And now, here’s a guest post from Emily Wenstrom about how to pants without… er, doing it by the seat of your pants?

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I just released the final book in my first complete series. Everything I did for this series, I did for the first time. My first novel. My first sequel. My first series conclusion. And at every step, I learned exactly how I never want to write a series again.

When I started this series, I was a bright-eyed pantser, all optimism and free-wheeling creative spirit.

Oh, I’ll figure it out!, I thought. I’ll figure it out when I get there.

It turns out that this is very much like wandering off into the woods without any supplies, and trusting that if you get lost, if weather happens, if your cross paths with wildlife, you’ll figure it out.

I managed to get out of there without being eaten by a bear, but wow, let me tell you, there were some close calls, and it took a lot longer than it needed to. Never again. I’ll always be a pantser, but that doesn’t mean I can’t take a compass with me, or maybe a few Cliff bars.

Here’s how I’m changing my writing process for my next series:

Map the World

Your characters can’t go anywhere without knowing where everything is. How long will it take? What kind of terrain and other risks will they face? How does each location relate to other important places in the series?

This is a lot to delve into before your books even have defined arcs, and it’s not necessarily the first thing you have to do. But it’s definitely something I’ll take the time to sort out before publishing my series next time.

Let’s say your characters running off this way and that on their quests. What if all that cross-traffic is an opportunity to tease or foreshadow for a place that will become important in a later book? What if it’s right in their path now, but it isn’t mentioned at all because you just haven’t ideated it yet?

If you don’t know where your characters go through the full series, you can’t plan for this. And if you’re not careful, you can limit your options later, too.

Look ahead for the characters’ arcs

For one book, it’s not hard to define your core characters. That’s just our authorly bread and butter. But as I got deeper into my series, this got more complicated.

You can’t count on your character being the same in book three as he was in book one. He’s seen some things between point A and point B. And he’s been changed by those things.

By the time I got to my series conclusion, I had to wrestle with who my hero was anymore. I tried to write him as the same classic hero character we expect from the first novel, it didn’t go well. I had to stop and think about all that had happened to him since then, and in particular, what he had lost. Only then could I make sense of the final book.

Don’t let your characters catch you off guard by these changes. Think about them ahead of time and let them inform your planning.

Track the details

Think quick—are your character’s eyes blue or brown? What about the supporting cast? If you can recall this type of detail at whim, well, you’ve got a better memory than I do. Between draft revisions I spent a lot of time word-searching through my own books to keep my characters and places consistent.

Other authors—wiser authors—seem to do this thing where they just track details as they go. Some create a glossary, others pull it into an Excel spreadsheet. I’m told Scrivener’s tool for this can be very helpful. I wouldn’t know, and that’s the problem.

For my next series, I’ll experiment with some of these methods and find a way that works for me. Because managing the internal consistency of my stories shouldn’t take over my life.

Think ahead

Now look. Everyone says not to write the full series before querying, and they’re right. I can’t imagine spending years perfecting three, five, more books just to find out at the query that no one will publish it.

So at first, put your energy into book one. Make it the best book one you can.

But once you know you’re getting published, this is a crucial moment when I hit a fork in the road. One was full of sunshine and flowers—the path of the true panster, unfraught with worries of the future. The other was dark and thorny, where plot tangles waited to be wrestled with.

I chose the first path, and I can tell you now, this is where the bears are waiting to eat you. The thorns and darkness came up later anyway, and by then I was too far in to do much about it.

Even if you’re not a plotter, once the series is for sure moving forward, hit the pause button. If you can at least pound out beats for the arc of each book in the series, you’re going to save yourself a lot of frustration and find more opportunities to build it up beforehand.

Once you know these core elements and how they will evolve over your series, go back and revisit book one.

The Best Bear Fight is the Bear Fight You Don’t Have to Have

The thing with art is that sometimes you have to do things wrong before you can do them right.

I learned a lot about bear fighting and plot wrangling with this series—and I’m proud of the books I was able to create through these struggles. I just don’t think it needs to be so damn hard next time.

Because the best bear fight is the bear fight you don’t have to have.

Sparks: Amazon

These are extraordinary times. And I don’t say that as a compliment, necessarily — it is not said with Spielbergian awe, but rather, with a kind of bamfoozled dread. As if you came upon a strange hole in the ground full of old-timey baby-dolls. You know, the creepy, haunted ones? You’d say, “That’s extraordinary,” and you wouldn’t mean it in the good way.

You might also say, “That’s fucked up.”

What I’m trying to say is:

These are fucked up times.

Shit’s fucked up. It just is. As I noted yesterday, it’s as if we’re witnessing the ghost of normalcy rather than normalcy itself — it died so fast, it hasn’t yet left this plane of existence, and so it lingers, refusing to be banished until an exorcism finally sends it packing. These are abnormal, bizarre, confounding, dipshitted, batshitted, extraordinarily fucked-up times.

You don’t have to be okay with that.

You probably shouldn’t be okay with that.

More to the point, you also don’t need to do it all. You don’t need to get it all done. You don’t need to clean your house from top to bottom. You don’t need to homeschool your kids into super-geniuses. You don’t need to write King Fucking Lear or discover a new scientific principle. You don’t need to be happy. We’re all in mourning from the death of normalcy. We’re all knocked off balance, like someone just kicked your bike as you were riding it. You ended up in the ditch. We’re all in the ditch with you. It’s okay to just sit here in the ditch for a while and say, “Fuck.” It’s okay to wait before you stretch, before you stand up with a groan and see what’s broken. It’s okay to sit on your couch and gorge on bad TV. It’s okay to read a shitty book. It’s okay to not finish the shitty book. It’s okay to let your kids be kids and just tell them they’re on spring break right now. You don’t need to be an A+ parent, and they don’t need to be A+ kids, and you don’t need to be an A+ spouse. Christ, you don’t even need to be an A+ human. Aim for B, maybe B-, C+, just hold it the fuck together.

Forgive it in yourself and forgive it in those around you, too.

That’s not to say this is the time to let all the rope slip through your fingers. Your kids need food. You need food too, and water. Everybody needs things and this is a crisis — though a weird-feeling slo-mo crisis, as if we’re watching two whales collide underwater, with us between them — but you don’t need to be a hero. You don’t even need to be normal.

You just need to be you, and go with it.

You’re allowed to feel all of what you feel.

Hell, I don’t know what to feel. I keep thinking, YEAH OKAY I’VE BEEN PREPARING FOR THIS MY WHOLE LIFE, TIME TO WRITE A BOOK, A WHOLE BOOK, HERE WE GO, HERE WE FUCKING GO, and then I just sit there and I’m like, hey that’s not happening yet? And I go to eat and it’s mostly just grazing. My kid’s like, “Can I play the Switch?” and I’m like, “Yeah, hell yeah, it’s Spring Break, go hog wild, dude.” I tell him to read a book after, and he does (Percy Jackson, the first book, if you must know), but I’m not running him through the wringer. No math flash cards or quizzes. Life is slower right now, and stranger, and I feel this mad pinball bounce of emotions: I go from panic to dread to a weird kind of giddy elation that has no comprehensible logic to it, and then I land on tired, and then I land on sad, and then I land on gratitude because if all else fails this has at least made me appreciate things more, and then I feel shitty for appreciating things more because this isn’t the time to appreciate anything, is it? Then I feel shitty for feeling shitty like, what is wrong with appreciation? What is wrong with finding joy? Guilt ensues. And a refutation of guilt. And a weird feeling of relief for the earth because I’ve seen photos of dolphins in Italy and I think back to the line I wrote in Wanderers (“Humankind was a disease. The earth was the body. Climate change was the fever. And in that fever, in that rising of global temperature, the earth was able to release new defenses.”) and then I just feel bad for writing that. AITA? Probably.

And so the drunken carousel of wildly-spinning emotions goes on, staffed by octopods, ridden by monkeys, narrated by a short-circuiting robot.

I’m not okay.

I’m not broken.

But I’m definitely, absolutely, unfuckwithably not okay.

And I’m going to let that be okay.

I hope you will, too.

These are weird days, friends. It’d be weird if you weren’t weird about that.

Carry on.

Here is a photo of a flower. Happy spring.

Late in the twenty-first century, drought and wildfires prompt an exodus from southern Europe. When twelve-year-old Caleb is separated from his mother during their trek north, he soon falls prey to traffickers. Enslaved in an enclave outside Manchester, the resourceful and determined Caleb never loses hope of bettering himself.

After Caleb is befriended by a fellow victim of trafficking, another road opens. Hiding in the woodlands by day, guided by the stars at night, he begins a new journey—to escape to a better life, to meet someone he can trust, and to find his family. For Caleb, only one thing is certain: making his way in the world will be far more difficult than his mother imagined.

Told through multiple voices and set against the backdrop of a haunting and frighteningly believable future, Bridge 108 charts the passage of a young boy into adulthood amid oppressive circumstances that are increasingly relevant to our present day.

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THE PERILS OF A MOSAIC NOVEL

Bridge 108 has six viewpoint characters, and the central story is about a young climate migrant who is trafficked into slavery in a post-Brexit England. As I tapped away at this novel, I wondered if the reader would confuse the different voices. I honestly didn’t think so—the characters themselves are distinct. However, when I’d finished the first full draft (I edit as I go along, so my first full draft is almost the done deal), I suspected I could do more to fine tune the six voices. Sure, at the end of the first draft they each had their own distinct vocabulary to match their background and personality, their own favoured profanities! But I felt I could do more.

In particular, I decided to further separate the voices of a twenty-something female trafficker, Skylark, from a thirty-something female illegal business operator, Ma Lexie. They had similar tough backgrounds though Ma Lexie had hoped to stay in education longer. My solution: when re-drafting Skylark’s chapter I adopted a prose style of long, meandering sentences to suggest her life of ‘ducking and weaving’ and her slightly more youthful, flitting mindset. Ma Lexie had experienced more hard knocks, and I shifted her voice to be a tad more clinical, to reflect her more strategic, more hard-headed approach to life.

TREASURE YOUR WRITING FAMILY

Bridge 108 is my fourth novel, and I now have more writing support than I had ten years ago. I knew no other fiction writers when I started writing my first novel, A Calculated Life. But I did have fantastic support close at hand. I relied heavily on my immediate family as first-readers. My husband is an ex-journalist, so he has a good eye. And our two sons gave me fantastic tips and advice based on their knowledge of the tech world, economics, maths and so on. With Bridge 108, once again they have all helped enormously. In addition, I could turn to my new writer friends to ask for help. It’s so important to have a writing family!

My advice to anyone asking for help from family, friends, writing colleagues, is to keep them posted on when your manuscript is likely to be ready for reading. Keep them updated if the schedule changes. Be flexible! If one of your readers has a time slot when they’ll be able to look over the manuscript, send them whatever you have, explaining it still needs some work/proofing etc. I wrote Bridge 108 to a tight deadline, and I am so incredibly grateful that my family and two close writer friends were prepared to read the completed manuscript as soon as it landed in their inboxes. Of course, I am ready to reciprocate! That’s how it works.

I CAN FEEL EMPATHY FOR A DESPICABLE CHARACTER

I admit I had mixed feelings about writing the character of Jaspar, the head of an enclave recycling clan. He enslaves migrants in his waste collection operation and at his recycling warehouse. See, I did not know if I could write a truly bad guy. Some of the characters in my earlier novels have appalling character traits, but none reach Jaspar’s levels of violent disregard for other people. Well, I needn’t have worried. I loved writing Jaspar’s viewpoint chapter and if anything it unnerved me how energised I felt in creating this despicable person. I shocked myself, and I feel his chapter is one of the strongest in Bridge 108. Having said that, there were aspects to Jaspar’s personality that struck me as endearing, even commendable. I feel that nuance is so important in creating believable characters.

I CAN ONLY WRITE FOR MYSELF

In the midst of drafting any novel, I can hear the critical voices of future readers, but I have learned to ignore them, especially so while writing Bridge 108. From the outset, I saw Bridge 108 as being more than ‘Caleb’s story’. I knew I’d become bored writing from his point of view for the entire novel – that’s just me, other writers might love to do exactly that. With the multiple voices, I could reveal more about how the enclaves operate, how the recycling clans operate in a shadow economy, how the state institutions exploit the climate migrants for economic gain, how each of my characters is both perpetrator and victim.

But throughout the many months of drafting and editing I could hear a future reader saying, “The story jumps around too much” or “I only want to know Caleb’s story”.

The fact is this: I can’t always give readers what they want! I have to trust my own writing instinct, stick to my own vision, and hope my novel that will be judged on its own terms.

CREATIVITY IS KEY, BUT SO TOO IS A WEIRD SPREADSHEETING

There’s a time for creativity—all that staring into thin air, imagining the next great twist in the plot, going with the writing flow etc—but there’s also a time for writing a journal, filling in spreadsheets and making checklists too. I love the beginning of a writing project when I buy an A4 hardback ­notebook (spending time choosing the colour!), which I use for sketching out ideas, working out timelines, outlining characters, etc. At the outset, I also set up two spreadsheets. In one spreadsheet I log my daily writing activity, specifying whether I’m outlining, drafting, editing, proofing, and adding my word count. I don’t stress about my word count (maybe a little), but I love to look back on a project to assess it in terms of cold metrics! Weird, I know. I also start a spreadsheet for the novel’s chapter-by-chapter story, with columns for chapter setting, chapter characters, story development, key events in the plot, additional notes, reminders for later edits. All gloriously colour coded. If I’m too tired to draft the next section of the novel, I joyously fill in my spreadsheets. Yes, definitely weird!

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Following her education at the University of East Anglia, where she studied environmental sciences, Anne Charnock’s writing career began in journalism and her reports appeared in New Scientist, The Guardian, Financial Times, International Herald Tribune and Geographical, among others. As a foreign correspondent, she traveled widely in the Middle East, Africa and India, and spent a year overlanding through Egypt, Sudan and Kenya with her journalist husband, Garry.

She went on to attend The Manchester School of Art, where she gained a Masters in Fine Art. Between art projects and exhibitions, she began writing her first novel, A Calculated Life, which she self-published. She signed a publishing deal with  
47North for a new edition and, four months later, A Calculated Life was shortlisted for the Philip K. Dick Award 2013 and for The 2013 Kitschies Golden Tentacle Award (Debut Novel).

Her second novel, Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind (47North), is set in the past, present and future. The research for this novel took her to Shanghai and Suzhou in China, and to Florence and Bologna in Italy. The Guardian included this novel in “Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of 2015.” Her third novel, Dreams Before the Start of Time (47North), won the 2018 Arthur C. Clarke Award and was shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Association 2017 Award for Best Novel.

She returned to the world of A Calculated Life in writing the novella The Enclave (NewCon Press). This won the British Science Fiction Association 2017 Award for Best Short Fiction. 
In 2017, she was delighted to become “interviewer in residence” for the Arthur C. Clarke Award as part of the award’s collaboration with the Ada Lovelace Day.

Anne Charnock: Website | Twitter

Bridge 108: Amazon

Mars 2080. 

While on a mission to Mars in the year 2080, a young astronaut encounters a decommissioned robotic Avatar unit, partially buried in the Martian dust. She pops open the cranial casing to find its central processing chip, still intact. She holds the chip up to her visual display unit to reveal its contents. Within moments, she is flooded with what-seem-to-be “memories” from the life of the avatar. This is Avatar Inc’s 24th successful mission, as part of an overall campaign to physically retrieve, preserve and archive the memory cards from their most valuable robotic avatar units. They searched the world, and deep into the solar system, to acquire the chips that contain avatar memories spanning the 21st century. These are those memories. 

Stories can heal and also bring us closer together, even when we’re miles apart

Even as we are faced with what seem to be insurmountable odds, the human spirit still rises to the occasion. Keep in mind that the avatars are controlled by humans. And they make mistakes but also decisions that help save lives even to their own detriment. I see this in Ken Liu’s “Uma,” when the person behind the maintenance avatar decides to go against protocol and save a family. I see it again in “Oannes, From the Flood” by Adrian Tchaikovsky, when people on an archaeological dig are faced with that same dilemma. What this tells me is that even in our most dire circumstances, our inclination is to do what we can to help others, no matter where they are or where they come from. Beyond the excitement of the gadgets, technology and devices, it is the human element that brings us all together.

This anthology is launching in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic and each hour the news seems to be getting worse and worse. Some may think this is the wrong time to be reading stories. But I disagree. I see many people online posting and engaging with the stories. What better way to take a break and still connect with others? These connections make me hopeful for what can be.

Writers may veer from the original prompt but that’s ok

Establishing a prompt that is provided to each contributing writer is an important way to design a cohesive theme and an enjoyable experience for the readers, but you also don’t want to creatively hamper the writers or have the prompt be so limiting that you start to see repetition across the stories. For Avatars Inc, we noticed that writers slightly deviated from the original prompt, which forced us to take a hard look at the overall narrative of the campaign. We ended up adjusting the prompt in response to the authors’ interpretations, and we are thrilled with the result.

I know that sometimes giving more freedom to a writer can be a dangerous thing (insert smiley face here) but in this case, it was a marvelous idea that generated extraordinary fiction.

Science Fiction stories never cease to amaze me

I’ve spent the last few years heavily immersed in fantasy stories after editing THE BIG BOOK OF SCIENCE FICTION and THE TIME TRAVELER’S ALMANAC.  Fantasy was a nice break for me. As I worked on Avatars Inc, I was reminded of why I love science fiction so very much. I feel challenged and comforted at the same time. How can that be? The stories in this anthology forced me to take a different look at the world as it is today, but also to feel hopeful that humanity will rise to the occasion to deal with complicated issues. Are all the futures generated in science fiction stories hopeful? Of course not. Right now, we’re inundated with dystopian fiction worldwide. But as long as we can reach for the stars, and writers keep sharing their vision of what could be, I can take comfort in that.

The relationship between Art and Science is getting stronger

I’ve always known there was a relationship between art and science. I’ve seen it while working on various projects in how writers approach their work, riffing off of current events and yet extrapolating into the future. And I am also seeing so many science experts reaching across the divide to include writers in storytelling, to help get messages across to the larger public. Just as many universities are having multidisciplinary conferences that bring scientists and artists together, organizations like XPRIZE also recognize this important relationship.

The Use of Avatars can be much greater and more creative than I ever thought possible

I was surprised by all the different ways avatars were being used in the stories. I knew there would be space stories, of course. But I never thought of crime scene cleanup, as an example, and it makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? Nino Cipri came up with that idea in their story “At the End of a Most Perfect Day.” I also was intrigued with Johanna Sinisalo’s story “A Bird Does Not Sing Because It Has an Answer.” We think in terms of using avatars to go where it would be dangerous for humans. However, in this story the avatar is adopted because humans are dangerous to the natural world! And in “La Mer Donne” by Sarah Pinsker, the avatar is operated for weather reporting in the middle of a storm. Living in Florida, I am very used to seeing reporters trying to stay put on solid ground while a storm whips around them. I expect that, just as I was surprised to read about novel avatar use-cases in the stories, that I will also be surprised to see what teams are developing as part of the real-life ANA Avatar XPRIZE.

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Over a 30-year career, Ann VanderMeer has won numerous awards for her editing work, including the Hugo Award and World Fantasy Award. Whether as editor-in-chief for Weird Tales for five years or in her current role as an acquiring editor for Tor.com, Ann has built her reputation on acquiring fiction from diverse and interesting new talents. As co-founder of Cheeky Frawg Books, she has helped develop a wide-ranging line of mostly translated fiction. Featuring a who’s who of world literature, Ann’s anthologies include the critically acclaimed Best American Fantasy series, The Weird, The Time Traveler’s Almanac, Sisters of the Revolution, The Big Book of Science Fiction, The Big Book of Classic Fantasy, and the forthcoming Big Book of Modern Fantasy (Vintage).

Avatars, Inc.: Digital anthology (free)!