For the past few years, and especially for the past two, I've been contemplating the direction I want to take with my writing.
When I started writing my first (finished) novel, The Prophecy, back in 2013, I was writing for the love of it. Words spewed out of me like lava from an erupting volcano. In 2014 alone, I published more than twenty individual stories, in addition to blogging, newsletters, and non-fiction. I was much less concerned with direction than with enjoying the stories bubbling in my mind.
That changed when I put The Choosing, my first Science Fiction Romance, up for preorder in May 2015. In a few short weeks, it garnered enough preorders to give me hope that I could earn a decent living from my fiction, and subsequently proved me right.
At the time, my son urged me to leave Romance behind and start writing "straight" (i.e. non-romantic) SciFi and Fantasy. Hindsight being what it is, I wish I'd heeded his advice. At the time, though, I was simply following my creative heart.
Over the intervening years, I've dabbled with non-romantic SFF, but that's about as far as it's gone, and now, after literally years of contemplation and study, I think I know why.
It all has to do with Anne McCaffrey.
As a 'tween and teen, I spent many, many hours reading everything and anything I could get my hands on. I devoured The Old Man and the Sea one night at the home of family friends, while my parents played cards and my siblings romped around with other youngsters. After my maternal grandfather's death in 1980, I would sneak into my grandparents' bedroom on Sunday afternoons, after church and lunch and cleanup, and read his books, everything from Biblical commentary to Plato to what would now be considered Christian literature. Stephen King, V.C. Andrews, Louis L'amour, Zane Grey, Danielle Steele, Fern Michaels, encyclopedias, and other books my parents bought were fair game, not to mention books borrowed from the school library and, later, my grandmothers' Romances.
The books I returned to, the ones I read over and over again, tended to be those blending speculative elements with a light touch of romance, featuring headstrong, independent women and fearless, intelligent men having adventures on far-flung planets. And of those, Anne McCaffrey's books became well-loved favorites. Not just her hallmark series, The Dragonriders of Pern, but also the brainship stories and Acorna's adventures and, my personal favorite, The Crystal Singer Series.
Modern SciFi in particular seems to have devolved into hopelessness and misery, based largely on the post-modern, neo-Marxist insistence on viewing every aspect of our lives through certain (false) lenses and then extrapolating those fallacies into a future where humans have not changed at all. (Which is, of course, much more unrealistic than the science upon which these stories are based.)
But the magical possibilities still exist in McCaffrey's worlds, and it is that from that tradition that The Choosing was written. Even when hostile aliens attack, Ziri and Ryn have hope. They know another adventure is waiting around the corner. They know the universe is infinitely full of possibilities.
As much as I want to write "serious" SciFi, deep down I feel drawn to the kind of grand, almost magical adventures that writers like McCaffrey created. There's still a place for those kinds of stories. In fact, I believe we need them now more than ever. We need to know that the future is bright, that we're not going to be stuck in this hole we've dug for ourselves, that there is something good ahead. We really need that belief.
And I think that's why I return to McCaffrey's stories again and again, rereading my personal copies until the spines break and pages fall out.
That's what I'm thinking of as I finish War's Last Refuge, the final Daughters of the People novel, and Sweet Surrender, The Choosing's sequel. I'm thinking of grand adventures on distant planets and the men and women who populate the future, and of the many stories waiting to be written for them.
For that, you can thank Anne McCaffrey.