Story ideas to spark your creativity

Fascinations: Space Sickness

6/12/2025

Motion sickness is rarely featured in popular media, the movie Woman on Top, starring Penelope Cruz, being a notable exception. (The movie features a woman who must drive or be in the “driving” position to avoid getting nauseated, which causes problems with her macho husband).
In most stories set in outer space, motion sickness or other health deficits associated with microgravity seldom—if ever—play into the plot. This is a missed opportunity to challenge characters already under pressure. Imagine how much harder Ripley’s survival would’ve been in the Alien movies if she’d been struggling with motion sickness when the monster attacked.

Because the human body evolved for Earth’s gravity and rotational speed, astronauts often struggle with “space sickness.” According to the Davidson Institute, this type of motion sickness can include “nausea, dizziness, vomiting, headaches, fatigue, general malaise, visual hallucinations, and disorientation in space.”

Space sickness can have serious implications if, for example, vomit landed on delicate equipment. According to the National Space Center, “astronauts use patches affixed to their body to give them doses of medication before spacewalks – as an added safety mechanism. It is one thing to throw up in your spacecraft, but throwing up inside your spacesuit helmet could be fatal. With nowhere for it to go, the potential for blocking up the oxygen supply or stopping an astronaut from being able to see means that extra safety steps need to be taken.”

The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency says, “If you stay for a few days in space, your brain adjusts its interpretation of the vestibular information, so the space sickness [usually] goes away. There are individual differences in the severity of space sickness, and some people don't experience it at all. When you return to earth, you experience the effects of earth's gravity again, and thus ‘gravity sickness’ sometimes occurs, with similar symptoms as space sickness.”

“Long-term exposure to zero gravity causes multiple health problems including redistribution of fluids and loss of bone and muscle mass. Over time, these effects can compromise astronaut performance, which can increase the risk of them being harmed, as well as reduce their ability to absorb oxygen, which slows down their cardiovascular activity.” (Davidson Institute)
According to NASA, “For every month in space, astronauts’ weight-bearing bones become roughly 1% less dense if they don’t take precautions to counter this loss. Muscles, usually activated by simply moving around on Earth, also weaken because they no longer need to work as hard. This loss of bone and muscle is called atrophy [and] has serious implications for astronaut health.”

An article published by Texas A&M says, “Currently there are several countermeasures in place on the International Space Station that seek to lessen the detrimental effects of weightlessness, including extensive exercise protocols. Unfortunately, about two-thirds of returning shuttle astronauts still experience some degree of orthostatic intolerance upon return to Earth. …Artificial gravity (AG) generated by the use of a centrifuge combined with exercise is a promising countermeasure to diminish these effects. … The centrifuge creates a gravitational force in the subjects similar to what is experienced on Earth.”

The benefits of artificial gravity are further explored in a study from Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience:

“Were astronauts to embark upon a journey to Mars today, the 6-month exposure to weightlessness en route would leave them considerably debilitated, even with the implementation of the suite of piece-meal countermeasures currently employed. Continuous or intermittent exposure to simulated gravitational states on board the spacecraft while traveling to and from Mars, also known as artificial gravity, has the potential for enhancing adaptation to Mars gravity and re-adaptation to Earth gravity.”
However: “No human-rated centrifuges [built] specifically to counteract cardiovascular and musculoskeletal deconditioning have flown in space to date.” And there are many unknowns, for example: “the impacts of centrifugation inside a space vehicle on the vibration level, motion sickness, or crew time.”

Although today’s astronauts are trained in simulated microgravity, that doesn’t mean they won’t get sick in space. According to The Mars Generation, “There’s no formal test as of now that can define whether or not someone is going to get SAS when they go into space. And it’s not even correlated as to whether or not you get motion sickness here on Earth.”
I dreamed of going into space as a child, but assumed my terrible motion sickness (and poor eyesight) limited my aspirations. It’s possible I wouldn’t get sick in space . . . but the detrimental risks of space travel, including space sickness, remain very real—and woefully underutilized in modern science fiction stories.

Writing Tips: Crafting Subtext

4/22/2025

Underlying or implicit meaning creates subtext: secret desires, unverbalized fears, or buried insults hidden within the words on the page.
Subtext constructs a treasure hunt for readers, drawing us more deeply into the story to discover what’s really going on.
“Write just enough to give readers the information they need to keep reading; hint at the subtext and let them fill in the blanks.
Withholding information creates space in the reader’s mind for the growth of questions and ideas.
This work on the reader’s part is especially important in sustaining interest.” — MasterClass

Dialogue is one way to convey subtext.
Robert McKee says, “Dialogue should imply, not explain, its subtext. . . . Adept dialogue delivers the sensation of insight, the sense of reading a character’s mind and knowing what she is really thinking, really feeling, really doing to the point of understanding her inner life better than the character herself.”

How to create hidden meaning in character talk? K.M. Weiland offers concrete steps for creating dialogue subtext:

Identify the point of character conversations then try to convey the same information without saying it. Instead, imply through body language, description, or by characters saying something oblique or contradictory.
Instead of answering direct questions, have the character dodge, deflect, respond with understatement or sarcasm, or refuse to answer.

Gotham Writers notes: “Subtext has the power to take an innocuous subject and open it up to profound meaning.” Miscommunication in particular “can add authenticity, create dramatic tension, and even reveal deeper truths.”

In The Art of Subtext, Charles Baxter offers several ways to convey miscommunication in dialogue:

Denial: “an unmethodical way of not hearing dangerous or intolerable information”
Deflection: “a harmless subject is substituted for an inflammable one”
Distraction: “listener indifference and inattentiveness . . . mishearing [or] selective listening” and even ignoring the speaker. “The great fallacy of most written dialogue in fiction of our time is that all the characters are listening.”

Baxter also advocates the use of inflection to imply hidden meaning: “He’d kill us if he had the chance” implies characters in danger. “He’d kill us, if he had the chance” implies characters plotting a murder.
And finally, the importance of silence: “The most emphatic point in the sentence may arrive not with the last word but with refusal to say a word, allowing accusatory silence to hang there.”
Additionally, Baxter describes crafting context through staging (characters getting into another’s personal space or turning away); detailed gestures or facial expressions, and character misbehavior. He says “bad behavior makes us visible, for good or ill.”

There are times when characters speak directly, but miscommunication and other forms of subtext early in the narrative creates a more nuanced, fun, and interesting story.
An example from my writing: In Sky God’s Warrior, the Greek hero Aietos initially believes the female main character, Ayda, is a beautiful young man—though he never directly states this. His misinterpretation of indigenous gender roles and Ayda’s misunderstanding of the subtext of his conversations creates a fun source of tension for the reader to enjoy until they decide to go swimming on a very hot day . . .

All forms of subtext are driven by character fears, desires, and inner conflicts motivated by subconscious emotions and moral dilemmas. These are the same elements that create microtension to generate reader engagement and emotional resonance using indirect imagery.

Fascinations: Creatures of the Night

3/10/2025

Bioluminescent fungi glowing outside my tent and twinkling fireflies filling the night sky are two of my favorite types of nighttime magic. I’ve also glimpsed bats fluttering through the darkening sky at dusk. These experiences reveal a fantastical world beyond the bounds of daylight knowing.
In our oceans, deep sea creatures glow (jellyfish pictured); others use light lures to attract prey. Friends have experienced a luminescent ocean among the many bays around our planet that shine at night.
One of the most incredible science fiction visions of bioluminescence appeared in the original Avatar movie.

Very different nocturnal creatures inhabit the Rocky Horror Picture Show. As a young adult, I loved belting out the lyrics to Creature of the Night (“Toucha, Toucha, Touch Me”), hence the title of this blog.

I recently discovered new night creatures in Night Magic: Adventures among Glowworms, Moon Gardens, and Other Marvels of the Dark by Leigh Ann Henion. The book was too unfocused for my taste, but had great info~
The bioluminescent fungi I’ve witnessed is the fruiting body of mycelium: glowing threads of light hidden beneath the soil.
Oregon’s Malheur National Forest is home to the largest known living organism on earth: a humongous honey mushroom that’s 3.7 miles across and 8,500 years old. Honey mushrooms glow in the dark, as do their mycelium, meaning that this enormous mushroom's underground hyphae produce “subterranean light for miles.”

In addition to yellow-blinking fireflies, the author describes Blue Ghosts, a type of firefly “notable for their neon-blue color and enduring flashes—which hold for up to sixty seconds at a time.” Imagine the night sky filled with these neon-blue beacons.
Spiders are also active at night. “Spiders are, like bats and moths, crucial nocturnal pollinators [and] play a great role in securing human food crops. Without spider and bat participation in agricultural activities, humanity would lose vast food supplies.”

Moon gardens can attract these nocturnal pollinators. “Moon gardens—with plants curated to be enjoyed after sunset—are designed with night bloomers and silver-and-white foliage meant to catch moonlight and ooze perfume.”
In North America, moon gardens might include Moonflower (pictured), Evening Primrose, Flowering Tobacco, Angel's Trumpet, Four O'Clocks, and silvery plants like Dusty Miller or Lamb’s Ears.

Bats are closely associated with the night. From Night Magic:
“The association of bats with Halloween traces back to the fact that, as they prepare for winter, bats are highly active around the holiday. It also has roots in Celtic Samhain, a festival where people would gather around bonfires for food and merriment. The firelight they created to warm themselves attracted insects." And the insects attracted bats on the hunt.

Glowworms are the larvae of beetles, including some types of fireflies. They can be as long as an inch but most species are smaller.
The author describes her encounter with glowworms in the wild: “Around each pinpoint of light, there are webs spun across soil. It makes the glowworms look like they are floating in cotton candy clouds.”
Another type of glowworm is the larvae of fungus gnats. These blue glowworms cover the walls of the Waitomo Caves in New Zealand (pictured).

Humans are also creatures of the night. The author notes that in the past, darkness “was a place to which humans belonged. Our ancestors, all of them, knew the night as it existed directly around them, just as they knew how to identify creatures and nuanced sounds that it held.”

She quotes an anthropologist: “For ninety-nine percent of human evolution, in darkness, by dim firelight, is how our ancestors lived.” Another anthropologist notes that dark caves are sacred in religions across the world, and says, ”Darkness has been an active agent in the development of human spirituality.”
Our eyes adjust to low light within 15-30 minutes, but “it can take several hours without flashlights or phone screens for eyes to reach full sensitivity, which, at its peak, grants humans night vision that can be one million times more powerful than what we utilize in daylight.” A protein called Rhodopsin maximizes light absorption in our eyes—but any light exposure will “bleach” the Rhodopsin, restarting the adjustment.

All magical night creatures—including humans—are at risk due to light pollution. The author says, “In US cities alone, 365 to 988 million birds are killed every year during [their] nocturnal migrations in part due to artificial lighting issues, which disorient and cause them to collide with buildings, often fatally. And without access to navigational stars in cities awash with LEDs, some birds simply lose their way.”

And though we may cling to artificial light for a sense of security, “studies have found that streetlights do not lessen accidents or crime. Certain forms of security lighting have even been found to decrease safety since they make potential victims and property that might be stolen or vandalized easier for perpetrators to visually target.”
She also suggests our attraction to digital devices may be the legacy of evolving around campfires: “when we throw ourselves against computers and tablets and phones as we scroll social media sites, we are likely attempting to reach the hearth fires that we, as humans, have always depended on. We’re seeking sensory-rich exchanges and comradery and caring reconciliation.”

Whatever your personal relationship to darkness and creatures of the night, I invite you to fill your imagination with a world overflowing with moon gardens and bioluminescence—our world, as beautiful by night as it is by day.

For more on deep-sea creatures of the dark, read my review of Underworld.

Writing Tips: Scene Architecture

2/19/2025

High-tension scenes feel like climbing a roller-coaster hill, ratcheting up the anxiety to the breaking point until we plunge over the other side.
Scenes may also resemble a mountain hike: a series of crests and dips before we reach the epiphany—or dark canyon.
Or they may be structured like a bar-room brawl, battering the reader with one devastating blow after another until our story protagonist either crumples into a broken heap or staggers out the door.

Elizabeth Sims, in You’ve Got a Book in You, has a very simple scene blueprint: “You show your hero going after something. He or she doesn’t get it, gets defeated, then regroups and forges a new path to victory. Scene by scene, that’s it.”

In Techniques of the Selling Writer, Dwight Swain defines scene as “a unit of conflict, of struggle, lived through by the character and reader. It’s a blow-by-blow account of somebody’s time-unified effort to attain an immediate goal despite face-to-face opposition.”
Swain outlines scene structure as Goal→Conflict→Disaster. The scene goal must be “specific and concrete and immediate” a “target so explicit that you [could] photograph your hero” attaining it. The outcome of the goal “must raise an intriguing question for the future—a question designed to keep your reader reading. . . . As a tool, the scene is designed to make the most of conflict. To that end, it organizes conflict elements. It telescopes them. It intensifies them.”

Karl Iglesias (Writing for Emotional Impact) describes a scene as a mini-story “with a clear beginning, middle, and end, a dramatic question, rising tension, and a climax, which should lead the reader into the next scene."
The opening set-up hooks the reader into the scene and the denouement (or sequel) shows the character processing scene events and/or planning their next move.
Iglesias says every scene “has a triple duty—advance the story forward through conflict, reveal additional character layers, and more importantly, have an emotional impact on the reader—whether it creates tension, arouses curiosity and anticipation, or even surprises the reader.”

In Story, Robert McKee says a scene “is a story in miniature” played out in real time that substantially changes “the condition of a character’s life.” The moment of decisive change, or turning point, in the scene is most powerful, Mckee says, if it involves a painful choice between irreconcilable desires (she can have only one and not both) or the lesser of two evils (both choices involve pain or loss).
This dilemma will have emotional meaning for the reader if three conditions are met:

“First, we must empathize with the character.
Second, we must know what the character wants and want the character to have it.
Third, we must understand the values at stake in the character’s life.”

Elizabeth George (Write Away) notes: “Scenes are for drama, so make sure events you render are dramatically depicted. Make sure the scene creates dramatic questions in the mind of the reader.”
This drama is created through conflict:
“During the course of the scene, tension should rise as the conflict brews. At the height of the conflict you should have the climax and what follows should be a form of resolution that propels the entire novel forward.”

Donald Maass recommends that characters have emotional goals in story scenes, in his excellent writing book The Emotional Craft of Fiction.
Emotional goals are best illustrated by showing the character’s emotional desire entering the scene, hinting at their secret fears or intense motivations for fulfilling this emotional goal, and then showing their emotional response after scene events.

In Character, Emotion, & Viewpoint, Nancy Kress has practical tips for writing a scene: “You don’t have to think about the whole book at once, the entire emotional arc, or the progressive motivations of six different characters. All you have to do right now is write this one scene. And the way you do that well is by knowing, before you write, exactly what the scene is supposed to accomplish . . . what you want this scene to do.”

James Scott Bell explains one approach to scene writing in his book, Plot & Structure. He recommends starting scenes with a hook “that grabs the reader’s attention” and pulls them into the narrative. “Try different opening paragraphs. . . . You’ll soon happen upon the hook that feels right.”
Keep reader interest by generating scene conflict: “pack your scenes with tension.” He says, “Always go over the scenes you’ve written with an eye for intensity level. If it isn’t strong enough, try to ratchet it up.”
“Finally you need to end scenes with a prompt, something to make readers turn the page.” Prompts can be impending disaster, intense emotions, a surprising revelation, a major decision, or unanswered question.

Example: Brymaeca sneaks into the enemy stronghold to retrieve her dead son’s severed arm in this excerpt from a yet-to-be-published short story:
  I slipped inside King Hrodgar’s mead-hall. The rancid tang of unwashed bodies and yeasty bite of spilled mead congealed the air. Fireplace embers cast an eerie orange glow onto dreaming men littering the benches and floor.
  A trophy glittered in the rafters: my son’s severed arm in its silver-scaled armor. What manner of monster wrenched a warrior apart then used his sundered limb as a prize?
  I tip-toed through the slumbering men, silent as smoke lest they wake and doom my mission. I leapt lightly onto the table beneath the arm and used a discarded meat knife to slice the leather straps binding it to the rafter.
  A frail old man stared up at me, raven-black eyes shining in the fire’s glow. Aeschere. King Hrodgar’s dearest friend. Aeschere remained the one man of honor in Hordgar’s warrior-hoard. He would let me escape with my son’s arm without sounding the alarm, or so I hoped.
  The safe choice, the wise choice, was to flee with the severed arm and ensure my son’s body was complete in the afterworld—which meant leaving his murder unavenged.
  Another choice bloomed, a chance to shatter King Hrodgar’s heart in retaliation for my son’s death and the years of humiliation he forced on my defeated people. It meant probable death if the warriors woke, and more bloodshed between our tribes. I wished it was anyone other than noble Aeschere waiting for me to choose.

Scene Purpose: set up the final confrontation between Brymaeca and King Hrodgar’s champion.
Scene Goal: retrieve her son’s severed arm so he can enter the afterworld whole.
Emotional Goal: suppress her shame over her son’s death and her people’s defeat.
Scene Conflict: Aeschere sees her; the other warriors will try to kill her.
Dramatic Question: Will she escape with the arm but leave her son/people unavenged—or risk death to kill Aeschere and avenge her son?

Stay tuned for publication updates . . .
For more writing tips read Creating Microtension, Writing with Authority,
Multiple Storylines, Crafting Emotional Resonance

Fascinations: Being a Bird

12/13/2024

I have dreams of flying and adore the fantasy trope of shapeshifting. But what’s it really like to be (or become) a bird?

FLIGHT
Although bird wings are essentially modified forelimbs (arms), they’ve evolved complex dexterity for flight.
Birds fly by flapping their wings and steer primarily with their tails. Tail shape affects how rapidly they can change direction (forked tails like those of barn swallows allow the quickest turns). Of course some birds swim (penguins) and others don’t fly at all (ostriches).

For birds that fly, wing shape varies based on whether the bird flaps their wings to stay airborne (shorter wingspan) or spends most of their time gliding (longer wingspan).
Birds can shorten, lengthen, and adjust the angle of their wings, and spread or close their long flight feathers to fine-tune their flight. They have muscles controlling the position of each individual feather.
Shapeshifting into a hawk, for example, would involve much more than flapping your “arms.” You’d also be constantly tilting and adjusting your wings and tail—and moving individual flight feathers—in response to fluctuating air currents. But wouldn’t it be glorious to fly?! But there's more to being a bird than flying~

VISION
Birds process visual information more than twice as fast as humans. As David Allen Sibley notes in What It's like to be a Bird: “where we would see a signpost on the highway as a blur, birds would still be able to see details and track the passing of each post.”

Humans have one focal point (fovea) in each eye and both eyes focus on the same point.
Raptors (hawks, falcons, owls, eagles, vultures, osprey) have two fovea on each eye (four total) pointing in different directions, so they see four different areas of detail and have nearly 360 degrees of peripheral vision.
They see their prey in detail from great distances, and in all directions simultaneously.

According to Tim Birkhead in Bird Sense, raptor visual acuity (ability to see fine detail) is boosted by about one million cones per square millimeter (compared to about 200,000 in humans, eighty percent fewer). He says the closest we can come to imagining what it’s like to process visual information as rapidly as a raptor is the sensation of time slowing down when we have a terrifying, near-death experience.
Our hawk shapeshifter will need to process four sets of visual data (both an overall view and an extreme zoom, on both sides of the head) at more than twice the human-rate of comprehension.

HEARING
Owls have very sensitive hearing, and the asymmetrical positioning of their ears (one is higher than the other) helps them pinpoint tiny sounds with exceptional accuracy on both the horizontal and vertical planes. The special design of their feathers allows “air to flow smoothly around the wing allowing nearly silent flight so prey can’t hear them and they can use their acute hearing to help locate prey.” (Sibley)
An owl shapeshifter must process a very different method of hearing since humans hear only on the horizontal plane.

NAVIGATION
Birds can “read the stars, track the sun, hear infrasound [very low frequency noises], follow smells . . . and detect polarized light, which gives clues to the position of the sun even when the sun is not visible.” (Sibley)

Even more incredible is their “sixth sense” that helps them detect the orientation and slope of the earth’s magnetic field “like a GPS map. [A] chemical mechanism based in the eye provides the compass, while the magnetic receptors in the beak provide the map.
The compass may detect the direction of the magnetic field while the map detects the strength, and by integrating both types of information the birds navigate home.” (Birkhead)

In addition to the complexities of flight, vision, and hearing, our bird shapeshifter will also navigate by more-than-human sensations including smell, detecting polarized light, and position relative to the earth’s magnetic field. Bound to be disorienting at first, but once you get the hang of being a bird, it should be an incredible rush—however, it might be a bit dull to shift back into the limited sensations of a human.

For more fascinating facts on our animal cousins (and shapeshifting options), read Human Hunters & Alien Brains, Lesbian Lizards, Cosmonaut Cockroach Sex, and my review of An Immense World

Writing Tips: Embracing Fear

10/7/2024

Facing the blank page, submitting work for publication, and getting dreaded rejections can trigger paralyzing fears. We might freeze when starting a new project, fuss over our work and endlessly revise it chasing impossible “perfection,” or break into a sweat whenever we submit our writing to for others to read.
However, it is possible to turn fear into an ally.
First, I find encouragement knowing I’m not alone with my fears:

In The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear, author Ralph Keyes quotes successful published authors and their experiences with fear.
He says, “Fear is felt by writers at every level. Anxiety accompanies the first word they put on paper and the last. …their best ideas are personal, candid, and deeply felt. Yet such ideas make them feel subnaked before the world.”

My most common recurring fears are:

failure, humiliation and shame
not (ever) being good enough
running out of time
rejection

It’s helpful to know that rejections are a common experience in the publishing industry, yet every time an editor passes on my work, I go into a brief shame spiral.
I try to remind myself that successful authors are persistent authors, and of the Japanese proverb: Fall down seven times, get up eight.

William Kenower suggests the antidote to the fear and vulnerability writing is focusing on the story itself. In Fearless Writing: How to Create Boldly and Write with Confidence he says, “Why you want to share your stories will both teach you how to share them and keep you safe from the fear that sharing engenders. ... To write fearlessly and with complete confidence, you must rest in your unconditional love for the story you’re telling.”

I love spinning stories and creating interesting characters, many of whom become “friends.” Publishing allows others to fall in love with these fictional characters and share in their adventures. I also try to imbue my work with meaningful themes, such as spiritual connection with the natural world and inclusiveness, where absolutely everyone has a place at the table, including my villains.

Ralph Keyes notes that “Writers work under constant threat of public ridicule and rejection.”
But in Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking, authors David Bayles and Ted Orland advise creatives to focus on the integrity of the story itself. “Audience comes later. The only pure communication is between you and your work.”

I must learn to balance writing in a way readers can enjoy, responding to critiques from editors and other writers, and staying true to my own vision—without getting paralyzed by fear.
Some days it’s especially challenging to quiet my inner critic.
Ultimately, I must come back to my character “friends” and the story I want to tell, then pray for the courage to tell it.

“Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear.” —George Adair.

I try to start every writing session with a brief ritual. I light incense and pray to be inspired and guided in what I write. Lately I’ve also been praying to “embrace and cherish” my fears. A tall order, but it does (temporarily) shift my dread.
Reading craft books and taking classes often inspire me to write, as does reading great fiction or fascinating nonfiction. Once I’m inspired, it’s easier to dive into writing.
When I’m stuck in a particular story and can’t seem to regain my momentum, I may go back to an earlier passage and move forward from there, or switch to a different project. Writing blogs and book reviews for my website and taking stock for my monthly newsletter provide creative outlets when my stories or poems aren’t working.
I’ve also started keeping a daily word-tally, which helps incentivize getting words “on paper.” I count each major revision of a story, which helps me celebrate my progress.
Sending stories and poems out for submission is always scary, but it helps if I reread my work to regain that thrill of completion.

In The Courage to Write, Ralph Keyes admits, “I feared…I would be revealed as an imposter: someone who said he could write a book but couldn’t.” It’s easy to fall into imposter syndrome when my work doesn’t measure up to my expectations.
Bayles & Orland address this issue in Art & Fear:
“The irony here is that the piece you make is always one step removed from what you imagined, or what else you can imagine, or what you’re right on the edge of being able to imagine. …The poem in the head is always perfect. Resistance begins when you try to convert it into language.”

My fear that I’m not “good enough” or will never “make it” as a “real author” triggers my perfectionism. But what does “perfect” mean in terms of writing? Every reader has unique tastes. You may not finish a book I adore and reread with delight. I'm learning that there's no one right way to tell a story. Instead, I strive to craft the words that most closely convey the story I want to tell.

Author Sarah Callender reveals that even success can be terrifying in her delightful essay “Writing (and Living) in the Midst of Fear.” After ten years she finally sold her novel, and was confronted with new fears. She uses her fear of being strafed by crows to explore how “like a contagion, fear infects our hearts and brains, our relationships and communities. Even when there’s good reason to feel scared, fear tempts us to retreat, isolate, blame, hoard.”
She recommends playing with crow finger puppets and “continue using words to expand the world, to amplify empathy, to fertilize the love-parts of our fellow human’s hearts.”

In The Art of Mistakes Melanie Rothschild suggests “Mistakes give us ideas we could never deliberately think up otherwise. …And most of the time, the price we pay for avoiding mistakes is the loss of stretching our thinking in substantive, new ways. There are serious consequences for not understanding the nature of how mistakes serve us.” Rothschild encourages us to embrace “mistakes” as part of the creative process.
The goal then is not to avoid “mistakes” or write “perfectly,” but to honor the integrity of each project.

In Fearless Writing, William Kenower advises us to “look upon writing as a practice—meaning something at which you gradually improve and are not expected to be perfect at every time you attempt it.”

Kenower also says, “The best writers exploit fear’s energy to billow the sails of their imaginations. They convert anxiety into enthusiasm and an unparalleled source of energy.”
I have found it beneficial to give my characters my deepest fears: rejection, abandonment, failure. By forcing my characters to face these fears and vicariously experiencing their courage, I become a smidge more comfortable.
And as much as possible, I let my imagination play.

I’ve come to accept that fear will always be a companion on my writing journey. And as my author friend LaShaunda C. Hoffman says about writing with fear: “Do it scared.”

Fascinations: Human Hunters & Alien Brains

9/11/2024

Inspired by An Immense World, Ed Yong’s exploration of animal senses, read on for highlights of the lowly (but infinitely annoying) mosquito, and the brainy octopus.

MOSQUITOES
In An Immense World, Ed Yong calls mosquitoes “the planet’s most effective hunters of humans.”
Research indicates that mosquitoes taste with their antennae, and, like flies, also taste with their feet. To mosquitoes, DEET tastes bitter, so when we cover skin with mosquito repellant “the receptors on their feet force them to take off before they get a chance to bite.”
Good thing, since the CDC lists multiple dangers associated with mosquito bites.

Ed Yong goes into detail exploring a mosquito’s inner world:
“Imagine what it might be like to be a mosquito. Flying through a thick soup of tropical air, your antennae slice through plumes of odorants until they catch a whiff of carbon dioxide. Enticed, you turn into the plume, zigzagging when you lose track of it, and surging ahead whenever you pick it up. You spot a dark silhouette and fly over to investigate. You enter into a cloud of lactic acid, ammonia, and sulcatone—molecules released by human skin. Finally, the clincher: an alluring burst of heat. You land, and your feet pick up an explosion of salt, lipids, and other tastes. Your senses, working together, have once again found a human. You find a blood vessel and drink your fill.”

OCTOPUSES
Photoreceptors in the human eye are the rods and cones that convert light into images within our brains. “Octopuses, cuttlefish, and other cephalopods have photoreceptors dotted throughout their skin, which might help control their amazing color-changing abilities.”
According to Two Oceans Aquarium, their color change comes from manipulating skin pigments: “Just beneath their skin, octopuses have thousands of cells called chromatophores. Each of these cells has a tiny sac filled with either a red, orange, brown, yellow or black pigment and by stretching or squeezing these sacs, they can rapidly change the brightness of each of these colors.”

It’s the octopus brain where things get really interesting. Ed Yong again:
“An octopus’s central nervous system contains around 500 million neurons—a total that dwarfs that of all other invertebrates and that’s comparable to the number found in small mammals. But only a third of those neurons are found in the animal’s head…The remaining 320 million are in the arms. Each arm has a large and relatively complete nervous system, which seems barely to communicate with the other arms. An octopus effectively has nine brains that have their own agendas."

“Even the 300 suckers on each arm are somewhat independent. Once a sucker makes contact with something it reshapes itself to create a seal and then sticks by creating suction. Meanwhile it simultaneously touches and tastes using 10,000 mechanoreceptors and chemoreceptors on its rim. Our tongues perceive flavor and mouthfeel as separate qualities, but given the wiring of the sucker, an octopus likely doesn’t.
“Depending on the flavor it feels, or the texture it tastes, the sucker might continue sucking or let go. And it can make that decision on its own, since each sucker is served by its own mini-brain. …[The arm brains] coordinate the individual suckers and allow the entire arm to act in an organized way. And they can also accomplish a lot on their own without involving the central brain ... .reach out, grab objects, and pull them back in."

“…an octopus has a body of pure possibility. Aside from its hard beak, it is soft, malleable, and free to contort. Its skin can change color and texture at a whim. Its arms can extend, contract, bend, and rotate anywhere along their lengths and have practically infinite ways of performing even simple movements. How could a brain, even a large one keep track of such boundless options? …The brain doesn’t have to. It can mostly let the arms sort themselves out, while imposing the occasional grudging nudge.”

It’s hard to imagine consciousness based on so many different centers of processing—like a biological internet with multiple terminals operating simultaneously but all focused on unique activities. The ultimate multitasker!
Not surprisingly, there’ve been a number of science fiction stories based on these amazing creatures, including The Mountain in the Sea and a delightful micro story by Peter Chiykowski.
Explore other amazing animal senses in An Immense World, by Ed Yong, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and my blog Being a Bird.

Fascinations: Serving Plants

8/12/2024

What if . . . we evolved to propagate plants? Perhaps gardeners and farmers are actually servants— diligently watering, weeding, and fertilizing plants who have convinced us they are the most edible and desirable.
In The Light Eaters, the author says: "We know that some plants are hallucinogenic, some are addictive…in what other ways are they influencing us? A fleet of humans carefully tending a field of crops can certainly start to look like an army of plant symbionts”

The author continues:
“There are presumably thousands of [chemical] compounds we might inhale or ingest every day, simply existing as plant eaters on a plant-dominated planet.

How might the complex chemicals plants synthesize influence us?
“[Consider the] thousands of natural plant chemicals we unwittingly ingest every time we eat a fruit or vegetable. We don’t know what they are doing with our brain. We can never be sure, when we are eating something nice and tasty, that there is not something in this tomato or apple that makes us believe it is the best food.”

Hot peppers are candidates for a top human-influencing plant.

Hot peppers contain a chemical called capsaicin that makes them unpalatable to most insects, and we humans are the only animals who “enjoy” having our mouths set afire from it. As a result of our singular taste for capsaicin, humans have spread pepper plants around the world and even bred them for a higher capsaicin content.
From the plant’s perspective, we’ve done their work for them.

Plants are more intelligent and cunning that we usually give them credit for--and incredibly adaptable per The Light Eaters:
“[S]everal plants, including lima beans and tobacco, can react to an attack of munching insects by summoning those insects’ specific predators to come pick them off.”
“Other plants…secrete a chemical that causes hungry caterpillars to turn away from devouring their leaves to eat each other instead.”

“[Plants] grow thorns and spikes and stinging hairs, developed with remarkable precision, to pierce the flesh or exoskeleton of whatever mammal ro bug might be its main threat.”
“[Or] secrete sticky sugar to entice and then immobilize their antagonists, whose hungry mouths get stuck shut.”

“[Plants] form, store, and access memories, sense incredibly subtle changes in their environment, and send highly sophisticated chemical aloft on the air in response. They send signals to different body parts to coordinate defenses.”
“Some plants are able to detect that an insect has placed its eggs somewhere on their body and sabotage the eggs.”
“Plants see each other by the color of the light. Light changes color when it passes through a plant, and the light that passes through different plants is altered each in a different way, far too subtle for us to notice but clearly distinct enough for plants to notice.”

“[C]arnivorous plants…were recently discovered to have evolved to hunt in packs. Collaboration on catching insects allows them to lure larger prey.”
A venus flytrap can count:
"if two trigger hairs... are touched within 20 seconds... the trap snaps shut. But the flytrap keeps counting. If the hairs [inside the trap] are disturbed five times... it injects digestive juices... and the meal commences." If there's no additional movement, it reopens the trap.

Plants communicate through chemical signals but they also make clicks.
“Each species of plant seemed to have their own click frequency. A cactus sounded very different from a grape, for example.”
“Perhaps plants are also speaking in movement, in electricity, or even in the flow of fluid in their bodies that clearly produces audible clicks, though all of this has yet to be understood.”

Ursula LeGuin predicted this understanding of nonhuman language fifty years ago in her fabulous short story, The Author of Acacia Seeds, that features translations of the language of ants and dolphins among other creatures.

Our world is more bizarre and mind-blowing than any science fiction story!
For more brain-boggling factoids read about whacky weeds, cyclical cicadas, the world of microbes, extremophiles, pathogenesis, cockroaches in space, and plant-animal hybrids.

Writing Tips: Creating Microtension

7/15/2024

Plenty of writing craft books advocate ways to create plot-level tension and suspense, but few mention microtension, the secret sauce that keeps readers turning pages.
In The Fire in Fiction, Donald Mass says, “Microtension is the moment-by-moment tension that keeps the reader in a constant state of suspense over what will happen, not in the story, but in the next few seconds.”
Microtension is born from conflicting emotions—the inner conflict of the characters— and its key element is making readers uneasy so they have to keep reading to find out what happens next.

In dialogue, it’s not what characters say, but how their words reveal their internal conflicted emotional states.
Action becomes tense when conflicting emotions are folded into the events, making outcomes more uncertain.
Exposition and inner monologue also benefit from conflicting ideas and emotions to keep readers uneasy and engaged.

Even quiet moments can benefit from microtension:
“Every minute has a mood. Every moment has meaning."
"Tension springs from weaving these elements into a passage that precisely captures small visceral details and surgically dissects the enormous feelings that fill a silence.”

The opening scene of A Taste of Gold and Iron by Alexandra Rowland illustrates the uneasiness created by microtension in the author’s word choices:

“acute relief” contrasted with “terror and worry” and “routine [birth]” → A self-aware character embarrassed by his intense, passionate emotions, which are exaggerated for the situation
“prayed fervently” versus “breathe easy” → A pious person who knows he worries needlessly
“days of celebration” and “daily concerns” contrasted with “alarming break-in,” “most blasphemous crimes,” “perplexing tantrums,” and “shaky nerves” → Subtext that all is not well despite the celebrations, and that the character struggles to fulfill his duties

Unease and reader questions infuse the opening scene of The Queens of Innis Lear by Tessa Gratton:

“Scars and fresh scratches marred the rich tan of his back and arms” → A beautiful man unconcerned by fresh scratches and scars [What caused these scars?]
“…the canopy of leaves chattered welcome.” → Are the trees actually speaking with him?
“...[He] replied, That’s encouraging, in their tongue” → How can he speak with trees?
“It had taken Bran months to win the trust of [these] trees, for he’d arrived angry and corded over by bitter flavors” → He is trustworthy yet full of anger and bitterness
“He needed the rhythm under his skin to properly connect, to find the paths of magic he could use to track the loathsome Burgan army” → A powerful magician concerned with mundane war
“Peace and solitude,” “tranquility,” “refreshed and blessed,” “where he might best catch hold of a wind willing to report on Burgun.” → Serenity contrasted with spying on his enemy
“Ban rather liked his [scars] for how they proved his experiences and belonged to none but him” → An unexpected response to scars and being physically wounded.

Reader uneasiness can thus be generated within characters and between the character and reader expectations.

Writer Zara Altair recommends using juxtaposition to generate microtension: a contrast between what a character sees and what they hear, or an inner conflict created by a character wanting information but being unwilling to sacrifice their dignity to get it.
She notes “each character has motivations. And each motivation is tied to an emotion.” Choosing words that highlight character motivations and emotions can help illuminate a character’s inner conflicts.

Writes With Tools describes crafting creative tension through “oppositions, juxtapositions, and resolutions of seemingly contradictory ideas or feelings.”
She offers the following practical suggestions:

Choose words with subtle nuances of tension (desire vs. lust) or contrary meanings (sweet sorrow, cruel kindness, admirable villain)
Explore polarizing word pairs: impossible/necessary, powerful/helpless
Show a character acting in a way that contradicts her stated desires
“Make one character uncertain about or suspicious of the other character”
“Make a character’s dialogue contrary to their goals, thoughts, body language”
Reveal the character’s “emotions about the action…and what it might mean”
“Tie setting, in some way, to inner tension” in the character

Writes with Tools also recommends structuring sentences and paragraphs without a summarizing lead sentence to heighten reader curiosity:
“Look for instances where you’ve made the punchline the topic sentence …when the [character] makes a conclusion then gives the reader evidence for drawing it. He’s a slob [summary]. His sink is full of week-old dishes. His bed is unmade… Instead, show what the character sees and then draw the conclusion…if you even need to. There’s no reason to repeat things the reader has figured out.”
This example also illustrates common writing advice of showing (dirty dishes, unmade bed) versus telling (He’s a slob).

Why work so hard to incorporate microtension in your writing?
According to Donald Maas, microtension is THE KEY to crafting compelling fiction readers can’t put down.

More from Donald Maass: The Emotional Craft of Fiction, The Fire in Fiction

For more writing tips, read Emotional Resonance, Scene Architecture,
Writing with Authority, Multiple Storylines

Fascinations: Wacky Weeds

6/8/2024

Some years are better than others for garden vegetables, but I grow one set of abundant crops without fail every year: weeds. They reappear as quickly as I yank them out, like aliens from a horror movie.

Science fiction/horror movies have long celebrated killer plants: The Thing from Another World (1951: a resilient plant-based alien); The Day of the Triffids (1962: walking alien plants); Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (1978: sentient tomatoes rebel against humanity); Little Shop of Horrors (1986: an alien plant with a taste for human blood); The Happening (2008: trees defend themselves agaisnt humans with psychosis-inducing pollen).

Actual weeds are as fantastical as anything in fiction. For example, in Weeds: In Defense of Nature’s Most Unloved Plants, by Richard Mabey, the author says, “In a single summer each underground stem [of ground elder] can extend as much as three feet, so that from a single rosette an area of more than a yard square has been colonized. The roots plunge down as well, to unprecedented depths. In a quarry in Kent…a worker found ground elder roots probing thirty feet below the surface. …[and] almost any fragment of the wiry root system or shoot, cut up by hoe or spade, can generate a new plant.”

Another fabulous weed Mabey describes is knotweed. “Each [knotweed] had a root system that could extend six feet underground and advance the growing shoots of the plant twenty feet or more each year. …The spring shoots, several of which appear from the bulky rhizome, can break through asphalt, lift concrete slabs into the air, and reach a height of five feet in four weeks.”

How do weeds become so voracious? According to Mabey, we create them:

First, it’s important to realize that weeds are naturally resilient~
“Weeds’ rapid, opportunist lifestyles mean that their role—what they do—is to fill empty spaces of the earth, to repair the vegetation shattered naturally for millions of years by landslide and flood and forest fire, and today degraded by aggressive farming and gross pollution. In so doing, they stabilize the soil, conserve water loss, provide shelter for other plants, and begin the process of succession.”

Second, this adaptability is genetically enhanced~
“It’s long been known that many plants —e.g., juniper or fat hen—can exist in different forms in different habitats without any genetic variation between types. It now looks as if these “epigenetic” effects can be produced in individual plants within a very few seasons or generations. ... gene complexes shared by many weed species, which predispose them, for example, to fast growth and adaptability.”

Third, agriculture promotes the evolution of modern weeds~
“…just as the hoe gave advantage to individual weed plants with deep roots that could regenerate when chopped, and grain sieves helped the evolution of weeds whose seeds were the same size as crop grains, so chemical weed killers actively encouraged the evolution of individual weeds whose biochemistry is unusual enough to be immune to the poison.”
This “endless game of chemical poker” encourages increasingly resilient weeds. Over fifty species “have evolved some type of resistance to a wide range of herbicides.”

Weeds not only inspire fantastical stories, they also provide a mirror:
“Every single weed nuisance—from the ground elder in the over-hoed English herbaceous border to the casually imported pond plant suffocating the Everglades swamps, to the cogon smothering the napalmed remnants of the Vietnamese rainforest—has been the consequence of thoughtlessness and sometimes deliberate disruption of natural systems. Weeds are our most successful cultivated crop.”
“[Weeds] are mobile, prolific, and…use multiple strategies for getting their own way. …the species they most resemble is us.”

For more on fascinating plant facts, read Serving Plants and Plant-Animal Hybrids.

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