Birthdays: James Branch Cabell (1879), Arnold Toynbee (1889), Erich von Daniken (1935), Mireille Guiliano (1946), Bruce Sterling (1954), Tina Rosenberg (1960), Daniel Clowes (1961), Wells Tower (1973)

Erich von Daniken is best known for “Chariots of the Gods”

Tina Rosenberg won the 1995 Pulitzer for Nonfiction for “The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts after Communism”

Quote: “With fiction, there’s no reason why everything you write shouldn’t be amazing. Nobody’s stopping you from making up better stuff.” – Wells Tower

“A book, once it is printed and published, becomes individual. It is by its publication as decisively severed from its author as in parturition a child is cut off from its parent. The book “means” thereafter, perforce, — both grammatically and actually, — whatever meaning this or that reader gets out of it.” ― James Branch Cabell

“This is not to say that science itself is politics. Scientific knowledge is profoundly different from political ideology. Science is an intellectual system producing objective data about the nature of the universe. Science involves falsifiable hypotheses, reproducible results, and rigorous experimental verification. Scientific knowledge isn’t a political construct, any more than element 79 in the periodic table is a political construct. But the things people do with science are every bit as political as the things people do with gold.” ― Bruce Sterling, Distraction

“Forget trying to pass for normal. Follow your geekdom. Embrace nerditude. In the immortal words of Lafcadio Hearn, a geek of incredible obscurity whose work is still in print after a hundred years, “Woo the muse of the odd.” You may be a geek. You may have geek written all over you. You should aim to be one geek they’ll never forget.  – Bruce Sterling

Tip: An opening to your story is not the place to put backstory. This will not pull the reader in. Backstory can come later. Check your opening. Does it start with action that invites the reader in, or backstory?

Jumpstart: Write a love letter. Not just any love letter, but from one person who is caught in a disaster and knows s/he is going to die to their secret love—someone nobody knew about, including the recipient.