M. Darusha Wehm

Science fiction and mainstream books by award-winning author M. Darusha Wehm

News

Nothing Exists in a Vacuum

Recently, we celebrated the third anniversary of leaving Canada. It’s not that we’re particularly happy to not be living in Canada – rather, we miss the places and people all the time. But instead we were celebrating the three years of traveling the world, testing our limits and living the Big Adventure of living on a small (relative to the grand expanse of the ocean) sailboat.

It’s been a fabulous experience, but we both feel like it’s time to slow down. We aren’t necessarily giving up cruising, but we want a bit of a normal life for a while. So when we get to New Zealand this spring (fall, for you northern hemisphere folks), we plan to stick around for a while.

One of the reasons that this is a compelling choice for me, is that I really miss having an in-person writing community. I am well connected with other writers via the internet, and feel like I have a very supportive online community. But I often miss the meetings I had with the critique group I was involved with back in Canada, and am really looking forward to participating in the vibrant artistic community alive in New Zealand.

I’m already a member of SpecFicNZ, though I never managed to make a meetup when we were there last year. I’m hoping to remedy that situation in 2012, and also hope to possibly attend one of the Spec Fic conferences.

While writing is fundamentally a solitary activity, it doesn’t have to be a lonely one. I’m looking forward to connecting with new colleagues in an active scene in one of the most beautiful places in the world.

I’m an Alien

[This was originally published as a guest post on John Mierau’s blog]

Alien 2

(photo by rarebeasts)

As I write this, I have been an alien for over three years. I’m a Canadian, but I’ve been in Canada for fewer than two of the past 36 months. I live on a sailboat and since 2008 I’ve been traveling the world about as fast as a dog can run. Sometimes it seems hard to believe.

But all authors spend much of their lives as foreigners. In our stories we, like our readers, are visitors to the fictional lands we’ve created. But unlike our readers, we authors are the tour guides and as such we have to pay attention to the little things that the locals take for granted.

We need to spend some time in our stories, finding the best grocery stores, figuring out the local transit system and poking our noses into that hole in the wall eatery in the sketchy part of town. Each story is an opportunity for cultural exchange between the world we live in and the world of our characters.

Editor extraordinaire Ben Bova wrote, in the must-read The Craft Of Writing Science Fiction That Sells:

Your job as a writer is to make the reader live in your story. You must make the reader forget that he is sitting in a rather uncomfortable chair, squinting at the page in poor light, while all sorts of distractions poke at him. You want your reader to believe that he is actually in the world of your imagination, the world you have created, climbing up that mountain you’ve written about, struggling against the cold and ice to find the treasure that you planted up at the peak.

Writers all know that the key to writing success is best distilled as “butt in chair.” But there’s more to writing great stories than just pounding away at the keyboard. If you want to create a world in your story that is more real to the reader than her own comfy reading chair, you need to get away from the keyboard every once in a while and interact with the real world, especially the parts of the world that are strange. At least, strange to you.

Whether you write mainstream young adult fiction, warm-hearted Christian romance or hard SF space opera, you can get ideas for settings, plots and characters from engaging with people and places that are unfamiliar to you. Visiting a foreign country (or even a foreign part of your own town) can open your eyes to new ways of living, to new styles of dress or culture and to new people.

My attraction to travel is, perhaps oddly for a writer, based more on seeing new places than meeting new people. The humbling solitude of sailing the wide open sea of the Pacific, craning my neck to follow a tropic bird soaring past the peaks of Polynesia, listening to the endless animal song in the jungles of Central America – these are the rewards I seek from a life on the move. But, even so, I know that those places that were the most wonderful of all I’ve visited were made that way as much by the people I met there as by the grandeur of the landscape.

Fiction writing is all about character. Settings, especially in science fiction and fantasy, are incredibly important, but without the characters we love to live through, all that worldbuilding is meaningless. If we want to write compelling stories, we need compelling characters in compelling situations. And travel, at its best and its worst, puts us in a position of meeting all kinds of characters.

Many of the people I’ve met along the way have found their ways into my stories – a turn of phrase here, a hair-raising anecdote there. I’ve learned that the more people I meet, from as diverse backgrounds as possible, the better and more real my characters have become. Plus, people tell wonderful stories about their lives and their homes. Just as a writer must be a reader, a storyteller must be a storylistener as well.

The places I’ve visited and the people I’ve met there don’t show up unadulterated in my stories. I don’t have a story about spending 30 hours on a dilapidated bus in South America and I don’t have a novel set in the ancient Mayan capital of Tikal. But those adventures have given me ideas which do appear in my stories, disguised by the veil of fiction but made more real because of my experience.

This is what fiction writers ultimately do – distill the kernels of their own experiences into stories that, even though they never factually occurred, expose a core human truth.

I have the great fortune of having spent over three years as a full-time traveler, but you don’t need to sail a boat half way around the world to see new places and meet new people. Go for lunch with a co-worker you hardly know. Take a bus to the nearest city or small town. Visit a different church or take in a public lecture at the local college. Expose yourself to something different; don’t be afraid to be the stranger in the room.

Travel doesn’t have to mean expensive vacations. Travel means encountering that which is different with an open mind and a true willingness to learn about something new. And after all, isn’t exposing us to different lives and different worlds what great stories do?

How to Survive the [blank] Apocalypse for Foodies

soup can 5-3-09 IMG_3506

photo by stevendepolo via flickr

Living on a sailboat in the tropics teaches a person many things: “tradewinds” does not mean 15 knots from the east all the time, stingrays are amazingly cuddly and eating food from stores doesn’t have to be awful.

We’ve been living in a special kind of future for the past couple of weeks — there’s no grocery store but there is broadband internet.  It’s a tough call whether the reverse would be preferable.  But there it is.  Due to a combination of events, we’ve been kind of stuck here, so I’ve gotten lots of recent practice with cooking from stores.

We keep a good amount of canned food and other stuff that lasts on board, exactly because of situations like this.  Even in places where there are supplies, sometimes the weather doesn’t let us get ashore or the shops themselves are out of things (the great Labasa butter shortage of ‘11, for example).  So I know how to manage on not much. Here’s how a reasonable supply of emergency food can be made palatable:

  1. Add a decent dried herb and spice collection to your Oh God, It’s The Zombies food horde.  A can of tomatoes, a can of beans, some onions and garlic aren’t much on their own, but with some nice curry powder, it’s a feast.  And it’s a proven fact that zombies hate the smell of curry.
  2. Making bread isn’t that hard.  So long as your yeast is alive and you have an oven, homemade bread will keep you going.  And PB and J tastes a million times better on warm, fresh bread.
  3. Couscous or bulghur beats rice any day when water or cooking fuel is scarce.  Both absorb less water and cook faster than rice, plus you can just chuck them in the sauce of your stew (see #1).  In a pinch, couscous can even be prepared with cold water, which works fine for your tabbuli salad (just add parsley and mint from your spice cabinet).
  4. Beans.  Pre-cooked protein and hours of entertainment after the meal.
  5. Lots of food can be kept unrefrigerated and therefore used in the direst of apocalyptic situations.  Eggs, most condiments, pickles, onions, potatoes, many cheeses, bread, peanut butter and jam all will last in a milk crate or backpack while fleeing the torch-wielding neighbours.  And if an egg does go off, it makes a decent projectile weapon.

So when you’re supplying to wait out some kind of catastrophe, you don’t have to live on hardtack or Clif Bars.  Just remember to bring bowls and spoons along with your shovel and towel.

Act of Will is a Parsec Award nominee

In excellent company, Act of Will was given the nod as a finalist in this year’s Parsec Awards.  The Parsecs celebrate excellence in speculative fiction podcasting, and it’s a great honour to have made it to the finals.

Congratulations to my co-finalists:

Junowrimo

About a month ago, I started to have this familiar feeling.  It’s kind of akin to heartburn crossed with nervousness.  I know that sorta sick sorta excited feeling.  It’s a novel idea.  Not a new or previously unthought-of idea.  No, it’s an idea for a novel.

But it’s not merely an idea.  That’s too small.  It’s like this universe is forming in my mind, small at first, then expanding rapidly until all these little details have been made extant – a character’s nickname, the colour of a house, the title (always the hardest part for me).  So.  I guess I’m writing another novel.

The timing wasn’t great, I thought, given that it’s May and all.  Then I heard about the Southern Cross Novel Challenge (SocNoc), and I was like, “Hey! That’s perfect!”

So, for the month of June, I’m pretending it’s Nano time and writing this novel that won’t get out of my head any other way.  It’s not like I have anything else to do here in Fiji where the water is clear and warm and full of beautiful fish to look at. No. Nothing else at all.

Thanks to author Brand Gamblin

Cheers to Brand Gamblin, author of the very fun YA space novel Tumbler (which I read and enjoyed a year or so ago) and the new book The Hidden Institute (which I’m starting soon).

Like me, Brand is an indie author who sells his fiction in paper and e-formats, as well as podcasting them in audio for free.

Check out his site or podiobooks.com for the audio for The Hidden Institute.

As I get support and help in promoting Act of Will from the podcasting and writing communities, I’ll be publicly thanking folks along the way. So, if you’re promoting me, let me know (send me email at darusha [at] darusha [dot] ca) so I can return the favour!

Cheers, @treed!

Podcast fan and self-professed “bitstrips addict” Thomas Reed made an awesome bitstrip comic about me and my books:

Is that cool, or what?!

As I get support and help in promoting Act of Will from the podcasting and writing communities, I’ll be publicly thanking folks along the way. So, if you’re promoting me, let me know (send me email at darusha [at] darusha [dot] ca) so I can return the favour!

Why I Love Goodreads

If you’ve never heard of Goodreads, it’s sort of like an online book club.  Or library.  Sort of.

Like Shelfari* and LibraryThing*, Goodreads is a social networky place where you can list the books you’re reading, have read and want to read.  You can read and post reviews, see what folks you know are reading and whatnot.  There are links to buy books online from every book page, too, so it’s easy to get your fix fast.

While this sounds cool, I’ve been surprised at how cool it really is.  I read a lot, like really A LOT, now, and a lot of the books disappear into book exchanges.  By keeping track of what I read, I can see what I’ve read and what I thought of it.  A great way to remember the books I’ve loved (or less than loved).

I also have managed to get great suggestions of books to read from people I know, which I probably wouldn’t have otherwise.  It’s not a very chatty social network, like Facebook or Twitter, though you can seamlessly post reviews and what you’re reading to either or both sites if you like.  For me, GR is more like a source I use to keep track of the books I’ve read and want to read with a dose of “ooh, look, she liked that?  Maybe I should read it, too” every once in a while.

Seriously, if you read a lot, check it out.

* I’ve never used Shelfari or LibraryThing, but I suspect they are just as cool, if one or either of them is more your cuppa tea.  

Thanks Chuck and Kreg of Technorama

If you like geeky, technology news with a hefty dose of humour, you should be subscribed to Technorama.

Chuck and Kreg are a pair of great guys who work in the IT industry as well as being SF fans. Their podcast is a mix of news, funny stories, technical tips and interviews. It’s a good laugh and you might even learn something.

Here’s a taste of what you can expect: Technorama Teaser

As I get support and help in promoting Act of Will from the podcasting and writing communities, I’ll be publicly thanking folks along the way. So, if you’re promoting me, let me know (send me email at darusha [at] darusha [dot] ca) so I can return the favour!