Alastair Mayer’s T-Space Blog

The 2010 National Novel Writing Month is coming up in a week. I’ll be participating again, and I’m encouraging others.

One complaint/excuse/whimper of fear I hear is “but I don’t know how to write a novel, or what to write”. You know what, neither did I the first time I started — and the result (after revision and expansion) was a novel that a publisher has expressed interest in. If you read novels, then probably your subconscious at least already knows how to write one. You’ve learned story structure by osmosis. As to what to write…for the purposes of NaNoWriMo, anything you want. It doesn’t even have to make sense.

I’ll confess, I’ve finished NaNo — meaning I wrote more than 50,000 words in a month — twice without having any idea what I was going to do even on the day it started. So how did I start? I just typed stream-of-consciousness until some part of my brain said Enough! and started feeding me ideas for what will become Alpha Centauri (I consider what I have — 53,000 words with a beginning, middle and end — to be more a combination detailed outline and “0th” draft than a real first draft).

Turn off your internal editor, sit down at your keyboard, and just write. Sooner or later something will start making sense, and if it doesn’t, don’t worry about. As I said above, for NaNoWriMo it doesn’t have to.

Want to see what I mean? Below I’ve quoted the first couple of pages that I wrote for the 2009 NaNo. It’s utter dreck, and will never again see the light of day. It’s here just to prove to you that even a professional writer’s first drafts can be crap, because you’re going to clean it before you show it to anyone else. Except for me this one time.

50K WORDS FOR NANOWRIMO
by Alastair Mayer

Blah blah blah. Wordy wordy word. The quick brown fox up and jumped over the reclining dogbat’s back. What the frack is a dogbat? Kind of like a foxbat only slower and dumber. Is a foxbat a flying forx? And just what is a forx anyway? King of the torx wrinches. Whatsa wrinch? I dunno but I’m coming up with some interesting words. Like Niven says, “keep your typeos” Also your typos.
A typeo is your typical Oreo, as opposed to your atypical oreo, like one with cream cheese feelings, or fillings. Man my fingers ware (also are) wibbly wobbly tonight. Danged eggety nog.
Here’s me typing with the silly sleevy things on my hands to keep my fingers from becoming fingersicles. Seems to improve my typing somewhat too. Oh frabjous day! Now if I jout er could just get some rational content as well as just wordy things. (And stop backspacing, dagnambit!)
Maybe I should take off the backspace key. Or type blindfolded.
Hey, I’m almost at the bottom of the first page. That’s it down there V (can’t do down arry or arrow easily, but whatever.)
And now, the second (fanfare please) page! Ta ta ra!
Man, this stream of consciousness stuff is easy to crank out but it sure don’t make a whole hell of a lot of sense. maybe it well will make cents instead. Or even dollars, thalers, pounds, sheckels,; inits, sols, yen, or even cumquats. Although why any one would use cumquats as currency is beyond me. Persimmons, perhaps. Small orangey fruity things that they are. I have a yen for some yen, or a pound of pounds. And that should be “intis”, not “inits” up there a few lines. So there.
The starship FANCYNAME entered orbit around the third planet from Aoph Centauri A (that’s Alpha, not Aoph). How? Did it aerobrake? Use thrusters? Either has Implications (with a capital I). What is the rest of the Centauri system like? How much do we know about it (then, in the future) from Solar-System based observation? Equatorial or polar orbit? Polar makes more sense for the initial survey. What do we know about it? It has to have a moon (stabilize). Any early signs of terraforming in the system? What about other stars with terraformed worlds?
Here’s the list from “Islands in the Sky”: Martyn Fogg’s article “A Planet Dweller’s Dreams” (NB Fogg wrote the expensive handbook on Terraforming from SAE):
Sixteen stars have better than 15% chance of having planets that could be “easily” terraformed, including: a Centauri A & B, e Eridani, e Indi, t Ceti, 70 Ophiuchi A & B, 36 Ophiuchi A & B, HR 7703 A, s Draconis, d Pavonis, n Casseopia A, 82 Eridani, b Hydri, and HR 8832. Highest percentage is alpha Centauri A at 44%. Cool.
So what do we know before we go?
Telescopic observation shows existence, maybe spectral evidence of free O2, other chlorophyll signatures (what would we see of Earth from as far?) Heavy planet in system would make it more difficult. Binary star more difficult yet at least through Doppler shifts. Terraform question: what would it take to move a planet from a Cen A to a Cen B (or vice versa?) How far out is stable zone ofr for aCen A :& B? Room for heavy planets?
Need to decide just what the Centauri system(s) look like.
We have: a Cen A has Sawyer’s World. a Cen B has Kakuloa, which has large ocean (and large moon, but then all Terraform planets have that. How large? needs to stabilize orbit.
What of Mars and Venus?

That’s where I stopped the first night. I didn’t even fix typos. (Don’t, until you’ve finished your 50,000 words.) It starts out pure crap. After a few hundred words I got the idea to write the story of the first Alpha Centauri landing (a paragraph in the early T-Space outline) and started brainstorming that.

So go ahead, sign up for NaNoWriMo. As Ms Frizzle in the kid series “The Magic Schoolbus” puts it, “Take chances! Make mistakes!” Go for it.

Today, October 4, marks the 53rd birthday of the space age, assuming it started with the launch of Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, back in 1957.

For me it’s a very happy day, despite getting off to a bad start. (I had to repair the clothes dryer, which needed the drum seal replaced. The first one I got from the Sears parts center wasn’t adequately stitched, so I had to go back and get another.) I sold not one, but two stories to Analog Science Fiction magazine. A short short, “Small Penalties,” will be a Probability Zero piece. The second, “Stone Age,” concerns some surprising challenges in extraterrestrial archeology. It’s a T-Space story. These will probably appear some time next spring, given lead times, and almost certainly in different issues.

My friend Brad Torgersen also got the paperwork today for his sale “The Chaplain’s Assistant” to Analog. It would be kind of fun if we’re both in the same issue.

I also received my author’s copy of Full Throttle Space Tales #4: Space Horrors now out from Flying Pen Press. It has some great stories!

Hope the rest of you are having a happy Sputnik day!

A bit breathless (see some of my previous publications on the right) but that’s the subject line for the email from Amazon DTP telling me that my Kindle edition stories/books (see Monday’s post are now on-line and available for sale. Now, before you rush off and buy them all, let me save you some money.

There are four new Kindle editions. Two are short stories (“Into the Fire” and “Snowball”), one is a novelette (“Renee”), and one is a collection (Starfire & Snowball) of all the above plus a bonus story (“The Gremlin Gambit”). The collection is the best deal at only $2.99. Individually the stories add up to $3.97, and you don’t get “The Gremlin Gambit,” although that’s available on-line from Mindflights.com, or from here as a PDF. (The story “Snowball” is also available in the anthology Footprints, available from Amazon in trade paperback edition.) As a bonus, I’ve added an author’s introduction to each story.

Amazon has some odd pricing rules. The minimum price — other than “free” — is $0.99, and they offer a better royalty percentage starting at $2.99. I may offer up a short story as a free sample in the future; I’m still getting my feet wet (and watching out for piranha — this is the Amazon). I expect buyers will opt for the better price point of the collection, Starfire & Snowball.

	Starfire & Snowball, a collection which includes all the stories below, plus “The Gremlin Gambit”.
The first Jason Curtis adventure, in T-space. Sometimes the only way out of the frying pan is …
	There’s nothing left of humanity but some hardware and footprints on the Moon. What do aliens make of it, and what happened?
Jason meets a girl, and then…     “‘Starfire, this is Kakuloa control. Are you declaring an emergency?’     Air hissed out of a bullet hole in my cockpit, yellow and red warning lights lit up my control panel, the fuel system leaked, my heat shielding was probably damaged, and my spacesuit was on the wrong side of a door to an airless compartment. Was I declaring an emergency?“

The above images link to the amazon.com pages. These ebooks are available from Amazon UK if you’re on that side of the pond. So, please give one of the above a try. If the stories aren’t quite to your taste (and while “Gremlin Gambit” has fairies, none of the others are at all fantasy) well, Amazon does have a refund policy. If you like them, please recommend to a friend. Happy reading!

Oh, and if you don’t have a Kindle, or something on which one of the free “Kindle for X” programs will run (PC, Mac, iPhone, etc), then please add a comment below. I’m looking at making these available via other channels. Cheers!

Eye wont two torque about spilling inn yore righting.

Okay, enough. That was probably harder for me to write than it was for you to read — but the built-in spelling checker didn’t complain about a single word. What I meant was “I want to talk about spelling in your writing,” and to make the point that you can’t trust computerized spelling checkers. They’ll happily tell you that you spelled the wrong word correctly — and sometimes complain about the correct word with a valid spelling.

Nothing turns a reader or editor off faster than a lot of spelling errors in a manuscript. (Okay, writing it in purple crayon on the back of a used paper lunch bag might, even if the words are spelled correctly on that bag.) To someone who reads for a living, even common errors — confusing “its” and “it’s”, or “their”, “they’re” and “there” are frequent — make the text as hard to read as my first line up there. Or worse. Even avid readers may have trouble with spelling, as one of my sons does

So, learn how to spell. Then turn off your computer’s spelling checker and especially turn off any automatic correction software. Seriously. Once you’ve written a few tens of thousands of words with that stuff turned off, and you’ve gone through and fixed typos like “hte” for “the” yourself, your fingers will have learned better the correct sequence. And you’ll have avoided all those times where the well-meaning but incredibly stupid software has changed a word you wanted to something it thought you meant. Besides, as Larry Niven says, “save your typos”. If you’re writing fantasy or science fiction, you might want some strange words, and Niven has invented several from mistyping other words. (The samlon creature in Beowulf’s Children comes to mind.)

Now, the spelling checker is a useful tool. When I’m done my first draft, I’ll turn it on and check for misspellings and typos. It’s useful for that, although I do find that I tell it to ignore more words than I let it change. Then read through the manuscript and fix all the places where you typed “their” instead of “they’re” (which a spelling checker won’t catch), or you paused in mid-sentence and typed “the the” or some other word duplication. Or just typed the plain wrong word because you were thinking of something else, mind racing ahead in the plot, as you typed. When I’m writing an action- or dialog-heavy scene, my fingers will sometimes type the homophone (word that sounds the same) for the word I meant, even though I know better. If I don’t catch that, I look stupid.

Don’t let your writing make you look stupid.

– – – – –

I’m in the middle of writing a significant addition, per editorial suggestion, to a T-space novel I thought was finished. (Although its been said that no novel – or any work of art – is ever truly finished, only abandoned.) For the next couple of weeks these entries will be on the short side. It’ll be worth it; the book is going to be way more fun to read than this blog.

After a slower start than I’d hoped, I’m up to speed and the “novel” is going well. Those quotes are there because at the moment it’s more of a very detailed outline; I know I’ll make significant changes in the next draft. But I’m coming up with some cool ideas and scenes. The working title is Alpha Centauri; it’s about humanity’s first trip there, with a few surprises.

Real time NaNoWriMo progress bar, the target is 50,000 words.

This past week-plus has been pretty hectic. Jill came back from Ohio with a truckload of her parents’ possessions, which we’re still finding homes for (including storage), and we have to get the place prepped for when her mom comes up later this summer.

I did get another T-Space page written, this one about Tau Ceti, a nearby Sun-like star that has been both a popular location in SF and a prime target for SETI (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence). It occurs to me that I haven’t really written much set in that locale; I’ll be changing that shortly.

It was another good week for planetary astronomy, with the announcement of the discovery of the smallest exoplanet (planet orbiting another star) yet, only twice Earth’s mass, orbiting the red dwarf Gliese 581. The planet, dubbed Gliese 581 e, orbits very closely, and would be too hot for life as we know it. However, in other news from the same system, one of the earlier discovered planets (we now know of four) Gliese 581 c, is orbiting in the habitable zone, which means liquid water could exist. It’s a big planet, Neptune-size, and may very well be a water world. Of course any moons it has (which would be too small for us to detect yet, even if they were large by our standards) would also be in the habitable zone.

Currently exoplanets are named after their parent star with a lowercase letter in the order found, with “a” reserved for the star itself. Thus Gliese 581 c was the second planet discovered orbiting that star, the recent Gliese 581 e the fourth. This has nothing to do with the traditional (at least in sci-fi) convention of using roman numerals to indicate position from the star; until we discover all the planets a star has, we won’t know the order. But at the moment, until we discover more, Gliese 581 e would be Gliese 581 I, and Gliese 581 c would be Gliese 581 III.

Gliese 581 is only about 20 lightyears from here, within T-Space. I really need to set a story there.

I just received the proofs for the anthology Fooprints, where my story “Snowball” will be appearing. It looks great! I’ve only skimmed it so far, but there a lot of wonderful stories in there. I’d buy it even if my story wasn’t in it. (grin).

As promised earlier, I’ve added a page on Alpha Centauri to the “T-Space Encylopaedia”.

I’ve added a page on the star system Delta Pavonis to the T-space pages. I plan to add pages there on a regular basis. They give the astronomical facts about the star (or other location) and some detail about how it fits into my T-space stories, and other writer’s stories too, occasionally. As best I can I want to keep things consistent with what we know about other star systems, but that still leaves plenty of room to play in what “hasn’t been disproved yet.”

Next up will probably be Alpha Centauri, a popular location for countless stories (being our nearest neighbor, and all). It’s possible, astrophysically, for both the main components (Alpha Centauri A and B) to have habitable planetary systems. I’ve also just found out something odd about it that has serious implications for T-space: its galactic orbit is very different from ours.

One of the best things to happen for those of us who like both hard SF and space opera was Miguel Alcubierre’s 1994 paper demonstrating how General Relativity does allow for faster-than-light (FTL) travel, using “warped” spacetime. (Yes, Star Trek and all the SF writers before it seem to have guessed right, but Alcubierre did the math. See my article “Yes Virginia, There Really is a Warp Drive”.)

However, I see today on the Technology Review arXiv blog that a recent paper by Finazzi, Liberati and Barceló, “Semiclassical instability of dynamical warp drives”, applies quantum theory to Alcubierre’s analysis and comes up with two potential problems: Hawking radiation (the effect that makes small black holes “evaporate”) could be hazardous to the occupants, and the warp bubble itself might be unstable because of the “stress-energy tensor” growing exponentially. (No, I’m not exactly sure what that means either, I never got that far in my physics classes.)

Does that mean Finazzi et al. just killed Santa Claus? No. For one thing, they make some assumptions about the properties of the exotic matter needed to maintain the warp which may not hold. For another, it looks like they just analyzed an Alcubierre warp rather than Van Den Broek’s refinement (see the “Yes, Virginia” piece mentioned above for the difference), so the Hawking radiation may be confined to the “shell” in the latter case. Finally, instabilities can be overcome if you have a fast-responding control system. Maybe that means the controller needs a quantum computer.

Addendum: There may be another way to overcome Finazzi instability, depending on the physical constraints of how you generate the warp in the first place. The idea came to me in the course of writing a novel about the first Alpha Centauri expedition. The details are one of the plot points so I won’t go into it here (besides, I may just be handwaving — the math is beyond me), but consider the simplifying assumptions we can make to predict the behavior of large systems. — AM, 2010