Science fiction stories typically arise from a novum, a scientifically plausible concept that is a “reality” in the tale. The novum might be an mechanical device like robot servants, artificial intelligence, or faster-than-light spacecraft; it also can be a hypothetical idea such as “The Earth is a scientific experiment run by aliens to determine the meaning of life” or “The government outlaws books.” The author then asks “What if?” exploring how the world with this novum is different than ours.

Among the problems of many novice science fiction writers is instead of introducing a new novum they rely on used furniture – that is, they borrow novums from popular SF series. After all, how many novels have you read that use starships exploring the galaxy for the Earth-based Federation? Barely changing names to appear as if you are not appropriating – a starcraft seeking M-class worlds for the Earth-centered Alliance – still doesn’t cut it as original or fully using the potential that science fiction offers to examine our culture or humanity.

To help SF writers, here are some novums of potential near-future inventions from which stories could be built:

Facial recognition app
What if smart contact lenses we wore include a facial recognition app that instantly told you the name of any person before you as well as provided a profile about them? How does this change our greeting customs?

Garden sensors
What if sensors beneath your lawn or in your garden could measure the amount of moisture in the soil and detect bug infestations then deliver targeted sprays of water, pesticides or fertilizer to those spots? How does this change the appearance of our lawns and neighborhoods?

GJ 338 AB colonization
What if future space explorers decided to settle a habitable planet orbited the second star in this binary? Such a planet probably would orbit the K-type star in just 34.5 days.

Living perfumes
What if people could download and apply bioengineered bacteria that when applied to the skin would emit a pleasant scent? The body’s epidermal area would become a living ecosystem of perfume.

Upcycling
What if products and their packaging were designed so that when recycled they retained 100% of their original integrity? This will be necessary in a resource-stretched world. How does this change the way we package, use and discard consumer goods?

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my writing guidebooks:

Hopefully you’ll be able to learn in one quick shot the difference between the words fazed and phased.

Fazed is a verb meaning to disturb or to cause one to feel disconcerted: Charlie was not fazed by his girlfriend’s temper-tantrum.

Phased is to carry out a plan in gradual steps: The new computer system will be phased in over the next several months.

If you can’t remember the difference, hopefully your editor won’t be fazed (er, bothered) by this.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my writing guidebooks:

Among the most important words in your story are the ones that begin it. Those words should get the reader to ask, “What’s going on here?” so he keeps reading. In a short story, the author usually only has a couple of sentences to make this happen; in a novel, a couple of paragraphs typically is the limit.

Your opening lines – also known as the grabber or narrative hook – need to deliver some vital information to readers as well. In most stories, the opening lines provide some striking situation that presents the reader with something unusual, and they usually introduce the main character, his conflict to be resolved and the setting.

There are a couple of ploys you can use to create gripping opening lines. First, show two seemingly disparate elements, such as “At 0150 Greenwich Mean Time on December 1, 1975, every telephone in the world started to ring”, which Arthur C. Clarke uses in “Dial ‘F’ for Frankenstein.” Another ploy is to start with a “distancing move” that shows we’re in a different world, such as “The great eye floated in space”, in Ray Bradbury’s “The Lost City of Mars”. A third technique is to show your main character in a crisis or puzzling situation, such as “Why must they do it one December 28th? John Stapleton considered the question” as Theodore I. Thomas wrote in “December 28th”.

When writing your story’s opening lines, remember that they should:
• Be interesting and intriguing enough to draw reader in
• Be integral to the story, perhaps even holding key clues to how the main character will resolve the central problem by foreshadowing the ending
• Establish, without much detail, the main character/protagonist and a problem or conflict that that the main character must resolve; in doing so, those lines shows the main character threatened and indicate what’s at stake for him
• Establish the setting, or at least the story’s place by establishing the scene of where the main character is
• Reveal the antagonist, if only vaguely
• Set the story’s tone
• Give the reader a sense that the main character’s life began before the story did; as Ben Bova wrote in “Notes to a Science Fiction Writer,” “this helps convince the reader that … (the main character) is really alive”

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my writing guidebooks:

“A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote.” – Mignon McLaughlin

“The good critic is he who narrates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.” – Anatole France

“Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.” – Christopher Hampton

“Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.” – Kurt Vonnegut

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my writing guidebooks:

The very act of writing is a testament that anything is possible.

Writing brings reality to what we cannot now do: the technology to travel to other solar systems; use of magical potions to immediately heal an injured comrade; the ability to cross the Old West or sail aboard a Roman galleon. Whether you pen fiction that creates a story centered on these impossibilities or nonfiction that details the path toward obtaining such dreams, writing transforms a vision in one’s head into something tangible.

The fuel for this transformation is one’s imagination; the devices that this creativity drives vary from pen and paper to keyboard and computer memory, from paperback to ebook.

When our visions become something tangible that others enjoy as well as learn and grow from, they can ignite within readers the desire to make that dream more than just words on a page. The annals of science fiction are ripe with readers who became engineers, scientists and entrepreneurs that made visions of space travel, new communication devices, and medical cures a reality of our modern times. Political, economic and philosophical tomes have spawned new ways of thinking about our world that whole generations then embraced and constructed.

Are you lonely and seeking love? Write a romance. Do you dream of greater wealth? Write a guidebook to investing. Want to visit mysterious Incan ruins? Write a travelogue or an action-adventure novel.

For with your pen, you can go anywhere and achieve any wish you desire.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my writing guidebooks:

If you don’t have a personal Facebook page yet, you should give serious consideration to getting one. Facebook is the largest social networking site on the globe. Everyone on Facebook has a page on which they can post updates, photos, and videos about their life. A page can be set up so that either “friends” (and you get to approve who is your friend) or the public can see it. The social networking site offers an excellent way to reach potential readers.

To promote your book via Facebook, you’ll have to begin by setting up you personal page. It’s quite easy to do, and Facebook takes you through the entire process with a step-by-step tutorial. It’s also free to join.

Once you set up your personal page, you then can create a page just about your book. This page won’t contain all of those updates, photos and videos about your kids and trip to Mexico that you’ll soon be posting on your personal page.

To set up your business page, you should have jpegs on hand of your book’s cover and some vertical photo that might be used as your “cover.” The book cover will serve as your profile picture. The vertical cover photo could be of you at a book signing, a photo related to what your book is about (for example, a spacecraft orbiting the earth if you’re book is about why we should spend more money on space exploration), or a close-up of the book cover.

You’ll also want to write a description of your book in the “About” section.” This description essentially can be what you’ve placed on your back cover blurb or the home page of your website. Also, there is a spot where you’ll be able to place links to your website and blog, so be sure to do that.

What to post on Facebook? Anything that you might blog. Given this, I essentially post what I write for my Twitter feeds (which are just links to my blog) on Facebook. This may sound redundant, but not everyone on Facebook uses Twitter and vice versa. You’re just covering your bases.

To make Facebook truly useful, you’ll need to get “friends” to maximize the number of people who view your page and will potentially read your book Once you get friends then you can ask them to “like” your business page. Each time you make a post on the Facebook page for your book, it will go out to a “wall” where anyone who “likes” your page can read what you wrote (along with what all of their other friends wrote).

How do you get “friends”? You have to ask them to be your friend via Facebook (it’s a simple click or two of a button). Look for the following people on Facebook to be your friends:
• Family
• Friends (Makes sense, doesn’t it?)
• Colleagues past and present
• Former classmates (high school and college)
• Friends of lots of your friends (You may not know them personally, but you do have something in common!)
• Pages on related subjects and “like” or “friend” them (If you’re book is about coffee, seek out coffeehouses.)

All of your posts show up on each of your friends’ walls, so hopefully others who are not friends will take an interest in your page.

Some savvy Facebook users reduce some of this work simply by making their personal page their book page. If you do this, however, you’re counting on people to buy a book by an author rather than buying a book about a specific subject or from a specific genre. Since you’re a new author, you probably don’t yet have much name recognition to generate many book sales. People will come to you because of the book’s genre and subject matter, not because you wrote it.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional book editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past decade, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of 80 books including the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my book marketing guidebooks:

How many times have you read a book then later as trying to find some statement or paragraph in it said under your breath, “What page was that on?”

Eventually you probably just give in and look up the page number in the index or table of contents. Good thing the author included page numbers!

You, too, should include page numbers in your book. Besides being useful to readers, including page numbers helps your book look professional.

Page numbers and running headers that include the book’s name and your title also are called folios.

Almost every page in your book should have a page number. Start with the introduction/preface and run through the main text, appendixes and index. Forewords and prefaces get Roman numeral pages (i, ii, iii, etc.); all other pages get Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3). You can skip page numbers, though, on the half title page, copyright page, dedication, acknowledgements, table of contents, first page of a chapter (though each first page of a chapter is counted), and the author’s bio at the back of book.

Some other basic rules for placing page numbers in books include:
• Don’t write “Page x”, just give the number
• Left pages are even numbers, right pages are odd numbers (Side note: To avoid looking amateurish, place the first page of a chapter on an odd-numbered page, even if that means you must leave the even-numbered page before it blank)
• Put page numbers on the outside margin (e.g. the side of the book away from the spine)
• Post them on the bottom of page (They can be combined with the running header, though – read on!)
• Change the font and point size so they appear slightly different than the book’s text

As noted above, you might include the page number in the running headers. Appearing in the top margin, these include either the book title on each page (typical of novels) or the book title and chapter title on opposite pages (typical of nonfiction books). Usually, the book title appears on the even-numbered page and the chapter title on the odd-numbered page, but there’s no hard and fast rule for this. Sometimes the book title and author’s name both will appear at the top of the page.

The running header can be centered rather than aligned left or right. If doing so, then consider placing page numbers at the top of the page. Align the page number to the outside margin (e.g. the side of page farthest from the spine); otherwise align them to the margin edge farthest from the spine.

Regardless of what format is used, place the running header slightly more than a line of type above the top line of text appearing on a page.

If formatting your book in Microsoft Word, you can set up running headers, but it gets complicated. Sometimes the best thing to do (especially if you have a nonfiction book or any book in which chapters have titles) is “cheat” by creating a text box for a running header for an even numbered page, copying and then modifying it for an odd page running header, and then copying and pasting each one to where it should appear on each page, changing page numbers and chapter titles as you go. This can be rather tedious, though.

There are a lot of good reasons to self-publish besides that mainstream publishing has shut its door to most authors. Most notable is the high royalty that can come back to you. With a mainstream publisher, you’re lucky to make a dime for every dollar of books sold. Up to 70 cents for every dollar can come to you, though, if you self-publish. Another good reason to self-publish is that it’s quick. Within a few hours, your book can be available for sale to the public when you self-publish. Mainstream publishing may require months from the time you complete a manuscript to its appearance on bookstore shelves. In addition, you instantly can sell your book across the globe when self-publishing. Expect several more months and attorneys to be involved with global distribution and sales if you go the mainstream publishing route.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 350 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the 7 Minutes a Day… writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my self-publishing guidebooks:

Good stories center on the clashing of characters’ goals and motivations. Sometimes a character’s goals and motivations arise when tracking another or when being tracked. Here are four writing prompts for stories that center on the plot of being tracked down.

Man vs. nature
Your main character is hired to capture some creature – a dangerous escaped animal, a monster of some sort, a beast on an alien planet. How does the main character go about capturing this creature? Elevate the power of this story by having the main character discover something about the creature that leads him to believe it should not be captured.

Man vs. man
The main character is hired to capture someone – a man wanted for a crime, an escaped convict, someone who holds a dark secret. How does our main character go about finding this person? What lessons about himself does the main character learn as he fails through the story’s rising action to capture the person?

Man vs. society
Turn the man vs. man conflict around: What if your main character is wanted by law enforcement or an intelligence agency? How does he avoid being caught by that organization? What does he learn about himself as the organization closes on his capture?

Man vs. himself
What if your main character, whose job is to track down someone, uncovers clues about the hunted that leads him to doubt his assignment? Focus on his internal struggle to rectify his assignment against his morals and the truth.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my writing guidebooks: