Steven James Scearce

I was recently asked to write a guest blog article for the Inkpunks. The following are the opening paragraphs to the article; at the bottom is the permanent link for the whole article at the Inkpunks website.

On March 1st of 2011, I began writing a novel-length supernatural horror story called Cottonwood. I’d spent two months in planning and preparation. I’d drafted a seven-thousand-word treatment in three-act structure and revised it until I thought it was water-tight. I created a chapter-by-chapter outline and a stack of 5×8 note card “call sheets” for each day’s writing. I made a map of the town where the story takes place. I wrote character profiles.

Going into the actual writing – a plan that netted me 192,000 words in 255 days – I felt confident. I had, for Christ’s sake, thought of everything.

I hadn’t.

At 9:30PM on October 17th, I watched in terror as the cursor stood blinking next to the last word and the final bit of punctuation. The room was dead silent. I’d been stabbing at the keyboard for 36 weeks straight. It was done. I wanted to celebrate but couldn’t.

I called fellow horror writer Jacob Ruby for advice. “I finished Cottonwood,” I said. “What the hell do I do next?”

At the time, Jacob was still working on his first novel. “Take a break,” he said.

It was too easy. “What?” My head felt like it was full of hot roofing nails. “But the story is fresh in my mind. I have all this momentum built up and…”

“Take a fucking break,” he said. “You’ve done enough. Jesus, you worked for eight days while in Hawaii for your brother’s wedding. Step away from the story. Read a fantasy novel. Go see a bad movie. Write some short stories. Anything else.”

I hung up… [more]

Read my whole guest blog “I’ve finished writing my first novel. What the hell do I do next?” at Inkpunks.  

About Inkpunks:
The Inkpunks are a collective of authors, editors, free-thinkers and creative professionals, whose members include John Remy, Galen Dara, Andrew Penn Romine, Christie Yant, Erika Holt, Adam Israel, Morgan Dempsey, Sandra Wickham, Wendy Wagner and Jaym Gates.

I was recently asked to write a guest blog article for Dagan Books (publishers of Cthulhurotica and In Situ). The following are the opening paragraphs to the article; at the bottom is the permanent link for the whole article at the Dagan Books website.

I’m fascinated by the weird things that writers do to get their head in the game. Writing is a solitary and sometimes tedious effort. Some writers require distractions to pass the time at the keyboard. Others need quiet. I personally know three writers that usually have a TV in their office playing a movie or a DVD while they work.

I can’t do that. I need something to help pass the time, but it has to help me immerse myself in what I’m trying to envision and flesh out – rather than provide background noise and occasional distraction. For me, the ideal writer’s retreat is a well-lit room and an iPod full of ambient sound. Yes, writers are creatures of strange habits – second only to professional baseball players. I know that I’m probably preaching to the choir here, so I’ll spare you the eccentricities made famous by Hugo, Nabokov, Dumas, Kerouac, Faulkner, Wolfe, and Twain. I have my own odd habits. I alternate sitting and standing (I had additions built for my writing desk to accommodate the quick-change). I find that I can’t write with someone else in the room (or the house, for that matter). I only drink green tea while working.

But I also do this weird thing whenever I’m working on a piece of writing, where I create a custom iTunes playlist that is tailored to the period and the assumed music interests of the main characters in the story. This is something that I’ve been doing for the last year or so, and I find it enormously helpful when it comes to getting into the right frame of mind, seeing the world through my character’s eyes, and putting myself in front of the computer for a 3-4 hour stretch… [more]

Read my whole guest blog “Music and a Well-lit Room” at Dagan Books. 

About Dagan Books:
Dagan Books is an independent publisher of the weird and wicked, the beautiful and brilliant. They publish both academic non-fiction and fiction works (specializing in speculative fiction).

This week, Station 151 and Unknown Transmission co-creator Andy Scearce (my brother) and I were interviewed for Ep. #52 of the Functional Nerds podcast. Along with program hosts  John Anealio and Patrick Hester, Andy and I had a great time talking about the evolution and growth of our speculative science-fiction serial. Other topics in the program include collaborative writing, how everything in sci-fi appears to be borrowed and stolen from earlier sci-fi media, short stories we’ve recently seen published, and the best barbeque ribs in Kansas City.

You can listen to the interview at the Functional Nerds website via this link: http://functionalnerds.com/2011/04/episode-052-steve-andy-scearce/

For those unfamiliar with Unknown Transmission or Station 151, it’s a serialized speculative fiction work. And although the story has been called post-apocalyptic, time travel, bio-punk, spy-fi, and space opera, I just call it speculative sci-fi.

Here’s the scoop:

In Unknown Transmission, we’re following the adventures of a Japanese/American communications specialist named Maxim – who is forcibly dumped into a dystopian alternate Earth future. The story begins in the year 2185, where Maxim and his assistant, Spegg, are sent into near Earth orbit to fix a transmitter issue at a Hyperdrive Assist station. Spegg, the assistant, is one of the story’s long-running antagonists and a Living Modified Organism (a Transgenic Fish/Humanoid).

Unfortunately for Maxim, Spegg suffers from an identity disorder that makes him foolish, crazy and ruthless. Spegg allows the Hyperdrive Assist Station over-spool and slings their ship into the deep reaches of space without any pre-planned exit vector. Maxim wakes alone on the ship to find that Spegg has loaded the survival pod and disappeared through a massive wormhole. He takes after Spegg and finds himself transported one-hundred years into the past – where Spegg has already had some 75 years on Earth to ruin almost all life on the planet.

Station 151 begins with radio astronomer Wayne Robertson landing in Antarctica to serve out a solitary three-month testing phase for a new radio telescope array. Soon after, Wayne begins receiving what looks like intelligent signals mixed in with the regular noise of space. Wayne finds it odd that these transmissions appear to be in English and are dated a couple hundred years into the future. Of course, if you’re following Unknown Transmission, you know that the signals are from Maxim.

Long story short: Spegg arrives in present day Antarctica, turns Wayne Robertson into a mental slave, starts a nuclear war, and releases a virus that kills almost everyone on earth – setting the stage for the alternate, future dystopia in Bellingshausen, Antarctica.

If you’re into all kinds of sci-fi geekery, give it a read. I think you’ll enjoy the ride.

Cheers!

I was recently asked to explain just exactly what Unknown Transmission (UT) is all about.The person doing the asking was not a fan of science fiction. Nevertheless, I offered them my standard elevator pitch.

A communications specialist in the year 2185 is abandoned in deep space by his deranged ship’s assistant, setting up a series of events that leads him back in time to a ruined home world ruled by a wealthy eccentric, a madman playing God, and the very creature that first stranded him in space.

Their response was a head nod and a “Huh, that’s interesting.”

I smiled.

They asked “Do you make much money off that?”

I smiled again.

Now… Station 151 is a whole other story.  In S151 (as we call it), a present-day astrophysicist in Antarctica discovers an intelligent signal from a billion light years away and 176 years into the future. The events that unfold lead up to the post-apocalyptic setting that we use in Unknown Transmission (so it’s a kind of prequel to UT). Additionally, the main character in S151, Dr. Wayne Robertson, is one of the main antagonists in UT (in 2086). Although I contribute regularly to S151, the story was created by my brother Andy Scearce.

Even though UT and S151 are nearly a year into their respective storylines, with hundreds of postings, and almost 100,000 words written so far, we think that you’ll enjoy the ride.

Enjoy!

I was recently given an opportunity to write a short story within the confines of the Cthulhu Mythos (still having trouble spelling Cthulhu correctly, but I’ll get it right). Although I’m fascinated with the works of H.P. Lovecraft, I cannot honestly say that I’ve read a great deal of his writings (and I realize that they are short in number). I’ve seen a variety of films and shorts based on his work. None of them seem to do his vision (or nightmare) much justice.

So, off I went to the bookstore to pick up a few selections. One title, “Tales of H.P. Lovecraft,” has a phenomenal introduction by Joyce Carol Oates. The other, “Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos,” is a tribute by a good number of famous authors. I selected this book solely because I wanted to see how others treated Lovecraft’s unique atmosphere and environment.

Given a little free-reading time in the next few days (what are the chances?), I may just get my head wrapped around the setting and character styling I need to “flesh out” this little story of mine. Tentatively, the short story is called “The Assistant Appears” and will be submitted for a to-be-named anthology of Lovecraftian horror and lust. Here’s hoping they like it!