Once again, we were lucky to convince some of our favorite authors to answer our dorky question. So how do you bridge the space between two utterly cool moments in your novel? Here's what the experts say...

David J. Williams, author of The Mirrored Heavens and The Burning Sky:

Writing with an ensemble cast of main characters has its disadvantages, but one of the big pluses is that it makes it easier to maneuver past this kind of problem. The entirety of the Autumn Rain trilogy is cutting back and forth between (widely separated) points of view, focusing on the highlights of each "plot vector", whether that's in a maglev tunnel beneath the Atlantic or in a bio-dome in the middle of a lunar fortress. This was a deliberate decision, in that I often find myself skimming pages of various books to get to the Next Cool Moment, so when it came to writing MIRRORED HEAVENS, I wanted to leave anything skimmable on the cutting room floor. That being said. . . sometimes "downtime" affords hidden opportunities. . . . are there implications or clues to the situation that two characters can talk about? Is there an opportunity here for more exposition or a newsfeed, or some kind of world-building? If the answer's no, then just fast-forward as much as you need to; readers will forgive almost anything save being bored. Screenwriters are taught to get into scenes late and get out of them early, and there are times I wish more novelists did the same!

Rebecca K. Rowe, author of Forbidden Cargo:

All it takes is two pet mice-more intelligent than we are and willing to explain a few things over a meal. That's in-between the destruction of planets and some possible brain-dicing if you're hitchhiking across the galaxy à la Adams. Barring that, there're always the gravediggers. Sure, their banter makes us laugh, a relief between the darker scenes, but they also give Hamlet and us vital information....

Of course, we're in it for the murder, the sex, the quest and the chase (and for us SF geeks the surprising widgets it takes for each), but we'll stay for the meals, the muddy treks and the quiet smoke. That's when we reveal our Character: how she holds herself (does she skip or walk with her toes crushed in shoes too tight), what she says or doesn't say, and what others say about her before and after the deed. A conversation, a moment of reflection or just looking (what she sees, what we see her miss) may suffice. In our fiction, as in life, we find it's those in-between times that matter most.

Ken Scholes, author of Lamentation, Canticle and Long Walks, Last Flights, and Other Strange Journeys:

Moving from Cool Thing A to Cool Thing B in a novel.... I think this is a hard question for me to answer because I don't think in terms of Cool Things in books. I'm thinking about the characters and what they're struggling with, what they're learning, where they need to go, and I let things unfold a bit organically. My Cool Things inevitably grow out of the interactions of my characters with the conflicts they're facing. Still, one thing I've recently read (compliments of Stephen J. Cannell, the TV writer) is that when you're stuck in the middle muddle of the second act, it is often helpful to figure out what to do next by imagining the POV of the antagonist and plotting the story from there, letting that character introduce the complications that my protagonist(s) must face. I can't vouch for it as I've not used it as a method, but it piqued my curiosity and I'm going to try it the next time I'm stuck.

The "Ask A Pro" panel at WisCon included author Eileen Gunn (Stable Strategies And Others), Tor Books senior editor James Frenkel, agent Shana Cohen, and author Jack McDevitt (The Hercules Text). Here's a digest of their advice and wise counsel to you, the future literary superstar.

Don't hire a freelance editor to polish up your book prior to submitting it to agents and editors. Says Frenkel, "If you can't write well enough, nobody's going to be able to help you." And if those freelance editors were such great writers, they'd be selling novels themselves. If you submit a novel to a publishing house and say it's been professionally edited, it may not help – and it could actually hurt, advises Cohen.

Likewise, don't deal with "marketers" who promise to submit your work to agents. These queries will get rejected instantly, says Cohen — she only deals with authors directly. Also, companies that promise to write your query letter for you will probably just give you a cookie-cutter letter.

Get an agent, even you have a book already sold. You need someone to read over the contracts and deal with the publisher for you — Jack McDevitt told about selling his first book without an agent, and after he signed the contract, the editor asked, "You didn't actually sign that thing, did you?" A good agent should be able to get you way more than 15 percent more money than you would have gotten otherwise, justifying their 15 percent fee, because they can use their other high-powered clients as leverage to get you a good deal. "Treat this author well, or our famous-author client may end up going with another publisher." Also, publishers would rather not have to deal with authors without the buffer of an agent explaining everything and parsing all of the contract issues.

Get some feedback. Join a writers' group, get into a workshop, and get all the feedback you can. If possible, find a good critic of your work and marry him/her, advises McDevitt.

If your first novel doesn't sell, you should keep writing anyway. First novels often are deeply flawed, and you may just want to work on something different. Writing a second novel gives you two things you can possibly sell. Don't work on the sequel to a novel you haven't sold yet, advises Frenkel.

But actually if you have a sequel idea, you should write it up, because it may make your first novel seem more marketable, says Gunn. Wherever your creative energy goes, you should just follow – because a lot of writers enter the field with three novels already finished, and release them one after the other.

So how do you know how long a novel should be? "A narrative should be like a dog's legs: long enough to reach the ground," says McDevitt, quoting a writing guru.

You should always communicate clearly with editors – even if they don't do a good job of communicating with you. Don't submit your work simultaneously to more than one venue, unless the markets allow it and you let them know that's what you're doing. And if you haven't heard back from an editor in forever, you should write and query before withdrawing it. Gunn told the story of her first short-story sale: she had sent a story to Amazing Stories and hadn't heard back in a long time, so she finally wrote to them and said that she was withdrawing the story from consideration. Then she ran into John Varley at a party and he said, "Hey, your story's in Amazing!" If she had just gone ahead and submitted it elsewhere, it might have appeared in two different magazines – causing immense consternation.

Don't look down on small publishing and self-publishing, but bear in mind that only a few people can really make it work. Leslie What's most recent book, Crazy Love, came out from Worldcraft in a limited first edition of only 500 copies, but Booklist named it as one of the ten best science fiction books of 2008, and it's gotten tons of readers and sales. But that's a case of a publisher that knew what it was doing. "It's worked for people," says Gunn, "but a very few people."

Be careful when a small press wants to work with you – make sure you're not dealing with a scammer. You can look them up on sites like Editors and Preditors, and scope them out to see how they've worked with others, advises Frenkel. If a small publisher wants to work with you, look at who else they publish, advised someone in the audience. Try to figure out if that's company you want to be included in.

Write short stories. It's a lot easier to sell a novel if the editors know your work from the short story markets. "if you spend a year writing a novel and they think it's godawful, you're going to hate yourself," says Jack McDevitt.

Look for reviews of short fiction online to figure out who's publishing cool stories right now, and try to submit your work there. Try Locus Magazine, advises Frenkel. The markets that Frenkel looks at to figure out which authors are up and coming include the big ones, like Asimov's, Analog, F&SF and Realms of Fantasy, plus some online magazines.

Send your work to the biggest magazines first, and then wait for them to reject your work before sending it elsewhere. Also, the top magazines are the ones that pay the most, says Gunn. "You have to have enough ego to send your stuff to the top-paying magazines first."

Top image from Cult Of The Giant Brain.

So first of all, let's just say that if you're not one of the estimated 75,000 people who've already downloaded this film from the Internet, you really shouldn't. For one thing, it's clear from watching the "workprint" that this film will look superb on the big screen - the action sequences really are widescreen and amazing, and there's plenty of dementedly awesome stunts. But also, this incomplete print is still missing a lot of the finished special effects, and some scenes are lacking, purely because the last elements haven't been slotted in yet. By all accounts, it's also an early cut, missing some scenes and without the final edits. You'll have much richer viewing experience if you see this film in the theater.

But also, I'm hoping, after watching the thing, that the studio will take this opportunity to make some improvements. As it stands now, unless the film gets re-edited pretty drastically, we're looking at a movie-length episode of Heroes, only with amazing stunts and mind-blowing action. (This early synopsis pretty much covers the bases, although it's missing a few plot wrinkles.) If all you care about is cool fight scenes and things exploding, then you're good to go. If you want to care, even a little, about the people who are fighting each other, then this film needs a bit of surgery.

The good news is, I don't think it's a lost cause. Without knowing what scenes ended up on the cutting-room floor, or what stuff director Gavin Hood added in reshoots (which might not be in this early cut), here are my 10 suggestions for ways the movie could improve drastically.

1) Pick just a couple of sequences of Wolverine looking up at the sky and screaming, and trim out the rest. Seriously, I felt as though someone involved with this film decided "Hey, that scene where Kirk looks up and yells 'Khaaaaan' so loudly the Reliant can hear it from orbit was pretty cool. You know what would be even better? If it happened like five times." Just, you know, pick your favorite howl-at-the-sky moment and keep that one.

2) Cut back on the love story, or give it some depth. I can't honestly remember the last time I saw a love story with less chemistry than the Wolverine-Silver Fox romance in this film. We don't actually see them meet, they're just suddenly a couple. And then she tells him an old Native American fable about a Wolverine and the moon, and then it turns out she actually just tricked him into loving her using her tactile hypnosis, and zzzzzz. Did they film more scenes of these two? Like, a scene where they meet, or where they act like normal people? Could we swap those out? We don't need to have an origin for why Logan calls himself Wolverine, at least not if it's going to involve his girlfriend telling him an old legend.

3) More male bonding. I can't believe I'm actually having to tell an action movie to have more male bonding, but there you have it. Every time there's male-bonding on screen, this movie shudders to life. Wolverine gets some nice male bonding with Wraith in a couple of scenes, and then he pairs off with Gambit. The rest of the time, though, all the male characters seem to hate each other, and not in an interesting, sparky way. Cut out one of the ten thousand scenes of the male characters grimacing at each other, and find some more footage of Wolverine being friends with another man. It's like the life-blood of action movies.

4) Make me understand Logan and Sabretooth. This is the biggest problem, actually. The whole movie is basically about the relationship between Logan and his brother Victor, starting before the Civil War and continuing until almost the present day. Pretty much the first time we see the two of them together as adults, Logan seems to find Victor's bloodlust obnoxious, so there's no arc. Logan doesn't start out admiring Victor and then realize that he's a monster. He just knows Victor's a monster from beginning to end. Did they film any scenes of these two actually acting like brothers? If not, then at least trim out some of the earliest snarking between them, so it feels a bit more like an arc.

5) Just generally trim it down. Right now, the running time is about one hour, 45 minutes. It could easily lose 15 minutes of random mutant cameos, without losing anything. Basically, this film probably needs to be a 90 minute action movie, with not much lag time from set piece to set piece.

6) Kill some subplots. Like, do we need to know that Beak (Dominic Monaghan) goes and gets a job at a circus where he charges $1 a pop to see him keep lightbulbs lit using his mutant power? Really?

7) Don't even try to make sense. I've tried to wrap my mind around this movie's plot, and it just sent me into a cranial mobius strip of confusion. And yet, I have a total soft spot for movies that make no sense but are totally awesome - I loved Doomsday, after all. At its best, this movie is joyfully nonsensical, like when the scientist chick tells Logan, "We're going to make you indestructible, but first we have to destroy you." They should just give up on any attempt to explain what Stryker's plan actually is, and just run with it.

8) Stretch out the first 20 minutes a bit. The movie's first 20 minutes feel seriously rushed, as if the script can't wait to breeze past Logan's childhood, through like five major wars, into the major conflict with Victor and his decision to become a lumberjack. Maybe this is all the shot of that part of the movie - but if there's any part of the film that could benefit from a slightly more leisurely pace, it's that early section. It's like, "Wait, he's in Vietnam. And now he's a commando. And now he's a lumberjack. Wha?"

9) Just ditch the cheesy Deadpool remote control. At the end, when Colonel Stryker is hunt-and-pecking commands for the newly jazzed-up Merc Without A Mouth, the interface just looks terrible. Is he controlling his supermutant using an old Commodore 64? Just trim out those shots. We get it, Deadpool is working for Stryker.

10) More funny bits, please. Again, no telling what they shot and didn't use. But every now and then, the movie actually becomes a bit comic, and it feels like a different movie. Like Wolverine accidentally trashing somone's restroom with his new adamantium claws. Or the bartender realizing he doesn't have insurance, and his bar is about to get trashed by a mutant brawl. So if there's more stuff like that, that could push this film into being an action-comedy, please pull it off the cutting-room floor. Note: by funny bits, I don't mean Wade Wilson stating the obvious in a funny voice.

11) Oh, and here's a bonus one: Cut down on the flashbacks. This movie isn't that long. We don't need to see Wolverine reliving the same stuff over and over, especially when it's often stuff we've just seen a moment earlier.

Like I said, I can already tell from the incomplete print that this movie is going to look amazing, and have some kick-ass fight scenes. You've glimpsed some of them in the trailer, like the truck-motorcycle-helicopter conflagration. There's tons more, and it really is fun to watch - and it'll be ten times more fun on the big screen with a giant Slurpee brainfreeze happening. I especially love all the stuff with the gun-toting Agent Zero.

So yeah, don't pirate this movie, because it'll be way more fun with the final effects. And also, because there's still a chance that some judicious editing will make it a fair bit more watchable than the rough cut.

Buckell is collecting his blog entries about writing into a condensed book, which will eventually see print but is online as a wiki right now. So far, he's put up the introduction and a few chapters, plus a set of the articles he wrote for Speculations about being a "NeoPro."

Reading Buckell's writing advice on the heels of Samuel R. Delany's About Writing is pretty illuminating - Buckell is much more concerned with the ins and outs of making it as a writer, although both authors offer some nuts-and-bolts advice. So far, Buckell's advice seems less philosophical, but probably more helpful to today's beginning author. I especially love his explanation for how to avoid creating a copy of a copy of classic science fiction stories - go back to the "original source" material and do your own research. Buckell seems to be adding stuff regularly, so it's worth bookmarking.

[A Draft In Progress via Tor.com]

This list actually came about because I had a friend who was interested in the wonders of B7, and I was starting to write her a long email with advice on discovering the show. Then it occurred to me that other people might actually find this useful. Anybody who has enjoyed shows like Babylon 5, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine or Firefly will find a lot to love about the anti-heroic Blake's 7, whose DNA is woven into the most daring SF on television.

• Find a friend who has the VHS tapes. Because of legal stupidities the DVDs aren't available in the U.S., but you could import them from the UK if you have a region-free player. There are also other ways to get the episodes, which we absolutely won't mention here.
• Go ahead and read spoilers. Blake's 7 is that rare show that's actually 1,000 times better if you know how it ends. I won't spoil the ending here, just in case you may disagree. But knowing the ending gives a new significance and poignancy to many scenes in the first two seasons.
• Feel free to skip the first episode. It's pretty good, but it's like a pilot for a different show. Pretty much none of the characters and threads from the pilot make their way into the following episodes, except for our hero, Blake. All you really need to know going into episode two is the show's main premise.
• And here's that main premise: it's the distant future, after humanity has colonized much of the galaxy. The evil Federation rules over most human worlds with an iron grip. Only a few rebels still hold out against the Federation, and their greatest, most legendary leader is Roj Blake, who gets stuck on a prison transport on a one-way trip to a prison planet. There, he has no choice but to team up with some unrepetentant criminals to fight for freedom. And maybe, over time, he can mould them into a force for more than just escape.
• Be willing to suspend your disbelief a bit in the first season. Blake and his crew have a run of good luck that's pretty hard to swallow, including stumbling on the greatest spaceship in known space and later inheriting the most awesome computer ever built. Just run with it, because it sets up some great stories later. And it's no different than lots of other science fiction shows, where the hero just happens to have the greatest time machine/spaceship/whatever in the universe.

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• The first season may require some patience, and you should feel free to skip some episodes liberally. The first season is a bit of a slog, because the show's creator Terry Nation wrote the whole thing himself. And this meant he was dashing off drafts as fast as he could, and then zipping to the next episode without looking back. Script editor Chris Boucher managed to add some sparkling dialog here and there, but there are also long stretches of padding and repetitive plot devices. The scripts improve a lot in season two, when Nation is no longer single-handedly writing them. Here's a compilation of some of the best quips and insults.
• The only first-season episodes you absolutely should watch are "Space Fall," where Blake meets his future band of criminals, "Cygnus Alpha," where Blake rescues some of his crew from a cult led by a scenery-devouring Brian Blessed, "Time Squad," where Blake meets a telepathic resistance leader named Cally, and "Seek-Locate-Destroy," which introduces the Federation's biggest villain, Supreme Commander Servalan. (It also introduces her lackey Travis, about whom more later.) You may also want to watch "Orac," the season finale, which sets up some stuff in the next season. And three other episodes, "Mission To Destiny," "Breakdown," and "Bounty," are amazingly great, but non-essential.
• Things to watch for: Servalan's outfits become more and more vampy as time goes by. Almost every episode has a cameo by someone who appeared on Doctor Who from time to time. The show's special effects get cheaper and cheaper, until some episodes actually just feature a cardboard cut-out of Blake's ship, the Liberator, instead of model effects. But the show scores points for having a teleportation effect that actually makes people have trouble finding their footing when it plunks them down.
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• Blake's 7 reaches its creative peak, and becomes more of an arc show, in season two. Watch for the relationship between Blake and the morally dubious computer nerd Avon to become more complex and twisted throughout season two. Also, Blake himself becomes more and more of a morally gray character as the season goes on. He's more and more willing to go to any lengths — make dubious alliances, take ridiculous risks, even condemn whole populations to death — to defeat the Federation. Blake's 7 gets a lot of credit for being a show with an overarching story arc, setting the stage for show's like Babylon 5, Deep Space Nine and the new Battlestar Galactica, and much of that reputation rests on season two.
• Almost every episode in season two is amazing and worth watching at least once. There are a couple of exceptions: awful filler episodes that you should skip at all costs. They're called "Hostage" and "Voice From The Past," and you'll be much happier if you just give them a pass.
• You'll notice that Travis, the number two bad guy, gets a new actor in season two. He also suddenly becomes a much, much more interesting and complex character. In season one, he's all about, "OMG Blake hurt me, so I must hunt him down." But in season two, he's been through a "reeducation" process (which is how they explain the new actor) and is a little less sure of himself. And his allegiances become a lot less clear, especially after the Federation hangs him out to dry. "Trial," the episode where Travis is put on a showtrial for war crimes — which he actually commited, but which are just a pretext — may be the best episode ever. Travis stands up in front of a jury of his superiors and explains, in a ringing speech, that war crimes are a logical outcome of his Federation training, not the aberration the judges would like to pretend. It makes the trial of Baltar in Battlestar seem like Matlock by comparison.
• Without getting too spoilery here, season three takes a very sharp turn away from the solid arc-focused nature of season two. To be honest, if you haven't become totally hooked on Blake's 7 by the time you get to the third season, there's probably no hope. However, it does contain a few of the absolute best episodes of the entire show's run: "Aftermath," where Avon gets to know the evil Servalan a lot better, "City at the Edge of the World," where the cowardly thief Vila finally gets to be a hero, and "Rumors Of Death," in which Avon tracks down the Federation agent who killed the only person he ever cared about.
• A lot of the rest of season three is sort of filler, and ranges from pretty good to awful. Skip "Volcano," "Dawn Of The Gods" and "Children of Auron" at all costs. "Harvest of Kairos," "Sarcophagus" and "Moloch" are okay for camp value, but that's it. You can watch the best of season three in a day.
• And season four is much, much worse. Apart from a few episodes ("Traitor" and "Headhunters" come to mind) it's just pure camp and silliness. The producers didn't expect the show to be renewed for a fourth season, so this run was just sort of an added bonus, with some scripts that seem to have been rushed out.
• But of course the final ever episode of the series, "Blake," is a must-watch, and a return to the greatness of the second season. I won't spoil what happens in it here, but you should definitely check it out. You may even want to be daring and watch the final episode first, and then go back and watch the rest of the show from the beginning. The last episode is pretty self-explanatory, and will definitely leave you curious about these characters and how they got to this point. And here it is!