You just never know what kind of book will become a good worldbuilding resource. I started reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success more as a business owner. Long before the end of this commendably short and fluently readable book, I was applying Gladwell’s many questions and paradigms to my two worlds as much as to my business.

Gladwell looks at “success” here mainly as professional success (a question in itself, fellow worldbuilders: what defines “success” in your world? Or does your world even have such a concept?).  And in doing so, he discusses not only the people we consider successful (professional hockey players, big New York law firms, Bill Gates and the other wizards of Silicon Valley). He also discusses people with average lives, whose talents or intelligence would lead our culture to predict that they ought to be successful; and why some groups of immigrants to the US were quickly able to leverage themselves out of the sweatshops and farm fields, while others were not. And he devotes a whole chapter to exactly what it takes for any human being to become really, really good at any one skill, whether it be programming, hockey or music performance.

He also looks at failures, especially when they are endemic and spectacular. One chapter takes apart the cultural anthropology of airline crashes (or is it sociology? I never can keep those two straight!) and how the way specific cultures require social superiors and inferiors to talk to each other can lead to catastrophe. This chapter alone is a perfect read for anyone who is creating a strongly hierarchical society, or perhaps a face-off between characters from a stratified society vs an egalitarian one.  It quotes conversation between superiors and inferiors that might take your dialog subtexts to a whole new level of crossed intentions.

Success, it turns out, is not just a matter of talent and hard work (though of course you do need those ingredients as well). It’s a complex of an enormous range of outside factors, including family and national culture, economic circumstances, luck, the tides of history, and even, sometimes, the month you were born. How those all combine to make the difference between a true Outlier and an average Joe or Jane, makes a fascinating stack of worldbuilding inspiration.

Geek sci-fi news site io9 has just put out a massive chart of comparative magic: “The Rules of Magic According to the Greatest Fantasy Sagas of All Time.”

Here’s a very small piece of it. To view the rest, you’ll have to jump over to the article and click on the image (I recommend downloading the large version so you can browse at leisure).

This chart is a great place to start thinking about how magic works in your universe. The column headings (see the whole chart) pose some essential questions about magic, and the columns give answers imagined by dozens of authors.

As an exercise, you might want to write out your own answers to each question. And I’ll add one more:

“What are the magic’s inherent limits?”

This question comes from the fantasy rule that is generally considered one of the most important: magic must have some kind of limits or consequences. If it doesn’t, your characters can just magic up anything they need, and magic away any problem.  Kind of like the replicator in Star Trek.

In building your own world’s magic, what rule of magic did you think about the most, and why? And what is your favorite example of a good use of that rule?

In my review of Unstoppable last time, I talked about how the film is lifted above the average Pow!Kaboom! action movie by aiming for an authentic portrayal of the railroad world.  Any story needs a bare minimum of authenticity to get your audience to suspend their disbelief and jump in. But I’m talking about a higher level of authenticity, the kind that makes people fall passionately in love with stories, characters and worlds. That’s what we’re looking for here. So what are some of the ways we can do that?

Know what you’re talking about. You have to know enough about whatever you’re portraying, to make it feel real. The languages and cultures in The Lord of the Rings feel authentic because even the invented ones grew from Tolkien’s lifelong study of ancient European languages and cultures. You don’t have to make a career study of every aspect of your world, but you need to know enough to convince most of your readers that you’re not just pulling details out of your– ahem!

And the more important something is to your story, the more you need to know about it.

Chris Pine and Denzel Washington as ordinary railroad workers at the start of a far from ordinary day. Image: 20th Century Fox

Unstoppable’s trailers and reviews led me to expect a fast-paced thriller with lots of exaggerated action, trains blowing up, and characters carrying out really preposterous stunts that would never work in the real world. In other words, entertaining popcorn.

What I got was a day in the life of a small group of railroad workers – a day in which something has gone seriously wrong. The writers of Unstoppable did something that’s relatively rare in the action movie genre: they took the trouble to research the world they were writing about and tried to portray it faithfully. The script doesn’t have the characters puke exposition to explain this or that technical detail of railroad operations. It just lets us watch and listen as railroad men and women work and talk to each other about their work, and assumes that we’re smart enough to figure out what we need to know to follow the story. As we watch people move trains around, we begin to understand (if we didn’t already) just how much care must be taken every minute of working with these steel and diesel monsters, to prevent exactly the kind of incident that drives the plot.

As a Project Editor at Cliffhanger Books, I want to remind all interested writers: Paramourtal 2 submissions close  on Halloween at midnight. Bwahahahaha!

We’re looking for male-female romance featuring at least one paranormal character, length between 6500 and 8000 words. These are firm limits, so please don’t email and ask if we’ll take 4000 or 10,000. (never do that anyway, to any editor. We don’t make up guidelines just to amuse ourselves, you know. ) You can find full guidelines and submission information on our Submissions page.

If you’ve read the guidelines and are still not sure what we’re looking for, take a look at Paramourtal (available in several ebook formats, for instant access) or if you’re short on time, at least check out some of the reviews for it to get a summary of some of the stories.

And a personal plea from this editor: don’t send us a vampire romance unless you’re absolutely certain we’ve never seen anything like your approach to the vampire romance. Because if you read this blog, you already know I was sick of vampire stories a decade ago!

Could you write a story or game scenario that had no female characters, or no male characters — by accident, because you just forgot to include the other gender as significant players in your world?

That is apparently what’s happened to the author of the fantasy novel I’m reading. I know women exist in this typically “European medieval” fantasy world,  because they’re mentioned once or twice as village wives and as travelers. But only mentioned. I’ve now reached page 53 of this otherwise well-written first novel, and the author has not yet singled out an individual female for even one sentence of description, let alone giving a woman a name or a line of  dialog.

In case you missed all the discussions on Facebook and elsewhere on the internet, NPR has just published one of its reader polls, this time on the  The Top Science Fiction and Fantasy Books.

The list can be found here on NPR’s web site.  Well worth a look, if only to see what the current generation thinks is worthwhile, and perhaps most important, to discover what goodies you might have overlooked.

Reading the list, you’ll run through the same emotions as did many of the hundreds of readers who posted comments. “Oh, good, my favorite!” “What! I can’t believe that made it onto the list!” “Why did this get left out?” “Why did so-and-so get five books, and my favorite only got one or none?” “Why did they pick that book by this author, instead of the other one?” “Too many new books” “Too many old books” “Where’s Harry Potter/A Wrinkle in Time/Narnia? [for the record, this list specifically excluded books published for children, regardless of how many adults love them!]“

I was pleased but not even a little bit surprised by the title at the very top of the list,

From Cliffhanger Books, where I am Project Editor, the announcement that will start me on another few months of reading, selecting and editing some great stories:

Our first cover

Cliffhanger Books is looking for new, previously unpublished short stories (approx. 6500-8000 words) for Paramourtal 2, the second volume of our award-nominated paranormal romance series. We are eager to read truly original fiction with unique (i.e. think beyond vampires and werewolves, though they are welcome as well), well-defined, emotionally complex characters. 

Give us an innovative take on an established character type. Approach your love story from a fresh angle or motivation. Hook us in with an imaginative and perplexing plot that will keep readers engaged until the very end.

Submissions are open to all U.S and international writers age 18 and over. Stories must be submitted in English. While paranormal romance authors are generally female, we want story submissions from talented male writers as well.

Interested writers are invited to review our submission guidelines at Cliffhanger Books.

Deadline for submissions is midnight, October 31, 2011 (Halloween).

Good luck!

A spaceship crashed in the street of an Old West cow town: the essence of Cowboys & Aliens. Image copyright Dreamworks/Universal Studios

So far this summer I’ve seen half a dozen blockbuster genre/action movies. Cowboys & Aliens is the only one to live up to my hopes. And that’s saying a lot, considering I’ve been eagerly awaiting this movie for a couple of years.

Picture a showdown building between a ruthless local cattle baron (Harrison Ford) and a tough-as-granite outlaw (Daniel Craig) who doesn’t like bullies;  with townsfolk like the sheriff (Keith Carradine), the saloon owner (Sam Rockwell) and others caught in the middle. Just when the gunplay seems ready to erupt, strange lights appear in the night sky, swooping toward the town…

Gods of Justice has arrived in print and in ebook format. You can order your copy by going to the Cliffhanger Books Gods of Justice page and clicking on the buttons for paperback or digital.  Or just go to Smashwords or Amazon and look it up.

Kevin and I are very proud of this book. Every one of the authors submitted a really entertaining original superhero story, then worked with us, rewriting and tweaking and polishing, to make each story as good as it could be.

It’s a great mix of styles, moods, settings and superheroes, and even a bit of cross-genre mashup here and there to add to the fun.

To make it even better, artists Mark Offutt and Joel Gomez contributed 8 terrific comic style illustrations of the superheroes.