Alastair Mayer's T-Space

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.

The server hosting this website seems to have been having unsuspected problems for the past few days. After a reboot, a restore, and some tinkering it seems all right now, but some of the recent posts are temporarily missing in action — I restored an older backup of the database until I can figure out just what happened.

No deathless prose was lost (of course not, it wouldn’t be deathless then, would it?) and I’ll back and fill soon. However, “soon” won’t be for about a week since I’ll be heavily involved in a novel workshop (led by Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Katherine Rusch) in Oregon for the next several days.

On a lighter note, yesterday I got a rewrite request from Stan Schmidt at Analog for a story I submitted a while back. Not a sale yet, but likely to be one after I turn in the revision (mostly trimming it to fit the Probability Zero format).

Just a quick note. I’ve uploaded my Footprints story “Snowball” as a PDF but I’m not happy with the formatting, so I’m going to tweak it a bit before publishing the link. I’ll be doing the same with “The Gremlin Gambit”. That last is still available in HTML from MindFlights’ archive.

If I haven’t gotten to this by the weekend, remind me.

Update 4/10/10: These are now available from my Stories page.

Internet shadows, that is, as in a dark network.

My web servers suffered a prolonged network outage because of (a) a change Qwest made that messed up the DSL line, and (b) my old ISP being totally non-responsive so I couldn’t get them to work with Qwest to fix the problem. I ended up changing ISPs, and the new folks (Solucian Networking, if you’re in the greater Denver area) have been wonderfully responsive in working to get all the problems fixed.

The past week, as you might imagine, was extremely frustrating for me but I’m taking steps (such as the new ISP) to ensure it doesn’t happen again. My apologies to those of you who noticed and wondered what happened.