The Big Idea: Tiffani Angus & Val Nolan

There’s so much to speculative fiction that you could write a book about it. And that’s exactly what authors Tiffani Angus and Val Nolan did! In fact, they did it twice. Today they’re here to tell you about their newest book, Spec Fic for Newbies: A Beginners Guide to Writing More Subgenres of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror, Volume 2, which is not so much a sequel to Volume 1 as it is a continuation.

TIFFANI ANGUS & VAL NOLAN:

We’re just gonna put it out there: We freakin’ love teaching. Our ideal jobs would be a spot at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters or on the faculty of Starfleet Academy (come on, you know they absolutely have a legit Literature and Creative Writing Department!). Specifically, we love teaching Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and all the uncategorizable crannies of weirdness and wonder that surround them. These subjects draw in the best students; they draw the best students out of themselves. Walking into a classroom and getting to discuss how these stories are made with novice writers who genuinely love genre fiction and seek to wield its power? Well, if that’s not the greatest job in the world then we don’t know what is (seriously, sometimes there are pizza parties; and, yes, with veggie and GF options!).

Spec Fic for Newbies (which we discussed on this honorable blog last year!) was our effort to share the excitement of those classes with everybody who sought it. Our Big Idea in Volume 1 was to break down the genres we love into their constituent parts and explore just how they worked. We wanted to do this as a book in order to blow the doors off the university classroom and give anyone who wanted it access to robots and vampires and sundry blood-splattered horrors on demand. So, we dismantled our lesson plans and refashioned them into short and accessible introductions to thirty subgenres/major tropes and how one might go about starting to write them.

But you know what? Thirty wasn’t enough.

The magical gourd of our enthusiasm (eew?) has even more to share.

And so we have spent the last year writing Spec Fic for Newbies: A Beginners Guide to Writing More Subgenres of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror, Volume 2. We got to return to the haunted well and haul out a whole new bucket of subjects to discuss (which, as the kind of teachers who seriously dig the Dungeon Master vibe of curriculum design, was more of a treat than anything else!). Some are core subgenres and tropes such as Space Opera, or Dragons, or Ghost Stories. Others are topical matters fueling some of the most striking fiction being written today such as Biopunk and Ecohorror. Honestly, a few were because we wanted to nerd out about specific topics such as Submarine Stories (Val will forever be a SeaQuest DSV fan!) or Enchanted Clothing (Tiffani always wants to know how the costumes are made!). In all cases they are subjects that students have asked about or raised in the classroom…

Spec Fic for Newbies: A Beginners Guide to Writing More Subgenres of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror, Volume 2: Amazon UK Preorder|Blackwell’s UK Preorder|Waterstone’s UK Preorder|Luna Press Publishing

Author socials: Tiffani’s Site|Val’s Site|Tiffani’s Bluesky|Val’s Bluesky