Unafraid to throw cold water where it is needed, Crawford Kilian frequently cites his own multi-faceted work in various genres for Writing Science Fiction & Fantasy (Self-Counsel $21.95), a wide-ranging work that encourages would-be SF writers to-ironically-approach their work more realistically. Much of his advice is helpful for novices in any genre.

For instance, Kilian suggests the most common anxiety for would-be authors is that their daring ideas might be stolen by the publishing house to which they are submitting their precious manuscript. "The sad truth is,"; he writes, "that your idea probably isn't worth stealing. In fact, the editor may wearily see it as the umpteenth variation on some ancient plot.";

Exploit your daydreams, but also learn how to write a succinct query letter. Reproduced from 1988, a sample query letter that Kilian wrote to a SF publisher advertises his critical acumen as well as his originality:

"The message in fantasy is always a pretty conservative one: We have come to a pretty pass, and drastic action is needed to put matters back as they once were in some ideal past. The ideal past is usually some form of feudalism; its modern forms don't look very pretty in Latin America, and it probably wasn't all that satisfying in medieval Europe.

"The medieval European feudalists, however, had terrific media relations (apart from guys like Cervantes)-so good that people still get a bang out of knight-errantry, dragonslaying and sorcery.";

With more than science fiction and fantasy novels to his name, Kilian offers historical references for the various SF genres-such as lost colonies, alien contact, utopias & dystopias, parallel worlds and time travel-indicating that he is as well-read as he is well-written. "If all American literature springs from Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,"; he advises, "then all military science fiction springs from Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, first published in 1959.";

Having developed a One-Hour-A-Day Novel Writing Workshop, Kilian includes a CD-ROM with writing exercises and ten steps for pre-editing. He believes most people simply waste too much time watching the tube. "I got the idea for Eyas when I was walking the dog one night in the neighborhood. After that, when I walked the dog, I'd think about how the story would develop, who the characters would be. I considered the problems that I would encounter in writing it. And so it went.";

Cogent chapters on The Mechanics of Manuscript Production, Selling your Story, Researching Publishers and Agents and The Publishing Contract culminate with a rare diversion into cheerleading.

"George Orwell once observed that, from the inside, every life feels like a failure,"; he writes. "Spoken like a true writer! If you publish your story in a webzine, you feel like a failure because you didn't get paid and hardly anyone read your work.

"If you publish with a big New York house and your book sells 100,000 copies, you feel like a failure because you didn't get a big enough advance and hardly anyone read it-compared to Stephen King or Diana Gabaldon.

"But that sense of failure, I suggest, is a deception. To conceive, write, revise, and publish any story are real achievements. When you achieve any of these things, you have achieved something special."; 978-1-55180-785-0

[BCBW 2008]