You should finish what you start. New writers often hear this piece of advice, and there is a time when it could be the best advice a writer could get. There are also times when it is the worst advice.

It is all too easy, when you get bogged down in a manuscript without a clear way forward, to start the next new shiny thing, until that becomes bogged down, too, and you can start on the next new shiny thing. And so on and so forth. Rinse and repeat. Manuscripts build up in the proverbial drawer and none of them are finished. Sound familiar? Then you’re a serial non-finisher. The best advice for you is that you need some discipline and to grab the manuscript you feel most strongly about and finish it to perfection.

On the flip side, who doesn’t know at least one new writer who has spent the last five years churning out draft after draft of the same book? Often, the book is a typical first-ever-novel mess, the characters are Mary-Sue-ish and the plot meandering if not downright absent. And every time someone in the writers’ group says something, the writer goes off and does another draft, because member X said it could be about a conspiracy and member Z said that the characters are flat. So obviously the plot-less book needs a conspiracy and all the characters need lots of personal problems…

Hold the show.

Yes, you should finish what you start, but you should first learn to judge which of your unfinished works warrant finishing.

As a new writer, it’s likely you don’t know. I certainly didn’t. I didn’t have a feel for what makes a good story. I had no idea what was a fresh concept, or even what was required to write a good story. I could tell a good story when I saw one, but hadn’t the skill to see why. As your skills in that area continue to grow, you will see what ideas are snippets of interesting stuff and what ideas are complete stories.

Presuming you’re in a similar situation and have not market-tested any of your work, and you have this cool idea that you want to write about regardless… Well, write it, finish the story, and then move onto the next story. It may not be any good, and you may realize this by the time you’ve finished. You may not even be able to finish it because you realized that you made a mess of the plot (does there have to be one?) or that the book ended up being about something different from what you intended. Never mind, leave it as-is, finished or not, and write something completely different. Never mind the planned sequels. Just pick up something completely different, and, using the skills you’ve developed in your other manuscript, start something new.

If there is one thing I have learned in my time as a writer, it’s that once you stop working on a manuscript, it doesn’t somehow vanish or become unwritten. Those words that made you bang your head against the wall will still be there one, two, three or more years later. Presuming you continue to grow as a writer, you’ll be able to look at those early manuscripts and judge whether or not the story is worth picking up again. What is definitely not worth it is to keep banging your head against the wall with something that is not working under the guise of “finish what you start.”

If you find that you can’t finish any manuscripts, then it’s still worth abandoning those manuscripts in favor of some courses or tuition on plotting to work out what is holding you back.

Patty Jansen lives in Sydney, Australia, where she spends most of her time writing science fiction and fantasy. She publishes in both traditional and indie venues. Her story “This Peaceful State of War” placed first in the second quarter of the Writers of the Future contest and was published in their 27th anthology. Her story “Survival in Shades of Orange” will be published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact.
Her novels include Watcher’s Web (soft SF), The Far Horizon (middle-grade SF), Charlotte’s Army (military SF) and books 1 and 2 of the Icefire Trilogy: Fire & Ice and Dust & Rain (post-apocalyptic steampunk fantasy).

Patty is on Twitter (@pattyjansen), Facebook, LinkedIn, GoodReads, LibraryThing, Google Plus, and blogs at pattyjansen.com.

Rain is coming down hard outside, so I’m not playing golf today. To the thunderous riffs of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir,” with my stereo set on one-track repeat, I’m staying home to conquer Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

Over the course of ten, maybe fourteen hours, I walk the path of the Jedi: escape the orbital bombardment of Taris, learn the ways of the Force at a small enclave on Dantooine, and seek out the fragmented star maps that will lead me to the fearsome Star Forge, a colossal war factory located deep in the galaxy’s Unknown Regions.

As Revan, the Prodigal Knight — fallen Jedi, redeemed Sith — I uncover the forgotten truths of my past.

Well, some of the forgotten truths. Amid all the celebration and redemption, Bastila and Master Vandar forget to fill me in on the rest of Revan’s lost history…

The year is 2011, and I hear that Drew Karpyshyn, author of the Bane trilogy (Path of Destruction, Rule of Two, and Dynasty of Evil) has written a novel titled Revan, which is intended to tie up the handful of loose ends left at the end of the original Knights of the Republic game. In the intervening years, there was a sequel — fun, but lacking the rich story that made the original so enthralling — in which I learned that while Revan may still be alive, even his wife, Bastila, doesn’t know where he is.

Here we are in 2012, and I find myself in a place of mixed emotions, sad to have finally arrived at a kind of closure about the Prodigal Knight’s story. As a fan of Karpyshyn’s work, not only on the original Knights of the Republic and Mass Effect games, but also on the Bane novels — which are among the best in the Expanded Universe, particularly for their intimate portrayal of Sith sorcery and well-drawn characters — I’m ecstatic that Lucas Books continues to entrust Karpyshyn with his own contributions to the Star Wars universe.

I devour the novel; the first half over a couple shifts at work, the second in a single Saturday evening.

An ambitious Sith named Scourge reveals himself to me, as does the rest of the hidden Empire — Darth Nyriss, the weakening Darth Xedrix, and the millennia-old Emperor himself, Lord Vitiate.

These folks, I quickly realize, are Karpyshyn’s bridge between the first two Knights games and the brand-new MMORPG, Star Wars: The Old Republic, which I probably won’t bother playing since my laptop isn’t optimized for gaming.

But the novel isn’t populated entirely by unfamiliar names. In fact, old favorites from that rainy July afternoon make noteworthy appearances, or even play vital roles in the story: Bastila Shan, the astromech droid T3-M4, Canderous Ordo… The one called the Exile, Meetra, the protagonist from Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords plays an intriguing and important role in Revan’s ultimate fate. A Jedi archivist, named Atris, shows up in one tense confrontation. Countless others are mentioned, but never make an appearance.

My greatest disappointment with the novel has everything to do, however, with the glaring absence of one very beloved character — one who lovingly refers to organic beings as “meatbags,” to the constant amusement of his master. The assassin droid HK-47 is mentioned at multiple points throughout the story, and one late chapter seems entirely devoted to foreshadowing his eventual arrival at Revan’s side, but by the end of the novel his dark humor and murderous tendencies are nowhere to be found.

If the novel suffers for anything tangible other than its seemingly rushed copy edit — there are a lot of places where needless expositional passages are more or less repeated, and I found a lot of typographical errors as well — it is HK-47′s absence.

But perhaps Karpyshyn didn’t think comic relief was befitting of a novel this…well, dark.

Whereas the Star Wars films are recognizable for their endearing campiness, the many novels in the Expanded Universe tend to venture into more mature, at times even somber or disturbing, territory. Take the Matthew Stover novels, for instance; his Revenge of the Sith novelization far surpasses the depth of the Episode III film precisely because it doesn’t shy away from the sheer darkness of its subject matter.

Throughout Revan, Karpyshyn unflinchingly confronts very human, very this-worldly problems, such as slavery, prisoners of war, torture as a means of interrogation, and the age-old mythic quest for immortality. His worlds are stormy, devoid of life and its Force-essence, and rife with political corruption.

For this reason, as much as the ending feels at turns dissatisfying and even potentially offensive, I have to grant the author my utmost respect as an honest, competent, and admirably bold storyteller. His fourth addition to the Star Wars mythos reminds us that heroes are the stuff of legend, of utter embellishment; that, in truth, men and women at war are simply mortal creatures, seeking goodness in a universe filled with suffering and evil. The tale of Revan, whether concluded or forever left shrouded in mystery, strikes at the heart of many harsh truths about the horrors of warfare, whether among the stars of a distant past, or in our own troubling times.

But I don’t really remember all of them, at least not well enough to spout off an inclusive list — so from now on, I’d like to know what I’ve read, what I’d like to read, and what my feelings about a given book were. Whenever I make a list of books I plan on reading, that never happens. I find new things, hear about new things, and move on; so I’m going to read what I want as I go along, with the single goal of reading a lot.

Also, I’ve gotten into a bad habit — thanks to something Neil Gaiman once said — of stopping halfway through books that aren’t holding my attention. The downside to this is, I finish fewer books; the upside is that I read more often, and don’t waste time on books that don’t tickle my fancy.

Since January’s almost over, it’s as good a time as any to talk a little bit about the books I’ve gotten through so far this year.

First, I started reading Hellhole by Kevin J. Anderson and Brian Herbert around the first of the month. By page 290, Chapter 38, I’ve lost interest in the plot. There are toomany characters that aren’t fleshed-out enough for me to give a damn. And the way the aliens are described, and their names — come on, guys. Get serious. I was a huge fan of the novel Dune: The Battle of Corrin, which I read in high school not long after discovering the elder Herbert’s original Dune masterpiece, and so I was expecting a lot more from this new trilogy. Anderson, for instance, is a tremendous writer. His work with Star Wars, D.C. Comics, etc., has set him apart as a veritable powerhouse in genre writing. But Hellhole feels rushed, flat, and unfeeling.

Then I picked up William Gibson’s Distrust That Particular Flavor, a collection of nonfiction essays about culture, technology, futurism, art, and interesting observations about the mundane. I read it in roughly two sittings, over the course of a day and a half, and…I’ll let my review at Digital Science Fiction save me the trouble of repeating myself.

I chased that shot of genius with a pair of guilty pleasures: Drew Karpyshyn’s Revan and James Luceno’s Darth Plagueis. The former was an enjoyable return to the Old Republic as fans of the original-Xbox Knights of the Old Republic games understand it, but it ends with a rather dark, somewhat vague denouement meant as an obvious setup for the recently-released Star Wars: The Old Republic MMORPG. Darth Plagueis, on the other hand, is a welcome dose of exemplary writing — the kind of thing you don’t expect from Star Wars, but you sometimes get when the cover has a name like Luceno, Matthew Stover, or Terry Brooks on it. I won’t spoil much, but one thing that piqued my interest about the novel is that the hardcover edition jacket has Darth Maul on the back of it, lightsaber activated and face twisted with fury. Also: Darth Sidious as we’ve never seen him in the films. Plagueis himself, well, by the end he’s underutilized, his apprentice having become the novel’s true protagonist and dominant viewpoint character, it seems; but he is one of the most intriguing characters in the Star Wars Expanded Universe, and the prequel films would have benefited from his role in the machinations of the Sith.

As of now, I’m about thirty or forty pages into George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, the first volume in his acclaimed epic fantasy series. I don’t usually read fantasy, but I’ve caught myself saying multiple times over the past year or so that I’d like to get into the genre as a way to stretch my writerly muscles and find another literary love. So far, I’m finding that Martin was exactly the gateway drug I needed. The characters are well drawn, believable; and the worldbuilding is phenomenal. Like many other geeks, I’m completely enthralled at present by Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – and so now seemed like as good a time as any to test the fantasy waters. I’m glad I did.

In school, I’m presently reading or rereading: Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (utterly incomprehensible to the modern reader, and largely devoid of effective comedy, but intriguing nonetheless if I take the time to read slowly and with care); Remaking the Modern by Farha Ghannam, an ethnography of present-day Cairo; and Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poetry authored by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I’m trying to keep an open mind, and read these with earnest, but it’s difficult. With schoolwork, there’s always a great science fiction book I could be reading instead — and I’m ready to get the hell out of school in general.

Dave Hutchinson was born in Sheffield in 1960. After reading American Studies at the University of Nottingham, he became a journalist and is now currently unemployed. He’s the author of five collections of short stories and one novel, and his novella “The Push” was shortlisted for the 2010 BSFA award for short fiction. He has also edited two anthologies and co-edited a third. He lives in north London with his wife and several cats.

Dave, thanks for agreeing to drop by for an interview. The last time I saw “The Incredible Exploding Man,” it was a rough but ingenious first draft freshly written for Jeremy C. Shipp’s Yard Gnome Army Fiction Writing Boot Camp. It was recently published in the acclaimed SF anthology Solaris Rising, edited by Ian Whates, alongside some of the biggest names in the field. Now I’m looking forward to getting Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology and reading it yet again, among a selection of the finest science fiction stories published throughout 2011.

What are your feelings in the wake of this tremendous success?

Not only that, but it’s now on the longlist for the BSFA’s short fiction award. It’s an odd feeling. I did Jeremy’s course — which I can heartily recommend to everyone — because I had a lot of time on my hands, I wasn’t writing anything, and I’d never done a writing course before. I’m completely self-taught — which in my case is just a euphemism for “hasn’t the faintest idea what he’s doing” — and I thought it might help point out the errors in my own writing. Somehow it didn’t occur to me that it would also involve writing a fresh piece of fiction, and when Jeremy dropped that bombshell on us I sort of panicked. You saw the extremely lumpy first draft and you know how bad it was; the fact that it went on to be sold, and then picked for Year’s Best, and then get longlisted, is entirely down to the comments of you and our fellow Boot Campers. It would almost certainly be a different story without all that input. So, how do I feel about it? Very pleased, obviously; I’ve had more people come up to me and say they’ve enjoyed this one story than I think all my other stuff put together. It just seems to have tickled a nerve somewhere.

The story features some pretty freaky science, showcased in the form of a pretty original militarized-superhero tale. Care to explain the basics of the scientific concept that inspired the work?

Hah! You know, even though it’s so recent I have no idea where the story came from. It sort of bolted itself together in my head spontaneously out of all kinds of junk that was floating around. Mostly I made it all up. There’s some stuff in there about string theory and a kind of quasi-dimension called Calabi-Yau Space, but I’ve only the vaguest understanding of that stuff; any half-bright physics graduate would shoot holes through the science.

After the other students and I gave you feedback on the story, how did you go about revising it? What pieces of advice from first readers were most helpful in the second draft?

Basically I realized I’d approached the whole thing wrong. The first draft was in the present tense and I think someone pointed out that it would work better if the central character was the narrator. So I took it to bits and did it again. The opening scene in the White House Situation Room — which incidentally I was quite pleased with — didn’t really impress anyone, so that went. After that was gone I needed a new opening, and once I had that the structure of the second draft settled down. I gave the narrator a sidekick, wrote some back story for the sidekick, and by the time I’d done all that it started to look like a proper story. Very hard work, though.

Was Solaris Rising the first place you sent the story? What was your reaction when you got the news that it would be published alongside works by the likes of Stephen Baxter, Alastair Reynolds, et cetera?

Yes. I got an email from the editor saying he had some room and did I have anything to send him. I had something finished, but it was about three times too long, so rather than let the opportunity drop I sent him the second draft of “Exploding Man” as soon as I finished it, and he bought it. It got a little tweaked afterward — the original was set at Fermilab and I suddenly realized that anyone who actually knew anything about Fermilab would tear the descriptions to bits, so I made up a fictional high-energy physics lab in a fictional town in Iowa instead. As for the book? Well, you dream about having a story in an anthology with writers like that. It really is very mighty company to be in.

It’s been about six months since I read the piece, but the overall impression is still very much with me — it’s sort of a frightening story, but the requisite sense-of-wonder that empowers so much of the best science fiction is alive in full force in “The Incredible Exploding Man.” Care to give your own summary of what the plot entails, without giving too much away?

Hm. How to avoid spoilers…? It’s really about an ordinary bloke suddenly being pitched into an extraordinary situation following an accident at a particle accelerator, and the choices he has to make after that.

Your writing is obviously very competent, which means you’ve no doubt been at this a while, honing and refining your craft, but also presumably reading widely in the genre. Who are your biggest literary influences, both within the science fiction section of the bookstore and beyond it?

Within science fiction, Larry Niven and Keith Roberts. I thought quite a lot of Niven’s earlier work had a kind of breezy So-Cal quality to it that I liked very much. Roberts, I thought, was one of our finest science fiction writers — his best stuff has an intense connection with the English landscape, particularly the landscape of Dorset. I would also love to write half as well as Eric Brown, Chris Priest, Charlie Stross, and Peter Hamilton, very considerable writers each in their own way. Outside science fiction, Raymond Chandler and Len Deighton. I just love their way with dialogue.

How long have you been writing, and to what author would you say you most owe the urge to scribble?

I’ve been writing properly since I was sixteen, so about 35 years. I’m not sure there’s one writer who prompted me to start; I read a lot of Heinlein and Asimov and Bester and Niven and E. E. Smith and many other writers when I was a kid, and I guess at some point it all reached a kind of critical mass and I decided to have a go myself.

What other influences have had an impact on your writing, literary or otherwise? Any particular band or artist whose music you enjoy listening to while writing?

I’m deeply fond of the English classical composer Ralph Vaughan Williams; his stuff has the same kind of connection to English landscape that Keith Roberts’s fiction has, and that’s kind of influenced some of the stuff I’ve done. I used to listen to talk radio a lot while I was working; for some reason it annoyed me so much it helped me concentrate on what I was doing. These days I’ll just put my Walkman on shuffle. I’m a big fan of Rush, which I suppose dates me a bit, but I’ll listen to pretty much anything for background.

I love Rush! They’re one of those rare classic-rock bands that only seems to get better and better over the course of their career.

What’s your opinion on the sudden surge of Hollywood-level interest in science fiction? Since the success of Avatar, we’ve seen a sequel to Disney’s Tron, a reboot/prequel to the brilliant classic Planet of the Apes, and Ridley Scott is in talks to direct a second installment in the Blade Runner universe following the release of his latest SF film, Prometheus; hell, science fiction seems to be just about everywhere in the mainstream. Would you say this is a good thing, and what project, rumored or confirmed, has your inner schoolboy-geek giddy with anticipation? (I know I’m most looking forward to the recently announced live-action TV series, Star Wars: Underworld, which producer Rick McCallum is describing as a blend of the Star Wars universe and The Godfather!)

It’s funny; to me there seems to have been a steady stream of big-budget science fiction films for years, going all the way back to Star Wars. It’s just that there are more of them these days. Which is good; I always think that films are a useful gateway drug for potential science fiction readers. What has heartened me enormously is the sheer quality of writing on genre television shows these days. Series like Battlestar Galactica and Carnivale had some of the best writing I’ve seen for a very long time.

Dave, I can’t thank you enough for taking the time to drop by and have this talk. I look forward to getting my hands on Dozois’s Year’s Best for 2011, and I wish you continued success in this crazy but thrilling vocation!

Alex, it’s been a genuine pleasure. Thanks for the questions!

“The Incredible Exploding Man” can be found in Solaris Rising, ed. Ian Whates, and will be reprinted in Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection, available July 3, 2012, and also featuring fiction by Catherynne M. Valente, Robert Reed, Stephen Baxter, Lavie Tidhar, Jay Lake, Peter S. Beagle, Michael Swanwick, and Tobias S. Buckell, among others.

Follow Dave on Twitter, where he tweets as @HutchinsonDave.

Take the trope of the cyborg, for instance. A symbol, a science-fictional image as well as reality, Gibson argues that in today’s world we fail to see the forest for the trees, so to speak — that our “literalist” sensibilities blind us to the truth of our existence: that the Net, or cyberspace, is itself a very real, very vital, and utterly enormous cybernetic organism.

Questions about the merit of ideas like the so-called Technological Singularity, or transhumanism, posthumanism, et cetera, are rendered moot in Gibson’s view, in light of the reality that we already exist — in a fully physical sense, whether we’re readily aware of it or not — as organic units within a larger cyborg (he employs the metaphor of the capital-B “Borg,” from the fictional Star Trek universe). That we are, quite literally, participants in a global, liminal state of being — transhumanist, if you prefer — that points to the inevitability of science-fictional concepts like human drones with a shared consciousness, or hive mind, and “a humanity where unaugmented reality will eventually be a hypothetical construct, something we can only try, with great difficulty, to imagine.”

Harvey, who gave the story four out of five stars, writes:

It’s tough to write a story entirely in second person and not have it come across as an unreadable gimmick, but Alex J. Kane pulls it off in this high-tech SF thriller about a female assassin laden with cyber-enhancements tracking down a murderer in order to pay off her own debts. The future-noir setting is well-realized in the confines of the short story, and overall the work is a fast and rewarding read.

The other reviewer explains:

I was very much caught off guard by the story. I really didn’t have any idea what to expect based on the title, but I definitely had not expected a second person story, but that’s what I got. Interesting choice that. The ideas are good, the pacing is good, the story overall is good, although it left me wanting more. More depth, more detail, more Tzitzi. I guess realistically being left wanting more is definitely a better thing than wanting less. I also expect that it’s something that’s totally common among people who are primarily book readers, and even more so in my case as I primarily read series. So going from stories which typically are told in hundreds of thousands to millions of words, and instead down to something that’s more appropriately counted in hundreds of words. Odds are that it’s going to leave you wanting more. Even stories that very clearly have a completed arc are likely to leave you with questions like: but what happens next?

Bottom line, I enjoyed the story and would consider reading more work by Alex J. Kane, but at this point I’m not going to go to any particular effort to seek it out.

Hey, fair enough. I’m pleased the story has gotten a reaction at all, let alone a humbling bit of praise from a writer as fine and hard-working as Ryan Harvey. I’m honored.

I can hardly call 2011 a failure…but it was a disappointment. I saw all the hard work I did in 2010, with the exception of a small press collapsing under its own weight and canning three of the books I was supposed to appear in, finally come to fruition in the form of books. These things were great. But I didn’t do the writing I’d hoped to do; what I did, I’m proud of, sure, but I could have accomplished so much more… Instead, I chose to bask in the glory of yesterdays, to dream and ponder instead of getting my hands dirty. For the most part.

So here it is, folks. My official declaration of intent for 2012. It’s modest, and extremely doable, but that’s the point. In the course of the next year, I will:

• Apply to Clarion, Clarion West, and Odyssey
• Complete and submit my current novel project, Doomster
• Write, revise, and submit 12 new finished short stories
• Continue to enter Writers of the Future every contest quarter
• Follow Heinlein’s Rules henceforth without exception
• Begin making lists of nouns, titles, concepts, and story ideas a la Bradbury’s essay “Run Fast, Stand Still, or, The Thing at the Top of the Stairs, or, New Ghosts from Old Minds,” from Zen in the Art of Writing
• Graduate college with a B.A. in English

I did see one ray of hope while wading through the mess: a newbie writer named Alex J. Kane. Despite the fact that he has few writing credits to his name, he spoke words of wisdom that were – for the most part – overlooked by his peers. But they weren’t overlooked by me.

Glad to see that my post on the matter hasn’t been entirely overlooked. It’s an important example of what can go horribly wrong in this industry, and all the early signs of trouble were blatantly obvious for all to see. We were just too anxious and naive to see them. Traditional publishing is slow, but when the conditions of contracts are approaching their expiration date, it’s worth reconsidering whether or not you’ve submitted your work to a worthy market. Sad but true.

School is coming to a close. Not winding down, as the expression goes, not yet — but it’s getting close to being over. I have a ten- to twelve-page research paper I’m working on, I have two or three major essay-based tests to study for, a ten-minute presentation to do, but then I’m fucking done.

At least until next semester. (The last one, finally.)

After that? Well, okay. Here’s the official announcement: I’m writing my first novel. I’ve got a couple of short story ideas brewing in the back of my mind, science fiction stories, but I’m saving those for afterward. I don’t want to get in the way of what has the potential to become a really, really interesting dark fantasy novel. Or horror novel. Or weird transgressive satire. I don’t give a shit what people end up calling it, because chances are that no one will want to read it. It’s a first novel — maybe you didn’t catch that part.

I’m calling it DOOMSTER, but you can call it whatever you want. Don’t call it crap, ’cause that’s rude as hell. Just ignore it, if you think it’s crap. Please.

I’ve got a lot of brainstorming notes and a very broad outline written, with some truly inspiring characters and ideas, but I honestly have no idea what it will end up being. It may prove to be a trunk novel. It may end up self-published. It may sell to a small press publisher like Raw Dog Screaming Press, who I think are doing some fantastic work in the field of horror and the weird right now, or somebody bigger. I dunno.

I just want to write a novel, and have some fun with it.

To write the book — here comes that advice bubbling up again — that I would want to read.

(Meanwhile, I’ll also be filling out applications to Clarion, Clarion West, and Odyssey. Fingers crossed.)

So what have I been reading? That’s relevant.

First: Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk’s earth-shattering debut novel from 1996. My favorite book, well, ever. Must’ve read it a hundred times. It’s been instrumental in motivating my lazy, stressed-out ass to hunker down and get a novel done. Finally. Before that: things like Horns by Joe Hill, and Palahniuk’s Damned. More recently, Jeremy C. Shipp’s Cursed, George Carlin’s posthumous memoir, Last Words, and The Dharma of Dragons and Daemons: Buddhist Themes in Modern Fantasy. I’ve been watching my favorite childhood anime series, Robotech.

This is where my head has been, when it’s not at school. Doing schoolwork.

By the time I get around to diving headlong into the novel draft next week, my head is still going to be here. I think that’s okay, even a great thing. These are books I love. The myths I’ve built my life around, to put it boldly.

They’re the reason I’m managing to make my homework fun in this last, final stretch.

Here’s the block quote that opens my final Buddhism term paper, for fun:

I would put forward that the next thing is going to be a story, because right now, people really don’t have a big story, a big software… They don’t have a big meta-narrative story; they don’t have a big story like Christianity was a big story. So right now, we need a really big story… And that story doesn’t have to be in conflict or in reaction to the current story, because I would say, right now, you don’t change anything by protesting anything… You give people a more effective way of living their lives, they won’t give a shit about foreign oil, you know? You give them the right story, and you make their cars obsolete, it’s gonna be like, “We are just swimming in oil. What are we going to do with all this oil?” And you can do that within the culture without reacting to the government, the war, whatever. Because in a way, by reacting to it, you’re wasting energy…you are making it stronger by giving it this token little resistance, keeping it in place. So your job, I would say, is to come up with a story like that, that makes all of the things we worry about so much right now completely beside the point… We won’t even think about them, because your story will be so incredible. I don’t know what that story is, but that’s why…if I can make my case, somebody’s gonna come up with that story.

–Chuck Palahniuk (Postcards from the Future)

The paper is called Karmic Demons and the Power of Compassion: Buddhist Philosophy as a Basis for Modern Myth, and I’m hoping to craft it into a kind of short fiction-writer’s manifesto. A foundation for the rest of my literary career, at the risk of sounding presumptuous, or even pretentious.

Because I’ve come to love the ideas that lie at the heart of Buddhist thought (even though I’m not, nor will I ever be, a Buddhist), I seek to imbue my stories with them — but only if I can achieve that without growing deliberately didactic. In this essay, I’m going to explore Buddhist ideas in existing stories and the larger philosophical truths they represent, and then explain the utility of such ideas from a contemporary storyteller’s perspective.

To give you an idea of the paper’s meat-and-potatoes content, the preexisting basis for my argument, here’s my works cited bibliography:

• Bacigalupi, Paolo. “Pocketful of Dharma.” Pump Six and Other Stories. San Francisco: Night Shade, 2010. 1-24. Print.
• Dick, Philip K. “Beyond Lies the Wub.” Paycheck and Other Classic Stories. New York: Citadel, 1990. 27-33. Print.
• Hill, Joe. Heart-Shaped Box. New York: Harper, 2010. Print.
• Hill, Joe. Horns. New York: William Morrow, 2010. Print.
• Loy, David, and Linda Goodhew. The Dharma of Dragons and Daemons: Buddhist Themes in Modern Fantasy. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2004. Print.
• Mitchell, Donald W. Buddhism: Introducing the Buddhist Experience. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.
• Okorafor, Nnedi. Who Fears Death. New York: Daw, 2010. Print.
• Palahniuk, Chuck. Damned. New York: Doubleday, 2011. Print.
• Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club: A Novel. New York: Henry Holt, 2004. Print.
• Postcards from the Future: The Chuck Palahniuk Documentary. Dir. Dennis Widmyer, Kevin Kölsch, and Josh Chaplinsky. Perf. Chuck Palahniuk. Kinky Mule Films, 2003. DVD.