Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop needs your help!

As many of you know, I was privileged to attend Launch  Pad Astronomy Workshop in 2011. This extraordinary workshop, a college course in astronomy offered over the course of a week, was one of the most intense, exhilarating, and inspiring adventures in bringing excellent science to larger audiences through fiction. Now Launch Pad needs your help to make this experience available to more writers, editors, journalists, artists and more.

Launch Pad is an education/public outreach effort, aimed primarily at writers, filmmakers, and other creative professionals.

At its best, science fiction can inspire and teach a wide audience about our universe. At its worst, poorly written fiction can mislead the public. At Launch Pad, we aim to provide our attendees with a weeklong Astronomy 101-level course, including a visit and observations through the University of Wyoming's 2.3-meter telescope.

In previous years, funding for Launch Pad was made possible through grants from NASA and the NSF. Due to funding cutbacks, we are asking for your help to cover our costs and reduce the out of pocket expenses for our attendees.

World-building in Collaborators: Add Some Characters

The central inspiration for Collaborators – that individuals respond in a variety of complex and contradictory ways to a situation of occupation and resistance – immediately suggested many types of characters: the rebel, the idealist, the opportunist, the political player, the merchant willing to sell to anyone if the profit is high enough, sadist who exploits the powerlessness of others for his own gratification, the ambitious person who doesn’t care who his allies are, the negotiator, the peace-maker, the patriot.

These are all interesting roles, offering scope for compelling confrontations, but they are not in themselves characters. They’re slots into which characters might fit at any given time, as those characters progress along their own life story arcs. The temptation is to take such a slot, insert a character, and then have him behave in that way and only in that way throughout the story. This is the classic “spear-carrier,” whose only function is to come onstage, carry his spear (or throw it, or make a speech, or die in some plot-appropriate way), and then disappear. He might have a few warts or wrinkles or a bit of backstory, but only in service to his predetermined function.

Effective characters work in just the opposite way. They go about their lives in their idiosyncratic ways, with their own histories and families, dreams and neuroses. Interesting as these might be, they do not in themselves constitute a dramatic plot, only a series of linked episodes. Then something – whether it’s an internal event like a new goal or an external one like an invasion by a space-faring race – catapults the character into a dramatic course of action. The overall problem/crisis/goal informs and shapes the character’s choices, but at the same time the character – her personality, history, viewpoint, relationships – drives the action in a unique way.  So I needed to find out who some of these characters were, both alien and Terran, throw them into an escalating situation, and see what they did with it.

BOOK RELEASE: Azkhantian Tales

The Seven-Petaled Shield was inspired by four short stories that Marion Zimmer Bradley bought for Sword & Sorceress. Now they're together in one collection (with a gorgeous cover by Dave Smeds!) Here's the skinny:

Across the Azkhantian steppe, warrior women ride to battle against foes both human and supernatural. From the world of The Seven-Petaled Shield come four fantasy tales, originally published in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword & Sorceress.


Prophecy links a mother and daughter in an unbreakable bond.

A young woman defies tradition to become a shaman.

When twins are magically divided, the survivor searches for the other half of her soul.

A warrior woman discovers that to wield a magical blade dishonorably carries a heavy price.

This collection includes a previously-unpublished Introduction and a sneak peek at The Seven-Petaled Shield.

Only $1.99 in DRM-free multi-format from Book View Cafe