroy are physically like two people I worked with, but behave in very different ways.

Then there was the Spanish Kids.

This is another record store scene that is drawn almost entirely from real life:

The Spanish kids had been coming in pretty much every day for the past two or three weeks. The store employees spotted them as foreigners right away. One of the clerks, Trish, pointed out the fact that they actually wore their backpacks on their backs, one strap around each shoulder. American kids, she seemed proud to observe, always slung them over one shoulder. Right shoulder if you’re right handed, left if you’re left handed. They bought Michael Jackson CDs, and as Jennifer noticed, only Europeans and South Americans were still into Michael Jackson. Also, they all spoke Spanish. Still, none of the store employees could be sure exactly where they came from.

That’s the basic set-up, and was exactly true, including the fact that in 1992, no one (in suburban Chicago, anyway) was still buying Michael Jackson CDs.

As the scene progresses, one of the foreign exchange students is caught shoplifting. This actually happened. I was, like Dave, in the back room pricing CDs when this little drama burst in on me. The conversation between Dave and the Spanish kid is actually drawn, verbatim, from my very clear memory of the incident:

“Please,” the Spanish kid managed around the beginnings of a sob. “It was a joke. Was just joking. Please.”

It was cool in the stockroom, but the Spanish kid was starting to sweat. Dave pretended not to notice him, slapping $5.99 sale stickers on a new CD single by Madonna.

“Sir,” the Spanish kid blurted, maybe thinking Dave didn’t hear him and wasn’t keenly aware of his weak, pitiful presence. “Please…help me.”

It was the last two words that made Dave turn to face him. He had to say something. All he could think of was, “Chill.”

“Please,” the foreign kid said again. “They’ll send me back to my country.”

Flash images from 20/20 and Dateline: NBC almost made Dave swoon. He had no idea where the kid actually came from. He spoke Spanish. Guatemala? El Salvador? He could be thrown into a rat-infested prison, raped, tortured, beaten, and finally, mercifully, killed. Dave could see the kid’s fat, hysterical mother claiming his body on the field of a war-ravaged, crumbling soccer stadium—the kid’s body in a plastic bag, his feet melted off while he was still alive by a greasy evil Federale with a blow torch. There were thousands of bodies there, lined up in rows.

“Where are you from?” Dave asked.

“Spain,” the kid sobbed. “Have you ever been there?”

“Spain?” Dave asked, not realizing he’d actually said it out loud. There were no “Missing” in Spain. It was, from what Dave had heard about it, a beautiful Western European country where people had internet access and all the Coca Cola they could drink. If he was sent back to Spain, it would be like being banished to Florida or something.

“Just chill,” Dave said, and went back to his work.

“Have you ever been there?” the kid pleaded, leaning forward so it looked like he was going to stand up.

Dave caught the movement in the corner of his eye and turned back to the kid, holding his right hand up.

“Sit down,” he said, “and chill.”

“Plea—” the kid started, but stopped abruptly when the door opened and Kevin came in.

Following behind him, holding the kid’s red backpack with the white soccer ball silk-screened on it, was a rather large uniformed Des Plaines cop. The Spanish kid’s eyes bulged when they settled on the cop’s black nine-millimeter, and he started to cry.

“Don’t shoot me!” he blurted and the cop laughed. Kevin was stone-faced, and Dave tried to mind his own business.

“Nobody’s gonna shoot ya, kid,” the cop assured him.

That happened, just like that, sometime in 1992 at Rose Records in Wheaton, Illinois. I swear.

But why do this? Just to get something off my chest about Ticketmaster customers, or thieving Spanish exchange students? Of course not.

The first scene was very carefully intended to  point out both Dave’s instinctive protective reaction to Trish in trouble, and as the scene progresses, his sexual desperation, which is beginning to lead him in dark places. The scene begins with Dave being gallantly protective of a woman, then turns darkly misogynistic. It’s part of the difficult road Dave is on, which gets lots more difficult for him as the book progresses.

The scene with the Spanish shoplifter is meant to showcase Dave’s general inability to act. He’s uncomfortable with the pleading exchange student, but is unable to do anything to help him.

Both scenes are further meant to highlight Dave’s rich internal life. He imagines details about the Ticketmaster customer, and the imagined Third World hellhole of the foreign student’s as-yet-unidentified homeland. These flights of fancy have very little truth to them, but it’s what Dave does instead of, say, asking Trish out on a date, or intervening on the scared teen’s behalf.

When you’re looking back on the events of your own life think about how you felt in that moment, and what your reaction to it said about you, then engage your imagination and twist that event in whatever way is necessary to serve your story. And if it doesn’t serve your story, if you just think it was funny, or you want to bitch about something, leave it out. Maybe that time the guy asked you if you masturbate to 2 Live Crew will make it into a different book.

 

—Philip Athans

 

TAKE A DAY OFF

All the hustle and bustle of the new year has got me all revved up, and I’m working harder than I have in a long time. I’ve got a major new consulting client for whom I’m acquiring vintage SF, fantasy, and horror e-book rights; still working to close a deal for Némopolis; two more big clients lined up that should be closed by the end of the month; a novel in circulation; my Fathomless Abyss novella begging for more attention; and more. I promised myself (and everyone else, via this blog, Twitter, and now, suddenly, Facebook) that I would hit the ground running in 2012, and I have done just that, even though 2012 is only nine days old.

I’ve extended that increased work ethic out into my personal life, too, driving down to Portland with twelve hours’ notice to look at a college with my high school senior daughter, and today we start applying for financial aid and to that and other colleges. I have a home to do list as long as my work to do list, and I’m knocking little things back left and right, though the dog still needs to go in for a nail trim, and the garage door opener that only sort of works is past the point of everyone’s patience . . . sigh.

I’ve always thought that the really ugly to do list, the point where you should start to worry, is the one with no items. If you have nothing to do, that probably doesn’t mean you’ve finished everything because you’re so awesome. Lets face it, it’s more likely your absence of to do list items is a result of no one trusting you to do work for them, or a symptom of your own laziness and disorganization: You haven’t gone out there to get some work.

But even only nine days in to the super-active all-success 2012, I’m thinking about maybe a day off.

The weekend was spent with college visits, National Portfolio Day, and a long drive. I already feel like I need a day off. I thought about maybe today, since my wife is taking the day off from work, and later this evening we have a school event, but I had to be on the phone with an overseas consulting prospect at 7:30 am, this blog must be serviced, I have something I’ve been meaning to write for a Gamasutra blog, too, and I have to file my state taxes for Athans & Associates and the National Buy a Book Day Foundation (which has a to do list all its own), and then there are these college things we have to do.

Okay, then, so no day off.

But eventually I will take one. I have to, and so do you.

Most of the authors I know hold down some kind of “day job.” When I had a day job like that, I used to tell people that I wrote books instead of playing golf—which is to say, everybody has some pursuit, hobby, avocation, etc. that  is separate from work and home, and sleep. Mine generated a little money, which golf doesn’t tend to do (unless you’re good and you gamble), but still, I put in an honest day’s work, then a second honest day writing.

Now all that’s mixed up. I have deadlines and tasks to do for clients, and a writing project—that Fathomless Abyss novella—that I’m horribly behind on. I can mix up my work day however I want to. No one is tapping his fingers waiting for me to get back from lunch. No one is expecting me to punch in at a certain time. I have no “sick day balance” or anything like that. And I’m lovin’ it—don’t get me wrong. None of this should be read as a complaint. I’m not bitching that I have too much work to do, or too little. In fact, I want more work—can do more work, and am actively seeking out more work. And I spend more time with my family than the average American dad. Of that I’m sure. I have been keeping up with my favorite TV shows, too, and exercising, and reading.

But still I’m worried that I’m doing it wrong. Have I actually achieved that Hoy Grail of contemporary America, the optimal work-life balance?

Yeah, probably not. In particular, I never really take a day off anymore—not entirely.

To some degree I blame my cell phone. I used to have to work to sign into my wizards.com email address from home. Now, my Athans & Associates email is with me at all times, with two sharp little vibro-buzzes alerting me to incoming emails, literally 24/7. My little business is international in scope, and I’ve always had strange sleeping patterns, so yes, I do read emails at 4:30 am, or 6:30 pm, or whenever I happen to be awake.

Instead of working a lot for eight hours, five days a week, I work at least a little almost all the time, with concentrated bursts of sit-at-the-desk-and-get-busy for a couple of two to four hour blocks five days a week. For a habit-driven guy like me this can be a little tough to manage. I’m a deadline guy, a detail guy, with a strong Midwestern/Greek immigrant work ethic, too, and it’s hard to turn that off.

Or am I just being too self-involved now? Everybody thinks about “work” when they’re not officially “at work,” right? Especially if they’re as lucky as me and there’s a very fine line between “work” and “fun.” If I finish up the really relevant items on my to do list before lunch today can I take the rest of the day off, and spend a little time with my wife? Of course I can. But that phone will be with me the whole time, so if you need to email me about that thing, well, you go right ahead.

Writers: Write! But don’t forget to take a day off from time to time, too. From both the day job, and the novel. Both will be better off for it tomorrow.

 

—Philip Athans

 

 

HEALTHY BODY/HEALTHY MIND

Last week, wrapped in some whining and ranting and raving, were embedded some of those delightful little devils, New Years Resolutions. Believe me, I’m not going over all that doom and gloom and impotent rage stuff again. On my to do list for today was the item:

> FAH blog post (something POSITIVE!)

The least I can do is follow my own instructions.

So here we are, firmly ensconced in 2012, a year I’ve determined will be better than the last. So what have I done about that? Well, lots of stuff actually. In the immortal words of Paula Abdul, “I work my ASS OFF, Jeff!” (That was her swearing, not me.) But today I’d like to talk about that evil resolution about being more healthy, which last week I outed as fat person slang for “lose weight.” When you’re, like me, somewhere around a hundred pounds overweight, it’s very difficult to get substantially healthier without losing weight. So even though my goal is not simply to shed pounds, but to feel better and live longer, I can’t have one without the other.

Well, so, then, good for me, right? But what the heck (see, that’s me not swearing) does this have to do with writing fantasy and science fiction, which is what this blog is actually supposed to be about?

Time and again, countless people have repeated  some variation of: A healthy body and a healthy mind go hand in hand. I think this is only partially true.

I’ve been working with Jay Lake on our Fathomless Abyss project while at the same time checking in on his regular posts about his continuing battle with cancer. Jay’s not giving in, but right now, his body is not healthy. Though he’s been very open about having some bad days, some days when much as he’d like, he simply can’t work, Jay has been writing all along, and if his story for Tales From The Fathomless Abyss is any indication, the cancer in his body has not affected his creativity—his mind—at all. Jay is one example of a healthy mind in an unhealthy body.

And here I am, an old, fat, bald guy, with even fewer excuses. I don’t have cancer, or any other serious illness. Right now I don’t even have any nuisance illnesses. So this morning, shed of all excuses, the kids back in school and my wife back at work, I had no choice but to stare that New Years Resolution right in the face. I can’t not even start, after all, so I dusted off that Yoga for Beginners DVD I bought so many years ago I can’t even remember, and actually did yoga.

People who really, y’know, do yoga, and people who like YouTube and America’s Funniest Home Videos, would surely have found this a sight to behold. But I don’t care. I was doing it. Then I got on the exercise bike, and while reading the first few chapters of Robert Silverberg’s Majipoor Chronicles, did my thirty minutes of cardio.

Day one, complete.

On that score anyway.

Has it made me a better writer? Too early to tell, but I have gone through healthier periods in my life and I know it will. Exercise gives me energy. I sleep less and get better sleep while I am sleeping. I deal with stress better—way better, actually. And those two things alone help me write more, and the more I write, the better at it I get—at least incrementally.

For the advice part of this post I would say, do the same. Don’t hurt yourself. Believe your doctor and other health professionals over me in all things, but do something. Hate yoga and/or exercise bikes? Do something else, then, but do something.

One of the things I would caution you to do is to ignore anyone who tries to tell you what your “goal weight” should be. Mine is XXL. When I fit into the XXL wardrobe that’s been waiting for me to get back down to that size for the last six years or so, I’m there. I don’t give the south end of a northbound rat what the scale tells me then or now.

Equally ignore any advice as to what your “normal” weight is. They keep shifting those things, actually: goal and normal and ideal. Now it seems that “normal” is what twenty years ago was considered “world-class athlete.”

If you’re spending more than two hours a day, five days a week exercising, I think you’re pushing it. If you want to train for a marathon or triathlon becuase you think it’ll be fun to participate in those events, go ahead. But if you aren’t a professional athlete, if you’re a writer, or pretty much anything else, you don’t have to be in the same physical condition as an Olympic athlete. If you’re older than, say, 25, you’re probably never going to be no matter how hard you hit the gym. If, like me, your genes tell your body to store fat more so than other people, this will be especially true.

If you’re exercising to the point of pain or exhaustion, back off. If you’re exercising instead of writing, exercise less and write more. But writing fiction is a long game. You may not be published in your teens. You may have several ups and downs in your career. You’ll have all sorts of real life challenges that interfere with how many words you can write today, let alone over the course of the next year, but if you’re dead of a heart attack at the age of 45, you’ve cheated yourself and your readers out of maybe that many more years’ worth of great stories.

I’m not doing all this so I can be mistaken for a taller Brad Pitt. I’m doing this so I can live to tell the tale.

Literally.

—Philip Athans

RESOLUTIONS 2012 (THE SEMI-COHERENT RANT EDITION)

I do this every year, and every year I seem to be disappointed by the same failures while being inspired by some surprising successes.

I keep promising I’ll be healthier, which is fat people code for “lose weight.”

Nope. Still a gentleman of generous proportions.

I keep promising I’m going to stop using four-letter words.

Not even fucking close. And that one had a bonus three letters.

I’m going to try both of those again. I need to survive my 40s, at least, and I sometimes sound like an uncultured beast, surely beneath a man of letters like myself. I’m not offended by swearing, of course. My mother is, like the father in A Christmas Story, a world-class cusser. I grew up with the F-word like other people grow up with . . . I don’t know . . . Catholicism. But at this point the swearing thing is less about the words themselves, or any sort of fear that I’m offending anyone else (I’m only offended by people who take offense to what other people are doing), and more about self control. If I want to be less of a potty-mouth, I should be able to be less of a potty-mouth.

The rest of the resolutions, about watching less TV, playing more games, writing more—stuff that’s actually more important to me, career-wise, I did pretty well on. I have been playing more games, mostly via PS3 (Flow, Dead Space, and Castle Crashers are faves), but we still haven’t played last year’s Christmas board games Risk: Halo Wars and Smallworld. I’ll try to fix that in 2012, too. Maybe we need to institute a Family Game Night.

Definitely we should do that.

I have written more, thanks to two exciting projects in particular: Arron of the Black Forest and The Fathomless Abyss. I did finish that urban fantasy novel, and just completed an additional revision inspired by some feedback from an editor who’s opinion I value. That’ll get into circulation again immediately after the new year. And I completed two work-for-hire assignments: The Warhammer short story “The City is Theirs” for Black Library and the fast-and-furious How to Start Your Own Religion for Adams Media. The only writing project I resolved to do last year that didn’t get done was a screenplay. I’ll get on that this year—the idea is here, just need to make it breathe.

So that’s it for the quick review of last year’s resolutions. A mixed bag of success and failure. I don’t swear more, and I’m no more fat now than I was a year ago, so at least I’m holding steady on some stuff, and getting to work on others. Let’s go ahead and stipulate that at the beginning of every year I’ll try again to be healthier, write more, read more, and so on.

For 2012, I want to do something a little bigger picture. One giant uber-resolution that I think will not only make me a better person overall in 2012 but may just have a ripple effect that will help me solve those other problems that I continue to struggle with.

In 2012 I resolve to live entirely in the future.

I know, that sounds a little Oprah Winfrey, but hear me out.

Like (I daresay) most people, I have a tendency to complain about what has happened, bemoan what could have happened, and endlessly suffer over what should have happened. And I do this more often and with greater vigor than I plan for what’s about to happen or go out in search of what could happen.

For instance, as much as I tried not to, and said I didn’t, I did hold a grudge about how things came to an end for me at Wizards of the Coast. No matter how many times I promised I wouldn’t, I still kept my ear to the ground there, still gossiped with people who, like me, have better things to do and more important things to worry about. I’ve been gone from there for eighteen months. It’s someplace I used to work, and though my time there was well spent and important to me, I use the lessons learned there (both positive and negative) every day, and I will still keep in touch with a small army of good friends and valuable allies from TSR/WotC past, present, and future, I hereby resolve in 2012 to spend no more time suffering over why I got fired from there as I do over why I don’t work for Rose Records anymore. Like WotC, they could have done things differently so that I didn’t get bounced out of a job five days after the birth of my first child. That was fun. At least Hasbro had a better-than-average severance package, and my kids were older.

But it’s not at all just WotC. Believe me, most days go by when I don’t actually spend any time thinking about Wizards of the Coast in either a positive or negative light at all. I also bitch about politics, including things that have happened, that everyone seems to accept were bad, but that will not ever be fixed. No one will stand trial for causing this depression we’re in. Most people participate in the huge lie that what’s happening now is a “recession,” or even have the balls (pardon me) to use the word “recovery” in any but the past tense. This is the kind of shit (pardon me again) that makes me crazy. This keeps me living in a shoulda-woulda-coulda life that’s of no use to anyone. No one wants to hear me bitch about the Hope and Change candidate I was excited to vote for but who has changed fuck all (pardon m—aw the hell with it) and most of us are only less hopeful now than we were in 2008.

Okay . . . see what happens?

This is no good. You’re no better off for having read that, and I’m no better off for having written it. Here’s one thing I’ll do, proactively, to keep myself moving forward: I will stop watching the TV news.

I know this seems like I’m just putting my head in the sand, but I’m the kind of person who, when confronted with a problem, sees that as a request, a challenge, a mandate to fix it. But I can’t light a fire under the legislature. I have no access to President Obama. I can’t talk Al Qaeda out of this crazy shit they’re doing. No one at Goldman Sachs is going to take my calls, let alone offer me their apology for cashing out on America. I can’t stop radon from leaking up through the ground. Who do I call to convince television networks that when people are being forced out of their homes every day for the sin of getting sick with no health insurance the details of a perfect stranger’s product-placement celebrity wedding is not just unimportant and uninteresting but obscene? If I could, I’d invent a clean, renewable energy source that makes fossil fuels obsolete.

I’ve sat through the endless “health reports”: carbs make you fat—no, it’s fat that makes you fat—no, wait, it’s fruit, no rice—no, wait, it’s . . . shut up already. The sugar industry releases a study that says that corn syrup is bad for you and it’s reported as science. Then the corn growers pay a few million dollars for a commercial to tell you that sugar and corn syrup are the same thing. Finally Michelle Obama warns you to stay away from both of them. It will drive you mad. It will. I can’t stand it. I have actually sat through episodes of TV news shows that have made me so angry I couldn’t sleep. Commercials for payday loans and bankruptcy lawyers send me into panic attacks. The re-introduction of Depression Era programs like “layaway” makes my hands shake. And supposedly “upbeat” stories of anonymous millionaires paying off strangers’ layaway items for Christmas doesn’t make me feel better—that’s not hopeful, that’s another sign of the pathetic, whimpering end of the American Dream.

I can’t carry this weight anymore. I don’t know how to begin to fix any of those problems. So what’s left to me after an hour of all that is impotent rage. I flatly refuse to crack and go off on some kind of shooting rampage, so the only other possibility for me is to step out of the madding crowd and get on with doing what I do.

I write stories. I’m going to concentrate on that. And sometimes, I’ll have to do research and I will, and Twitter will tell me if something big happens, and I’ll seek out informed and balanced information on events that interest and/or effect me directly. But don’t ask me about Wizards of the Coast, Kim Kardashian, Rick Perry, or Rachel Maddow. I’m not going to have an opinion.

I’m going to get to work. I’m going to work my ass off. And if the only hope for middle class Americans like me is to buy our way into the 1%, well, then, 1% here I come.

I’m not saying I’m all of a sudden going to “sell out”—after all, as soon as I put pen to paper to write the Baldur’s Gate novelization that ship well and thoroughly sailed—it just means that I’m going to point at the sunrise, not the sunset, get busy being busy, and do for me and mine.

After all, they got this Depression on.

 

—Philip Athans

 

GOD HAS A SENSE OF HUMOR (I HOPE)

Why do I have such a hard time remembering dates? I should start keeping a diary or something. Anyway, I don’t remember when it was that my former boss at TSR and Wizards of the Coast, Peter Archer, now an editor at Adams Media, came to me with this idea. Peter edited The Guide to Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction, and we’ve known each other for a decade and a half. He knows I couldn’t say no to this one, and I didn’t, even though it’s a bit of a departure for me—especially becuase it was a bit of a departure for me.

I say “a bit of” because I’ve had my hand in creating more than one fantasy religion, including taking the lead on the revised pantheon for the fourth edition Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, and offered some advice on the same in The Guide to Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction. But this new book, which came to me pre-loaded with the title: How to Start Your Own Religion: Form a Church, Gain Followers, Become Tax-Exempt, and Rule the World, was meant to be a mix of fantasy and reality. It’s “fantasy” in that, frankly, I don’t expect you’re going to use any of its tongue-in-cheek advice to actually create a new religion (and may God help you if you try) and “reality” in that . . . well, I’m not really sure.

I saw the cover for the first time on Amazon!

But what I do know is that it’s going to be funny, if I don’t say so myself. I laughed when I was writing it, anyway, for what it’s worth.

Here’s a little glimpse into the book, the current version of the introduction:

So You Want to Start Your Own Religion

If you have ever observed the power, wealth, and privilege that accrues to leaders and practitioners of certain religions, you’ve probably thought, “You know, I should start my own religion. Then I would be the one who gets to decide if recreational drug use is an acceptable response to the crushing angst of adolescence.” Or perhaps you have experienced a loftier sentiment and have toyed with the idea of creating a lasting ethos that will endure through the rest of human history, spreading enlightenment to the unenlightened for all time to come.

Either way, you’ve come to the right place. In How to Start Your Own Religion, you will discover everything you need to know to go about establishing a religion, gaining adherents, and running their lives. They will thank you for this by making offerings of money, time, sex, and bulls (and sex with bulls) unless you’d rather they didn’t.

In Part I, you will decide what kind of religion you wish to start. You will also create (or “receive from On High, in a dream”) the religious texts that will dictate your religion’s policy on questions such as one’s right to control one’s own body, one’s obligation to share the wealth (e.g. “help the less fortunate”), and more.

In Part II, you will find out not only how to spread the word and attract followers, converts, and fanatics, but what to do with them when you’ve got them.

In Part III, you’ll start to figure out where to gather your adherents, and work on all the little things that keep them coming back for more, like holy days, adulthood rites, and weddings—and learn how, when, and why, to toss them out.

In Part IV, you’ll take it to the next level by insinuating yourself and your new faith into every last corner of your followers’ lives, and have them thank you for it.

And finally, in Part V, we’ll speed the dearly departed off to wherever it is you think they’re headed, and maybe bring a few of them back from the great beyond.

Lofty goals, all that, but I think I deliver on it, with a wink.

The book is almost done. I’m going to be making one more pass through it over the holiday weekend (no rest for the wicked, as they say), and it’s already slated for publication in May.

They work fast over there at Adams, and it was quite an experience working on this sort of book, a departure for me in a number of ways. But my initial reluctance with the process gave way to the pure fun of it.

I hope that comes across in the finished book. And hey, maybe when people say “Happy Holidays” this time next year, it’ll include one of your own creation!

—Philip Athans

NASA FUTURE FORUM

Last Friday, December 9th, I sat in on a series of discussions at Seattle’s Museum of Flight. The NASA Future Forum brought together a group of experts on space and aviation to discuss the future of both manned and unmanned space flight, leaning a bit heavily on the new dependence on private enterprise, at least for trips to low earth orbit.

I grew up in the 1960s and 70s, during the heady days of the Space Race. Every boy back then wanted to be an astronaut. At the time, my parents, always the dreamers, told me I couldn’t be an astronaut because I was going to be too tall. Thanks. Still, we were all convinced that by the time we were grown up in, like, the 1980s and 1990s, surely we would be living on the moon, probably Mars, too. Hell, we’d all seen 2001: A Space Odyssey and Space: 1999. Space seemed like our birthright. Well, we all know how that turned out, but just because the vision of 2001: A Space Odyssey didn’t exactly come true, there’s still an awful lot to be excited about when it comes to the future of space travel, and quite a bit of that came out during this event.

I’m the too-tall guy on the left. On my right, the last man to set foot on the moon.

I registered for the conference more or less on a whim. I get emails from the Museum of Flight, and I can’t tell you how many of this sort of thing I’ve passed up, though several years ago I did attend a speech by Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison H. Schmitt where he autographed a copy of his book Return to the Moon for me. That was amazing, except for when I told him the story about my parents telling me I was too tall to be an astronaut. I had about eight or nine inches on Dr. Schmitt, who looked me up and down and said, “Yeah, you’re probably too tall.”

Come on!

But even that hasn’t dampened my love of space travel, and the future as outlined last Friday seems like it may even be able to accommodate tall people. Before I get into any of that, though, it’s important to touch back to the purpose of this blog, which is to inform and inspire science fiction and fantasy writers, not necessarily to report on science and engineering news.

If you’re a writer, you have to write—everybody tells you that and everybody’s right—but you also have to get out of the house. This is a hard one for me. I’m busy. I’m a “home-body.” I can be lazy, sometimes, too. And I’m also terribly routine-driven. But at least I recognize these things about myself and have started to detect a trend toward too many “inside days” in a row. Valid excuses like racing against a book deadline and crappy Seattle fall/winter weather aside, I need to get out of the house more. And here comes, presented like a gift on my email account, the NASA Future Forum. It was free, which is my favorite price. It was here in Seattle—no expensive airline tickets and lonely hotel rooms. And it was NASA, for God’s sake. I went, and I listened, and though there isn’t a book or story I’m working on now that will be directly informed by anything I saw and heard there, it all gets filed away into the memory banks.

I listened carefully to the way they talked, the easy use of seemingly nonsensical acronyms, the sparkle in their eyes when they said words like “future” and “innovation.” I’ve spent most of my seminar time at SF/fantasy, gaming, and comic book conventions, eyes sparkling the same way. It was a delight to cross out of that universe and into the no less passionate world of the professional engineer. These are a whole different kind of geek, and though I don’t speak the language as fluently as I do at someplace like Comicon, every turn of phrase, even their clothes (they still wear suits, most of them, which is strange) have been carefully filed away for later use.

If you’re writing fiction and don’t have this kind of mental, or even written file, you better get busy starting one up. Not interested in space travel, and don’t write hard SF? Okay. What are you into? If you write steampunk and don’t go to Victoriana events you’re missing out. Fantasy authors should look for history or craft classes. Learn how to dip candles, or ride a horse, or start a campfire without matches. Writing about a country surrounded by mountains but you live in Iowa? Buy a plane ticket to Denver or Seattle and get your hiking boots on. Get out there!

Okay, then, so what about the future of space travel?

Not yet. Before that, I have to tell you that I sat four rows back from Bill Nye the Science Guy. I’ve seen him before—he lives in Seattle—but it was a gas to see him in this context. Some of the NASA and private space company people really fawned over him. He was a true celebrity in that context and he asked a couple of great, animated questions at a microphone set up only a few inches from my left shoulder. He even chastised the organizers of the event for having a door open on the side of the theater that was bringing in cold air (it’s been unseasonably chilly here) and noise. Bill Nye is big on energy efficiency. I was disappointed that they didn’t take him seriously and close the door, especially since the Museum of Flight sits off the edge of the big runway at Boeing Field and the occasional jet aircraft took off or landed less than 100 yards from that door during the event. That’s loud, by the way.

The keynote address was given by NASA Deputy Director Lori Garver, which put me in mind of a scene from A Mighty Wind, but that aside, she gave an interesting speech.

Though maybe a little smug in her delivery on the subject of adapting to new paradigms, she was absolutely right. No one in the “New Economy” is free to slavishly abide by the status quo. NASA, like everyone else except maybe the Saudi royal family, has some limit to their financial resources. No one has all the money in the world to spend, so priorities have to be set, and not every project is going to be fully funded, or funded at all. The basic gist of it is that NASA will be farming out LEO (Low Earth Orbit) to commercial concerns, including getting supplies and people up and down from the International Space Station. This will free up NASA to concentrate on deep space missions, including a manned mission to an asteroid, then on to Mars. How cool is that?

Ms. Garver did a great job handling questions from the audience, even a bizarre anti-Obama, pro-Lyndon LaRouche screed from one really creepy guy. But the overwhelming majority of the questions came from really smart, interesting and interested people, including a University of Washington professor emeritus who was part of the original Viking team and his daughter, an engineer herself.

My blurry cell phone shot of the innovation panel.

The moderator of the second discussion, a panel of five scientists and engineers on the subject of the Importance of Technology Innovation for our Economic Future, NASA’s Deputy Chief Technologist, Joseph Parrish, had my favorite quote of the day. He said, “Innovation is the constructive rejection of the status quo.”

One of the participants on that panel was Dr. Ed Lazowska, who holds the Bill and Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. He pointed out that the same computing power that existed in the Apollo spacecraft now resides in a Furbie, and that gave me chills. How do you not start to wonder about the next-level toys of 2051, when the computing power of IBM’s Watson super-computer runs the robot child from Brian Aldiss’s “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long.”

The third discussion really got more deeply into the idea of privatizing low earth orbit, and some of the questions from the audience revealed a little of the bias that Deputy Administrator Garver railed against. There were frequent reminders that NASA has never done anything entirely on their own and civilian contractors have always been a part of manned and unmanned space flight. This wasn’t entirely lost on an audience that included several aerospace engineers from local employer Boeing.

So what is the future of space travel?

Near term: Private companies building cheap, efficient, small-scale rockets to deliver satellites to low earth orbit, and a few very rich people blasting up to the edge of space via Virgin Galactic.

Medium term: A private mini-shuttle that will take crews up and down from the ISS and on other sub-orbital and orbital scientific missions, and a new big rocket from NASA that will deliver payloads up to geostationary orbits.

Long term: NASA manned flight to an asteroid. I want to go on that trip. Badly. Also, less expensive sub-orbital and even orbital joy rides.

Very long term: Mars.

Longer than that? The colonization of the Milky Way galaxy.

How do I know that? Becuase it’s already been imagined, and imagining it in the first place is the hard part. Don’t believe me? Ask Jules Verne, the science fiction author who imagined the nuclear submarine and the fax machine, or Arthur C. Clarke, who first described the modern communication satellite. Figuring out how to actually do it is just a matter of funding and time.

 

—Philip Athans

 

 

 

EXCERPTS FROM THE FATHOMLESS ABYSS

THIS JUST IN: Tales From The Fathomless Abyss is on sale NOW for the Nook!

THIS JUST IN: Tales From The Fathomless Abyss is on sale NOW for the Kindle!

Just this morning I posted Tales From The Fathomless Abyss to both Amazon (for the Kindle) and Barnes & Noble (for the Nook). As of this writing, both are still “pending” but should be up for sale within the next couple days. Until then, I thought I’d share some glimpses into the book itself.

So, without further ado . . .

From the introduction by fantasy author Ken Scholes:

Phil’s team came together quickly and as I saw the list of names, I was impressed. And I was pleased to be counted among them—because, yes, initially I was to play in this world as well. Unfortunately, life doesn’t always let us do everything that we want to do and soon after we all started talking about the project, setting the various deadlines and fleshing out the world of the Fathomless Abyss, I realized that there was no way I could pull it off at the time. So I bowed out gracefully.

Imagine my delight a few months later when Phil asked me if I’d introduce the first volume—the anthology that launches the project.

Naturally, I agreed and Phil sent the anthology my way so I could give it a read and form my thoughts.

I’m rarely envious; it’s not my way. But I’m envious about this one.

From “The Lioness of God, Daughter of the Peaceful” by yours truly:

It’s funny, what goes through your mind as you’re falling into a bottomless pit, was what went through Keegan O’Malley’s mind as he fell into a bottomless pit.

He didn’t understand what the pit was—a sinkhole? It was too big for a sinkhole, and too deep.

He realized he only had a couple cigarettes on him.

He wondered who would call his mother, and if whoever it was would be nice to her, and break the news gently.

He was disappointed that he’d never had kids.

He was surprised that his glasses hadn’t fallen off.

He was afraid someone would find that box of videotapes he kept under his bed, and would think he watched them more often than he did, which wasn’t that often at all, really.

He knew that what he was falling into couldn’t possibly be there in the first place. The round hole must have been two miles in diameter, opening into a straight shaft. A thin, focused beam of light—Keegan guessed it was a laser—shined up from the bottom of the pit and out into the overcast sky to disappear into the low clouds. The pit seemed to have no bottom, somehow felt like it had no bottom, though it had to have a bottom. But anyway, it was deep enough that when Keegan found the bottom, it would kill him instantly.

And lastly, he thought—I hope it kills me instantly.

Then he screamed.

From “It’s Mine” by J.M. McDermott

“Beasties don’t do sensible things. Today’s going to be a feast of beastflesh, once one drops. Of course, that’s if our ancestors forgive you for your foolishness.”

My family’s oldest red lichen flared up when I was mad, and he knew it. I was glowing bright red. It was easy to call them beasts when a body never had to walk to the village Below and back again, past so many beasties, and their villages and caravans.

The fighting kept on. The naked ones were wearing out, panting and heaving. The older one, in the red pants, had drawn blood along the wings of his enemies. He was cutting at them. He didn’t even seem winded, and he had been in a full brawl since Uriah’s warning shout. He was going to win. Some of us were taking bets on the fight. Some were taking bets on which net would catch the meat.

From “The Gatherer” by Mel Odom

A short time later, the men stopped to care for their mounts and to break their fast. The scar-faced man approached Otetiani and spoke to him harshly as he lay bound on the ground. When Otetiani could only reply in the languages of his people and of the Abyss, the man growled in frustration and kicked his prisoner several times.

Otetiani rolled over and protected his face and stomach as best as he could. Joola screamed in anger and tried to run at the man, but one of the others held her back and they all laughed at Otetiani’s helplessness and her unsuccessful efforts to save him. The scar-faced man kicked Otetiani twice more for good measure.

The Final Cover!

Holding in his pain, forcing himself to be attentive and not to give up hope, Otetiani watched his captors. He searched the ground with his numb hands and managed to claw up a piece of promising rock that had an edge on it. He cupped the rock in his palm and waited, knowing that any movements he might make now would be noticed.

After the break, the men climbed back aboard the felines and Otetiani rode once more on the hindquarters of one of the beasts. Thankfully the rider that carried him rode at the back of the group. Working carefully, frustrated by the numbness that plagued his hands, Otetiani scraped at the plastic that bound his hands. Stubbornly, the material gave way.

From “The Ascent” by Mike Resnick & Brad R. Torgersen

There were so few survivors from when the world was flat and our village could look down the hills to the shore of the ocean. Grandmother says the ocean was like the pool on this ledge, only infinitely larger. I cannot imagine how, just as I cannot imagine much of Grandmother’s life before the land trembled under her feet, and the people of our village had to flee as the Earth broke apart around them.

Grandmother was young then. Not much older than Mother is now. Grandmother says she was sure they would all die—after all, the mountain was exploding!—when a huge hole opened, as wide as the world is wide. The terrified village climbed in all together, and the hole shut over them, and we have all been here ever since.

Grandmother is fond of stories, many of which Mother considers to be lies. But I have always believed them. We cannot have come from nowhere. And even if I never find the top of the world, there’s got to be more out there—other places, and especially other people. I don’t want to wind up like Mother, with a man I don’t love, but grow to hate because he is all there is.

From “A Querulous Flute of Bone” by Cat Rambo

They had chased each other downward this time, a journey through nest villages and bridge towns and basket farms. While in a cavern city’s tavern chamber, Aaben overheard a scrap of conversation indicating a trail leading to an artifact in a category that had previously proved frustrating with its elusiveness: appreciation.

This artifact might, Aaben thought, actually lead its perception to spring along the ladder more than a few rungs. It was supposed to induce the appreciation of a thing’s innate qualities. Rumor held that those capable of mastering it learned to make wonderful things: paper masks that spoke, stews that made the eater capable of dancing all day and night, or clothing that masked a wearer’s every defect so they seemed so noble and upright in appearance that populaces flocked to elect them mayor or ruler or demagogue or whatever form of leadership they practiced.

Paradoxically, the trail led Aaben upward and back to a geniod village, Halahalka the Minor.

From “That Which Rises Ever Upward” by Jay Lake

All he could do was cling to the wall and dream.

His village, Ortinoize, wasn’t much of a place. Built into a crack in the pit wall that ran roughly upward at a thirty-degree angle, it had all the charm of a staircase on which someone had dropped a great deal of junk. Not that Attestation was all that personally familiar with junk. Everything in Ortinoize was reused, repurposed, recycled. It was just old Sammael that taught the kids—he was an infaller, from some place called Canada, outside the pit—he had a lot to say about the world and the way it was used, and was full of mysterious ideas like “junk” and “oceans” and “flight.”

Join us in the Fathomless Abyss. It won’t be much longer now.

—Philip Athans

THE FATHOMLESS ABYSS

Finally, one of my notorious “secret projects” revealed.

First, the amazing cover art by Mats Minnhagen

Yes, that’s me, plunging to my doom.

Whose idea was it? The idea for a shared world collective was a combination of Mel Odom, Joe McDermott, and me, I suppose. The idea of a bottomless pit as a fantasy setting is one I’ve been kicking around for years, but what to do with it?

Let’s take those in order.

Everyone knows I’ve been dipping my feet into the self-publishing well with Completely Broken and The Haunting of Dragon’s Cliff (follow the links and buy those, by the way, what the heck are you waiting for?), and based on the latter project, which I’m working on with Mel, the idea came to widen our net out to include other authors in an effort to see how big this thing can get. And I don’t just mean how much money it can generate—reports of authors making millions on Kindle Direct are, let’s say, exaggerated—but how much . . . what’s the right word? Buzz?

By going in as a team, we have each other for support. Each of us brings in some audience the others may not have. But more than anything, honestly, we’re doing it for fun. I’ve blogged about how much fun I had writing The Haunting of Dragon’s Cliff, how much it helped me to recapture the pure joy (sans deadlines, contract negotiations, and other outside pressures) of just writing—of simply telling stories. I’m having at least as much fun with The Fathomless Abyss. It’s turned out to be, with the generous and spectacularly creative input of the rest of the collective, a fascinating setting that I know (and I have a certain amount of experience with this sort of thing) will support a virtually endless stream of great stories.

I know. I need to back up.

Who is this “collective”? Who’s on the team?

Let’s do it in the order in which their stories will appear:

Myself

J.M. McDermott

Mel Odom

Mike Resnick & Brad R. Torgersen

Cat Rambo

and

Jay Lake

Not a bad line-up of serious SF/fantasy heavyweights, if I don’t say so myself. If you look at that list you’ll see a wide range of voices coming from a number of sub-genres and a wide range of experience from up-and-coming new talents to one of the genre’s great veterans. This invitation-only list was very carefully considered, and though a few authors said no, this great team signed up to share the world of the Fathomless Abyss.

Nice segue.

The Fathomless Abyss is just that: a bottomless pit.

Though it has a top, which we call the Crown, it has no bottom. If you fall, you fall forever. The Crown is normally closed, but from time to time (and no one has been able to determine any sort of regular cycle, so there’s no way to predict this) the Crown opens onto some unsuspecting world, like Earth.

Not only is there no rhyme or reason to where the Crown will open—what strange, exotic planet—but when it opens. The Fathomless Abyss has appeared on Earth on numerous occasions, but one day it opens in 2010 then a few years later (“Pit Time”), it opens onto Earth in the year 1521, then 1024, then far back into the age of the dinosaurs, and mixed in there, an infinite number of worlds throughout the universe.

And almost every time it opens, someone, or something, falls in.

Over untold millennia, the endless expanse of the Fathomless Abyss has become the home of humans from all over the world, and across centuries of time, who share the pit with alien species from thousands of worlds. In some places, like the trade town of Watershed, these disparate species come together in a spirit of community. Other times, they fight to the death.

And not everything that falls in is a civilized, sentient being. The Fathomless Abyss also has its share of monsters.

You’ll get a chance to see the Fathomless Abyss come alive for the first time, starting next month, in the anthology Tales from the Fathomless Abyss. It’ll be available in both Kindle and Nook formats and features a story by each of us (with Mike Resnick & Brad Torgersen working as a team). From there, in the order listed above, we’ll break off for books of our own, starting with my as-yet-untitled kick-off book this coming February. I’m also serving as series editor, so expect professional quality on that front—and feel free to comment here if you find any instance where I’ve fallen down on my job.

We’re hoping to release a new book every two months, but cut us a little slack. No one’s getting any up-front money, and a long list of busy professionals don’t always have as much freedom in their schedules as they hope for, but we’ll be working hard on this, and loving every second of it.

And get ready for more posts here—including interviews, sample chapters, more great Mats Minnhagen art—and on the other authors’ various blogs, web sites, too. There’s a million stories clinging to the walls of the Fathomless Abyss, and we’re only just getting started!

—Philip Athans

WHAT I’M THANKFUL FOR, 2011

On November 24, 2009 I wrote a post here entitled “What I’m Thankful For, 2009.” I looked back on that post this morning equally happy and sad. I smiled at my “sense of near-completion” on The Guide to Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction, which was indeed finished and published on schedule in July 2010. A bit sad to see that two years ago I was “plenty thankful for just being employed,” though that only lasted another seven months or so. Still, in that one paragraph you can sense that things were starting to go south at Wizards of the Coast.

I’m thankful for the amazing response to this book.

The rest of it is fairly silly, though I shouldn’t take health and happiness for granted. We continue to be healthy and happy, so we have that going for us, which is nice. This is me being thankful for that again this year. Apparently I wasn’t thankful for anything in 2010, anyway I skipped that blog post last year in favor of other business.

But this year I thought I’d regroup and see where I am as 2011—not an easy year, believe me—draws to a close. And I’m happy to report that I have a lot of be thankful for.

Secret Projects

Anyone who’s been following me on Twitter has heard me speak of the various secret projects I’m working on at any given time. Here’s an update on those.

As I’m typing this I’m waiting for a call from a publisher regarding a very exciting secret project that I still can’t talk about yet. Contracts are still be written up, plans still being laid, but this is going to be a good one—I’m very excited for the opportunity, and can’t wait to spill the beans.

I’m also writing a new book for that same publisher, with an insane deadline that so far I’m on track to hit. I bet if I asked they’d give me the okay to tell you all about it. I’ll ask this morning and maybe I’ll be able to blog about it next week.

Another secret project is coming along nicely. It’s an anthology of fantasy stories, part of a shared world collective that I’ve cooked up with a small group of author friends. I’m still reluctant to describe it in detail, since I haven’t discussed with the rest of the group any sort of plans to announce anything. Still, we’re on track to have that anthology up for sale as early as December 5th—maybe we’ll just announce it then.

Both of those are the most near-term.

Another secret project is a book, too, currently sitting in outline form, waiting for a final decision from the publisher. It’s a very exciting opportunity, so please keep your fingers crossed for me.

What’s great about all these secret projects is that not only will they help keep a roof over my head, they’re extremely exciting projects, the sort of work I live for. All four will require hard work and long hours, but I couldn’t be happier to expend all necessary energy to make them happen.

I’m thankful for Arron of the Black Forest, and friends and allies Mel Odom and Keith Birdsong.

Friends and Allies

I’m always thankful for the people who continue to stand by me as I build my new business and maintain my old one, but beyond merely professional relationships, I’ve got a great network of people out there who are part of my “team,” and allow me to be a part of theirs. I always feel like I need to call people more often, get out of the house more, and I’ll talk about that more in a month or so when we get to the annual resolutions post. But until then, friends and allies, you know who you are, and thank you for sticking with me.

Unforeseen Opportunities

You never know exactly what the world is going to throw at you, and one of the things I’m trying very hard to do is turn off, or at least turn down, that old cynical part of my brain that expects the worst from people and situations, and keep my mind open to whatever the world throws at me—not in a defensive mode, but in a way that allows me to recognize opportunities big and small.

I’m thankful that Christian Dunn allowed me to be a part of this great new Warhammer anthology.

You need a plan to succeed, I firmly believe, but you also need to maintain the mental agility necessary to change course in response to unforeseen circumstances both positive and negative. I set myself up moving in a very specific direction as I continue to assemble my new business and move into an independent future. That track is moving forward with some exciting opportunities, which still fall in that “secret project” category and that I expect will bear fruit right after the first of the year, but a whole bunch of other stuff has come my way that I never expected. That new stuff is not only helping to keep the lights on, but as I said before, are extremely exciting projects that I can’t wait to work on.

You never know what the world is going to throw at you, so you better be prepared to catch everything.

Thanks, Everybody

And I’d like to end on a personal note. Thank you. Whoever you are, whether we’ve met in person or not, if you’ve read any of my books or not, however you came to this post—thank you for reading, and I hope you’ll stick with me. I hope you’ll be one of those friends and allies, and we’ll have a great 2012 together. I can feel it.

—Philip Athans