Author: terribleminds (page 25 of 454)

Many new technologies follow an inevitable evolution that starts with invention and ends with exploitation by governments, usually for strategic defense purposes. Weaponization, in other words, often follows innovation. This is not a new trend. Stone tools were one of the first human inventions preserved in the archaeological record. In 1991, two Germans discovered a body embedded in a melting glacier in the Italian Alps. It turned out to be the mummified remains of a prehistoric man who died 5,300 years ago. Ötzi, as he was named, was found with a bow, a quiver of arrows, a copper axe, and several stone tools. Advanced imaging (X-ray and CT scan) revealed that he also had an arrowhead.

It was lodged in his back.

So it turns out that the human tendency to (1) invent new things, and (2) use them to attack others is something of a tradition. In modern times, we have followed it with every new technological advance. Within a dozen years of the Wright Brothers’ first flights in 1903, the first World War became the testing grounds for airplanes as weapons. Rockets that carry spacecraft into orbit can also carry nuclear warheads. GPS satellites that help us navigate to anywhere on the planet might also provide target guidance to those warheads. (At least in theory. I’m guessing the military has their own satellites that aren’t distracted by telling Uber drivers where to turn next). The association of many recent large-scale computer hacks to foreign states suggests that current and future wars will play out on a digital battlefield, an idea explored in books like Chuck’s ZER0ES.

The fear of biological weapons is what really keeps me up at night, though. As the recent pandemic has demonstrated, tiny pathogens can simultaneously kill millions of us and drive us apart like nothing else has done. SARS-COV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, is by all indications a naturally occurring virus in some other animal that made the leap to human. It has evolved in the face of every measure aimed at eliminating it. Now imagine if such a virus were weaponized. Engineered to be more infectious and more deadly. It’s a sobering thought and probably within reach of current biotechnology.

A couple of years ago I wrote a book about a slightly less frightening application of near-future biotechnology: using genetic engineering to create dragons. In Domesticating Dragons, genetic engineer Noah Parker goes to work for a company that creates customized dragons for use as pets and service animals. He has his own secret reasons for getting a job there which have little to do with dragons themselves. Yet for reasons I won’t spoil here, at the end of the book it’s apparent that the Build-A-Dragon Company will need some new customers.

In my new book, Deploying Dragons, their new customer is the U.S. Government. More specifically, it’s the Acquisition Corps, the body that oversees development and testing of new weapons systems for the U.S. Army. In other words, Noah and his colleagues aim to develop dragons into weapons. If you allow yourself the suspension of disbelief to buy into dragons, this makes a lot of sense. Dragons can do a lot of things that current weapon systems cannot. They can be adapted to ground, air, and marine environments. They can pass through metal detectors. And probably most important, they can think for themselves. I think if we had dragons like that, the U.S. government just might come calling. Granted, it’s more of a collaboration in my book than outright co-opting, but I think it still makes for a good story. Especially because, as Noah finds out, he’s not the only one who can design dragons anymore.

ABOUT DEPLOYING DRAGONS

A BIOTECH RACE AGAINST TIME TO DEVELOP MILITARY-GRADE DRAGONS. Brilliant genetic engineer Noah Parker is pitted head-to-head against the founder of Build-a-Dragon to design custom dragons for the military.

Genetic engineer Noah Parker has at last landed the job he’s long coveted: director of dragon design for the Build-A-Dragon Company. With a combination of genetic engineering and a cryptic device known as the Redwood Codex, he and his team can produce living, breathing dragons made-to-order. But sales of dragons have plummeted, and the Build-A-Dragon Company will have to find new revenue streams if it hopes to stay in business. A contract to develop dragons for the U.S. military promises a much-needed lifeline. Yet the specs are more challenging than anything Noah has ever designed. Worse, he learns that a shadow company headed by former CEO Robert Greaves has stolen the dragon-making technology to make a competing bid. Noah’s dragons will face off against those of his old adversary. It’s a head-to-head design competition, with the ethical future of domesticated dragons hanging in the balance.

Dan Koboldt is the author of the Gateways to Alissia trilogy (Harper Voyager) and the Build-A-Dragon Sequence (Baen), the editor of Putting the Science in Fiction and Putting the Fact in Fantasy (Writer’s Digest), and the creator of the sci-fi adventure serial The Triangle (Realm). As a genetics researcher, he has co-authored more than 100 publications in Nature, Science, The New England Journal of Medicine, and other scientific journals. Dan is also an avid deer hunter and outdoorsman. He lives with his wife and children in Ohio, where the deer take their revenge by eating the flowers in his backyard.

Dan Koboldt: Website

Deploying Dragons: Buy Here

Hey, I am as shocked as you are, but apparently The Book of Accidents went and won itself one of them fancy Dragon Awards @ DragonCon for Best Horror Novel? I say I’m shocked not because I don’t stand by the book — I do! I like it just fine, thanks. But it was in some really stellar company, and I say with all sincerity it’s a win just to be mentioned in the same breath as those writers. (C’mon, Stephen Graham Jones, Grady Hendrix, Caitlin Starling, Daryl Gregory, Kiersten White? That’s a helluva group to be in.)

But apparently, people actually… voted for TBOA, which is so great, and I thank all of you who registered and voted. I cannot be mad at an award that is chosen by fans and readers, which is really great, and I’m over the moon. Week made.

SO THANK YOU, GOOD HUMANS.

Congrats too to the other nominees and winners!

Buy my books or I die in the lightless abyss!

*waves*

The results of last week’s challenge are live.

This week, the art robot has given us FIVE DOORWAYS.

You can choose one of these and write about them. Or, perhaps, what waits behind these doors. Or about who put them in, or why there is a door there at all. These doorways are strange, and there must be a story about them.

From there, you can and should write ~1000 words of fiction based on that prompt.

Do not post your fiction in the comments.

Deadline is one week, next Friday, the 26th.

Post it at your requisite online space, and drop us a link to that online space in the comment section below so others can read it.

Any genre is acceptable.

Let us know what prompt inspired the flash fiction you wrote.

Let’s do it!

What is it about small town horror? Why is it so godsdamned compelling? Good horror can happen anywhere. I’ve written city-based urban horror and international thriller-type horror as well as small town. There’s super famous horror set in the Arctic or the jungle or any number of other locales. A good dark yarn can be spun in any environment. But there’s something particularly delicious about hamlet hideousness. Why?

For many of us who live in or near such places, we see some of the more mundane horrors on a daily basis. I mean, you live in a place where almost everyone knows who you are—that’s terrifying. The level of gossip that circulates a small community like scum slowly circulating a partially-blocked drain, is appalling. But these are indeed everyday horrors.

The small town has its edge, I think, due to several other factors. For one, it shares its tight-knit community with some degree of isolation. After all, if it wasn’t isolated it would be a suburb. The fact that it stands alone is what denotes its identity. And that allows a certain culture to build up. Every small town has a vibe. An accent. A unique weirdness. Mostly they’re entirely benign. Maybe they’re great for antique shopping, or farm produce. Perhaps they have particularly interesting trees. Or maybe, like Snowtown in South Australia, they’re great for bodies stuffed into barrels. (In case you don’t know about that one, the short version is that between 1992 and 1999, three guys murdered 12 people and, with the help of a 4^th person, hid all the bodies in barrels in an abandoned bank vault in Snowtown, about 87 miles north of Adelaide. None of the killers or victims were actually from Snowtown, but the town carries the stigma to this day.)

It’s that combination of peculiar local culture and isolated location that lets small towns develop into genuine horrors, if we let them. When I wrote The Gulp and The Fall I leaned hard into that concept—Gulpepper is a small harbour town on the coast of New South Wales in Australia that some maps don’t even show. That town is weird with a capital WEIRD. I got to build an entire mythology around its weirdness which allowed me to tell all kinds of wild stories, and I’m not finished yet. There’ll be more Tales From The Gulp one day.

I wanted to visit that idea again with Sallow Bend, my latest novel coming out through Cemetery Dance Publications on September 2^nd. But where Gulpepper is truly weird, Sallow Bend is a small town with a slightly different angle—this one is a pretty regular place, only it has a dark and forgotten history. Forgotten except that it periodically repeats, and at the start of the novel it’s beginning to come around again. That history best left unspoken is another aspect that makes the small town intriguing and potentially frightening. It’s small, isolated, with a dark past…

Where the isolation of the small town allows strange culture to build, it also provides a kind of trap when things go awry. In the city, the police are usually not far away (although they might shoot you simply for calling them, but that’s an entirely different strain of horror). In the city, you can jump on a bus or a train or hail a cab and leg it. In the city, there’s usually cell phone coverage. In the city you can get lost in the crowd and spend most of your time unnoticed. In a small town, the cops are very far away. In a small town there’s no public transport to help you get away (where I live there’s a bus once per hour on weekdays between 9am and 6pm—good luck if the monster is after you in the evening, or you just missed the last bus and have to wait another hour.) In a small town there are often cell phone dead spots—honestly, those places piss people off but they’re a fucking godsend for horror writers. In a small town, you can’t do anything without someone seeing you and taking note. And there’s another aspect of the horror we draw on.

“Oh, I noticed young Charlie wasn’t in school on Tuesday. Perhaps he’s dying of some rare terminal childhood disease!” Yeah, or maybe he had a dentist appointment.

“Hey, I saw old Mr. Crackerjack taking a lot of money out of the bank on Friday. I wonder if he’s paying off some terrible debt? Or hiring a hitman to take out Mrs. Crackerjack?” Yeah, or maybe he needs a new car.

Honestly, the gossip machine is out of control in local communities. But that’s the thing about the small town community—any of those explanations could be true, from the boring to the infernal. The people can have as many dark secrets as the place. Someone might be as sweet as pie or a cannibal who wants to eat your lips, sauteed in a nice onion and garlic sauce. Your lovely neighbour might indeed be dear old Mrs. Flowerpot, who runs the Country Women’s Association and makes delicious orange marmalade cake, or she might be dear old Mrs. Flowerpot, who runs the Country Women’s Association and makes delicious orange marmalade cake and is also a slimy swamp beast wearing the original Mrs. Flowerpot’s skin like an ill-fitting suit. “Do come in for a nice, moist slice of cake dear, then I’ll trim off those full lips of yours and fry them up with onions and garlic.”

Small towns are often old too, therefore packed with haunted places. There are a million apocryphal stories passed on by generation after generation that make city-based urban legends seem like children’s stories. When people see everything that goes on, it’s easy to speculate about your neighbours and the best speculation involves all manner of things sinister and cruel. Despite the idea that small towns are friendly and supportive (which, to a large degree, they often are) they frequently also create sharply opposed cliques, groups at loggerheads with each other about any number of issues, small or large. This engenders all kinds of potential conflict. Now the town is small, isolated, with a dark past, and there are factions and gossip running rife. Who fits where? And why? Or why not?

But the idea of fitting in often brings those communities together on one subject: their disdain for the outsider. Their distrust of anyone not local. That alone creates some wonderful fodder for horror. But what if you’re part of that community but also, somehow, always seen as the outsider?

Equally, of course, the disdain can run the other way, with urban folk sneering at the backwards simpletons in the country. Well, that’s all very well, Chad, until you go for a weekend antiquing and your cell phone has no coverage and dear Mrs. Flowerpot is eating your lips. Sucked in, Chad!

Small town horror has been around forever, and some of our favourite horrors are small town ones. Think of movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Scream, or The Lost Boys. TV like Midnight Mass, Stranger Things, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, League of Gentlemen, or Gravity Falls. And of course books, like Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, Needful Things or IT, Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Josh Malerman’s Goblin, Jennifer McMahon’s The Winter People, and so many more. Plus, of course, my own books like The Gulp and The Fall, and now my new one, Sallow Bend. All these examples are just a random selection off the top of my head, and even there you can see such a wide range of horror styles. The genre is indeed a truly broad church, from the blood-soaked to the deeply disquieting and everything in between.

I think small town horror has a place deep in our souls, and I have a theory as to why, beyond the obvious one that it’s just super entertaining and hella creepy. Just maybe it’s because, no matter where we live or were born or grew up, we’re each a kind of small town ourselves, existing in our isolated brain-mind-trapped-in-a-meat-bag state. The locations of these horrors are small, isolated, with a dark past, and there are factions and gossip running rife, and people who don’t fit in. That only serves to highlight our own fears of insignificance, isolation, forgottenness, otherness, with our secrets we don’t want others to know, and a terror of not fitting in, or just being too fucking weird. Perhaps therefore, these stories reflects some of the most deep-seated issues we all carry with us, consciously or not.

But take comfort, friend, because the other thing horror does so well is help us face the darkness. It helps us interrogate our fears. It’s cathartic and emboldening. And while we might each be a little isolated weirdo, we can all be isolated weirdoes together in our love of this wonderful genre. I hope you enjoy some small town horror soon, you brain-mind-trapped-in-a-meat-bag, you.

Sallow Bend is now out through Cemetery Dance Publications — ! Learn more about it and everything else Alan Baxter at www.alanbaxter.com.au

Sallow Bend: Cemetery Dance

The war between Assassins and Templars wreaks havoc in the Victorian era, in this breakneck thriller which opens up a whole new chapter of the Assassin’s Creed universe.

London, 1851 – When Pierrette, a daring acrobat performing at the Great Exhibition, rescues the mathematician Ada Lovelace from a gang of thugs, she becomes immersed in an ancient feud between Assassins and Templars. But Lovelace is gravely ill, and shares her secrets with Pierrette, sending the acrobat in search of a terrible weapon which she’d been developing for a shadowy figure known as “the Magus”. Pierrette’s only ally is Simeon Price, Lovelace’s childhood friend, who belongs to a Brotherhood devoted to free will. With Simeon’s aid, they uncover a startling web of political assassinations destabilizing Europe. As they race to foil the Templars’ deadly plot, murders and bombs are everywhere they look, but hope is nowhere in sight.

Nothing Is True; Everything Is Permitted

Players of the Assassin’s Creed videogames will recognize this as the maxim that guides the game’s ancient brotherhood. The basic idea is that rules are made up, and what is true in one place or time may not be in another, and what should guide an individual’s behavior is consideration of the consequences. This is also pretty good writing advice, as it happens! There are no rules, there’s only what works to achieve your goals and what doesn’t. I knew that already, but I need a reminder from time to time.

When I realized that this book would work much better if I moved one of the chapters earlier and slightly out of timeline, and the best way to flag that for the reader would be to call it a prologue, I hesitated, for a couple of reasons.

The first was that prologues have their haters. A lot of people have translated “sometimes prologues are unnecessary padding” to “prologues are always unnecessary and annoying.” So that made me pause to consider whether I was ready to risk the consequence of some readers skipping what is, in fact, a integral part of the book that’s just told out of sequence for several reasons.

But ultimately, the only consequence that matters is: “is the book as good as it can be?” I knew the story would unfold better in the order I wanted to tell it. I can’t control the way readers will interact with a book, but I can control my decisions as a writer.

The second reason I hesitated was that my original plan for the book didn’t have that chapter appear in the beginning as a prologue. But an outline isn’t sacred. (Although with tie-in writing such as books based on videogames and movies, changes may need to be approved.)  An outline is only “true” as far and as long as it serves you.

We Work in the Dark to Serve the Light

“Everything is permitted” is all fine and good when it comes to whether or not to write in second person or write your novel in verse – fill your boots – but it’s a little more complicated when we’re talking about the actual Assassin’s Creed, because what’s permitted in that case is, well, killing people. The creed is full of paradoxes. Assassins push back against dogma, but they act on faith themselves, and have a set of rules to obey. They don’t kill innocents or harm their brotherhood; but who decides who is innocent, and what constitutes harm?

Yes, awareness of consequences can guide to morality – but every individual comes to the world with their own knowledge and character. We can see this all around us in how people respond to the pandemic and weigh the consequences of something like not wearing a mask in a crowd. Societies have rules for a reason. But then, of course, someone has to set and protect those rules, and those people are also fallible…

In the Assassin’s Creed universe, these questions are frequently debated by the characters themselves – and the only thing that’s certain is that nothing is. Both the main characters in The Magus Conspiracy are internally divided, pulled in multiple directions at once, forced to make moral decisions that sometimes turn out to be mistakes. I wanted my characters to have plenty of chances to explore the philosophical underpinnings of the games (sorry, characters).  

Games and stories about larger-than-life, morally grey characters and situation are entertaining. But more than that, writing characters who have extreme choices to make (like whether or not to stab someone) can help illuminate the less dramatic moral choices we all make every day.

Hide in Plain Sight

I wanted the reader to be involved and engaged in those choices too. Reading a book isn’t a passive activity, and reading a videogame book really shouldn’t be.

One of the ways a novel can heighten that sense of participation in the reader is to include a mystery or a twist to figure out. There’s a mystery at the heart of The Magus Conspiracy. But writing twists always makes me a bit nervous, because I’m one of those people who tends to spot them early (or at least I think I do!). When the twist is all there is, it can feel anticlimactic to just have it confirmed that yep, it’s what you thought it was on page 3, or in the first five minutes. Alternatively, sometimes giving a reader red herrings can create a different kind of disappointment. I’ve sometimes reached the end of a book or movie and learned that the writer went with a solution that wasn’t as cool or satisfying as the thing I thought it would be.

So as I wrote The Magus Conspiracy, I asked myself all the way along how I could make sure to satisfy a reader who figured things out faster than my characters do – or who was quietly rooting for a different twist. I laid my trail of breadcrumbs for the reader, but I also assumed for the sake of argument a hypothetical reader who guessed the destination of that trail right away, whether the guess turned out to be the same as the ultimate revelation or not. What sort of tension, what further layers of mystery, could I include? How could I make the “why” or the “how” or the “oh no” into a ball of yarn just as fun to play with as the mystery itself?

We Must Be the Shepherds of Our Own Civilization

The character Ezio Auditore says this in one of the Assassin’s Creed games, and it kept coming back to me as I was writing The Magus Conspiracy.

One of the key thematic questions of the Assassin’s Creed franchise is the role of order and authority, represented in the games by the Templar Order. The Assassins believe they are fighting for peace by pushing back against the Templar conception of authority. So exploring those questions in a novel set in early 1850s Europe seemed a natural fit.

The middle of the 19^th century has a lot of parallels to our own time. The one that really grabbed me, as I was researching and writing this book, was the collapse of authority. There was widespread hunger in Europe in the 1840s; we mainly refer to this today as the Irish Potato Famine, where the consequences were extreme and were exacerbated by the British government, but there were shortages and rising prices throughout Europe. There was also a tech bubble – railroad speculation – that collapsed, leading to a financial crisis and, in the UK, a run on the banks. Like today, monetary policy was a hot topic – never a sign that things are going well.

In 2022, authority continues to not make a very good case for itself, in everything from public health to policing to the climate crisis to the economy. I have no idea which way things will go, but I found it very instructive researching the Hungry Forties and the years that followed. In 1848, Europe rose up in a series of revolutions that failed in most of their immediate aims, but changed the world significantly. The lesson of the 1840s is that order is not peace.

If You’re Going to Take a Leap of Faith, It Helps to Be Facing the Right Direction

One of the things I learned in my research for this book is that Ada Lovelace was even more of a badass than I knew.

She’s best known for her annotations of Charles Babbage’s design of a proposed Analytical Engine that would be programmable in the much the same way a computer is. Her notes explained the significance of the concepts underlying the design, and even included a detailed example that is widely considered the first computer program.

What made her a great figure in the history of science was not expertise in mathematics or in any particular area, but her capacity for imagination, which she described as “the discovering faculty.” She thought of science as being an unseen world all around us. Once she had applied her imagination, making new connections between apparently unrelated things, she could “see” things no one else could. She talked about a “new language” and the “science of operations” as distinct from mathematics, in an age in which computers didn’t yet exist.

What I hadn’t realized was that her work with Babbage was only one of her many interests, and not even her biggest one. She corresponded with several scientists in various fields, and kept all sorts of notes about her plans and ideas – some of which were, frankly, a bit weird. She was interested in the science of music and talked about tantalizing, universal ideas just out of her reach. If she hadn’t been ill most of her life, if she hadn’t been plagued by creditors and bad guesses at the racetrack, if she hadn’t died of cancer at the age of 36, who knows what else she would have written and perceived?

But then again, maybe all those other avenues of inquiry into the various faddish sciences of the 19^th century wouldn’t have led to other moments of equal greatness. Maybe the main thing is that she had an imagination that was ready to leap, and she happened to leap toward something sublime.

***

Kate Heartfield’s novel Assassin’s Creed: The Magus Conspiracy is published by Aconyte Books. Her novel The Embroidered Book, published earlier this year, a Sunday Times bestselling historical fantasy about Marie Antoinette and her sister, Maria Carolina. Kate’s novels, novellas, short stories and games have won or been shortlisted for several major awards, including three Nebula nominations in the novella and game writing categories. Her debut novel, Armed in Her Fashion, won Canada’s Aurora Award. She is a former journalist who lives near Ottawa, Canada.

Kate Heartfield: Website | Twitter

The Magus Conspiracy: Audio | Indiebound | Bookshop | Amazon | Aconyte

A FUTURE FOR THE TAKING…

As the last Bloodnamed Warrior left in the former Jade Falcon Occupation Zone, newly-elected Khan Jiyi Chistu has ’Mechs, but no MechWarriors—making it impossible to rebuild his Clan after the disaster on Terra. Meanwhile, despite being riven by the Dominion-wide vote on whether to join the new Star League or not, Star Colonel Emilio Hall’s Ghost Bears have a planet full of talented sibkos ready to graduate.

When word of these sibkos reaches Khan Chistu, he hatches a bold plan to take them, eager to rebuild the Jade Falcons. But with Star Colonel Emilio caught up in the politics of the Ghost Bear vote, will he even see Jiyi coming? Or will he lose the sibkos that represent the very future of his Clan?

For both men and the Clans they hold dear, these dilemmas become nothing less than a question of survival…

***

All stories are personal.

When I got to work on this book, I knew I was going to have to deal with the in-universe politics of BattleTech pretty heavily. For those unfamiliar with BattleTech, it’s a fairly warlike future where big stompy ’Mechs tend to do the diplomacy for people at the end of a gun. There are pockets of civilization, to be sure, but for the most part, people just want to shoot each other. At the outset of the book, the Ghost Bears, a segment of society that has settled into a part of the universe and been largely left alone for a long time, are forced to vote on whether or not they want to join up with something called the Star League Defense Force. It’s led by an unstable warrior named Alaric Ward of Clan Wolf and joining would seem not great. The entire population gets to vote and it gets ugly. Having a divisive vote that could very well end in civil war seems like it’s on a lot of people’s minds right now, given the last few decades of…well…the trashfires across the world. And I needed to make a way to make the politics feel relevant to people without seeming too overtly partisan. Going through and looking at how divisive elections happen on a small scale and affect individuals and families provided a much more interesting touch point than the sort of views I might have gotten just paying attention to the national news. Politics affect people deeply, even when they’re being misled, and it happens at the smallest of levels. It hits people personally. This book forced me to examine and interrogate that at a level I hadn’t considered.

Dueling protagonists heading toward each other like freight trains is a challenge, but fun to write (and read).

As you write, you get into your head that your story needs a protagonist and an antagonist. You always hear that your antagonist needs to be the protagonist of their own story. But what’s more fun than two co-protagonists heading toward each other, one an immovable object, one an unstoppable force? I’d never tried to write a story like this before and it quickly became an exciting challenge. Especially when these characters have such drastically different mindsets from both each other and me. How do I get into their heads and do them both a service of the protagonist treatment, even though they believe such drastically different things. It came down to the same things as the political story. I had to find the small things that made them human. For the head of the Jade Falcons, it was tapping into the twisted joy he felt for facing challenges. For the head of the Ghost Bear faction in this book, it was about tapping into their inner-life and approach to magnanimity in the face of losing things. Then, when you humanize them both and put them in conflict, it creates something greater than the sum of its parts.

Licensed universes require just as much craft and thought as any other form of writing.

It might not have been something I learned, but it’s definitely something that was reinforced as I set out to work on this latest book. Working in a licensed universe pushes and constrains you in ways that you don’t have to be contend with when you’re writing your own work. It’s a challenge on its own just to get the details right. You have to fit inside a world that already exists and that people already love, even if you have a fact check team behind you. Having guardrails of the universe actually forces you to thread a tighter needle and I think it creates (in some cases) more creative work. Every tool of craft you’ve learned over the years as a writer has to come to the forefront of what you’re doing so that you’re actually able to thread that needle. It’s so rewarding when it works.

Write the book you want to write.

It’s easy to be concerned about what the fans of a universe will say when they read your book. BattleTech has been alive and well since the ‘80s and there’s a long history there. Am I going to have anything to say that’s going to resonate with them? Or am I going to piss them all off? I really had to face that challenge by pushing those concerns away. Ultimately, I had to tell a story that I was proud of and that made sense to me and fit into the things I cared about. I included things in the book that I thought some fans might react poorly to, but they were important to me. At the end of the day, I wrote the book I wanted to write and I’m proud of it because I was able to push aside those worries about “fandom” and just tell a good story.

Make the story suspenseful, even if they know the ending.

There is a major event that occurs in my book that was actually revealed in a sourcebook that came out earlier this year. One of my main concerns in taking the writing assignment was that folks who had read the sourcebook wouldn’t find anything of interest in the story. Instead of falling into that trap, I had to get creative. I focused on the characters who had the most to lose by the event in question, and then carry the story beyond the threshold of the sourcebook. I had to make the events they already knew about compelling by making them care about the characters and adding new wrinkles to the story they hadn’t considered based on the original source. But, then again, I’m the sort of person who thinks prequels are great even though we know the ending: it’s the journey that counts.

***

Bryan Young (he/they) works across many different media. His work as a writer and producer has been called “filmmaking gold” by The New York Times. He’s also published comic books with Slave Labor Graphics and Image Comics. He’s been a regular contributor for the Huffington Post, StarWars.com, Star Wars Insider magazine, SYFY, /Film, and was the founder and editor in chief of the geek news and review site Big Shiny Robot! In 2014, he wrote the critically acclaimed history book, A Children’s Illustrated History of Presidential Assassination. He co-authored Robotech: The Macross Saga RPG and has written two books in the BattleTech Universe: Honor’s Gauntlet and A Question of Survival. He teaches writing for Writer’s Digest, Script Magazine, and at the University of Utah. Follow him on Twitter @swankmotron.

Bryan Young: Website | Twitter | Mailing List

A Question of Survival: Link