Alastair Mayer’s T-Space

Coming up in a few weeks I’m scheduled as a speaker at the July 18 DASFA (Denver Area SF Association) meeting. (Their web site is somewhat dated, but the meeting time/place info is still correct.). The next day (July 19), I’ll be at Who Else! Books in Denver, signing copies of the Footprints anthology. Better than that, fellow (and better known) Colorado author James Van Pelt will also be at the signing, he has a story in Footprints too. (Jim may also be speaking at the DASFA meeting the evening before, I’m a bit fuzzy on the details.)

Before that, I’ll be going to Westercon (aka FiestaCon), the big western regional SF con in Temp, Arizona over the July 4th weekend. I’m just a con-goer at this one, not speaking, but I’m looking forward to seeing some old friends and meeting new ones. I’ll be cleverly disguised as myself, if you see me feel free to step up and say hello.

Today was a good news day, although those of you who aren’t writers or aspiring writers might not think so. First I heard from Joni Labaqui of the Writers of the Future Contest, to let me know that my entry for second quarter of 2009 was a Semifinalist. While not a Finalist, one of the group of eight stories selected for final judging and selecting the three winners, semifinalist is still good and earns a written critique from writer KD Wentworth, who does the preliminary judging. There’s a list of the other semifinalists, finalists and honorable mentions on Joni’s blog. Congratulations to all!

The next bit of good news was like one of those “good news, bad news” stories. In the afternoon mail I received a personal note from Stanley Schmidt, the editor of Analog, regarding a story I’d submitted to him. He said it was well written and that he personally enjoyed it (the good news), but because of the nature of the story (a technical problem in a research lab) it might not be sufficiently engaging even to Analog readers. So, not a sale, but when the editor of one of the (if not the) highest circulation SF magazines, who has been editing it for over thirty years, says he likes your story, that’s good news. Especially if you’re, like me, still an aspiring writer.

Speaking of aspiring writers, I got back last week from the trip out to Oregon. Part of it was family vacation, part of it was to attend a workshop given by Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Katherine Rusch, both professional writers and editors. Fellow attendee Brad Torgersen blogged that it was “the most important weekend [he'd] ever spent”. I’m inclined to agree. If you’re just starting out in the writing business — and you want to go at it full time rather than as a hobby — you owe it to yourself to check out the next Kris and Dean Show. They’re offering it again in September.

A short post from the road (you’d almost think this was Twitter) as I’m enroute to the track of the Yellowstone hotspot, i.e. the Snake River valley. The hotspot is currently sitting under Yellowstone Park, a while back it caused the lava flows that make up Craters of the Moon National Monument, and apparently originated under what’s now southeast Oregon. And I’m headed to Oregon for a writer’s workshop with prolific and award-winning authors (and editors) Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Katherine Rusch. Should be a good time. I’m getting fired up to write just thinking about it.

I find I haven’t talked about the process of writing nearly as much as I thought I might when I started this. That’s going to change. I’ve been a little reluctant up until now; I know there are many aspiring authors out there, but there are quite a few sites, with authors more experienced than I, offering excellent advice. But perhaps I do have something to offer, if only another viewpoint that might click with someone a little better. (Or, worst case, as a bad example.)

On that note, let me mention a slim (64-page) book of excellent writing advice, Writing to the Point, by Algis Budrys. Algis was a well-respected author and editor in his own right, and served as the managing judge for the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest. (Don’t let Hubbard’s name put you off. If there is any connection between the WotF contest and the Church of Scientology, it is by no means apparent to any of the contest participants, and the contest, its online forum, and award events are excellent.) In this little book Budrys offers up brilliant advice in easily absorbed chunks. He distinguishes between a story and a manuscript. A manuscript is one way of presenting the story. The story itself is a character, in context, with a problem, and the attempts and final success in overcoming the problem. Other authors, including Orson Scott Card and Marion Zimmer Bradley, have offered similar advice, but Budrys nails it in fewer and clearer words. Other chapters cover everything from agents (sell your first book first) to ideas to manuscripts to some specific advice on writing science fiction.

I had been stalled out on a novel in progress, and after reading this book I realized that I had stalled because I didn’t fully understand the main character’s central problem (a story beginning is a character, in context, with a problem). With that realization I saw where the novel needed to go, and also where I could take an individual chapter and create a stand-alone short story from it. (This offers not only the chance to get paid twice for essentially the same work, but the short can help build a market for the novel.)

If you’re at all interested in writing fiction, I recommend this book. One thing, when I went looking for it on Amazon they only had a couple of used copies at an asking price of $499.98 (!). It is, however, available directly from the publisher (Action Publishing) for only $10.50 plus a couple of bucks shipping. I got my copy in just a few days. (And no, I’m not making anything by linking it, I just think it’s a worthwhile book.)

It has been another good week for astronomy, in particular for space-based astronomy.

The Hubble Space Telescope repair mission has been the biggest of such news items, and at the moment seems to be going well. This week (yesterday, in fact) saw the successful Ariane launch of two European space observatories, the Planck observatory to investigate irregularities in the cosmic microwave background, and the Herschel telescope, which is essentially a souped-up Hubble (it’s mirror is 1.5 times bigger than Hubble’s). All will add significantly to our knowledge of the universe as a whole and the various planets and stars in it.

But it gets better. This week another space-based telescope, NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, began its formal mission to, as Star Trek puts it, seek out new worlds. It is specifically intended to look for Earth-like (terraform, if not terraformed) planets around other stars. Over the next three-and-a-half years it will examine over 100,000 stars. The observatory itself was launched in March and its telescope saw “first light” in April. Between then and now it has been going through testing and calibration. This past Tuesday (5/12/09) it was pronounced ready for its primary mission. Kepler is designed to look for planets as small as Earth orbiting their stars in the habitable zone (where temperatures could let surface water remain liquid on at least part of the planet). I’m eagerly awaiting results, the first of which will be transmitted from the satellite in mid-June.

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 sold my short story “The Gremlin Gambit” to MindFlights online magazine. Woohoo! Still not into the SFWA pro-rate markets yet, but I’m getting there.

This story was fun to write, it’s a mix of science fiction (alien invasion) and magical-creature fantasy. I’ll update when it gets published.

As if I wasn’t already spending too much time on other people’s web sites instead of getting writing done, I now find myself  in a few Yahoo! groups (relevant to a writer’s workshop coming up in June), Livejournal, (because Eric Reynolds, my editor for Footprints, was there, as were a few co-contributers) and now Facebook (again, several co-contributers to Footprints and a number other authors I know, and a few family members).  Problem is, I just spent (I won’t say “wasted”, since it wasn’t totally unproductive) several hours on Facebook instead of getting things done.  Like finishing the short story I’m working on, or writing the new scenes for Venaticorum Archive to bring it up to saleable length.  Sigh.

Speaking of Footprints, Eric now has a proof copy and posted a picture of it of Facebook, it looks great.  I can hardly wait to my hands on a copy.

The workshop I mentioned above is being presented by Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch, both prolific and award-winning writers. He just sent us details on accomodation, and there are still a few slots left.  If you’re interested in selling a novel or becoming a professional writer, it could be worth your while.  They did a very abbreviated version of the “Kris’n'Dean show” at the Denver Worldcon last summer, it was fantastic.

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”.