Alastair Mayer’s T-Space Blog

It’s been an interesting week.

CoSine
This weekend is the CoSine SF convention in Colorado Springs, which I’m currently missing, but I’ll be there tomorrow. GOH is Sharon Shinn. Several well known Colorado writers will also be there: Connie Willis, Ed Bryant, Wil McCarthy, Sarah Hoyt, and Kevin J Anderson, among others. CoSine always seems to be at a chaotic time for me (two years ago I ended up in the hospital that weekend) but always fun … when I can get there.

Award nomination season
As I mentioned a couple of days ago, it’s nomination season for various SF awards. I found out this week that I have at least one nomination (no, not by me) for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. It takes more than that to get on the final ballot, of course. I discovered Campbell’s Analog when I was thirteen, and it had a profound influence on me (and now I’m selling to Analog, how cool is that?). It’s cliche, but it really would be an honor to make it to the ballot.

Hunting the day job
Earlier this week I was called about a follow-up interview for a systems administrator position, a technical interview that apparently includes hands-on work to see how much I know my stuff. I’ve been brushing up on obscure corners of Solaris and Linux, the kind of stuff that fades from surface memory if you’re not doing it on a regular basis. Thank goodness for VMware, it let me set up a bunch of virtual Solaris computers on my Linux desktop; Solaris has outgrown all the spare physical computers I have sitting around. (By the way Sun/Oracle: if the minimum install memory is 539 MB please don’t say that it’s only 512 MB — it’s most annoying to go all the way through the install only to have the kernel panic on first boot because it can’t lock a (non-existent) memory page.) The interview is Monday, should be interesting and even fun.

I hope you all had enjoyable solstice festivities of whatever sort you celebrate, and that the new year is starting off well for you. My usual year-end chaos ran long this time around, aside from the usual (Christmas, my birthday, New Years, Jill and my anniversary). I had two separate job interviews this past week (which went well, but competition is tough; we’ll see) and a deadline for galleys to be proofread. Also a couple of doctor appointments (family and eye) — just routine checkups, although my eyeglass prescription is changing a little. All of which means I’m behind where I wanted to be on new writing and overhauling this website. (Although the more observant of you might have already noticed a minor change to the banner above.)

The writing/publishing industry is abuzz with the news of how well e-book readers sold over the holiday, vastly exceeding expectations. This (and the precarious fiscal position of Borders Bookstores) has a lot of writers, including yours truly, excited because all those new e-readers are going to need e-books (and e-short-stories) to fill them up. I’ve been prepping a couple more of my previously published stores to go up Amazon (here’s what’s available so far. I also mentioned them in an earlier post). I want to change a couple of the covers and also make the stories available for other e-readers like the Nook.

Among other resolutions, I’ve committed to finishing and submitting forty short stories and three novels this year. That’s not quite as daunting as it sounds, as some are in progress already (and is nothing to Dean Wesley Smith’s challenge of 100 stories on top of his usual novel writing schedule). I’m tempted to add a couple of Young Adult novels to my project list — they’re shorter, my kids are in the target age range, and I have a few ideas. But first I need to finish what’s in progress.

How about you? Taking on any interesting challenges in 2011?

Happy solstice! For those of us north of the equator, the sun has stopped heading south and is coming back, hooray! (Okay, for the pedantic, the Earth has just passed the point in its orbit where its axial tilt points the north pole furthest from the sun. Either way, it means more daylight and eventually warmer temperatures.) For those in the south, hope you’re having a great summer.

Things have been a little more chaotic than usual this season, with my two boys working up toward their black belt exam this past weekend. They passed, but not without a lot of sore muscles. Part of the point of black belt is to push you to the limit and then a bit beyond. The exam started with 100 push-ups in less than four minutes, then 100 v-ups, then … but you get the idea. It finished with board breaking – 14 one-inch pine boards, some two at a time. But that was the fun part.

Between one thing and another I’m behind on posting here. I’m looking at overhauling the design of this site; I think it’s a bit too T-Space centric. I have more to offer than just that. More about what I have in mind as I get closer to relaunching the site. I’ve got some big plans for 2011, and some serious challenges to overcome to get there — but as my boys’ sensei says, the bigger the obstacles, the greater the sense of accomplishment.

Virtual manuscripts, that is, although my desk is piled with a few marked-up hardcopies too.

The NaNoWriMo novel turned out to be slower-going than I expected because it’s a part two, and has to make sense in the context already established in part one. (Well, strictly speaking for NaNoWriMo it doesn’t have to make any sense at all, but that would just leave me with a bigger rewrite job. It may come to that to meet deadline.)

The requested changes for Chara have gone through a couple of iterations. Trying to make it longer by just tacking another subplot onto the end totally screwed up the beats of the original, so I dug in deeper, reorganized and adding or expanding scenes so that the structure still worked in terms of the revised word count, and that the midpoint doesn’t come too early, and so on. (If you’re wondering what I’m babbling about, there are a number of good books out there on story structure, both for novel and for screenplay. My current favorite is Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat! which focuses on screenwriting but adapts well to novels.)

Then there’s the small handful of short stories that I need to do a final pass on and put in the [e]mail.

It’s Thanksgiving, and while I have much to be thankful for, time enough to get everything done isn’t one of them. I may not be adding anything here until December. Meanwhile, enjoy your holidays.

I was looking to better-define a character in a novel in progress, the leader of a small exploration team which deliberately maroons itself on a planet in the Alpha Centauri system. (It does so to continue research while the mothership returns to Earth with surprising news. No faster-than-light subspace radio or ansible here.) It’s rather a major plot point that he keeps the team together through some major adversities. What better inspiration for my character than Sir Ernest Shackleton?

This week marks the 95th anniversary of the final break up and sinking of Shackleton’s ship, Endurance. From October 27 to November 21, 1915, Endurance lay crushed in the Antarctic ice, where it had been stuck for some ten months already. On November 21st the ice parted enough to let the ship sink. Shackleton, already knighted for his accomplishments on an earlier expedition to within 190km of the South Pole (the closest anyone had come at that point), kept his team alive on the ice for an additional six months before making a break over open sea in lifeboats to an Antarctic island. From there Shackleton led a small team in an open boat on a two-week trip to South Georgia, followed by another overland trek to a whaling station, where he organized the rescue of the others. All of the crew who had been stuck on the ice with him survived the two-year ordeal.

The circumstance of my characters is more benign than Antarctica and the southern ocean, with nearly two centuries of technological advances. Still, when you’re stuck 4.3 light years from home on an unknown planet, with no timetable for resupply or rescue, “what would Shackleton do” is a question the team lead finds himself asking a lot.

It’s Veterans Day and Remembrance Day.
Again, I salute and thank all those who served. A few personal remembrances here.

I think war is stupid. It’s rarely (ever?) a net gain for either side. However, I am not a pacifist. If the other guy starts it, the goal should be to not merely win, but to defeat the aggressor so thoroughly that the mere thought of trying again leaves them quivering. Otherwise, leave them (and everyone) alone. Alas, we get politicians (no need to name names, I challenge you all to come up with counter-examples) who like interfering at the small scale but don’t have the guts to do what it takes when necessary.

But I digress. Veterans, I salute you.

It’s Guy Fawkes day again, something I’ve mentioned on this date before. It’s also my writing buddy Lou Berger’s birthday (happy birthday!), and the day after my daughter’s sixteenth birthday (happy birthday, sweetie!). Yes, I now have a driving-age teenager in the house. Why am I having these strange near-panicky feelings?

Anyway, fireworks for all! (Offer void where prohibited.)

If you had difficulty connecting to this site in the past week, I’ve discovered the problem. The nameserver for alastairmayer.com was returning the wrong IP address. Since my local access takes a backdoor route to the server, I didn’t realize the problem until I got a few complaints. Sorry about that! (For future reference, until I re-host the website, www.alastairmayer.com and www.ajwm.net should give the same IP address.)

To all my friends and family in the Great White North, happy Canada Day. Today marks the 143rd anniversary of the British North America Act which created Canada as an independent country. Which means, good grief, that it’s been 43 years since Canada’s centennial and Expo67 in Montreal.

Forty three years, has it really been that long? If we’d launched a ship back then towards Alpha Centauri at a modest one-tenth lightspeed, it would be getting there just about now. Mind boggling.

Anyway, enjoy the holiday. It’s our turn down here in three days.

I just finished up a great novel workshop with Dean Smith and a handful of other writers in Lincoln City, Oregon. There was a lot of good interaction and hammering on submission packages for our recently-completed novels. My package is now eagerly on its way to the hands of an editor who (I hope) will be eager to see the whole thing.

Yesterday, at the end of the workshop, Dean gave us all a little advice on dealing with inevitable piracy — folks posting our work on the web without our permission. I won’t go into details, it was mostly commonse sense given the realities of the world.

But imagine my surprise when, doing a casual out-of-curiosity search on a couple of key phrases today, I found that a website has already posted a complete (but shoddy) copy of my first Analog story. Shoddy in two senses: they got the byline wrong (they left out my first name) and they changed some typography that was important to the plot and the humor in the original story. The really weird thing is that, given the nature of the rest of the site, it makes no sense at all for them to have posted an SF story — or any fiction — in the first place.

Anyway, I won’t get my knickers in a knot over it. I might not even have minded if they’d got my name right — but please don’t take that as permission to post an author’s stuff without asking.