To the Inner Garden of Stone

August 1, 2012 by Cassidy Frazee | 3 Comments

I have a ton of Italian food right now, and I wonder when I’m going to get to it.

This week I’ve been trying to break up my routine a little, do some different things, and decided to stop off at an Italian restaurant last night before coming home.  They are an old-style “Family Style” place, and they have two sizes for everything:  small, and regular.  The small could have fed my family.  Guess I’ll take the rest home to them on Friday.

Before I got into writing, though, I started thinking about something I wanted to do, which was plot out the orbit of a planet around the start Altair.  This goes back to something in my current story, and my novel Transporting:  the center of government is found on a planet orbiting said star.

But Altair is a huge star:  an A7 V.  If you know your stellar classifications, you’ll know what that code means.  Yes, I realize that it shouldn’t even have planets, if our theories of planetary evolution are correct.  But I’m bending my own rules here a little, because this is a fantasy, and because I like the idea of having a planet with a green sky in orbit around Altair.  And if you know your science fiction, you know there is precedence for such a thing.  So, in reality, I’m just following in the footsteps of those who’ve come before me.  Or I’m ripping them off because I’m lazy.  Hey, whatever works.

So I got that worked out.  Four point six years to make one orbit of the primary, a half a billion kilometers out from Altair.  Working out the calendar for this sucker is gonna be fun, since it’s also a thirty-three hour day.  You either get used to it, or have a psychotic episode.

Then it was writing . . . Part Fifteen started.  Only 519 words, but it was a good start.  Meredith has hunted Albert down after not seeing him for a week–all in the aftermath of their little high orbit tryst–and she’s discovered he’s not quiet the person she though he was.

So it’s time for a little talk.

The place where Albert lives is an arcology, which is really a huge building that holds a small city worth of people.  There are a few of them in the down of New Oxford, but the arcology where Albert and Cytheria live is built inside–and in the case of their home, on the outer edge–a huge, near vertical cliff named Land’s End.  And I do mean huge:  their home is hanging off the side about seventeen hundred meters above the surrounding territory.  While some of it is built into the wall, and along the outside, the majority of the people live inside the rock, all safe and sound.

Where they go to talk is a huge garden, really a park.  It’s huge, a couple of kilometers on each side, though Meredith can’t tell that, because the walls are hidden by holographic projections that make it appear the park is outside.  This is the future, so stuff like this is somewhat simple to pull off.  Hell, they even have sunlight . . .

Meredith has wanted to know about Albert’s life.  Now she’s going to get her chance to learn everything.  This scene was short and sweet in the original story; here, it’s going to be drawn out a little more, and become a little more complete.  For Albert has his own issues about coming back to class . . .

Ah, it’s getting closer to the end, and the story is feeling very better now.  All that hard, personal stuff I had to dig through in the story is behind me, and now . . . it’s a good run to the end.

Now to just get myself in the right frame of mind for NaNo.

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