Vessel: Channeling the Maltese Falcon?

I was rereading Vessel last night and it occurred to me that although how we approach a writing subject makes it original, there are tons of influences that factor into what we write.

Me, I am a History Buff and an Old Movies and Radio Programs Buff. Especially the Old Whodunit movies that were made from the detective stories. Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler are two of my favorite non-SF authors. As I read Vessel, I felt the way I used to when I watched reruns of Humphrey Bogart movies and listened to the old Sam Spade recordings.

Was I channeling those guys when I wrote Vessel? Probably not intentionally and there’s no direct indication of their work in Vessel by any means. But the feeling I got from reading it after not for so long was incredible to me. And I wrote it, so what does that tell you?

Anyway, back to working on Parallax. It’s a shame that books don’t write themselves, eh? 😉

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The Three Safeties: Cause and Effect

At its core, The Three Safeties is a story about Cause and Effect. Cause and Effect is the idea that everything has a starting point from which all action subsequently occurs.

Now, in Fiction, we can play with that a little bit and place the Effect before the Cause, taking the audience along for a step by step analysis of what happened to create the situation.

I like to think that The Three Safeties follows in a grand tradition of Time Travel stories dating back to H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, which I highly recommend as good classic SF Literature.

This is a topic that I would love to go into more detail with, but I’m walking very close to giving out spoilers and I don’t know about you, but I prefer to be surprised.

Anyway, thanks for your time and have a great day. 🙂

Corona: Ghosts or Temporal Echoes?

I firmly believe in my heart of hearts that anyone can write a ghost story. Take a dead person’s spirit, attach it to a person, place, or thing. Hilarity ensues.

Now, let’s add a twist to that. What if what you see and think is a ghost but in reality is an echo of the past that’s leaked through a weak point in the fabric of Space-Time? This is one of the central plot devices I thought of when writing Corona.

Let’s face it, ghosts are not hard to write about. Disembodied spirits missing their former lives, having unfinished business in the Corporeal World, or just looking to start some shit because it’s probably boring as Hell being dead. Plus, I hear there’s no bacon so that in itself would be enough to piss me off.

I like the idea of temporal echoes, not because it disregards ghosts, but that it can demonstrate, fictionally, how different time periods can co-exist in the same physical space yet in different dimensions. Of course, I expanded more on the concept in Corona, but the basic gist is there.