Tag Archives: writing

MLA Land News

Issue 1 , July 2026

Welcome to the first edition of my newsletter, an experiment in progress. My goal is to discuss topics of interest, let you know what I am working on, and hopefully entertain you in the process. I’ll share my thoughts and opinions, and I look forward to hearing yours in return. The focus will be on writing with occasional forays into the unknown and unknowable.

On Writing:

In my novels I make it a rule to speculate about what might be possible in the future based on what we know now. However, in the first book of the NanoMorphosis Saga series and in the second one on which I am working now, I had to make an exception to that rule when it came to space travel.

 Everything scientists have learned to date proves that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. To get around that limitation in my fictional world, I had to rely on the old science fiction trope of hyperspace (an altered state of existence that allows a ship to take a shortcut through real space). 

Without it, there would be no Star Trek, no Star Wars, no Lost in Space, and Mel Brooks would never have made us laugh with Space Balls.  Sadly, there is no evidence that such an alternate reality exists other than in our imagination… at least not yet.

A Topic of Interest:

I haven’t seen the new movie Disclosure Day yet but it’s on my list. Any movie by Steven Spielberg is a must see, but I was surprised to hear his motivation for making it. The story centers around a deep government-led conspiracy to cover up the presence of extraterrestrials on Earth. Sounds exciting, but it’s fiction, not to be taken seriously. Right? Except Steven Spielberg says that it’s true. I was, to say the least, surprised. What hard evidence does he have, I wondered. He cited stories of what other people have reported about things they believe they have seen. So, no hard evidence then. He just believes in his heart that it’s real. As Neil DeGrass Tyson said recently, belief isn’t evidence.

A friend of mine suggested I look up the documentary by Bob Lazar in which he claims to be a physicist with an inside scoop on what went down in Area 51—alien spacecraft and alien bodies. A hands-on eyewitness to it all? Wow. So, of course, I checked him out and it seems he’s not who claims to be. The universities where he says he earned his degrees have no record of him and he has a criminal history. So, not exactly a reliable source. You can read all about him and his “documentary” here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Lazar

Okay, so what’s my point? It’s to say stay open to new information and be willing to be proven wrong but do your research. Is that new information verifiable? Or is it simply the product of someone’s imagination? Like a science fiction trope, these ideas are fun to think about and even tell stories about, but they’re not to be taken seriously until proven otherwise.

Keep reading. It’s the best brain food there is.

Thank you for sticking with me this far.

Sincerely,

Marla Anderson

www.mlandersonauthor.com

Still Working Hard

I confess to neglecting my blog here, but not my writing. I’m working hard on NanoMorphosis,  raising the writing to a higher level.  The scifi story I’ve written is solid and won’t change, but I’m concentrating on reducing narrative and adding dialogue to carry the action forward. The challenge in world building is always to find a way to convey the necessary information without bogging the reader down with long tedious explanations.   Most of the changes won’t be major, but this tweaking makes a definite difference in readability.  Right now, my manuscript is being looked at by the scifi publisher Angry Robots.  So wish me luck with that.  Self-publishing is still an option and may be the best choice, once I’ve finished this last editing.  We’ll see …

How does a writer come up with ideas?

“What made you write about this? Where did you come up with your idea?”

These are common questions writers get asked. The answers are as varied as the writers themselves and the stories they’ve created. Inspiration comes from many sources ranging from a fleeting observation to a lifetime of hard-earned experience.

Since my writing focuses on science fiction, reading science related magazines and articles is a high priority for me and provides a reliable source of inspiration.

I find it fascinating to see what’s been newly learned and to read about research underway that might change how we perceive the world around us and interact with it. Sadly, I can only absorb a limited amount. Keeping up with all of the discoveries and inventions coming out of the scientific community is an impossible challenge. The rate of new information is accellerating at ever increasing speed and quantity.

There was a time when we thought the physical world could be explained with a set number of rules wrapped in a nice little package, but so far it hasn’t happened.  One question just leads to another and another and …. well, you get my point. The unending openness of scientific inquiry can be disconcerting.  Safety lies in what is known, danger lies in what is not

I agree, a neat package would be comforting, (perhaps explaining the appeal of religion, which provides set answers accepted on the basis of unquestioning faith), but the price of believing in a wrapped package without examining the contents, means closing one’s mind and ending the pursuit of knowledge.

Personally, it’s the uncertainty that keeps me awake and alive, ready to get up each morning to see what we might learn next.