MonSFFA’s next club meeting will take place in two weeks, on Saturday, September 19, at which time we will welcome a guest speaker via ZOOM, Canadian independent SF author Sean Robins. With some 200,000 books sold, Sean tallies 46 published novels across six series. He will engage us in a discussion of themes explored in his latest series (I, Anomaly), the story of a battle android that gains consciousness, and he’ll talk, as well, about his writing career in general. Sean’s I, Anomaly series is available on Amazon: https://mybook.to/YqPCYkm

Our guest speaker’s path to becoming a writer is personal and uniquely interesting; he shares the tale with us…

Writing a novel is hard.

Don’t “Duh!” me, and don’t you dare quote that “writing is easy, you just sit at a typewriter and bleed” line. (Looking at you, Hemingway’s ghost.) Think about it for a second. Actually, think about it for several months, because that’s how long it’ll take.

The amount of time that goes into research, planning and outlining the novel, preparing character sheets (which look suspiciously like D&D character sheets), and the endless cycle of writing, re-writing, and re-re-writing (re-re-re-writing? re⁴-writing?) is more massive than the Death Star. And if you have a day job (I teach English, which means I spend my days explaining why Romeo and Juliet isn’t just a really badly executed dating app story), finding enough time to do all that is like trying to fold a fitted sheet—theoretically possible but probably requires breaking several laws of physics.

During the nine months it took me to write The Crimson Deathbringer (yes, the same amount of time it takes to create a human, though my book required significantly more coffee), I stopped all my hobbies. I didn’t even watch movies, which for a pop culture junkie like me is like Tony Stark giving up his suits or Doctor Who parking the TARDIS permanently. I even stopped going to the gym, and I ended up with a belly that would make Thor from Endgame feel better about himself. Now I understand why George R. R. Martin looks the way he does—though in my defense, I actually finished my book. (Sorry, George, but someone had to say it.)

What prompted me to take on this Herculean task, then, you ask? Was I bitten by a radioactive Shakespeare? Did a wizard show up at my door with a mysterious typewriter? Did Nick Fury appear in my living room with a writing-related mission?

The truth is both simpler and more complicated: I’ve got purely obsessional OCD. What this means is a thought enters my mind—usually something negative—and doesn’t leave, like that one song you heard at the grocery store that follows you around for weeks. I end up having to think about it five thousand times a day (I counted once—actually, I counted several times, because… you know, OCD), and once this starts, my life is ruined for a week, two weeks, a month, or six months. I’d tried everything: therapy, medication, meditation, interpretive dance (okay, maybe not that last one)… Nothing worked, until I read an article that said people with this problem had an overly active imagination, and it would help if they channeled it into something productive, like writing.

I’d always wanted to be a writer. This is literally a childhood dream, one of those you give up when you grow up, like becoming a Jedi or finding Platform 9¾. Instead, I ended up being a university/college-level English teacher, explaining to students why “IDK” isn’t an acceptable answer in a literature essay. I had the story of The Crimson Deathbringer in my mind for years (even started writing it and stopped a few times, like George R.R. Martin with his… no, no, I promised I’d stop with the George jokes). When I read that article, I was going through a tough time in my marriage (fighting with your wife is no fun, even for sane people), and my mind had gone into its life-destroying overdrive, so I told myself, “Well, you’ve tried everything else, let’s give this a shot.”

And then a miracle happened.

My mind put the same energy it used to put into producing BS and making my life miserable into coming up with stories. It was like my brain got rebooted and decided to install a better operating system. Ideas would come to me fast and furious (though with fewer car chases than the movies), and I had to stop whatever I was doing several times a day to write them down. I’ve been OCD-free since then (I know, I sound like a recovering alcoholic at a Superman convention: “Hi, I’m Sean, and it’s been 547 days since my last obsessive thought…”).

When TCD (cool abbreviation, eh? Though not as cool as MCU or TARDIS, but I’m working on it) was finished, it took my out-of-control brain half a day to plan my second novel (The Golden Viper—think Star Wars meets The Office, but with more explosions and fewer paper sales).

And as long as I’m in confession mode (though this is less “forgive me father for I have sinned” and more “forgive me readers for I have created characters I love more than my coffee maker”): I’ve fallen completely, hopelessly in love with my characters. There’s Ethan and his never-say-die attitude (think Captain America’s optimism meets Han Solo’s snark), Jarred and his deadpan jokes that would make Drax proud, and my older characters Maada and Xornaa, who are just awesome (like if Nick Fury and Agent May had space-traveling cousins).

If you end up liking them half as much as I do, then my job here is done. Though fair warning: side effects of reading these books may include unexpected emotional attachment to fictional characters, sudden cravings for space adventure, and an inexplicable desire to check if your local gym offers anti-gravity yoga.

Yes, I wrote this entire confession while procrastinating on my actual writing. Meta, right?

In addition to chatting with Sean, our September club meeting will also revel in our favourite “so-bad-they’re-good” sci-fi B-movies, and examine the genre’s doctors and scientists.

So mark your calendars accordingly, folks: Saturday, September 19, from 1:00PM-5:00PM! As usual, we’ll meet live and in person at our downtown meeting hall, and concurrently online via ZOOM. See all of you then!