Today the United Nations (U.N.) recognizes World Refugee Day, bringing attention to the plight of 60 million people worldwide who have been forced to flee their homes. One in every 122 humans is displaced or seeking asylum, according to the U.N. It’s not only international conflicts driving refugee numbers to this new record: an increasing number … More Real-Life “Engees”: Record Numbers on World Refugee Day
This post concludes a seven-part series discussing my experience writing climate fiction in my novel, Blue Karma. Conclusion Over the past week, I’ve shared the five greatest challenges I encountered writing the cli-fi genre: turning a vision into a narrative, defining the scope and thematic focus of the story, drawing inspiration from current events, and avoiding rhetoric. … More Environmental Hazards: Five Challenges of Writing Climate Fiction (Part 7)
This post is part six of a seven-part series discussing my experience writing climate fiction in my novel, Blue Karma. Challenge #5: Step Away from the Soapbox As both a writer and a bibliophile, I think the greatest power of fiction is its ability to provoke thought. Here the cli-fi genre has a clear mission. Less than … More Environmental Hazards: Five Challenges of Writing Climate Fiction (Part 6)
This post is part four of a seven-part series discussing my experience writing climate fiction in my novel, Blue Karma. Challenge #3: Choose-Your-Own-Apocalypse Our present environmental situation offers a smorgasbord of cataclysms for writers to employ: air pollution; mass extinctions; ultraviolet rays roasting us through holes in the ozone layer; a rise in mosquito-borne disease as regions grow … More Environmental Hazards: Five Challenges of Writing Climate Fiction (Part 4)
This post is part three of a seven-part series discussing my experience writing climate fiction in my novel,Blue Karma. Challenge #2: Scope and Scale Cli-fi works because we can identify with it. It’s our own world, reflected in a warped mirror of environmental armageddon. If I’d set Blue Karma on a distant planet, it wouldn’t have … More Environmental Hazards: Five Challenges of Writing Climate Fiction (Part 3)
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