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Thursday, December 19, 2013

WARNING: SOMETHING ELSE IS HAPPENING by Lindsay Edmunds

Today, I have the honor of welcoming one of my favorite authors to my blog. I loved Lindsay Edmund's first novel CEL & ANNA, which I almost didn't read because science fiction isn't usually the genre I'm interested in. But I liked Lindsay's blog posts and I figured I'll give it a try. I am glad I did. I loved her interesting and quirky characters, the humor, and the funny jabs at modern government and society. But most of all, I realized that behind those imaginary beings are real people with real human feelings and problems. Besides, who has ever written about a computer who falls in love with its owner? What was even more intriguing was the fact that I fell in love with Cell, the computer. But enough preamble. Here is Lindsay. Take it away!
 
Good People Doing Their Best

Your family trilogy is about good people doing their best. Karla Bocelli and Andreas O’Reilly and their three children do not have trouble-free lives, but their approaches to trouble are heartening. These people fix things. They also make things: Karla is a painter; Andreas, a stonemason. This is heartening.

 I read EMILIA on a summer Sunday, and it was a pleasure to hang out with these folks. The armchair tourist in me also enjoyed the locales of Switzerland, France, Peru.

Scratch the surface of an ordinary life and you find there is no such thing as “ordinary.” It’s a myth, and a lazy myth, that a person can be reduced to a cliché.

In this blog announcing my new novel WARNING: SOMETHING ELSE IS HAPPENING, I want to
focus on the human characters and how they solve their problems.

Living Life No Matter What

In October 2013 I spent a happy long weekend in Chicago, Illinois, aka the murder capital of the United States. In the murder capital of the United States, people were out walking, driving, shopping, chatting, sightseeing, running businesses, and walking dogs. Even in the most dangerous parts of the city people were out living their lives, heroically though no one will give them medals for it.

The characters in WARNING live in an unstable society under an overstretched, unraveling government. The United States was ravaged by another civil war and has been reassembled under the name of the Reunited States. The country is showing signs of coming undone again.

In spite of the hard times they endure, people get on with their lives. They have relationships, they do their jobs, they cope with the harshness and weirdness of their lives. They chase their dreams. They unravel mysteries. They pray. They make mistakes and correct them. They adapt, adapt, adapt.

Computers have turned us into a nation of typists, but computers will never turn us into computers. In the end, as novelist Russell Hoban put it: “the things that matter don’t necessarily make sense.”

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WARNING: SOMETHING ELSE IS HAPPENING is Lindsay Edmunds’s second science fiction novel. It is a dystopian fairy tale, populated with Networld e-beasts who feel about humans the way natives feel about foreign invaders. Its regular price will be $3.99. but it is on sale for $1.99 through January 19, 2014, at Amazon, Amazon UK, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords.

Lindsay Edmunds blogs about machine intelligence, books and independent publishing, movies and TV, and life in southwestern Pennsylvania at Writer’s Rest. Drop by, say hello, and share a story or two. She is newly on Tumblr, looking for people to draw her e-beasts and sometimes blogging about old movies, and on Twitter.






Saturday, December 7, 2013

The Journey of Writing

Every writer knows the feeling of elation when he or she finishes a book. "I did it. It's done!" Then comes the moment of truth. I realize that although I am pleased and happy to have arrived, the book I wrote is not the book I intended to write. It falls short of my initial expectations.

Now, don't get me wrong. I don't mean to be negative. I don't mean to belittle what I have achieved. It is more than I ever dreamed of. But I am not there yet.

What keeps me going is the process of writing, the insights I gain, the joy and (sometimes) the despair I experience. It's a journey and I may never get to the ultimate destination. But I will reach milestones and enjoy the vista from a mountain top, from where I can see the next, higher mountain. I rest and then go on ...