THIS IS A LONG PIECE...SO MOVE ON IF IT'S TOO MUCH!
In September of 2007, I started a blog with a bit of writing advice. A little over a year later, I discovered how little I knew about writing after hearing children’s writer, Lin Oliver speak at a convention hosted by the Minnesota Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. Since then, I have shared (with their permission) and applied the writing wisdom of Lin Oliver, Jack McDevitt, Nathan Bransford, Mike Duran, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, SL Veihl, Bruce Bethke, and Julie Czerneda. Together they write in genres broad and deep, and have acted as agents, editors, publishers, columnists, and teachers. Since then, I figured I’d finally learned enough been published enough times that I can share some of the things I did RIGHT. Here's a few of those things.
While I don’t write full-time, nor do I make enough money with my writing to live off of it, though someone pays for and publishes ten percent of what I write. When I started this blog, that was NOT true, so I may have reached a point where my own advice is reasonably good. We shall see!
As my kids and wife will attest, I started EMERALD OF EARTH twenty-one years ago in response to the wave of dystopian science fiction aimed at young adults. Of COURSE there has always been "dark" science fiction -- HG Wells' WAR OF THE WORLDS springs to mind!
In fact, I was really and truly hooked on science fiction by the grim future in John Christopher’s THE WHITE MOUNTAINS books. Lois Lowry’s THE GIVER came when I was in high school, and Margaret Atwood’s THE HANDMAID’S TALE rose to the top NOT as teen lit, but as subversive science fiction – not for teens, but for adults who were looking for MORE after rereading the HARRY POTTER fantasies a dozen times.
Then came the deluge of the “book-to-movie” best sellers like THE HUNGER GAMES and MAZE RUNNER following on the heels of what I think of as “teen carnage” novels where, like the Harry Potter series after GOBLET OF FIRE with teens slaughtering each other and being slaughtered by evil adults became normal for YA fiction. Because while they were ostensibly for teens and YA, adults were reading them in DROVES.
There’s been some serious research on this as well: “Why Do Adults Read Young Adult Novels?" Monica Hay, Fellow at Portland State University0 Department of English wrote “Book industries and trade, Publishers and publishing, Young adult literature” (from the abstract): “Young adult books are widely read by adults. Through interviews with publishing professionals and a survey of 2,139 participants, several reasons were discovered regarding why adults read young adult literature.
“In the research, the most common reasons were the influence of Harry Potter and Twilight, the relatability for millennials, the social media presence of YA online, and the success of women writers in the category. Survey participants had more to add. The survey themes were nostalgia, ‘less pretentious,’ ‘faster reads,’ diversity, escapism, ‘less graphic,’ and perhaps most importantly, hopeful.”
So I started to look at a DIFFERENT future than the doom-and-gloom presented by some of the books that adults and kids appeared to be reading.
What if Humanity launched into a serious exploration of the Solar System and it wasn’t just with soldiers and old people? What if the future included young people? The ones would would spend a long time living in space?
I was compelled to give my novel a title that would draw in YA readers expecting carnage in their reading. I changed it to EMERALD OF EARTH: HEIRS OF THE SHATTERED SPHERES, with the intent of writing a series. And I WILL if sales of the first book go well. came out in March 2024, and while sales haven’t been stellar, I’m doing things like this to boost the signal.
It takes place in a future where Humans have launched into an exploration of the Solar System thoroughly and methodically. Using a hollowed out asteroid called the SOLAR EXPLORER (SOLAREX for short!) as a base, they will spend a year at each planet, probing, landing on, collecting samples, data, and answering questions without having to worry about shipping tiny amounts of material “home” to be analyzed by experts. The experts were right there.
But at one point, I thought EMERALD OF EARTH was boring and would have had a hard time finding advocacy among the more exciting titles (except THE GIVER; that was hardly self-explanatory, nor was THE HANDMAID’S TALE or even Butler’s 1979 masterpiece, KINDRED). Flashy titles had replaced subtle, so I had to do the same.
I came up with EARTH ATTACKED! Ugh. Then I tried LEGACY OF THE WOUNDED WORLDS…Worser and worser!
Finally, I resorted to something I’d never done: I sat down with a thesaurus and the “Legacy” title and found synonyms for all of the words and wrote them on slips of paper. Then I went to a table and began to rearrange them, speaking them out loud countless times until I found one title that held up under the stress of repetition.
HEIRS OF THE SHATTERED SPHERES. Instead of a single book, though, I suddenly had an idea for a SERIES.
Emerald’s story would be its own story, separate from eleven others but intertwined with them because they all live aboard the hollowed out asteroid SOLAR EXPLORER.
Emerald’s story would be the first of a much, much larger story. I wouldn’t have her defeating Inamma in one fell swoop. She needed to fight for her existence, so I made Inamma smarter than it had been before and more subtle.
Even more though, I needed Emerald to have “kid problems”. She needed to deal with issues every kid on Earth needed to deal with. So I gave her friend problems. She wanted them but couldn’t seem to keep them. But what began as a nebulous, “I can’t get friends”, needed a firmer foundation.
As a guidance counselor, I’d started working closely with several autistic students and had come to understand them just a tiny bit. The ones I dealt with were brilliant – but challenged by the world they lived in. I realized that my growing understanding of these young people might be an aspect of Emerald that I hadn’t really developed.
Once I started to understand Emerald, other things fell into place – things like answering the question: “What do teenagers DO on a spacecraft called SOLAREX, committed to a twelve year mission?” So I had to give them “school in space”. But NOT a clone of “school on Earth”, cloned from a form that came from England with American colonists in the 18th Century.
To tell you the truth, when it comes to school for teens in space, SF writers have TOTALLY lacked imagination!
Star Trek: The Next Generation and ST:DS9 have children and teens going to school and SITTING IN DESKS!!! They don’t even go to a holographic “virtual school” that is identical to what we had during the pandemic as in Michael’s Burstein’s award-winning short story, “Teleabsence”. Yet we’ve fled BACK to kids with butts in seats in schools…because we’ve got this weird idea that PARENTS are incapable of educating their kids and ONLY TRAINED TEACHER can do the job.
As a teacher for 41 years: during which time I taught science 6th grade general science, 7th grade life science, eighth grade Earth science, 9th grade physical science, 10th grade biology, 11th grade chemistry, and 12th grade physics, as well as designing and teaching TWO Astronomy classes – as well as writing classes for gifted and talented young people between 4th and 10th grade – I can tell you that THE BEST TEACHERS ARE PARENTS.
(I’m one of those, too…and a grandparent.)
For science fiction writers, you have Orson Scott Card training children to just “be soldiers” in ENDER’S GAME books. Why is that? I think the Science Fiction world has treated the future of education as if we’d already reached the PINNACLE of “educational technology” here in 21st Century America…I don’t even see SF attempting to include educational theory and practice from other cultures! A quick Google search reveals only that there are lots of articles on how to use SF to teach about science or inspire girls to be scientists. This list / is a good start, but hardly complete – at least I hope it’s not complete.
At any rate, to create an educational system that made sense, I drew from my own experience. One thing I knew for certain was that I didn’t want my teens – and there are 130+ of them on SOLAR EXPLORER – just “going to school” and then “hanging out”.
As important as that activity is, and knowing that I’m not speaking tongue-in-cheek – these young people are not only going to be in space for twelve years, they are going to mature into adults who will in their own time take their places in the operation of the ship. Some will be “promoted” to apprenticeships or leadership positions; some will become menial laborers. Some perhaps will become philosophers, others still recorders, writers, and artisans.
But how do they get there? NOT ONLY just “hanging out” on their cellphones and on social media all the time! That is PART of their education – social and educational media are adjuncts to formal education – but THEY have to be adjuncts of PARENTAL education efforts as well.
Honestly? This society has abdicated our wisdom by waving our kids in the general direction of “teachers”. THAT’S A BAD THING. I’m telling you here that not ONLY have I known absolutely shitty teachers; I’ve known EVIL teachers. You know what else? There are times in my life that I’ve been a shitty teacher myself.
Education in classical literature, mathematics, social studies (including history as well as the social experiment they live in!), physical education, science (duh!), art, and practical skills like programming, global languages, welding, recycling technologies, particle physics, gravitational manipulation technologies, and mass communication and journalism – how do you cover all of these things without sitting the fat butts of these kids down? And we need to start teaching our kids MANNERS – not sloppy adult manners, but a FOUNDATION of manners that EVERY SINGLE SOCIETY ON EARTH HAS.
In my novel, SOLAREX is a tiny, closed society. You might consider it a microscopic section of countries like “Andorra, Luxembourg, Greenland, Norway, Liechtenstein” where “literacy reaches virtually 100 percent.” Surveillance is practically universal (though I touch on the fact that it’s NOT!), so teens will only get into minimal trouble in the ways that they do. As well, there’s an “illicit” athletic outlet (pryzhok) as well as plenty of other things to do. Education is experiential as well as academic. They work on Intensive Training Teams as well as receive homework assignments in the “traditional subjects” we expect teens to study. They also receive tangible rewards as a result of inter-Team competition in both their vocational training and academics. And YES, “‘Vacation days, Leisure Study days and tours, credit chits to buy food at the alternate restaurants and hang outs, mostly.’”
Instructors design educational pathways for students – “He was willing to admit that he’d been a master query marker guide at one time. He’d figure out what someone needed to know then lead them there. After the suicides, he’d adjudged himself a stupid query marker guru, quit, and fled.”
I’m trying to explore ways that we might educate our young people. It SEEMS sometimes like it’s a lonely business, educating young minds. It SHOULD NOT BE. It needs to be EVERYONE’S job…
And it’s no longer seen that way. And from MY perspective, that is ALSO the main reason the Pandemic Distance Education hit our kids so hard…NOT ALL OF THEM THEM…but lots of them.
I put forward community effort on SOLAR EXPLORER as a model for us to return to – and then allow communities to ADAPT TO THEIR KIDS…Comments anyone?
LINKS: https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/eng_bookpubpaper/35/; http://sf.hackeducation.com; http://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-highest-literacy-rates-in-the-world.html;
IMAGE: https://www.amazon.com/Emerald-Earth-Heirs-Shattered-Spheres/dp/1958333166/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.PMZul37u_A-yH1LfdxoJ_4iBsTIPAa-dcKcAYmv6WDJZJACtYOnZ8toIWHepGLzwDgcwPZa5ySaFTyXxDHB6x85EysrwG8c_Fs_6IxTzQ6L3naz7ZGJ4nJL1UMFwPAR6HPceUFI79nNdKI79TOzkCzNlUM0Fslu7enXSYjoi5shC0EWph5S5EukqRan_LFpafkgVdrt5AriNaxk4v6AWYTRuDaSk_91uYI1tD4ZiQ3s.RSgRAQeOVuHkoEpV9T_vci5uBYmbWChcdjg1uzqkqpw&qid=1713588732&sr=1-1
