No Boom Yesterday, Boom Today

By the time you read this, chances are 2012 DA14 will be a fond memory.  The asteroid, about fifty meters in diameter, will soar some 27,520 kilometer over the Indonesian island of Sumatra at 1:25 PM Chicago time.  No chances at all it’s going to hit anything, though it’s going to be watched closely, because Earth is gonna kick its orbit a bit and send it screaming off into the black.  Though, again, there likely won’t be a lot of kicking, and definitely no scream, because we all know, no one can hear you scream in space.

Then again, if you were in Central Russia, near the Ural Mountains today, you didn’t need to wait for 2012 DA14; you had your own close encounter.  A ten meter hunk or rock or ice flew in, lit up the sky, disintegrated  and kicked out a sonic boom that broke windows for miles.  Reports are that over five hundred people have been injured by flying glass, ’cause in Russia, meteors open windows on you!

I like the headlines, though:  ”Rare Russian Meteor Strike” is a misnomer if there ever was one.  First, the meteor came apart in mid-air, so it was really a strike.  And lets dress the “rare” part:  Tunguska, anyone?  Sure, it’s been more than a hundred years, but nature doesn’t want you to get complacent  it likes you to know it’s got your ass in its hands, and it can take you out any time it feels.  We don’t even have to go back one hundred years, thought:  12 February, 1947, Russia experienced the Sikhote-Alin meteorite strike, which touched down in the middle of nowhere–

Though if you want to make this last one a little scary, Sikhote-Alin occurred about four hundred fifty kilometers northeast of Vladivostok, and about five hundred kilometers due east of the Chinese city of Harbin.  1947 was a scary time:  imagine the reaction of the Chinese if they’d had a huge meteor disintegrate above one of there cites.  Not saying they’d have done anything–they were sort of busy with their own internal issues–but it might have made them go, “Hummm”.

These things happen all the time.  There’s a lot of things out there in space, and we run into it every day.  Most of the time were talking about something the size of a coffee cup burning up and making a bright flash for a second.  Sometimes you get something like the object that shook up Russia, about thirty feet across, breaking up and leaving a loud boom in its wake.

And every so often you get a Tunguska:  a hundred meters of rock air busting some five to ten kilometers up, developing an explosion like that of a fifteen megaton hydrogen bomb.  Not the sort of thing Micheal Bay would screw with, save to take out Paris, but if this sucker had detonated over Russia this morning, the videos popping up would have been a lot different.

When people say, “Hey, what do we need science for?  What good is a space program?”  This is why.  We’ve reached the point where it’s even money that a cosmic shot is going to take out something significant.  People were injured by flying class today; in five years a slightly bigger rock might set a few fires with a heat burst and kill some people.  Or maybe it’ll be a little larger than that, and people will once more have the opportunity to know what it was like in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on a couple of dates in 1945.

This was the argument Arthur Clarke put forward in Rendezvous with Rama:  after parts of Europe are devastated by a meteor breakup on a particularly lovely morning in 2077, the governments of Earth decided they couldn’t afford any more of these cosmic potshots, and beefed up their ability to detect these threats, and a way to move them the hell out of the way should it be necessary.  There’s no reason we can’t start on this now; it only takes the willpower to make it happen.  And don’t tell me about costs:  take a NOLA/Sandy sized disaster, and start scaling up.  As Clarke pointed out in Rama, Earth in 2077 couldn’t not afford another strike like the one that had taken out most of Northern Italy, and had sunk Venice.

And just to show you Arthur was on to something when he wrote in 1972 about an event that wouldn’t occur for another one hundred and five years:  the date of his meteor strike was . . .

September 11, 2077.

He was just a writer; nothing to see here . . .

 

Orbital Plaything

The allure of space is strong with me.  When I was thinking about stories, I was playing out a scene within my alternate space history story, where a woman, whose father was involved with Soviet Space program from the mid-50′s until the early 1980′s, is recollecting watching Valentina Tereshkova and Irina Soloviyova prepare to lift-off on Vostok 6.

That time Tereshkova flew and became Seagull, but her recollections covered two more important memories.  The first was standing at a launch pad two years later and saying goodbye to Tereshkova and Soloviyova as they prepared to lift-off on Voskhod-5, and how she felt a year later after Yuri Gagarin did everything he could to keep his best friend Vladimir Mikhailovich Komarov from flying Soyuz 1, where upon he suffered the same fate his friend suffered in this reality.

Where is this taking me?  Yesterday I became interested in a program I downloaded last year, a simulation program named Orbiter.  The person who created set it up so that it would be as realistic a space flight simulator as possible, and given the number of times I’ve already crashed, I’d say, yes, it very much is.

While most of the simulation is taken up by the space shuttle Atlantis, and the ISS, there are a few fictional craft that will let you experience things that you might not ever do in real life.  One craft, the Dragonfly, allows you to take off from the ground, fly into orbit, and even fly off to and land upon the Moon if you so desire.  There is another craft called the Saturn-A that is used on the Moon and Mars, but last night I managed to lift-off from Earth and fly into orbit–for a little bit, that is.  I did something bad, and I ended up putting the ship into an uncontrollable flat spin (or, in the vernacular, I entered an excessive yaw-right maneuver, and exhausted my RCS fuel trying to correct) and reentered the atmosphere somewhere beyond Africa.  One moment you’re trying to fix your situation, and the next thing you know there’s all this glowing red mist just outside your window . . .

Trying to figure out what you’re doing is half the battle.  I’ve gotten good enough that I can figure out how to get into orbit without burning too much fuel (I’ve still gotta learn those angle of attacks so I don’t rocket straight up and out), but I’m still learning the fine points of trying to go from the Earth to the Moon.  Tried that today, and ended up getting to the moon’s orbit–only the moon wouldn’t show up at that point for a couple of weeks.  Oops.  It’s that sort of “accident” that leaves you gasping for air, wondering what the hell happened.

The best part of this:  addons.  There is a very large community out there that’s constructed all sorts of simulations, from historic flights to flights that are happening today.  But if you prefer, there are modules that’ll let you fly craft that exist only in your imagination . . .

I’ve already got my eye on a few adons, but first I’m going to figure out how to fly better than I am, ’cause these ships cost a lot of money, and I don’t want to spend my time crashing them, or ending up lost in space for eternity–

Hey:  Lost in Space.  Sounds like a good title.  I wonder if I can do something with that?

The Marathon Cruise

First, lets recognize a couple of birthdays.  First, we have George R. R. Martin, born in 1948, which if my magic calculator is correct, means he turns 64 today.  I offer this as a public service to all my friends who follow A Song of Ice and Fire series, only to remind them that he’s another year closer to not finishing the series.

Second, we have the birthday of a certain Malcolm Reynolds, who likes to wear a brown coat and tight pants.  Of course, he won’t be born until 2468, so if my magic calculator is still working correctly, we only have to wait 456 years before the blessed event occurs.  Take heart, people, you have plenty of time to get flowers out to Shadow.

With that said, lets move on to the other insanity.

Writing is hard:  I think I’ve said that on more than a few occasions.  If you want to create a story, and do it the right way, you gotta work at this stuff.  You gotta write every day, even if it’s just a little bit here and there.  And you have to edit.  It’s not enough to get it slick the first time around–you gotta polish it up even more after you’re through with the story.

Last night was like that with me.  Two chapters of Her Demonic Majesty, about six thousand words.  The first chapter disappointed me; found all sorts of things that needed fixing, so I fixed them.  By the time I was finished, I’d cut out about one hundred words, rewrote more than a few paragraphs . . . got it nice and pretty.

Then I looked at the next chapter:  another three thousand words.  It was 8:30 PM.  Did I want to get into that?

You do what you do, right?

This chapter was much better.  I rewrote a few paragraphs, but the net result of this edit was to add words, to make everything clearer.  Stuff was removed, but the net result of this edit was to bump the word count.  By the time I was finished, I found my word count was pretty much a push:  I was about twenty words ahead of where I’d been when I began working.

It was 9:45.  I was tired.

You never realize how tiring this work is until you get into the actual doing.  It’s a matter of concentration, trying not to miss anything, reading everything so that it makes sense.  It’s actually a lot more work than getting the story down, because you’re looking, thinking, feeling . . . wondering.  You see the words on the page before you, and you’re mind is going in circles, deciding if what you are reading makes sense, and if it doesn’t, how should you go about fixing those words.

Two move chapters into the “Done” category.  That’s six total.  I have eighteen to go . . .

The next chapter is fifty-four hundred words.  The chapter after that is about forty-five hundred words.  No matter what, I tackle the first chapter, and put Part One to bed.  What I might do, after I’ve finished that first chapter, is take on two shorter chapters in Part Two and kick them out of the way.  The more out of the way, the more likely it is I can have this all wrapped up by next Saturday.

I’m not in a sprint:  no, this is a marathon, though it might not look that way.  If you’d rather, think of it as a short triathlon–similar to the one Sunita Williams did the other day.  She swam half a mile, biked eighteen miles, and ran four miles in one hour, forty-eight minutes, thirty-three seconds.

Oh, I forgot to mention:  she did this in orbit, aboard the ISS.

From that perspective, I’ve got it easy.

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.

A Life Less Hackneyed

Speaking of the above title, how does it look like . . . that –>  

Did you ever wonder what A Life Less Hackneyed looks like in Gallifreyan?  Well, now you do.  The crazy-ass things I find on the Internet, huh?  What’s next?  We’ll have to wait and see, won’t we?

Anywhere, where was I?  Oh, yeah:  stories and ideas.  They are still there, rumbling about in my head.  That’s not always a good idea, because, before you know it, I’m trying to do something with it.

The last couple of days I’ve run the story idea I wrote about yesterday around again and again.  I’m about this close to getting it into Scrivener, because there are things I need to keep straight about how one gets from place to place in the galaxy of the 28^th Century.

This is world building time, and though I don’t want to get distracted from other things I’m doing–I have one story I need to finish, and I was given an idea for one to write in October, and there’s that looming hell-bound train known as NaNoWriMo to tackle . . .

But this is one of those ideas that’s just hanging with me.  I can’t say why, but it’s there.  Probably because the story is a bit challenging.  It’s one of those science fiction ideas that’s been done before, but I like the idea of bringing it into my world, into something that could be real.

I love world building, and getting everything done for this one is nice.  I will admit, I’m nicking a few ideas here and there from other sources, but it’s not so much the tech and the sci-fiey things (is “sci-fiey” a word?  It is now), as it is the characters and the story.

However . . .

As I’ve stated from time to time, I like to have most everything thought out before I start writing.  I’m rarely one for sitting down and just going for it, because the characters don’t tell me jack.  I’m thinking through the plot, such as it is, and there’s a point where something just doesn’t make that much sense.

Now, I think is have the situation worked out; I feel that I have a reason for why one of the people in the story does what they do, but there was a moment when I was thinking out the story that I thought, “Wait . . . hasn’t this been done already?  And better?”

I won’t say what the “has been done already” was, because to do so will give something away.  It would also have geeks going, “You loser!  You’re doing that?”  So I had to change things around.  Just a little, but enough that it worried me.

Over lunch I figured it out.  I actually had it figured out before that, but lunch finalized it.  That’s me rolling like a writer again; I can finalize something over a cup of coffee and a burrito.  All hail my writing coolness–said phrase which I’ve also translated into Gallifreyan right over there . . .  –>

It’s easy to do something that’s been done before, and not realize you’re treading over worn ground until you’re half-way through the muck.  I guess I’m used to the way Australians used to clear minefields during WWI:  they’d drive a flock of sheep into the area, let them blow up, and follow the cleared path.

A story line can be as treacherous as a minefield, and you want to clear that sucker as much as possible before you head across.  Face it:  it’s either you or the sheep–

Wouldn’t you rather you not be the one getting blown to hell when you’re half way across?

Sensual Vacuum

Yesterday was crazy writing day.  Interviews, blog posts, guest blog posts, research, and my story.  Busy bee, you say?  You know it.

I’ve said–or, as some of you might say, bemoaned–that at times being a writer can be a real chore.  When you are a writer, you are always writing.  That’s the job, honey bunny.  You sit and put words to whatever medium you prefer.  So whenever anything comes up, it’s always do 500 words on this, 300 words on this, maybe a 1000 on that.  When it’s needed you go get your writing cap (or shawl, or slippers–I could use some writing slippers), slip it on, and get to work.

That was me starting 6:30 yesterday morning.  I hit the ground running, with a break or two here and there.  But I spent a good part of the day writing.  If I wasn’t doing, you know, writing-writing, I was formatting something for a blog tour I’m on.  Or putting a picture inside a blog post because I am just a cock-eyed wonder when it comes to these fancy computers.

The biggest thing, however, was I got into Part Eight of Diners at the Memory’s End, and I finished that sucker.  Did it in two parts, because I was taking my time with the writing, doing about 1,100 words on one end, and finishing up, around 10:15 PM, with a final 360 words.  So a little over 1,450 words, and Part Eight slips into history as the–so far–longest part of my current story.

The thing that really seemed to hold me up?  The sex scene.  I stopped the first time because my head was threatening to explode, and I needed a break.  I knew I’d start getting into a bit of the sexy, as I like to say, and I didn’t want to try and write that while forcing myself to hold my head up.

But when I got back into it, all the stuff I envisioned about what was going to happen, all the language and the sensations and so forth . . . they didn’t feel right.  Actually, they didn’t feel real.  It felt a bit contrived, like I would have been writing a sex scene for the sake of writing a sex scene.

I remembered something I did in my NaNo Novel.  During the final battle between my protagonist and antagonist, I had all these visions of it being huge and protracted.  Then I thought about it:  if you have two people with incredible powers squaring off, getting ready to kick each other’s ass with magic, how long would a battle like that really last?  Generally speaking, you have a lot of defense, a few jabs to wear each other down–then, when you see a weakness, you clobber the other person.

In the mean time, however, you probably destroy everything around you, and have whatever passes for the magical cops on your ass.

I figured these two would likely go right at each other, flat out, trying to score the knock out pretty quick.  One of the combatants wasn’t suppose to know magic real well, so taking her out right away seemed prudent.  It didn’t work, and the other witch got her ass kicked in short order.

If less was more for a battle, then it’d work for sex.  After all, I don’t have to show everything, or even much of anything.  Just get the party started, and let people wonder was really happened in the cold, quiet, vacuum of space so far from anyone else.

So I went that route.  I got it started, but everything after the initial contact became fantasy fodder for the reader.  This isn’t erotica, it’s science fiction.  That doesn’t mean I can’t go for the sex in the story, but describing the exact proportions of Meredith’s vagina, how it might appear as it glistened in the dim light of unblinking stars . . . yeah, didn’t need that level of detail.

It’s out of the way, and it was a long week dealing with a part that, for some reason, was totally holding me back.  Now I’m beyond.

Time to break the heartbreak and resolution.

Welcome to Bay 17-B

Memories of what I did in the past–damn, but those can really mess with your mind.

I got into Diners at the Memory’s End last night, and I took my time writing.  As in, it took me like three hours to get 992 words in.  Oh, I had thing going on.  I had to plot a polar orbit, which was not all that hard:  just bring up a program, plug in a few numbers, and there you have it.  I was surprised to see the orbit of my ship coming within seven thousand kilometers of a moon’s, but given that the orbit I plotted has a twenty-two day period, no need to worry about getting too close.

Not that seven thousand kilometers is all that close . . .

And I had a hell of a time getting started.  It was one of those, “Shit, man, how do I start this chapter?” sort of issues.  I had someone on Facebook tell me that I should walk away for a bit–Ha!  I don’t walk away!  I write!  I sound like Keanu Reeves yelling at his dad now!

So I did something I like to do:  I wrote something very short at the head of the part, then had it go to a flashback.  When I return to writing, I’ll bring it all up to current time.

It was the flashback that was hard, though.  See, I’ve been to this place before, where one of my main characters keeps his, well, space ship.  Yeah, he has one; yes, he used a cheesy line on his friend Meredith when he told her they were headed to the craft.  So the flash back of Part Seven was going to the ship–

I realized that I didn’t have a very good image, in my head, of both the spaceport, and the ship.

Allow me to explain:  when I wrote the first draft of Transporting a very long time ago, there was a very long scene where someone was walking through the bowls of the spaceport on the way to where Albert keeps his ship.  I had the image down, and I even had a pretty good idea of what the ship looked like at rest.

But that was back twenty years ago, and even though I have these images in my head about what things are like at the spaceport, I didn’t actually see them.  If I can’t see them, then I can’t show them very well, can I?

So I picked my way through the literary mine field that is, “I gotta see this and show it,” and did it.  Got the underworld of the spaceport down, and not only came up with a good description of the space ship, but came up with some reasoning for why there are certain things about it that show Albert is not who he seems . . .

Writing this story is hard.  It’s hard digging back into something I did so many years before, trying to remember what was written, and giving it a polish that wasn’t there before.  But I am a better writer now, and this story–it makes me think, and that, in turn, makes me even better.

It is true:  if you remember the past, you won’t repeat it.

But you damn sure will improve upon it if you give it a shot.