Creating a Fantastic but Believable Setting by BC Deeks, Paranormal Mystery Fiction Author

 

 Visit B.C. Deeks' BWL Author Page for Book and Purchase Information 

 

http://bookswelove.net/deeks-bc/

SETTING is crucial to a story’s development and the reader’s experience in any fictional work, but never more so, in my humble opinion, than in a fantasy. If an author is working on a contemporary story, you can count on the reader to have enough personal experience to fill in the blanks with minimal prompting. 

In the fantasy genre, all bets are off. It is up to the author to show the reader how far they should suspend their disbelief in every aspect of the world they are entering—from the ground they stand on, to the creatures they will encounter, the language that will be spoken…Indeed, every aspect of the reading experience can be distorted to best tell the story that is about to unfold. The setting where all this distortion will occur must support the changes from what the reader has come to expect in ‘real life.’

It would be jarring for a fur-covered fire breathing dragon to appear on the sunbaked beaches of Florida, for example. Not that it couldn’t be done but the author would sure have to work at developing plausibility for such a scenario.

When I created a family of supernatural beings inspired by witches, I needed to base them in a dimension that could support their use of powerful magic as a daily occurrence. I decided that not everyone should have such powerful magic, so therefore my primary characters would be the Guardians to the ruling Council of Master Witches. Their powers would draw from the elements of nature – air, water, fire, earth, and a fifth universal element known as Aether. The rest of the population would have diluted powers linked to nature but not of the same strength.

Since my characters must be freely able to interact with their elements, I supposed that they would need lush outdoor spaces, with mountains and forests, oceans and open skies. Yes, I thought, a rocky island out in the ocean…much like where I grew up! My magical dimension of The Otherland began to take shape. 

The Island of Newfoundland where I was born is definitely on earth although far enough out in the North Atlantic to forget at times. Its history dates back to the Vikings and leans heavily to Irish, who believe in everything from fairies to leprechauns, four-leaf clovers to banshees, and have all sorts of rituals to ward off evil spirits or bad luck. There were still Gaelic speakers in Newfoundland well into the 20th century and, like the Irish, we love to spin a tale!

Of course, my characters would travel to other dimensions, so I adopted the accepted fantasy principles of portal magic and integrated that into my imaginary world. My supernatural beings would have a gateway on the edge of the granite cliffs that allowed them to pass through to alternate realms, including the mortal world. Since I wanted to write a series, this would allow for a revolving door so they could visit a wider range of story settings like the coastal regions of Seattle or the mountains of Montana when adventure called. And adventure does summon the Egan family members...

Mythics and mortals battle dark forces in my epic paranormal mystery adventure trilogy, BEYOND THE MAGIC. In Book 1: WITCH UNBOUND, Marcus, the powerful eldest brother, is sent to the mortal realm to investigate the murder of two long-lost Guardians of The Otherland. Can he abandon everything he’s ever believed to save the life of an extraordinary witch who knows nothing of her heritage? Together they begin a quest to deflect an ancient prophecy that could destroy his world. Marcus’s brother, Theo, and sister, Elowyn, join that quest in Book 2: MORTAL MAGIC and Book 3: REBEL SPELL, respectively, coming in 2023.

Artificial Intelligence – Can You Program Creativity? By BC Deeks, Paranormal Mystery Fiction Author

Visit B.C. Deeks' BWL Author Page for Book and Purchase Information

http://bookswelove.net/deeks-bc/

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is a trending topic these days, with applications like ChatGPT and Jasper being touted as replacements for human writers. These applications are models trained on a large codex of text data that can generate responses to questions, summarize long texts, write stories and much more. It is often used in conversational AI applications to simulate a human-like conversation with users—You’ve probably already been chatting with AI if you’ve contacted online Customer Service.

The jury is still out on whether the latest AI language model, ChatGPT, is actually intelligent, as defined by a machine's ability to behave like a human. They are still basically just a computer program designed to respond to text inputs and generate outputs based on patterns in the data they’ve been trained on.

So far, many uses for AI are controversial if not outright negative, including creating malware, Phishing and scamming, and cheating in school by letting students submit papers written by their computers.  A consultancy firm reportedly found that applications written by ChatGPT beat out 80 percent of humans.

In theory, AI can even be used to write a book. But would that book be a good story or just be a distillation of characters and plot from previously published works? If AI does not have intelligence, could it take the data and CREATE a unique and imaginative piece of work the way a human author does.

From my research, I gather AI software can generate a list of book plot ideas, suggest opening paragraphs, and output a batch of character sketches. If an author provided the program with a detailed outline of a story, it might produce a workable first draft of a novel. AI language models seem best suited to generating non-fiction web content or product copy and even then should be proofed and fact checked by the writer. I read an article generated by the Jasper AI application and it contained 7 typos and grammatical errors. The author had clearly not bothered to check the work before publishing.

Getting back to fiction, I don’t think authors will be out of work any time soon. If an AI language model was asked to generate a bestselling novel with a dragon and a wizard in a magical dimension, I believe the key components of a saleable novel would be missing — imagination and creativity. AI models can only pull from what has already been done; not imagine the things that are new and exciting. AI language models are, IMHO, another tool in a writers’ toolbox that might speed up the process of generating the words on the page. I'll admit to using a copy editing software program to help with my revision process for practical reasons. It helps me spot awkward sentence structures, grammatical errors and typos in my manuscript. But at the end of the day, human intervention is required to bring the magic to the story.

For the time being, I’ll be writing REBEL SPELL, book 3 in my Beyond the Magic trilogy, with minimal aid from artificial intelligence. Besides I love writing, so why would I want to give it up?

Weaving a Little Love into Every Story By BC Deeks, Paranormal Mystery Fiction Author

 

Visit B.C. Deeks' BWL Author Page for Book and Purchase Information

 

http://bookswelove.net/deeks-bc/

I write heartwarming stories of mystery and magic. But I learned most of what I know about writing craft when I joined a romance writing group. Do you know the most important lesson my mentors taught me? LOVE is part of every story. I’m not talking romance necessarily; but the development of an intense feeling of deep connection and caring. Your story won’t come alive for your reader unless your characters resonate with each other.

At its foundation, my Beyond the Magic series is a story of family ties - three siblings who have a strong bond with each other because their mother died in childbirth and their father is a harsh disciplinarian. The Otherland is a society that is desperate to preserve its hereditary magic and so is relying on genetic matching for their mating practices. The realm’s leaders don’t account for love matches and when one occurs, it could destroy their world. In the series, each of the three siblings set out on an adventure and, in turn, form a bond with another ally who they need to fight off dark forces. Ultimately, they all — mythics and mortals - must fight together to defeat an ancient prophecy. Each plot evolves around the emotional development or arc of the primary characters as they grow to trust their skills and inner emotional strength so that they can do what they must to meet their goal.

Isn’t that what life is all about? Perhaps modern advertising around Valentine’s Day focuses too much on romantic love. We can choose to expand it to recognize our own emotional attachment to our family and friends. Who do you care about? Let’s come up with a way to show them.

·         Help your child make a handmade Valentine's card for their favorite teacher.

·         Pick up a book as a gift for a friend who’s always there for you.

·         Wrap up cookies and drop them over to a neighbor who always waves and makes you feel part of the neighborhood.

·         Mail cards to family who live far away just to say you care.

·         Tell a friend how important they are to you.

Life is full of relationships and our books must accurately reflect the depth of those connections. It doesn’t matter whether the book is a mystery, a romance, science fiction or any other genre; to be successful, a story has to weave all the emotional complexity of life through our characters.

Imagination, Science fact, Science fiction, ancient history, and fantasy – part 1 - by Vijaya Schartz

 

amazon - B&N - Smashwords - Kobo

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Arthur C. Clarke

amazon - B&N - Smashwords - Kobo

All science fiction authors struggle to make their stories believable, because most of us only believe what we can explain and understand. Anything else is considered fantasy. And while we witness unexplained feats of magic and fantasy each day, like UAP (Unexplained Aerial Phenomena), ghosts, premonitory dreams, out of body or transcendental experiences, fiction writers are held to more stringent rules. Unlike reality, our stories have to make sense in the physical world.

Readers often tell me I have a fertile imagination, but to imagine the future, you only have to study the so-called mythology of many Earth cultures.

Lord Shiva claimed to be from another planet
and traveled through the air on a vessel surrounded by flames

Ancient civilizations worshipped gods who came come from the sky (heavens) in chariots of fire that rumbled like thunder. They were said to possess magical powers, like the power of flight, infinite knowledge, and incredible powers of destruction… powers we now understand as advanced technology.

They lived in magical cities in the sky, cities we would now call motherships, and they flew down in smaller crafts they called Vimanas. They also waged violent wars in the sky, with terrible repercussions for our planet.

Shiva (the destroyer of worlds) wielded weapons that could destroy entire planets and fiery arrows that never missed the target. 

The Shiva Lingam found in a multitude of temples, and long discarded as a fertility symbol, was recently recognized as an accurate representation of a nuclear cooling tower. Lingering radioactivity in ancient ruins and bones, along with vitrification of the stone (that only happens with the kind of heat produced by a nuclear explosion), and ancient manuscripts describing epic battles of the gods with such weapons in the same area, support the fact that a nuclear event must have happened around that time… several millennia ago.

 

In the subcontinent of India, these powerful beings, who visited Earth and lived among men in the faraway past, were not human. They had blue skin, several pairs of arms, sometimes a third eye, monkey heads, elephant head, or snake bodies, and claimed to have come from other planets. To the people of India, they were not mythical or gods, but flesh and blood beings from another place. The epic adventures depicted in the Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Mahabharata are not considered mythology but true ancient history and taught in schools as such.

But this phenomenon of alien visitors perceived as gods is not particular to India.

In the Buddhist world, the stone stupa inside which the statue of buddha resides represents some kind of transport craft to take him to the “cities in the sky.” Spaceships?

In China, the first emperor descended from the sky on a flaming dragon and claimed to come from space. To this day, the dragon is the symbol of China.

In Japan, Amaterasu, the goddess of light, came down to Earth to start the ruling dynasty to this day.

In my science fiction stories, my characters travel the galaxy, discovering new planets and cultures, or they are planet bound, visited by more advanced aliens. 

amazon - B&N - Smashwords - Kobo

Vijaya Schartz, author

Strong Heroines, Brave Heroes, cats

http://www.vijayaschartz.com

amazon - B&N - Smashwords - Kobo - FB