Finally, we’ll finish our articles with a video of the Saturn V rocket launch on the Washington Monument.
You can compare it with the actual Apollo 11 video below. This live event was recorded fifty years ago.
My fourth novel, Secret Supers, began a middle-school science fiction series. The premise: what would happen if disabled seventh graders got superpowers?
I read half of the book to my elementary age daughter and she loved it so much she finished the book without me!! She still talks about the characters and their unusual super powers.
My 5 Best SciFi Story Ideas from science articles I’ve found around the internet. Let’s start with number one.
A quick summary of the previous story: The WannaCry worm came close to crashing the internet. It was only stopped by the quick thinking and hard work of two cybersecurity specialists.
How would you write a SciFi story off this? What would happen if the whole world used virtual reality and hackers attacked that? Reply with your best ideas and I’ll give each of you a short story.
This video is kind of science-fictiony, but more of a cautionary tale is what can go wrong with high-risk rocketry.
5 Best SciFi Story Ideas – Your Next Idea
What if? That’s the essence of writing science fiction. What if the moon program hadn’t been cancelled by a budget conscious Congress? What if we discovered something that changed human history? Again, comments to this blog post or email replies will get a free short story from me
Along with writing stories comes editing. Editing separates the lemons from the melons.
Your Third Science Fiction Seed
Here, I present to you a scifi take on pterodactyls.
Would you like pterodactyls flying around? Would you hunt them?
Then, speaking of things that fly, you have this unique video.
Your Fourth Science Fiction Inspiration
Where can you go with an AI poker player? Clean out Las Vegas? Or take over Las Vegas? Or flee assassins seeking to kill you?
Then you can get this science fiction short story I wrote, based upon a jar of pickles. And so much more.
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The Last of 5 Best SciFi Story Ideas
Gravity lensing. Now used for astronomy. Could it be used for space travel? Teleportation? The sky’s the limit! No, your imagination is all that limits you.
No scientific article or paper is complete without a pie chart. So here it is.
Thanks for reading to the end of the blog! Laugh through my first novel, Zombie Turkeys for free by clicking this following cover.
Click to get your free copy of Zombie Turkeys
Sam Melvin, an underachieving e-reporter from a small town, changes forever when he meets turkeys that won’t stay dead. You can shoot ’em, chop ’em, burn ’em—they come back stronger. The undead plague of poultry spreads uncontrollably, rocking the whole country. As Sam tracks down the zombie turkeys and how to eradicate them, his editor, Lisa Kambacher, nags him to turn his stories and expenses in on time. During their years of working together, Lisa has mellowed into an irascible pinchpenny.
Lisa snipes at Sam for plebeian writing but uses her intelligence to pursue the lucrative carnivorous turkey story. Sam and Lisa ricochet across the landscape, tracking turkeys and fleeing the bloodthirsty hordes. Careening from shell-shocked grocery store owners fighting turkeys crawling out of refrigerators, to machine-gunning turkey farmers, to secret militia, Sam and Lisa doggedly report. Throughout the turkey apocalypse, they dare ravaged cities, plow knee deep in gore and corpses, and upload streams of zombie turkey video news to the world.
Paranoid militias clashing with the federal government forces and unkillable turkeys make Sam and Lisa doubt their ability to survive. Sam and Lisa have no superpowers. If you have a heart condition or lack humor, you should not read Zombie Turkeys, no matter how much you want to find out what happens.
What was most surprising to me about Andy Zach’s Zombie Turkeys? – that is qualified as an actual adventure story! I wasn’t expecting that. About a quarter way in, when a young reporter gets the assignment to follow a swarm of 10,000 rampaging turkeys into a stretch of unfamiliar woodlands, it actually grabbed my attention while I was driving, and I was scared for the reporter (even without the zombie element, 10.000 turkeys is a LOT, and being a reporter is no protection against 10,000 wild animals).
5 Writing Posts to Make You a Better Author – where am I going with this? I found these great articles teaching writing skills. Then I thought, “Maybe other people can benefit from these. Other authors, poets, non-fiction writers and students can all learn.
So tell me if you like this kind of blog post here.
5 Writing Posts – Your First Lesson
Just kidding! I thought I’d start with a laugh. Here’s the real article next.
Yes, that’s right. This initial post covers everything you should NOT do as a writer. It’s a simple list, but it covers most of the bad things writers can do and do do.
Your Next Lesson
Now you get a video tutorial on how to structure a book.
Various plot structures
The following quickly summarizes :
1. Hero’s Journey 2. Save the Cat – 15 beat story structure 3. The Plot Embryo 4. 27 chapters (3 act structure) Each act into 3 blocks and each block has three chapters.
Do I follow these structures? Not consciously. I seek to start quickly with a tense situation, and build through each chapter. I’ll have ‘relief’ chapters where I surprise the reader with new, interesting characters and conflicts, before returning to the big conflict. The problems build through the book until they’re finally resolved in a big climax. Then I throw in a twist at the end.
I did this for each of my books:
Andy Zach’s novels
5 Writing Posts – Your Third Lesson
Now, let’s tackle that dreaded activity–editing after you’ve written your book.
My quick summary, in time order:
Developmental editing – story structure and organization
Line editing – making each sentence the best it can be.
Copy editing – getting rid of stupid speling misteaks and grammar errorz and punctuation!!!
Proofreading – how does the final copy look on the page? Font size, spacing, paragraphs, page breaks.
For my latest novel, Secret Supers, just published last March, I tapped Leslie McKie’s expertise.
Aside from professional editing, she’s taught middle school and disabled children. She was perfect to edit my book about seventh-grade disabled superheroes.
Secret Supers Cover
For my layout or proofreading edit, I use Rik Hall at Wild Seas Editing. He’s formatted all my books for print and ebook versions.’
Your Fourth Writing Post
More on plotting! I dislike any structure forcing me to write a particular plot, but I follow everything it says.
Your Last Writing Tip
Naturally, I couldn’t resist publishing another joke first. Your real, last tip comes next.
