In Which, the Author Rambles Perhaps a Bit Longer Than is Prudent

Sometimes when your writing things get away from you. A story that you were trying to take in one direction ends up going in an entirely different direction. At that point, you have two, no three options. You can follow to see where the story leads or you can go back and try to figure out where it jumped the tracks and have another go at it or you can do both.

I had a story in mind when I started writing Against the Cold of Deepest Space. It ended up going somewhere I wasn’t expecting it to go. I ended up liking where it went quite a bit. Enough so that I think I’ll keep following it to see where it ends up.

On the other hand, there is the poor dear that I started out to write. I think I’ll just have to go back and start over on that idea. It was a good idea but it will have to wait until I resolve the story that I did end up writing or at least started to write.

While I’m beating this poor horse long after it has given up the last breath, I’ll just say that when you are writing a story by the seat of your pants as I obviously often do, it is liberating. You don’t have to worry about things like consistency and all the parts of the story that you haven’t figured out yet. That’s what makes it so terribly difficult when you decide that you like what you’ve written and want to flesh it out some. You all of a sudden have to ask difficult questions.

Questions like, given the level of technology that you are describing, would what they are doing make economic sense? Or, what kind of engines are they using, how much fuel would it take for them to get where they are going to and back, and why would they need a crew of twenty or even one? Wouldn’t it make more sense to send a robotic resupply mission? Then you wouldn’t have to expend air, food, heat and fuel for the extra mass that you were carrying.

I think there are good answers to those questions and I am pursuing them as quickly as I can. Maybe I will have time to crank out that other story that I started. Maybe it is even in the same fictional world as the story that I began to write. You’ll be the first to know after I figure it out.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the people you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

The Show Bible

Writers of all sorts of fiction, from novels to screenplays and even television series, share a single concern; maintaining consistency throughout a given milleau. This is often accomplished by what is called the Show Bible in the television industry. This is the document where all the relevant details from each episode are kept so that they can be looked up when they become important in future episodes. The movie industry has a department devoted to this function. It’s called continuity in that domain. And novelist, especially authors of multivolume series, often have many notebooks filled with lore of the world that they have created.

I have had a programming project on the back burner for some time that amounts to an computerized Show Bible. I may still finish it eventually. I have some ideas for features that I haven’t found in any other product yet. But in the mean time, I think I’ve found a tool that will solve about 80% of the problem. It is the single page web application called TiddlyWiki that I wrote about here a while ago. Here is a brief list of it’s virtues:

  • It is small enough to fit on a thumb drive.
  • It works with any modern web browser.
  • It is easy to create hyperlinks between various entries in the document.
  • It is easily searchable.
  • It is easy to extend.
  • It is easy to format.
  • It is easy to add photographs, drawings, video clips, and all kinds of other multimedia to it. In fact, it can display anything that any other web page can.

I have decided that I like the world that Against the Cold of Deepest Space is set in. I intend to develop a Show Bible for it so that I can write multiple stories and perhaps even novels in that world. I am going to use TiddlyWiki to compile that document.

I am, however, going to go ahead and write the short story that I started in the blog post that I labeled (Part 1).

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the people you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

A Neo-Golden Age of Science Fiction

First let me assure you that I will write another installment of Against the Cold of Deepest Space. I like the story and intend to give it the attention it deserves. I often write my blog posts right before I go to bed. If I have to go to work the next morning that limits the amount of time I can spend working on a post before I must quit and go to bed. Consequently, I am limited as far as how much I can write in any one blog post and still meet my daily blogging commitment. That was probably more than you cared to know about the details of how this blog gets written.

I imagine that it is clear by now that I like science fiction. I cut my teeth on Robert Heinlein and Andre Norton. I soon discovered Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov. After that I read any science fiction that I could get my hands on. But my favorite stories were always the Space Operas. The Tom Corbett Space Cadet series was an early favorite. E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman series was another.

I recently read a book that reminded me of the Space Operas of the Golden Age of science fiction. Only this time, it was updated to reflect all the things that we have learned about actual space travel, space manufacturing, and building space habitats. It was called Seveneves and was written by Neal Stephenson. I highly recommend the book. It is, like all of Stephenson’s books, epic in scope. It is also extremely well researched and grounded in hard science. Stephenson work for a while at Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and had access to some of the premier minds in space science as a result. And, best of all, it is a page turner. I would tell you more about it but I wouldn’t want to spoil any of the numerous surprises that Stephenson cooks up.

Reading Seveneves is what inspired me to try my hand at writing Space Opera. The installment last night, Against the Cold of Deepest Space (Part 1) was so much fun that I’m going to do some planning and some research and try and get at least a novella out of it if not a full blown novel. November is right around the corner. I may do NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) again with this as my project. In any case, I will post more excerpts here as I write them.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the people you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Against the Cold of Deepest Space (Part 1)

I opened the hatch and dove into the chamber beyond it. Turning quickly I pulled it shut and spun the handle to seal it behind me. This intense feeling of deja vu swept over me as I cocked my head to listen to the announcement blaring from the speaker over the door. “Batten all hatches and observe containment protocol until further notice. We’ve been breached. If your compartment is losing air, remember to seal your suit before you help others seal theirs.”

We had drilled for this situation in training but this was my first time in an actual situation. We were two weeks from anywhere and that was assuming that the engines were still functional. This could get interesting fast. I was intensely curious as I fastened the last seam of my model 2700X3 emergency space suit. It was built for barest survival, not for spending hours on EVAs. It would keep your blood from boiling until you could cycle through an airlock but you’d be lucky if you didn’t have a bad case of frostbite.

There wasn’t enough room to carry complete EVA suits for everyone on a freighter like the Roger Miller. If it hadn’t been for the catastrophe three years ago, the fleet wouldn’t have been required to have emergency suits for everyone. I was relieved to discover that the compartment I was in was intact. It also had a full complement of emergency rations. I turned on the comm unit in my helmet.

“This is Al, from logistics. I’m in A6 forward. What can I do to help?” I said. The comm was totally silent for a minute.

“Al? Is that you? It’s Steve, the cook.” That certainly wasn’t a voice I expected to hear right now.

“Hey Steve, where are you?” I asked. We were taught to identify ourselves and give our location when signing on to comms during an emergency.

“I’m in the galley, of course. Where else would I be. Do you know what’s going on?”

“No, and we should see if anyone else is on comms. You start at the top channel and work down. I’ll start at the other end and work up. We’ll meet back on this channel in five minutes. Agreed?” This was also standard protocol but since Steve had forgotten to say where he was, I felt justified in reminding him.

“Will do. Talk to you in five.” I heard the click as Steve changed the channel of his comm unit. I did the same and started scanning for other crew members on the lower channels. I found Jim the ships medic on four and told him about the rendezvous on channel ten in three minutes. Out of twenty crew members there was only three of us on comms, that I knew of anyway.

We met up on channel ten at the assigned time. Steve had found Kay, the exec on channel eighteen. She was in the captains ready room. Jim was in sick bay. Kay gave us the situation as she knew it. “The bridge has lost atmosphere. I have little hope for Greg or Ralph.” Greg was the captain and Ralph was the navigator. “The rest of the crew were in their quarters. We assume they sealed their hatches and put on their emergency suits. I can only hope that they are okay. They should have been able to turn their comm units on though. I am in command unless or until the captain is found to have survived. Everybody with me so far?”

We were. With her and a hair’s breadth from panic. “Yes, ma’am.” I replied. Steve and Jim also acknowledged her.

“Okay. Who has an EVA suit?” The comms were silent. “That’s not good. Isn’t there one in sick bay, Jim?” she asked.

“Rodrigo was upgrading the radios on it.” Jim said.

“Here’s what I’m going to do. I can make it to the fore airlock in this emergency suit. If you lose contact with me, Jim is in charge. Here I go.” I heard the sound of the air being pumped out of a chamber as Kay got ready to open the hatch to the companionway. Her teeth were starting to chatter. “Damn! It’s cold. I’m almost to the airlock.” We held our breath as we waited to hear whether she had made it or not.

The next thing we heard was the sound of the pumps bringing the airlock to full pressure. “That’s as close as I want to come to freezing to death.” Kay said when she was warm enough her teeth stopped chattering. We could tell she had found the EVA suit because of the clangs of the fasteners as she opened them and started putting it on.

“I’ve got a PAL here. I can move around among pressurized compartments using that.” A PAL was a Portable Air Lock. It was made out of air tight plastic and had a small pump and a cylinder of air attached to it.

“I want you all to check the inventory of the compartment where you are. We may need to do some consolidation until we can restore atmosphere to the whole ship.”

“What happened?” I asked since no one else had bothered.

“I think we were hit by an asteroid. That’s the theory I’m going by until I find out otherwise.” she replied. “Radio check. Can you hear me on this suit’s comm unit?”

“Roger that.” Jim replied. “Be careful. You’re the only officer left. We need your experience.”

“Thanks. I will. Al, take notes. I’ll narrate my exploration of the ship. I don’t want to have to repeat it unnecessarily.” I heard the clang of the airlock transmitted through the walls of the ship as she opened the hatch to the companionway.

“I’ve got my pad recording. I’ll take notes as you give them.” The pad could record audio for weeks but it wasn’t that good searching speech. That took processing on the level of the ship’s main computer. As far as I could tell it was offline. I would take notes in plain text. That would be easily searched on the pad.

And here ends this installment of this story. I like it. I suspect I’ll continue it.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the people you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Your in a Maze of Twisty Passages…

I write because I am stubborn. I refuse to let a blank page intimidate me. I am convinced that I have the imagination to create something where once there was nothing. I also know that unless I put one word after another, there will never be anything on said page. Think of all the people that have read this much of the post, that would have been left wondering where it was. What would they have done with those fleeting minutes of their life had they not been consumed by reading this blog post?

They might have made up a story of their own. Or perhaps used the time to count the number of blogs entitled ‘Reflections’. They might have sat down on the couch and vegged out to reruns of Columbo. They might have sung old Beatle songs with their spouse and children while waiting for the apocalypse to arrive.

They might have sat down at their computer and written their own blog post. They would have had to overcome the distraction of the electric green furry monster sitting on the corner of their desk and the little notification that pops up to tell you you’ve get email.

They might have put on some instrumental music to help them relax so that they could fill that cold, barren, empty page with words, just like I have done. But why should they be bothered? I’ve already written this post and their time has been spent reading it.

Our existence is comprised of choices. If you listen hard enough, you might hear them calling out to you, “Choose me! Choose me!” There are so many things vying for our attention. We must take up our will and exercise it. There is nothing more useless than a flabby will. Consciously make those choices. The truth is, you’ll never have this chance to make these choices again. Perhaps similar choices, but not these choices exactly.

And so, you have seen some of the obscure, twisted little places that my mind goes when it is faced with a blank page. It isn’t intimidated, it goes stark, raving bonkers.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the people you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Spectant Vita

The cool evening breeze announced the arrival of the first autumn like weather. There was a smell of new mown grass in the air and the pavement had not yet cooled off from the sunny afternoon. I heard a train horn blowing in the distance. A dog barked as I walked past. I was alone with my thoughts.

Earlier in the day I had struggled with the details of a programming problem at work. I had been fully engaged by it for several hours. It finally melted under the withering gaze of my attention. I checked the fixed code in and headed for the car.

I was in the habit of taking a walk in the afternoon but my intense debugging session had kept me longer than I had intended. There was no time for a walk before I went home for supper. I would have to deal with that later.

I was greeted at the door by an enthusiastic puppy, an affectionate older dog, and my beautiful wife. I petted the dogs and kissed my wife and headed into the kitchen. I took a cheese pizza out of the oven and chopped some olives and sliced a fresh tomato to spice it up a bit.

After dinner, we watched television for a while and then I retired to write my blog. I knew I would have to get in my steps afterwards. I wrote for several paragraphs and decided that the topic I had chosen deserved more attention than I had to give to it today so I saved a draft of it and started again.

I found myself writing in that strange space between fiction and non-fiction. I was telling my story without revealing too much of the irrelevant details. It might just be something that someone would want to read. In any case it was something that I wanted to write. It came from the heart and that is the source of the best pieces, fictional or otherwise.

I breathed the night air in and finished the turn around the neighborhood. I hadn’t walked as far as I would have liked but I was a whole lot closer to my thirteen thousand steps than I had been before the walk. I would sleep well tonight.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the people you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Nonlinear Fiction

What does it mean to be nonlinear? At face value, it means not denoting, involving, or arranged in a straight line. The mathematical interpretation of that is that the output of a function is not directly proportional to the input. Mathematicians,  and physicists, and engineers often take that definition further and talk of systems of equations consisting of a set of simultaneous equations in which the unknowns (or the unknown functions in the case of differential equations) appear as variables of a polynomial of degree higher than one. Whew! (Hang in there, all my non-mathematical friends. It’s all downhill from here.)

In digital film editing it means having all the various scenes available for editing in a nondestructive way. This was a revolutionary change in the way that film and audio were edited. Prior to the existence of nonlinear editing software, the original content (or copies of it) had to be cut into pieces and reassembled by splicing them together. This was both time consuming and tedious, requiring careful cataloging of shots (or takes in the case of audio editing) and patient assembly of the pieces into a coherent finished product.

But what does it mean when we are talking about prose? Nonlinear fiction, as I envision it anyway, is a story that is broken up into very small pieces that the reader can then explore by clicking on links. It has some of the feel of the old create your own story books where you were given the choice of going to page 26 if you want to pick up the rock or page 100 if you turn and run away. Only it’s slightly different. There is only one story. You don’t choose on of two actions. Instead you choose what you want to read about next.

It blurs the distinction between beginning, middle, and end. It may not even be particularly satisfying for the reader to read. I suspect that depends more on the skill of the author than it does on the nonlinear mechanism itself.

I have never read a story composed in this fashion. I am attracted to the idea of trying to write one. I may have to figure out the details of how to deliver the story to a reader. I might be able to adapt an existing framework like TiddlyWiki upon which to build the story.

There is a game that was written for the Macintosh called A Fool’s Errand that has a number of the qualities that I am striving for here. Also, Myst and Riven were stories that were similar in concept to what I have in mind. Those stories had a similar structure but not necessarily similar content to what I propose to write.

Let me know what you think of the idea.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the people you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

The Silver Lining

What if you got to the end of your life and you realized that all you had accomplished was surviving? You had managed to feed, clothe, and shelter yourself and your family. You had gone to work and done the job that was assigned you. You had done everything that society expected of you.

But you had lost yourself. Your personality had faded until you hardly recognized yourself when you looked in the mirror in the morning. Your passions had evaporated like the afternoon rain. Your world had turned a uniform gray. Would you say that you had actually lived your life?

Our society has failed so many of its members. It has taught many of them how to survive but few of them how to live. How to think about what they are passionate about and how to live a life that they will be pleased with when it is over.

The good news is, even if you feel that way today, your life isn’t over yet. There is always time to think about these things. To make these decisions. To live a life that you will be pleased with when it is over.

Sweet Dreams, don’t forget to tell the people you love that you love them, and most important off all, be kind.

Happy Fiftieth Star Trek!

Science fiction at it’s best shows us who we are in the reflection of a time and place removed from our current circumstances. It allows us to reframe the important issues of the day in metaphors that illuminate the essence of what it means to be human. I am, of course, talking about the legend that is the Star Trek franchise. Gene Rodenberry took his vision of a future that was better than things are now and reinvented the medium of television into a canvas that would accommodate that vision.

It is a rare franchise that fifty years on is still inspiring spin offs and fan fiction and conventions like Star Trek. It has dealt with space travel of course but that hasn’t stopped it from also exploring time travel, telepathy, telekinesis, parallel universes, artificial intelligence, matter transmission, a unique spin on virtual reality not to mention hundreds of alien societies. I can think of no other show that has dared to explore such a wide range of topics and premises.

So, on the fiftieth anniversary of Star Trek I proudly proclaim that I am a Trekker forever and I thank Gene and all the marvelous actors and writers and directors and crew members that have given us such a rich and wonderful world full of some of the best dramatic literature ever written. May they all live long and prosper.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the people you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Recipe for Success

Here is the recipe that I have learned to get things done.

  1. Define your goal, i.e. what you want to accomplish, in terms that can be measured.
  2. Make a plan. A plan is a series of specific steps such that you can tell when you have completed each one.
  3. Execute several of the steps. If it takes more than an hour or so, you probably need to think about breaking the steps down into smaller steps.
  4. Measure your accomplishments against your goal.
    • If you are making progress toward your goal but haven’t achieved it yet, go to 3.
    • If you are not making any progress toward your goal, go back to 2 and rethink your plan.

That’s it. Simple, eh? It took me 61 years to figure it out. I got stuff to do. I’ll write more tomorrow.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the people you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.