Tag Archives: Books

Back … Maybe?

I can’t believe it’s been almost two months since I last posted here. As I think I predicted at the start of the year, I had a flurry of writing for most of January and a little bit of February, and then it just kind of … died.

The good news is that this time, it isn’t because I was cripplingly depressed. (I mean, I’m always a little depressed, but that wasn’t the main driver behind my inactivity.) In fact, I’ve been remarkably productive in the past month or two – just not with writing.

Rather, I’ve been busy with my spare time (which I feel I have less and less of) writing music. Years ago (I literally mean in like 2005) I started work on a metal ‘symphony’, by which I mean it’s structured like a classical symphony in four movements. I wrote about two-thirds of it years ago, then abandoned it in favor of writing, and later, more traditional metal music.

But I always intended to revisit it, and in particular produce it with a more modern aesthetic. So over Christmas and into January, I set about re-producing the parts I’d written so far, and completing the parts I hadn’t. And if I do say so myself, it came out pretty damn good!

And that’s not all – fresh off the wave of satisfaction that comes with completing a project, I decided to embark on a second metal symphony – this one including full orchestral instrumentation. So far it’s about half written, and sounding good.

So as you can see, I have been busy – just not with blogging and writing. Which is unfortunate in a way, of course, because I always intended to keep up with things here as well. We’ll see if I’m able to continue updates, Thoughts of the Week, and all that good stuff, but I wanted to check in at the very least and say hi, because I felt bad that I’d left this for such a long time.

As far as other projects go, I should be getting the edits back for my second YA novel from the editor today, for which I’m exceptionally excited; I’ve been waiting a while, and she’s been delayed (understandably, with COVID and everything), but I can’t wait to see what she has to say – so far apparently it’s made her cry (!).

The Redemption of Erâth is also progressing, if slowly; every so often I’ll try to write a little bit more of it, but I’ve lost – not the enthusiasm for it, but the drive, perhaps? I still want to complete the story, but there’s a lot ahead of me, and other projects just seem to keep getting in the way.

Writing is a lonely profession, and feels thankless, often; I write to get readers, not for money, and reviews are one of the few ways in which I know people are reading my books. And whilst I’ve amassed a fair few reviews for my YA work on Goodreads and Amazon, The Redemption of Erâth remains a little less … accessible, perhaps. I realize it’s a slow story, and I think this puts people off sometimes; in the years since its publication, I’ve only had fourteen reviews for the first book on Amazon, seven for the second, and exactly one for the third.

Still, it isn’t a reason to stop – the story must be written – and I will continue, however long it takes me, until the story of Brandyé, Elven and their companions is complete.

And in the meantime, I will try my best to continue posting here, as well as on cmnorthauthor.com, with updates, thoughts, and random things, because blogging is another way to connect with readers, and I actually really enjoy it.

So thank you until next time – which hopefully won’t be another month and a half!

Elements of a Great Time Travel Story

I have to admit, I’m a sucker for a great time travel story. Whether it’s Star Trek, H.G. Wells or The Terminator, there’s something about the confusion, impossibility and theoretical consequences of traveling backwards and forward through time that engages and excites the imagination. However, not all time travel stories are created equal, and there are many different theories (fictional and real) on exactly how time travel might work, if it were possible. I’m not going to debate whether time travel is actually possible or not – Stephen Hawking’s party for time travelers may have unfortunately proved this – but rather examine the elements that make for an exciting and mind-bending time travel story, within which universe time travel – according to the rules set forth in the story – is entirely possible.

Paradox

Let’s get the obvious out of the way first: one of the most intriguing aspects of time travel stories is the concept of temporal paradoxes – the notion that by going (specifically) back in time, you can cause an event that would, in one way or another, prevent you from going back in time. The most famous of these is the grandfather paradox: if you go back in time and murder your grandfather before your father was born, you would never have existed, and therefore couldn’t have gone back in time to commit the murder.

There are a number of stories that deal with this – and other – paradoxes in wonderfully inventive ways. One of my favorites is Futurama’s feature-length episode, Bender’s Big Score. In it, a ‘time code’ is discovered (on main character Fry’s butt cheek, of all places) that allows for one-way backwards time travel (the traveler can go back in time to any point in history, but cannot return without waiting it out). A group of scammers get hold of the time code and use it to pull off heists in the past – all by using the robot, Bender, who can commit the crime, then simply wait out the centuries in the basement until bringing the pilfered goods at just the right moment.

The paradox presented in this episode is that of time duplicates: the more you use the code, the more copies of you end up in history, leading to the possibility of encountering yourself, and even killing yourself (or, in one somewhat disturbing scene, making out with yourself). This is corrected, humorously enough, by introducing a concept called the ‘doom-field’; the time code corrects all paradoxes by ‘dooming’ any time duplicates to death or destruction. This leads to some rather emotional moments, as Fry ends up going back in time to relive life in the 20th century, only to discover that his arch-nemesis, Lars, is not who he seems to be.

There are, of course, countless other paradoxes presented by the concept of time travel, and each story deals with it in interesting ways; some embrace the paradox, using it as a reason for everything to have happened in the first place, while others try to find a way around the paradox, but it’s one of the key aspects of any decent time travel story.

Fish-Out-Of-Water

Another major component of time travel stories, whether used for serious plot devices or simply for humor, is the idea that by traveling to another point in time – whether the past or the future – the traveler will find themselves woefully unprepared to deal with life in that other time. In cases where the traveler finds themselves in the past, we usually see a technologically advanced character in a position of superiority to the inferior technology of the past; when the reverse is the case, we usually see the character marvel incomprehensibly at the newness of imagined future technology.

One of the earliest examples of a going-to-the-past time travel story is Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, where the protagonist is hit over the head and awakens in 6th-century England, around the time of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Whilst the story itself is something of a satire, the concept of an advanced character in a primitive setting is inventive (for the time). It helps that the main character, Hank, is an engineer, and therefore able to recreate the technology of the 19th century without additional aid, but a famous moment comes partway through the story when he is challenged to joust a fellow knight; rather than go through with the contest and potentially get killed himself, he fashions a rudimentary gun and simply shoots his opponent.

Of course, traveling to the past is entertaining in that we get to feel superior to our ancestors; traveling to the future, however, is an opportunity to engage both the author and the reader’s imagination and see how we would feel if presented with significantly more advanced technology than currently exists. To some extent, sci-fi shows such as Star Trek, set entirely in the future, are an example of this, but the fish-out-of-water concept specifically comes in when a character from the past is introduced. Star Trek has actually done this several times, but one of my favorites is the episode Relics, where Scotty, the engineer from the original series, finds himself aboard the Enterprise-D after almost a century of suspended animation.

This episode specifically plays on the notion that technology advances rapidly, and that we as humans are inevitably going to feel left behind, whether due to age or other advancements. Scotty, once-revered as a wizard of engineering, suddenly finds himself unable to do even the ‘simplest’ things (such as changing the dilithium crystals required for warp drive), because advancements in the century he was absent rendered most of his knowledge completely obsolete. It’s an interesting take that doesn’t really deal with time travel specifically, but more so deals with the the idea that human technology will one day advance beyond us all, and that what is incomprehensible today will one day be commonplace knowledge.

Causality

Perhaps connected to the idea of paradox, causality is also an important aspect of time travel stories, inasmuch as traveling back in time to cause an event is just as important a notion as going back in time to prevent one. Coming out of the blue as it did in 1984, seemingly billed as a simple action vehicle for Arnold Schwarzenegger, one of the best examples of this is the movie (and subsequent franchise) The Terminator. In it, the infamous titular villain is sent back in time from a future in which machines have taken over the world, on a mission to enact a grandfather paradox: killing the mother of the leader of the human resistance, meaning that John Connor would never be born, thus ensuring the victory of the machines.

However, The Terminator takes this a step further by introducing a second character sent back in time, Kyle Reese: a human, knowing the machines’ plot, is sent to stop the terminator before it can kill Sarah Connor. IN doing so, Kyle falls unexpectedly in love with Sarah Connor, and without knowing it, fathers her son: John Connor. In other words, the human savior would not have been born at all if the machines’ plot to kill his mother had not been hatched – which it wouldn’t have been, had it not already happened. It’s actually really quite confusing.

In this instance, we see an example of causality: in going back in time, Kyle caused an event to happen (the conception of John Connor) that ensured he would eventually have to go back in time to cause it to happen. In real life, causality usually only goes one way: we do a thing, which in turn causes another to happen. When the ability to travel into the past is introduced, things get funky: we can cause things that have already happened, leading into the time where we go back to cause it to happen again (an almost never-ending loop).

There are quite a few other aspects of time travel that I haven’t gone into, such as multiple timelines (see Back to the Future), but these are some of the aspects that intrigue me the most, and are most likely to get me hooked when reading/watching a time travel story. What are your favorite time travel movies, shows and books? Are there aspects discussed in them that I haven’t mentioned? What makes them so appealing to you? Let me know in the comments!

Writing in the Film Generation

If I’m to be brutally honest, I don’t really read that much – particularly not as much as I think I should, as a writer. This isn’t a new problem for me, but I haven’t always been this way – in my youth and young adulthood, I used to read voraciously, devouring book after book with gusto. In fact, I would argue that I stopped reading so much around when I started writing (an odd coincidence, to be sure), but it also occurs to me that I stopped reading quite so much when I started watching.

I’ve always loved movies, film and TV, and there was a time when I would be excited about all the newest movies in theaters, or the latest TV show to grace cable networks (I’ve also come to realize that, as I get older, I kind of just want to watch the same stuff over and over again, a kind of comfort in familiarity). And if I’ve never said as much outright, I find that film and literature are really two sides of the same coin – namely, storytelling.

I think that’s what I really enjoy more than anything – a good story. Something that triggers the imagination, that gets the creative juices flowing, or simply makes you feel. And I don’t particularly think that any given story ‘needs’ to be told through any particular medium; the core essence of the story can be just as valid as a book, a poem, a photograph or a full-length movie. However, the way in which the story is told is more important to the medium, and this is where I think that, as I write more and more, I’m slowly realizing the influences that are guiding my storytelling.

You see, reading in the past – wonderful books like To Kill a Mockingbird, or Great Expectations, or even Salem’s Lot – got me feeling in a way that, in my experience, only a book could. When Scout and her brother are being stalked through the dark, or when Magwitch is waiting in the staircase for Pip, I remember feeling a deep unease, a fright and terror that no movie could ever instill in me – something that came from a deep caring of lovingly crafted characters, and the words on the page painted emotion as much as they did images.

Film, on the other hand, is (obviously) a heavily visual medium. And whilst some films don’t necessarily explore this in depth, others manage to convey the story in a way only visual imagery could. The Lord of the Rings, Lawrence of Arabia, or even the manufactured but highly enjoyable Marvel movies … these are all prime examples of stories that, I feel, are absolutely best told through film. The grandeur, spectacle, and beautiful blending of sound and light simply wouldn’t work as words on paper (ironic, that all of these would have started life as scripts – or in some cases, actual books).

But as I delve deeper into writing my own novels, I’ve come to realize that I’ve become more influenced by these visual stories even as I put digital ink onto screen. When I write The Redemption of Erâth, I see the story in my head, almost as a film playing before my eyes; I write it as if I were describing a movie. And the more I think about it, the more I realize that I’m really writing movies – 400-page movies, to be sure, but movies nonetheless. My inspirations aren’t the books of my past, but the films I’ve watched and adored.

It’s interesting, because in some of the reviews I’ve read, people have actually said that they would make great movies – perhaps because of the visual element I’m trying to instill into black and white text (not always successfully, of course). And it makes me wonder – is there room for a different kind of story in me? Can I even write a book that toys with emotions and thoughts in a way that film can’t do justice to?

In any case, I enjoy writing these stories – whether they’re primarily visual in my head or not – and I suppose I’ll carry on for now in the way I always have; after all, I don’t particularly want to see a great change of style halfway through the Redemption of Erâth series. But as I continue through my literary journey, perhaps I can try to include a little more of the written story in my books, as well.

What do you think? What books have made you feel things that you couldn’t imagine from a film? Or vice versa?