At some convention or other, Dave Creek turned to me and said, “Say, I have some thoughts for a story that we could write together. I’ve got a survey team that enters an abandoned orbital habitat and stumbles across some super-intelligent dinosaurs. You’re the one who knows about dinosaurs.” This sounded intriguing, especially when we conceived of it as a short story that we could send off to a magazine that had published bunches of our stories written separately. Ah, but like that recon team, we had very little idea what we were getting ourselves into. Little did we suspect that SAUROTOPIA would expand to become a whole novel. Or that we’d find a publisher who wanted six books.
Science fiction fans have long enjoyed collaborations. James S.A. Corey’s series, THE EXPANSE, is actually a collaboration between Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. For fantasy readers, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE THE TIME WAR won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Ignyte awards. Other writers who’ve jointly produced well-received novels include Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, as well as Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.
How exactly do writers work together to make this magic? I’m sometimes asked if I wrote the dinosaurs and Dave wrote the humans. That’s a reasonable assumption, especially given that the chapters alternate between human and dinosaur viewpoints. However, for us, this isn’t how it works. Dave created my favorite character, who is an ostrich-like dinosaur best described as a fierce version of Big Bird. The first scene in which this dinosaur appears was Dave’s creation. No, this is not the only dinosaur he created. There’s also the leader of a predatory band of different dinosaurs. Basically, they are feathered velociraptors. I added the parts where they hunt in packs and stalk their prey from branches of trees. Don’t get me wrong, I did create several other characters for both these species of dinosaur as well as some peaceful herbivores.
Here’s another surprise that I learned as we worked together. It seemed natural to suppose that a book can be written by two authors in half the time it will otherwise take them to write it alone. If only this were true! Both Dave and I have a batch of other projects we were working on. I write a regular book review column and am about half way through a different series. Dave has his own series of novels and short stories clamoring to be written. This meant we both needed to find time in between our other work to write chapters of SAUROTOPIA and edit each other’s work.
Then there is the prospect of encountering “creative differences.” Part way through this project I worried about Dave hating my ideas and me hating his ideas. There were certainly times when one or the other of us would come up with something…let’s call it surprising. Looking back, what worked best was for me to sit with his unexpected plot developments. Over time, his new idea would not only grow on me, but I would become really intrigued by where it might take our characters, both the humans and the dinosaurs. Now I am looking forward to the times when he will spring something completely unexpected on me.
If you’ve read this far and are a writer who is wondering whether you might want to collaborate with another writer, I have to say, it can be tricky to figure that out in advance. Even if you have similar approaches, such as you both outline before you start, that’s no guarantee. Nor for that matter is there any assurance that a solo work will come to fruition. So, take another look at those collaborators I mentioned at the start. What the heck, give it a shot.
Rosemary Claire Smith writes science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories showcasing her interests in dinosaurs, alternate history, space exploration, mythology, genetic engineering, time travel, and aliens. She draws on her background as a trowel-wielding archaeologist, reformed lawyer, and keen observer of society. Her other interests include flower arranging, abstract photography, foil fencing, and astronomy.
This was a guest blog post. Interested in blogging here?
Assembling an itinerary for a blog tour? Promoting a book, game, or other creative effort that’s related to fantasy, horror, or science fiction and want to write a guest post for me?
Alas, I cannot pay, but if that does not dissuade you, here’s the guidelines.
Guest posts are publicized on Twitter, several Facebook pages and groups, my newsletter, and in my weekly link round-ups; you are welcome to link to your site, social media, and other related material.
Send a 2-3 sentence description of the proposed piece along with relevant dates (if, for example, you want to time things with a book release) to cat AT kittywumpus.net. If it sounds good, I’ll let you know.
I prefer essays fall into one of the following areas but I’m open to interesting pitches:
Interesting and not much explored areas of writing
Writers or other individuals you have been inspired by
Your favorite kitchen and a recipe to cook in it
A recipe or description of a meal from your upcoming book
Women, PoC, LGBT, or otherwise disadvantaged creators in the history of speculative fiction, ranging from very early figures such as Margaret Cavendish and Mary Wollstonecraft up to the present day.
Women, PoC, LGBT, or other wise disadvantaged creators in the history of gaming, ranging from very early times up to the present day.
F&SF volunteer efforts you work with
Length is 500 words on up, but if you’ve got something stretching beyond 1500 words, you might consider splitting it up into a series.
When submitting the approved piece, please paste the text of the piece into the email. Please include 1-3 images, including a headshot or other representation of you, that can be used with the piece and a 100-150 word bio that includes a pointer to your website and social media presences. (You’re welcome to include other related links.)
Or, if video is more your thing, let me know if you’d like to do a 10-15 minute videochat for my YouTube channel. I’m happy to handle filming and adding subtitles, so if you want a video without that hassle, this is a reasonable way to get one created. ???? Send 2-3 possible topics along with information about what you’re promoting and its timeline.
Want access to a lively community of writers and readers, free writing classes, co-working sessions, special speakers, weekly writing games, random pictures and MORE for as little as $2? Check out Cat’s Patreon campaign.
Want to get some new fiction? Support my Patreon campaign.
"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
~K. Richardson
You may also like...
Guest Post: Asking for What We Want in Our Lives "“ And What We Deserve in Literature by Kathrin Hutson
Asking for What We Want in Our Lives ““ And What We Deserve in Literature
Kathrin Hutson
We are not defined by our mistakes, and we deserve to reach beyond our dreams until they become reality.
This is a pervading theme in everything I write, morphed into various forms through story and character but no less poignant from book to book. It’s an incredibly important message I strive to offer my readers in whatever different flavor each story brings, because it’s a message I have lived through personally. And I know I’m not the only one.
As a wife, a mother, and a queer female author navigating the literary world and supporting my family solely by writing fiction, I’ve struggled for some time to find the balance between meeting needs and fulfilling wishes. For years, I operated under the belief that what I needed, what I wanted, and what I deserved were three very different things within my personal life. Trying to visualize and actualize all three was a feat tossed even farther to the winds when I struggled through an active heroin addiction in my late teens and early twenties.
I’d drawn reality and dreams so far apart from each other that only the idea of meeting my immediate needs seemed even remotely attainable. I needed to recover and rebuild my life. I needed food, shelter, comfort, community, sanity.
What I wanted and what I thought I deserved after moving through one of the roughest patches of my life over ten years ago now were two entirely different things. I wanted to be successful. I wanted to write. And I believed I no longer deserved to lose myself in the magic of writing fiction because of the mistakes I’d made, the people I’d harmed, the fear and heartache and discouragement I’d sown in myself and in others. For four years after finally getting clean and on my road to recovery, I carried with me the immense weight of wanting to write””of dreaming about writing again to my heart’s content the way I had when I first discovered my passion for it””and simultaneously believing that what I wanted was no longer within the realm of what I’d earned. What I deserved.
I hardly picked up a book to read for pleasure when I was an addict. I’d turned away from the healthy outlets I’d honed by necessity as a child and an adolescent and a teenager. And while it took me four years to start writing again, it still took me almost a year to allow myself to pick up a book and start reading again purely for the enjoyment of it.
What I found when I dove into fiction again might as well have been a newly discovered world, as if I’d just learned to read for the first time and was seeing everything again with brand-new eyes. I rediscovered the brilliance of my previous favorite authors in Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series and Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman graphic novels. And I found others who stoked a new curiosity in me about myself and the way I wanted to operate within this world after having been given a second chance at life and working so hard not to squander it.
Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel Legacy series carried with it the new possibilities of diving into one’s purpose and fluidly acclimating to it without giving up or giving in. “That which yields is not always weak” (Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel’s Dart).
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale illuminated a deeper understanding of what personal strength entails, when an individual’s needs aren’t anywhere close to what a human being deserves and are in fact pitted against basic human rights. “I am not your justification for existence” (Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale).
Octavia Butler’s Patternmaster revealed my first glimpse of awareness that I wasn’t alone in my inability to mold myself to any number of binary definitions””as a recovering addict, as a writer who hadn’t touched a word of fiction in years, as a queer person, as an adult struggling through life without the experiential knowledge of how most people perceived a “natural progression” without having screwed it all up first. “Most people who ask want me definitely on one side or the other” (Octavia E. Butler, Patternmaster).
When I did finally start writing again, I did so with zero expectations and a hesitant shyness, not of what others might think of me for writing again but of how disappointed I thought I would be in myself. That if I strived for what I wanted and it wasn’t in fact what I deserved, I would have lost the single defining aspect of myself I’d carried with me since I was ten years old””Kathrin as a writer and nothing more.
What I found when I dove back into a freshly unexplored wealth of experiences I now had to draw from was that I could more easily create what I wanted to see in fiction than what I felt I deserved to receive from a life worth living. The first book I wrote after my four-year hiatus, Sleepwater Beat, became not only my first venture into LGBTQ+ fiction with queer characters at the forefront but also the first truly raw piece of fiction that exposed to myself and the entire world who I really am. As Dystopian fiction so often does, this book highlighted the things I saw in society, all while I wondered if I was the only one who saw them and simultaneously hoped I was not.
I wanted to see strength and hope blazing beneath a gritty top layer of darkness, despair, bigotry, xenophobia, and injustice. Just as I’d seen it, somehow, through the darkness of my active addiction and the underbelly of society exposed to me as a result. I wanted to see characters like myself””those who were not defined by their mistakes, their pasts, their upbringing, their race, their sexual orientation, or their truest identity but who did not hide from the value each piece of themselves provided to the whole. Those who had absolutely no idea what they were doing beyond the fact that giving up simply wasn’t an option. Those who could stare their own demons in the face””either by choice or by necessity””and carry on no matter the consequences.
After Sleepwater Beat became an international bestseller in 2019 and then what is now the first book in the Blue Helix series, I realized how much easier it was for me to ask for what I wanted in fiction than what I wanted in my own life. The more I realized I was not the outlier in wanting to see more characters like me within the pages of speculative fiction, including Dystopian Sci-Fi and Grimdark Fantasy, the more I came to understand that this stretched so much farther beyond myself.
Yes, I write what I know. So much of what I know is a long line of having defined myself by all the “wrong decisions,” the “bad mistakes,” the “inability to conform.” And the more I heard from readers who picked up my stories, the more I learned that I was writing what we deserve to see of ourselves within the context of fictional worlds, or eerily paralleled versions of our own reality, or the “unexposed underbelly” of society. Within the context of identity, shared experiences, real and raw interpersonal relationships, and the too-often glazed-over horrors of isolation and alienation instead of belonging.
As a result, I’ve grown so much more aware of what it means to pursue what I want and need and deserve as an individual person within my own life. These things aren’t mutually exclusive, and one is not more important than the other when we’re navigating the obstacles tossed into our paths. Now, I write because I want to and because I deserve to fulfill that desire with the gifts I was given and my own obstacles turned opportunities. I write because I want to see the types of stories, darkness, struggle, pain, hope, and breaking down of barriers and stereotypes that people like me deserve to see reflected from within such stories.
It’s so much easier to write what I dream of in fiction. But when I do, asking for the things in life that bring me abundance, joy, peace, and a sense of purpose through the one thing I know I was born to do becomes that much less difficult along the way.
International Bestselling Author Kathrin Hutson has been writing Dark Fantasy, Sci-Fi, and LGBTQ Speculative Fiction since 2000. With her wildly messed-up heroes, excruciating circumstances, impossible decisions, and Happily Never Afters, she’s a firm believer in piling on the intense action, showing a little character skin, and never skimping on violent means to bloody ends.
In addition to writing her own dark and enchanting fiction, Kathrin spends the other half of her time as a fiction ghostwriter of almost every genre and as Fiction Co-Editor for Burlington’s Mud Season Review. She is an active member of both the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and the Horror Writers Association. Kathrin lives in Colorado with her husband, their young daughter, and their two dogs, Sadie and Brucewillis.
For updates on new releases, exclusive deals, and dark surprises you won’t find anywhere else, sign up to Kathrin’s newsletter.
As I drank my morning coffee and scrolled through Twitter one morning, I stumbled upon a preview for the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. At first, I didn’t quite realize where it was from. The name sounded familiar, them it hit me! It was a reboot of Sabrina the Teenage Witch. I was instantly intrigued. I thought, if the executive producers of Riverdale worked on it, it must good right?
Sabrina from the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.Before I get into talking about the gritty Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, I should start at the roots. Now, I understand comparing a sitcom to a gritty satan loving Netflix original is quite silly, but hear me out.
I am one for originals so let me start with Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Of course I had watched the new version first, but for the sake of old times, I revisited the original. And may I say, it was everything I missed. Hilda and Zelda’s relationship was like every sister’s relationship. They would get on each others nerves but in the end they always looked out for each other. Sabrina was also their pride and joy and would do anything for her!Hilda, Zelda and Sabrina from Sabrina the Teenage Witch.
Sabrina, in the sitcom, I found to be very brave and thoughtful. The moment she found out she was a witch, she used her magic for her friends and yes, sometimes her uses could be selfish. However, all of her uses of her magic, no matter what it was used for, came from the heart. Especially when it came to Harvey, who as you may know is her soulmate. Despite him being her boyfriend throughout the series, it never stopped Sabrina from pursuing her dream. Sabrina had also always been passionate about her studies and succeeding. This is part of the reason why I have always loved her as a character.
Salem takes the cake though. He is a comedic gift from the Gods. I mean it when I say Salem is the best character on the show. As most of you probably know, Salem is their family cat and has been with Hilda and Zelda for years. Salem is their familiar, but Salem has a backstory which is undeniably hilarious. Salem was originally a witch, but after attempting world domination, he was sentenced to hundreds of years of being a cat. Despite him being a cat, that doesn’t stop him from causing tons of shenanigans throughout the series. This just gives him more character.Salem from Sabrina the Teenage Witch.
Yes, it may be goofy and yes, it may not be gritty, but it’s lighthearted. Sometimes, you just need a little laugh.
Now that I have clearly state my love for the 90s sitcom, I should state my thoughts on the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.
Now, in this series being a witch is no surprise for Sabrina unlike in the Sitcom. She has known she was a witch since she was little and in this series, her parents have passed leaving Hilda and Zelda (including her cousin Ambrose, who was not in the sitcom) to take care of her. In the sitcom, Sabrina isn’t allowed contact with her mortal mother or her mother will be turned into a ball of wax. Her father, in the sitcom, was out traveling and working. The way they approached her parents in the Netflix series was just rather bleak.
Salem the cat in the new series, does not talk. He also does not have his awesome backstory not to mention that Sabrina attains Salem by summoning her own familiar. I would have nothing against this way of approaching introducing Salem. In fact, it is more or less that I’m angry that Salem doesn’t talk. He doesn’t bring anything to the table in the new series. Salem, in fact, is hardly shown in the show despite him being very important in the sitcom version.
Salem from Sabrina the Teenage Witch.You may say that it’s petty of me to be upset about a cat, but Salem is apart of the Spellman family, so to not include him in the new series seems ridiculous to me.
Now, let’s talk about Harvey. This is something that I hold a lot of thoughts on. In the sitcom Harvey is a doof. He’s goofy and somehow never found out that Sabrina was a witch for years. Netflix must’ve upped Harvey’s IQ because he does not skip a beat in the new series. Not to mention the fact that despite Harvey being Sabrina’s boyfriend, he was always sort of a side character.
In the Netflix series, you are introduced to Harvey’s family. Of course, you’ve had some backstory for Harvey in the sitcom. You knew his parents were together, he had sibling and his dad worked as an exterminator. In the Netflix series, Harvey has a brother and a dad, and his dad works in a mine. His dad, in the Netflix series, is rather aggressive and abusive, which was never established in the sitcom.
My final comparison about Harvey comes to his reaction to when he finds out that Sabrina is a witch. In both series Harvey is clearly did not handle Sabrina being a witch very well. In the sitcom Harvey ends up breaking up with Sabrina for a very short moment. Towards the end of the series, Harvey ends up patching up things with Sabrina. In fact, they end up becoming very good friends like they did in the beginning of the sitcom. In the Netflix series, Harvey wants to end all ties with her. He acted like being a witch was the equivalent of being a monster. In fact, even when Sabrina tries to patch things up and help Harvey, he still treats her like a monster.Harvey and Sabrina from Sabrina the Teenage Witch.
This leaves me to my final thoughts. I would like to end this post talking about how the two series deal with the topic of witches. In the sitcom, they treated witches differently than in the Netflix series. In Sabrina the Teenage Witch, all the witches lived harmoniously. They had their own government, The Witches Council, and lived in what they called the Other Realm. However, some witches chose to live in the mortal realm, which is earth.
In the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, they use cliche witch backgrounds. They make them seem quite evil when they really are not. Of course I am not saying there aren’t any witch stereotypes in the sitcom. In the sitcom, they have their familiars and also make potions in cauldrons, however, those do not compare to the stereotypes portrayed in the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. In the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, they portray witches like every media platform does. This bothered me the most.From the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina
I love the sitcom because it is not full of stereotypes. It doesn’t make witches out to be Satan loving monsters. Not all witches, in my opinion, are Satan loving monsters. I understand they wanted to make a gritty remake, but what made the sitcom so original to me was how lighthearted it was, even if they did touch up on difficult topics.
The way Netflix portrayed witches to me was something that I’ve seen so many times before. Making witches Satan worshippers is so. . .overused and not at all true. Today, there are people who identify as witches who do not worship Satan. I find the use to having a “dark baptism” and celebrating their “lord Satan” in the Netflix series is stereotyping and frankly, rude.
From the Chilling Adventures of SabrinaI’m not saying the Netflix series is all bad. There are aspects of the show that are enjoyable. However, it was not my favorite. I found there to be a lot of things I did not enjoy. Not to mention, there are things I would definitely tweak, but overall, the editing was well done and I believe it was well produced. Although, I’d take a goofy talking cat in a silly sitcom any day.
Lou is a writer of rom coms, eater of pizza, lover of 90s boybands and cat enthusiast. You can follow her on Twitter at @aweosmewriter.
At some convention or other, Dave Creek turned to me and said, “Say, I have some thoughts for a story that we could write together. I’ve got a survey team that enters an abandoned orbital habitat and stumbles across some super-intelligent dinosaurs. You’re the one who knows about dinosaurs.” This sounded intriguing, especially when we conceived of it as a short story that we could send off to a magazine that had published bunches of our stories written separately. Ah, but like that recon team, we had very little idea what we were getting ourselves into. Little did we suspect that SAUROTOPIA would expand to become a whole novel. Or that we’d find a publisher who wanted six books.
Rosemary Claire Smith writes science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories showcasing her interests in dinosaurs, alternate history, space exploration, mythology, genetic engineering, time travel, and aliens. She draws on her background as a trowel-wielding archaeologist, reformed lawyer, and keen observer of society. Her other interests include flower arranging, abstract photography, foil fencing, and astronomy.
