Veronica Scott shares Trapped on Talonque & her blogging for USA Today.

Today, I have the fabulous Veronica Scott over explaining how she writes her blogs for 

Dark Matter & Killjoys.

(Turns out it's a lot of work, but I, for one, appreciate it.)

Then she'll tell us about her latest book.
Can't get better than this, can it?

Thanks for allowing me to invade your blog yet again, with my new book!

Before we get to talking about the book, I’ve been having fun this summer recapping two scifi shows for the USA Today Happily Ever After blog. I was doing ‘Killjoys’, which as now had its season 2 finale, and ‘Dark Matter’, which will conclude on September 16^th. Both shows have been renewed for summer 2017.

It’s been interesting turning myself into a version of a TV show recapper. Of course I had done season 3 of ‘The 100’ as a warmup and learned you can’t just sit and watch the episode once, dash off a quick recap full of humor and insights and be done. At least I can’t.  I was fortunate enough to have access to screeners from NBC/SyFy for these two shows so what I do is watch the episode once on my laptop and just absorb the show like any viewer would. Then I watch it again, usually a day later, and take notes. Detailed notes. Endless pages of notes. Especially with ‘Killjoys’, there’s so much great dialog in any one episode that I love to capture the best bits and share them throughout the recap. But the characters on ‘Dark Matter’ have some zingers as well.

I also look for tiny moments that may be foreshadowing some bigger development, tying up loose ends from a previous episode or revealing aspects of a character. Sometimes there will be nods and shoutouts to other scifi movies and series.  Lots of visual references to “Star Wars” in some of the ‘Killjoys’ flights through asteroid fields, and in, around and through the Archive space station. I regard it as my job to try to hilite these in case the viewer misses them the first time around. I can’t catch them all!

I try to explore issues that have been raised but not yet resolved, maybe do some theorizing. What about the character of Pawter’s sister, left on Qresh in ‘Killjoys’? Of course there will be some snark from me because that’s my nature. For instance, the ‘Dark Matter’ showrunners are constantly having the character of Four watching the galactic news about his home planet Zairon and the war they’re losing. Ok, guys, we get it that Four will be going back there. No surprise!

If I’ve been lucky enough to interview one of the cast, I may add some tidbits from the interview to the episode writeup.

I write the recap from my notes and let it sit overnight. In the morning, after the show has aired, I go through it once more and then submit the draft to USAT/HEA, where my editor does her process and then the recap goes live. Wow. But I really feel responsible to bring value added to my column, if a viewer is going to invest their time reading my thoughts on the show we both love.

The biggest thing that strikes me is how different it is for me to write a science fiction romance novel, with a fairly confined list of characters, always focusing on the hero and heroine, and bring the story through an arc, finishing with the Happily Ever After, versus the way a TV show can bring characters on, drop them, bring them back, introduce plot threads that may never come to fruition, have romances that don’t have an HEA (or maybe not for more than an episode or two), kill off a main character (I still miss One on ‘Dark Matter’) and take other jaw-dropping twists and turns. I could possibly get away with some of them in a series, but not all in one novel!

I’m not recapping any programs this Fall, although I’m going to keep my eye on the three new time travel shows to see if one of them might evolve into something fun to write up in its second season. Doing the recaps is a lot of work but I’ve had so much fun along the way, no complaints from me!

Do you have a favorite science fiction TV show you wish someone would recap?

Trapped on Talonque

By 

Veronica Scott

My latest science fiction romance novel is Trapped on Talonque, where I had a lot of fun writing a Sleeping Beauty story, but with an alien heroine and a Special Forces soldier as the ‘prince’. Here’s the plot:

Will an alien sleeping beauty awaken to save him, or destroy everyone around her?

When a Sectors Special Forces soldier and his team crash land on an alien planet, they’re taken captive and given a challenge–win at the violent ball game of sapiche and live. Lose, and they die, sending a mysterious, alien beauty to an even uglier fate. To survive, these soldiers must win the game and find a way to free the dangerous prisoner from her locked chamber.

Nate Reilly and his team are in deep trouble. Prisoners on a backward alien planet, they’re brought before an alien ‘goddess’, sleeping in her high tech seclusion. Nate is astonished when she awakes and establishes a psychic link with him. But her news is not good–he and his men must win a brutal challenge set by their captors, or they will die. She’ll give her aid, but in the end their courage and strength must win the contest.

Bithia sleeps in her chamber, as she has for thousands of years, since her own people unaccountably left her there. Viewed as a goddess by her captors, she must hide her ancient secrets to survive. But only the bravest of men may free her. Can she use her psychic powers to keep Nate and his men alive long enough to help her escape, or will her only hope of freedom die with them?

Trapped on Talonque gives you two great stories in one. It could easily be a 2 book series on its own.

The first half is being captured by a group of people who enjoy the deaths of other. (We had our Romans and coliseum and these evil souls have their games, in which the loser loses his life.)

The first half of the book is the struggle to survive the games and the cruel king and some demented women. Good crewmen lose their lives in the process.

Nate also falls in love with an ancient person who is safely tucked into stasis but can telepathically communicate with Nate. While she uses all her energy to heal Nate after a brutal beating, she remains in certain danger from the evil king who wishes dearly to torture her.

 So they plot an intricate escape that includes rescuing the woman in stasis.

This proves to be very difficult. She just wants to save Nate. She doesn’t believe she can be rescued, but Nate refuses to escape without her. Rescue is hard and escaping even harder. Every time they appear to have escaped death, more minions and priestesses of the king appear and more people die.

This is a poignant story, not just of love, but of the caring of people they meet, of the companions they lose along the way. It is well-written, beautifully tied together, despite the inherent complexity of the plot. I never once had to reread a section. Veronica Scott writes with the best of them. And while I won’t reveal the ending, trust me, she knows how to end a story. 5 stars

Amazon    Apple iBooks     Kobo    Barnes & Noble 
    All Romance eBooks

Author Bio:

Best Selling Science Fiction & Paranormal Romance author and “SciFi Encounters” columnist for the USA Today Happily Ever After blog, Veronica Scott grew up in a house with a library as its heart. Dad loved science fiction, Mom loved ancient history and Veronica thought there needed to be more romance in everything. When she ran out of books to read, she started writing her own stories.

Three time winner of the SFR Galaxy Award, as well as a National Excellence in Romance Fiction Award, Veronica is also the proud recipient of a NASA Exceptional Service Medal relating to her former day job, not her romances! She recently was honored to read the part of Star Trek Crew Member in the audiobook production of Harlan Ellison’s “The City On the Edge of Forever.”

Blog: https://veronicascott.wordpress.com/

Twitter:  https://twitter.com/vscotttheauthor

Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/pages/Veronica-Scott/177217415659637?ref=hl

Amazon Author Page: http://www.amazon.com/Veronica-Scott/e/B006CUCJ92/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1

iBooks:  https://itunes.apple.com/us/author/veronica-scott/id433256176?mt=11

Athena Grayson; on current TV Sci Fi series

 Strange Horizons

Like many of you, I've been eagerly following a handful of new TV shows via Netflix and SyFy, courtesy of Amazon where I have no qualms about paying for commercial-free TV. I shotgunned the entire season of Sense8, the moody, epic, sweeping science fiction opera spearheaded by J. Michael Strazynski of Babylon 5 fame and the Wachowskis of Matrix fame. I, like thousands of others, was blown away by the breadth and ambition of it, and remained in awe of the creators who can make something on a truly speculative scale.

Then I heard about a new SyFy show called "Dark Matter." Six astronauts, awakened on board an interstellar ship, but with no memory of who they were or why they were there. This show is still getting its legs, but the premise is maintaining its intrigue. The show that surprised me, however, is "Killjoys," another SyFy show. This one has a more developed cast with stronger character personalities. The premise is Intergalactic Bounty Hunters. It's got a kickass heroine, her two sidekicks, and a great potential balance of long-form story in the form of characters With A Past mixed with the warrant-of-the-week spine. The showrunners seem to know what they're doing.

What really made me think about these three shows was how much--and how little--worldbuilding they do. Sense8 is ambitious--behind the scenes, the cast and crew flew all over the world to film, and the scenes take place from Chicago to Nairobi, San Francisco to Seoul, and the places in which the stories happen are just as much a part of the series as the characters and the speculative premise. Dark Matter and Killjoys, on the other hand, are very limited in scope...but no less large in concept.

Granted, on one hand, it's like comparing apples and watermelons--Dark Matter and Killjoys are both short-season summer fillers, Sense8 is a straight-to-Netflix headliner spearheaded by big names familiar with big screens and big budgets. On the other hand, it's an exercise in just how much you can say with so little.

Both Dark Matter and Killjoys have limited sets, Dark Matter moreso than Killjoys. Dark Matter takes place mostly on the interstellar ship's multiple locations, with occasional forays into space stations that all look like the Toronto airport, and population centers that look like municipal water treatment plants. It follows the long and storied tradition of such shows as Star Trek, where the Planet With The Cave wore different Christmas lights to portray different exotic interplanetary locales for the duration of an episode. The universe of Dark Matter includes planets whose entire government is based on feudal Japan, and multi-planetary corporations with their own military fleets, all operating under a vague umbrella of a galactic government.

Killjoys, on the other hand, maintains a less open-ended location. There's a definite boundary to the everyday world of the main characters. Dutch, D'avin, and John operate in an area of space known as "The Quad" - one planet, and three habitable moons (or rather, two habitable moons and one future plotline). In addition to their ship (aptly named "Lucy"), the Killjoys live their story out on the moon of Leith and Westerley's Old Town, occasionally returning to the RAC (the bounty hunting organization under whose authority they work) which is maintained on a huge ship.

The universes of the Killjoys and of Dark Matter have an implied vastness to them...but it is a vastness that the viewer never needs to see. The creative use of lighting, small spaces, backstory, and a handful of panoramic shots of (digital?) matte paintings, are all cleverly utilized to present the illusion of large, diverse, interplanetary spaces...yet at the same time, these spaces have an all-too-familiar analogue to them. Spaceports look like airports. Outside looks like outside, even if your farm equipment operates on fusion instead of bio-diesel.

On the surface, this feels like low-budget, syndicated sci-fi shows making do with what they have. Scratch a little deeper, and this feels like filmmakers who know how to use creative lighting, set design, and editing without an endless budget for computer-generated effects. But dig even deeper--down to the narrative-hacking level, and this is what science fiction is all about.

Science fiction is about exploring the human continuum, even when we are separated by immense measures of time, space, and circumstance. "Dark Matter's" storyline shows us that families--even royal ones--are families. One of the persistent locations in "Killjoys" is a Westerlan bar that--despite its futuristic setting--is still a watering hole. No matter how our fate spins us out into the vast universe going forward, we will still be human, and our settings may change, but our spirits will remain the same.

***

Athena Grayson started out writing a book about an interplanetary bounty hunter. It turned into twelve episodes of a space opera. You can find all twelve episodes of “Huntress of the Star Empire” collected in convenient bundle form at athenagrayson.com/huntress and even get the first episode free! You can find other narrative hacking at her blog at athenagrayson.com.