Ian's Curated Musings

In her article " Fantasy, Reading, and Escapism ," author and Tor.com contributor Jo Walton writes, "If your life is bounded and restricted, seeing that more options exist helps, even if they’re all theoretical and imaginary. Escaping doesn’t mean avoiding reality, escaping means finding an escape route to a better place." This defense of Fantasy (and we might add Science Fiction) is one that many of us first encounter in print through J.R.R. Tolkien's On Fairy Stories , but it is also something that many readers and writers of Science Fiction and Fantasy know intrinsically. There is value in getting away, in witnessing another world's epic struggles of good against evil and putting our own problems aside, if for a moment, so that we might recharge. It's something I've felt, too, but when I sat down to create the world for my latest Work in Progress, I thought: Fantasy can be more than that.  It can be equipment for living. It can be an exploration o...

When Donald Trump ran for the 2016 presidency, it was common to hear late night hosts and comedians joke about how their material was writing itself. Then, as time went on, the joke became that they would much rather write their own material than deal with the horrific confederacy of dunces that is the Trump presidency. Now, with a teenager jailed because she didn't complete online schoolwork ,  with our personal data being weaponized by companies to manipulate our opinions , with federal officers abducting people participating in the uprisings in unmarked vehicles , and with the Homeland Security chief terming these as 'proactive arrests,'  it doesn't feel like jokes are writing themselves anymore, but (what should be science fiction) dystopias are. In Marie Lu's Legend , a plague ravages the people as the government tests its people, but only offers them treatment if they can afford it; while in M.T. Anderson's Feed , personal market data is used by companies ...

Of the many things New Jersey poet William Carlos Williams is famous for, one of them is the quote "no ideas but in things," which encapsulates the belief that, in poetry, images and symbols work best to create themes and deeper meaning.  That's all well and good in poetry, but I've found the opposite to be true when coming up with ideas for stories: I have nothing without my ideas. In other words, I've found it's important to have a concept when coming up with new ideas for writing, something to give the narration a point, a direction. Pitching Books to Myself The best way I can describe this is like selling myself a book that hasn't been written yet (or at least that I haven't written yet). I write down a few high-concept sentences, as if to prove to myself that there's something worth exploring there. Here's an example for a book I've recently finished writing: It's a dystopia, but in its earliest stages so that we can see how a typi...