Tag Archives: Writing

Not the best of days

Well, my back is still giving me grief from twisting it Saturday night. Getting through work was a challenge. The chair was not well designed for someone with a long torso — like myself – and by the end of the day I was hurting fairly smartly.

I did not let it keep me away from Cawdor though. Tonight I started in on worldbuilding and notes  about the Grand Unified Compact. I also have started putting out feelers for military assistance. I hoping not to be one of those military SF writers who makes really dumb blunders in military matters. I know quite a bit about the Navy and what that is like. I know very little about ground forces, how they are organized and utilized in combat. Hopefully I can find the right advise and make something that reads well is exciting and is believable.

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Things we will not do with alien life

So as I have been working on Cawdor and doing my research and planning it has sparked a desire to write a quick essay about what we will not do with alien life.

Popular media has given us some of the bad ideas about what might happen when we get out into the stars and land on worlds with alien biomes and ecosystems. Star Trek is the worst offender with the character of Mister Spock. Mister Spock is the half-breed offspring between a human woman and a Vulcan man.

RULE ONE: We will NOT breed with it.

The process of creating sperm and egg is a delicate and sensitive process prone to all manner of error and failures. A significant number of pregnancies self terminate in human/human coupling because of chromosomal issues. We can not cross breed with apes our closest evolutionary cousins. In no way shape or manner are we going to successfully cross-breed with the product of a totally alien evolutionary process.

(Yes, I know late in Next Gen they brought out the idea that the galaxy was seeded by a forerunner race and this why all the aliens can interbreed. Balderdash! We have the clear proof of evolution here on earth in the DNA of the biosphere. Even if someone went around and seeded the same DNA on dozens and hundreds of worlds the unique paths and changes that occurred would insure no capability for cross-breeding.)

I am not saying that there will not be a few, very very few,  sick individuals who may try to breed with something alien. After all we have people who have sex with animals and corpses right now, but there will be no offspring.

Next up on the hit Parade is Michael Crichton  and The Andromeda Strain. It is the story of an alien disease that comes to Earth and threatens all of humanity. It’s a fun read and the original film is worth seeing. (I own it.) Still, as an example of that SF trope, the bad space bug, it is sill.

RULE TWO: We will NOT catch diseases from it.

Diseases are finely tuned parasitical organisms and molecules. (I add molecules because a Virus is very special and not really a living thing, More like a natural nano-machine.) To infect their host they need very careful conditions. They need the right pH balance, the right temperature, and the right receptors on the host. Malaria is a parasite that infects red blood cells, if the cells are not shaped just right, it has a very hard time infecting. Disease are matched to their hosts. There are thousands and thousands of viruses on this planet that can’t hurt a person at all. Go to an alien planet with an alien ecosystem and nothing will match up. It would be worse than diving into a foreign junkyard and grabbing parts at random and hoping that they would fit your american car.

The final thing on my list is something SF writers have ignore for decades. The truth of the matter is that biology is often the forgotten science of science-fiction. Oh there plenty of fiction about advances in biological sciences and what that might mean to us, but alien biology is mainly restricted to unusual animal and their traits. An alien ecosystem will be truly alien and it will not support terran life.

RULE THREE: We will NOT eat it.

Most people do not think about the process of eating and how it works. Food goes into your mouth, chomp chomp chomp, drops to your stomach, you get fed, and then the leftovers are ejected out the backside.

It’s not really like that.

In your stomach there are numerous acids and more importantly enzymes that make digestion possible. Think of the molecules of food as being locked boxes. You have to unlock the box before you can open it and get the sugary goodness inside.  Enzymes are the keys that unlock the boxes. If you do not have the right keys, you will never get that box open. This is why you cannot eat just anything. You do not have the keys to break down most plant matter and quite a bit of animal matter too. (Eating bones generally won’t help you.) That’s just life you evolved with too.

Alien life will have molecules that evolved along different lines. Their locks and your keys will not go together. It will not nourish you.

Most ‘hard SF’ skips right past this problem. People on alien worlds eat the fruit and animals just like they were exploring the North American continent. It won’t be like that at all.

This plays into Cawdor and now it will play into a new story that is forming in my mind set in the same universe.

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I’m falling in love with Cawdor

The world building on this novel has really captured my imagination. Tonight I did a quick sketch of the religion and it’s implications for the characters.

What started out as a re-interpretation of Macbeth has really grown and taken a life of its own.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, the heart of the story is still Murder, Mutiny, and Madness. The setting has become richer and the characters are really starting to form around the world-building, but it is still at heart a gender-bending Macbeth.

I am staying away from new version of Macbeth lest my vision become clouded.

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The world just keeps getting larger

The world I am referring  is the world of Cawdor.

I have continued working on the world-building for this novel and every time I turn around a new aspect just starts unfolding. Tonight I was working out the basic government structure of one faction and suddenly I found myself lost in the design of a legal system unlike ours. (Short description all court actions are civil actions and there a four possible pleas a defendant could enter.)

I also found the official names for my two major governments/faction in the novel. So I present to you…

The Celestial Renaissance Cooperative

and

The Unified Grand Compact.

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Not much to say

It’s been a busy and stressful day at my paying job and that has cascaded into a tired and not very motivated host here.

My sweetie-wife and I also looked at re-finacing the mortgage but decided against it. The goals of re-fi and our long term goal simply do not sync up.

The Station On The Edge got another rejection and I am thinking it is time to retire the story to the truck.  The most common feedback has been that the characters are too unlikable, but they were the characters who reported for duty when I wrote it. I have sat down to try re-writing it and never typed a word. I like the characters and the story as is. Perhaps I am the only one.

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No Sunday Night Movie

I was simply too exhausted to even watched a TV episode last night much less a full feature film. I will return to the Sunday Night Movie next weekend with either The Mist or We Were Soliders.

Sunday was a pretty good day overall. I saw a good movie — Zombieland — nearly won at Scrabble with my sweetie-wife and had a pleasant time hanging out with my pal.

Working is coming along on world-building for Cawdor. I’ve making tons of notes for a new human culture and new human religion. This will be the basis for one faction of the novel, the TANS. A lot of what I am putting together will not appear directly in the novel but it will inform how characters act and react to each other. The fun part will be presenting each culture truthfully with pluses and minuses. I’ll leave it up to the reader to decided which side is just and right in its war.

I do think life is messy and novels and arts shouldn’t be too cut and dried with good and bad guys.

(That was the biggest weakness in Eric Flint’s 1632 novel.)

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Gail’s Book hits the shelves today!

SoullessMy friend Gail Carriger has her first novel, Soulless, hit the stores today. I am so very happy to see this happen. I met Gail — a pseudonym but one I shall honor here — five years ago at a Science-Fiction convention at a panel on writing. She’s a woman with brains and talent and a wicked sense of humor. All of which she has put into her novel.

I am not jealous of her success, but I am rather encouraged by it. You hear tales about how the industry is closed and the way to break in is to know someone. To network at conventions and thereby get an editor or someone else to notice your work.

Yes, it can be done that way, but it’s not the only way. Gail’s book went into the slush pile without any agents or networking. In the end it is always the writing that sells the story and nothing else. If my stuff isn’t selling either I haven’t found the right editor — and that is a component as well — or my writing simply isn’t good enough, yet.

I’m not normally a fan of fantasy. I’m much more of an SF kind of reader, but I do like funny fantasy and that’s why I feel perfectly fine in recommending Soulless. Gail brings her unique wit and viewpoint to tropes that other simple noticed and Gail shows you the other side.

You can find her website in my blog roll, and it’s worth a  read as well.

Gail, congratulations! You go girl!

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I am defeated

I am conceding defeat to my muse and to A Taste of Tears and Blood. The werewolf story has kicked my ass and I and throwing it aside. For whatever reason I can not make decent progress on the short story and any more effort spent on it will simply be wasted.

In addition to that muse in my ear simply will NOT shut-up about Cawdor. My mind returns to the plots and characters like a pundit to a scandal. My mind refuses to let go and let me work on other things. So be it. I’m throwing myself fully into my next novel, Cawdor.

It’s time for Mutiny, Murder, and Madness.

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A tough story

My werewolf story, A Taste of Tears and Blood, is kicking my butt, however I refuse to give in and quit on the story. I am going to get all the words down on the page and I am going to edit it. Now, I do not know if it is going to be good enough to send off to any markets, but I refuse to let it simply fade away incomplete.

The most frustrating thing about being stuck finishing A Taste Of Tears and Blood is that I have two novels backed up behind it. My next novel-sized project is Phaeton’s Phoenix a story about a young man’s quest for immortality and sex, then after Phaeton’s Phoenix I have the novel Cawdor an SF novel about mutiny and murder amid isolated military units.

Some may suggest working on the short story at the same time I work on a novel. I know there are authors who can do this, but I’ve never been able to juggle writing two different stories at the same time. I have to finish A Taste Of Tears and Blood or abandon it.

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Troubled story

So I have been trying to get my werewolf story written and it has been a troublesome story. I have the beginning of the story on paper and I know how it is going to the end, but I’ve been struggling to find the voice and arc of the middle.
I have finally figured out where I’ve been going wrong and I think now I should be able to finish it. In reality I still hadn’t settled in what the story was really about. I had some ideas and some characters and some events but it didn’t add up to a complete story.
Now it has. I had that flash of inspiration that seems to bring it all together.
And I think I have found a market for it as well.
It’s a print market which is good. Call me old fashion but I still have a bias towards print. (It’s wrong head I know, but I started writing when computers were things writers simply didn’t have access to. I remember as a teenager lusting for an IBM selectric typewriter.)

Anyway I’m going to push and try to have a first draft finished within a week and a half.

We’ll see.

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