Alastair Mayer’s T-Space Blog

Today, at 3:00 pm, is the mass signing and foodbank drive at the Broadway Book Mall in Denver (200 S. Broadway). See the post below for more details. Come on out, bring anything you want autographed — or better yet, bring money to buy new stuff to be autographed 😉 — and bring a canned food donation to get raffle tickets. See you there!

I will be joining Colorado authors Mario Acevedo (X-Rated Bloodsuckers, Killing the Cobra, Werewolf Smackdown, etc), David Boop (She Murdered Me With Science), Warren Hammond (KOP, Ex-KOP) and Laura Reeve ( Peacemaker, Vigilante, Pathfinder) at the Broadway Book Mall, 200 S. Broadway in Denver at 3:00 pm this Sunday, 12 December, for a mass booksigning and homeless food drive. Bring a canned food donation and get a raffle ticket for glorious prizes! It should be a lot of fun. More info at Booksigning at Broadway Book Mall.

At 23:57 on November 30, with 50,594 words:

And I’m going to bed.

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.)

Word Fantasy Con in Columbus, OH this past four days was a blast. This is not your average SF con, there’s a much higher proportion of writers and editors among the attendees at WFC, and much time is spent schmoozing. Between the late (and early) hours and the energy it takes for a natural introvert like me (and many other writers) to schmooze, I’m still kind of tired. More WFC details in a later post.

The galleys for “Small Penalties”, which will appear in Analog‘s Probability Zero section, came in and look good. I don’t know which issue, but I’m guessing maybe the April 2011 issue, early March or late February. I’ll keep you posted.

And this is the first day for NaNoWriMo (see previous post). Of course NaNo’s servers are massively bogged down under the load, but that should ease up as thing progress. Anyway, you don’t need their server to begin writing. I’ve got over a thousand words in already on the new novel (a sequel, or perhaps it will end up as Part 2, to my last year’s NaNo, about the first expedition to Alpha Centauri. It’s set early in T-Space, and it tells (among other things) how Sawyer’s World gets its name.

It’s early days, so if anyone wants to toss me a plot bunny I might use it. That also goes for suggesting a lifeform that could have branched off from Earth fauna or flora 60 or 70 million years ago. (Sorry, no dinosaurs.)

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.

This weekend is the 42nd annual Front Range regional SF convention, MileHiCon. It looks to be a blast, with GOHs Rachel Caine, Katherine Kurtz, Donato Giancola, and this year’s Hugo and Nebula winner, Paolo Bacigalupi. There will be the usual crowd of other authors and artists, including a number of fellow Codexians who I’m looking forward to meeting or seeing again.

As usual I’m on several panels or other events. My schedule looks to be as follows:

• Friday: 8pm – Meet, Munch, Mingle (Autograph Alley)
• Saturday: 11am – SF/F/H Authors You Should Be Reading; 8pm – Space Horrors Readings
• Sunday: 1pm – Weird Physics; 3pm – Building the Ensemble.

Come on up and say hi!