Alastair Mayer’s T-Space Blog

My first pro story, “Light Conversation”, which appeared as a Probability Zero in Analog earlier this year, involved a conversation with a slime mold in a refrigerator.

Earlier this week, after spending much of the weekend (more than I wanted to, anyway) repairing a clothes dryer, I woke up with an idea for another Probability Zero story featuring, what else, a dryer. The story pretty much wrote itself and the first draft had everyone in the family laughing out loud.

Alas, some of that was in-jokes. I pretty much had to trim those to cut the story to fit Analog‘s Prob Zero space requirement, but there’s still plenty of humor in it. I sent it off today. I hope Stan likes it.

(One way or another it’ll eventually see print, and I may have to start an “appliance series” of humorous flash fiction. My son Robert wants me to do something with flying toasters. I think I’ll wait a while on that one.)

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!

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.)

The other night, more like 3 o’clock in the morning, I was working on expanding “The Chara Talisman” to a more-publishable length. (Whatever happened to those 65K-word novels I grew up with, anyway?) Making the novel richer and filling in details that I’d skipped. In many ways I’m a “adder-inner” writer rather than a “taker-outer” (see Dean Wesley Smith’s blog post on rewriting (or not) for an explanation of these terms), so there’s nothing surprising there. But what I added in that night would have pushed the novel in a completely new direction.

In this case, what started out as a scene where our intrepid heroes arrive at a planet and visit its only settlement, an isolated agrarian colony, before going off after their main objective turned into a scene where they find the colony deserted, with strong parallels in my mind (not necessarily the story) between that and the colony of Roanoke whose population vanished sometime between 1587 and 1590. Fascinating, but completely derailing the current novel. I could make it work, at another 50,000 words and a total change in emphasis in the story. That’s better saved for a different story, I think, so next day I backed up a bit and headed that plot thread in the correct direction.

But where did that Roanoke parallel come from? Well, sure, the parallels between small isolated colonies that have been out of contact for a few years no doubt dredged it out of my subconscious. Now my inner reader is saying “this is a neat idea, what happens next?” and my inner writer is trying to respond. Which kind of gets in the way of what my inner project manager is telling me to do, which is finish up the novel I’m working on before plunging into something else of that magnitude.

A lot of writing, at least in certain genres, is like that. It’s an intellectual puzzle game – toss up an idea and see where it leads. Endanger your protagonist and then see if you can figure a way for him to save himself without “cheating” by going back and writing in the seeds of the solution into an earlier chapter. It’s a real thrill when you find a solution that depends on something you just happened to put in several chapters back, which you did not (consciously) intend to be part of the solution to a problem you hadn’t even thought to throw at the protagonist yet. When it’s a surprise to the writer, odds are it will be a surprise to the reader, too. Of course with a skillful writer the reader will never know if he put the solution in before or after he created the problem. (And a less-skillful writer will just throw in a deus ex machina solution that doesn’t depend on anything that went before. How unsatisfying.)

Writing is a solitary occupation. In many ways its also like a game of solitaire — or better yet, like one of those “choose your own adventure” book games where the pages are blank and you get to fill in what happens. How cool is that?

And now I need to go fill in a few more pages in an adventure. I want to see what happens.

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!

As I mentioned last week, I spent much of the past few days adventuring in the Amazon — Amazon DTP (Digital Text Platform) that is. That and getting a couple of my stories, which happen to be adventures (of Jason Curtis, owner/pilot of the Starfire) Kindle-ready and uploaded for sale.

The process is pretty simple for a work of fiction (ie no fancy formatting or graphics as might be needed in a textbook). I ended up spending most of my time working on images for the “covers”. That’s not strictly necessary. A plain gray rectangle with the title in plain text would work, but wouldn’t attract many customers.

I used the Gnu Image Manipulation Tool, the GIMP, a free/open-source imaging suite that is remarkably powerful. I kept learning new tricks. One strong suggestion: layers are your friend. Put each element — background, foreground images, title text, etc — on different layers, especially if you want to re-use some of them on different covers to maintain a theme e.g. for a series. For example, here are the cover images for the first two Jason Curtis stories:

The art itself is a mix of free-drawn and pieces of images from public domain sources (mostly NASA photos).

Converting the text is dead easy with a good editor (like vim) and a basic knowledge of HTML. Amazon’s upload process will convert other formats, including MS Word .doc, epub and Mobibook .prc, but does the best job with straight HTML. What I did to convert my text from OpenOffice was to, first, replace all italicized (or underlined) text with the same text surrounded by HTML <i> and </i> tags. (This involves regular expressions. I have no idea if MS Word is capable of this. I use Linux as my main desktop OS.) Then I just copied the whole thing and pasted it into new .html file that I’d opened with vim. A few global search-and-replace’s converted quote marks and m-dashes. The HTML header portion I cribbed from Shala Kerrigan’s web page on Kindle formatting. I previewed the HTML in my Firefox browser to make sure it wasn’t too horrible, and double checked with Amazon’s “preview” tool once uploaded.

It takes a couple of days between uploading the ebook (or estory) and it appearing for sale on Amazon’s site, as they run some checks and get their databases populated. You need an Amazon DTP account, but you can set that up online in a matter of minutes.

I have a couple more things to prep and upload yet. I’m making my story “Snowball” (which appears in the Footprints anthology) available as a standalone story, and I’m also going to put up a collection, Starfire & Snowball, with the Jason Curtis stories, “Snowball”, and “The Gremlin Gambit” (published in MindFlights last year). Amazon price-points are a little odd: it will be cheaper to purchase Starfire & Snowball, which includes the other stories plus, than the others individually — but it will pay a better royalty to the author (that would be me). So, go for the collection.

The next step, after I get back to doing some actual writing for a bit, is to convert these to some different formats and check out the programs at Barnes & Noble and at Smashwords. That and figure out the marketing side of all this. 😉

I’m having second thoughts about these Writing Wednesday posts. As I mentioned when I started, they were partly at the urging of another writing blogger who encouraged my more SF-genre slant on things, but I feel like much of it is just going over the same ground that several other, and more experienced, writers also cover. I’d rather write about new stuff, be that about writing, science, publishing, or whatever. So I’m going to put the “Writing Wednesday” titles on hold, although I still expect to post here on a regular (for some chaotic value of “regular”) basis. Sometimes even about writing.

This week I’m actually gearing up to do some publishing. I have a backlist of several stories that I’d like to experiment with in terms of making them available for Kindle or other e-readers. That’s a channel which is rapidly growing in importance, with Amazon reportedly now selling more e-books than hardcovers (and catching up quickly to paperback sales). I’ll be spending the next few nights and part of the weekend playing with different formatting tools and making “covers”. More on that project when I get something uploaded to Amazon.

I love it when researchers turn up new data or new theories to explain old data that expose some interesting new gap in what we think we know about the universe. It’s from those interesting new gaps — like absorption lines in what should be a smooth spectrum — that lead to new science and new technologies. (Those absorption lines, in 19th century observations of the Sun, ultimately led to quantum theory — and modern electronics and lasers.) This week we’ve had several instances of this.

You’re probably aware that the universe is expanding, and even that it seems to be expanding at an increasing rate. This somewhat counter-intuitive observation has been explained by “dark energy”, some unknown force that is accelerating the expansion. But many scientists aren’t comfortable with dark energy; the numbers for the vacuum energy don’t work out, and it seems to violate conservation laws. Now, this presumed expansion acceleration is based on measurements of very distant (edge of the universe distant) supernovas. If there’s another explanation for those measurements, then the acceleration may not really be happening and thus we don’t need dark energy to explain it.

There’s another problem. Models of the Big Bang that started the universe predict the creation of a certain amount of hydrogen, deuterium (heavy hydrogen), helium, and lithium. Our observations of the first three match pretty closely the predictions — but we only see about one-third the lithium we think we should.

Cosmologists Marco Regis and Chris Clarkson think they have an explanation for both of these discrepancies. Scientists make the assumption that the universe is pretty much the same in every direction we look, that — celestial bodies aside — there’s nothing special about one part space over any other. Regis and Clarkson point out here that the above problems go away if don’t assume the universe is homogenous. But there’s one other thing: if that’s the case, and there’s a huge bubble of space that is lithium-deficient, then why is Earth in the center of it?

Speaking on inhomogeneities in the universe, two different deep sky studies by the Keck telescope in Hawaii and the Very Large Telescope in Chile have turned up unexpected differences in what’s called the fine structure constant, considered to be one of the fundamental constants of nature (it relates to how strongly atoms bind their electrons). The really interesting thing is that while the Keck observations suggest that the fine structure “constant” was once smaller, the VLT observations suggest that it was once bigger. (Papers here and here.) These two telescopes — one in the northern hemisphere, one in the southern — look at two different regions of the sky. This, especially in light of Regis and Clarkson’s conjecture, raises all sorts of interesting questions. (Such as: What affect does this have on chemistry — and biology — in different regions of the universe? Would a space ship travelling such distances drag its own fine structure constant with it, or would it change according to local conditions? And, what causes this “constant” to vary, and could we reproduce that effect locally? Larry Niven had disintegrator guns that worked by “suppressing the charge on the electron”; could that really be possible? If you could reduce the charge on a proton, wouldn’t that make fusion easier?)

Somebody (Asimov?) once said that real scientific discoveries are less often heralded by “eureka!” than by “hmm, that’s odd.” Looks like we have several “that’s odd” moments going on. Cool!

This week’s entry is going to be a short one, but with some amusing links.

Hearkening back to installment 4, on the usefulness (or not) of spelling checkers and proofreading, this YouTube video is priceless: The The Impotence of Proofreading (warning, language may not be safe for work).

And if you’re wondering why we science fiction writers are really in the business, this video is a hilarious: F*ck Me, Ray Bradbury (and no, this one is definitely not safe for work, and yes, I’m kidding about the reason for being a writer).

No Writing Wednesday this week, today being Thursday. My time sense is still a little warped from NASFiC/ReConStruction this past weekend in Raleigh. It was a great time, and this time I stayed over until Monday morning which is part of why my time sense is screwed up. It feels like Wednesday to me.

The con was a little on the small side as such things go — the final attendance figures were somewhere in the 700-800 range, smaller than a regional like MileHiCon. I imagine part of that is the economy, and part of it may be that Raleigh’s a little harder to get to. Well, it is from Denver anyway. I went out via Newark and came back via Houston. My buddy Lou Berger came back via Tampa, I think.

But good things can come in small packages. There was a lot of great programming, and I got to meet and hang out with some fellow writers from Codex that I’d only met on-line before, including Lawrence Schoen, who I shared a table of contents with in Footprints and whose story there is up for a Hugo this year, and [at this point I am pausing with the sudden realization that if I start listing people, I’m going to feel obligated to list everyone, or feel bad about those I left out. Okay, I’m not going to list everyone, apologies and no slight intended to the rest of you] Mary Robinette Kowal, (2008 Campbell Award winner, current VP of SFWA) who hosted a release party for her first novel, Shades of Milk and Honey. She’s a charming and intelligent lady, and a darn good writer. She reminds me a bit of Connie Willis in some ways.

Baen Books has their galactic headquarters near Raleigh (Jim Baen was smart enough to move out of expensive New York years ago) and there were a number of Baen folk in attendance (although they run a distributed operation). The Baen party Friday night was well attended and a lot of fun, with Toni Weisskopf being her usual intelligent and entertaining self. (And no, I’m not just saying that because I want her to buy my novel — although if I thought it would help, I might.) There were the usual Worldcon bid parties, too — Chicago in 2012, Texas (San Antonio) in 2013, and perhaps the best, London (UK) in 2014. These are all largely, so far as I know, uncontested, although there’s time for someone to mount another 2014 bid, and even a 2013 bid although the timing is tight on that one. Since London is my original home town, I’m supporting (technically, pre-supporting) their bid. They put a cool London 2014 video together to promote it, see how many SF/fantasy shows or movies you can identify. If London does win, then there’ll also be a NASFiC that year (location to be determined, I’m sure bids will start showing up as we get closer to the date.)

There are a lot of reasons that sf cons are worthwhile. I had a chance to meet with Analog editor Stanley Schmidt, who bought me (and writer Shane Tourtellotte) lunch in part so that I’d “feel obligated and send more stories” Stan’s way. That’s quite a compliment. I also find that the interaction with creative and intelligent people stimulates a lot of new ideas. I have several stories already in mind since coming back, and I’ve heard the same from other writers. You need to keep up the input to keep the output flowing.

And on that note, I need to sign off here and go write some of those stories down. Ciao.