Constructing the Walls of a New World

The weekend was one of business and writing, among other things.  I started playing with Daz3D, and it didn’t take me long to realize that I need to work with the training videos, because I stumbled about for about thirty minutes before realizing I had no freakin’ idea what I was doing.  You graphic models, you know how to drive me crazy.

I got into writing Chapter Ten–and, man, is my muse a nasty person when she wants to be.  Not only that, but she’s a potty mouth, big time.  Probably picked it up during the Dark Ages, you know?  The story continues, and I understand why there is so much hesitation with my storytelling these days:  this is a somewhat dark tale, and there is a lot of unhappiness ongoing.  I’m not good with unhappiness  but I admit it exists, and you have to work it into your writing.  No, it’s not all rainbows and unicorns:  most of the time it’s a lot of pain, and I’m starting to feel it now.

On the other hand I could write about virgins having sex with their stepparents . . . naw, I think I’ll leave those masterpieces for the amateurs.

As the night wore on, I discovered I had–here it comes–nothing to do.  I mean, that does happen from time to time, but last night it was driving me a little nuts.  I was finished with writing for the evening, and if it hadn’t been so late I may have added a few hundred more words, but they wouldn’t have been good words, so no point there.

That was when I started talking . . .

See, someone I know on Facebook, another writer who is starting her research on her story, wanted to know if she could pick my brain in a non-zombie way about something science fictiony.  I said sure, go for it.  With that, we got into a discussion about what would happen if the moon were much closer to this planet, or if the moon were, say, twice as big, and what it would do to the Earth–or another Earth-like planet similar to one a reader might find in a story.

I love this sort of thing, building systems.  I don’t claim to have all the math right all the time, but it’s a good experience  letting you mind wander and imagining what could happen if this were in place.  So I started talking about Roche Limits, about higher tides and fewer ice ages because the primary is going to be more stable.  I spoke about how shorelines will look difference because of more erosion, and how the day will be longer because the moon is slowing the primary down.

I asked a few more questions, the made the offer:  give me some broad outlines about what you want, and I’ll put the system together for you.

See, I am a nice person.  Just ask most anyone.

Now I wait and see what comes my way.  After that, I start working things out, and before you know it, another system will be out there shining.

We need all the light we can get.

 

The Vision of the Beguiled

Of late I’ve been rising very early.  Is this a return to my old habits, or is it that I don’t need that much sleep any more?  I don’t know–but I was sleepy for about an hour yesterday afternoon, a drowsiness that vanished about four PM.  I don’t want to find myself heading back into the cycle of work and exhaustion that I ran through over the summer.  That needs to end right now, and in a big way.

The mind was working overtime when I woke up, however.  There was a song in my head that shouldn’t have been there, and visions that I should have ignored.  This seemed to happen as well, probably because my brain is trying to pull me away from whatever dreams I had that were, in all honesty, crappy enough that they would have bummed me out in the long run.

Then I wake up, get on Facebook, and am greeted by another in a long line of post that indicate you are indeed a manly man if you wear a kilt.  I’ve even seen posts that say you’d never see a gay man wearing a kilt, which leads to me believe that somewhere on the Internet there is a picture of John Barrowman in a kilt–oh, look:  ask, and the Internet provides!  So much for gay men in kilts . . .

It’s the time of year for visions to be upheld, for things to be viewed through a dark lens of remembered that isn’t always that clean.  This time of month is when everyone goes on about holidays of the past, gathering with family, sitting around the tree and enjoying the kidlettes ripping up all those carefully prepared packages, then running off to their rooms for the next few hours while dinner is being readied.

I want to say I had a lot of memories like this, but I don’t.  Oh, I spent my time around the tree, getting presents.  I also remember getting yelled at a few times because I didn’t seem “appreciative” enough for what I got, and there was one time when I was yelled at for almost an hour to write a thank you note to my grandmother for sending me two dollars in a card.  Good times, yo.

I know you might find this strange, but the only really good Christmas memory I have as a kid was the broadcast from the moon by Apollo 8.  I didn’t listen much to what was being said–particularly the whole “reading of Genesis” thing, which I didn’t need under any conditions–because I was watching the landscape being filmed.  That was what drew me in:  not the words, but the vision.

We spend way too much time thinking of the past and using that to drive our present.  Where we fall down is there’s no vision for what’s to come.  I tell my daughter, “Do something that will make you happy, not what’s going to make you the most money,” and I mean it, because there is a singular lack of people following their dreams these days.  Seems like most people are scrambling to pay bills and get shit for the holidays that will be looked at, come March, with an expression similar to, “Why the hell did I need this?”  Or someone will look at that iPhone they received from Santa and thing, “Fuck this:  I need a new Android!” thereby proving that gifts of this nature are usually bullshit.

I don’t think about gifts this time of year, because I’m as generous as get out for 364 days of the year (365 this year, yeah!).  If someone needs something, I get it.  There was a time when Christmas wasn’t about some kid being born (which, in reality, he wasn’t–not at this time of the year at least, but don’t let that spoil the fun . . .), but more about lighting bonfires and making lots of noise because you thought if you didn’t, the Wild Hunt was coming for your ass.  Yule was a blow out party, celebrating getting through another year in one piece, and you decorated trees–not ones that were cut down, but those things that grow in something called a forest–to give your thanks to nature not dropping a Storm From Hell on you and your family, or infesting you with the Black Death.

Set a vision for yourself.  Go with it.  Make that your gift, not just to yourself, but to the world.  Maybe it won’t pay off right away, or even ever, but you owe it to yourself to do.  I saw the moon when I was eleven years old, and I wanted to go there.  I couldn’t in real life, but I could in my imagination.  It’s taken a while, but I’ve gone there, gone to other worlds, gone to other dimensions.  I don’t think about getting something for the holidays, because for me, it’s just another day.

Work your vision.

If you don’t, who will?

Mons Pico Musings

Run here, run there–it was a day for running.  Had to get a toll pass for my car, then went looking at earrings–I need a good, everyday pair, but I love my gold hoops–then . . .

Well, here comes the thinking and the wondering and such that makes up a good part of my day.

Late last night I got back into Replacements and ended up breezing through about a thousand or so words for the second chapter.  There were likely about eight hundred words when I started on my editing expedition, but by the time I’d finished I’d added nearly three hundred words to the document.

I felt a lot better while going through the editing process.  Maybe it’s the feeling that I do have a story here, and this thing, this pantsing that I did, got me started, but didn’t really create my story.  For most of my writing I feel as if I’m in control of the story, but with Replacements, I started feeling a bit lost with the action.  Now that may be changing, because I’m seeing something a little differently now.  We’ll see how the editing goes today, because I’ll likely do some afternoon work on the third chapter.

Part of my time deals with my alternate space story, which I sort of have a name for, but don’t.  I hate when I don’t have a name for the novel–or, in this case, novels, because I can see how this story could be broken up into parts.  Gee, just what I need, another series.

I was doing my “thinking” bit, which is to say I was coming up with ideas for how things might progress in the story.  I’ve imagined beyond the point of getting the history into place, and getting my people into orbit for the first time.  I’m into the part where my characters are trying to establish a foothold in high orbit, and–well, hell, there’s the moon, lets go visit.  Of course they gotta go to the moon–I mean, who doesn’t to go there?

The idea I had was that the proof of concept ship would be modified and upgraded to be able to take a lander and an extended living model, launch the lander with a BDR (that’s Big Dumb Rocket for the less knowledgeable, something that arose out of an extension of space shuttle technology, but never came to fruition.  The BDR was used by Stephen Baxter in his novel Manifold: Time, so even though I’ve known about it for decades, I can’t claim complete credit), pick the lander up in order, then rocket off to the moon.

Because they were able to take extra fuel, the lander will be able to make three trips to the surface of the moon, and give everyone a change to look about and get their exploring done.  Two of the landing cover things that should have happened:  the first landing goes to the Descartes Highlands, the landing site for Apollo 19, and the second heads for Tycho crater and the Surveyor VII site, the landing site for Apollo 20.  After twenty years, my characters feel they needed to give NASA a little closure.

But what of the third landing, you say?  Well, that’s going somewhere else.  Originally the main character–who is taking the ship down himself–said they were going to land near Mount Pico, because he always wanted to see it after reading Arthur C. Clarke stories.  (The climax of his novel Earthlight takes place near Mount Pico.)  Eventually they end up landing near the southwest flanks of Plato, very near the foot hills of the Montes Teneriffe.  When it’s pointed out that no one says, “Mount Pico”, that the new terminology is “Mons Pico”, my character will chuckle and say, “Yeah, we’ll, I’m old school.  I can learn only so many new things in a day.”

No school like old school, they say.  Sometimes learning takes a lot of work.  And sometimes, all you have to do it think about what you need to learn, and just start.

As for me?  I’ve learned I have a lot more to learn.

Just keep it coming, people.  There’s still plenty of room up in my brain for more.

Star Born Unicorn

I remember a time when no one walked on the moon, save in the science fiction stories I read, or movies I watched.  Hell, wanna get real, when I was born no one had even launched a satellite; I beat Sputnik I to the gate by five months and one day, and it would be another four years before a Russian went up for one orbit around the Earth, mostly because he was a very good parachutist–but that’s another story for another day.

I was big into science fiction as a kid, which meant I was big into space–’cause, we’re talking about reading stories that had been written during the Golden Age of Science Fiction–and that meant I was into everything that happened regarding space flight.  We had no internet, so everything came from papers, from radio and TV news, from Life Magazine–which used to print most of the pictures released to the public–and from the few books pertaining to the American efforts, as those wacky Soviets just didn’t want to talk about their stuff.  Hell, they even named their launch complex after a town that was hundreds of miles away, just so we’d get confused . . .

Whenever I had the chance I watched whatever was shown.  I tried to keep up; I tried to gather as much information as possible.  It’s not easy when you’re nine, ten, eleven years old to get your hands on stuff that wasn’t normally available to the public, or had limited accessibility.  That’s the 1960′s for you:  we just weren’t on the cutting edge of the future, you know.

I saw it all.  I watched every mission that went into orbit.  I watch every one that went to the moon.  And I watched, to the best of my abilities, every walk upon the moon.  Even saw a few cars drive around, saw three Lunar Modules take off, and once watched one of Galileo’s experiments get proven.  It was a great time for science, and an even better time if you were a geek.

Those times are long gone.  We haven’t walked on the Moon since December, 1972.  If you removed the trips to the Moon, we haven’t had anyone higher than a few hundred kilometers above the Earth since the last days of the Gemini Program.  While we’ve had a continuous presence in orbit for a long time, we’ve lost our will to explore.

There will come a time, probably within the next five years, that everyone who has ever walked on the moon will have died.  The youngest of the walkers is 76; the oldest 82.  After that, we might have to wait until the middle of the 21^st Century before someone does it again–unless people do start walking on the Moon in the late 2020′s, as some are saying.  And the chances are good those people who do the walking again are Chinese, because it seems like no one here gives much of a shit anymore.

In the U.S., there is a definite feel that science is for people who are just too damn smart for their own good, and who are pretty anti-religious as well.  That ignorance is just as good as intelligence, and in some ways better.  When you have people yelling at Bill Nye, as they did a few years back when he spoke in Texas, that the Moon gives off light like the Sun ’cause the Bible says so, one has to wonder where they hell we are going.  When you still have people saying they have “proof” that we never landed on the Moon, you have to wonder how we are ever going to continue.  And when you hear people state, as “fact”, that the Earth is only 6,000 years old, and they have “proof”, it makes you want to just end it all.

One day we, as a species, will get back out into The Black.  It might not be us as a country, but someone will go.  Someone is going to take more steps–on the Moon, maybe Mars, maybe somewhere else.

Say it won’t happen?  You’re surely wrong.  ’Cause one day I’m gonna hop on my unicorn and take my own trip . . .

And join those who can tell me what it was really like to skip along in the dirt of another world.