Story ideas to spark your creativity

Fascinations: Gender and Sexual Diversity

1/25/2026

We live in such a diverse and beautiful world, but until recently, I was unaware that infinite variety included multiple forms of sexual coupling and gender expression among our more-than-human cousins.
I find this fascinating as a speculative fiction writer—imagine a world of communal parenting and fluid gender expression. Turns out, our fellow animals live in just such a world.
My primary resources in this journey were the fabulous Evolution's Rainbow (reviewed separately) and Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity by Bruce Bagemihl, PhD. Unless noted otherwise, the following quotes are all taken from Bagemihl’s excellent book:

“Other animals regularly have partners of both sexes, and some even live in communal groups where sexual activity is common among all members, male and female. Many creatures are ‘transgendered,’ crossing or combining characteristics of both males and females in their appearance or behavior.”

Widespread "homosexuality" among animals can take the form of male-male or female-female genital (or anal) penetration, or “pelvic thrusting and rubbing the genitals on the rump of the other animal.”
Nearly 40% of mammals and birds engaging in same-sex mating also engage in courtship behavior. “Perhaps most interesting are those creatures that have a special courtship pattern found only in homosexual interactions. Male ostriches, for example, perform a unique ‘pirouette dance’ only when courting other males, while female Rhesus macaques engage in courtship games such as ‘hide-and-seek’ that are unique to lesbian interactions. … Male lions ‘head-rub’ and roll around with each other before having sex together.”

Polyamory is natural among more-than-human animals. “Spinner Dolphins … participate in “wuzzles”—group sessions of mutual caressing and sexual activity (both same-sex and opposite-sex)—while West Indian manatees have a similar sort of “free-for-all” group activity known as cavorting. Group sex and courting behavior occurs in over twenty five species “involving anywhere from three or four (giraffes, lions) to six or more (bowhead whales, mountain sheep) partners.”

“Gorilla babies grow up in mixed-sex, polygamous groups where their mothers may have lesbian interactions with each other, while Pukeko [birds] and Acorn woodpeckers live and raise their young in communal breeding groups where many, if not all, group members engage in courtship and sexual activities with one another (both same-sex and opposite-sex)."
"Same-sex trios of male Greylag geese or female Grizzly bears are sometimes known as triumvirates, while bisexual (and heterosexual) trios in Flamingos are called triads.”
Among primates, “female bonobos and Rhesus macaques, for instance, may have sexual relationships with several different ‘favorite’ partners or consorts (of both sexes).”

There are also many documented cases of pair or individual masturbation including: “diddling (fondling of the penis and scrotum) in male Savanna baboons. Bottlenose dolphins and West Indian manatees rub another male’s penis with their flippers. Mutual masturbation in female and male macaques. ‘Rump-rubbing’ and ‘bump-rump’ among bonobos and chimpanzees. Mutual genital stimulation using trunks in female elephants, and anal stimulation and penetration with fingers by male chimpanzees, siamangs, and macaques. … Many birds masturbate by mounting and copulating with tufts of grass, leaves, or mounds of earth.”

In fact, nonprocreative sexual activity "frequently constitutes a significant portion of all sexual behavior.” These acts include “various forms of oral sex … stimulation of a partner’s genitals with the hands or other appendages (such as flippers), including vaginal stimulation (in primates); anal stimulation, penetration with fingers or oral-anal contact (orangutans), rump-rubbing…and even heterosexual anal intercourse (in orangutans).”

“In many animals with communal breeding systems, only one or two individuals in each group reproduce while the others are nonbreeders; many of the latter help…raise the young, but in a few species…nonbreeders do not contribute.”

“Virtually every animal population includes non-breeding individuals. There is a tendency to regard the urge to procreate among animals as instinctual, all-pervasive, and unstoppable. … Many non-breeding animals are still sexually active; on the other hand, celibacy, abstinence, and other kinds of asexuality are also prevalent. ... Among white-handed gibbons, males and females are thought to interact sexually with each other every two years or so, while Siamang females often space their pregnancies by a couple of years, turning over parental duties to males while they assume leadership roles.”

There is also a wide range of gender expression in the more-than-human world: “Animals with females that become males, animals with no males at all, animals that are both male and female simultaneously, animals where males resemble females, animals where females court other females and males court other males … Many animals live without two distinct genders or with multiple genders.”

Organisms such as shrimp and oysters “undergo complete reversals of their sex at some stage in their lives. … more than fifty species of parrot fishes, wrasses, groupers, angelfishes, and other species are transsexual. In all such cases, the reproductive organs of the fish undergo a complete reversal. What were once fully functioning ovaries, for example, become fully functioning testes, and the formerly female fish is able to mate and reproduce as a male.”

“In addition to nontranssexual males and females, some individuals [of lantern fish] are hermaphrodites (both male and female at the same time) and others are secondary (transsexual) males, while a few individuals exhibit courtship and mating patterns typical of the opposite sex (directed toward individuals of the same sex).”

Transgender animals that assume "opposite" sex roles: "transgender animals sometimes have high status in a population (e.g., Savanna baboons) or are more successful than other animals at obtaining sexual partners (e.g., red deer, common garter snakes).”
On the other hand, white-tail deer “velvet-horns” (individuals who combine both male and female characteristics) are hounded by nontransgendered deer of all ages and sexes in “highly aggressive attacks” so that “velvet horns tend to associate only with other velvet horns.”

Male Bighorn sheep spend much of their lives in "bachelor" groups where they routinely mount each other. “A small percentage of male [Bighorn sheep] are behavioral transvestites: they remain in female herds year-round and also mimic female behavior patterns. Such males generally refuse to allow other males to mount them, just the way females do. Thus, among Bighorn sheep, being mounted by a male is a typically “masculine” activity, while refusal of such mounting is a typically “feminine” behavior. Males who mimic females specifically avoid homosexuality.”

New Guinea traditions attribute androgynous and sex-transforming characteristics to the cassowary, a “mammal-like bird.” Human representatives of the cassowary ritually enact its transgender characteristics and “these transgendered and nonreproductive ‘animal-people’ are symbols of fertility, fecundity, and growth—corporeal manifestations of what one cassowary man-woman calls ‘the hidden secret of androgyny ... inside the living center of the life force.’ ”
Other transgendered shamans are common among a number of cultures from the Siberian arctic to the American southwest to the great plains.

Intersex animals: There are as many as ten to twenty percent of ‘masculinized females’ in wild populations of grizzly, black, and polar bears. These animals have the internal reproductive anatomy of a female combined with portions of the external genitals of a male, including ‘penislike’ organs. … Intersexual animals that combine male and female sex organs … also occur spontaneously in other mammals…primates, whales & dolphins, marsupials, and rodents.”

Although biologists historically assessed ecosystems by their limitations, scientists are now studying how abundance and excess drive natural systems.
Life on Earth is characterized by “the super-abundance of biochemical energy” freely provided by our sun.
“The challenge confronting life is not scarcity, but excess—what to do with all this extra energy.”

A related idea is biodiversity, the “principle that the vitality of a biological system is a direct consequence of the diversity it contains … as diversity increases, so does stability and resilience. … Every individual, every behavior … comprising 1% or 99% of the population—has a part to play.”
“Seen in this light, [gender diversity], homosexuality and nonreproductive heterosexuality are ‘expected’ occurrences—they are one manifestation of an overall ‘extravagance’ of biological systems that has many other expressions. … an affirmation of nature’s plurality, strength, and wholeness.”

Read more about gender and sexual diversity:
Nonfiction: Evolution’s Rainbow; Genderqueer Gods, Lesbian Lizards
Read more about our natural world: If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal,  The Forest Unseen,  The Light Eaters, An Immense World,  The Hidden Life of Trees,  The Salmon Cannon and the Levitating Frog
Read novels with gender-diverse characters: The Four Profound Weaves,  Light from Uncommon Stars,
The Bruising of Qilwa,  Sistersong,  Spear,  Most Ardently

Writing Tips: Playing with Palindromes

11/17/2025

A palindrome is a word or phrase that reads the same forwards and backwards: kayak, civic, mom, noon, etc. A mirror poem reads the same forwards and backwards, often with a word in the middle serving as a bridge between the two reversible halves.
The most famous and complex reversible poem is “Star Gauge,” embroidered by Su Hui in the fourth century. Her poem is composed of a 29x29 block of Chinese ideograms whose meanings can be deciphered in any direction. The description of her poem in The Golden Thread began my fascination with palindromes.

English is less flexible than Chinese in terms of multiple meanings, yet poets have created a wide variety of reversible poems.  A palindrome poem can be a line-by-line reversal, like the excellent “Lost Generation” by Jonathon Reed which has entirely different meanings depending on the order the phrases are read.
  Other powerful examples of word order completely “reversing” a poem's meaning are the too-timely composition “Refugees” by Brian Billston (the video recitation is profound), and the haunting poem “Doppelganger” by James A. Lindon.
  “School is Hard” by high school freshman Kya Hixon is another exceptional reversible poem.

More challenging is a letter-by-letter palindrome poem, “Dammit I’m Mad,” by Dimitri Martin, which opens and closes with two contained palindrome phrases (Dammit I’m mad and Evil is a deed as I live), which read the same forwards and backwards, letter by letter. The rest of the poem has the same order of letters forward and backwards, but arranged into different words and phrases, many of which are nonsensical.

I’ve played with my own simple word-by-word palindromes, featured in my July 2025 Newsletter.

“Firefly Palindrome” celebrates the lightning bugs that fill the evening skies in summer and reads the same forwards and backwards (word by word): “Fairy Light Shine Bright Shine Light Fairy.”

My second word-by-word palindrome poem, “Lament,” went through several iterations; the first draft included the words “fluid heartbeat.” Here's the final version from the newsletter:

These two simple mirror poems lack the impact of the complex palindrome poems opening this blog, but they gave me a sense of the construction process.
I wondered if I could construct a block poem with a simpler structure than a full 29x29 grid of Su Hui's “Star Gauge,” and decided to try a 3x3 Tic-Tac-Toe-style format. Like the game, the poems can be read forward and backward vertically, horizontally, or on the corner diagonals. They’re not as elegant as a freestyle poem, but aren’t entirely nonsensical either:

Start in any cell reading up/down, forward/backward, or diagonally to create three-word poems:
Fast spring light.
Fast dusk dark.
Fast now slow.
Slow now fast.
Slow autumn dark.
Slow Dawn Light.

Eight-word poems can also be constructed by reading the periphery forwards or backwards:

Fast spring light,
dawn, slow, autumn,
dark dusk~

Dusk-dark autumn,
slow . . . dawn . . . light
spring fast--

I discovered the box poems needed a central pivot word to function: “now” for the poem “Mutable,” and “into” for the following poem, “Moonflower,” which uses words that can be either a noun or a verb depending on context:

Vertical, horizontal or diagonal three-word poems (forwards and backwards) include:
Whisper moon dance.
Whisper into bloom.
Bloom flower charm.
Shadow into cloud.
Dance into charm.
Charm into dance.

The eight-word periphery poems might read:

Moon whisper cloud;
Charm flower--
  bloom shadow dance~

Bloom flower charm:
  cloud whisper . . .
  moon dance (shadow).

Finally, I wanted to try a box poem with palindrome words and simple phrases (that read the same forwards and backwards). This time I used a palindrome (never ever) as the pivot word.
Again, three-word poems can be read vertically, horizontally, or diagonally (forwards and backwards):
Avid diva never even dumb mud.
Eke never even toot.
Gold log never even lion oil.

Eight-word periphery poems might read:

Avid diva deified lion oil, eke dumb mud.
Dewed gold log—toot!

Gold log dewed dumb mud.
Eke lion oil deified avid-diva toot~

Lion oil, deified avid diva,
Toot gold log, dewed.
Dumb mud . . . Eke!

I find “Box Poem of Palindromes” the least effective of this group in terms of poetic meaning, though they might work in a children’s book for the nonsensical sounds: Toot! Eke!

Simple 3x3 box poems are far from the sophisticated 29x29 grid of Su Hui’s embroidered “Star Gauge” poem that can be read in any direction, but they were fun to create.
One of the benefits of this exercise was “thinking” in palindromes—the more I played, the easier it became to sort and shuffle words within the 3x3 grid to get the most effective poetry.

This thought process reminded me of a lecture by Steven Caton on the improvised oral poetry tradition of Yemen, where poems are used for political conflict mediation, requiring the poets to speak spontaneously in an intricate meter of short and long syllables. Like a poetry slam happening in real time, except the tribe’s fate dependent on their poet’s performance. The poets think and speak in poetry throughout the mediation process.

I hope you enjoyed this exploration of box poems and palindrome poetry. Perhaps you’ll be inspired to write a mirror poem of your own . . .

Read skillful poetry in You Better Be Lightning and Not a Princess
Read my published poetry: “Singularity Storm,” “Inanna Eclipsed,” “I Love the Ball Park,”
“Summer Amusement,” “Home from the Wizard’s War,” “Forest Heart,” and “Night Communion”
Browse poems from my newsletters

Fascinations: Animal Emotions

10/5/2025

New research has demonstrated sentience (the ability to experience sensations and emotions) in a wide variety of animals, including insects, fish, birds, and mammals.
For example, according to Dr. Stanley Coren, dogs have all of the same brain structures, hormones, and neurotransmitters that produce emotions in humans. “With the same neurology and chemistry that people have, it seems reasonable to suggest that dogs also have emotions that are similar to ours.”

Dogs do have most of the same emotions as humans: “joy, fear, anger, disgust, and even love. However, based on current research it seems likely that your dog will not have those more complex emotions like guilt, pride, and shame."

Dr. Coren says, “Many people might argue that they have seen evidence that indicates their dog is capable of experiencing guilt. The usual situation is when you come home and your dog starts slinking around and showing discomfort, and you then find that he or she has left a smelly brown deposit on your kitchen floor. . . . However this is not guilt, but simply the more basic emotion of fear. The dog has learned that when you appear and his droppings are visible on the floor, bad things happen to him. What you see is his fear of punishment; he will never feel guilt.”

Per Purina, cats also express basic emotions; “they feel happy, sad, afraid, relieved, and even frustrated, just like us.” Cats convey emotion through body language.
For example, pupils will be dilated in an anxious cat, and their ears will either be perked up or flattened back if they’re really upset. They may cower and the tip of their tail may swish back and forth.

The classic Halloween cat displays typical angry behavior: “rigid, with [their] tail held out stiff and straight or curled around and under their body. They [can] be silent, hissing, spitting or growling. They will try to look large and threatening, with fur erect, stiff front legs. . . . Their ears will be tense, and flat back against their head, and whiskers will be stiff away from their face. Their eyes will be hard and focused.”
Fearful cats behave similarly, with ears flat, eyes dilated, and they may hiss or growl at close threats.

The article says, “An actively frustrated cat usually focuses intently on their object of frustration, and will try everything they can do to get what they want! . . . They may pace impatiently if they can’t get to what they want.” Or in the case of our cat, Tiny Tim, meow loudly and piteously.

Tristan sprawling

After an upsetting experience, cats express relief by stretching, yawning, and “having a good wash.”
Happy cats are easy to spot. Their ears and whiskers are relaxed, and their tails are still. When cats are happy they may sit with their legs tucked under them (life a bread loaf) or sprawled on their backs (Tristan often demonstrates the Sprawl). They will also purr gently when petted.

Fish also “have a conscious awareness — or "sentience" — that allows them to experience pain, recognize individual humans and have memory,” says Dr. Jonathan Balcombe, author of What a Fish Knows.
In one experiment, zebra fishes purposefully migrated into a tank with pain relievers after being exposed to caustic acid. Other studies show that fish recognize individual divers. “They come up to be stroked. It is almost like a dog.”

Fish also communicate, albeit in unusual ways. Schools of herrings, for example, use "flatulent communication" . . . "They live in big schools and they omit gases from the anus in large numbers, and it makes a sound. And they appear to use this as a communication device to maybe signal to others that it's time we moved up or down in the water column, because it's that time of day when the predators are coming out and this sort of thing.”

Bees and some other insects have demonstrated sentience in scientific experiments according to Professor Lars Chittka. “Bees, for example, can count, grasp concepts of sameness and difference, learn complex tasks by observing others, and know their own individual body dimensions, a capacity associated with consciousness in humans. They also appear to experience both pleasure and pain.”

In one experiment, the bees were given balls to play with.
“Bees went out of their way to return again and again to a “play area” where they rolled the mobile balls in all directions and often for extended periods without a sugar reward, even though plenty of food was provided nearby.”
He notes that cockroaches and fruit flies are also known to experience pain; some species of wasps recognize their nest mates' faces and acquire impressive social skills, such as assessing the strength of other wasps.

Zaria Gorvett of the BBC cites “mounting evidence that insects can experience a remarkable range of feelings. They can be literally buzzing with delight at pleasant surprises, or sink into depression when bad things happen that are out of their control. They can be optimistic, cynical, or frightened, and respond to pain just like any mammal would.”

Research has found that fruit flies pay attention to their peers and are able to learn from them. Their “brains use dopamine just like ours do, to elicit feelings of reward and punishment.” Also, “injured fruit flies can experience lingering pain, long after their physical wounds have healed. . . . almost like an anxiety-like state, where once they've been injured, they want to make sure nothing else bad happens . . .”
And although their brains are the size of a poppy seed, they’re structured similarly to human brains in terms of nerve receptors and neurotransmitters.

When bees are attacked by wasps they scream, using “an amplified, frantic version of their usual buzz. And though no one has conclusively tied the shrieks to an emotional response in the bees,” these shrieks are similar to “the alarm calls of many other animals, from primates to birds [which] might suggest that they're fearful.”
Further, just like humans, rats, sheep, dogs, cows, cod, and starlings, experiments demonstrate that bees who have been traumatized tend to be pessimistic and expect the worst.

According to Rescue the Birds, bird’s brains are structured similarly to our own and other mammals. “They have a limbic system, a specialized portion of the brain necessary for true emotional behavior.”

Author Annie Krug notes, “the most obvious example of birds showing affection is their courtship and mating behaviors. Mated birds preen each other, share food, and protect each other from predators and threats as a sign of their bond.”

Like other animals, birds like to play. Sea birds ride the waves and a crow was filmed using a plastic lid to sled down a roof in Russia.
Birds also express fear by flying away from danger, chirping distress calls or screaming, and flapping their wings. Angry birds “flash their colorful wings or tail feathers as a warning. . . . Fluffing feathers and spreading wings and tailfeathers, are also signs that a bird is ready for war.”

Angry birds may also dive-bomb perceived threats. When the fruit on my mulberry tree ripened, a territorial blue jay used to terrorize our cat Jack to keep him away. Similarly, crows are known to attack specific people they remember as threatening, as do magpies.

According to Krug, birds also display mourning behavior similar to our own: “their posture droops, they appear listless, and often cry real tears. Certain birds—jay birds, pigeons, and ospreys—will remain near where their baby died for long periods of time. Others—magpies and crows—hold “funerals” for their dead, walking in circles together around the fallen bird for several minutes.”
“One of the most pronounced expressions of bird grief comes from Barn Owls, known to stick with their mates for life. When one mate dies, the remaining owl will often starve itself to death, causing some to wonder if it dies of a broken heart.”

In How Animals Grieve, scientist Barbara J. King affirms animal sentience through the lens of grief. Elephants, for example, “remember events vividly, to the point that they may suffer with post-traumatic stress disorder, as when their sleep is disrupted by nightmares after witnessing the killing of relatives or friends by ivory poachers.”

As Zoe Cormier of the BBC notes: “Elephants are famed for visiting the remains of dead family members, stroking their bones or at times rocking back and forth in what resembles a ‘vigil.”
Other examples of animal mourning include “twenty-seven adult giraffes holding a vigil for one dead baby giraffe, elephants from five different families visiting the bones of one of the dead, a group of fifteen dolphins slowing their speed to escort a mother dolphin carrying her dead calf, and [two ducks] who formed a friendship at their sanctuary home. When one duck died, the other lay with its head on the other's neck for hours.”

Cormier documents additional mourning rituals, such as a mother orca tending her dead calf for almost three weeks and a chimpanzee cleaning the teeth of her dead son, and suggests these behaviors might help the mothers come to terms with their loss.

An article published by the James L. Voss Veterinary Teaching Hospital says “Research in evolutionary biology, cognitive biology and social neuroscience supports the view that many diverse animals have rich and deep emotional lives” including grief.
“The surviving animals may change their sleeping habits [and] much like humans, animals may become despondent.” They may search for the deceased and become clingy or isolate from others. Sleep habit changes may include sleeping where the deceased member used to sleep and sleeping more often.

Grief research shows that cats “alter their behavior when they mourn, much like people do. They may become depressed and listless. They may have a decreased appetite and decline to play. They may sleep more than usual and move more slowly, sulking around. They may hide under the bed, choosing to be alone even more than usual for cats.” They may also become clingy, demanding more attention from their humans.

Even plants share this expression of pain and grief according to Dr. Lonny D. Meinecke: “Trees form attachments with other trees much like social animals do. Chop down a tree’s companion tree and the surviving tree will probably die too—very much like when someone as old as me loses his lifelong partner.”

We now know that trees scream when an animal eats their leaves or humans prune their limbs. Scientists discovered that “plants cry out the same way animals do when they are in pain. We just couldn’t hear them before, because we can’t hear the high-frequency sounds they make in response to their suffering.”
“Plants now join mammals, ants, bees, and social fish in the ever-growing number of living things that can feel anguish, express pain, and warn their own kind of imminent extinction — even if they realize they can’t save themselves.”

Dr. Meinecke notes that regarding other sentient creatures as objects for material exploitation dehumanizes them —and dehumanizes us. “But if we listen closely, we can hear a host of tiny voices all around us—it’s our chance to learn how to treat each other well by learning to treat all things, great and small, well.”

For more on plant sentience, read The Hidden Life of Trees and Serving Plants
For more on animal sentience, read If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal and Sounds Wild and Broken

Writing Tips: Research Rabbit Hole

8/26/2025

Researching a story can lead down fascinating (but not always productive) tangents. The trick is excavating exciting new ideas without getting lost in a research rabbit hole. Writing blogs warn of under- or over-researching, research pitfalls, the importance of balancing research with imagination, and the critical role of research in creating verisimilitude in story worlds.
Here are four tips for using pre-writing research to spark story ideas and on-the-go research to flesh out drafts and revisions, when not to include your research in the story, and ways to keep research organized.

1. PRE-WRITING RESEARCH can be as simple as saving links (or making photocopies) of interesting articles and ideas encountered day-to-day to later weave into existing or future stories.

I’ve written elsewhere of my fascination with parthenogenesis, which originated when I read about lesbian lizards in a biology textbook. Learning that cockroaches can breed parthenogenetically was the primary creative spark that inspired "Captain Palaio’s Twilight Flight. "
If you haven’t read the story yet, I invite you to read Captain Paliao now.
Spoilers follow~

Captain Palaio opens with these images of cockroach grooming:

I’m alone in the dim central chamber, compulsively preening, when a warning light flashes.
. . .
I resume grooming unnecessarily with quick, anxious jerks.

I gathered pages of information on cockroach anatomy, physiology, social behavior, and reproduction (including parthenogenesis). In the published story, parthenogenesis merited one paragraph:

Our people have replicated by parthenogenesis since extraction procedures released a prehistoric fungal infection from the permafrost. Millions of dankomata died, and all surviving males were sterile. Over the centuries, our all-female species has dwindled toward extinction, breeding-age females laying fewer and fewer eggs. Every Interstellar Exploration Corps member dreams of finding breeding males somewhere in the universe.

First mention of the social structure (communal aggregation) of cockroach society:

I click to myself in irritation. I’m the most senior crew member and my programming skills are critical for mission success, but the consensus the two scientists share over studying the aliens gives them a source of communal aggregation I don’t share. A foretaste of the bitter isolation I’ll face as a retired has-been.

Serendipity can also influence a story. Reading about ‘Oumuamua, an interstellar object that tumbled through our solar system in 2017, led me to Harvard University professor Avi Loeb, who suggests life on Earth is the result of directed panspermia.
This gave me a pseudoscientific way to justify compatibility between cockroach species. As Doctor Giaotos explains when confirming the similarity of Dankom Gis and Earth cockroach DNA in Captain Palaio:

“Incontrovertible proof of Doctor Katsarida’s theory of parallel panspermic evolution.”

2. ON-THE-GO RESEARCH. During early revisions of Captain Paliao, I focused on scale after feedback from my writing group. What circumstances might create pony-sized cockroaches?

Like the more famous giant reptiles (dinosaurs), insects were also oversized during Earth’s Mesozoic Era. Because oxygen levels were 30% to 35% during this age of dinosaurs (compared to 21% today), scientists believe high oxygen saturation contributed to increased animal size. The largest insect found in the fossil record was a millipede (Arthropleura) almost 9 feet long that weighed 110 pounds.

So the Dankomata of the story presumably come from an oxygen-rich planet. This research was distilled into a single paragraph in the published story:

She’s right. Only twenty percent oxygen at the surface . . . Far different from the humid, oxygen-rich atmosphere of Dankom Gis--

Initially, the cockroaches hunted for lithium (one of the universe's rarest minerals) near Camp Pendleton in California, but in later drafts I switched to beryllium, which is more common in aerospace engineering:

Thankfully, long-range scanners detected enough beryllium on the obscure planet below to repair our hull.

This led me to change the setting to Utah, which has the largest beryllium mine in the world. The Burger Barn in nearby Ashton, UT looked like a good hangout for off-duty military personnel on a road trip (referred to by Doctor Giatros as “a feeding site for the dominant tetrapods”), leading to this sarcastic comment by a captured airman:

“Road trip to the Burger Barn,” the decorated alien says. “Great idea.”

I chose Hill AFB for the final confrontation, which represented hours of research, but mere sentences in the final story (my friend Wes helped me with realistic military communication):

Through the translator, we hear the planet-side aliens prepare for our arrival: “Atypical heat signature. Ground radar confirms. Projected trajectory forty-one point one zero niner seven degrees north by one one one point niner eight two seven degrees west.”
“That’s Hill Air Force Base,” another signal says. “Hill Command Post, do you copy?”
A third signal comes across the translator. “We copy. Scrambling fighter squadrons.”

The editor at Bullet Points Magazine, Nathan W. Toronto, sought clarification of story details during the submission process, prompting further research into orbital defense, SIPRNet, and the 75th Air Base Wing at Hill AFB. This research added one sentence: “Another unidentified ping from orbital defense."

3. WHEN NOT TO INCLUDE RESEARCH. I uncovered a lot of fascinating information researching Captain Palaio, but too much detail bogs down a story's pace and tone. Here’s what didn’t make it into the story:

The exact wavelengths insects can hear (15 kHz-60 kHz) versus the wavelength of the human voice (60 Hz-1500 Hz), or the data I gathered on radio and TV waves out of curiosity. The in-story summary: “They [humans] emit relatively fast vibratory waves,” Neos says.
Twenty pages of research on orbital debris (researched for another story and briefly summarized Space Trash) became part of one sentence in Captain Palaio: "The pods rise in response. They’ll have to navigate the thick band of satellites and debris girdling the alien planet to reach us. "

Ideas I researched but decided not to pursue in this story:

Anaerobic organisms: I originally envisioned Captain Palaio and crew as carbon-monoxide breathers.
Intelligent psychedelic mushrooms: I read Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake, who is the son of Rupert Sheldrake, a peer of Terrance MckKenna, who “hypothesized that psychedelic mushrooms might be intelligent extraterrestrial life”. I originally planned to construct the spaceship out of mycelium but decided instead on a structure inspired by animal cells.

4. ORGANIZING RESEARCH. I create a “background file” of associated research for every story, and some have multiple files.
My poem Inanna Eclipsed, started as a short story that never quite jelled. Research for the story/poem included a thematic outline; background on Mesopotamian beliefs and funeral practices; translations of Gilgamesh & Enkidu, Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven, and Descent of Inanna; and interpretations of Ereshkigal’s role in the underworld and Inanna’s Descent as a powerplay between sisters. I embedded these links in the files for reference.

For more involved projects, like the novels Sky God’s Warrior and the drafted sequel, Sea God’s Lover, I have spiral-bound notebooks of key world-building elements for Kolkha and neighboring states: Geography, Flora & Fauna, Religion & Gods, Culture, Trade & Economy, Travel Timelines, Social & Political Structure, Architecture, Magic System, Legal System, etc. Notebooks for the main characters (Ayda'ia and Sary) have a story synopsis, X-Ray outline, scene outline, and themes & images for each character in the story.

While writing, I consulate (and update as needed) digital files with character names, a glossary of in-world terms, a scene-by-scene book outline, the book’s thematic outlines for each major character, and a timeline (spanning before and after the entire series of possible books from 10,000 BCE when migrants from Mesopotamia first reached Kolkha to 513 BCE when Darius the Great absorbed Kolkha into Persia).
I’ve used Scrivenor in the past to link these files, but currently organize most of my writing in Google Docs, which is free to anyone with a Google account.

I also keep a spiral notebook nearby (on my nightstand in the evening) to jot down story ideas. I number the pages, and link relevant pages in my scene-by-scene book outlines or as a comment in a short story revision.
For example, the short story I’m working on now has references to Green 128-129 and Blue 334, 335, 337, which are page numbers from two different notebooks where I recorded snippets of dialogue or story ideas that I want to consider during revision.
As I incorporate (or choose to discard) ideas from these notebooks, I scribble them out so I know not to revisit these elements.

I hope you enjoyed this exploration of writerly research and that it will either give you helpful guidance on your own projects and/or more appreciation for the work that goes on behind the scenes of published stories. You may also like Short Story Writing, Building Inclusive Worlds, and Scene Architecture

Writing Tips: Drafting Daring Dialogue

7/12/2025

Dialogue is a fundamental element of creative writing, and there are a wide variety of techniques to design dialogue with intention.
William Noble, in his book Show Don’t Tell, says “dialogue has the power to put us into the middle of the scene, to make us characters in the ongoing story, to involve us in the tensions and conflicts wherever they might be. Dialogue is drama.”
Here's a summary of some I've found especially useful:

CONFLICTED CONVERSATION
  In Writing Fiction for Dummies, the authors say, “Dialogue is war! Every dialogue should be controlled conflict between at least two characters with opposing agendas. The main purpose of dialogue is to advance the conflict of the story.” They note, “conflict can be hidden under a surface politeness, as long as the different characters have different goals.”
  Gloria Kempton, in Dialogue: Techniques and Exercises for Crafting Effective Dialogue, says, “We can use dialogue to keep raising the stakes for our protagonist [and] keep propelling the story forward. …Every scene of dialogue, in some way, needs to move the story conflict forward. We need to be at a different place at the end of the dialogue than we were at the beginning.” Do this by “engaging your characters in conflict and using dialogue to increase their struggle.”
  She provides questions to help writers hone dialogue conflict, including:

How does the dialogue increase suspense for what’s to come, raising stakes for the protagonist?
What kind of external and internal obstacles does the passage of dialogue surface for the protagonist?
How is the dialogue pivotal in changing the characters—making them more desperate for what they want, causing them to want to give up, bringing them to a place of new determination?

SURPRISING SIDESTEPS
  In Revision and Self-Editing for Publication, James Scott Bell says, “One of the most common mistakes aspiring writers make with dialogue is creating a simple back-and-forth exchange. …This sort of dialogue is called on the nose. There are no surprises … Your dialogue will be stronger if you sidestep the obvious.”
  Here’s an example from my own writing of direct, on-the-nose dialogue:
  “What brings you to my door, imp?” The honey-skinned witch loomed over me.
  “I need your aid.”
A less direct revision:
  “An imp. On my doorstep.” The honey-skinned witch loomed over me. [Implied question: What are you doing here?]
  “You know why I'm here.” [Implied: The imp needs something from the witch, but what?]

Another example of sidestepping between three characters, Garso, Ayda, and Ayda’s cousin Tark, preparing to steal a herd of horses, from my novel-in-progress, Sky God’s Warrior:
  “Leave stealing the horses to us spiritshifters,” Garso said to Ayda. “Go keep watch.” [Implied: I want Tark to myself; you’re too lowly to help steal the horses.]
  Ayda appealed to her cousin. “I spotted the herd. I want my share.”  [Implied: I should be the one to help steal the herd, not Garso.]
  “You have the sharpest eye,” Tark said. She slid to the ground, her wildcat spirit-cloak floating behind her. “Go.” [Implied: I’m willing to sacrifice you to keep the peace with Garso.]

CREATING CUES
  Before I started studying dialogue, I often front-loaded or buried the key word or phrase in a character's discourse, tacking on physical actions or exposition to the end of their speech. This muddles the reaction of other character(s) and creates extra work for the reader.
  According to Robert McKee’s book, Dialogue, “ideally, the last word or phrase of each speech is the core word that seals meaning and cues a reaction from the other side of the scene.”
  Here’s a scene from an early version of Sky God’s Warrior with poor cueing caused by too many intervening lines of exposition between the cues:
  “Back to camp now?” Ayda asked, anxious to gain distance from the enemy Saarmadi.
  Dni angled her horse toward the river. “Water the horses first.”
  Ayda reluctantly reined Red to fall in behind her. “We should water them at the stream we crossed,” she said.
  Dni squeezed her horse into a trot. The other spirit-shifters followed, their cloaks floating from their shoulders. “This is closer.”

Here's a better flow with the cues linked together more tightly:
  “Back to camp now?” Ayda asked, anxious to gain distance from the enemy Saarmadi.
  “First water the horses.” Dni angled her horse toward the river.
  “We can water them at the stream we crossed,” Ayda said.
  “ This is closer.” Dni squeezed her horse into a trot. The other spirit-shifters followed, their cloaks floating from their shoulders.
  Ayda reluctantly reined Red to fall in behind them.

LEAN LOCUTION
  Another technique James Scott Bell suggests is dropping words to create “the feeling of real speech.” When words are left out, the “exchange sounds so natural, yet it’s lean and meaningful.”
  My character Ayda from Sky God’s Warrior often leaves words out of her sentences. The missing words are italicized in brackets:
  Ayda showed her palm. “[The] Last time I saw you Varka Mogeli tried to throw you on a manure pile.”
  “[It was] Lucky for me you intervened.” He flourished an elaborate courtesy.
“You’ve aged nicely, Vahza Shavardeli.”
  “My friends call me Shavard.”
  She waggled her eyebrows.  “[Are you] Offering [your] friendship?”
  His mouth quirked in a lopsided smile. “Such as it is. Mother says my tongue is too barbed for civilized company.”
  Ayda snorted. “[There is] No civilized company here.”

THINKING OF T.H.A.D.
Elizabeth George coined the phrase “Talking Heads Avoidance Device” or THAD. In her craft book Write Away, she says, “it’s an activity going on in a scene that would otherwise consist [only] of dialogue [and] chosen wisely, it reveals character; it may in and of itself contain important information; it can be used as a metaphor.” The activity can also reveal a character’s state of mind.
She urges writers to choose a THAD deliberately. In Mastering the Process, she says, “its ability to depict and illuminate character shouldn’t be overlooked. … THAD can reveal or illustrate [a] character’s emotional state, psychological state, or physical state [and] can add details to the setting of the scene.”
In addition, “THAD can increase the tension or conflict between characters. This works especially well if the THAD is something that makes the reader’s skin crawl and allows her to project her reaction onto the character performing the THAD. Gutting a majestic but newly killed animal is an example of this, especially when the details are intimate and brutally given.”

In the opening chapter of Sky God’s Warrior, Ayda has a tense scene with her cousin Kusskil in which he’s lecturing and she’s throwing her knife into a nearby wooden wagon—to blow off steam and to obliquely reveal her frustration with his lack of support for her plans. Her throws get more vicious as the scene progresses.
Kusskil calmy retrieves her knife and keeps lecturing~

Elizabeth George sums up the attributes of effective dialogue in Mastering the Process.
Successful dialogue:

Adds to the revelation of character through what is said and how it is said
Displays a character’s attitudes, beliefs, intentions, and agendas
Distinguishes between characters and defines their relationships
Acts as an efficient means of moving the story forward, adding tension, providing conflict, and giving a scene subtext

For more on subtext in dialogue, read Writing Tips: Crafting Subtext

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

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