Words Deferred

A City on Mars — Read Report

Book | E-book | Audiobook (affiliate links)

A City on Mars is the perfect kind of pop-science non-fiction for science fiction writers. It’s no surprise they got blurbs from the likes of Mary Robbinette Kowal and Andy Weir. It’s easy reading, comedic without being too jokey, and well-illustrated (Zach is author of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal). It delves into a subject that’s core to science fiction, one we’re all familiar with, and makes it feel new and interesting.

This is a book about space colonization, but with a few unexpected twists. “Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through?” asks the subtitle. Those might seem like silly questions when so much engineering and money have gone into space exploration over the last 75 years. And yet, the authors make a fairly convincing case that in some really important ways, we’ve only scratched the surface.

The Weinersmiths note that we seem to be at the beginning of a new age of space exploration. Unlike the Apollo era, there are more countries in the space game. There are private companies managing flights. And there is an awful lot of supposedly serious talk about space colonization, or at least space capitalism.

A City on Mars explores space colonization on multiple axes: not only engineering and tech, but biology, law, economics, and politics.

The Technology of Colonization

We have rockets. We have space stations. Space suits and space toilets. All sorts of advanced space technology. Hundreds of people have been to space, including Katy Perry. How hard could it be?

Of course, simply going into space is fraught with danger and wildly expensive, and this is easy to forget after watching a blockbuster movie or two. Living in space (or on other planets) is more expensive, harder, and more dangerous than living at the bottom of the sea or Antarctica. Orders of magnitude worse. And yet, those harshest of terrestrial environments often seem more fraught in our imaginations than the cold, airless, heavily irradiated void of space.

We have surprisingly little understanding of living in space—really living for years, or lifetimes—not just visiting and doing a little science. Practically everyone in space has been a well-trained, psychologically stable adult, in the prime of life and in incredible physical shape. The longest contiguous period ever spent in space is 437 days. Nobody has built anything approaching a self-sustaining environment in space. Nobody (that we know of) has ever conceived, been pregnant, or given birth in space. No children have grown up, way up there.

Despite all these unknowns, all these open questions and possible things that could go wrong, there are plenty of high-profile calls for “space colonization.” We could solve Earth’s population crisis. We could make trillions of dollars mining asteroids. We could make humanity a multi-planetary species, robust against catastrophe.

Don’t get me wrong, there have long been space nerds with dreams like this. I’m one of them, and so are the Weinersmiths. But now, space nerdery has been infected by the same Silicon Valley ethos that captured tech, finance, a lot of government, and seems to be rapidly becoming the villain of modern life. Its core tenet says that if we understand computer programming we can understand and solve any problems, probably very easily. It’s good to remember that is often not the case.

A City on Mars is in many ways a litany of all the problems that need to be solved to make space colonization a reality. It’s a long list, but also an interesting one.

More than Tech

The intersection of tech and law is rarely something that catches the zeitgeist. Where Silicon Valley interacts with the law, it often seems to be working under the famous adage of “move fast and break things.” And by pretty much any measure, it turns out that space colonization would be breaking our current space laws.

International space law is unsurprisingly limited. A handful of documents from 50+ years ago comprise all of it. That hasn’t been much of an issue while you can count all the space-faring governments on one accident-prone sawmill worker’s hand. It might become more of a problem when a dozen space programs and an equal number of private corporations are racing into space. Especially if they’re led by libertarian billionaires with certain ideas about manifest destiny.

The Weinersmiths look at the existing laws, where they are likely to be inadequate, and some international frameworks that might make good templates for new laws, including those that govern the deep sea and Antarctica.

They also look at the economic drivers for space exploration and colonization, or the lack thereof. Even with drastic improvements to the tech, the likelihood of making money in space seems slim. It’s so hard and expensive and slow to do anything in space that the payoffs would have to be outright astronomical to develop any kind of self-sustaining industry.

Space Livin’ Ain’t Easy

If there’s a broad takeaway from A City on Mars, it’s that space colonization is still a lot harder than it’s often assumed to be, and that it would be a good idea to take it slow and act thoughtfully rather than jumping in with half a plan and dealing with the consequences. It’s not a sexy position for a book aimed at space nerds to take, and the Weinersmiths are keenly aware of this.

They make their case well, and it’s hard to argue against it. This doesn’t mean space colonization is doomed, but it does probably mean that it’s a very long-term project, and one whose parameters may not jive with a lot of the current discourse. It means there are a lot of problems still to solve, and that throwing money at them won’t be enough.

Science has proven pretty good at solving some of these problems, given enough public support. That’s half the battle. The other half is purely social: can we work together and get along, as individuals and nations? The technology may be the easier lift.

Pessimism for Writers?

So why would a book that catalogues all the barriers to space colonization be good for science fiction writers? Simple: we need tension and conflict in our stories.

Practically every page of A City on Mars is a story waiting to happen. Every challenge, every difficulty or unsolved problem is just another seed for an interesting new plot.

Sci-fi can get bogged down in the land of technobabble solutions to technobabble problems. It’s not always satisfying when your dilithium crystals break and you solve it by reversing the polarity on the tractor beam to push your ship out of the neutral zone. A City on Mars offers a wealth of potentially fun challenges for characters to overcome: problems of technology and biology, but also of politics, law, and economics. If you want to write about near-future space colonization, it’s a fantastic place to start.

Week 26 — Year of Short Stories 2026

2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I track my short story writing, from idea and draft to submission.

This is the weeks of Jun 29 – Jul 5.

Stats

Stories Finished: 2
Submissions Currently Out: 5
Submissions Total: 20
Rejections: 17
Acceptances: 0

Submissions and Responses

All quiet this week. No new submissions or responses.

Goals and Results

Last time, my goals were:

Revise Beneath the House in Caen to completion, or close to it.
Clean up and trim T.I.M., consider whether it needs another round of Critters.

As usual, this was optimistic, but I did want to leave the week open to work on either of these stories, depending on what I felt like doing. In the end, it was Beneath the House at Caen that I ended up working on. This was productive revision, trimming about 200 words and cleaning up quite a few small things.

My process for dealing with workshop feedback has evolved into roughly three steps. First, I do the initial read-through of all of it, and copy it over into a single unwieldy OneNote document. Then I take a second pass through all of it, decide what I’m going to discount or ignore, and begin taking bullet-point notes. The result is a stack of bullet points and a few pages of little feedback snippets at the top of the doc, and everything else relegated to the wasteland at the bottom of the doc. The final refinement is to go through the snippets and either immediately change something in the story to address them, or convert them into a bullet point.

Similar feedback gets combined. If I’m clever, I come up with a fix that addresses several things at once. Eventually, what I’m left with is a long list of bullet points (about 50 in the case of Caen). Some are still easy fixes, some require more thought. Then I work through them.

The Halfway Mark

Week 26 means we are halfway through the year. I figured this would be a good time to review my goals and see where I stand.

Finish and submit twelve short stories — Current: 2 / Goal: 6
Send 50 submissions — Current: 20 / Goal: 25
Post 100 times on Words Deferred — Current: 43 / Goal: 50

I’m a little behind on all of these metrics. The biggest issue is actually getting those stories across the finish line so they can be sent out. However, even if I get the two in progress finished soon, I’ll still be behind there. I always knew that a story per month was going to be difficult for me, but I’d still like to get this number higher.

My submission count, on the other hand, is solid. I’ve been doing more simultaneous submissions this year, which helps a lot. If I can get a few more stories in rotation, that will make this goal easy to hit.

The state of the third goal can be clearly seen on my WordPress stats. All I have to do to meet that goal is two posts per week, and one of them is this weekly update. I absolutely hit that standard the first three months of the year, but I trailed off in the second quarter. Part of that comes down to finding something interesting to talk about. I have no interest in writing something that bores me and you. If I had to pick one goal to not achieve, it would be this one. After all, it’s the “Year of Short Stories,” not the “Year of Blogging.” That was somewhere around 2006.

Next Week

I’m a broken record:

Revise Beneath the House in Caen to completion, or close to it.
Clean up and trim T.I.M., consider whether it needs another round of Critters.

Week 24 & 25 — Year of Short Stories 2026

2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I track my short story writing, from idea and draft to submission.

This is the weeks of Jun 15 – Jun 28.

Stats

Stories Finished: 2
Submissions Currently Out: 5
Submissions Total: 22
Rejections: 19
Acceptances: 0

Submissions and Responses

Two submissions came back to me over this two-week period.

One was for The Incident at Pleasant Hills, and was a very pleasant personalized rejection that said several nice things about the story before the usual “we get 1000 submissions each submission period and only have 10 slots” let-down. The one piece of feedback was that the beginning was too slow, so I might review the story and see if there’s anything I can tighten up next time I send it out.

The other response was an honorable mention in the Writers of the Future contest for my story, Red Eye. This is the second time I’ve submitted, and the second honorable mention I’ve received. So that’s something.

I do not know how many submissions they receive for their quarterly contests, but I am sure that a paying contest with no submission fee receives quite a few. They have a multi-tiered system: honorable mentions, “silver” honorable mentions, finalists, and 1st/2nd/3rd place. Judging by Duotrope stats, I would guess that something like 10-20% of entrants fall into all those categories. So I’d say an honorable mention is about on par with a tier 2 rejection from a paying publication. More or less.

I still narrowly meet their “new writer” criteria, so I’ll likely send more stories their way as long as I am able. Being an L. Ron Hubbard joint, they are at least nominally associated with Scientology, something I am certainly not a fan of. But all that Tom Cruise money pays for a free contest with good prizes. I figure the cult cash might as well go to me, rather than all the other shady things they get up to.

Goals and Results

Last time, my goals were:

Finish T.I.M. (Formerly F-TIB)
Start working on Beneath the House in Caen revisions.

I “finished” T.I.M., clocking a little over 2,000 more words, and bringing the total to 6,000. That’s a significant bump from the original 2,300-word story. It’s also not surprising since it went from 5-ish nebulous short scenes to eleven. It still needs significant cleanup, and maybe another Critters run, and will hopefully shed words along the way. However, for the moment I am happy to let it rest.

Meanwhile, I collected all the Critters feedback for Beneath the House in Caen into a single document and started creating a bullet list of things to work on.

I have to say, there are a lot of things I like about Critters, and the fact that Andrew Burt keeps the enterprise going year after year when he undoubtedly loses money on it makes him a saint among writers. But dear God, the website and the email infrastructure feel like they are from the 90s, and the critique emails come in with bizarre formatting. Every time I submit a story, I think about creating some scripts reformat the critiques for readability. Maybe I’ll get around to that some day.

Beneath the House in Caen feels to me like a story that needs much less work than T.I.M., and I think the feedback bears that out. I’ll try to bounce back and forth between this and T.I.M. over the next week and see what I can get done.

Next Week

My goals for next week are flip-flopped versions of the previous weeks:

Revise Beneath the House in Caen to completion, or close to it.
Clean up and trim T.I.M., consider whether it needs another round of Critters.

Next week will be Week 26—the halfway mark of this Year of Short Stories. I plan to review my goals and see how they compare to my current progress. Spoiler: I’m a bit behind. However, I’m not that far behind, so I suspect I picked my goals well. More on that next week.

Adventure — The Story Idea Vault

It’s a common misconception that a great idea makes a great story. The truth is that most great stories come down to execution. A great idea with poor execution rarely works, but a great writer can breathe new life into even the most tired tropes.

Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.

Use these ideas as a writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.

Adventure

Life in the preserve is peaceful. It’s not very big—you can walk the perimeter in a day—but there are only a few of us and we don’t need much. There is plenty of good food, and for the most part we all get along. If any of us feel the need to explore, there are other preserves the Robbies can take us to.

I was happy where I was. I didn’t plan my adventure; it happened to me. One day I woke up sick, the first of us to know “illness” in 194 years. The Robbies were very kind. They explained how my illness could spread, so I had to be taken away from the preserve. That’s why I became the first person to see the world outside the preserves.

The Robbies have cities filled with gleaming spires of silver and glass. Machines fly among them like beautiful insects. They brought me to a tower and told me it had been built just for me, a “hospital” where they would examine me and try to understand why I was sick.

They haven’t found the answer. My body hurts so much I can barely get out of my bed. I do not blame them. They know much more than I do. If they cannot find the answer, who could? They are always kind, and they seem to be working very hard.

One of the Robbies visited me yesterday to tell me I may be the first human in centuries to go on another kind of adventure. He placed a silver hand on mine and explained that the illness would stop my body from working. Then, I will embark on an adventure called “death.” Just as we left the preserve to come here, I will leave my body and go somewhere else. Even the Robbies don’t know where.

It sounds frightening, and I am very tired, but I have learned that we cannot always choose our adventures. Sometimes they choose us.

Week 23 — Year of Short Stories 2026

2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I track my short story writing, from idea and draft to submission.

This is the weeks of Jun 8 – Jun 15.

Stats

Stories Finished: 2
Submissions Currently Out: 7
Submissions Total: 20
Rejections: 17
Acceptances: 0

Submissions and Responses

We seem to be in the summer lull. No responses to any of my submissions this week.

Goals and Results

I continue the rework of T.I.M., finishing another 1500 words or so. I had a tough time figuring out the right way through one of my new scenes, but I think I cracked it. I have two scenes left. If I can get through those next week, I’ll do a cursory clean-up pass and set it aside to look at the Critters feedback for Beneath the House in Caen. The feedback for that story was fairly positive, so I don’t think I’ll have nearly as much rework to do.

T.I.M. has gone through enough of a re-work that I will probably submit the new version to Critters to see how it is received. This is unusual for me; I usually do one round of critiques, and then tighten the story with that feedback to my own satisfaction before sending it out to publishers. However, I’ve been doing more rework after the critique phase recently, so a second round is beginning to feel more justified.

I don’t know whether that means I’m refining my process, or if these last couple stories have just needed more rework than usual.

Next Week

Finish T.I.M.
Start working on Beneath the House in Caen revisions.

The Other Side — The Story Idea Vault

Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.

Use these ideas as a writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.

The Other Side

We converted to green energy. We built the carbon sequestration plants. We started turning things around. We had the best of intentions. We were just too slow.

The result was widespread famine and death, unnatural natural disasters, and the worst refugee crises in human history. The die-off of species eventually slowed, but so many ecosystems had already been thinned out and strained beyond the breaking point.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. When the ecosystem is going to collapse anyway, you might as well get creative.

Enclaves of rogue gene-grinders sprouted up in places that were already supposedly uninhabitable, CRISPRing up new versions of old species to fill in the empty niches. It was an imperfect science, and every change caused its own cascade of problems, like propping up a collapsing building so they could live in the basement.

Instead of becoming wastelands, those places became new oases of chaotic life—riots of species that broke down pollutants, converted chemicals, generated energy, and regenerated resources.

The gene-grinders didn’t stop at other species. They had grown beyond taboos. They altered themselves to better fit their new ecosystems, and sometimes just for fun.

The world survived global catastrophe. Humanity survived too. But neither was the same on the other side.

Week 21 & 22 — Year of Short Stories 2026

2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I track my short story writing, from idea and draft to submission.

This is for the weeks of May 25 – Jun 7.

Stats

Stories Finished: 2
Submissions Currently Out: 7
Submissions Total: 20
Rejections: 17
Acceptances: 0

Submissions and Responses

Two weeks, and one form rejection for Incident at Pleasant Hills. All my stories are still on submission in at least one place, so I’m not sending out more at the moment.

Goals and Results

Last post, two weeks ago, I had a singular goal. Finish revising F-TIB.

Well, it’s still not done, but some progress has been made. Firstly, the story has a new name! It’s now called T.I.M.

After critiques came back, I did a lot of rethinking, which resulted in a whole new outline and roughly twice as many scenes. I’ve now written a couple thousand words of fresh or mostly fresh material toward that outline, and I’m approximately halfway done. It’s looking like the updated story will be a little more than double the word count of the original, at least until it gets its follow-up trimming.

I think I may be able to get this new version of the story written by next week. However, I have had…

A Distraction!

I don’t talk too much about my non-writing hobbies here, but something has been absorbing a decent amount of my time and attention lately. I’m making a game.

It’s not a big exciting game, and I don’t expect it to end up on Steam or consoles or anything like that. It’s a traditional roguelike, which is a very niche genre, and I’m currently making it strictly for fun. And perhaps surprisingly, part of the reason I’m enjoying the process is AI.

When it comes to writing fiction, I have a very cut-and-dry opinion on AI, one that seems to be largely shared by other writers: it’s pointless to use it. Writing fiction is self-expression, and if AI is mucking about with all the words, it’s inherently taking away at least some of that self-expression. If I read something, I want it to be written entirely by a human being. The words and their entertainment value are only part of the equation—I also want to feel that I’m receiving a coded signal from the author, a signal that tells me something about them, as vague and ephemeral as that might be. I want to make art and consume art, not just content.

So it might seem odd that I’d use AI for software development. However, I’ve always felt that there is a messy blend of art and craft when it comes to programming. There is certainly an aspect of self-expression, but there is also the purely mechanical part. A program is a machine that can carry out a series of (often incredibly complex) tasks. As of the past six months or so, AI has become quite good at building many of the mechanical aspects. Since I’m working with some tools I’m not highly familiar with, it has been a helpful assistant in building the machinery, while I focus on the design and the…gaminess of it all.

And that’s what’s been distracting me. I’m still trying to figure out exactly how to split my time between game development and writing. We’ll see how it goes.

Next Week

That same dang goal, with a new title: finish T.I.M.

Fifteen Years — The Story Idea Vault

Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.

Use these ideas as a writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.

Fifteen Years

He’s one of the most successful CEOs in history, turning a small business into a corporate behemoth in a little over a decade. Every industry he touches is revolutionized. Every decision proves prescient. He keeps the prices low. He takes care of his workers and their communities. He puts people over profits, but the profits still roll in. The business analysts don’t understand how he does it. Nobody does.

It’s easy though. Easy when you can travel backward in time exactly fifteen years. Easy when you can try every strategy, make every mistake, and then start again. How many times has he started over?

What’s hard is the long cycle. Fifteen years to recharge, and then back again. No way to go further. No way to escape that event horizon of the past.

So many days are too far back now for him to visit. They exist only as memories. The day he met the woman he loves. They day they married. The day she got her diagnosis.

She’s still back there, in the past. He can still visit her hospital bed. He can smell the antiseptic, see the sunken hollows of her cheeks and eyes. Hear the wheezing rhythm of the machine that helps her breathe. Two weeks before she passes on. Two weeks by her side, every fifteen years.

He knows he should let her go. That’s what she would want. He has tried. But he’s so afraid to lose those last two weeks. Then she’ll really be gone beyond his reach. And what will be the point of this empire he has built? What will be the point of anything?

The date is blocked off in his calendar, among the meetings and events. It’s nearly time again.

Fifteen years.

Week 20 — Year of Short Stories 2026

2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I track my short story writing, from idea and draft to submission.

This is the week of May 18 – 24.

Stats

Stories Finished: 2
Submissions Currently Out:8
Submissions Total: 20
Rejections: 16
Acceptances: 0

Submissions and Responses

I had one story come back to me this past week—a form rejection for Dr. Clipboard’s Miracle Wonder Drug. So I sent it back out.

The rejection and new submission were both publications that don’t accept simultaneous submissions (that is, submitting the same story to several places at the same time). It used to be like this almost everywhere, but explicitly allowing simultaneous submissions has become more and more common. Generally a good thing for writers. The remaining sticklers tend to be the more prestigious or higher-paying markets.

Some writers will say that nobody can stop you from submitting all you want, and it’s unlikely any publication will catch you. That is generally true. If you are lucky enough to be accepted by more than one publication—well, Lucy, you might have some ’splainin to do. Accepted stories do sometimes get withdrawn, though it’s unlikely to ingratiate you with any editors.

As someone who likes to spend some time vetting publications and submitting to those where I think my stories have the best shot, I don’t necessarily mind some of my stories being submitted to a single publication at a time, so long as those publications don’t have annoyingly long turnaround times. I sometimes find it hard to keep up with submissions anyway. I can spend that time working on other stories instead.

** Goals and Results

Last week’s singular goal:

Continue revising F-TIB.

Here’s where I sound like a broken record and complain that I haven’t had much time to write over the past week. A couple hours on the weekend doesn’t feel like it goes very far.

I have gone through all the critique feedback for F-TIB and decided what to address and what to ignore. I then took that, along with my breakdown of the story structure, and used it to outline a new structure that I believe will fix the things that need fixing.

The result is an outline with twice as many scenes as the original, but that’s a misleading description. Certainly at least twice as much happening. The first draft only had a couple real scenes embedded in a kind of montage of description. It felt stylized when I was writing it, but it’s clear that many of my readers found it bland, messy, and too fast to earn the emotional payoff that I was trying to build at the end of the story.

In the current draft I’m building more traditional scenes and spending more time ramping into the key moments so they feel earned.

Next Week

It has been far too long that I’ve been slowly chipping at F-TIB, so I’m upgrading last week’s goal:

Finish revising F-TIB!

I might put in some late evenings this week, just to try to get this done.

Ted Lasso and Using Tropes Effectively

I’ve been rewatching Ted Lasso recently, and while there are many things to appreciate about the writing on that show, I found myself impressed by the tropes. Rebecca is the tough female boss, Higgins is her bumbling sidekick. Jamie is the fantastic young athlete who only cares about himself, and Roy is the old curmudgeon, past his prime. Many of the characters are shown in the first episodes as decidedly one-dimensional.

Normally, “trope” is a dirty word among writers—synonymous with laziness and lack of creativity. Tropes are things we’ve seen before; things we’ve seen so many times, in fact, that they are familiar and often boring.

But that familiarity can be an asset when used carefully. A trope can be a shorthand. It doesn’t have to be explained, because the audience already knows. A show with a big cast like Lasso needs these shorthands to introduce so many characters so quickly without confusing the audience. The show manages to get a ton of story across in the first few episodes, when it also has to build a world for these characters to live in.

But a show full of tropes will bore a smart audience quickly, so Lasso pulls off a second trick. The trope isn’t the end state, it’s the opening move. Each trope is quickly deflated by a scene or two where the character shows a surprising attribute—something that directly contradicts what the audience is expecting from that trope. Suddenly, those characters feel considerably more like real people.

These rounded characters also play directly into one of the core themes that makes Lasso such a heartwarming show. The audience finds that they’ve pre-judged these characters, but everyone has a reason for their weaknesses. They’re good reasons, and easy to sympathize with.

The characters are cold to protect themselves, they’re angry because they’ve been hurt. They are never excused their bad behavior, but they are forgiven for it, because they’re human.

So don’t discount tropes. They can be extremely effective when used carefully.