17 Sep 2007

Beyond the Forest and Over the King’s Highway

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We’ve been threatening to do it all summer, and today we did it—Allysen and I rollerbladed all the way to the end of the bike path in Bedford, and back. It was about 17 miles roundtrip. We had done it once before, a few years ago, and weren’t sure we’d ever manage it again. But today we made the trek in just a couple of hours.

This took us well past the Forest Perilous, and even way beyond the Lexington Wall. We crossed through the King’s Courtyard, fallen into disrepair now, since there’s been no king for centuries. (Some know it as Lexington Center.) And we passed over the old King’s Highway (known to the local folk as I-95). It’s now teeming with hard-carapaced orcs and trolls, speeding along on their evil business. We moved quickly on, before anyone could notice us. Finally, at the far end of the trail, we came to a reminder of the old rail line we were skating on—a nicely displayed old Budd railcar, along with a bike shop and some benches.

Upon our return home, we promptly made some frozen margaritas to celebrate our odyssey!

“One of the most difficult things is the first paragraph. I have spent many months on a first paragraph, and once I get it, the rest just comes out very easily.” —Gabriel Garcia Marquez

13 Sep 2007

Dark Matter Galaxies, and the Loss of a Literary Star

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Space.com reports the apparent discovery of “Hobbit” galaxies—tiny, ultrafaint, dwarf galaxies in our local group—which appear to consist mostly of dark matter. Though they were observed by their stars, which presumably are made of normal matter, gravitational calculations based on the movements of the stars indicate that the galaxies are 100 times more massive than the estimated total mass of their stars. The rest? Dark matter, more than likely. The findings will be published in the Astrophysical Journal in November.

Meanwhile, you may already have heard that Madeleine L’Engle died on September 6, 2007, another great loss to the book world. She is best known, of course, for the A Wrinkle in Time series of young adult novels, but she wrote many other books, as well. (Her official web site)

I never got to meet her, though we exchanged some correspondence once. Paradoxically, I didn’t discover her books at a young age, but as an adult. (Someone tried to turn me on to A Wrinkle in Time at a particularly sensitive age—when I didn’t want to read “YA” and I didn’t want my SF to read like fantasy. So that effort failed. But I tried the book years later, and that time it clicked. Marvelous.)

Farewell, creator of Mrs. Who and all the others. And thank you.

“You have to write whichever book it is that wants to be written. And then, if it’s going to be too difficult for grown-ups, you write it for children.” —Madeleine L’Engle

12 Sep 2007

Strange and Exotic Robots on TED

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Dutch artist Theo Jansen has created an extraordinarily odd set of moving sculptures, which any normal person would want to call robots, though they have no intelligence and are purely mechanical creations. He speaks of them as being “Strandbeests,” and when you watch, you will understand why. Take a look; it’s about an eight-minute video. I’ll wait.

You can also view it in a separate browser window and read some background info on it. While you’ve got that open, check out some of the other videos listed in the TED sidebar. (TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. That’s the name of the web site that presents these pieces.) They’re all of a scientific and/or artistic bent.

“When I’m not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I’m working, it is quite clear I know nothing.” —John Cage

12 Sep 2007

Return of the Ultimate SF Writing Workshop

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Craig Gardner and I are running another intensive writing workshop this fall, starting on October 15, at the Pandemonium SF Bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (Obviously, this will be of interest mainly to people who live within easy commuting distance of Cambridge! But maybe some of my blog readers fall into that group.) It’s aimed at aspiring professional writers, and runs the gamut of subjects, for ten successive Monday evening meetings. It’s also intended as an intensive workshopping experience: learning to work as a group to provide mutual support. (Our last group went off and formed their own writing group afterward.)

All the details are online at http://www.starrigger.net/workshop.htm.

“A writer is a man who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.” —Donald Barthelme

6 Sep 2007

The Forest Perilous, and Other Treacherous Paths

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Rollerblading is what Allysen and I do for exercise and pleasure, a few times a week if our schedules and the weather cooperate. We live near a wonderful bike/recreational trail (former rail line), which gives us a perfect place to skate and a bit of nature. The trail itself is eleven miles long from beginning to end, though most of the time we stick to a wooded stretch that’s maybe three or four miles long.

Lately we’ve taken to naming some of the landmarks along the way. For some reason, they seem more important on the homebound leg, maybe because it’s usually starting to get dark, and we’re getting tired, and we need some sense of progress. So if we’ve made it, say, almost to the center of Lexington, we might stop at what we call the Lexington Wall (not unlike the Wall of Gondor), marking the beginning of a stretch of dangerous territory (bad pavement) leading toward the center. Turning back, we head eastward toward home, and through some pleasant woods—although we must at one point cross the Trollway, a driveway where stern signs warn against trespassing. (Okay, we won’t. No kill us, please.)

It’s smooth sailing for a while, passing wood and field, and then under the Aqueduct, followed by the Mosquito Bench and Mare Scumtatis (or Sea of Scum, a lovely green pond). Once we’ve passed the Great Meadows (its real name!) and survive Bug Alley (bad only at certain hours, thank heaven), we cross out of the Lexington Gates and on through the Borderland that will bring us into Arlington—and into the Dimwoods, a long stretch that can be pretty tricky at twilight, especially when that Chinese restaurant somewhere out of sight fills the air with mind-altering aromas. The Dimwoods Trestle (a former railroad bridge) marks the approach of the eastern edge of the Dimwoods. But that just means we’re about to enter the Forest Perilous—most dangerous stretch of all—where sticks and stones abound (on the pavement) and light does not. Here we slow, and wonder if it’s safer to glide on two skates for greater stability, or continue stroking right-left to reduce the probability of a strike. No way to know.

We steel our nerves, check our pads, and press on. The homeward edge of the Forest Perilous brings us over the Trestle of Noxious Fumes, a bridge that passes near a natural gas facility that seems to vent in our direction periodically. Hold your breath, it’s quick. Finally we break out into the sun again—freedom! But that does not protect us from having to pass the Field of Mortal Combat (which the lesser mortals think is merely the high school football field). We do this without complaining—we laugh at death!—until we are safely away, and on toward home.

So many dangers, so little time. And I haven’t even mentioned the Legions of Fear—the berserker bicyclists who zoom by without so much as an “On your left!” That tale must await another time, another campfire.

“Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” —E.L. Doctorow

30 Aug 2007

Lunar Eclipse and New Writing

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I wasn’t able to see the August 28 lunar eclipse, but Jerry Oltion—SF writer, amateur astronomer, and member of our Launchpad astronomy team—sent us a photo he took. I thought it was so beautiful, I asked his permission to put it here on my blog:

Photo by Jerry Oltion

Seeing the photo reminded me of one of the NASA pages I read prior to the eclipse, suggesting that we imagine what it would be like to stand on the moon during an eclipse, surrounded by that incredible copper-glowing landscape. I think it would be a pretty mind-blowing experience. And as Jerry said, “Imagine what the Earth would look like from there. A dark hole in the sky with city lights glowing in it, surrounded by a ring of blood-red atmosphere.”

Here’s a montage Jerry put together, of the phases of the eclipse:


Jerry has larger images on his website, and they’re worth a look; these smaller reproductions don’t do them justice.

Meanwhile, I’ve been putting finishing touches on a short story (my first in many years!) that I hope will find its way into print eventually. More on that when I have something to report. (The name of it is “Dog Star.”)

Starting a new book is often just about the hardest thing in the world for me, and I’ve been having a devil of a time getting anywhere with the beginning of the next Chaos book, to follow Sunborn. Tonight, I decided to take Buckbeak out for a spin after dinner, in hopes that the night air would clear my head and bring some inspiration. It worked, at least a little bit. I came home with a couple of new thoughts on how to make this beginning work, and I’ve started putting it down in pixels and electrons. Feeling more hopeful, and now let me get back to it!

“Where the spirit does not work with the hand there is no art.” —Leonardo da Vinci

29 Aug 2007

Buckbeak and Dragonbreath

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I haven’t posted for a while, and the reason is I’ve been cleaning my garage. Really. Well, at least partly. It all started when we bought Dragonbreath. Dragonbreath is a Honda moped we bought secondhand for my wife to ride to work—the big idea being to save money on gas and car repairs, and make the commute a little more fun. Well, she has been having fun riding it—and furthermore, I discovered I liked grabbing it for a ride when she got home.

We had no intention of buying a second moped. But when someone posted to our town email list that she had a low-mileage Tomos moped that had sat in a garage for about seven years, and now she couldn’t get it running, and a hundred bucks or best offer would take it away…well, we went to look at it. Not sure if it was a good idea. Who knows if we could get it running? I bought it. Named it Buckbeak, after the hippogryph in Harry Potter.

Much tinkering ensued. Here’s what I wrote at the time, beginning a blog post that I never finished: “I gave Buckbeak its first real road test yesterday, and experienced a couple of “soft seizes,” as they refer to it on the moped owners’ forums. Abrupt engine stoppage. Turned out the oil-injector pump wasn’t working, and I was running with basically no oil. Not good. Doesn’t seem to have hurt it too badly, as far as I can tell running it today in the driveway. (I’ve now filled it with pre-mixed gas/oil, after reading the widespread opinion that the oil injectors are junk, and best disabled or removed anyway.) However, I must wait for Allysen to come home from work with our one helmet, so I can road test again. (She’s getting me my own helmet for my birthday.)”

Yeah, I seized the engine. And got it running again, anyway. It’s running great now, and as promised, I got a helmet for my birthday. And I love taking it for rides around town, running short errands that were annoying and seemed wasteful of gas in the car. (Too soon to be sure, but I think I’m getting over 100 miles per gallon.) And those Slovenians make a pretty tough little moped, for it to have survived my resurrection blunders. (Yeah, the Tomos is made in Slovenia, the former Yugoslavia. We used to joke about wanting to own a Yugo. And now we do.)

So what’s this have to do with cleaning the garage? Well, part of the agreement to buy Buckbeak was that we had to clean the garage, because that was the only way we could possibly fit both bikes into it (along with various regular bicycles and work benches and lawn junk and, oh yeah, a camping trailer). We have never even aspired to actually fitting a car in our garage. To give you some idea of the magnitude of the job: about two years ago, we rescued some kitchen cabinets a neighbor was throwing out, thinking they would help us organize the garage. They sat piled in the middle of the garage like Richard Dreyfus’s “Devil’s Tower” in the movie Close Encounters, ever since. A year ago, we bought a hammer drill at a yard sale, thinking, this will help us put those cabinets up on the cinderblock walls of the garage. This year…we’re actually doing it! A few more weekends, and I think we’ll have it done.

So that’s why I spent my birthday weekend cleaning the garage—so that Dragonbreath and Buckbeak could have a nice place to stay.

I’ll post a picture when we get one.

“The writer’s way is rough and lonely and who would choose it while there are vacancies in more gracious professions, such as, say, cleaning ferryboats [or garages]?” —Dorothy Parker

16 Aug 2007

The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Lose

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A few days ago, I got an email from a reader, telling me she and her family had informally named their dog Lopo Lupeko, and she thought I’d like to know. I sat there scratching my head for a little while, thinking, why did she tell me that? Did she confuse me with another writer?

Finally a tiny bell starting ringing way in the back of what passes for my mind. Something…but what…? I opened up the directory on my computer where all my book files are kept and did a search for “Lopo.” Sure enough, what popped up was my novel Down the Stream of Stars. As soon as I opened the file and found the spot, it all came back in a rush. Of course! Lopo is a dog-like creature who lives in the circ-zoo on the starship my heroine Claudi is traveling on! Lopo helped save everyone from the Throgs! How could I forget?

In my defense, I did write the novel over 15 years ago. But still, you’d think a writer would remember his own characters, wouldn’t you?

Maybe not. The next night I took a short story I’d just drafted to my writing group for vetting, and Richard says to me, regarding the main human character, “Didn’t you have a villain named Jarvis in one of your novels?” I sit scratching my head, willing to believe anything at this point. Then I remember: Jarvorus, the false-iffling in Dragon Rigger. Close enough!

I wonder if it’s time for me to reread all my own stuff, so I won’t keep redoing it.

“Write a wise saying and your name will live forever.” —Anonymous

16 Aug 2007

A Star That Sheds Like Our Cat!

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By now, you’ve probably seen news reports about the star Mira (pronounced my-rah), in the constellation Cetus. It’s barreling through the galactic medium at unusual speed and as a result is shedding a trail of starstuff. In the ultraviolet pictures from NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer, it looks like a comet:

The Star
Our cat

You might not have seen the cool animation NASA has online, though, along with explanation of how it is probably a bow-wave effect that’s causing the tail.

There’s supplemental material on another NASA page.

I can’t believe how much great astronomy has been coming our way in the last year or two.

“It is with words as with sunbeams—the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.” —Robert Southey

14 Aug 2007

Off to College!

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It finally happened, and we survived it. We took our older daughter Lexi to begin her college career. She was nervous, her mom bore up but not without traumatic pangs, her sister was quiet, and I was shell-shocked. (Well, what with one last-minute preparation thing and another, we managed to only get about an hour or so of sleep before getting up at 5:30 a.m. to hit the road. So once we were there, and she was moved in, and Allysen and I were attending presentations for the parents, a certain amount of nodding off was taking place.)

Anyway, she’s there and we’re home, and we hope all is rolling smoothly toward the beginning of a great college career. I have great faith in her, and my only concern is how we’re going to manage here without her. Here’s a picture she took of herself and me a couple of days before leaving:


“I’m scared all the time, which is always good. You have to be scared or you’re not working hard enough.” —Sue Grafton

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