Geek Grotto: Geek Your Home Library

In an earlier edition of the Geek Grotto, I shared some fun Star Wars decor and appliances for your home. This week, we're looking at the home library. Okay, okay, most of us don't have real dedicated libraries, but if you're a reader, you've probably got a spot full of books and hopefully a comfy chair. I went digging and found some fun things that might inspire you to revamp your reading nook. Geek style.

Star Trek bookshelf

First off, appropriate book shelves are a must for a geeky book worm. This Instructables article will teach you how to build an Enterprise shelf. Hey, as long as you're stuck at home, why not take up woodworking?

Tetris Book cases

If you prefer to purchase bookshelves, you can find a number of Etsy sellers willing to bring some old-school games to life. Nothing fits together quite like Tetris blocks.

Knob Creek Metal Arts

 



Once you've got your bookshelves sorted, you're going to need some appropriately geeky book ends to prevent any spillage. I confess that I'm an owner of the alien abduction book ends from this seller (Knob Creek Metal Arts). I picked them up for a gift a couple of years ago and somehow forgot to give them away. I had to get something else for that particular person.

The Hobbit Book Nook shelf

Book nooks, or little artistic inserts that go between your books on your shelves, are an up-and-coming trend right now. There are a whole bunch of them you can check out (including one inspired by Blade Runner) in this Bored Panda post. The one above was inspired by The Hobbit.

Captain Kirk chair

And what about a comfy reading chair for the library? I'm sad to inform you that this $5,000 Captain Kirk chair is no longer in production, but perhaps someone can let us know if there's a how-to out there for the handyman Original Trek fan.

Wampa bean bag chair

In the meantime, perhaps this far more affordable (and available) Star Wars Wampa bean bag chair would do. Who doesn't love a bean bag for chilling around the house?

Books coffee table

Once you've got your book shelves and chair sorted out, you'll need a table. This one isn't for sale and appears rather homemade, but maybe if you need another DIY project? A proper books coffee table should be sufficient for holding your drinks and e-reader.

Dice display

And finally… these shelves aren't for books, but for all you gamers in the house, here's a way to display all the cool dice you've picked up over the years. I found this piece at the Fun Board Games Etsy shop.

Do you have any geeky things in your book nook?


Lindsay has early memories of convincing childhood friends, pets, and stuffed animals to play the roles of characters in her worlds, so it’s safe to say she’s been making up stories for a long time. 

When she’s not writing, she’s usually hiking with her dogs, practicing yoga, playing tennis, or eating entirely too much dark chocolate (she only does one of those things truly well, and she will let you guess which it is). She grew up in the Seattle area and still visits the Pacific Northwest frequently, but after realizing she was solar powered, she moved to Arizona and now lives in the mountains north of Phoenix.

She's written several sci-fi series: Fallen EmpireSky Full of Stars & Star Kingdom.

You can follow Lindsay on FacebookTwitter and her website.

How Stories are Born

This is a question that probably gets answered a hundred different ways, so let me start out by saying that I’m talking mostly about my own stories. I’d wager a lot of other authors are similar, maybe most even, but I’d also bet many are different, too, and that’s great. But I tend to have a pretty specific flow of ideas, one that is more or less the same every time.

Not surprisingly, I start with an idea.  

Now, I write quickly, usually at least, but that doesn’t mean I put my story thoughts together in short order. Quite the opposite, in fact. I have lots of narrative elements floating around in my head all the time, and while I can usually write pretty quickly, I can’t produce that much. So, what makes a story idea develop into something more…and ultimately an actual novel, or more likely, a series of novels?

Well, first, there is time.  

As I mentioned, I can put out 5 or 6 books a year, usually, but the actual storylines, or at least the general outlines, have probably been floating around in my head for years.

Yes, that’s right…years.  I haven’t sat down and written anything I haven’t been thinking about for at least 12 months, and often for much, much longer. That doesn’t mean I’ve figured everything out, but it does give me at least a basic starting point, and quite possibly one that’s changed an awful lot over that year (or two or three or more) that it’s existed. The truth is, a finished novel is usually quite different from the original idea I’d jotted down.

Second, I have to consider how something works once I start trying to take it from a basic starting point to a finished novel. The dirty truth is, sometimes I’ll start something new, and I’ll find it very difficult to proceed at a given time, while other books will go far more easily. It’s a hard thing to understand, at least from time to time, as some things I thought would be easy prove to be difficult…or the reverse. It’s hard to determine what will go easily, and what will give me a hard time until I’m actually trying to work through them…which is why I have three or four started series that have ten thousand or twenty thousand written words, but ended up being abandoned, at least for a while. 


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Third, fan reactions are always crucial.  

I’m fortunate that I don’t need everything to be at the peak sales level all the time, but I’d be lying if I said that reader reactions weren’t important. If I’ve got two things going on, and one has twice the fanbase of the other, I’ll definitely show some preference to the stronger series. That doesn’t mean I won’t write the lesser work, I absolutely will, but it does mean I will probably write a number of the more popular ones first…almost certainly to the disclaim of at least a few old stalwarts who want to see the lesser book sooner.

Most recently, this has become the case with my  Blood on the Stars series which has exploded to a 16 book strong saga, with 18 total planned. With such a voracious readership of this particular universe, it makes sense for me to keep writing the story while fans keep asking for more installments.

Lastly, and strangely both good and bad, there’s my own reaction to each story.  

I’d like to say these are always good, but the truth is, sometimes one storyline is just better than another at pulling itself out of me and coming together, while a different one seems to get hung up on this and that. It’s not always that one is demonstrably better than another in some definitive way, but often one is just easier to work my way through at a given time. With luck, maybe the other one will open up over time, and be “ready” to actually launch in a year…or a couple years. The truth is, I’ve still got story ideas that date back to before I published my first book, and some of these have just proven to be more difficult to write.

Am I going to run out of story ideas? Nope, not in my lifetime at least. It’s one of the questions I get asked the most, and one at least, to which I can give a satisfying answer. I can’t say for sure my stories will remain interesting, or I will retain the same audience size (or even increase it), but I can say for certain that I’ve already got more ideas than I can write, especially since most of them are for series and not individual books.  That’s the first step…and assuming they’re mostly decent ideas, probably the most difficult one as well.

I’ve done okay so far, and with any luck, I’ll continue to pick and write good books. Maybe my sales will even go up, and not just stay the same!


Jay Allan

Jay Allan is a USA Today bestselling author of roughly 30 science fiction and fantasy books, including the bestselling Blood on the Stars series, Crimson Worlds series and the Far Stars trilogy published by HarperCollins Voyager.

A lifetime northeasterner, Jay currently lives in New York City, where he writes from his apartment…and continues to fill small notebooks with ideas for future books.

He has been a voracious reader of science fiction and fantasy for many years, a writer of the same far more recently. His tastes are varied and eclectic, but most often he will be found reading military and dystopian science fiction, space opera, alternate history, and epic fantasy. He is also an avid historian, and is as likely to be reading non-fiction as a novel.

Jay writes a lot of science fiction with military themes, but also other SF and some fantasy as well. His works tend to feature complex characters and lots of backstory and action, always with an emphasis on world-building and extensive detail.

Join Jay's reader group on Facebook to keep up with the latest in his work.

Nomad wins “Science Fiction Book of Year” award

Matthew Mather‘s novel Nomad was just announced as the winner of the Authors' on Air coveted “Science Fiction Book of the Year” award for 2015. The winner was determined by an online polling of the close to two million active listeners in forty-six countries that Authors' on Air is active in, and earns Mather a title as an international award winner. Nomad has already sold over a hundred thousand copies in a little over a year since its release, and has over a thousand mostly five-star reviews on Amazon.

The Brink of a New Age of Discovery

Do you remember those old posters from the 1950's that had people in flying cars and robots doing the dishes? It must have been an exciting time. Test pilots had just broken the sound barrier, followed by a breathless rush into the dawn of the Space Race that led to the moon landings just 66 years after the first time Orville and Wilbur Wright flew the first airplane. At that time, nuclear power seemed ready to offer limitless cheap energy, and the boom of microelectronics was just beginning to dazzle.

flying-car

 

What happened to my flying car? While it's true that electronics have gotten smaller and faster beyond the wildest of imaginings of 40 years ago, it's also true that the 747 airliner first flew in 1969, and that's probably the same plane you'd take to fly today. Same speed, same altitude–the 747 was an amazing feat in the 60's, but by now we were supposed to be vacationing in the vast donut space stations of Arthur C. Clark's 2001. And speaking of 1969, that was 47 years ago…if we went from the first airplane to the moon in just sixty years, fifty years after that shouldn't we be taking warp-drive spaceships to Betelgeuse? What happened?

For instance, what about dark matter? This is the stuff that makes up about 90% of the mass/energy of our universe, but so far physicists have only been able to narrow it down to (a) massive subatomic particles that we're literally swimming in although have never detected, or (b) primordial black holes that invisibly glue together galaxies. So 90% of everything is either something subatomic or something unimaginably massive and large. That's a pretty big gap for something rather important.

Dark_matter_stride_by_tchaikovsky2

Or how about eels? If you live in North America or Europe, you've most likely encountered an eel in your local river. Yet all North American and European eels originate from a single source, the mysterious “Sargasso Sea” somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean where eels spawn each year and migrate outward. Despite knowing this *has* to exist, not one person has ever witnessed a spawning eel, or found the location of the Sargasso Sea that has to exist.

eels

Two obvious things that have to exist, and yet we've never seen them. I believe this is called faith. So keep the faith, my friends, because our future is fast approaching.

Just a few years ago, I remember feeling depressed when NASA made tired-sounding announcements of sending humans to Mars in thirty or forty years. Ho-hum, ho-hum. And then this week, SpaceX makes a surprise announcement saying they plan to send an unmanned Red Dragon capsule to Mars in 2018 (TWO years from now, not twenty), and in September of this year will they will release serious plans for colonizing Mars. Holy Buck Rogers! And this comes just a few weeks after they butt-landed a rocket on a floating drone ship in the middle of the Atlantic. Does this sound like something from a science fiction book? Cause it's not. This is happening, folks, not to mention the slew of other private space enterprises going on.

In other news, big corporations are now creating their own endemic artificial intelligences–witness Siri from Apple, Alexa from Amazon, Cortana from Microsoft, and reports of just about every major hedge fund in Connecticut starting up their own AIs to run their core businesses. It's not quite the android Replicants of Mr. Philip K. Dick, but it's more than halfway to HAL of 2001…and pair this up with the walking robots from Boston Dynamics. And speaking of AI disasters, when Microsoft recently unleashed Tay–Cortana's AI cousin–free and unfettered into the world a few weeks ago, within hours she became a Hitler-loving racist asshole, which I feel perhaps doesn't bode well for humankind over the long term (bear fealty now to our robot-AI overlords before it's too late).

But this isn't the big news. No. The big news, I think, is that we're on the brink of TOE–and by that I mean the Theory Of Everything. Without getting stuck in the details, for the last forty or so years, we've been stuck with quantum-electrodynamics theory on one side (the merger of quantum, electromagnetics, and strong and weak nuclear force theories) and gravity-relativity on other, and never the twain shall meet. Nobody has been able to devise one coherent physical model of our universe that includes the four fundamental forces together with quantum theory–but I think scientists are on the brink of a breakthrough (witness the discover of a new, previously unsuspected particle by the LHC) that may create a new fundamental picture of reality.

Esoteric?

How can this possibly affect us?

Perhaps.

But “quantum theory” only really emerged in 1924 as a discipline unto itself with Heisenberg and Schrodinger (it did exist as bits and pieces in the 1800's, but only hints of something unconnected), and at the time, sitting on a steamship deck and sipping your coffee, you might have been excused from wondering what possible application it could have. Fast-forward sixty years, and it fueled the technical underpinning of the electronics boom that has birthed the Internet, AIs, and worldwide instantaneous communication networks.

images

What could a new theory of the ultimate nature of reality make possible? I have no idea, but I'll bet you that in fifty years it will be something amazing that we can't even imagine now. Tired old NASA is even funding a serious research project into faster-than-light travel–the idea isn't to really travel faster than light, but to bend space (and thus time) to punch holes through it. The physics say it's possible, but the energies required are either vaster than a hundred suns, or not much at all–what's needed is an understanding of the real physics behind the ultimate nature of our reality, and our lab-coated friends may just be on the edge of supplying it. So dust off your Mars suit, boot up your personal AI, and step onto that warp-drive spaceship, because the future is fast approaching.

But I doubt we'll ever find out where eels come from.