First Saturday Sci-Fi - August - The Women of Sci-Fi

1.Tell us about your favorite work… what makes it special ?

Gosh, what a great question.

I have so many short stories on my blog and I have three novels that I am querying at the moment that it is hard to pick only one that is my favorite.

I guess my absolute favorite (at the moment) is a short story on my blog called “Three Hundred Years”. It’s a piece that came to me in an afternoon, over lunch actually. About a character who is… a little bit different. She doesn’t see things the way everyone else does and certainly doesn’t understand emotions. The world discovers they have three hundred years before the sun dies. It is a piece that explores what we do when we receive news that we cannot change. Three hundred years is longer than our own lifetime, longer than our children’s children’s lifetime… Do we care? Should we do anything about it? Do we fight or do we give up and just accept the inevitable, after all… it won’t affect us.

I love the way this story makes a reader think.

What would you do? What do you believe?

2.What do you think makes for good Sci-Fi ?

Action, humor and above all… spaceships.

Who doesn’t love a good spaceship?

It’s like a car. It is the one thing, other than a house, that will probably be your most important and expensive purchase in your life. A spaceship is kind of like a caravan… it’s your mobile home.

I have been in love with spaceships since I was little… The Millennium Falcon, The Enterprise, Moya, Serenity, The Defiant. There are soooo many terrific spaceships in fiction and tv/movies.

Good sci fi to me… is about home.

In those spaceships you have people who are forced, though choice or circumstance to live together or work together. Family is the best part of sci fi.

The family and the home we choose. All of my favorite sci fi novels are about family (and spaceships).

3.Do you think your books can help shape the future and if so how?

I think they tell us what can be.

The potential is there. Any version of the future is possible.

If you can’t see what is possible, how can you prepare for the future? I think and what I love about sci fi is, that you get to see how the possibilities might play out. The more advanced we become; the more possibilities open up to us. And I don’t think this needs to be negative. There are so many positive possibilities… future ways of living and loving and dreaming. I don’t like to think of the ways things can end (my novel Blood Fever is set in the aftermath of a galaxy-wide war… how life goes on, how it finds its feet and rebuilds.) I prefer to think of how we can make things better.

4.Do you have inside jokes or true events hidden in your writing?

Absolutely

Okay, I was going to leave you hanging on that one. Yes, I have many nods to my favorite shows and books, and many nods to personal events. I love it when someone tweets or messages me asking if so and so was a reference to this and that… J I LOVE hidden messages. I like people to have that Captain America moment where they stop and point “Oh, I understood that reference.”

5.Which do you prefer… model your characters after people you know or just make them up?`

Something and what facial expression they might use. It might be something that I have seen a niece or nephew say/do. Something I have seen on the train or at a coffee shop. Everything is fair game. J But, to be fair, most of the time it is all in my head. Sometimes, the main characters are a little bit of me. How I might wish I had responded to something, you know, to say the thing that you were thinking but would never dare to say. My characters are braver than me in some respects.

6.Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to take away?

Self-belief is SO important.

My characters need to know themselves, to understand themselves really well and to be proud of who they are. All of them suffer from self-doubt. A lot of their troubles are made worse from this, giving rise to trust issues and love issues. All of them see themselves through the eyes of other people and find themselves wanting. This causes them all sorts of problems.

I wish they had belief in their own abilities. That they are confident the decisions they make are the right ones.

I hear so many people IRL say “Oh, I can’t do that.” Hearing that actually makes me quite cross. How can anyone say they can’t do something if they haven’t tried? What they are really saying is that they don’t “want” to try/learn something, not that they can’t. Self-rejection is a powerful magic…

7.What is your favorite review?

Ahhhhhhhhhh

Reviews that I have written or that has been written about me?

As I am not published yet I have to say the best review I have had, has been from my latest editor. I’m not sharing that but it made me feel pretty good.

What comes next?

While I am working to get an agent for my sci fi novels... I am still writing.

Something new on the novel front. A Science Fiction/Fantasy set on another planet. All the angst and drama of a YA set not on Earth but dealing with very human issues! And there’s a war involving giant space slugs!

I also enjoy have a lot of new stuff coming up on my blog too.

Where can we learn more?

You can read samples of my work at my blog (including Three Hundred Years) at www.solothefirst.wordpress.com

You can also find me on Facebook at www.facebook.com\WriterLaurieBell

And on Twitter @LaurienotLori