Writing Words for Nerds #AtoZChallenge--G is for Geek

I speak geek, and I write words for nerds.

Many see these two words--geek and nerd--as interchangeable, but I don't. I see them as similar terms for two different parts of the same thing.

Gilbert Garfinkle from Why My Love Life Sucks (The Legend of Gilbert the Fixer Book 1) is the ultimate teenage geek and nerd, and that to me makes him the ultimate hero.

For me, being a geek is all about the heart. It's about passion. It's about what you love and how much you love it. A geek geeks out about stuff that other people don't, not to that degree. That's how passionate we geeks are. If you love something to the point where others find it excessive, you're a geek--like me.

Being a nerd, on the other hand, is all about the head. It's about knowing about something to the point where others find it excessive. I'm a book and writing nerd. I study these things with a passion others might find excessive. When it comes to most things, though, I'm more of a geek than a nerd. I wish I knew more about the things I geek over, but my memory just isn't that good. I can always find someone who knows way more about these topics than I do.  

For example, I'm a Whovian, which means I adore Doctor Who. I have several Doctor Who t-shirts and several pieces of Doctor Who jewelry. I even have Van Gogh "Starry Night" socks because of one of my favorite Doctor Who episodes. But I'm not a Doctor Who nerd, because I would almost certainly fail any serious Doctor Who quiz. I know all the basics, of course. I can tell my Daleks from my Cybermen, and I know you must not blink when you see a Weeping Angel.  But go beyond that, and I get my episodes and monsters and Doctors and companions mixed up.

I'm a general all-round geek. I geek out over all kinds of things, from books and comic books to movies and TV shows to scientific discoveries and new tech. But when it comes to books and writing, I'm also a nerd because of my passionate need to know as much as I can about this one particular topic.

It takes a curious mind to be a nerd, and not everyone has that.

But I believe everybody can and should be a geek. We should all find something that we are excessively passionate about. Something that makes us beyond excited. Something that makes us geek out in the most exquisitely, embarrassingly geeky way. Something that makes us squee for joy.

Whichever label you use, I'm glad to be a geek or a nerd.  Life is so much better when you care this much about something.

So what makes you geek out? Let me know in the comments below.  

Want to geek out with me? The best way is to follow me on Twitter at https://Twitter.com/SheviStories.

What Writers Can Learn from DOCTOR WHO

I'm a big fan of Doctor Who. Like most Whovians, I don't like every single episode. I have my favorites, just like I have my favorite Doctors and my favorite companions.

So what exactly makes Doctor Who so great? And what exactly is Doctor Who?

Doctor Who is a BBC science-fiction series that has been around for over 50 years--even before I was born--although there was a long break between the late eighties and 2005 when the new series began.

Doctor Who tells the ongoing story of the Doctor: a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey and the last of his kind.

The Doctor is hundreds of years old, and he’s seen a lot of terrible things. He has a lot of enemies, like the Daleks and the Cybermen.  He’s lost a lot of friends along the way, which makes him very lonely.

That’s why the Doctor likes to take people along for the ride. These special people are the Doctor’s companions. They get to travel with the Doctor is his time machine, which is called the TARDIS.

TARDIS stands for Time And Relative Dimension In Space. On the outside, the TARDIS looks like a blue police call box from England in the 1960s. It’s much bigger on the inside, though. Sometimes bigger than others.

The Doctor’s real name is a secret he must keep, because if it falls into the wrong hands… Actually, I don’t know what would happen, but apparently it’s something really bad.

When the Doctor dies, he regenerates and turns into someone new. So far 13 actors have played the Doctor, and each one has brought something different to the role.

Some people say that this is what makes Doctor Who so great: because the Doctor can become anyone, the show can be anything… Except apparently a woman, but that's something I hope will change. I've even written a first episode for her, and I've entitled it "Madam with a Box," a play on somethin the Doctor sometimes calls himself: a "madman with a box." I'd like to someday create a Kickstarter project so I can turn Madam with a Box into a fanfic graphic novel. Someday... 

Anyway, remember how I said that the TARDIS is bigger on the inside? Well, I think that what makes the show great is that the show itself is bigger on the inside.

The show makes you feel, and it makes you feel BIG time.

For example, I’ve never seen a more romantic couple on TV than the 11^th Doctor’s companions, Amy Pond and Rory Williams.

He dies over and over for her, and as the Last Centurion he waits over a thousand years to guard her in the Pandorica. And when Amy has to choose between Rory and all of time and space, she chooses him. “Together or not at all.” Try to beat that, any other TV couple out there.   

Looking for something scary? Try the episodes entitled “Blink,” “Silence in the Library,” “The Time of Angels,” “Flesh and Stone” and finally “The Angels Take Manhattan.” I don’t know of any other show that’s made thousands of viewers too scared to even blink.

Looking for something funny? Donna Noble probably would win a funniest companion competition, and one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen on TV was near the end of companion Donna Noble’s storyline in the episode entitled “Journey’s End.” Of course, it very soon becomes one of the saddest things ever. (Maybe that's a spoiler, although soon after Donna Noble is introduced as a companion we're told that something very sad is going to happen to her. The only spoiler here, really, is that it's true.)

And that’s what makes Doctor Who so great! It makes you feel so much and so deeply.

You fall in love with the characters. You feel their terror and sadness and joy. In a way, everyone who watches Doctor Who BECOMES the Doctor’s companion. We’re all onboard the TARDIS for this wonderful, scary, funny, exciting ride!

So it’s not that the show can be anything; it’s that the show can take your emotions ANYWHERE, and it does.

There's a lesson there for any storyteller: don’t let the audience half feel things. Go as far as you can. Make your story like a TARDIS: bigger on the inside.

And that’s why I love the “Madman in a Box.”   

Daily Geek Quotient (or GQ)

Shevi’s Geek Q for today: 132 (pretty high!)

Activities: Watched Weird Al Yankovic on The Late, Late Show with Craig Ferguson and laughed myself silly. Here it is: 

Am I the only person who thinks Weird Al talks and acts like a Muppet?

Ate: Sushi, which I made myself. It was very good, but I think I probably should have passed on the Trop-a-Rocka diet Snapple. (It didn't like me.)


Bought: One Kingdom Hearts tee and this awesome Doctor Who tee (based on the Van Gogh episode) in navy from FYE in the mall, which had a buy one tee get one half-off sale: 

Fun level: Pretty good

Creativity level: Low

Brain activity: Stimulated from this fascinating article on how play seems to be a natural part of life, even in forms as lowly as ants: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2012/02/play-seen-in-humans-fish-atoms-and-the-universe/ How cool is that? 

To Tweet or Not to Tweet, That Is the Question

I have a Facebook friend who wanted to try Twitter but found it too confusing. 

I completely understand. It can be confusing at first, particularly in the area of "Why do I need this?"

For him and anyone like him who would like to start Tweeting but finds it overwhelming, here's the easy guide that should get you tweeting like @NeilHimself in no time.

First, the Twitter website is one of the worst ways to use Twitter. It just throws you in and doesn't explain anything.

The welcome page for Twitter.com

However, I would recommend you start there to set up your avatar and the basic info about yourself.

These two things are important, because they let people know you're a real person (it's best if it's a picture or drawing of your face), not some sort of spam bot, and because they give people a reason to follow you back.

I usually follow writers or funny people (particularly funny writers) back. I also follow back people who love books. I don't follow back people who want to show me how to lose weight or make $10,000 a month, and I really don't follow back girls with avatars showing them crawling on all fours and making eyes at the camera. I also don't follow back twitter birds or eggs, which are the generic avatars that Twitter comes with. Spammers usually use these, because they want to create and abandon Twitter profiles quickly. As Doctor Seuss almost said, "I do not like green eggs and spam." The two often come together, so you should try to avoid them.

You can also upload a nice Twitter background, so that people visiting your Twitter page can see you've put a little effort into it. If you have a digital camera, a nice panorama or a picture of flowers or leaves will do. For a while, I just had a photo I took of one of my bookshelves. I think that's a good way to show my interest in books. Right now, I have a bunch of my illustrations from Toren the Teller's Tale.

My current Twitter background with my illustrations for Toren the Teller's Tale

This might also be a good time to start following some people.

You can ask your friends on Facebook (if you're already on Facebook) for their Twitter names and the names of people they recommend following. You can also look up interesting people in your industry.

Give yourself a Twitter name, avatar, and bio that make it clear who you are
and why someone might want to follow your tweets.

Feel free to follow me, @SheviStories: http://twitter.com/shevistories.

You can also click on the list of people I'm following to see if there are people there you'd like to follow: http://twitter.com/#!/SheviStories/following Feel free to follow whoever you like. While most of the people I follow are writers, illustrators, or people in publishing, you'll find all sorts. For example, I'm a big geek, and I love Mythbusters, so you'll find I'm following AppyGeek and Adam Savage.

Pretty soon people will start following you. Just know that it's good manners to follow people back, although you should, obviously, never follow back a spammer. Also, don't expect a celebrity to follow you back. And if you're a writer, don't expect agents to follow you back. They might, but they probably won't. Still, you should follow them if you want to see what they're tweeting about.

Look up people you're interested in. I like Neil Gaiman, so I follow @NeilHimself. Editor Elizabeth Law is a lot of fun, so I follow @EgmontGal. And Ellen Hopkins is great, so I follow @EllenHopkinsYA. Type in the names of any people you're interested in, and, with any luck, you'll find them on Twitter.

Okay, once you're done with that, you can forget about the Twitter.com website, because you won't need to look at it until the next time you want to change your avatar, your information, or your background. That's because what you will be using--what almost everyone on Twitter uses--is TweetDeck.

Go to http://www.TweetDeck.com and click the button marked "Download."

When it comes to Twitter, TweetDeck is your new best friend.

Open the TweetDeck app, and everything after that should be clear.

TweetDeck starts with a page that looks like this:

The TweetDeck welcome page

See how all the information is there for  you to click on? You can find out how to compose a message, add multiple Twitter accounts, manage Twitter lists, sort information into columns, and so on. If you'd rather figure things out yourself, you can just click "Get Started" at the bottom of the window.

Here's what my TweetDeck window looks like:

I've created columns for the various topics I'm interested in.

In Twitter, a topic is usually, but not always, a word or group of words with a pound sign in front of it. That's why they're called hashtags, because of that hash mark, #, in front of them.

I created columns with the following hashtags, which let me follow conversations of interest to writers: #litchat #amwriting #writegoal #WritersRoad #askagent #YALitChat #KidLitChat.

Play around with hashtags to see what people are talking about. For example, do a search for "poet" if you're a poet, and find out if there are hashtags that contain the word "poet" or hashtags poets use. Create columns with the hashtags as the search terms, and read past conversations in those groups. If you'd like to join the next conversation, ask someone from the group if there's a scheduled chat and when the next one will be. Not all groups have scheduled chats, but they are one of the best uses for Twitter. To participate in a chat, make sure to incorporate the group's hashtag in your tweets.

Hover your cursor over someone's avatar, and you'll see several options. You can follow the person, reply to the tweet, or forward it. Start a conversation with someone. Don't be shy. A good way to start is by forwarding great tweets and saying how great you think they are. The original tweeter usually appreciates that.

Take it slow, have fun, and you should get the hang of it in a week.

Oh, and in answer to the "Why do I need this?" question, you don't. It's fun, though, and it's a good way to connect with people, make friends, and stay in the loop when it comes to developments and opportunities in the industry.

Have questions for agents, for example? The quickest way to get an answer is by using the #askagent hashtag. Feel good about writing 1,000 words in a day and you want to tell the world? The #amwriting and #writegoal hashtags are good for that. Have questions about writing YA? Try #WritersRoad, #YALitChat or #KidLitChat. You can even include multiple tags on the same tweet, provided you keep it under 140 characters.

Twitter is just another way to connect with people who share your interests--all of your interests. I even have columns in TweetDeck for #Eureka, #DoctorWho, #Grimm, and #OnceUponATime because I love these shows, and it's fun to talk to other people who love them too.

I hope this helps.

Oh, and there's one more thing. Blog posts like this often have buttons you can click below them in order to share them with your Facebook friends or Twitter followers. As a blogger, this makes it easier to share information that wouldn't fit into a 140-character tweet on Twitter. As a reader, this gives you an easy way to share helpful posts with other people. It's also a nice way to show your appreciation to whoever wrote that blog post, and most bloggers appreciate the recognition for their work.

I know I haven't included everything, not by a long shot, but I do hope it's enough to get you started without seeming too scary.

To tweet or not to tweet? I say give it a try! I look forward to reading your tweets.

Fantasy, Science Fiction and the Many Worlds Theory

Before the Many Worlds theory, the separation of fantasy and science fiction was clear. If a story was based on science and scientifically plausible yet not currently possible, it was science fiction. If a story had elements that weren’t based on science and that were not scientifically plausible—like magic, dragons, vampires or ghosts—it was fantasy. The division was clear, and which shelf every book belonged on was simple.

Then along came science fiction writers who used some of the elements of science fiction but sometimes fudged the facts or went beyond what was scientifically possible. So science fiction was divided into hard and soft science fiction. Hard science fiction stuck with what was scientifically possible, and soft science fiction went into the realm of the scientifically impossible. Both were still based on science, but where they went from there on was different.

As time went by, the science in some science fiction became softer and softer, to the point where it was given different labels, like space opera, sci-fi, speculative fiction (or spec-fic or simply SF), or science fantasy. Star Trek, at least after the original TV series, is science fiction. Star Wars, though, is a space opera. Science fiction movies and TV shows that are very weak on their science are generally considered sci-fi. Speculative Fiction tends to be more literary and deal more, as the name implies, with “What if?” rather than what could be. And science fantasy is fantasy with science fiction elements, like Doctor Who. Doctor Who has had episodes with ghosts, vampires, werewolves and so on, usually giving pseudo-scientific explanations for them. You can’t argue that things in Doctor Who are scientifically impossible, because it’s not meant to be science fiction. Stick a bunch of planets in the Earth’s sky without gravity on Earth going haywire, and that’s fine. It’s science FANTASY, so it doesn’t have to follow the laws of science.  

But let’s step back in time a little before all this was going on. In 1957, Hugh Everett formulated a theory that reconciled the indeterministic behavior of subatomic particles with the laws of physics. This theory, which he called the theory of Universal Wavefunction, was later renamed by Bryce Seligman DeWitt and popularized as the Many Worlds theory. According to the Many Worlds theory, our world is one of many—perhaps even an infinite number of worlds—that are like our world but different in ways both big and small. Expansions of the Many Worlds theory have taken this even further by saying that many of these worlds might not even follow our laws of physics.

I repeat: according to expansions of the Many Worlds theory of physics, there are many--perhaps even an infinite number of--worlds out there that don’t follow our laws of physics.    

The Many Worlds theory was both troubling and exciting for the science fiction community. It was exciting because it opened up so many new possibilities. There could be alternate histories, like 19^th century worlds with 21^st century technology, or to put it another way, there could be steampunk. Time-travel paradoxes no longer existed, because instead of traveling back in time to a world where you weren’t meant to exist yet, you would travel sideways in time to an alternate world to which you were always meant to have time traveled. In a scene near the end of the most recent Star Trek movie, the two Spocks are having a laugh at Kirk because the older Spock managed to convince Kirk that his meeting with the younger Spock would cause a time-space paradox, which according to the Many Words theory couldn’t happen. But the meeting of the Many Worlds theory and science fiction was also troubling, because how do you define hard science fiction as being different from soft science fiction, science fantasy, and even fantasy if EVERYTHING (except for paradoxes) is scientifically possible?

I think the distinctions between fantasy, science fiction and science fantasy remain the same, but with one exception: fantasy that uses science to explain the fantasy in it can be science fantasy or even science fiction.

Back when I was in college, I fell in love with a science fantasy series by Gene Wolfe: The Book of the New Sun (Shadow & Claw: The First Half of 'The Book of the New Sun'). This series starts out as a pure fantasy novel--or at least it seems to--in a world similar to our middle ages but with other-worldly magical elements. As the story progresses, there are hints that this is not a fantasy world based on the past, but a future world based on our own. In one scene, the main character, Severian, is served what appears to be coffee from an office coffee cart. Because he doesn’t know what this is, he gives the coffee and the cart different names, but we can tell from his description what it is. In another scene, he comes to a path with broken bits of black asphalt. Again he doesn’t know what this remnant from our world is or why it’s there. The reader, however, recognizes this as a hint that long ago this world had paved roads, so long ago that anyone encountering them would not even be able to recognize one as a road. It takes four books, but by the end of the series, we know that this isn’t a fantasy world based on the past but a future world, a science-fiction world in every sense.

The novel I’m currently editing, Toren the Teller’s Tale, is a fantasy based on a literary interpretation of the Many Worlds theory. Because if the Many Worlds theory and its expansions are true, every story--no matter how fantastic--could also be true. They might not be true here, but they could be true on alternate worlds. And if they are true on alternate worlds, then that makes stories spyglasses to those other worlds.

But what does that make the storyteller, the person who lets you see through that spyglass? Some sort of bridge to that other world, perhaps, but a limited one. The storyteller can only take you there in your mind, not physically lead you there. If the storyteller is a filmmaker, he can also show you that world in a way that lets you see and hear it, yet physically you still remain in this world.

But what if--those two favorite words in speculative fiction--what if there were a storyteller who could read and retell physical objects, and even people? What if there were no difference between a word that storyteller told and the object, a story she told and the world that story was about? What if a storyteller could be an actual bridge to the worlds of her stories? What if?

That is the question Toren the Teller’s Tale attempts to answer. It’s the Many Worlds theory in literary terms. It’s metafiction--as in fiction dealing with fiction--but what else is it? Is it a fantasy novel? Is it science fantasy? Or is it a work of speculative fiction? I leave it up to the reader to decide. Opinions may change as the series progresses, because this is meant to be the first book in a trilogy.

Whatever shelf you decide to put it on, I hope you enjoy it.  




Toren, from the soon to be released Toren the Teller's Tale by Shevi Arnold