Tips Archives » Sci-fi humor Author Ian Lahey

Is your sense of humor clinically dead?

Ian Lahey — Wed, 21 Jul 2021 09:02:36 +0000

Where do authors find the fun stuff? Not the puns and jokes, which also may have a small part in your narrative, but which never go above second-class humor. No. I’m talking about natural, unintended and unexpected moments of authentic funniness. Where?

Well, mostly online, nowadays, but still, the original source for the best material is always real life, real situations which someone has had the presence of mind to write down for the enjoyment of all posterity.

So don’t worry if you can’t shazam a funny scene out of thin air, it doesn’t mean your sense of humor is clinically dead. All you need are some real life examples. And, speaking of clinics, here are some notes found in real hospitals, which ought to tickle your funny bone, and maybe inspire some hilarious dialogue for your stories.

1- Well then it can’t be THAT bad, can it?

She has no rigors or shaking chills, but her husband states she was very hot in bed last night.

Click the page numbers to go on reading.

The post Is your sense of humor clinically dead? appeared first on Sci-fi humor Author Ian Lahey.

Will we continue keeping track of time in space?

Ian Lahey — Tue, 16 Feb 2021 16:17:34 +0000

Science!!!

When Albert Einstein proved everything is relative, and time is not absolute but varies wildly depending on your speed, the level of space curvature and the lecturer’s tone of voice, everybody applied it to all sorts of stuff, such as keeping GPS satellites aligned, getting twins to age differently and keeping Madonna’s gold teeth a shiny yellow. I, in the meantime, worried whether traveling through Einstein’s space-time continuum would still allow us to maintain essential time conventions, such as Taco Tuesday.

My findings, after a series of experiments involving extremely fluctuating gravity, relativistic speeds and highly unstable margaritas, are less than comforting. It turns out space travel has some pretty heavy implications regarding keeping track of time. Here are some of the most important things you need to take into consideration, especially if you’re into writing space-travel science fiction:

Don’t plan anything over the week-end, because weekends are OVER.

Once you leave Earth’s 24-hour, 365 1/4 day rotation period, the calendar becomes pretty useless. Mars takes 687 days to go around our same star, which means you’d need to go through nearly all the months a second time, and then stop at the end of October and jump to January, which would imply a Christmas Halloweeen New Year celebration every two years. It would be horrible. Everyone would dress up as Jack Skeleton and nobody would have fun. Several new weekdays would also need to be invented to buffer out the twenty extra slots that would turn up each year. This means that you might plan to visit Mars for what you believe would be the week-end, and instead discover, as you disembark, that it’s still just Wednesdoubleday, and you’ve even missed tea-time.

How to solve this:

Off-world colonies will necessarily have to create their own calendars, compliant with their individual orbital rhythms. This will mean we will have the interplanetary equivalent of time-zones. Although this may be a bit cumbersome, it will allow for more freedom, including the possibility of having a planet where it is always Saturday afternoon, just before the bars close.

Your date’s probably dead.

So, your main character is a senior officer on a starship. During a routine stop at a space station she meets Lieutenant Sexy Hot Lips and they hit off right away. She then leaves for another month or so of zipping around at warp speed for space exploration after promising her beloved to visit him as soon as she’s off-duty. Cool right?

Sorry I’m late hon, that Alpha-Centaurian bureaucracy took hours!

Wrong! Because of the relativistic effects of travel through space at high velocity, your poor lieutenant will end up having to wait several decades for her to return. Time actually stops at light-speed, and even has the gall to go backwards if you exceed it. If you instantly jump away from Earth to a point that is a hundred light years away, you will be able to look back and see Earth as it was a hundred years ago. In addition, if you set off now for a system which is a hundred light years away, it will actually be a hundred years older when you drop out of warp. Which means you can forget about that dinner at half past seven you planned.

How to solve this:

This is known as the twins paradox. Because of time dilation, the clock slows down on the moving starship, so if you don’t want all your galactic love stories to end with belated funerals, you should have Sexy Hot Lips get conveniently preserved in a cryo-stasis pod, turning him into Sexy Frosty Lips until he’s thawed or, as an alternative, you either make sure your sweethearts serve on the same vessel, or have them serve on separate ships which agree on flight plans that exactly match each other’s speed when flying away or towards each other. Of course, starbase restaurants will be used to people booking their table for dates a hundred years in the future.

Excuse me sir, what stardate is it?

Star Trek fans out there looked at the paragraph about not being able to maintain a calendar and were like, “pfft! Of course, that’s why we have stardate numbers, you mindless PetaQ!”

We are Borg. Resistance is…late?

For your information, the stardate system in the Star Trek universe began as a progressive number which began with the original series in a more or less arbitrary way and was then reformed in the Next Generation series in 1987 with the five-digit system in which the first digit: 4, indicated the 24th century and the second one the, ahem, TV season. The idea of a simple progressive number which is clock-based and does not need to specify whether it’s day, night or a specific weekday, is definitely a step in the right direction. Day and night rhythms are simply duty shifts, so each crewmember would still have a healthy sleep cycle. The problem is that crews on each ship wold wind up with very different stardates after just a few days out, once again because of time dilation, making joint operations very difficult to organize. Imagine rallying up all Federation ships to counter a Borg attack. While the counterattack is scheduled at 44002.3, each ship would actually have their stardate counter off by hours, days or even longer. Ships would end up randomly turning up for a battle which was either lost long ago or not even due yet. Communications with the base would be futile since Hot Lips, now admiral, has been dead for many years.

In addition to that, time on the actual planets would still follow the local time frame and not the space-travel stardate system, resulting in jet-lag of epic proportions.

How to solve this:

Starships should limit their missions to shorter periods, in order to reduce the accumulation of time-dilated intervals. In addition, travel routes should be dispersed with synchronized time-buoys. Upon arrival, the ship’s computer, which has automatically compensated and gradually updated its clock to match the destination timeframe, will be able to hook up with the nearest time signal to synchronize perfectly. Of course, individual planets would keep their own day/night rhythms, so in order to minimize the jet-lag, the spaceship would enter an orbit which matches the current light and darkness cycle of the ship. In other words, if on your spaceship it’s time for the morning shift, orbit the planet where the sunlight is just about to arrive, so you can beam down and have breakfast with the locals.

…or the locals have breakfast with you, depending on the color of your shirt.

THANK YOU FOR READING!

Are you writing some space-scifi stuff? Let me know in the comments below. Have you signed up for my newsletter yet? You’re missing a ton of cool stuff!

Don’t forget to check out my other writing tips below:

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How to Make an Author Page on Facebook

Ian Lahey — Fri, 12 Feb 2021 15:58:47 +0000

All authors have an author page on Facebook, or so you’ve heard. So you wanna make one too, right? But how?

Yes, I know there’s a “create page” button right there, silly. That is not the problem. The problem is you, or rather your perception of yourself.

Bear with me for a couple of paragraphs.

Have you ever listened to your own recorded voice? It’s a weird experience. Most people will not recognize their own voice and a good majority will outright hate it. That’s because you are not used to hearing your voice with your ears. What you hear is mostly the vibration going directly to your eardrums after traveling around your skull and, in my case, picking up echoes of vast, empty spaces within…

The same happens with more or less everything else about us. We know who we are, but we don’t have the objective, sensory perception others will have of us. That is the main issue when you set off to create yourFacebook page. It should not be a personal page, it should represent your author persona as you wish it to be perceived by others. In order to do so, even before you click that “create page” button, you need to go through a couple of preliminary steps:

Find your brand

What are you all about in your books? Do you feel like you’re continuing the work of a famous author of the past? Are you creating something entirely new? What makes it unique? Do you identify with one of your characters?

The answers to those questions will help you begin to define your brand. The final result can be as simple as getting an author photo dressed as a steampunk vampire or merely adding a tagline, like “Sci-fi, fantasy, fortuitous humor”. I chose the latter after trying the vampire thingy and deciding it sucked.

The more time you dedicate to defining and perfecting your brand, the easier it will be for you to come up with your image, the combination of logo, color palette and message you want to convey through your Facebook page. This step can be a toughie, so it’s recommended that you proceed to step two:

Find successful similar brands and study them.

Unless you’ve invented a whole new genre, you can safely assume there are other author pages out there which you can check out and draw inspiration from. Do you write noir thrillers? Mark Dawson’s FB page might put you on the right track. Maybe you’re into historical fiction with a Christian twist, in which case Author J.B. Richards has a page you may want to explore. Do you write science fiction and fantasy mysteries with unexpected humor? don’t even think of hijacking my style because I will cut you. Nah, just kidding. You can check me out too.

Create your brand material

All right. You’ve figured out what you’re all about. You know how you want to appear before your readers. If you can dabble with computer graphics you can probably conk out a decent logo and a convincing Facebook page banner. It’s best if you get someone else to check your work out and, in case, suggest you hire a professional graphic artist. It shouldn’t be a huge expense but it is definitely a good investment. Also, please have a decent author photograph taken. In the end, your face is part of your image and I assume you’ll be wearing it at book signings and video interviews. You might find a smooth looking mugshot among your selfies, or more probably something taken by your friend or spouse (or both you lucky totterpot). Please don’t settle for “human-looking”. If you need a professional photographer find just the right light to bring out your best, get it done.

me, vs AUTHOR ME!

Set up your FB page

All right! Time to hit that “Create page” button! Go through the steps to create your page. Select the categories which, quite predictably, are “Author” and “Writer”, and upload your pics and produce your first post, then sit back and enjoy the result of your hard work and try not to focus too much on that “Zero followers” detail. Followers will come, because now it’s time to…

Link to and from your author website.

Because you do have an author website right? If you don’t, do not panic, Setting one up with Wix or WordPress is fairly easy and, as a plus, you already have your brand and image figured out. Make sure your website displays the links to all the social media channels in which you wish to appear as author. Start sharing your author page posts around and be patient.

All, right, you’re not patient. You want followers, you CRAVE page follows like some social media intoxicated Gollum. And that’s when Facebook’s wicked little algorithm sidles up to you and asks you if you’d like to promote your page

Do NOT advertise.

Never advertise a Facebook page. You may want to promote a post, if you really want it to get extra visibility, but most of the time, because of how dispersive Facebook is, you’re wasting money which you could have spent on that profile photo.

I warned ya…

Luckily, I have another article where I walk authors through some very effective strategies to get hundreds of engaged, interested followers without spending.

Let me know if you appreciated this article by liking, commenting, retweeting/sharing and generally clicking all the other clickable social thingies for my posts!

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Speech Verbs and Dialogue tags

Ian Lahey — Tue, 19 Jan 2021 22:30:34 +0000

He said, she said…a dialogue which runs short on speech verbs quickly becomes dull and repetitive. When in that magic condition of creative flow, we only marginally pay attention to the tags, the part of dialogue which expresses just how the character said, and usually write down the more familiar ones: once our characters replied, remarked, exclaimed, asked, answered, added, and maybe suggested and noted whatever they had to note, we feel we can pretty safely use “said” a couple more times.

Now, I’m the first to say the prince of dialogue, “say” is the most unobtrusive and neutral of all tags, and I am in no way trying to encourage you to chump up your text with every single one of these alternatives, and a sign of good healthy dialogue is when you can actually skip a lot of tags because you have made it clear who is saying what. That said I do believe a little more range is no bad thing, and in those cases where you actually would like to specify exactly how someone uttered something, you can rely on the amazingly vast expressive capability of the English language. Here is my personal and ultimate list of speech verbs. Feel free to scan through it to see how many you already know.

I have provided a brief definition for each speech verb.

Next: speech verbs listed alphabetically. ->

The post Speech Verbs and Dialogue tags appeared first on Sci-fi humor Author Ian Lahey.

TOP TEN FACEBOOK GROUPS FOR WRITERS

Ian Lahey — Wed, 23 Dec 2020 21:16:05 +0000

One of the first things I was told when I embarked upon the highly disreputable endeavor of promoting one’s own books was “Join some of the Facebook groups for writers”.

…clueless.

That I did. Joined a writers’ group, posted a book link and got immediately booted from the group.
It turns out self-promotion is frowned upon in most if not all author-oriented FB communities. You’re supposed to tallk about books, discuss ads placement and cover art, but NOT promote your book there. Writers are not readers, when they’re wearing their author hats.

So I turned to a readers’ group and signed up there. Posted a link and nearly got booted again. Reader groups are run by specific pages and will not always tolerate authors self-promoting. Any recommendation must be either filtered by the page authority or come from an actual reader. Some kind soul pointed me in the right direction: “You should post that stuff on an a book promotion group,” they said.

Book promotion groups are BIG, some have nearly 30k members. Some require your posts to be approved while others, like this one let you dish out Amazon links to your heart’s content. And dish out I did.

And nothing happened. Nothing. The post was drowned in the middle of hundreds of other daily book promo links, which I didn’t really bother to check because I was there to promote my books, not to buy them. And I realized that’s what nearly everyone else of those people were doing.

After much searching, I have worked out a decent list of Author-friendly Facebook groups, divided into three color-coded categories:

RED: Groups for writers, usually NO self promotion but useful advice and/or indie author oriented services.

GREEN: Reader groups, usually genre oriented and very responsive, but also heavily guarded against spamming.

BLUE: Book promotion groups, where everything goes. I have come up with a few that have at least some engagement.

The post TOP TEN FACEBOOK GROUPS FOR WRITERS appeared first on Sci-fi humor Author Ian Lahey.

Cinematic Book Trailers

Ian Lahey — Tue, 01 Dec 2020 20:03:32 +0000

(on a budget)

WARNING: In this article I showcase two book trailers I made. I think they’re pretty awesome and above the average self-made material out there. Despite the evident awesomeness, the objective of this article is not to boast about my outstanding multimedia skills, but simply as a case study. The ultimate goal here is for you to become aware of the software tools which are available for free (or for a moderate investment) as an alternative to spending hundreds, if not thousands of dollars, (up to $15,000) on a professional job. IF, and I repeat, IF, you are willing to climb a few learning curves.

First of all, I would like to discuss WHY you should invest time (or money, should you choose the professional option) in a book trailer.

Book trailers are living blurbs. They engage the senses with a concentrated, sizzling bomb of pure narrative. Compared to a properly designed trailer the typical text blurb is no more than a footnote. Prospective readers can see your protagonist, hear the soundtrack and survey the setting. A book trailer can convey the atmosphere, the theme of the novel, and will make it clear to the viewer that if the trailer resonates with them, then they HAVE to buy the book.

I call this a “squid pro quo”

In order to reach this goal, whichever route you choose to take, you need to be able to produce at least a decent summary of what your story is about. An illustrated storyboard of the trailer would be ideal. I mean, you can always toss a copy of the manuscript in the artist’s hands and let them come up with an idea but: 1. it’ll cost you more and 2. it’s YOUR story, dammit. To me it’s like asking the neighbor to pick your daughter’s prom dress, and hoping he doesn’t get the wrong idea and follow his personal hentai tastes. So, no matter what, either make a pencil & pen ink sketch of your trailer, or use storyboarding software.

“Boords” is a free-to-try storyboarding platform, but they’re so cool about the whole deal they also give you links to alternative options.

If you wish seek the help of a professional for your book trailer, then you can stop reading here. There are many excellent videomakers out there and not one of them offered to sponsor me, so no links.

If you wish to know how I made my own book trailers, and want to try yourself, then we’re ready for the next step.

Storyboard.

Yes. you have to do that bit anyway. It is essential for you to get a clear idea of the timing, because a good trailer lasts between 20 and 30 seconds, and there is always the tendency to try and cram too much in that time.
A storyboard will let you visualize your scenes and realize you’re never gonna fit the whole book in five panels.

So? What should your trailer be about? Think about your story…does it rely on strong characters? Does it narrate a fall into darkness, a rise to higher levels of being? What color is your novel? Try to visualize your work in terms of movement, color, light and character.

Case study: The Descent.

For my Historical fiction novel “The 45th Nail” I didn’t take too much to find the correct format. The narrative starts as a light-hearted escapade to Italy, but gradually descends into a dark quest of a man seeking impossible forgiveness. The key-word there was “descends”. And the trailer is a long, slow scrolling movement downwards. A narration, in the voice of the protagonist, gives a first-person retelling of the blurb while a few items flutter past and the whole background darkens. The final landing displays the title of the book.

How I did it:

I used a free image editing software called “Gimp” to patch together images into a long, vertical strip. If you have Photoshop or have worked with it, Gimp is fairly similar and there are a lot of tutorials online to learn the basics you need to stitch pictures together. Time: 3 hours

The image of the golden “bulla” was created using a free 3D tool. (The one I used back then is not available anymore but there are many titles out there). If you can create a sphere, flatten it, and apply a picture of a gold medallion as texture, you can make the bulla. Depending on the software it may take you more or less time to figure out how to animate it spinning on itself. This was the result:

https://youtu.be/l5tEYOH8ViA

Notice the black background. Some programs will let you create videos with transparent backgrounds, but they’re usually not free. Black is a good workaround. Time: 2 1/2 hours.

All the other things you see floating up in the video are static .png images I made using Gimp. .png images can have transparency. Time: 30 minutes.

I found the music on freesound.org which is exactly what it looks like: a free sound library. You are required to create an account and, if the composer requires it, mention them in the credits. I used Audacity to put the sounds together with my own voice. I was able to balance the levels and darken the tone, after twiddling around a bit with the various effects. Time: 1 hour.

I put it all together with video editing software. There are free video editing programs (DaVinci Resolve is Hollywood-grade production software and it’s 100% free. It’s also bloody murder to figure out.) I bought Filmora, which is $60 and is much more intuitive. Time: 2 hours.

A total of nine hours of work, and I got to keep the video editing software for future book trailers. Did I do it again?

You bet I did.

Case study: The Character.

For my recent novel “To Cipher and to Sing” I wanted the viewer to do two things: get to know one of my main characters and get really suspicious about him. Once again I opted for the downwards scroll. I may have a thing about vertical drops, I don’t know. Anyway, this time the fall had to be a real one, a drop from a futuristic high-rise.
The trailer begins as a futuristic ad for some kind of A.I. chip. As the chip upgrades make it faster and more powerful the ad itself glitches off as the technology evolves into a robotic skeleton.
As the figure continues to evolve the camera speeds ahead and, upon reaching the bottom of the building, it witnesses the landing of the finished product, a complete android with eerie golden eyes which turns towards the camera and, in a not altogether disturbing way, smiles.

How I did it:

Again, I went hunting for freebies and found Kitbash 3D, an amazing team that produces professional cityscapes and which, occasionally, gives out some free kits. I got their “Utopia” city, a $199,00 value, for free. The sheer quality of their kits has me thinking seriously of spending some real money the next time I need a 3D cityscape and I’m not lucky enough to find another freebie. I also used it as background for the cover of the book.

I used Meshmixer to select and move the buildings around, and save the result as an .obj file. Then I used it in Daz 3D Studio, where I created my character.

Now, Daz 3D is a BEAST of a program. It relies on high-performing computers to give you photo-realistic poseable humans. Yes, it’s free.

But you need to pay if you want to buy more props and characters. The prices are not terribly high and if you need something specific, you might want to spend twelve dollars on top of a fully-fledged 3D video studio which you just downloaded for free.

It takes a while to figure out all the things you can do with Daz3D, so take your time. All in all, between creating my character, finding some stray 3D skeleton on-line, importing everything, lighting and animating, it took me over ten hours.

Plus another FORTY HOURS to render the final animation. Luckily I was able to render blocks of frames and save them as clips, so I could use my computer for other things. Otherwise, while rendering, the intense CPU usage made it impossible to even browse the Internet.

Once more, I used Filmora to patch the clips together and include the soundtrack and sound effects from Freesound. I also made use of the excellent title kits and special effects included in the video editing software.

A conclusive thought:

I personally rely a lot on 3D animation, because I happen to have a background in multimedia design, and it comes in handy, especially if the subject is science-fiction. But bear in mind that I designed my trailers with the foreknowledge of the video footage I could produce myself or the 3D models I knew I could find.

You can reach great results even if you choose to shoot a whole live-action sequence with real actors and costumes, if that’s more in your set of skills. Use the material you are most familiar with, and your result will be more in your own style. Remember that in order for your trailer to be effective it has to focus on the emotion and the atmosphere more than the plot itself.

Thank you for taking the time to read this longer than usual article. I hope you found it useful and inspiring.

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The post Cinematic Book Trailers appeared first on Sci-fi humor Author Ian Lahey.

Confessions of a failed planner

Ian Lahey — Mon, 16 Nov 2020 21:42:57 +0000

First of all: I am a pantser, at heart. More specifically, I am a failed planner. I try to plan the whole story, but as soon as I create the characters, they handcuff me to the fridge and carry on by themselves.
You can see how that would make writing a mystery novel especially challenging.

For my latest novel, “To Cipher and to Sing”, I chose to focus on the few key elements I wanted. Like giant cog-wheels for a clock that had yet to be built. No matter how complex the rest of the mechanism, those wheels had to remain in place, and spin in the direction I’d planned.
Did it work?
Well, almost. I got one wheel, one plot point to remain in place (the murder mystery). Another one had to take a different spin when one of the characters who wasn’t supposed to die, did, and the last plot point encountered a quantum-level paradox and now occupies all my books at the same time, but only at lunchtime on Wednesdays.

The draft, as a result, was a murder mystery surrounded by sudden twists and turns, sometimes at right-angles with reality.
But that’s fine. And the point of this article is just this: keep a good hold on the main plot points and let the story find its way around them. I don’t think I would have been able to plan ahead for some of the more surprising and unexpexted events in the book.
As a result, my re-write was similar to a detective’s job. Discovering and connecting clues to the mystery itself to make sure they didn’t contradict each other. Figuring out which of the characters became more suspicious for the reader, and subtly changing dialogue and actions to reinforce such impressions. Leading, but especially misleading, all the way to the next twist.

I stand by my clumsy, failed planner method. It’s true that for the final edit I spent a week patching plot holes the size of Ohio, but the result is a novel which entertained me both writing it and editing it.

“To Cipher and to Sing” is now available for pre-order on Amazon, Book two should come up around June.

I hope that’s the right date.

I’m a terrible planner…

The post Confessions of a failed planner appeared first on Sci-fi humor Author Ian Lahey.

How to Murder your Villains with Style

Ian Lahey — Tue, 03 Nov 2020 22:34:42 +0000

Always keep your pencil well sharpened.

Books and films have their wonderful, intense moments: the long-awaited kiss, the revelation of the hero’s true calling, the power of friendship which overcomes insurmountable difficulties.

But we all know the scene we all secretly wait for, the one that gives us the most satisfaction. No, it isn’t the solution of the mystery.

It’s when the bad guy croaks their last.

Yes, the villain’s final moment is one of the most important ones, and one which must be served properly. Yes. It is not only required for the villain to die. How they die is also very, very important. A badly scripted demise will leave the reader deeply dissatisfied and, in addition, will not do the villain proper justice. Imagine, for example, Darth Vader choking on a chicken bone during lunch break. That would be awful, especially for the Death Star Chef, I suppose. But also for Vader.

A great villain deserves a great, memorable death. Here are some of the most interesting and fulfilling ways famous baddies have gone to take a dirt nap.

“It’s a Christmas mooooovieeeeeeeeeeee!”

1 GONE WITH A BANG (or a splat)
The most satisfying death is the one that leaves a mark. A nice crater for example, or at least a sizeable dent in the sidewalk, like good ol’ Hans in “Die Hard”. The look on his face as he plummets, panic-stricken, to his gruesome and absolutely well-deserved death, is the best part of the whole film.
The fundamental idea is to make the end of the villain final. They’re dead, loud and clear. Especially, loud.
Sauron’s annihilation at the end of “The Lord of the Rings” is a perfect example of this spectacular kind of demise.
On a smaller scale, but still poppin’, we might mention the passing, or rather the zapping away of Bellatrix Lestrange, in “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”. The death eater carks it when she is disintegrated by a spell, giving us a nice, enjoyable moment of killer magic as well as revealing how Molly Weasley kicks wizard ass.

“Fiendfyre is safe, right?”

2 BACKFIRED TO HELL
On par with Gone with a Bang above, we can’t suppress that jolt of joy when the villain’s end, no matter how horrific, is brought about by their own evil and treacherous ways. Karmic Death gifts the reader with memorable wipe-outs of characters who fully and completely get what they deserve, and the punishment they wish to inflict on the hero bounces back and kills them instead. Vincent Crabbe – a minor minion of evil, true, but still a very real threat to Harry Potter’s existence – gets a hefty dose his own fiendfyre magic and, in the end, is the only victim. HA!
Another cutting-edge example of boomerang justice is the Green Goblin who gets impaled by his own flyer as it returns back to him as a…uh…boomerang.
My favorite example of Karmic Death? Those Nasty Nazis in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” who spare no villainous act to get a hold on the Ark of the Covenant, only to be turned into Human Marshmallows when they unleash the Wrath of God unto themselves because it is apparently a deadly sin to look at phantom boobs. What’s your favorite Karmic Death?

BOOOOOOOOOOOOObs

“GHHGRRGRGGRGRGLGRRGL”
-Joffrey Baratheon

SLOW AND PAINFUL
The moment comes, from time to time, when you just come across that villain who is just so despicable that – to put it simply – death’s too good for them. You end up cheering at each strangled gurgle as Joffrey Baratheon kicks the oxygen habit. After all the pain and suffering he’s caused to the characters we love, a Gone with a Bang death just doesn’t cut it. Voldemort is one of the first examples that comes to mind. He pesters Harry and goes on killing his friends for seven bloody books. When Harry finally decides to make the unmentionable bastard pay, he takes the long route and starts hacking at his soul.
Piece by piece.
And finally, Harry uses his adversary’s own wand, as if to say “I’m a better wizard too, dumbass”, before dealing the death-blow which shreds Voldemort into oblivion. Flake by painful flake.

One does not simply imitate
a hedgehog

THE REDEEMED VILLAIN
There are cases in which the reader might get sick and tired of all the vengeance, and piling death onto death in a senseless game of Murder Tetris. An equally satisfying end to the villain is the unexpected redemption. Or even the discovery that the villain isn’t a villain after all, like the odious Snape, who turns out he’d been on Harry’s team all along.
Another redeemed villain is Boromir, who doubtfully joins the Fellowship with the intention of using the One Ring to defend Gondor and ends up being corrupted by the power of the Dark Lord. His final moment of repentance and ultimate sacrifice reminds us that sometimes evil is just the result of misguided good intent, and that the corruption of evil is not invincible.
Perhaps the most complete redemption is Darth Vader’s who, still not gratified after dropping one of the most memorable plot twists in cinematic history, tosses the emperor out like yesterday’s news. Then he dies, because, seriously, screw that guy.

Oh, they’re so cute! I think I’ll take a good look without the protection of my glasses!

TOO DUMB TO LIVE
This last group is dedicated to those villains who have such a basic lack of rational thinking that even Karma doesn’t want to have anything to do with them. We feel instant relief when their evil, malevolent intentions are thwarted by their own innate idiocy which shoves their villainous asses right at the edge of extinction, where they inevitably go on and do the worst possible thing, and die a stupid, but much deserved, death. Programmer Nedry from “Jurassic Park”, for instance, turns his petty resentment towards his boss into a major disaster, and then, in his dishonest attempt to sell embryos to the competition, has a very educational moment where he discovers that the apparently harmless Dilophosaurus has eye-burning spit and lots of friends with a voracious appetite. Stupid villains are my faves. They’re the ones who are not killed by their own evil plan but rather the lack thereof. The aliens from “Signs” are so astoundingly dull the one planet they decide to invade is 71% covered in water which is for them, deadly. Karma, presumably, is watching from the sidelines, eating popcorn.

Know of any other fun ways in which famous villains pegged out and started pushing up daisies? Let me know!

The post How to Murder your Villains with Style appeared first on Sci-fi humor Author Ian Lahey.

Paying Facebook for page likes?

Ian Lahey — Tue, 09 Jun 2020 14:21:49 +0000

Yeah I flushed some money down the toilet too. Turns out paying Facebook for page likes is not going to get you many REAL likes.

Look at me, I’m a writer!

You’re an indie author. You heard someone talking about building a reader base and raking in those likes, so off you go and create your author page on Facebook. Facebook, by the way, barely even has a page category for authors. “Writer” and “Author” are there, but there is no way to let people know what genre you write, or even that you write novels and not cookbooks, or road signs.

Anyway.

There you are with your author page, you’ve picked a nice mug shot and, I’m guessing, the cover art from your latest book for page background. A couple memes and a dozen Amazon links.

And of course you invite all your friends and family. And then you sit and stare at your page stats. 38 page likes in one day.

And the number stays the same the next day and the day after that. Damn relatives and friends, betraying you and not inviting the thousands you deserve. So you look at the competition, and see they have followers in the tens of thousands. What do they do that you don’t? Well money, of course! They must be spending shazillions in Facebook ads. You timidly check the promotion options and hey, that’s not so bad…Facebook promises to get your page out to the world and only charges you a few pennies for each actual like!

Ready to start your first page campaign?

Stop.

Don’t even start down that path. I am not saying it won’t work. Believe me it will. I tried it on my first author page and it worked wonders. In a week I had three thousand likes. I felt so famous. Now my posts and especially my Amazon links would reach my trusted readers.

I went on for a few months like that, thinking I would be getting incredible sales anytime now. I didn’t.

None of my posts were getting much engagement. Not even my absolutely hilarious memes. (I have a very high opinion of my sense of humor. The mere thought makes me laugh every time.)

Three thousand followers and maybe five thumbs up for my awesome posts. Not a single link click on “buy my book” posts. Not even when I had a freebie giveaway.

What was happening was that I was not targeting people interested in me as an author or in my books. Despite spending hours refining my audience and reach, I was not reaching the people who click on something they like.

I was reaching a lot of click farms. Click farms are batches of accounts which, through affiliate marketing, get a small portion of money back for liking paid links.

When I realized that, I deleted my page and started from scratch. This time I vowed to never use Facebook page ads again. Instead, I created a second page dedicated to people who like famous authors and genres close to my own writing style. A page dedicated not to buyers, but to fans. I write sci-fi and fantasy humor, so I made a page called “The BookLover’s Guide to the Galaxy” or “BLG2G”. I dedicated some time to that page and watched it grow quickly, from a few dozen to nearly two thousand followers. I never spent a single cent on it.

Oh, and I never invited any of my family members in there either. Those who liked the page simply discovered it because I shared some of the stuff on my personal page.

In the meantime I created my new page, and started sharing some of my material (never buy-me links) to BLG2G. Some followers trickled from there to my author page, where they were able to “discover” my writing style. Just a few dozen, that’s true, but their response to my posts was amazing. Their shares brought a few more likes. I looked at the profiles and saw they were active in many groups dedicated to sci-fi, fantasy and funny stuff.

And here’s the next move: I joined those groups. As my author page where possible.

Whenever I posted something which was in line with the topic of one of those groups, I shared it there. If you are careful and pick the right content, usually a meme, a quote or an interesting link, you have a 99% chance of getting your post approved.

What happens next is better than any Facebook boost: I got likes, hundreds of likes, and next to them, a little button saying “invite”.

That’s right. If you share as your page and someone likes the post, you can invite them to like your page. About 20% – 30% of the people who liked your post will be inclined to accept the invitation. You usually retain 80% of those likes.

I now have about 1,800 page likes on facebook.com/authorlahey, about half of what I originally had with paid likes. But the response is absolutely incredible. Each one of my posts gets hundreds of likes and tens of shares. My average post reach easily hits the thousand mark, and I’ve had a few posts go viral and exceed 300’000 views.

In exchange for this, as a sign of respect for my tribe, I don’t flood them with “buy my book” Amazon links, also because good ‘ole Facebook catches those posts and throttles their visibility. Instead I give insights on my writing, share my absolutely outrageous sense of humor hahahaha, and, of course, some of my free short stories from my author website. As a result, when I’m not reaping invites from the groups I get a steady flow of new followers every day.

In conclusion, fewer is better, get engaged followers, not paid clicks, but make sure your content is worth their attention. Your tribe will reward by liking, sharing and, yes, actually buying your books.

If, while doing all this, you actually remembered to write some.

hahahahahaha.

The basis for this article comes from the Rule 300 concept. You can find more about Rule 300 here.

Don’t forget you can get a free short story just by signing up to my newsletter. You will also be invited to virtual book fairs and get the opportunity to promote your book for FREE and even win a $25 Amazon gift card.

The post Paying Facebook for page likes? appeared first on Sci-fi humor Author Ian Lahey.

So you wanna write Sci-Fi?

Ian Lahey — Sun, 12 Apr 2020 18:13:01 +0000

Science! Spaceships robots and time-travel! That’s what science fiction is all about, right? One of the top 5 best selling genres in the world, and all you need is your imagination! You can write about life on a colony ship to Alpha Centauri and explain what it’s like to be teleported onto a planet, and nobody’s gonna ask you if you’ve tried those things out before writing about them. It’s not like that other genre which is currently #1 in sales: Sibling Incest Bondage Erotica.

It turns out that today’s Sci-Fi readers have an uncanny ability to determine when a sci-fi writer is writing science fiction that just doesn’t wash.
I’m not referring to accurately predicting the future, some of the best science fiction from the past century has proven itself to be quite off-mark, if not entirely wonky. In the last few years, a lot of the Fi has relocated to the Sci, and very few forecasts have survived the migration. Sure, Robert A. Heinlein may have predicted Google, but a lot of his other predictions for the year 2000 have fallen quite short. We found no life on Mars, haven’t defeated cancer yet and interplanetary transport is still far off. And although Philip K. Dick’s crawling mega-cities in his blockbuster “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” do strike our fancy, it still has paper newspapers as main media, and people smoking indoors. SF readers don’t mind this, and most won’t even notice. They don’t go to the genre to have their fortunes read to them, it’s not horoscopes they crave, it’s scientific speculation.

Now it’s true that the genre does split up into two main subgenres, hardcore and softcore…no, wait, that’s erotica. Hard and soft science fiction.
Hard science fiction delves more completely into the scientific details and technical specifications which make up its futuristic hypothesis. Soft science fiction will deal more with the plot, while not explicitly going into the mechanics of how the protagonist’s sister’s atoms got reassembled inside a temporary alternative timeline which, when seen from outside, looks suspiciously like a bondage knot.

I kn egfplain…

That said, even soft science fiction needs to be plausible, which means authors can’t just make shit up. Some of the most memorable SF authors, like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, were also scientists and scientific divulgers. And although readers are not scientists, at least not all of them, they’re still known for being damn good at spotting incoherent and unsubstantial science.

It turns out that SF authors are the ones who need to do the most research, and the hardest kind of research too, because nobody knows what it’s like to travel through time or wake from cryogenic sleep. You need to piece that information together starting from existing scientific theories and available tech. Lucky for you, apart from a pre-existing article on time travel which I wrote some time ago (heh), I also went and did some more research for you. Here are two interesting links to start building your future scenarios:

Wanna write about space travel? How hard can it be, it’s not that it’s rocket science, right? Well that’s precisely what it is! But this website gives you a nice, simplified breakdown of the fundamental physics involved in launching stuff into space: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/prelimnotes.php

One of the worst things you can do is use a scientific term improperly. They’ll be onto you in a matter of seconds. Nasa itself comes to the rescue with this quick list of the most common terms used in SF literature: https://er.jsc.nasa.gov/seh/SFTerms.html?fbclid=IwAR2QWLuGKdZS9XOUxCvKC-T67iTz0eAj8R4jKvVDlaiVGLW1m-m7I9Vx0Yc

There you go, you’re off to write your first Sci-Fi bestseller, and you didn’t even have to ask your sister to help you out. Not that she’d help you…

…she’s all tied up at the moment.

The post So you wanna write Sci-Fi? appeared first on Sci-fi humor Author Ian Lahey.