Eric James Stone, Nebula winner and “graduate” of NASA’s Launchpad workshop, joins us to talk about astronomy in our world-building.
We talk about tides, habitable zones, planetary orbits and axial tilts, stellar life-cycles, and other fun factors for authors to take into account. But obviously we can’t teach you everything you need to know about astronomy in 15 minutes, so we wrap with some handy resources for you to begin your continuing education:
Hey, guess what 2012 has fifty-three of? Mondays! So you’re getting a fifty-third episode of “Writing Excuses” this season. (You’re also going to be getting a fifty-fourth, because we stuck an extra in there a few weeks back.)
Hopefully this excuses (no pun intended) the fact that this episode is a full three days late. Merry Christmas!
Let’s talk about secret histories. A secret history is a subset of alternate history, in which historical events are given new explanations, typically fantastical ones, but in which the reader is invited to believe that this is the world we all currently live in.
We mention Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Tim Powers’ Last Call, and Jo Walton’s Among Others, and why secret history has the appeal it does, especially when it’s done well. And because you want to know how to do it well, we spend some time on that, as well as discussing some of the ethics of creating secret histories in the first place.
Tagged with writing alternate history setting world building
During this podcast episode, PJ discusses how to move from merely setting goals to achieving them.
http://goatmilkstuff.com/blog/2013/01/18/achieve-your-goals/
Tagged with setting goals achieving goals
Pyr editor Lou Anders has an interesting description of Hollywood formulas, and a nice description of Dervish House for the Audible pick.