Spelunking Speculative Fiction: In Which Jess Evander Breaks Down the Space-Time Continuum

Her blood holds secrets she never knew existed.

Despite the fact that she acts as a parent to her alcoholic father, Gabby Creed feels pretty normal. But her life is turned upside-down on her seventeenth birthday when a bracelet appears on her wrist and sucks her back through time. 

Turns out she’s not even a little bit normal. She’s a Shifter—a protector of humans and of history itself. And she’s not alone. The other Shifters believe Gabby is special, even more special than the mysterious Michael Pace. Oh, and the Shades—seriously creepy creatures who feed off of human despair—are determined to capture her. 

It’s all a lot to absorb. So Gabby’s grateful to have Michael as her Trainer—or she would be if she could get her rebellious heart under control. Then again, if the rumors about her blood are true, saving yesterday will be the least of her worries.

That's Saving Yesterday, loves. It saved me one afternoon, too. Stuck in an epic downpour, I suddenly had a few hours to read in my car. It's a rare thing for me to have uninterrupted reading (without editing) time. 

I devoured the book. And I've been hungry for the sequel ever since. JUNE, people. It's almost here. 

Jess is gifted at writing in several different time periods and storyworlds at once. (She's got to be.) I asked her to tell us a little about how she pulls us from time period to time period, grounds us so quickly, and keeps the action from suffering even a beat. Here's what she says:

Full disclosure here: I’m a fantasy-light writer. Which kind of means I’m a cheater in the speculative fiction world. When most people think spec fiction they picture four-hundred page tomes that have made up languages, have names the reader can’t pronounce, and are heavy on world building. But spec fiction doesn’t have to get bogged down in the details, even when you’re writing complex layers, intersecting plot lines, and many locations.

Take my TimeShifters series for example. The books start in a contemporary setting. But then the heroine, Gabby Creed, discovers she’s a Shifter—a person who gets pulled through time to protect humanity and safeguard history. The rest of the book straddles multiple historical settings as well as a made-up place called Keleusma where the Shifters live and train.

The changing locations and time have the ability to quickly confuse a reader, especially when you consider the story is told in first person, so the reader figures out where in history Gabby is when she does. 

But with a couple tricks, it’s not hard at all.  

• Ground the reader in each location with tangible items they can relate to.

If you’re going to tell a story that takes place on a purple planet where the creatures have horns on their face instead of noses, that’s fine, but you must give the reader a way to attach to the location so they can picture it. Think of it as a flag in the ground for them that everything else can grow from. Like when you’re traveling in a third world country and come across a bottle of Coke and suddenly don’t feel so lost.

For example, while some aspects of Keleusma are foreign to a reader and can be hard to grasp, all of my characters obsess about the pumpkin muffins served there. Instantly a reader knows what a pumpkin muffin is. They can picture it, taste it. All without me having to waste words on description. Something small like that makes the reader feel comfortable in your world. And you want that. Very much.

Um, I know I at LEAST want that muffin. (Signed, Bethany)

Think of Tolkien. For all the strange names and languages found in Lord of the Rings, the world is easy to imagine because it has forests and mountains and rivers—same as ours.

• Go easy on the crazy.

Yes...spec fiction is the place to let your imagination explode. But within reason. Why stop at purple planets and horns instead of noses? Why not have them walk on ceilings and sleep underwater and eat...let’s stop there, okay?

At some point (even in spec fiction) you have to pull the reins on your imagination for the sake of your readers. They can’t walk into our heads and see this glorious world we’ve created (and even the most talented writer can’t write perfectly the world we’re envisioning). It’s easy to make readers feel lost. (Remember, help them find the bottle of Coke—offer them something normal to hang on to while they absorb everything else). Pick important and distinctive things that are make-or-break aspects of your story and highlight those. After that, err on the side of making the reader comfortable in your setting instead of making the setting crazy different.

• When you bring us somewhere familiar, use description sparsely.

Speculative fiction is my favorite genre to read (YA spec fiction, to be exact) but the quickest way an author can get me to toss a book aside is to slow down the plot and character development with huge portions of text dedicated to description dumps and worldbuilding. Worldbuilding is important—imperative. But a cool world does not a story make. Your characters are why we’re reading, so keep them the focus.

When you bring your characters somewhere familiar (for a reader), try to use that time to build your plot and characters and keep your description to a minimum. Think about the Hunger Games. Suzanne Collins doesn’t load the first chapters detailing where Katniss lives. Why? Most of us, at one point or another, have learned about mining and what miner’s lives used to be like. As an author you have to be in tune with what the preconceived ideas are about your setting and use that as a springboard for your world.

While Gabby is in contemporary time it would be a waste of page space to detail her family home because the reader knows what a suburban house in 2015 looks like. I lace in one-line details here and there and call it a day. The reader doesn’t need to know the color of the carpeting unless it’s meaningful to the story.

That’s the best question to ask yourself: Is this meaningful to the storyline? If not, leave it out.

• Use extra detail when you land your character in places that will be unfamiliar to your readers.

I know. I know. This is completely contrary to my last point, but stick with me here. When you drop your characters in a place that is completely unrelatable to our readers, this is when you can disregard everything else I’ve said, roll up your sleeves, and detail to your heart’s desire.

For me, it was when I dropped Gabby into historical situations. I needed her to catalogue the world around her so she could figure out when she was and what her mission would be—but this also served to help readers connect to the location.

In unfamiliar places, you have to take time setting the stage before action and development can happen, or else you risk losing or confusing readers.

By doing these things and balancing worldbuilding details, we can write spec fiction that captures the readers with plot and pacing that doesn't suffer because of the details, but instead, shines because of them.

Jess is giving away an autographed paperback copy of Saving Yesterday to one lucky commenter. Here's what you have to do to enter: 

In the comments, hit us with an example of something that grounded you to the storyworld in one of your favorite spec fic books. Be sure to share the title and the author. And, if you're a fan of Jess's already and have read Saving Yesterday, give us an example from there! That'll score you two entries for a chance to win a signed copy! (Who wouldn't want that?)

Get the word out.

Jess Evander is the young adult pen name used by multi-published author, Jessica Keller. Jessica holds degrees in both Communications and Biblical Studies. She writes Young Adult Fiction and Inspirational Romance and has 100+ magazine and newspaper articles to her name. Making her home in the Midwest, Jessica believes there’s never a wrong time to eat cake.

Connect with Jessica through her  Website, blog, Facebook, Amazon Page, Pinterest, and on Twitter.

Spelunking Speculative Fiction: Imaginative Storyworld, Immediate Conflict

Very soon, The Book of Things to Come will be released. 

Image by Dana Song

(I. Can. Not. Wait.) 

Book one of Aaron Gansky's The Hand of Adonai series promises fantasy action, witty banter, video-gaming, monsters, and a team of four American kids--all pulled into Alrujah, a storyworld that will simultaneously enthrall you and rob of you breath.

One of my favorite things about this novel is the balance between clarity of the storyworld and immediacy of action. There's no anthropology lesson first, story later. 

So I asked Aaron to share the recipe to his secret sauce. 

One of the most widely heeded advice in writing is “drop your characters into conflict right away.” This can be stated (and has been) in several ways. Kurt Vonnegut says to “begin as close to the end as possible.” Jerome Stern urges us not to wait, but to “jump in.” And then there are all the great writers who rightly argue we should not to open our books with weather or setting.

I love all these rules, and try to follow them in nearly every respect. But the intention of these, I think, is to get to the conflict as soon as possible.

That being said, fantasy readers are a notoriously patient lot. They love storyworlds. They fall in love with the setting as much, and sometimes more than, they do with the characters. I still love the shire, though I’m not really a huge fan of Frodo. Can I say that without incurring the ire of hobbit apologists everywhere? (Side note—I think there’s more to Sam than there is to Frodo. I say, give him the ring. He’ll do the right thing, and won’t whine about it).

Back to the point.

While I’m not the foremost authority on fantasy, I do know this: your world must be rich, and deep, and beautiful, and frightening. It’s hard to do this if you don’t give it some space in the opening of your novel. We need to know, immediately, that we’re in a different place, a different time, and we need to get a sense of the specifics pretty quick.

For example, is this a Tolkien-style high-fantasy, or more of a quasi-industrialized fantasy like the Mistborn series? Or is it more of an urban-fantasy, with a gritty town and corrupt government? We need to know. The good news is this; it doesn’t take much.

The Wheel of Time series notoriously starts with wind whipping across an expansive, empty plains. It’s like an establishing shot, of sorts. From there, it focuses on a town or city that immediately grounds us in the world of the fantasy.

Map by Kristin Brittner

One good way to do this is to give your characters a storyworld based conflict that may or may not be related to the primary conflict to save the world. Maybe the farm boy has to attend the harvest dance with a girl from another town he’s never met, and she’s worried that she’ll be hideous. This tells us several things—your town is still dependent on agriculture, there are multiple towns, and there may be a negative stigma about people from the other town over.

Also, don’t underestimate language in defining your world. I think, again, of the Wheel of Time series. There are several variations of “blood and ashes” as a curse. But by the very fact that we have people who curse, we also have people who don’t, and people who are offended by the use of the phrase. This helps us better understand the world.

Long story short, ask yourself this: how do I get the most bang for my buck? What’s the smallest detail I can include that will immediately establish my world? Think of this: how is your world different than the one we know? Focus on those, on language, on holidays, on cultures, on economies, and politics, and how they’re different.

And then there are those who get caught in “world-builders” disease. That is, they spend so much time building story world, they forget that there needs to be action as well. This is a problem that develops in the Wheel of Time series. So much worldbuilding, so little action. The key is to balance the two, to use action as a way to build a world. 

Aaron D. Gansky is a novelist, teacher, and writing mentor. He is the author of the novel The Bargain (2013, Lighthouse Publishing of the Carolinas) as well as The Hand of Adonai, a YA Fantasy series. Additionally, he’s written two short books on the craft of fiction; Firsts in Fiction: First Lines and Write to Be Heard (with Diane Sherlock). To find out more about his books, visit his book page here. And you won't want to miss his weekly Firsts in Fiction podcast either. Just have a notepad and sense of humor handy.

Spelunking Speculative Fiction: Creating a World Your Readers Will Love

I cannot even tell you how pumped I am to have Susan Kaye Quinn joining us today. This lady started her own writing journey about the same time as Erynn and I. We clicked from the get-go, and it has been surreal to watch her rocket onto the bestseller lists. Her fuel is 100% determination. This woman writes and writes.

And writes. Because of you, readers. And for you, writers. Without further ado... 

Creating A World Your Readers Will Love

Worldbuilding – a term so sweeping, only writers would dare to use it to describe what they do every day.

I’ve built worlds where everyone reads minds, as well as ones where debt collectors suck out your life energy instead of emptying your bank account. I’ve invented steampunk skyships and humans with nano-tech enhanced brains. I routinely sprinkle new technology into my speculative fiction works just for the giggles—and because inventing on paper is so much easier than doing it in real life. I happen to have a Ph.D. in engineering, but you don’t have to have advanced degrees to wield your imagination. In fact, I’d say too much knowledge can hold you back, where your expertise morphs into a nagging, pinch-face professor who proclaims your fanciful creations unrealistic. The truth is that human knowledge is extremely limited; thankfully, our imagination is not. So please let your creative powers go wild while inventing your gadgets and political systems and alternate economies. Don’t let reality get in the way of what you can dream.

With that unshackling of your creative powers, how exactly does one go about building a world that readers will want to live in… even if it terrifies them?

Think Big

I almost always start a story with a character or conflict in mind. For my upcoming Singularity series, that was a boy who wanted to be a machine—a reverse Pinocchio story set in a post-Singularity future where most of humanity had ascended into super-intelligent human-robot hybrids, while my character was one of the legacy humans left behind. Right there, you’ve got a whole lot of worldbuilding to accomplish. How radically must the world have changed—politically, socially, physically—in order to accomplish such a transition from our current-day world? One of the ways to bring depth to your worldbuilding is to THINK BIG—look at the larger political and economic structures of your world, and how the unique parts of your story would change them. For example, in my Mindjack series, everyone reads minds. This happened suddenly, but over time, the building codes changed… because if your house was closer than about 30 feet to the next door neighbors’ house, you would hear their thoughts in your sleep. A small worldbuilding detail, only mentioned a couple times in the story, but it transformed the Chicagoland area into a sprawling landscape of towering, spindly suburban homes spaced to “mindreading codes.” Only the impoverished—or demented—would live in the close-packed spaces of the city.

Look for BIG changes that can be realized in SMALL concrete ways in your story, and your readers will feel the depth of thought you’ve put into it.

Leave Shadows

At the same time, do not feel like you have to over-describe every facet of life in your world. Paint the larger system (above) with telling details, but leave plenty of shadows… and occasionally hint at what might be in them. In my upcoming Singularity series, the first novel closely follows the story of Eli, the boy who competes in the Creative Olympics for the chance to join the ascenders in their enhanced-intelligence world. Because the trajectory of the plot follows Eli so closely, there are lots of shadows—many aspects of the world that are virtually unexplored. In one paragraph out of 95,000 words, I mention something about “the barbarism of Oregon’s dissenter reservations. The holograms I’ve seen are pretty horrific… Seattle may have its share of human dreck, but at least the life expectancy is more than thirty.” With just one paragraph, I’ve created a shadow and filled it with monsters (to be sure, that paragraph will be explored more in future books). But just that tidbit draws the reader into asking questions—what has happened to the other humans? Why have they descended into barbarism? If that’s happening there, what else could be happening in other places?

Illuminate Corners

While you want to leave plenty of shadowy areas to excite the readers’ imaginations, you can also gain a lot of reader satisfaction by illuminating distinct corners (in space and time), that say a lot with a small vignette. I very much like the idea of telling “stories in miniature”—where you encapsulate the broader themes of a novel in a story-aside that explains how the world works. In my Mindjack series, I have a tidbit where the main character, who is still like a child in that she doesn’t read minds, is finally able to sense, through her mindjacking power, what it’s like to be a mindreader:

I caught whispers of Raf’s thoughts passed from mind to mind. It was like our childhood game of mindtalk, where we pretended to read minds by whispering messages around a circle. The message had been distorted beyond reason by the time it circled back, which had caused us fits of giggles. Only Raf’s messages of anger and pain were far from making me laugh.

Again, just a tiny peek into the past—what it was like to be a child who fully expected to grow up to be a mindreader—married to the present, where that child has grown up to be something quite different instead. By illuminating that corner of the past, we see the present more clearly. And overall, it brings greater depth to the world you’ve created.

Do enough of that, and the readers’ own creativity will fill out your world for you… and have them coming back for more.

Susan Kaye Quinn is the author of the bestselling Mindjack Trilogy and the Debt Collector serial, as well as other speculative fiction novels and short stories. Her work has appeared in the Synchronic and Telepath anthologies and has been optioned for Virtual Reality by Immersive Entertainment. Her business card says "Author and Rocket Scientist" but she mostly sits around in her PJs in awe that she gets to write full time. 

The first book in her Singularity series, The Legacy Human, just released—and it's only 99 cents this week! 

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Spelunking Speculative Fiction: World-Building and Research

When I started dreaming of this foray into the hinterlands of Speculative Fiction, I made a wish list. Who has a unique spin on their craft? Who entertains? Who can we learn from? 

Today, it's award-winning author Carla Laureano. 

Not only is she fabulously witty, she writes the kind of story you fly through (because you can't put it down), and then you keep tucked in your bag to re-read at a moment's notice. I'm not alone in that, surely.

And genre boundary lines do not hem this woman in! I love that. Her Facebook statuses often cause me to wonder what in the British Isles her next book will be about (and when I can get my hands on it). 

So I've asked Carla, aka C.E. Laureano when she's wearing her wizard hat, to share about her research process.

The single most frequent question I get from new and aspiring fantasy writers is “How do I start world-building?” For most readers of fantasy, the world is both the most crucial and the most exciting part of fantasy fiction, whether it be one that mirrors our own or something created entirely from scratch.

But if you’re a writer, how do you begin crafting a well-thought out setting that feels realistic to a reader while still keeping a sense of wonder and discovery? There are two approaches: build a world from the ground up or find your inspiration in historical cultures.

Most beginning writers start world-building from scratch. The freedom to craft an entire world, make things work anyway you want…it’s irresistible. But as I quickly learned when I wrote my first (awful) epic fantasy, the lack of parameters can make it hard to craft a cohesive and understandable setting. You need to not only have creative ability, but also the sensibilities of historian, anthropologist, and sociologist to pull it off. I’m not ashamed to say that I don’t have the background or the energy to do the kind of research (and post-graduate degree) that would require.

That brings us to the second option: finding your inspiration in historical cultures.

Far from being a way to “cheat” on your world-building, it allows you to start out with a coherent and logical society for your jumping off point. Whether you choose ancient Egypt or Renaissance Italy, you don’t need to think about every detail of your society ahead of time, and the setting will seem believable to your readers because it actually happened. That leaves you with the time to focus on the details that makes your setting unique and different.

The key to incorporating your own elements, however, is understanding the impact they have on the rest of the culture. If you’d like to have modern firearms in your Egyptian setting, go right ahead… you just need to know how those firearms got there, the impact they have on your society, and how that effects the development of history and its relations with the rest of the world. Clearly, if Egypt had flintlock weapons seventeen centuries earlier than the rest of the world, history would have unfolded quite differently.

Likewise, if you’re incorporating magic into the model of an existing society, you have to consider the place it occupies. How are magic users regarded—as good, evil, or both? Are they part of the existing religious structure or outside of it? Do they hold positions of leadership or are they considered threats to the political order of the day? How do those considerations change if you’re working with a post-Enlightenment society?

To use an example from my own work, when I started building the world for my Song of Seare series, I knew I wanted it to be Celtic.

I started with research on ancient Ireland, up to about the seventh century. Details like the manner of dress, types of fortresses, and even some of the topography came directly from the history books. Then I began to read mythology and heroic poetry like the Ulster Cycle to get a feel for the types of heroes and stories that the Irish valued, in order to give my books that epic, larger than life, “written into the annals of mythology” sort of feel.

Keeping in mind the actual history and Celtic culture of the early Irish, I then started to play the “what-if” game. What if some of the druids were not as peaceable as they seemed and drew on darker powers? 

My Red Druid was born. What if the Red Branch Knights were not merely a regional militia, but a secret society of reclusive warriors, dedicated to returning the rule of the High King? Enter the Fíréin brotherhood. And what if the Irish reverence for bards and musicians was not strictly because of their skill, but because some bards possessed magical ability? My hero Conor’s ability to transform music into magic came into existence.

The final result is a story that feels both original and authentic, thanks to its roots in the real world. By allowing history to do some of the heavy lifting on my world building, I was able give more page time to the elements that were unfamiliar, rather than having to detail every last piece of clothing, weapon, and food that populates my world. It also allowed me to craft an expansive story within word count restrictions that would have otherwise made it impossible. And because of its real world roots, the story has appealed to not just fans of epic/high fantasy, but also Celtic culture enthusiasts and historical fiction readers.

Now I’d love to hear what trends in world building you’ve noticed through your reading. How do your favorite authors balance the real world and the fantastical elements in their writing?

Carla Laureano is the RITA® Award winning author of The Song of Seare (as C.E. Laureano) and Five Days in Skye. She's an avid cook, an enthusiastic but untalented singer, and a thwarted world-traveler. She currently lives in Denver with her patient husband and two rambunctious sons.

Connect with her: Web | Facebook | Twitter | Google+ | Pinterest

Thanks for joining us today, Carla. Readers, be sure comment below, because Carla's got a freebie for ERRYBODY... 

                   and a prize for one lucky winner.

First, the deets for the prize: One reader who answers Carla's final question will get his or her choice of a signed paperback--either Oath of the Brotherhood or Beneath the Forsaken City. So let us know how your favorite authors balance the real and the fantastic. 

And for everyone, from January 25-31 only, Oath of the Brotherhood is free on all e-reader platforms. So run and get it!

And thanks to Timothy Krause and Russell Davies for the sweet numeric images.