Swift for the Sun
By Karen Bovenmyer
Benjamin
Lector imagines himself a smuggler, a gun runner, and an all-around scoundrel.
A preacher’s son turned criminal, first and foremost, he is a survivor.
When
Benjamin is shipwrecked on Dread Island, fortune sends an unlikely savior—a
blond savage who is everything Benjamin didn’t know he needed. Falling in love
with Sun is easy. But pirates have come looking for the remains of Benjamin’s
cargo, and they find their former slave, Sun, instead.
Held
captive by the pirates, Benjamin learns the depths of Sun’s past and the
horrors he endured and was forced to perpetrate. Together, they must not only
escape, but prevent a shipment of weapons from making its way to rebellious
colonists. Benjamin is determined to save the man he loves and ensure that a
peaceful future together is never threatened again. To succeed might require
the unthinkable—an altruistic sacrifice.
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Guest post with Author Karen Bovenmyer...
Where Do You Look for Inspiration? An Extrovert’s Guide
A question I hear frequently asked by non-writers at conferences
is “Where do you get your ideas?” This question is always hard to answer—ideas
come from the most unlikely places. Today a chemical engineer explained to me Shizuo
Kakutani’s Random Walks theory. A drunk person can randomly wander in two
dimensions and eventually cover all potential space. However, a drunk bird
flying in three dimensions could fly forever and never get home. I spent the
next several minutes mentally on a space ship with an impaired AI unable to get
home, flying randomly, confused, endlessly searching. I filed the idea away in
that corner of my hind brain that tumbles over and over while I’m doing other
things. Sometimes ideas emerge on the page when I sit down to write, other
times they sink and recombine with other things and come out when I least
expect it. The brain, and creativity, seems to be at constant work under the
surface. I think this is true for everyone—the trick is learning how to access
where you’re storing these things and recombine them on the page in ways that
are personally currently relevant to you.
Many writers carry a journal with them everywhere they go
and write these ideas down for later processing. I’ve always got some paper
with me, and I do scribble down the too-good-to-forget ideas, email them to
myself, or go ahead and schedule a titled appointment on my calendar “write the
one about the cadaver feet coming to life and the graduate student who has to
walk them on leashes.” Sometimes the act of writing a note banishes the desire
to write and it’s better to store the idea mentally until it’s “done cooking.” But
what happens when you’ve used all your good ideas, or the ideas coming to you
don’t seem to fit, or everything you write feels dumb?
The standard advice: Write your way out.
For just about every writer, extrovert or introvert,
experienced or new, writing until an idea comes is the most often recommended
solution. The motion of “word swimming” can jar things lose and get you going
again. I’ve found this to be effective sometimes, but other times I can write
for hours and feel like nothing I’ve written is salvageable and I could have
more productively used the time watching Star Trek reruns. Stephen King says in
On Writing that some days the words
come easily to him and others he feels like he’s shoveling excrement from a
seated position. Then, when he rereads his work, he can’t tell which days were
which.
I’m not Stephen King.
However, when I’m doing a long project, like SWIFT FOR THE
SUN, I occasionally struggle to get more words on the page, but I know where
I’m going and that I’ll get there eventually—I have an overall plot in mind
and, barring that, the characters tell me where they’re going to go and what
they want to do next. I just have to keep grinding.
But short fiction, or the beginning of a story, is different
for me.
I need a great idea, or a compelling character’s voice, or
an impossible situation. A song lyric I can’t get out of my head. Or something
I’m angry about and I either need to write about my feelings or write something
to distract myself from those feelings. That’s just to get going—to keep going,
I must have an inherent sense of “goodness.” Basically, this boils down to the
gut feeling that the work I’m doing is going to result in something someone
else will publish. Like Ira Glass says, I’m narrowing the gap between my taste
and my ability so I can more quickly tell what stories are going to produce
something worthwhile and which ones I should probably set aside and return to
later, if at all.
But sometimes there is nothing in the world that can make a
good idea happen. I’ve sat down to write and then found myself all over the
house, doing every chore from cleaning the toothpaste speckles off the bathroom
mirror to scooping the litterboxes. I’m searching for a chore that I want to do
less than the pain of creating that will drive me back to my keyboard. This can
work, sometimes, the act of getting moving knocks something loose.
Other times I’m stuck so deep I need to consciously employ
an understanding of my creative process and self-knowledge. I am an extrovert.
Every personality test, from the MBTI to the Clifton Strength’s Finder, reminds
me of this fact. Mixed in with the necessary hours and hours alone talking to
imaginary people is a need for real human contact. If you’re an extrovert too,
some of these may help you:
·
Drive a friend somewhere. If they are trapped in
the car, they can’t escape you talking about your current project (I’m only
partly kidding! A captive audience is quite valuable).
·
Text or call a writing buddy for help. Explain
you’re stuck and need some motivation and let their devious or supportive
genius decide how to encourage you with punishment or reward for reaching your
goal.
·
Schedule a write-in at a coffee shop (or via
video conference) and invite friends you either love to be with or love to
compete with.
·
Look at your work in progress and think about
different editors or friends whose taste you know that you could send it to.
What might they like the story’s tone or ending to be? How would you rewrite it
with them in mind?
·
Create a deadline and people who will be
disappointed if you don’t meet it.
Each of these have been great motivators for me to get going
with a story even when I seem to be down to my very last idea. Extroverted or
extrinsically motivated writers seem to be a more rare breed, so these tips
might not be applicable for you. However, if you find yourself wandering like Kakutani’s
drunk bird, stop flying, meditate on what kind of person you are, and see if
you can shift from three dimensions back into two. Sometimes the fastest way to
do this is a sober friend. Other times it’s cleaning the gunk out from under
the treadmill. Whatever gets you writing.
Karen
Bovenmyer was born and raised in Iowa, where she teaches and mentors new
writers at Iowa State University. She triple-majored in anthropology, English,
and history so she could take college courses about cave people, zombie
astronauts, and medieval warfare to prepare for her writing career. After
earning her BS, she completed a master’s degree with a double specialization in
literature and creative writing with a focus in speculative fiction, also from
Iowa State University. Although trained to offer “Paper? Or plastic?” in a
variety of pleasant tones, she landed an administrative job at the college
shortly after graduation. Working full-time, getting married, setting up a
household, and learning how to be an adult with responsibilities (i.e. bills to
pay) absorbed her full attentions for nearly a decade during which time she
primarily wrote extremely detailed roleplaying character histories and
participated in National Novel Writing Month.
However,
in 2010, Karen lost a parent.
With
that loss, she realized becoming a published author had a nonnegotiable mortal
time limit. She was accepted to the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast
MFA program with a specialization in Popular Fiction and immediately started
publishing, selling her first story just before starting the program and three
more while in the extremely nurturing environment provided by the Stonecoast
community, from which she graduated in 2013. Her science fiction, fantasy, and
horror novellas, short stories, and poems now appear in more than forty
publications including Abyss & Apex,
Crossed Genres, Pseudopod, and Strange Horizons. She is the Horror Writers Association 2016 recipient of
the Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Scholarship. She serves as the nonfiction
editor for Escape Artist’s Mothership
Zeta Magazine and narrates stories for Pseudopod,
Strange Horizons, Far Fetched Fables,
Star Ship Sofa, and the Gallery of Curiosities Podcasts. Her
first novel, SWIFT FOR THE SUN, an LGBT pirate romantic adventure set in the
1820s Caribbean, will be published on
March 27, 2017.
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Love really can change someone. I would love to read how it all turns out.
ReplyDeletedebby236 at gmail dot com