The Voices Saga Blog by William Stolley
| This entry is meant to demonstrate the problems I face while writing the Voices Saga July 2010 To hire an editor or not to hire an editor I have come to a crossroad and must make a difficult choice. Let's call it a dilemma between what is acceptable to the professional world of publishing and what I can deliver from my semi-professional status (I have received residual checks for my work and paid taxes on that money, albeit minuscule): the publishing world will not take your work seriously unless you have it professionally edited. The only problem with this scenario is that editors are not cheap. It costs me as much or more to hire an editor as it does to publish my novel. The greater an editor's reputation, the higher his/her fee. Without an agent or publisher to help with editing, we independent authors are at the mercy of editors. Do I need an editor? Whom do I pick? Advertise? Craig's List? Want ad? Will they correct grammar and punctuation only? What about content? What about continuity? What are the costs, by the letter, by the word, by the page, by the foot? If you change editors, as in writing a saga, how will the next editor know the characters or their capacities established in previous novels? I decided not to use an editor for book III. However, the feedback from book III was better than the first two books of my saga, which were edited professionally (those editors also left in glaring mistakes and said nothing about content). Personally, I enjoyed working with my second editor. However, it was pointed out to me afterward, that an editor is supposed to make suggestions. The second editor, while very kind, efficient, and professional made no suggestions. Currently, I am revising/editing/correcting the fourth novel in the series, "The Voices Down Under." An editor approached me last week... I still haven't decided if I can afford them or even trust them with my money and my work. With a track record of zero to two, I am leery. Throughout the summer, I managed to revise and modify all the remaining novels in the series. During this process I read through each unpublished novel and made corrections to grammar, punctuation, structure, and continuity as I progressed from novel to novel. I managed to read novels IV through X (approx. 700,000 words) between May and late July. When I returned to "Voices Down Under" in late July (to begin my final edit), I found some glaring mistakes and some passages that needed serious rewrite. So much for my confidence back in May when I put the book to bed and declared it "ready for review and publication." I was completely wrong in that assessment, which leads me back to the question of the day. Do I need an editor? Probably. Can I afford an editor? The truth is, not really. Would it be satisfactory to have an agent and/or a publisher take over publication (as they would have the novels professionally edited)? Most definitely! Agents and publishers can be extremely helpful to authors. However, until that day arrives, I must continue to write my novels and churn out product whether an agent or publisher makes an offer or not. The Voices Saga will be published in one form or another. Will it be the great series it could be without professional help? That conclusion has yet to be determined. |
| Everything you know about the future is wrong - August 14, 2010 A problem lies at the heart of science fiction, a problem that has lingered and festered far too long – common sense. No, common sense is not the problem but a lack thereof. Let me site some perfect examples: Robots – In a world that has six, seven, or even eight billion people, however you count them, the need for additional people-type mechanical objects is inefficient. It costs millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars to design and build a robot, an extremely complicated machine. For what purpose? The cost alone makes them prohibitive to only the wealthiest citizens of the planet. Even if one could be made, notice I said one, the idea that it could run for any length of time in a reliable fashion is to stare complexity in the face. With so many things that could go wrong, we are speaking of a non-practical device, too expensive, too complex, too unreliable, with no purpose. A wheel chair can carry a person better than a robot at a millionth of the cost. A person can care for another person better than a robot with far more compassion and intuition. The robot is an overblown myth. Let people do what any robot can do, with more subtly and more reliability. Let’s use that robot building capital to fund education, infrastructure, and research. Flying cars – I find this one easy for most people to understand. In a country that has millions of cars on the roads, but only hundreds of planes in the air at one time, all you need to do is the math. Imagine millions of cars in the air… now imagine crashes over school yards, streets full of pedestrians, cars crashing into things, out of control. You cannot apply brakes in the air. Even if you could, you’d wipe the occupants of the car off the inside of the windshield if you suddenly stopped a vehicle traveling at a high rate of speed, and we’re talking hundreds of miles an hour. Flying cars would be terrible in so many ways that it is impossible to number them. Keep the cars on the ground. Make them green. Towers of glass and steel – The city of the future is always depicted as having huge towers of glass and steel. The problem is that creating a building that rises straight up presents immediate difficulties in that its extended oblong design is extremely inefficient. Architects of the past did not consider the ideas of security, safety, fire, heating, cooling, energy usage, etc. They simply created designs and carried them out based on limited real estate. If we cannot build out, we’ll build up. The major difficulty with this premise is that by going up, you create so many additional problems that you spend all of your time trying to compensate for the fact that if you scale back the height of the building, you immediate solve many problems. The solution is not urban sprawl or towers of steel and glass, but population control. We cannot form relationships and start popping out babies without assuming responsibility for what these children will do, where they will live, and how much they will consume in a world with limited resources. Babies are a necessity of lineage, but of equal importance is the survival of the human race. The answer? Fewer babies… that is the true answer that most of us cannot face. Space travel - The idea that one can travel through space by practical means and arrive at some distant destination light years away is absurd. This is not like going somewhere in a car. Space has distances that defy most people's ability to comprehend them. You cannot stand or sit inside some "ship" and travel, even at the speed of light, and reach any place closer to us other than a star (Proxima Centauri) with no inhabitable planets, whose voyage will take you a year. Even if you could travel at the speed of light, the world of practical physics intervenes. As an object reaches the speed of light, its weight relative to its size would increase to such a degree that an extraordinary amount of energy would be needed to propel such an object. Should any obstacle lie in your path, it would instantly destroy your ship when you made contact. You cannot turn left at the speed of light. Further, let us consider time. To spend years, decades, or centuries on such a quest would be to ignore your point of origin. No UFO ever visited planet Earth for the reason no spacecraft is capable of crossing such distances of space and time without breaking ties to its homeworld. The UFO, like space travel, is an absurd myth. The solution I present in my novels, is that humanity is linked to other worlds by our minds. However in practical terms, it is more likely that our connection to distant worlds in the future might be solely through some form of communication, not space travel. Technology is the answer – this is one of science fiction’s biggest crutches. In my novels, the characters use the fusor to create many gadgets and black cards that expand with limitless knowledge at their fingertips. However, when it comes to solving problems, they fall back on the most reliable technology of all – the human brain. Today’s humans think less, use our imaginations less, and rely on technology to the extent it has replaced the practical application of thinking in our lives. Remember the lesson of the nursery. In the beginning of our lives, most young children do not stare endlessly at television. They pick up a simple object and imagine it to be something else… and proceed to play with it. What is happening when they do this? They use their brain to problem solve, something we lack later in life, when parents spoil children with too much technology. We let the machines make choices for us, instead of using our minds to think things through to their logical conclusion. That is why Han extrapolates ideas from facts. He does not rely on the wisdom of some machine. A computer is only as smart as its programmer, and I do not see anything of wisdom in a computer. It is but a tool, like a hammer, and nothing more. It will never build a house. It will never knit a sweater. It will never change a diaper. It will never cook a meal. It will never solve a problem. Your brain will. Use it. Thus ended the lesson… time to bring back common sense. |
| Addendum: The teleporter or transporter: I almost forgot this myth. This is the device that is supposed to break down your body into atoms and somehow, miraculously, transport them across great distances of space and time, reassemble them and you will have changed location in seconds (as opposed to the old fashioned method of going from place to place inside some sort of carrying vessel). I mean, really, sci-fi fans. Do I really need to debunk this myth? This was Gene Roddenberry's way of cutting costs on the television show "Star Trek" so he didn't have to use a shuttle. But in reality, it could never work with any complex organism, and I doubt it could even work transporting something as simple as a bar of steel. Atoms are funny things. They don't like having large amounts of energy applied to their outside and push them around without reacting in strange ways. A bar of steel could end up as a pile of ash. And you want to transport a human being whose memory is chemically stored inside the brain? Never... in a million years, never. |
| Final word on the future: For men like Jules Verne or even DiVinci, the future held promise for complex machines. However, even they did not foresee the microchip. Verne had steam engines in his day. He saw how eventually, man could create machines that would conquer the air and go beneath the sea. His airships were balloon-based, yet his submarine seemed powered by nuclear fuel, a lucky guess on his part. Much of what he and DiVinci predicted were already feasible in their time. However, Welles hit wide of the mark when he predicted life on Mars. He is not alone in making bad predictions of the future. 1950's Science fiction imagined that man had limitless resources when authors wrote about space travel. Even they would admit today, that travel to any place in the universe via a rocket is impractical, if not impossible. Giant space stations cost so much money as to make them extremely unlikely. Bases on the moon are not a necessity and would take billions, if not trillions of dollars to keep them viable. This blue sphere, water bound, green lush appearance of Earth appears to be a rarer type planet, one spread throughout the universe, no doubt, yet not as plentiful as gas giants or lifeless rocks. So when we recklessly burn pockets of fossil remains (oil and gas) at rates that overwhelm nature's ability to recycle them; when we dump our garbage into the ocean that gives this planet its ability to breathe (oxygen); when we mow down forests, build too many houses, and flush our toilets into pristine lakes and rivers, we destroy any future that our children or grandchildren may wish to enjoy. If you think you are giving your children a legacy, think again. We, as the human species, cannot poop all over our garden and expect to produce anything decent to eat. The Garden of Eden is all around you. It won't be God that drives you from it after you bite from the tree of knowledge; mankind will cut down, pave over, and pollute the garden into oblivion. Then it will join the other planets as a largely uninhabitable place to live. The future awaits humanity. What that future will be largely depends on how mankind adapts to our changing environment. It is far more important to wake the sleeping heads of naysayers who stand in denial of an ever increasing warmer climate due to man's intervention with nature, than to build an army of ultimate robots or make a giant circular space station. The future is more about survival, tending the garden called planet Earth, and putting delusions of a techno-future on hold until we can deal with the more apparent and pressing problems of the present. |