Timothy Callahan

Is this the end?

I considered my writing to be a little bit more than a hobby, yet not exactly a career.  Sure, I wanted to be good at it and I worked hard at being good at it but I never thought I worked harder than say, a person who works on his car on the weekends. Or someone who works hard at a local dinner theater.  I write because it’s something I enjoy doing and if I succeed at it or make money off it, all the better.   

There are times when I work hard to get something published, it never happens, but I try.  I have gone the self-publishing route but really, I don’t have the time to promote my work as I should.  Maybe if I quit my job and worked at it full time I could get some publishing deals, but the truth is I’m not really brave enough to just go off and do something like that. 

I missed some chances when I was unemployed but to be honest I was more worried about getting a job than publishing anything.  Besides, all I had was one short novel that was good, but not great.  I did send it to places, heck I still send it places every once in a while, but so far no one has touched it. I can’t blame them, I’m not a popular name and agents and publishers want people who can make them money. I might be able to make them money but who’s going to take that chance?  If I were an agent or a publisher I don’t think I’d buy my novels.  The writings good, but not strong.  Why spend money publishing something that only a few people might buy?  Agents and publishers tell you they like to take chances on new writers but the odd are I won’t be one of them.   That’s not putting myself down, that’s an honest truth. 

It sounds like I’m giving up or I’m a pessimist.  Trust me, most people around me think I’m too optimistic about things.  I guess when you’re a realist about things that automatically makes it sound pessimistic.  I have hope that if I keep sending my stuff out someone will bite.  It will probably never happen but I have hope.   

I know my work and it’s good.  I like my work.  I read stuff that I’ve written years ago and I like it. I can see its flaws of course but I see flaws in most of the stuff I read.  Are my flaws any worst?   Maybe but until a professional reads my work I’ll never know.  Of course, the only way to get a pro to read my work is to get published.  Or pay a lot of money. I don’t have a lot of money so I’ll have to wait for a pro to buy my stuff.  Which probably won’t ever happen. 

When I spend an hour or so writing something I stop and wonder why I’m doing it.  Who am I writing for?  I want to write for people other than me and a handful of people who might listen to my podcasted writings at podiobooks.com.  The truth is, I’m not sure who I’m writing for anymore. In my 20’s and 30’s I wrote to try to get published.  I wrote to tell people I did something that was interesting.   I wrote because it was a release from a life that, while not horrible, had a bunch of holes that needed to be filled.  I wrote because my imagination was so large it needed an outlet.  I haven’t felt the need to fill any holes in my soul for a while. I wrote the Arwen saga because I had an idea that wouldn’t go away.  Now that that saga is done and I have nothing else to say I wonder why I still write. 

I’m working on another novel and my heart isn’t really in it. Could it be because the novel isn’t good enough to hold my interest or is it something more?  Have I finally gotten sick of spending the limited hours I have in the day writing something that no one will read?  Has my mind finally stopped supplying me with ideas?  Have I gotten to the point in my life where I don’t need to write anymore?  Or, do I simply need to sit back and relax and not worry about all those things?  

 

Characters are people too.

I love the fact I have Netflix and Netflix is now showing a lot of the stuff I used to watch as I was growing up. Over the course of a week I was able to cherry pick some of my favorite Star Trek Next Generation episodes, a few Buffy and Angle shows, and some Arrested Development. I'm eagerly waiting for them to get Deep Space Nine so I can watch those as well. TV was a huge part of forming my imagination, more so than books or movies, although they also played a huge roll, just as big as Television.

What I found interesting as I was watching Next Gen was just how much that show did influence me. Story structure, characters, situations, all the things that show did well I can see in my work today. The Arwen, my very own Star Ship series, can easily trace its roots back to Episodes like Best of Both worlds, Cause and Effect, and The Inner light. It's no coincidence I guess that those are my favorite episodes and, on some level, I wanted to re-write them in some way with my own characters. It wasn't really a conscience choice, it just sort of happened.

Another show that really influenced me, more as a young kid than a teenager, was Star Blazers or, if you were in Japan, Space battleship Yamato. I loved that show so much. I used to race home after school to watch it. I would then try to draw the episode and when I figured out I have no artistic ability I used to write stories about the show, using my own characters in place of the ones on TV. Of course, the stories I wrote were just mirroring the stories on the TV by that really was my first attempts to write a story, all because of that show.

One of the odd things that struck me at that early age were characters. I felt like I was giving people life! If I thought of a character and I wrote about that character I was sort of creating a new life form in my mind and that life form could only act if I let them act, could only do what I wanted them to do. As an 11 year old that was a pretty powerful concept and one that I held on to even as I was learning how to write and how to build story and structure. I would create a character and in my eye the person was alive, not just a figment of my imagination but a real, live being. Which is way I always feel bad when I kill someone in a story.

I also hate it when I just remove a character completely. To me I not only killed someone but he or she no longer existed! That's kind of dark.

In my one novel, Ida, I had to do that. I killed a character half way through the book for impact not realizing I would need him later in the story. I had created another character to take his place but as I wrote it I thought, "why did I just create this new guy when I had a perfectly good guy that I killed?" So, I went back and unkilled the guy and totally wrote out the new guy. I felt bad for the new guy so if I ever do a sequel maybe I'll give him a part. I also think the guy I killed was pretty happy to be alive again, especially since his death was kind of painful to begin with.

I also did that with another character in my Arwen books. I was going to kill him in book two but decided not to but then I killed him in book three for no good reason really. Come to think of it he should have died in the second story cause his death then would have meant more than his death in the third. Oh well, if I could do it over again I would but I can't so he lived to see another story. . .where he died.

When writers talk about how the characters tell them what to do most people who don't write have a hard time understanding that. I understand it. More than once my characters have told me what they want and what they want to do in a situation. I find it hard to get anything past my characters, if they need to act dumb for some sort of plot point to happen I have a hard time making them dumb and I feel I need to trick them into going for the plot point before going forward. Smart characters who act dumb really annoy me so I think it's more that I don't want someone to read my work and go, 'wow, that character is normally on the ball, how does she not know what's going to happen?'

That drives me nuts when I see it on a TV show or a movie. I'll give you an example of a show that I liked a lot but had a hard time watching because the characters acted way dumber than they were supposed to be.

One of the news shows I enjoyed, before it was canceled, was No Ordinary Family. In this show you had a bunch of really smart people. It was a show about people with super powers and how they adjusted to those powers. In fact, one kid had the powers of super-duper smartness.

In one of the episodes they meet a shape shifter who could make herself look like anyone in the family. Now, I can see that fooling people the first time and it made that episode kind of fun. Eventually they find out she's a shape shifter and beat her, she escapes and they hope they've seen the last of her, only they don't know if she'll be back or not.

A few episodes later she does return and does the same thing, taking the shape of family members to get information out of them. Now, as I'm watching that show I can't help but think, "boy, these guys are dumb. They know someone is out there after them who can look like any member of the family wouldn't it be smart to, oh I don't know, come up with code words to ask someone a question only they know when they first meet?"

That's just one example from one show, there are lots of other shows with lots of other examples I can think of. I personally think it takes a lot of imagination to come up with a way to fool your characters without them being dumb.

Like I learned in improv, play up to your characters intelligence, don't make him a dumb guy cause the audience can see right through that.

Almost science

I remember my first really bad comment on one of my stories. It was a story where I had the entire city of Chicago evacuating the city after a rather brutal alien invasion of the city. I had never really seen a mass evacuation, never really thought about the logistics behind millions of people walking down a highway toward a military base twenty miles away. I posted that chapter of a larger story on AOL's writing board and let people read and comment on it. I remember being pretty excited, I had posted a few short stories and they got some positive remarks so I was pretty confident that this epic tale would be no different. Heck, it had everything, a dynamic leader, some twists and turns, some heroism, everything I loved to read about and everything I love to write about. So, you can image my surprise when I get a very lengthy comment on the story ripping it apart line by line.

Thinking back on it now it actually wasn't that bad. The guy pretty much pointed out all the logical holes I had created, things that wouldn't be possible with so many people leaving the city. He asked good questions, how did they feed these people? How did they organize them? How did they all go to the bathroom, stuff that I really should have asked myself before writing the scene. But, at that time, 20 years or so ago when I wrote it, I was angry thinking that I didn't need to answer those kinds of questions, it was the story that was important, it was the heroes, that characters, the invasion, who cares what they ate or slept or peed. That wasn't the point!

Of course he was right, I need to ask myself questions before writing a technical scene like that. I need to figure out how to solve those kinds of problems and, since I write science fiction I can make magical solutions to the problems using science! Of course my science needs to be vaguely plausible and normally, I'm okay with that. A strange concept now could be common place in the future, I just need to nudge it in the direction of 'yeah, it could happen.'

I think I got pretty good at that. Wormholes can't open so I have to figure out a way to make it open. Okay, I saw a show on the Science Channel about Particle Accelerators and how they could accidently create Strangelets, an exotic particle that turns all other particles around it into a strangelet and could open a wormhole. Cool, that's prefect! So, I use it for my Arwen stories and it works well in the stories. Do I need to explain how we fit a particle accelerator into a starship when most of them today are miles and miles in circumference? Nah, I figured the people who are listening or reading can figure out that in 300 years we could probably scale it down to starship size so I didn't worry about that.

So, I think things through pretty well, for the most part, when I'm writing stories like this. Sometimes I'll think about it for weeks before even starting the story. I normally feel pretty confident sitting down that I can at least BS my way through the technical stuff until the second or third drafts but I can't cover everything and every time I post a story I worry if someone is going to send me an e-mail detailing why my science is wrong and why I should never write another science fiction story ever again.

I worry about that but it has never happened. When someone does comment on something I screwed up I take it in stride and move on. Heck, once it's out there it's really hard to bring it back so I just have to let the moment of stupidity hang there for everyone to see and read. And, to be honest, most of the time they're right and it forces me to think harder the next time I write a story in which a Dyson Sphere is 17 AU's in diameter. How will that affect, well, everything from its gravity signature to how close you need to be before you crash into it, how do the inhabitance live in it, stuff like that.

I love fantastic ideas and I love fantastic ideas in Science Fiction and, even if they don't make total sense when you really think about them, there really is a power to the imagination.

End of a project: The Arwen

The Arwen first made it's appearance at Podiobooks.com on March 11, 2007. Almost four years and six seasons later the Arwen series will be over. . .for now anyway, it's time to move on to other projects and stories. I've been thinking about, writing about, podcasting Arwen stories for much, much longer than I ever imagined and I've loved every second of it.

It seems a bittersweet in a way. When I first started the four part series that I'm working on now I knew this would be the last set of stories I wrote but I had no idea how I was going to end it. It took a flash of inspiration to finally find the ending I liked, the ending that made the most sense. I was playing with ideas of destroying the Earth and having the Arwen lead a fleet of stragglers to a new home while being persued by the bad guys. . .needless to say I had this idea while watching Battlestar Galagtica so yeah, that idea was scrapped.

I had an idea where Marjorie and the Arwen got thrown into Wormhole space and were lost for a thousand years. It would have ended with them returning to the Earth to find (Dum dum dummm!) the system has been turned into a Dyson sphere system! Thought that was too sad of an ending and it would force me to write another Arwen story explaining everything so yeah, decided to scrap that idea.

Was also going to destroy the Arwen, have it sacrifice itself to save Earth and the Corps but, I almost did that in Arwen 3 and it's never good to repeat yourself. *cough* Second Death Star *cough*

I was nearing the end of the story and worried cause I didn't have anything, no idea how I was going to end it but, while writing the second to last chapter Captain Cook told me what she wanted to do and it made total sense. Can't wait for those who've stuck with me since 2007 to read it, hopefully it'll meet or exceed their expectations.

So, where am I at now? Well, Arwen VI: The final days of peace has been recorded and, as of today, edited up to Chapter five.

Arwen VII: Battlesphere (that title might change, haven't decided yet) has been written and now I'm going through and revising it. I should start recording sometime soon, hopefully by the end of February. It would be nice to have it ready by fourth anniversary of my first Arwen but I don't think that'll happen, I'm shooting for April, May at the very, very latest then, the Arwen will completed!

If you have no idea what the Arwen here is what I'm talking about.

The Arwen

Arwen seson 2

Arwen 3

Arwen 4

Arwen 5