Tag Archives: On Writing

Original VS Derivative: Original Worlds

Posted by natechen on

So last week I talked about the reasons why you, or the author of the book you’ve recently been bashing to your friends, might choose to write a book set in a world that is merely derivative, showing little in the way of original thought as far as world building goes. To summarize, there are plenty of good reasons to choose a derivative world over an original one. So why choose to build an original world at all?

Well, there’s several things in favor of original worlds.

For example, if the theme of your story is exploration it’s important that your readers share in the wonder and excitement of something new. The easiest way to do that is to make sure the reader has never seen the world(s) you’re exploring before, and the easiest way to do that is to build them yourself. While it’s nearly impossible to come up with totally new ideas that have never been done before (a lot of fiction is published every year, after all, and that’s without taking movies and television into account) there’s still plenty of room to innovate and combine unusual ideas. Sometimes all you need to do is take two ideas and combine them to find a totally different world waiting for you.

Another possible reason is that you are looking to really emphasize some particular aspect of human nature or society. A great example of this is if there’s some aspect of technology you want to put at the forefront (see Asimov’s robot novels highlighting AI, or any number of modern stories looking at genetic engineering or nanotechnology).

But the biggest reason is that it’s fun. It’s more fun for you*, it’s more fun for the reader. On some level all stories are about discovery. Discovering how things work, discovering how people think and feel, discovering how the story turns out. Discover is what keeps people turning the pages. When there’s nothing left to discover, the story is over. Having a world remarkably different from anything they’ve seen before gets readers excited and gives them another reason to keep turning those pages. Of course, like any aspect of story world building can’t carry the show on its own. Don’t count on your phenomenal story setting to replace good plot or good characters. But still, a vivid backdrop helps a lot more than having a bland one.

If you want to see some books with solid, original world building, I recommend Taylor Anderson’s Destroyermen series or any of the works of Timothy Zahn set in original world but especially the Quadrail series and the Conqueror’s Trilogy.

 

*Unless you don’t like writing all this stuff down. In which case might I suggest thinking about a different profession?

Original VS Derivative: In Defense of Derivation

Posted by natechen on

Okay, so this is really a big subject, and really when I sat down to poke at it I really meant to just talk about world building, so I’m going to restrict myself to that this time around. I did have some thoughts about this on other subjects, such as characterization and backstory, but I think I’ll leave that on the back burner for now. Who knows? Original VS Derivative may become a running theme. Or maybe I’ll just tackle the issue whenever I get to rambling about those subjects.

Also, as you may have already guessed from the title, I intend to continue this next week, and look at Originality.

So, what do I mean by derivative world building?

The most obvious example is fantasy world building because, as many people familiar with the genre are already aware, most fantasy world building from the 1970s to the mid to late 1990s (and even some today) is heavily influence by the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, who’s Middle Earth is still the defining fantasy world for many people, including me.

The influence of Tolkien over fantasy is pronounced. For instance, one of the most ubiquitous antagonistic races in fantasy is the orc, creatures that first appeared as the shock troops for Sauron in The Lord of The Rings trilogy.  Magic rings, dwarves that are antagonistic to elves but can learn to be friends if they spend enough time with each other and rotund little people who just want to be left alone and live the good life – all of these are staples of the fantasy genre.

But isn’t relying on that kind of thing lazy writing? Shouldn’t a world builder take a little more pride in what they do?

Well, the first thing to keep in mind is that Tropes Are Tools*. Just because a work doesn’t strike you as original doesn’t mean it isn’t good. In fact, you’d have to look far and wide to find a truly original idea, most story and/or world building elements have been done before in some way, shape or form. It’s just that some patterns of them have been used more than others. So why are they so prevalent?

For starters, they give the reader a definite grounding point in the work. If an author is planning on spending a lot of time working with ideas of political or magical theory, they might not want you to have to try and remember all the details of a half a dozen new fantasy races, temperaments and class systems as well, so they just give you something they’re relatively sure you’ll already understand. It’s true that you, personally, might be able to follow all that, but you may not be representative of the audience as a whole.

Alternatively, world building tropes give the writer a definite grounding point in the work. Perhaps they feel that some part of the trope has been consistently overlooked, and needs to be explored. Perhaps they want to subvert the trope, showing what they feel is inconsistent or ill thought out about it by writing a story built around it. Or maybe the scope of the work doesn’t justify reinventing the wheel, as noted above. Readers aren’t the only one with limited headspace for dealing with a work of fiction, after all.

A third possibility is that the broad lines of a pre-existing world already provide what your story needs. Why reinvent the wheel when there’s already perfectly good framework to draw on? Isaac Asimov’s three laws of robotics are the starting point of most people’s A.I.s, and why not? Most people agree that it’s a sound theoretical starting point for their development (whether it can actually be implemented or not is another question, and has more to do with how hard or soft you want your sci-fi to be.) Once again, a big part of it is where the author wants to spend his or her time, world building or somewhere else. And let’s face it, there’s a lot of other places they could spend their time.

Finally, some people are actively trying to retell old mythologies in modern contexts. The appeal of old fairy tales, or Greek or Norse myth is enduring. You can’t be totally original and pay homage to those sources effectively. You can try, but you might be better off aiming for authenticity.

In short, when you stumble across what strikes you as a derivative world, don’t just dismiss it as a failure of creativity on the author’s part. Stop and ask yourself what they’re trying to do with their story, then judge it on those merits. You may find that the story still manages to be a good one after all.

*Follow the above link at your own peril.

Jargon

Posted by natechen on

Double Helix is a talent. That means he has an unusual ability that sets him far, far apart from the majority of other people. Specifically, he’s a heatsink, a talent that lets him reverse the normal tendency of heat to spread out, but only in a set area. He works for Project Sumter, a branch of the government that handles threats to the public safety from talents of all stripes. He works with getmen, tac teams, specialized equipment and dozens of other federal, state and local government organizations with their own names or abbreviations to keep straight.

Open Circuit is also a talent, one known as a fusebox, with the ability to feel electrical potential and force circuits open and closed, an ability from which his name is derived. In addition, he’s a computer savant, and fluent in all the accompanying techspeak that goes with that field of study, and an electrical engineer with an interest in hydroelectricity and the accompanying architectural challenges.

That’s a lot of terms to juggle, and that’s without bringing the other kinds of talents in Project Sumter’s archives into it, not to mention the fact that each individual talented person gets their own code name, which they’re supposed to use in place of their real name whenever they can. Not to mention the bureaucrat-speak that goes with anything run by the government.

Not to mention the legalese.

Now I love technical terms. Using them makes you sound smart, tends to impress people who know what they mean and can tell that you’ve used them correctly and generally lets you get away with using fewer words to describe a situation than you would otherwise. The problem with jargon is, not everyone knows what it means.

For a writer like myself who loves to jargonize* words, that can be a problem. You see, as often as not a reader who doesn’t know what most of the words in a piece mean tends to stop reading, rather than look them up.

Gone are the days when Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky would be something most people could enjoy. Now, it’s just meaningless garbage that people ignore in favor of their texting shorthand (infinitely more comprehensible, apparently). Not that I’m getting up on a soapbox here…

Ahem. Finding the right level of jargon to let readers follow along yet still let your characters sound informed, reliable and smart about the subjects they’re talking about is a challenge. Your best bet is probably to write the technical dialog out, define as much of it as makes sense in the current context, then try to cut the amount of jargon you use in half. Then run the whole segment by a test reader who has never looked at anything about your piece before.

Then cut the jargon in half again.

Hopefully, by that point you’ll be good to go!

Most importantly, don’t become over attached to any piece of jargon, whether it’s something you’ve cooked up or a real, technical term. Sometimes it’s more important to keep things comprehensible than to sound as authentic as possible.

 

*Jargonize: 1) Verb, the act of taking a word and assigning it an unusual and/or technical meaning.

2) Verb, to take a word and add a technical sounding suffix such as “ize” or “ium” to it, thus creating a technical term.

Story Ideas

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A lot of people think that the hardest part of writing is coming up with the ideas. After all, once you have the idea worked out the rest of the story should just flow naturally from that, right?

Well, if you’ve actually been a writer for any length of time you know that is pretty much the opposite of the way things really are. Most authors will admit that they have a lot more ideas for stories than they know what to do with. It takes months of careful thought, writing, editing, critique and rewriting to make one good, solid story. In the mean time, while not working on that story idea, you will probably have six to eight really good ideas for stories present themselves to you. That does not include the two or three dozen ideas you have that aren’t any good, sound vaguely interesting but really aren’t worth your time right now, require way more research or technical knowledge than you have the time or money to acquire at the moment, or otherwise don’t mesh with your time and talents.

In other words, if you’re a writer with a real investment in the art of story, you’ll see stories everywhere, and never lack for ideas to follow up on. On the other hand, if you’re not, it may seem like stories simply pop up out of nowhere for some people while you can never seem to get one started.

But not to worry! Finding story ideas is a skill that can be practiced, rather than a talent you are born with. So how does one spot a good story idea?

Well, the first thing you need to keep in mind is that all good stories focus on a compelling conflict. This doesn’t necessarily refer to a physical confrontation, but there must be at least two goals being pursued by a character or characters in the story, and achieving them must conflict somehow. It can be as simple as a man not having enough money to pay rent and buy a present for his girlfriend’s birthday or as complicated as a multisided dispute over territorial rites on a completely fictional world humanity colonizes after achieving space flight. It’s the working out of these conflicting goals that forms the backbone of your plot and gives your story its narrative drive.

The second thing about your story is that your conflict cannot have a simple solution. Even if the solution seems simple at first, there must be enough obstacles in place to make achieving the solution very difficult, if not impossible, otherwise your story will either be too short or feature characters who are painfully shortsighted. If it’s not possible to complicate your story’s solution, it may not be a good idea to pursue.

Lastly, your story idea must interest you, or you won’t have the drive necessary to slog through all the work necessary to turn the idea into a serviceable story. If the idea isn’t working for you, you shouldn’t work for it!

Keep these ideas in mind and sooner or later you’ll find yourself with plenty of ideas to play with. Then all that’s left is the outlining, drafting, character development, writing, editing, rewriting, ripping up huge chunks of plot and redrafting them then finally stepping away from the whole mess and calling it done before it ruins your life!

Enjoy.

Voice

Posted by natechen on

What’s the hardest part about writing for me? If you guessed “voice”, you probably stopped to read the title of this post! Voice is a weird art form, it involves picking and choosing the right words and patterns for your writing, in order to reflect your character.

Now for a person who uses third person omniscient narrative, that really only matters in dialog. You can describe events however you wish, developing a fly on the wall style or what have you, all while showing your writing abilities to their best advantage. You will have a narrative voice, but it will be all your own, and you don’t have to share headspace with anyone else while you’re writing it.

On the other hand, if you write from the first person perspective everything you write has to be filtered through your character, his or her likes, dislikes, personality, vocabulary and moods.

I normally write in the third person, so Heat Wave is something of a deviation from the norm for me. Part of the reason I avoid the first person is my difficulty with voice.

While I do like to tell stories, I often feel that there is one way to tell that story and then refine that method until the story runs like a well oiled machine. Yes, I stand in the shower and tell myself the same story over and over again, so that when it comes time to tell it for real I’ll be able to rattle it off just right, with solid delivery and no pausing. I can be obsessive like that.

While compulsive editing and revising is a good thing for a writer, in my case it has also made me very set in my patterns and habits. Differentiating voice is not always easy for me.

Of course, Heat Wave is told in two voices. As you can probably imagine, developing and maintaining distinct, individual voices for Helix and Circuit was and is challenging, and I’m not really sure they’re as distinct as I would like. While each character has a very concrete list of does and don’ts that dictate what kind of vocabulary, phraseology and tone they should strike, neither one is particularly close to my usual narrative voice. Maintaining their individual quirks and patterns is a constant challenge and requires both vigilance and careful editing.

If you’ve been reading for a while it should come as no surprise that I consider back story to be a big part of understanding voice. A person’s vocabulary and word usage is determined, in no small part, by their family and friends, the people they’ve listened to all their life, combined with their level of education and opinions of others. Their tone is an outgrowth of their personality and circumstances. Generally, once you have these two things down working out voice is just a matter refining, the catch is to keep the voice in mind.

People may look at you weird, but tell yourself stories in the tones and patterns of your characters. Don’t start with anything complicated, like trying to retell part of your novel in a new character’s voice. Just babble about the events of the day, or a funny commercial you saw on TV (assuming you watch TV) or even what you’re seeing at the moment. Then enjoy the weird looks and improved feel for voice!

Oh, and if you have the time, enjoy watching me try to keep Helix and Circuit straight. You wouldn’t think it, but it can be very difficult at times…

Writing History, Pt 2

Posted by natechen on

Last week I went kinda gung ho and, by the end of the week, I was kinda worried about my posts being overlong. So when last week’s Friday post started to edge up over the fifteen hundred word mark, I decided to break it in two. If you didn’t read last week’s post, here it is.

Okay, so what does all that have to do with writing fiction? Well, one thing that annoys me about modern world building is how it has a horrible tendency to only present the past from one or two points of view. Usually, there’s a prevailing point of view and an underground, occult (secretive) or subversive point of view. In Marxist terms, a thesis and an antithesis. Usually, the main character uses these two viewpoints to figure out what really happened and uses this new point of view (a synthesis!) to figure out the correct course of action.

Authors have been using this very straightforward literary device to help characters resolve conflict and bring an end to stories for years, and making millions of dollars in the mean time. (Eat your heart out, Marx.)

In addition to being a simple way to assemble your plot, this makes thing easier on your reader as well. After all, having to keep track of too many perspectives can clutter your plot and confuse your reader. It really isn’t the best way to engage and keep a large audience.

The thing is, this approach is also overly simplistic and unrealistic, and the best authors take great pains to avoid it.

Look at Isaac Asimov’s Prelude to Foundation. It shows us the young Hari Seldon searching for the history of the Galactic Empire. What he finds instead, more or less, is a history of robots. Some people say they were helpers, some traitors, some think they were never even real, or if they were they obviously weren’t important, because they didn’t survive to the modern day, did they? Piecing it all together is central to understanding the story. Not every story needs to delve so deeply into its history, but if you’re going to make your own you need to at least hint at that level of complexity if verisimilitude is something you value (it doesn’t have to be, of course).

History falls into many chunks: Documents like newspapers, government paperwork and diaries generally form the backbone of history. Rumors, myths and other forms of oral history can be very hard to verify but give a definite picture of what people were thinking and talking about. Cultural context gives us a lens with which to see both documents and rumors through. Outside viewpoints must be balanced against each other as well as the experiences of the people who were there.

As Helix winds through Project Sumter he primarily leaves his mark in documents- paperwork is bureaucracy’s stock in trade and agents of the Project can easily generate a book’s worth of it during a busy week. Circuit, on the other hand, is not in the greatest position to leave incriminating paperwork behind. He leaves a trail in rumors and speculation which is rarely centralized outside of tight-lipped people like Hangman. The marks they leave on their culture, and what people think of them is what makes the story tick.

And even with all that, it’s not the whole picture. I’ve been looking into their history for years, and I don’t think I’ll ever have all of it. That’s the nature of writing history, whether it’s fiction or real. So the next time you take a trip to the halls of antiquity, keep an eye out for all those little hints. Grab them from anywhere you can, and do your best to make sense of them, but don’t ever fall for the trap of thinking you have the whole picture. Because then the story would be over.

And where does that leave us?

Writing History

Posted by natechen on

It’s one of the most absurd truisms of the modern age that the victor writes the history books. I’m not really sure how this idea got started. The original quote is typically attributed to Winston Churchill, although no one’s quite sure who said it first. My biggest problem with this idea is how vigorously actual history seems to contradict it.

Take the Peloponnesian wars. Thucydides wrote a history of them, one of the early scholarly histories. He was from Alimos, a small place just outside of Athens. But they lost the war, so Thucydides had no business writing history books about it, right?

Another example from antiquity is Josephus, the historian who wrote a history of the Jews while they were under the rule of Rome. The Jews would not have a nation to call their home for more than 1800 years, living an existence that was pretty much the total opposite of a victor, but Josephus still wrote the history of his own people.

Or, more recently, consider the American Civil War (or War Between The States, or what have you). In spite of the fact that no one has fired a bullet in that conflict in nearly a hundred and fifty years, no one can agree on the history of it. Was it a war of northern aggression? Was it a war to liberate slaves? Was it a war to protect the Union? Do they even mention protecting the Union in history books any more? How did the premier cause of the victors wind up getting so totally lost in the retelling? Weren’t these people writing the history books? And how did the South get away with creating the legend of the Lost Cause if they weren’t writing any of the history books?

There are other examples, to be sure. From monasteries on the British Isles writing records of being sacked by raiders to Masanori Ito’s book Fall of the Imperial Japanese Navy right up to the aftermath of Tiananmen Square, the defeated have been chronicling their own history and doing their best to both remember and learn from their defeats ever since the study of history first came about.

To me it frequently feels like this idea that the history books are written by the winners actually has its roots in a famous quote from someone on the other side of the English Channel from Churchill. Joseph Goebbels told us that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will come to regard it as truth. We’ve come to accept this as a truth, that if we can just get a platform to push out agenda loudly enough and often enough, we can make people think whatever we want about anything, even history.

However, in spite of telling his lies for 12 years, Goebbels is not now thought of as a great historian, a visionary thinker or a leader. He’s thought of as a liar.

Perhaps the real problem is the lack of scope in this way of thinking. There are no victors in history, there are only people who come for a short time and then quickly fade away. We don’t write history. Rather, history is written on us, its letters and words the lives of people and the traditions, values and literature they leave to their culture. History shows through how we live and what we do far more than what we say. After all, you can’t know the winner until everything’s over, and in history, the end has not yet been written…

Points Of View

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By this point you’ve probably realized that Heat Wave is told from two different perspectives: Double Helix, a member of Project Sumter, and Open Circuit, a wanted man. You’ve probably also noticed that so far, Helix has had more time in the driver’s seat than Circuit has. You can expect that pattern to continue, at least for the near future. But here’s a fun fact: When I originally had the idea for these two characters I actually intended for Circuit to provide most of the perspective.

Helix is pretty much an accidental viewpoint character. I never even intended to use him to provide perspective. When I first created him, Helix existed pretty much entirely to provide a foil for Circuit. So how did he wind up becoming the primary point of view?

Well, as you might already suspecte, it had very little to do with his character and a lot to do with Circuit, and a little bit with the needs of the story (Circuit and Helix existed in a number of forms before they found a home in the world of Project Sumter.)

The protagonists of Heat Wave started off in a series of unpublished short stories told from the perspective of Circuit that served to help me refine their voices and establish many of their important character traits. I hadn’t been working with Circuit and Helix long when I came to realize that, while Circuit could be fun to write and has a unique way of looking at the world, prolonged exposure to him steals much of his charm.

For one thing, he’s very superior and sooner or later your going to get the feeling that he’s looking down on you for something or another (which is understandable, because he is.) For another, he’s not very sympathetic to others, which also serves to make him hard to sympathize with. But most of all, he’s given to sermonizing on the importance of his own point of view, which can really get dull.

Worse, he wouldn’t be as effective a character as he is without those qualities, so I couldn’t simply sort through a box of writer’s tricks for replacement quirks. Circuit really needs to be a sanctimonious, arrogant know-it-all in order for Heat Wave and some of the ensuing stories to work.

In addition it quickly became clear to me that only showing things from Circuit’s point of view wasn’t really working either. The stories needed some kind of insight into how Circuit’s enemies were working against him to really be effective, and Circuit himself couldn’t provide that insight without introducing a whole new host of problems (like, how does Circuit even have trouble with Helix if he understands him so well?)

When Project Sumter was added to the mix to keep track of talents and serve as an the organizational foil for Circuit, it only seemed natural to have a point of view on that side of things. Helix, as the most thoroughly established character in the story after Circuit, was the natural candidate.

As the story progressed Helix came to take more and more narrative time away from Circuit, in part because he has the more interesting early parts of the story and in part because Circuit with time on his hands is truly obnoxious. If you enjoyed Circuit’s opening narrative, worry not! Once he has something constructive to do it will be safe to let him out more often. In the meantime, hopefully Helix will be able to keep your attention.

Changing History

Posted by natechen on

History is vitally important to writing a story. Everyone has history, so it’s important that any story you write not actually start at the beginning, but before it. The backgrounds of your characters influence their prejudices, interests and reactions to new situations. By extension, the history of a society and a world influence how it reacts to large scale changes in circumstances or the ideas of individuals.

The farther a world is from what we know, the larger its differences from our own history must be. But changes in history have large ranging repercussions, and if you’ve decided that you don’t want a world radically different from what we know in the modern day you’ll have to take steps to compensate for that. (Of course, if extrapolating the changes to the modern day situation is what you want to do, that’s fine, but we’re not all Harry Turtledove.)

There are a lot of options for how an author might make significant changes to history and still manage to keep their fictional world similar to what we know.

The simplest is to make your changes very recent, occurring within the last twenty-five years or so. In this case you can generally get away with saying that whatever your unusual element is, it hasn’t had time changed the world too much yet. A corollary to this is to make whatever change you want to take place totally apocalyptic in nature, like a zombie plague or a sudden ice age, changing all the rules after the point of departure, keeping the old and developing the new.

Another option is to make the changed history an occult element, in other words, totally secret. If only a select few people know about the different history, it’s really easy to justify it not making any real changes to history as we know it.

A third possibility is to hand changes to historic figures with such overriding circumstances or goals that they could only do one thing with them, which reinforces our own history. Abraham Lincoln, for example, is going to use just about any innovation or discovery handed to him to preserve the Union. Likewise, Churchill would probably have used anything he could against the Nazis. If Albert Einstein had laid the foundation for practical nano-tech instead of figuring out how to split the atom, I guarantee it still would have gotten used against Japanese sooner or later. Not that World War Two with nano-tech would ever make a good story.*

Heat Wave is, in many ways, a combination of approaches two and three. This is one difference between Heat Wave and the early days of comics, where superheroes were typically a new occurrence. I’ve chosen this approach for a number of reasons, but the biggest one was to allow for the back story I have in mind. Also, it’s different from the norm, which is a good thing so long as it doesn’t make things any harder to grasp, which I don’t really feel it does.

So as you read, keep your eyes open for hints to Project Sumter’s slightly different understanding of world history. Hopefully it will be as much fun for you to figure out as it was for me to put together.

*Note to self: Story idea..

The World You Know…

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It’s one of the great goals of a science fiction or fantasy author to create their own world and their own rules and then run with their story as far as they can. Look at Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” or J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Who wouldn’t want a work of fiction of that caliber to their credit? These worlds were different and captivating, in Tolkien’s case so captivating that a whole generation of writers chose to pay homage to his Middle Earth rather than write different worlds that might be overshadowed by his towering work.

Now there’s a whole ‘nother essay or two on the subject of being original versus being derivative, but that’s not exactly where I want to go today. Rather, I wanted to talk about why I’ve chosen to set Project Sumter in what is essentially the world we know, rather than attempting to write a story in a world that is built from scratch.

When you are writing a novel there are any number of reasons you might choose to set your story in the everyday world, or at least a world that is very much like it, with only one or two major differences. You might want the familiarity to help readers adjust to the more fantastic elements (after all, not all readers are ready for full fledged fantasy), you might not have a fully developed world on hand or you may just feel that some element of your story is heavily invested in the real world and doesn’t make sense if transferred over to one you create.

In the case of Project Sumter, the Helix and his friends occupy the real world for three basic reasons.

One, living in something like the modern day real world is part of the superhero genre. Spiderman, the Fantastic Four, Batman and, of course, Superman, along with legions of other comic book characters have always inhabited a world strongly based on the one we live in. While Heat Wave is obviously not a comic book, many of the elements it plays up find their modern day roots in comic books, and in order to emphasize that, one of the things that makes sense is to set it in a world virtually identical to our own.

Two, I am not yet confident in my ability to lay out the breadth and richness of a truly great original world. The kind of careful thought that creates a Middle Earth is breathtaking in its scope. Tolkien wrote about it for his whole life and, even after his death, the full backstory of the world was far from complete. I’ve considered writing my career for barely ten years. I’m not sure it’s reasonable for any author to be up to that kind of a work after such a short period of time. For now, the much smaller tweaks to history that come with writing fiction in the real world will serve to hone my skills. Perhaps one day I’ll have the necessary skill for an endeavor of the world building scale. We’ll see.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, the story doesn’t demand it. Superhumans are nothing new in the history of storytelling. From Merlin to Hercules, stories about people with strange and wondrous abilities interacting with normal people are nothing new. If a story does not call for some radical departure from recorded human history to tell, it is probably better of told in the confines of our own world. A story that is made needlessly complex isn’t necessarily better, just more complex. And a complex thing is much harder to do right.

Heat Wave wants to be a piece of speculative fiction set in the real world and I want to do it right. The best way to meet both goals is to set it here in our world, with a slightly different past, perhaps, and see what happens. I hope that you’ll come along for the ride.