Every month we read a book together, as writers. Reading as writers is different, it is not just about enjoying a story, but about trying to figure out what is happening, what makes it bad/good/interesting/horrible/fantastic?

Time for Science-Fiction!

This ‘month’ of May/June we will read a book by Marion Zimmer Bradley. She is an author I personally only know from her Avalon books, which I loved as a child. But she started out writing science-fiction/fantasy! So, as we have many people at @thewritersblock who are interested in that genre, it is about time (after spending #book-club reading mystery by P.G. Wodehouse, a literary novella by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and short stories by Kafka) to read science fiction.

I scoured the interwebs for available public domain science fiction, as I figured it would be nice to read something by a less known author this time, or at least one that is perhaps not known for writing sci-fi. As I was doing this, I found out one author, of some of my favorite books, actually also wrote science fiction. So, the decision was made!

The book we will read is:

The Door Through Space by Marion Zimmer Bradley.

The original paperback has 132 pages. The novel is freely available to download at the Gutenberg Project.

Written originally in 1961, it is an expansion of a short story first published in 1957 called ‘Bird of Prey’ (which you can also read first, to see how she went from short story to book, in case you’re interested!). It is her first novel, and she mentions some planets in this book which will later be the basis of a whole other series of books (the Darkover series), which is also an interesting fact to think about while reading, especially for young & aspiring authors. You never know which worlds are hidden in your present story!

READ!

Please read the book, or try to make it through at least. And think about why it is a good/great/bad/horrible/interesting/fantastic/bizarre book. What works, what doesn’t work? And why? What did the author do to make it so?

Share your thoughts & tribulations & feelings & whatever other response in #book-club channel of the @thewritersblock Discord! Looking forward to hearing your thoughts there. We try to keep spoilers to a minimum, but talking about style & approach & things like that are very much encouraged!

WRITE!

And then: write about your experiences. Or use what you’ve learned to craft something of your own.

• Non-fiction: discuss the methods used, your reader-experience, something you learned from reading it.
• Fiction: can you use the same mechanics, the same approach and write a story of your own? Did you identify something, like a specific use of POV, tenses, plot, etc, and can you use that to build a strong story yourself? Please don’t write fan-fiction, at @thewritersblock we’re dedicated to original work only
• Poetry: let the setting or the story inspire you. Or write a poem about your experiences of reading as a writer. The possibilities are endless.

We’ll aim at finishing this book by the half of June, and to write about it in the final weeks of June 2018.

Good luck, and looking forward to your experiences!

@nobyeni