Celebrating Seven Years: Best of The Machine Stops

Saying goodbye to the old Machine Stops logo

August 8, 2016 was the seven-year anniversary for this blog, and I finally got around to giving the site a facelift. Hopefully, the new layout will make reading easier on they eyes. I'm also going through and updating broken links, including making sure all the book titles and images now have active links.

The Machine Stops started out with me intermittently rambling on about what I was working on in the infancy of my writing career, but as I became more involved in the SF/F community as a professional (sometime around 2011), the blog become infinitely more interesting, featuring interviews with other authors and the occasional SF/F lists.

Looking forward, I'll still be blogging about my own writing updates (about once a month), but you can expect to see a lot more interviews with other authors and fun features like top-10 lists and whatever other strange ideas pop into my head.

To celebrate the first seven years and kickoff a new chapter for The Machine Stops, here are the

Top 10 Most Popular SF/F Posts

The History of Modern Fantasy Fiction (Sort of) – Part I

So, I’m teaching a fantasy writing course at the Orange County School of Arts, and it’s…well, pretty freaking fantastic! The students are highly enthusiastic, all are well-read for their age, and we’re having a grand time talking about things like world building, magic, exposition, and whatnot. Because the students are all high schoolers, though, their reading has been focused primarily on contemporary fantasy authors, so I’ve made an effort to expose them to some of the key authors in the evolution of modern fantasy writing. It’s no easy chore to pick only one author a week who represents a transformative moment in the genre, but here’s what we’ve gotten through so far, complete with reading recs and my thoughts.

Origins of Fantasy: Mythology, Legends and pre-20th Century Literature

I have no qualms arguing that fantasy is the oldest genre of storytelling in the history of human civilization. Our earliest ancestors created fantastic tales to explain everything from the creation of Earth to why humans must experience suffering and pain. Fantasy authors have drawn from this well from the start, tapping into archetypes that are culturally, and perhaps even evolutionarily and spiritually, ingrained into us.

The most common inspirations for fantasy authors include Greek and Roman mythology, Norse mythology, Judeo-Christian mythology, Celtic mythology, Arthurian legend, and, to a lesser extent, Eastern mythology and philosophy (Taoism, for example, seems to be a big inspiration for Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea series.)

Now, for the sake of defining limits for my class, I somewhat arbitrarily drew the starting cut-off line for “modern fantasy” as

Writing Groups Part I: Introducing the Inklings II

Writing is a solitary profession. Apart from your characters, it’s just you and your computer. It’s no surprise then that writers so often form writing groups. One of the main appeals of a writing group is to simply have other like-minded people to commiserate with (“Guh, I received another rejection letter…,” “The agent told me I’m a talentless hack...,” “I accidentally drank an entire handle of spiced rum while working on chapter 3, and then spent next couple of hours on the toilet…,” etc., etc.). More importantly though, writing groups offer up an invaluable luxury to writers: a captive, literate audience to read the early drafts of stories and provide feedback.


I’m lucky enough to be part of two great writing groups, Inklings II and The Biscuits. Inklings II is my spec-fiction writing group. We’re an odd group in that we are spread out all of the world and workshop our fiction primarily online. We can only manage to all be in the same place at the same time once every two or three years (and then spend more time barbecuing and drinking beer than actually talking shop, but that’s neither here nor there). We’re still a highly effective group. So much so, that members Ahimsa Kerp, Craig Comer, and I managed to write The Roads to Baldairn Motte together. More recently, The Inklings II were instrumental in helping me beat Dreamwielder into readable shape.

Read Free of Die (Part 2)

(Update: My website has undergone several reincarnations since this post and these ebooks are no longer available there. Instead, you can find new versions of these ebook singles on Amazon, here.)

The Knight’s Dog
Download for free!
Promo Code: KNIGHT (Nook, iPad, Android) or KNIGHT2 (Kindle)

The first complete novel I ever wrote was a high fantasy novel called Praxis of the Gods. It was the thesis project for my MFA degree and it took me a little over two years to write. After getting gobs of critiques and feedback from my thesis committee, I spent the next year or so after graduating completely rewriting the novel. By that point, I was sick of looking at the book and I was a bit burned out on writing fantasy. So, while I started sending off query letters to agents and publishers about the novel, I turned to writing other genres, primarily horror and literary fiction. I wrote my novella, The Shadow, which ended up comprising half of Umbral Visions, and then a dozen or so literary short stories. A few years later I got on a sci-fi kick, going back and reading a bunch of Asimov, Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, and Phil Dick, and writing my own sci-fi pieces, including “The Tracer Pilot” and “The Lunar Resort.”

Dreamwielder: From Inception to Publication

I am very happy to announce that I’ve signed a publishing contract with Diversion Books to publish my epic fantasy novel, Dreamwielder. Diversion publishes e-books only, and at first I was a little down on the idea of going with them, still being hung-up on the notion that I wanted to go with a traditional print publisher. However, after researching Diversion and taking a look at the publishers who were still potentially interested in the book, I quickly had a change of heart. Diversion is the real deal. I feel that they’re going to be able to reach a huge audience with my novel, and that’s what it’s all about. I don’t have a specific release date yet, but we’re tentatively due to launch the book in the Spring of 2013. Needless to say, I’m thrilled.

Now that the ink is dry on the contract and copyediting is underway, I thought I’d take a look back and see how long the process took, from the first inception of Makarria, the main protagonist of the novel, to the moment of signing the contract. Yikes! Once again, I’m reminded that writing isn’t a business for impatient people. Here’s how it played out.

A Brief History of Eä, the World of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and The Hobbit

A year or so ago, I taught an author study course on J.R.R. Tolkien. For their final project, the students had to create an almanac for The Lord of the Rings, and I decided to write the introduction, a primer of sorts on where all the races of people and creatures came from. This turned out to be much harder than I anticipated, but the final product is a fair summary of the world Tolkien created, or at least I like to think so. My sources included The Silmarillion, The Books of Lost Tales, Unfinished Tales, and of course, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. 

A Brief History of Eä, the World

of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and The Hobbit

 by Garrett Calcaterra

  

In the Beginning...

            Illúvatar is the god and creator of Eä. He first created the Ainur, the Holy Ones, and together they created a song in which they imagined Eä, the world of trees, Elves, and Men. Once the world was imagined in song, Illúvatar created the world amidst the void and sent those of the Ainur who were willing to go make the world as they had imagined it in song. These Ainur who went to Eä were thenceforth known as the Valar and Maiar. The Valar were the more powerful of the two groups, and chief amongst them were Manwë, Aulë, Ulmo, Yavanna, Oromë, and Melkor.