“A Blessing and a Curse” RPLA Showcase: Charles Cornell

Creativity is a wonderful gift where ideas spring up from the lush jungle of the mind. But it can also be a heavy burden, drowning a person in hundreds of ideas and precious little time to work on them. Charles Cornell is very familiar with this struggle. His mind is flooded with many colorful, fantastical ideas. Luckily for us all, he’s been able to get many of these on paper. One of his recent novelettes, The Orchid Man, won Gold in the Novelette category for the 2019 Royal Palm Literary Awards. Charles talks speculative fiction, humility, and the benefits of letting a piece mature on this week’s RPLA showcase.

Cornell’s Writing Journey

I write speculative fiction (science fiction, science fantasy, steampunk, and dieselpunk). I started writing seriously 17 years ago, although I did a fair amount of creative writing as a child. I recently discovered two short stories I wrote when I was twelve years old. They weren’t bad! So I took the basic idea of those stories, rewrote them as steampunk, and published them in my most recent anthology, The Most Peculiar Tales. As a youngster, I read a lot of science fiction and my influences included Isaac Asimov, Aldous Huxley, and John Wyndham. I read all of Edgar Rice Burrough’s John Carter Of Mars series which was the Star Wars of my youth. But the most influential novel I read when I was younger was George Orwell’s 1984. What an insightful story that was! It’s a goal of mine to write a science fiction novel that might come close to achieving Orwell’s brilliant and prophetic vision of social, geopolitical, and technological change. I’m still working on it!

I have an overactive imagination which is both a blessing and a curse. New ideas float in and out of my head all the time which means I have a lot of work in progress on the go. My biggest challenge is to complete one idea, whether it is a short story or novel, before embarking on another. Writing is a passion, whether you are commercially successful or not. It’s in your blood, a craving to create and explore with the power of words. This is the driving force, a kind of perpetual motion machine in your mind. There is always a need to learn new things no matter how successful you become.

Facing rejection is the hardest part of any writer’s career. I’ve had my fair share of failing to gain traction through the traditional route of finding an agent despite three First Place RPLAs in both long and short fiction categories. I’m getting older and frankly don’t have the time and patience to wait out the results of endless queries. Besides, there is something to be said for being fast to market. So my first inclination is to always self-publish.

The Winning Entry, The Orchid Man

Logline: During the Vietnam War, an extraterrestrial becomes trapped in a deadly firefight. A story of desperate survival in a time of conflict, as seen through the eyes of an alien.

My winning novelette, The Orchid Man follows my win in 2016 for Crystal Night. Both stories come from The Prometheus Saga series of short stories by an author co-operative called The Alvarium Experiment whose stories have won multiple awards. The Prometheus Saga Volume Two is the fourth anthology we have published. The premise of The Prometheus Saga is that a probe has been sent to Earth by an advanced civilization and has been on our planet for 100,000 years. It is part organic, part mechanical, and can morph into any human form, male or female. The mission of each author is to take an important moment in human history and describe it through the eyes of this alien who is hidden among us.

In Crystal Night I chose 1938 Berlin and the start of the Holocaust. In The Orchid Man, I was inspired by watching Ken Burns’ TV documentary on the Vietnam War. The probe takes the form of a young Chinese man studying the pharmaceutical properties of rare orchids in the middle of the Vietnam War. We see the war threw his eyes, as he and a young village boy get caught in a vicious firefight between American and North Vietnamese forces.

The imagery in The Orchid Man can be both serene and beautiful, as well as terrifying and deadly:

Sunbeams descended through the high canopy like heavenly spotlights, the forest floor dotted with red canna lilies and white camellia bushes. A fragrant scent perfumed the humid air. The path fell suddenly into a shallow hollow of fallen tree trunks layered in moss. They had arrived in Jin’s hidden garden, a lush sun-kissed oasis where hundreds of orchids grew everywhere, their delicate multi-colored petals hanging from thin stems like translucent porcelain ornaments.

When the battle reaches its pinnacle, the prose focuses on danger and fear as my protagonist survives a napalm attack:

Ru Bo Jin stumbled into the tortured jungle like a puppet with several broken strings. War had blasted ragged paths of destruction among the burning trees. Large craters dotted the hillside. The land was littered with burnt bodies, some still aflame, unrecognizable as anything that once had a name.

There is no doubt that being a finalist or winning a Royal Palm Literary Award—whether first, second, or third—means a very great deal to me. It’s absolutely the most satisfying feeling when it is your peers, your fellow authors, who have expressed their admiration for what you have written and have judged it worthy. They are the best critics and their praise is the most precious.

“Dear Me,” (Advice to My Younger Writing Self)

My first piece of advice…there is always something about your fiction you can improve. I learned very early on that you can never stop learning the craft of writing. I tell this to myself every time I approach the keyboard. You need to be humble about your skills regardless of any past success you’ve had and you always must exercise humility in the face of criticism no matter how good you think you are. Everything is a learning experience. You have so many avenues to learn from. Learn by reading other authors’ works. Attend conferences, seminars, workshops. The amount of craft-related advice on the internet is almost infinite and usually free for the taking. Take it. Absorb it like a sponge.

My second piece of advice is that perseverance and determination will help you get over rejection. It’s a real pity there’s such a tremendous volume of queries descending on agents that they can’t provide individual feedback on each rejection. If you get any feedback from them, treasure it, and then learn from it. Your critique partners and beta readers are also a source of feedback. Plow through it. The harshest criticism can be the most valuable. Your worst feedback comes from your family and friends. They invariably hold back because they don’t want to hurt your feelings. You gain nothing from false praise. Reaching out to a fellow author for their honest feedback is the best approach if possible. Don’t become deflated if they don’t like your work. Ask for specifics…why not? Take that on board.

My third piece of advice—which I always take to heart— is to put that ‘final draft, ready to publish’ version of your work down and leave it alone for a while. This advice takes the first two points above and puts them into action, an easy tactic every aspiring author can implement. Put it down, let your novel or short story sit to mature like a fine wine, then write something else. Revisit that ‘draft’ weeks or even months later. You will be surprised at how many new insights you gain as you re-read your work and subsequently, how many new revisions you make that make your prose better.

Other Works by Charles

RPLA Winners:

Tiger Paw (Thriller, First Place)

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007DK91FU/

Crystal Night (Novella, First Place)

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00S31ZOU4/

The Orchid Man (Novelette, First Place)

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07F5N2GG8/

DragonFly (Science Fiction, Third Place)

https://www.amazon.com/DragonFly-Illustrated-Missions-Squadron-Book-ebook/dp/B00IPU44N6/

Steampunk Anthology

The Most Peculiar Tales

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07HFFQ3B3/

These six stories are also available individually in Kindle format.

Science Fiction Short Stories and Anthologies*

The Prometheus Saga Volume One*

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B017081GKW/

The Prometheus Saga Volume Two*

https://www.amazon.com/Prometheus-Saga-2-Bria-Burton/dp/1729184111/

Children Of The Stars (short story)

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01KE4GIGQ/

Return To Earth*

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1540548287/

In Shadows Written*

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01B43XDYQ/

Die Fabrik (The Factory) (short story)

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00KUVUYFK/

Non-Fiction

A Survivor’s Guide To Working At A Big Corporation

https://www.amazon.com/Survivors-Guide-Working-Big-Corporation-ebook-dp-B071FPG3KY/

Satire

Harvey Drinkwater and The Cult Of Savings

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0741PPV8J/

My main focus is on speculative fiction. I’m currently completing the sequel to my science fantasy/ dieselpunk work DragonFly. I’m working on a steampunk/dystopian series of novels set in the far future; a novel series based on the short story Children Of The Stars; and a series of standalone science fiction thrillers about space colonization.

Stay Connected

My main website is CharlesACornell.com. It contains ‘portals’ to my fiction via dedicated websites, SteampunkNovels.com, DragonFly-Novels.com, and BigCorpSurvivor.com.

I can be found on Facebook @CharlesACornell, @SteampunkNovels, and @DragonFlySquadron.

My Twitter handle is @CharlesACornell.

More about RPLA

The Royal Palm Literary Awards competition is a service of the Florida Writers Association established to recognize excellence in members’ published and unpublished works while providing objective and constructive written assessments for all entrants. Judges include literary agents, publishers, film producers, current or retired professors, teachers, librarians, editors, bestselling and award-winning authors, and journalists from across the nation. Entries are scored against the criteria set by RPLA using rubrics tailored to each genre. Winners are announced at the annual FWA conference during the RPLA awards banquet. To learn more about RPLA, click here for the guidelines.