In today’s article, I’d like to share with you some tips to consider when you’re reviewing your current website or when you’re thinking about creating one. Let’s take a look at these tips for your website’s design and usability.

1. Structure Your Theme Around Your Update Frequency – First and foremost, I believe that you have to make a decision, up front, about how often you plan on updating your website. If you’re not going to blog or update very often, you can simply choose a different website theme that’s a little more static than a blog, but still attractive and professional. If your website isn’t focused around a blog, visitors won’t expect you to update your website as often, but you can still provide good, useful information for anyone who visits. Several themes offer you the ability to have a blog component integrated separately into your website, too.

2. Balance Text with Images – Images can be a great enhancement to your website and they can allow you to easily share content with your readers that they might enjoy seeing. However, your website copy is arguably the most important asset you have for many reasons. Copy allows you to reach your readers and search engines, and it also allows you to attract new visitors through Google and similar places. As an author, your content is exceptionally important because it’s a reflection of you and your work.

3. Consider Saying “No” to Fancy Functionality – I’ve seen quite a few big budget author websites that have no text and lots of bells and whistles. Unfortunately, when you start adding a lot of fancy programming scripts, you can end up making your site inaccessible to the blind because there is nothing for them to read. Accessibility is a huge topic in website design because people with disabilities interact with the web differently than you or I might, and those groups have sued other companies for their oversight. Keep in mind, too, that not every visitor will have the latest software that is often required to interact with that complex functionality either. How many times do you stick around installing new software to interact with a website?

Additionally, depending upon how your website is programmed, search engines can also have a tough time picking up your content, which can hinder your ability to be accessed through search. If your functionality (Flash, JavaScript, QuickTime, etc.) ends up being a roadblock, that can affect how your visitors and search engines interact with your website.

4. Think About Avoiding a Splash Page – Do you have an additional page that your readers have to go through to get to your website? If your answer is “yes,” then you have what is known as a “splash page.” Regardless of how your website is structured, it can be questionable to have a splash page from a usability perspective, because it hampers your readers’ ability to quickly get to the information that they want to see.

5. Design for Readability and Consistency – Even though you might spend hours reviewing color schemes and fonts, your website may not render the way that you want or expect it to. Sometimes, a website design will look totally different in a browser like Chrome than in Firefox, even though the website’s programming is the same. Color can be more difficult to standardize, because two computer monitors may render color very differently. To avoid poor readability and to increase consistency in your design, try to ensure that your theme has a lot of contrast and offers common fonts. If you don’t want to use a font like Arial, etc. for your logo, then I would consider turning text into an image or a logo.

6. Own Your Own Domain – Did you know that if you have your website on a free domain like WordPress, Blogger, Typepad or Blogspot that you may not own your own content? Every free service — including blogging and website platforms — has a Terms of Service (ToS) that spells out what your rights are. I highly recommend reviewing the Terms of Service of the websites you’ve registered for and consider owning your own domain. Also, if you own your own domain it does tend to look more professional than if you use a free service. After all, what is your career worth to you?

7. Provide Easy, Intuitive Navigation – There is nothing ( and I mean nothing) worse than having to hunt and peck on an author’s website to find what I’m looking for. I can’t tell you how many times I have had to dig through pages of cat pictures or other personal information just to find out more about an author’s book or their bibliography. Your website navigation should be easy for people to browse and should be centered around your primary focus. If your website is about you as an author, then cater the navigation to your multiple audiences: readers, reviewers, agents, editors and the press. If your website is about you as a person, then be clear about that on a FAQ page and redirect visitors to your professional presence.

8. Offer the Ability to Search – Remember what I said about being able to find things on your website? A visitor shouldn’t have to click back to a search engine to look for things that are on your website. Some websites offer built-in search functionality; some don’t. Either way, it’s a good idea to double-check your site to ensure that it has that ability.

The good news is that you don’t have to listen to or agree with anything I’ve said in this article, because you can see for yourself how your website’s design and usability is affecting your visitors through your website analytics data.

Google Analytics (GA) doesn’t charge you a dime to use their service. Even though you technically don’t “own” the data (e.g. you can’t maintain it or download all of it), there is a lot of insight you can glean from the reports. There are also quite a few other web analytics services you can explore, and many of them may charge you a fee. Since there isn’t “one” standardized method of garnering the data from your website, different programs may provide you with different insight. Fortunately, GA has some tutorials and the program is pretty intuitive.

The thing to keep in mind when deciding whether or not to add analytics, is that the data that you learn from a tool like Google Analytics can help you improve your website’s design and usability. Simply identify what questions you want to answer and then leverage your data to find the answer.

About the Author

Monica Valentinelli is the content and web analytics manager for the digital sheet music retailer and publisher Musicnotes.com and the project manager for the horror and dark fantasy webzine Flamesrising.com. Monica is an aspiring novelist working on revisions for her first novel which she’s talked about at VioletWar.com; she has several non-fiction, short fiction and game writing credits to her name including her recent digital e-book release entitled THE QUEEN OF CROWS.

To read more about Monica, visit her blog located at www.mlvwrites.com.

A style sheet is a document the copyeditor prepares that lists the grammatical conventions, characters, places, unusual or made-up words, and the distinctive treatment of words (capitalization, hyphenation, favored spellings, etc.) within a particular text. My style sheets are very thorough, because every decision I make is a deliberate one, and I’m often leery that an overzealous proofreader will come along and try to change things.

Style sheets are useful in a number of ways. First, they help the copyeditor maintain consistency. I’ve heard other copyeditors say that they prepare the style sheet once they’re done with a book, and I cannot imagine how that works for them. I refer to the style sheet constantly as I copyedit, because despite having a freakishly good memory for what I’ve read, even I cannot keep track in my head of the hundreds (literally) of possibilities that alternate spellings, hyphenation, and capitalization produce in any book.

For fantasy and science fiction, style sheets are particularly important for a number of reasons: First, SF/F books often come in series, and a thorough style sheet is important for maintaining continuity from one book to the next. Second, these books generally contain a large number of made-up places and terms–the authors are often fantastic world-builders–as well as very unusual names. In any genre, it can be difficult to remember the exact spelling of the name of a minor character you haven’t seen in three hundred pages–Was it “Frederick” or “Frederic”?–but in SF/F you might have an alien proper noun with seven consonants and an apostrophe. Unless you’ve already written it down and can refer back to your list, you’re going to have a hard time maintaining consistency. (And incidentally, the complexity of the world-building and its attendant vocabulary is one reason many copyeditors don’t like to take SF/F–it’s a lot of work that way.)

Style sheets are often provided to the compositor, too, and the compositor can then use them while setting the book to verify that something was indeed done intentionally.

And style sheets are always provided to the proofreader.

As an aside, proofreading (which is comparing the set proof against the manuscript) requires less knowledge than copyediting. Therefore it pays less, partly because proofreaders don’t have to make decisions about how to apply styles and so on: They’re just supposed to make sure the styles the copyeditor decided on were followed. That doesn’t stop some proofreaders, however, from deciding that the copyeditor should have followed strict CMS (Chicago Manual of Style, the basic publishing Bible) and altering things accordingly. (I personally think that authors should always be able to see the proofreader’s alterations, and many publishers don’t show them outright, though they may send along second proof with the changes already incorporated.)

As I’ve noted elsewhere, I dislike CMS for fiction; it is geared toward nonfiction. And despite the fact that some production editors like copyeditors to follow strict CMS, I’ve yet to talk to a single editor (and I’ve talked to many about this) who feels the same way. Tor editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden, for instance, agreed with me about that in this thread, calling strict CMS “potentially disastrous” for fiction. CMS’s rules on hyphenation, for instance, drive authors insane if you follow them exactly, and with good reason: The rules often make fiction less readable. (And yes, I know I’ve promised a post on hyphenation; I’m just really skeptical that I won’t bore people to death with it.)

So my style sheets contain a lot of items in which I’m instructing the proofreader to leave things alone: “Fragments are acceptable with this author’s style” and “Split infinitives are acceptable with this author’s style” and “Please follow style sheet for hyphenation.” (I detest the “never split an infinitive” rule, btw. Everyone knows that the only reason the rule came into being is because some bishop looked at Latin and decided that since Latin didn’t split infinitives, English shouldn’t either, right? And Latin can’t split infinitives, because they’re all one word. Argh. Drives me nuts. Following that rule can result in the most unnatural-sounding sentences. There’s a detailed discussion here if you’re interested. )

I also put into the style sheet things I need to keep track of: Does the author prefer to lowercase or capitalize a full sentence after a colon? What is the author’s preference for showing the possessive of proper singular nouns ending in “s” or “x”? How does the author treat titles? Some publishers have particular house styles they want copyeditors to follow for those rules, and if so I note those on the style sheet.

And of course I put in all the character names and nicknames and epithets and titles. I put in the names of the characters’ pets or horses, and what color and sex they are. I note all the place names, and whether they take a “the” in front. I note the names of wars and laws and the titles of books to which the characters refer. I note the author’s preferred spelling for any words for which there are alternatives. For all of those, I put in the page number for the first time I saw each item.

It goes on and on. I want to be consistent, and if I make a change, I want it to make sense to the author. The book is their baby, after all. By maintaining a thorough style sheet, I am able to have a particular page to show the author if I query or change something in order to produce consistency. To me, that’s just common courtesy.

—

Reprinted with permission from the author’s website.

Deanna Hoak is a freelance copyeditor specializing in fantasy and science fiction. SF/F novels she has copyedited have been finalists for (and have sometimes won) the Hugo, Nebula, Arthur C. Clarke, Endeavour, Golden Spur, John W. Campbell Memorial, Quill, Locus, Philip K. Dick, British Science Fiction, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy awards. In 2007 she became the only copyeditor ever short-listed for a World Fantasy Award.

The world is changing rapidly, its moments swarming us like pixillated butterflies.  The woman walking down the street in front of you talking to the air may not be crazy, but having a conversation on her Bluetooth headset. Two people who have never met face to face may fall in love, or out of it.  Our relationships to each other, both at the personal and professional level, are becoming crowded and changed, to a point where it’s difficult to track what is and isn’t the same as it used to be.

One shift lies in the area of social networks such as Facebook, Livejournal, MySpace, and Twitter and their skyrocketing popularity. According to a Consumer Research Center study, 43% of online users visited social networking sites this year, as opposed to 27% the year before. If you believe maintaining an online presence is useful for connecting with readers, social networks form the way to interact efficiently with nearly half of them.

From February to May of 2009 Twitter grew from six million users to 35 million. Discussions of Twitter’s ubiquitousness were held on the pages of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, as well as the Daily Show and the Colbert Report. Some news programs now use “Twitter crawls”, a scrolling line at the bottom of the screen showing people’s “tweets” (Twitter posts) about news stories or issues, while websites may use Twitter to furnish part of their content. In June, Twitter was used to expose problems with the Iranian elections. When scheduled maintenance would have taken the service down, Twitter decided to stay up in order to help with the scheduling of an important demonstration, not just because its users asked, but because the Obama Administration requested it.

At the most basic level, millions of people are using Twitter and other social networks to connect with friends, family, and co-workers. A few are writers. A lot of them are readers.

Social networks manifest what technologists call “Web 2.0″. Web 2.0, a term first used in 1999 by user experience consultant Darcy DiNucci, is the next generation of Web tools and usages. It emphasizes on communication, ease of use, and accessibility. Its products also include collaborative efforts like wikis (Wikipedia being the most notable example), blogs, video-sharing sites like YouTube and Hulu, and the concept of mashups, web pages or applications that combine “data or functionality from two or more external sources to create a new service” (quote taken from Wikipedia). Mashups have become a familiar concept in speculative literature lately, recently introducing zombies to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

A major technological factor encouraging social networks is the acquisition of Internet capability by cell phones. I can update Twitter, Facebook, and my blog through my iPhone, and more companies are developing phones that do much more than phone home. Brief tweets and Facebook updates are suited to a cell phone’s small screen. They can be checked standing in line at the grocery store, waiting for take-out, riding on the bus. No wonder more and more people are participating!

At the same time, people resist what seems a social mandate to electronically network. In a world where things are changing rapidly and technology is having an impact on everything from the way we work to the ways we play and perform, social networks are sometimes unfairly the symbol of Technological Anxiety.

This article intends to do a few things. The first of these is to assuage some of those anxieties. Once that’s (hopefully) accomplished, we’ll take about the differences between the most popular social networks, how to behave in a way that maximizes your effort, and what’s worth (and not worth) doing.

What’s It All About?

Social networking’s basic concept is not difficult. You have people who influence you and are influenced in turn by you. Word of mouth, which depends on social networks, has always worked this way: someone makes a recommendation to a friend or family member. When that friend or family member is shopping, they remember the recommendation and act on it, purchasing the recommended good or service .

Many marketing-minded people enthuse about social networking because as social networks change to suit the Internet, the power of word of mouth balloons. Not only do more people see that recommendation, but it can be made more compelling, through the ability to point someone at a link about the product, include a snapshot taken with a phone, or even embed a YouTube clip of the product in action.

Publication time is different on the Internet, too. A book review on a website sticks around much longer than a print recommendation. While the magazine sits on a shelf or molders in the recycling bin, the web review continues spreading the word about the book indefinitely. Its popularity can fluctuate – a mention on a site such as Boingboing.net or Slashdot.org can send the numbers skyrocketing. As the editor of an online magazine, I’m fascinated by this. One of the most popular articles on the Fantasy Magazine website, for example, is a piece of steam punk gadgets. It continues to gather a significant number of hits and is almost always one of the top ten posts each week. Behold the power of a good search keyword!

Your informal social network, the people you interact with on a regular basis, has changed with the advent of electronic social networks. For example, my Facebook account allows me to connect with: close and extended family, such as my brother and my cousins in Kansas; former workvcolleagues; college acquaintances and teachers; friends from the online game I work with; friends who I gamed with twenty years ago; fans of my writing, fans of the magazine I edit; fellow writers and editors; and assorted people who just really like my name.

Facebook even makes it easy to build those networks. Birthday reminders let me pop over to their Facebook page and write quick greetings. If I wanted to go digital, I could buy them a virtual present to display on their page, like a picture of a pet or a flower.  (How smart of Facebook, to be selling what are, essentially, pixels.) I can see what my cousin Faith is up to, and drop a line of commentary on it. I’m told what groups my friends are joining, what videos they’re posting, when they update the “relationship” status of their profiles.

Perhaps you’re new to this world, deciding to dip your toe in the electronic pool for the first time. Or you’ve made a few attempts and never really followed up, letting your MySpace profile moulder or your blog sit there with one post back in 2005. Maybe you have a strong presence on one network and want to know whether or not you should expand into others. That brings new questions: how do you pick a social network? Which ones reach the most people, are the most effective, and/or involve the least amount of effort on your part? How do you avoid getting swallowed up by the social networking world?

Identifying the Important Networks

Why think about the different social networks? Because each represents a distinct group of potential readers. People tend to find a social network they like and stick with it.  Therefore, while there’s some overlap between social networks, it’s not as great as one might think.

The social networks with the largest numbers of members are Facebook, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, MySpace and Twitter. Each has its own unique aspects, advantages, and disadvantages. I use three, and by my estimate, advertising a new publication that way allows me to reach several thousand people that are already interested in my writing, for no cost other than the time spent posting. I’m a very minor author, although like everyone else on this particular rung of the ladder, I hope to expand my following. But were I larger, I’d be making as much use of social networking as I efficiently could.

Facebook:

When you create a Facebook account, you are setting up your profile: what people on your friends list see about you. Facebook can be confusing in its distinction between profile, group, and fanpage. Most people are represented on Facebook by profiles. People who want to see their updates must request that the other person “friend” them, and the relationship depends on both parties agreeing to it. A person’s Facebook “feed” consists of updates from their friends, groups, and other subscriptions. Updates can include items a person posted, as well as things they did. For example, my friend Sue just requested help in a Facebook game she’s playing, Mafia Wars, and that item appears on my feed.

Groups revolve around a single cause. Anyone can create a group, and they can range widely, from a group of people wanting to change an aspect of Facebook to a group denying global warming, or another group organized to get out urban voters in a campaign. Silly causes abound too, such as a recent one to “stop over-fishing on Saturn’s moon Enceladus.”

If you are a writer who does has a signficant number of fans, the most useful thing you can do is probably to create a “fanpage”. For example, Fantasy Magazine is represented at and anyone, regardless of whether or not they’re a friend, can become a fan of it. Fans see the updates to the page in their Facebook feed. Post on your fanpage when you have something you want to share with fans. You’ll find that people comment on items, and the comments will be visible. You can respond to them or not, as you choose, but you’ll find that responding will tend to make the group more appealing to new members. However, don’t do it, unless there’s a genuine following for your work — nothing looks sadder than a fanpage with a following of two.

LinkedIn:

When you set up a LinkedIn account, you are also setting up a profile, but one that is considerably less interactive than a Facebook one. Only LinkedIn users that are linked to you (sometimes through another person) can see all of your profile information. LinkedIn is primarily a job and employment site, so the emphasis is on your resume and references. This is useful to writers and editors in terms of finding work or workers to do it. While I make sure I have links to my site in my profile, I don’t think of LinkedIn as a network that will drive traffic to a website. LinkedIn might also be useful in terms of finding reviewers, reading or speech venues, or markets for articles or fiction.

LiveJournal:

The primary purpose of a LiveJournal account is to create a LiveJournal blog. You network with other people by “friending” them. as with Facebook, which allows you to see their private entries as well as collecting their posts with those of your other friends in an easy to read format for you.

LiveJournal boasts a thriving collection of authors, editors, and publishers, including Elizabeth Bear, Ellen Datlow, Gregory Frost, Sean Wallace, and Martha Wells. One of the confusions that has arisen on LiveJournal deals with the issue of “handles,” special names attached to accounts which may bear little to no resemblence to one’s real name. Writers setting up a LiveJournal account under an exotic name may want to make sure their real name and contact information are listed on their profile page.

MySpace:

MySpace is very similar to FaceBook: you set up a profile page which your friends can comment on, and which can hold music, embedded video, pictures, and the like. MySpace is a favorite of musicians, and has additional functionality to offer them, but there are many authors here as well. Many people, including myself, complain about MySpace’s interface, but it does allow writers some good functionality, such as allowing people to readers to your posts.

Twitter:

Twitter is all about brevity. Users post “tweets”, 140-character messages that span a gamut of possibilities. You can subscribe to or “follow” someone’s tweets, or twitter a message that directly addresses them but which can be seen by anyone. The most rapidly growing network, Twitter was the first to exploit cell phones, allowing users to post from phones as well as the web.

Twitter is used by a wide, wide range of people, including Shaquile O’Neill, Jon Hodgman, Christopher Walken, and Ashton Kutchner, and ghost-writing tweets is a growing field for freelancers. The shortness of the form has led to a fascination with it; there are several speculative-fiction Twitter magazines, such as Thaumatrope and horror-based TweetTheMeat.

Twitter spreads information with remarkable quickness through the practice of “retweets”, signified in Twitterese by “RT.” For example, I might see a book recommendation from my buddy, user @bestfriend, and decide to pass it along to my followers, in the form like, “RT @bestfriend says Baloney by Oscar Meyer is the most tightly plotted mystery ever!” Retweets help spread news fast, such as the Hudson River plane crash or the Mumbai terrorist attacks. In both cases, eyewitnesses tweeted, and the tweets were quickly passed along and even used by the slower moving news networks.

Twitter has a secondary mechanism for passing along information, hash tags. They are called hash tags because one uses the hash mark symbol, #, to indicate one. Hash tags are words that people can use to search for a common interest group, such as #fantasy, #tengu, #buffy, or #pabloneruda. They are sometimes used to create an event such as #followfriday, where users broadcast their recommendations for interesting users to follow. Anyone can look for the word and find lists of users interested in being followed and following in turn. A Twitter stream making judicious use of hash tags can steadily increase its number of followers, allowing its messages to reach more and more people.

One of the joys of Twitter is the wide range of tools that can do things with your Twitter feed. Here, for example, is my Twitter stream displayed as a cloud of words. Words are larger and redder if they are more often used; smaller and bluer when they seldom appear.

The TweetBeep service can be used to alert you when certain key phrases (like your name) appear on Twitter, which you can have it do on an hourly or daily basis. I use Tweetbeep to monitor my name and the phrase “fantasy magazine”. Followmebutton.com allows you to generate a button, easy to post to a blog or other social network, that lets someone follow you on Twitter with a single click.

Blogs

Blogs are a favorite form of networking. THe wide variety of blog-based networks includes Blogger, Blogspot, and WordPress. Blogs tend to be time-intensive, although you can take the labor-saving approach of only posting excerpts from your work in progress and/or announcements of events. If the former, responding to comments will, as with any network, help drive traffic.

Sometimes virtual networks are dedicated to meat-space meetings. For example, you might use TweetUp.com, Twtvite.com or Meetup.com to organize events such as signing, readings, lectures, or other performances. Or it may be just as easy to use one’s social network presence elsewhere for such organization.

The feel of different social networks vary according to their communication model. Facebook communication is like being at a party in a very large house or apartment building where everyone knows everyone else, even if sometimes only in a vague way. You can wander into someone’s space and join the conversation, comment on the decorations or the items stuck to the front of their refrigerator. MySpace is the strip mall and trailer park down the road. LinkedIn, on the other hand, is much more like an office building or conference center, where all communications center on employment and professional networking. Of Twitter, novelist Kelly Eskrige has noted, “It’s like being in a stadium full of people and having a shouted exchange with friends on the other side of the field, while also overhearing random bits of strangers’ conversations, which every once in a while tell you something that you actually needed to know right now — a weird and wonderful synchronicity.”

By contrast, blogs usually contain a single resident, unless they’re one of those hippie commune blogs like the Daily Cabal or SFNovelists. – they’re like being invited into someone’s house. All communication is, by the virtue of the location in which it’s taking place, addressed to them, and the sense is that of a one to one relationship between reader and author/host. While readers may address each other in the comments, they’re always aware that the host is there watching, and some, like John Scalzi, have a notoriously firm hand in ejecting trolls and steering the conversation.

There are other networks. GoodReads and LibraryThing, for example, are book recommendation, review, and listing sites. Good reviews on there will help sell copies of your book. You can make use of these networks in two ways, one of which is considerably less time consuming. This first way is simply to spend some time figuring out who the prolific reviewers who you think might do justice to your book are, and then make sure they get a copy. The second is to actually join, and then spend time reviewing other people’s books, so you develop a reputaiton that leads to people seeking out your work. If you go the second route, I would suggest making sure you have links to your work in your profile on the network.

Flickr and YouTube

Flickr is a great site for publishing visual images. It’s free, but a professional account will allow you to publish more pictures. YouTube is often used for video, such as interviews, readings, or book trailers. While there are a number of audio-based social networks, none of them have yet emerged from the pack as a standout.

YouTube is particularly appropriate if you do something visual. For example, writer and SFWA secretary Mary Robinette Kowal has published a number of clever and interesting videos, ranging from popular pieces to DIY to interviews. Book trailers can make for great video. Mario Acevado has done amazing trailers for his Felix Gomez vampire detective series using Lego and a driving sound track.

In selecting a network, figure out what you want to achieve through social networking. Promote events and new material to fans? Reach new readers? That helps you decide both what sort of venue you want to opt for as well as what you do with it.

Behaving Correctly

No matter which social network(s) you decide to join, the important thing to remember  there is to behave in accordance with the rules of the group. You wouldn’t walk into someone’s house and spray-paint the title of your latest book on their kitchen wall. You don’t want to do the equivalent in virtual space either.

Don’t spam people by posting the same message or messages over and over again. Make your content interesting, meaningful, and/or entertaining in order to keep people still reading.

One pitfall is thinking of your blog as a billboard. It’s not, or at least it’s one where people have the ability to put notes on it. Read and answer the comments you get, and engage your readers. Answer their questions and give them a reason to feel invested in the blog. Some bloggers periodically ask their readers to introduce themselves if they’re new, or to weigh in on an issue.

What’s a Writer To Do?

Internet social networking sites can provide valuable space for publicizing events such as signings, convention appearances, or book releases as well as products. They also provide ways for you to influence where your writing and publicity efforts appear through tagging and word-of-mouth sites.

An early concern is branding. Writers understand the power of names. You want a distinctive, memorable name representing you on the Internet by . You want readers to  find you easily when they use a search engine. For example, my name is one where, nine hits out of ten, they mean me. (The other one time, someone has named their housecat Rambo.)

When setting up accounts , use the name you write under so your readers can recognize you. If you’re a longtime Net participant (or even a short one), you may have developed an avatar name, like grouchyoldwoman43 or PrinceSparkle. Unless that is the identity you wish to embrace, consider making new accounts with the correct name. You may want to make sure that your e-mail address is similarly straightforward and recognizable, as well as professional sounding.

What if someone has your name already? Play around with your name. Can you use a special character, like an underscore, or perhaps a middle initial? Perhaps first person, such as IamYourName, or append something that signifies your genre, like SFwriterYourName. Perhaps a number that’s significant, like 2010YourName (be aware some names may age more gracefully than others.)

Representing yourself visually: It’s worthwhile spending time picking a photo that shows you well, and perhaps even paying for a professional photo. Don’t use an abstract image, like a guitar to show you play one, or a petunia to demonstrate you like flowers. But no matter what, do include a picture – one study showed that no photo decreased a person’s likeliness of being followed by 80%.

Networks don’t do much good unless you’re using them, no matter what. The Associate Editor of PANK wrote: “If you’re going to have a blog or a Twitter feed or a Facebook page, update them regularly. One of the things that drives me crazy is going to a blog that hasn’t been updated in months. If you’re not updating a given social networking tool regularly, you don’t need it.”

And In The End

In the end, are social networks bane or boon to the modern spec-fic writer? While I’ve regretted the hours I’ve frittered away on Facebook games or checking Twitter, in the end I’d still land solidly on the boon side. To me it seems inevitable that we procrastinate and dawdle, and that we poke at the Internet doing all manner of things. Inevitably, we’ll let those pixillated butterflies lure us into enjoying a chat here and there. All in the name of networking.

Ten reasons I might actually want to know what you had for breakfast

1. You are a close friend or family member and I am interested in your health.
2. Your breakfast was particularly poetic.
3. Your breakfast was particularly unfamiliar and thus interesting to me.
4. You tried a food I am curious about.
5. You tried something that I know an Interesting Fact about.
6. You had something that has strong emotional resonance for me.
7. You tried something a favorite fictional character eats.
8. Your description persuades me to try something new.
9. Your description warns me off from something I know I won’t like. (If you’re reliable or I know your taste matches.)
10. I am stalking you.

Simple Things You Can Do To Build Your Online Presence

1. Tag things.
2. Comment, comment, comment. Responding to someone is the best way to show that you’ve read their content. FaceBook condenses this down to the simplest possible form with the “Like” functionality.
3. Share your opinion.
4. Tell authors when you like something.
5. Include links in your e-mail signature.
6. Make sure your fans gets link whenever you publish something on line.
7. Sell to some of the online pro markets, which pay as well as the majority of the print magazines, and which allow you to link to your material from your website or blog.
8. Put a press kit on your website that includes: a headshot, a brief bio, and links to interviews.

—

This article has been reprinted, with permission, from The Bulletin

Cat Rambo lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest. Her collections, EYES LIKE SKY AND COAL AND MOONLIGHT, and THE SURGEON’S TALE AND OTHER STORIES (with Jeff VanderMeer) are available on Amazon.com.  She is the fiction editor of FANTASY MAGAZINE. Upcoming appearances include a reading for RASP on January 29, 2010, a one day workshop for the FIeld’s Edge Writers Community program, March 13, 2010, Norwescon, WisCon, WorldCon, and World Fantasy Con.

I did not invent moss-trolls. They belong to Marissa Lingen

“The advantage of writing urban fantasy or world-crossing fantasy is that when the sea serpent has eyes the color of NyQuil, you can say so rather than spending time trying to come up with settlement-era Icelandic-ish equivalent having something to do with moss-troll ichor. Because then you’re stuck with moss-trolls, and also they have ichor, and you can pretty well guarantee that’s going to come back and bite you in the butt in another book or two: you didn’t have to deal with moss-trolls *before*, and now you do, and it’s a lot of bother just for a color analogy.”

But I’ve thought a lot about the problem that Lingen identifies; it’s one that a writer of secondary-world fiction encounters frequently. (I’m using the term “secondary-world fiction” rather than “fantasy” because science fiction set far enough in the future has the same issue, though the variables of the equation are a little different.) You can’t, for instance, say something is as basic as the missionary position in a world without missionaries. What about saying something is as swift and sharp as a guillotine’s blade? Well, did Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin exist in this world? You will find moss-trolls again and again whenever you start describing the imaginary people, places and things of your imaginary world. Because one of the first ways we try to describe something is to say what it’s like.

Literature is all about metaphors–analogies. One thing is like another. Much of literature works by saying, “This thing is like this other thing.” And really great literature works by saying, “This thing is like this other thing, which you would never have thought of comparing it to.” The act of comparison can be overt (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Shakespeare asks his Fair Young Man. “Thou art more lovely and more temperate.”) or covert, subtextual, subliminal. But it’s there. You take a thing–a thing in your imagination–and you compare it to another thing–a thing in the frame of reference you (hopefully) share with your reader. And thus you generate meaning and imagery and all those other things that are what makes literature tick.

Now consider the Moss-Troll Problem and what it says about secondary-world fiction. We’ve declared one of the fundamental gestures of literature out of bounds. We make this same gesture–this thing is like this other thing–but we have denied ourselves the frame of reference in common with the reader. So when we do this, when we say the sea serpent’s eyes are the color of moss-troll ichor, we have to somehow convey both sides of the analogy, rather than relying on one half to explain the other. Secondary-world fiction therefore takes self-referentiality and makes it into a defining gesture of the genre, a form of intensely compressed poetry. This is the place where world-building is trying to get you, where you have a secondary world that’s rich enough and deep enough that it can generate its own frame of reference, that you can reinvent the wheel using unobtanium and dragons’ bones.

The moss-trolls make writing secondary-world fiction hard. But they also make it an endless joy.

—
Sarah Monette grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of the three secret cities of the Manhattan Project, and now lives in a 104-year-old house in the Upper Midwest with a great many books, four cats, one husband, and one albino bristlenose plecostomus. Her Ph.D. diploma (English Literature, 2004) hangs in the kitchen. Her short stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, among other venues, and have been reprinted in several Year’s Best anthologies; a short story collection, The Bone Key, was published by Prime Books in 2007. Her first four novels (Melusine, The Virtu, The Mirador, Corambis) were published by Ace Books. She will publish her next novel, The Goblin Emperor, with Tor Books, writing as Katherine Addison. She has also written one novel, A Companion to Wolves, and three short stories with Elizabeth Bear, and hopes to write more. Visit her online at www.sarahmonette.com.

Let me talk about conventions and their relationship to my writing life. Everyone will have very different experiences, depending on their personality. Here’s how it works for me.

I primarily go to conventions for three reasons.

1. To see other people in the field whose company I enjoy.
2. Improve craft/business sense.
3. To be “visible.”

1) To see other people in the field whose company I enjoy.
I relish the social aspect of SF. There are people that I just plain like and a convention is like old home week. It’s fun! I like you guys.

2) Improve craft/business sense.
A convention with a really good list of panels is going to appeal to me more than one in which I only hang out at the bar (though I love that, too). I want to know what’s happening in the field and to think about things that aren’t just products of my own brain banging against the inside of my skull. Even if I only learn one new thing, that’s a thing I didn’t know before.

3) To be “visible”
I’m a new writer, so I’m building my “brand.” I’m not going to get that many new readers at a convention, but the people at cons are the ones who vote on things and frankly, nominations can be leveraged ((Nominations and awards do not automatically mean a reader increase. You have to know how to work them, but the power of narrative on career is a different topic.)) into getting more readers which means…that cons are filled with a good target audience. Cons also tend to have editors at them and those are good people to know.

Now, I’ll be frank about how this works, because a lot of people don’t understand how to do effective schmoozing. Yes, yes, I’m aware that admitting this happens is distasteful. But, I’m going to talk about how to schmooze, anyway.

Schmoozing 101

These are all ideas to employ but none of them are hard and fast rules. Schmoozing is all about being charming and that will vary somewhat depending on the situation. So, here are the basic ideas behind successful schmoozing.

First idea: The other person is more interesting than you are.

Clearly, there are going to be cases where this isn’t true BUT act like it is. Why? Because the more time someone spends talking about himself and the more he feels intelligent and the more interesting he will think the conversation is. Hence, the more interesting he will think you are. So practice being a good listener.

Now, the way I do this is that as I’m talking with the person, I listen for the things that we have common interests in. They like cars? Great, I can reference the MG-TD that I covet. That gives me something to add to the conversation so that they don’t feel like they are being interrogated.

What if you can’t find any common ground?

Second idea: Have an exit strategy.
Let’s say you are a writer talking to an editor. It’s a good conversation, but you don’t know them all that well. The conversation pauses. Rather than looking for a way to prolong it, excuse yourself. To borrow from theater, “Always leave them wanting more.”

Exit strategies are also useful when you are trapped in a conversation. It’s okay to break the flow and say, “I’m so sorry, it’s been good talking to you, but I need to [x].” Yes, I’m suggesting that you lie. They trapped you. You are escaping. It’s fair.

But if the conversation is going well?

Third idea: Don’t be the first to bring up business.
Why? Because everyone at the con is talking about writing and business and you, you will be a welcome respite in the midst of a sea of people who have all been talking about the same things. You stand out this way. Now, if someone else brings it up, you are more than welcome to indulge, but don’t go there first. Later, make sure you follow up, but when you are in a non-business setting, leave the business alone.

Fourth idea: When the conversation turns to business, be prepared.
It is a con, so the conversation is very likely to swing round to writing. If you have something to pitch, practice your pitch at home. If you have a question, practice it at home. If you’ve gone to panels, think about what your opinion is before someone asks you.

Right now, I’m sucking at answering the question, “So what do you write?”

I rattle off a couple of magazines — which is what they want to hear — and I fail to say, “I have a novel coming out from Tor in 2010.” I think I told two people that at the last con. This is foolish. Someone gave me an opening to pimp myself and I didn’t oblige them.

Fifth idea: Be physically pleasant.

Is this shallow? Yes, yes it is. But we’ve all read the studies that repeatedly show that people who are attractive are treated better, so for heaven’s sake, take advantage of that. You look good in green? Wear green. Nicely turned calves? Show them off. And for heaven’s sake, bathe. Trust me, in a con, just a little bit of effort will make you stand out.

Want to know a secret? In real life, I almost never wear makeup, but I wear it at conventions. Too many people take photos and I look dead in photos without it. Especially on very little sleep, which is a natural state at cons.

Sixth idea: Follow up.

You meet someone who is either fascinating or who might be a good connection later. Drop them a line afterwards. It can be as simple as swinging by their website and saying “Hey, good to meet you!” Don’t stalk them, but that tiny bit of post con contact will help them remember who you are. Heck, it’ll help you remember who they are too.

By the way, this is why it’s good to hand out cards at conventions. I’ve been bad about this lately and keep forgetting to print enough to take with me.

So let’s review.
1. The other person is always more interesting than you are.
2. Have an exit strategy.
3. Don’t be the first to bring up business.
4. If business comes up, be prepared.
5. Be physically pleasant, ie, bathe.
6. Follow up.

There are other things too, but these are the basics.

—

Conventions and Writing, or Schmoozing 101 is reprinted with permission of the author.

Mary Robinette Kowal was the 2008 recipient of the Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Cosmos and Asimov’s. Mary, a professional puppeteer and voice actor, lives in Portland, OR with her husband Rob and nine manual typewriters. Tor is publishing her debut novel, Shades of Milk and Honey, in the Spring of 2010.

Written by Chuck Rothman

Index

1. What is an agent and why do I need one?
2. When do I need an agent?
3. How are agents paid?
4. Where to I find information about agents?
5. How do I choose an agent?
6. How do I contact an agent?
7. How do I create an outline and sample chapters?
8. What happens if I don’t get an agent?

1. What is an agent and why do I need one?

   An agent is a writer’s business representative. His job is to market your book, negotiate a deal with the publisher, keep track of rights sold, and generally handle the business end of things so that the author can concentrate on writing.

   You may not need an agent. If you write poetry, or short fiction, or articles, you don’t. Agents only handle book length manuscripts — fiction and nonfiction. It’s not worth their while to handle shorter works.

   Even if you write books, you may not need an agent. There are two main advantages that an agent can offer you when it comes to marketing:

   • A good agent knows what editors are looking for. He can target your manuscript more effectively; an author has to send it out hit or miss, wasting time on editors who are overstocked and missing windows of opportunity. Generally, it will take a good agent less time to sell a manuscript than it would take if you did it yourself. However, if the agent can sell the novel, there’s a good chance you can sell it, too. Conversely, if the novel is no good, no agent is going to be able to sell it.
   • Many publishers don’t accept unagented submissions. Or, more commonly, they allow an agent to send the entire manuscript, while limiting unagented submissions to outlines and sample chapters. You’re more likely to sell if the editor reads the entire book.

   The main advantage of having an agent is not in marketing a novel; it’s when you find a publisher willing to publish it. A good agent is an expert in negotiating contracts. She knows what clauses to ask for, which are harmless boilerplate, and which seemingly innocuous ones are invitations to disaster. A good agent will know how to get you the best possible deal. Unless you are in the publishing industry, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to negotiate a contract that gets you the most money possible while protecting all your rights.

   (Some people think that a lawyer can replace an agent when it comes to this. However, few lawyers specialize in the type of contracts publishers use. In the words of editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden of Tor Books, every time an author used a lawyer to negotiate with Tor, the author was left “skinned and bleeding.”)

2. When do I need an agent?

   The first thing you need to do is write a book-length manuscript. Unless you have the book in hand, an agent won’t be interested. He needs something he can see; without a manuscript, there’s no knowing if you can write anything that’s worth the agent’s time to try to sell.

   When the manuscript is done, you can start contacting agents. But don’t let the search for the agent get in the way of your search for a publisher. You’re perfectly welcome to start marketing the book yourself, if you want. It’s up to you.

   If you do send the book out, and get a call from the publisher that they’re interested, this is the perfect time to find an agent. Indeed, some publishers will even recommend you get an agent before there’s any negotiation; they’d much rather deal with a professional. It’s said that, if you do get the call from a publisher, you automatically say, “I’ll have my agent contact you” — whether you have an agent or not. If you call agents and tell them about the offer, they will often jump at the chance to take you on. After all, it’s a quick way for them to make a buck. The hardest part has been done; all they have to do is negotiate a contract, which means they (and you) will be paid in a couple of months, not several years.

3. How are agents paid?

   Agents are paid by publishers. Usually, when they sell your book, the check is written out to the agent. The agent then takes his percentage of this amount and sends you the remainder. Most literary agents nowadays take 15% of any money paid you; a few still stick with the old rate of 10%. (Screenplay agents are required to only charge 10%.) If the agent sells your book to a non-North-American publisher, they usually take 20%, since they often work through a subagent.

   Some agents also pass through charges for expenses to their authors. This can happen in different ways. Most commonly, an agent will pass along charges for “extraordinary” expenses. These include charges for such things as Express Mail, Special Couriers, and other items that are not the usual part of doing business. Regular postage and copying costs are not extraordinary. Agents generally deduct these expenses from any money due you. In other words, if you’re paid $1000 for your novel, and the agent spent an extra $15 for Federal Express, you’d be paid $835 instead of $850.

4. Where to I find information about agents?

   There are many sources, of varying degrees of reliability. The best is to ask a published writer about her agent. If the writer likes the agent, ask if the agent is taking clients. If so, contact the agent.

   Writer’s Market and Literary Market Place list agents in their yearly volume. Check out the agent entries, looking for people who represent authors in your field of writing. Look for names of clients and recent sales.

   You can find ads for agents in Writer’s Digest. However, many of these are for sham agents who take money and do little to advance your career. I would strongly urge you to look elsewhere. Good agents don’t take out ads to find clients.

5. How do I choose an agent?

   This is the hardest question to answer. Anyone can call herself an agent. Scams are common; the pages of Writer’s Digest are filled with people who claim to be literary agents, but who have never sold a book in their life. Even among legitimate agents, one agent may be perfect for you, but all wrong for someone else.

   The first step is to eliminate the scams. The quickest way is to stick to one invariable rule:

   Never, under any circumstances whatsoever, pay money to an agent.

   If you follow this, you automatically eliminate the frauds. A fraud is out to get your money. A few years ago, scam agents charged “reading fees.” Lately, as word has slowly gotten out that this is the sure sign of a ripoff, the same agents are charging for “expenses.” Sound plausible, but the reality is that legitimate agents don’t ask for money in advance for any reason.

   If you send money to an agent in advance, there’s no guarantee she’ll do anything other than cash your check. A legitimate agent doesn’t get paid unless she sells your novel; a fraud isn’t going to go to the bother.

   Other signs to be wary of:

   • Agent asks you for money up front. Yes, I know I just said this, but it bears repeating. Do not pay any agent, and especially don’t pay anything in advance merely to have him represent you.
   • Agent won’t give you the names of his clients and recent sales. Always ask for this. A legitimate agent is all too happy to recount his successes; most send out press releases whenever they sell a book. A fraud won’t tell you (usually citing “confidentiality”), because it gives you a handle to track him down (and because he often has no recent sales).
   • Agent recommends an editorial service. Be very wary here. Real agents either like your manuscript or pass on it; if it’s close, they may ask you to revise it yourself. There is, however, a common scam where the agent recommends an editorial service. There’s a good chance the service is paying the agent a kickback to make that recommendation. (Note: probably the most notorious of these editorial services is a place called Edit Ink. Don’t even consider any agent who mentions Edit Ink.)
   • Agent has contacted you. Agents don’t need to go out of their way to find clients. But it’s quite common for frauds to buy mailing lists of writers and go fishing. Unless you have published something, or otherwise have a reputation as a writer, no real agent is going to contact you out of the blue.
   • Agent’s contract has a time limit. Agents used to work on a handshake basis, but nowadays even good agents often have contracts. But legitimate agency contracts are open ended: the continue until either party decides to quit. Frauds set a time limit, since this allows them to ask you for a further fee for “expenses” or “representation.”
   • Agent claims sales to a vanity press. A vanity press is one where the author pays to be published. No real agent would even consider sending a manuscript to one (how could they make any money, if the publisher isn’t going to pay?). Some agents do recommend vanity presses, most likely because they are getting kickback from the press (how else do they get paid?)
   • Agent asks you to put up your money in advance. What I tell you three times is true.

   If an agent does any of these things, go somewhere else. There is little chance any agent who has these policies will be any help at all to you, and could do great damage to your career — with you paying for the privilege of having them ruin you. It’s just not worth it.

   For more information about how agents work, check out this article by Dan Perez.

6. How do I contact an agent?

   Once past this hurdle, the question becomes one of nuances. Does the agent seem interested in having you as a client? Does she have some sort of vision for your career? What do her other clients think of her?

   Most agents do business by mail (a few by e-mail). The first thing to do is to send a query letter. The query letter should introduce you to the agent. Explain that you are looking for representation for your completed book. Describe the book in general terms (i.e., it’s a science fiction novel), but don’t summarize the plot. Mention any publishing history (if you have one, if not, say nothing) or any background information that might indicate a relevant area of expertise (if there’s nothing directly relevant, leave this out, too). Keep the query letter short (if it’s more than one page, it’s way too long). Be sure to include a self-addressed stamped envelope for a reply. Send it off.

   A question that crops up is whether you can query several agents at a time. It all depends on what you’re comfortable with. It’s generally acceptable to send off multiple query letters, so if you want to go that way, do so. However, once an agent asks to see your manuscript (or more likely, sample chapters and an outline), you should send it to that agent alone, and to none other until he says yes or no. If you get a second request, wait until you hear back from the first agent before sending it along (it isn’t necessary to tell the second agent it’s out somewhere. Just say nothing until you’re ready to send it to her).

   Incidentally, your agent hunt can be separate from the hunt for a publisher. You can send the book out to editors while agents are deciding; if the book sells, call the agent who is currently considering it. Note, however, that an agent often wants to market the book from scratch, and has a slight preference toward a book that has yet to be rejected.

7. How do I create an outline and sample chapters?

   These are essential to selling a novel. Most agents (and publishers) want to see these instead of a full manuscript (note: if at all possible, it’s best to find a way to send a full manuscript. But be careful: doing this when the agency/publisher doesn’t allow it may mean that your book will not be read. You can break this rule, but be prepared to suffer the consequences).

   The sample chapters are always the first chapters of the book. Usually the first three, but if you’re writing extremely short chapters, send the first 50-60 pages (don’t stop in the middle of a chapter). The idea is to give the editor/agent an idea of your ability to write.

   An outline runs around 20 pages and describes the action in the book. It is usually written in the present tense (our hero kills off all the soldiers, but the princess is kidnapped by the Grand Vizier). Include any particularly important lines of dialog and all important scenes as you lay out the plot and all subplots.

   Some agents prefer a synopsis to an outline. This is shorter (5 pages) and is more of an overview. Needless to say, either your outline or your synopsis must be well written and interesting.

8. What happens if I don’t get an agent?

   There’s no reason you can’t market your novel yourself. There are a few hurdles, but it’s eminently possible. It isn’t the end of your career, so just keep on plugging. Sooner or later, it will click for you.

—

Chuck Rothman has been writing SF since way back in the previous century, with stories in Asimov’s, F&SF, Realms of Fantasy, the current issue of Space and Time, and dozens of other magazines, some of which are still publishing.  He lives in Schenectady with his wife, poet Susan Noe Rothman, daughter Lisa (just back from the Peace Corps), and cat Lightning.  He is looking for an agent.

Copyright © 1998 by Robert A. Metzger. First published in the Summer 1998 issue of the Bulletin of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

Interstellar space travel. We dream about it. We write about it. Science fiction writers have come up with all manners of interstellar travel, ranging from multigenerational arks, to wormhole generating warp drives that can spit you across the galaxy in a blink of an eye. As wondrous and amazing as all these approaches may be, most suffer from a very fundamental problem.

Traveling for long distances, over long periods of time, can be a colossal pain in the butt. You can never pack all your stuff. You always forget something. Did you lock the door? Did you turn off the iron? You forgot to say good-bye to Aunt Mildred, who will be dead by some 12,000 years when you return due to relativistic effects. And then there is that library book you forgot to return.

What to do?

The answer should be obvious. Just take it all with you.

I’ve got a solution, one that I consider very practical. My method does not require any magic physics – the ability to go faster than the speed of light, or jump about the galaxy by way of Star Gates. No. I am going to use good old fashion basic rocket science. Metzger’s Rocket Science Law #1 says that momentum must be conserved (some of you with a historical fetish and knowledge of obscure ancient scientists might recognize this as Newton’s Third Law of Motion – for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction). If you throw something out of the back of your rocket ship with mass m1 at a velocity v₁, then the momentum of this exhaust is just the product of these two components – m₁v₁. As a result, your rocket ship will be propelled in the opposite direction of the exhaust, and with the exact same momentum. This means that if your rocket ship weighs m₂, then the velocity of your rocket will be v₂ = m₁v₁/m₂. It’s as simple as that. If the mass of what you threw out is the same as your rocket, then you will move at the same speed as the rocket fuel (but in the opposite direction). The heavier the rocket, the slower you go.

You now know everything you need to know about rocket science.

Now back to my discussion about taking it all with you.

Forget all this business about building really big spaceships, or hallowing out asteroids and strapping on big fusion engines. No. The ideal solution is to simply move the entire planet. If you want to travel the 4 light years to Alpha Centauri, then just move the Earth those 4 light years. That way you don’t have to pack your bags.

It all goes with you.

Now there is one little problem with this plan. We depend on the Sun to keep everything running on this planet. Without the Sun we’d all be popsicles by the time we moved Earth out past the orbit of Mars. Well, the answer to that problem is obvious. We’ll need to take the Sun with us.

What the heck, let’s just move the entire solar system.

And here is the really beautiful part of this plan. You don’t have to do a single thing to planet Earth. Unlike the case in which you try to move the Earth, you don’t have to drain the oceans to get enough hydrogen to run the big fusion reactors needed to move the planet (which would probably occupy all of Australia and a sizable chunk of Europe). If you move the Sun, the Earth, along with all the other planets, just come along for the ride by way of gravitational attraction.

So all we have to do is move the Sun.

First, we need some sort of engine, something to heat up our fuel so it is moving really fast when we blow it out of the back of the engine (remember Metzger’s First Law). Well, we are in luck. The sun is the perfect engine. In fact that’s all it is. It’s one big fusion reactor. And the really amazing part is that it is almost all fuel. There is very little overhead. If and when we ever build a fusion reactor on Earth, the thing will probably weigh in at several thousand tons and be able to fuse a few micrograms of hydrogen. Not a very efficient use of mass. The sun is 78% hydrogen by weight, all of which can be used for fusion to generate energy.

What else does the sun have? It is in possession of some really intense magnetic fields. And that is a good thing, because we can take advantage of those fields. Here is where I wave my future technology wand. I will speculate that in the not too distant future (100 to 1000 years) that we can perturb the magnetic fields in the sun. And why would we want to do that? The reason is that if you take a hydrogen atom (which consists of a proton and an electron) and ionize it (remove the electron from the proton), what you are left with is a positively charged proton and a negatively charged electron. Forget about the electron (it weighs some 1835 times less than the proton), and use the proton as the mass which you are going to shoot out of the Sun. It will be no problem. If you shape those magnetic fields right, the positively charged proton can be shot out of the Sun moving at nearly the speed of light. It’s just like a particle accelerator.

Proton propulsion.

We’ll need a lot of protons.

The sun weighs 2×10³⁰ kilograms (a 2 followed by thirty zeros), while a single proton weighs in at 0.167×10^-26 kilograms (that is 26 zeros before the decimal place). However, that is for a proton which is sitting still. If you get it going near the speed of light (3×10⁸ meter/sec) then its mass increases (special relativity). For this little example, let’s assume that we can use those magnetic fields to push the proton up to 99.9% of the speed of light. In that case, the proton’s mass has increased by a factor of 22 and now weighs in at 3.74×10^-26 kg. Well, shooting one relativistic proton out of the sun is not going to move the sun very fast by Metzger’s First Law. In fact, its velocity is going to be 5.61×10^-48 meter/sec. This is definitely not very fast. In fact, at this speed, if you wait 10 billion years, the sun would have moved some 10^-30 meters, or roughly one-billion-millionth of the width of an atom.

This is not what I would exactly call interstellar travel distances.

Obviously, what we need are more protons being shot out of our proton propulsion system. Let’s make it easy on ourselves, and say that we would like to get the Sun moving at 20% of the speed or light – .20c (that’s a good value – fast, but not so fast that the Sun’s mass increases very much due to relativistic effects). So by Metzger’s First Law, to get the Sun moving at .20c we would need to shoot out a mass moving at the speed of light which weighs .20 times the weight of the sun. That sounds bad. If we threw away 20% of the sun’s mass some bad things might happen on Earth. The gravitational tug on Earth would lessen, and our orbit would slip further out. Also, the energy output of the sun would lessen (it’s now got less fuel burning). Both these effects would really cool down the planet (perhaps that would be a good thing if we hadn’t yet addressed global warming). But fortunately, since our protons are now so heavy (because they’re moving at 99.9% c, and their mass has increased by a factor of 22), we need to roughly throw out only 1% of the Sun’s mass as long as it is in the form of these heavy protons.

Not so bad.

So here is the plan.

We turn on our proton rocket engine, and keep the exhaust pointed in the opposite direction from Alpha Centauri (you need to remember that the sun is rotating on its axis once every 25 days at the equator, so we need to keep shifting the location of our proton exhaust to take this into account). Let’s accelerate at a very gentle 0.01 g – that is only 1/100 of the gravitational force that we feel on Earth (by contrast astronauts may pull any where from 3 to 10 gees when launching from Earth). After one day of accelerating at that low rate, the Sun is already moving at 18,000 miles per hour. What we need to do is keep accelerating until we cover 2 light years distance (the half way point), and then turn the direction of our proton exhaust by 180°, so that we can then decelerate back to zero velocity over the next 2 light years (quite some braking distance). So the question is, how long does it take to cover those 2 light years, and what is your velocity when you reach that point? The equations are really easy:

D = .5AT²
V = AT

Where D is the distance covered (in this case 2 light years which is 1.86×1016 meters), V is the velocity of the sun when you reach 2 light year mark, A is the acceleration (which for 1/100 of a g is 0.098 m/s²) and T is the time in seconds. Performing those calculations (I will leave that as an exercise for the reader), it turns out that the 2 light year distance is covered in 19.5 years, at which point the velocity of the solar system will be just .2c. Isn’t that handy, since I have already showed you that by Metzger’s First Law we can get the solar system moving to .2c by throwing out 1% of the sun’s mass, just as long as the proton exhaust is moving at 99.9% of c. During our 19.5 year outbound acceleration we are tossing protons out of the sun at a rate of 6.6×10²⁰ kg/sec. That is a lot of protons (actually 1.77×10⁴⁶ protons/sec). Once we reach the halfway point and turn the direction of the proton engine, it takes another 19.5 years to bring the sun to a stop right in the neighborhood of Alpha Ceauri. Total trip time is 39 years, and you’ve used up 2% of the Sun’s mass.

39 years is nothing – half of a human lifetime. And remember that you never even had to leave home. Once you get to Alpha Centauri you can explore, take pictures, visit the locals, colonize, do whatever you’d like. You can refuel the sun by gobbling up whatever gas giants you might find there, or by siphoning off a bit of the local Sun’s mass. And then you can be on your way to the next solar system that you’d like to explore.

Make it a 3 million year trip – the scale of time during which proto-humans evolved into us. If you arrive at a new solar system every 50 years, then the human race will have explored some 60,000 solar systems and traveled 240,000 light years during those scant 3 million years.

240,000 light years!

The diameter of our galaxy is only 100,000 light years. During those 3 million years you could travel from one end of the galaxy and back again. And after all that exploring, perhaps the human race would be ready to make the big jump to neighboring galaxies. Andromeda is only 2.2 million light years away. So what if it takes us some 11 million years to get there. That is just a blink in geological time.

And what does it matter, because we will have never left home.

And think about this. Why stop at merely moving the Sun. The same approach could be used to move entire galaxies. We all know that the universe about us is expanding, all these distant galaxies hurtling away from us, all this motion an artifact of the Big Bang. Perhaps not an artifact of the Big Bang. Maybe the resident big brains of our universe have converted the galaxies into massive spacecraft, and they are just going on a little outing to visit the neighbors.

NEWS YOU CAN USE

Fuse This

Fusion reactors in science fiction are as common place as Star Trek novelizations – all pretty much the same thing, based on the same premise, using the same old tired technology. Fusion reactors come in two flavors – get a big plasma chamber, add monster superconducting magnets to hold that plasma in, and then push the temperatures and pressures high enough (trying to build a little sun) and atoms fuse together, throwing off some energy. The other approach is to bombard a small pellet of fuel with some mighty laser/ion beams, and as the pellet implodes due to the shockwave generated, the atoms in the pellet fuse together, throwing off some energy.

That’s how it’s typically done in science fiction.

And that’s also how it’s typically done in the real world. No, at the moment there are no actual fusion reactors producing more energy than they consume, but things are getting close. In the next ten years a monster called ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) which will cost $10 billion may be built, and may just produce more energy than it consumes. ITER follows the old tried and true approach of building a little sun by getting a plasma as hot and dense as possible. Other folks at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory are about to break ground on the NIF (National Ignition Facility) and will give the laser implosion approach a go around.

Those are the two politically correct approaches.

Those are the two which fill our science fiction futures.

But those futures may not come to pass. A few new things are on the fusion horizon. I’m not talking about cold fusion in test tubes, or someone selling snake oil and fusion reactors from the back of a van. This is real.
The Z Machine (1). Forget all those liquid helium cooled superconducting magnets to hold your plasma in. There are other ways to generate a magnetic field. Any time electric current flows through a wire, it generates a magnetic field. What researchers have done at Sandia National Laboratories is to send an enormous blast of electricity through an array of parallel wires – enough electricity to vaporize the wires, transforming them into a plasma, which in turn gets compressed by the magnetic fields generated by the current flow. Compressed plasma gets hot – in this case 1.5 million degrees. Right now the experimental Z machine can produce about 20% of the energy, 40% of the power, and 33 to 50% of the temperature required for nuclear fusion to produce more energy than it consumes. As a bonus, this machine produces X-rays in the 200 terrawatt range (that is million-million watt), more than enough to X-ray every set of teeth on the planet.

Xenon droplets (2). You might think that 1.5 million degrees is hot, but compared to what physicists at Imperial College in London have heated up, the Z-machine might as well be spitting out ice-cubes. By hitting a microscopic droplet of xenon atoms (with about 2500 atoms) with a laser beam, the electrons are torn from the xenon atoms forming an electron cloud which then absorbs energy from the laser. This energy is then transferred to the xenon ions (a xenon atom which is missing some electrons), heating them up to temperatures as high as a reported 940 million degrees, which is 30 times hotter than the core of the sun.
There is more than one way to fuse a cat. Let’s see some creative fusion reactors.

Strange Sightings

A strange sighting which I’ve recently heard about is that of flying frogs (3). These frogs are not flying about by way of some mutant flapping wings. It’s nothing that complicated. These frogs use diamagnetism to perform this feat. When a diamagnetic material is placed in a magnetic field, the electrons orbiting the atoms within the material have a tendency to line up, generating a magnetic field which opposes the field that it’s been placed in. And just what materials are diamagnetic? Almost anything if a large enough external magnetic field is applied.

This includes frogs.

A consortium of researchers from such prestigious institutions as The University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands, the University of Sao Carlos in Brazil, and the University of Nottingham in England used a powerful solenoid magnet (think wires wrapped around a pipe), and placed a frog inside the center of the magnet.

The magnet turns on, and the frog floats.

They’ve also reported success with grasshoppers, plants and water droplets.

The race has begun. I’m certain that it is only a matter of time before monstrous solenoid magnets are installed in Disneyland or Las Vegas (the line between those two continues to blur) so guests may float about. If those two locations are a bit too alien for you, then consider some distant planet with a magnetic field so powerful that the resident aliens can float within it.

Another strange sighting has been reported by Marcus Chown (one of our fellow SFWA members) in a piece he wrote about the trouble when animals come into contact with the Tevatron particle accelerator at Fermilab (4). As expected, there are any number of roasted raccoons, rodents and reptiles which squirmed their way into the facility in search of warmth and then get toasted on megavoltage equipment. Nothing all that weird there. The real weirdness has to do with the 40 buffalo which live at Fermilab. They scamper about the grounds. Some of the locals believe that the buffaloes are very sensitive to radiation and that the labcoats at Fermilab use them as an early warning system. Other rumors deal with a mutant 4 meter tall buffalo which has taken a few too many protons to the chromosomes.

Hello, let me talk to Chris Carter of X-Files.

Look Ma, No Engine

Getting a person, or a piece of equipment into orbit is mighty inefficient. You either need to strap on some huge solid rocket boosters and fuel tanks onto the spacecraft, or put the payload on top hundreds of feet of fuel and engines which will be jettisoned on the way to orbit.

What you need to be really efficient is a rocket without an engine or fuel. Just make the whole thing payload. Well, a group of scientists at the USAF Research Laboratory’s Propulsion Directorate at Edwards AFB, and at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center at Huntsville, have succeeded in launching a vehicle which has no engine or fuel.

You haven’t heard about this breakthrough?

The craft weighs 50 grams and it has reached altitudes as high as 14 feet.

Well, the technology is not quite at the point where you can line up and buy a ticket to launch yourself into Earth orbit, but this still represents a breakthrough. How this little spacecraft works is that a 10 kW pulsed laser is aimed at an annular chamber at the bottom of the craft, where the laser beam is focused, and then bursts the air in that region into a plasma, which in turns explodes away from the rocket, creating thrust. Plans call for the laser-based projectile to reach an altitude in excess of 3000 feet in 18 months. Eventually, an orbital concept would use a ground based laser to heat air while the craft is still in the atmosphere, and then onboard gas when in space.

No engine required. (5)

Turbolution

Turbolution is my word, so please be sure to mention my name when you pick up your Hugo for the story which features this little technology gem. Evolution is a drag. It works so, so slow. Yes, if a species gets the crap knocked out of it for a few million years, and manages not to go extinct in the process, then said species may grow 25% larger and sport a new set of fangs to defend itself.

What we need is turbolution – something to allow a species to evolve in an afternoon. Well, thanks to group working at the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics at the University of Sussex, they may have opened the door to turbolution. Consider a typical species which can reproduce itself in five years. In one million years that means you’re looking at 200,000 generations. Not too bad – hopefully something new can evolve in that amount of time.

Now, consider if you are not operating in the organic world, but instead, in the inorganic world – in this case a world dominated by Silicon. These researchers are using a special type of Silicon chip to study turbolution – a field programmable gate array (FPGA). This is a piece of Silicon hardware which can be rewired by software into a nearly infinite number of different types of circuits. One moment the circuit is a modem, and the next it is an amplifier.

As an example, suppose you want to build a circuit in which its output is run into to a speaker, and you want the speaker to say “Hello Dave, this is Hal”. How would you design such a circuit? I don’t know, and with an FPGA and turbolution you don’t need to know. Just start off with a few thousand transistors randomly wired together, and use an audio comparator to check its output to your desired one. Try it 100 times. The ten which come closest you keep, and the other 90 you toss out. You then take the 10 close ones and have the computer randomly rewire some of the transistors. You try another 100 times and again pick out the ten best. You run this process as many times as needed until your circuit tells you what you want to hear.

How long would it take to run those 200,000 generations? The chip can be reconfigured in a matter of milliseconds. The real time is consumed with each version of the chip being allowed to babble for the 2 seconds it needs in its attempt to say “Hello Dave, this is Hal”. So if it takes 2 seconds for an attempt, how long does it take for 200,000 attempts (remember that for the organic it took 1 million years). I’ll do the math for you. It would take 4 days and 15 hours! This improves on organic evolution by a factor of nearly 80 million.

Think about what this means. Build a brain in hardware that can direct its own evolution, and you will find that if it was able to burp and recite Nursery rhymes on Monday morning, that come Friday afternoon, it will have ignited its own Big Bang and become the God of its own universe. (6)

Tabletop Black Holes

Here is a bit of Physics 101 for you. The word power is used all the time, and quite often used incorrectly. Power is defined as the time rate at which work is done, or the amount of energy consumed in a unit of time. A 100 Watt light bulb delivers 100 Watt of power, and in the process it burns up energy at a rate of 100 joules per second (that is how one defines the unit of energy measurement – joules). So who cares? If you burn this energy at twice the rate, then you would have a 200 Watt light bulb, but of course, if you had a fixed amount of energy, it would only burn for half as long before that energy was used up. The faster you use it, the greater the power, but of course that power lasts for a shorter amount of time. Energy is conserved.

Again, so what?

If you take a modest amount of energy, but use it up extremely fast, then for that brief moment, you can generate some fantastically large powers. This is how a new generation of extremely high power lasers are being built, lasers which fire their pulse of energy in times which are measured in femtoseconds (which is one million-billionth of a second – 10-15 seconds). These lasers are now capable of producing power of 1015 Watt, which is a fantastic power level, even though the total energy dissipated is comparable to that burned by a 1 Watt light bulb in 1 second. But in this case that modest amount of energy was burned so incredibly fast. Again, and for the last time, so what? Well, during that femtosecond time interval, so much energy is packed into so short a time and in such a small volume of space, that any charged particles trapped in that region would experience the accelerations, and the electric/magnetic fields that, a particle would experience close to the horizon of a black hole.

Think about that the next time you flip on a light bulb.

Remember to turn off the black hole when you leave the room. (7)

BITS AND PIECES

• Still outlining that 27 volume Mars epic, and want to make sure that you have the latest data before you start terraforming? Then I suggest you check out a special issue of Science which has every detail of the recent Pathfinder mission. (8)
• The University of Tokyo has developed the first biomechatronic robot, by interfacing a cockroach with a robot, in such a manner that the cockroach’s nerve impulses run the robot. Great – a robot which tries to burrow under the refrigerator when the kitchen lights come on (9).
• Another vermin tale. Having trouble routing the latest high speed cable through your business or home? No problem, just call up Rattie. Wearing a harness to pull a nylon string and computer cable behind her, this rat can get the job done. She doesn’t even mind working around asbestos. (10)
• How many elements are there? In the prenuclear days the periodic table ended at element 92 – uranium. Today, atom smashers have pushed the number of elements up to 112. But most of these superheavy atoms are extremely unstable, decaying into lighter weight elements within a few milliseconds. However, theory predicts that element 114 may be quite stable. And what might one make with a stable superheavy element which has never before existed? How should I know? You guys are members of the SFWA – you figure it out. Oh yes, element 126 might be even more stable than 114. (11)
  1. Ivars Peterson, “The Z Machine,” Science News, Vol 153, January 17, 1998, pg. 46.
  2. Jeffrey Winters, “Cluster Bombs,” Discover, January 1998, pg. 52.
  3. Corinna Wu, “Floating Frogs,” Science News, Vol 152, December 6, 1997, pg. 362.
  4. Marcus Chown, “Reckless Raccoon’s Big Day,” New Scientist, December 20/27, 1997, pg. 56.
  5. Paul Proctor, “Laser Thrust Flies,” Aviation Week and Space Technology, September 29, 1997, pg. 15, and Aviation Week and Space Technology, November 3, 1997, pg. 19.
  6. Clive Davidson, “Creatures from Primordial Silicon,” New Scientist, 15 November 1997, pg. 30.
  7. Gerard A. Mourou et al, “Ultrahigh-Intensity Lasers: Physics of the Extreme on a Tabletop,” Physics Today, January 1998, pg. 22.
  8. M.P. Golombek et al, “Overview of the Mars Pathfinder Mission and Assessment of Landing Site Predictions,” Science, Vol. 278, 5 December 1997, pg. 1743.
  9. Philip Yam, “Roaches at the Wheel,” Scientific American, January 1998, pg. 45.
  10. Toni Feder, “Rat Wires Schools for the Internet,” Physics Today, January 1998, pg. 51.
  11. Richard Stone, “An Element of Stability,” Science, Vol 278, 24 October 1997, pg. 571.

Bob Metzger received his PhD in electrical engineering from UCLA in 1983. He spent 10 years at the Hughes Research Labs in Malibu, California, building high-speed electronic devices and trying to beat obnoxious atoms into submission. He is currently on the faculty of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta GA, where he now attempts to beat both obnoxious atoms and students into submission. He writes a science column for Aboriginal SF, and his fiction has appeared in Aboriginal, Weird Tales, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Amazing, and Science Fiction Age. His novel Quad World was published in 1991 by Roc. His e-mail address is rametzger@aol.com.

Props Master, Eric Hart, has an introduction to furniture with a number of useful links for European influenced furniture.