Ask the Author: Tony Taylor
Answered Questions (6)
Tony Taylor
No. It merely moves the problem from the realm of the impossible to the realm of the barely possible.
It's always an adventure, because there are always millions of ways a mission can fail, but only a single way for it to succeed.
It's always an adventure, because there are always millions of ways a mission can fail, but only a single way for it to succeed.
Tony Taylor
I do everything I can to induce it. That includes some of the tricks Harris Mitchel--the protagonist in Darkest Side--uses to avoid writing about his asteroid: doodling for hours, meticulously sharpening all his pencils, arranging them in a cup like a bouquet of thin yellow flowers, reading in the john, daydreaming, and more. Another thing that I find very effective is cruising the internet (which was a little too new for Harris to get into).
Come to think of it, those are some of the same things Steve Mylder does in "Counters" to avoid writing an article for his hometown newspaper. I guess I'm in a rut on this one.
Come to think of it, those are some of the same things Steve Mylder does in "Counters" to avoid writing an article for his hometown newspaper. I guess I'm in a rut on this one.
Tony Taylor
You know, I’ve never even thought of it before, so I’ll have to struggle here. It’s probably subconsciously a childish desire for attention: “Look, mommy, look what I wrote.” I can remember the first time I wrote an essay in grammar school that I enjoyed writing, probably around the 4th grade. I put considerable effort into it and used some fancy-schmancy words and embarrassingly cloying phrases. The teacher praised it and I thought, Whadda’ya know, I can write! That was a revelation, because previously I’d hated it. Just the fact that that memory has been in my head so long tells you it must have been important.
Tony Taylor
I use Word on a Mac. I took up digital writing as soon as it came into existence and I could get a computer. I had an old Apple II. It wasn’t worth much as a word processor, but I’ll bet it’s worth a lot as an antique nowadays. I can’t imaging writing with a pen. How do people do that, how do they edit? Word processors make it easy to edit, over and over and over again which is certainly how I do it. I never met a paragraph of mine that I didn’t want to re-edit; it’s almost an obsession.
Internet and particularly Wikipedia: I use Wikipedia a lot for researching any topic I need to explore, even some very esoteric ones like quantum mechanics and cosmology—which are talked about in the book (not to worry; reader friendly; no equations). I even use Google as a spell checker, since I can search on an approximation of the word I want and out comes the correctly spelled version: “Did you mean ...?”
I love Visual Thesaurus (http://www.visualthesaurus.com/) because it gives an amazingly interactive and graphic relationship between words. I almost always keep it active when I’m writing because I’m always looking for that perfect word—a never-ending search.
Internet and particularly Wikipedia: I use Wikipedia a lot for researching any topic I need to explore, even some very esoteric ones like quantum mechanics and cosmology—which are talked about in the book (not to worry; reader friendly; no equations). I even use Google as a spell checker, since I can search on an approximation of the word I want and out comes the correctly spelled version: “Did you mean ...?”
I love Visual Thesaurus (http://www.visualthesaurus.com/) because it gives an amazingly interactive and graphic relationship between words. I almost always keep it active when I’m writing because I’m always looking for that perfect word—a never-ending search.
Tony Taylor
Nothing special. Well ... maybe quite good, considering that I have an unfettered view of the red rocks and green Junipers of Sedona, Arizona from my second story office window (not to mention the vortices!). Unfortunately, when I write, that landscape just disappears and becomes invisible since I can’t focus on more than one thing at a time. For the same reason I never play music while I’m writing because I can’t handle distractions. It’s basically blinders on and bore straight ahead—all background fades away.
Tony Taylor
I was at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in the early 80s watching the first pictures come down from the Voyager spacecraft after it flew by Saturn. The planet had grabbed Voyager with its gravity and flung it upward out of the plane of the solar system, and now we were looking back and down at the night side nested inside the crescent of the day side, and from that higher perspective came a view that had never been seen before. Saturn had always, in all of history, never been more than a 2 dimensional disk painted onto the celestial sphere from where we saw it on Earth. But now for the first time, from a new perspective higher than the one we had before, the shadow cutting across the rings and that darkness nested into light made the planet real. It had finally become a three dimensional sphere floating in space, and the title popped into my head. “The Dark Side of Saturn” (Darkest came later). The dark side contrasted against the light made it real.
I didn’t start writing the story until a decade later and by then I’d figured out what that meant: the yin and yang aspect of the world. How opposites taken together from a larger perspective make a whole. Good and evil, science and religion, faith versus understanding, male versus female, each provides context for the other, and out of that you get something more complete than either one by itself. That’s one of the deeper reaches I intended for the story.
I didn’t start writing the story until a decade later and by then I’d figured out what that meant: the yin and yang aspect of the world. How opposites taken together from a larger perspective make a whole. Good and evil, science and religion, faith versus understanding, male versus female, each provides context for the other, and out of that you get something more complete than either one by itself. That’s one of the deeper reaches I intended for the story.
About Goodreads Q&A
Ask and answer questions about books!
You can pose questions to the Goodreads community with Reader Q&A, or ask your favorite author a question with Ask the Author.
See Featured Authors Answering Questions
Learn more