Doin’ that writerly thang!

Has anyone taken their laptop to a coffee shop to sit down and write? I’ve always viewed this as a bit of a cliche, something non-writers assume writers spend much of their time doing ... in between signing contracts and practicing their award acceptance speeches, of course.

Whether or not it’s an accurate portrayal of writing life, it certainly sounds like a pleasant way to spend an hour or two.

This week I took a couple of days off work. No particular reason, just have some vacation time that I need to take this year and a couple of days free in my calendar, so an opportunity for a bit of down time. This morning I had a handful of errands to run, and I decided to round it off with a visit to a nearby coffee shop, laptop in hand. Just out of curiosity.

Conclusions:

• Yes, it was a pleasant way to spend an hour.
• The place was fairly busy, and I had wondered if that would be a distraction. As it turned out, that wasn’t an issue. I guess I pay more attention to noises around the house than when I’m elsewhere.
• It was a productive hour, but no more so than when I put on my headphones and am on a roll.
• By the end of an hour, I was more than ready to leave. I’m not the sort of person who’ll sit there for hours on end.
• It was good to get a change of scenery. I sometimes find that valuable in itself ... taking my laptop to the library, or to a picnic table in a park or by a beach.

OK, I can’t pretend that was a bucket list item, but at least I can say ... writer writing in coffee shop? Yep, done that  :)

Weekend Writing Warriors November 18

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image.




I’m back for another stretch. This time I’m picking up the start of an earlier chapter in Ghosts of Innocence, where Shayla is on her tortuous path into the Palace under cover. Here, she has to get into character for the next leg of her journey.

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Shayla Carver - Imperial lackey! She smiled at the incongruity of it as she checked her appearance in the wall mirror.

Her ruddy skin tone had grayed slightly overnight, and her plump cheeks sagged. She squeezed her eyes shut and willed her implants to correct the signs of fatigue. After a few minutes, Shayla opened her eyes and staggered back to sit on the edge of her bed. She took deep breaths and wiped a sheen of sweat from her face, but the face that gazed back now radiated calm and confidence befitting her station.

Brynwyn had left a clean set of traveling robes hanging, ready to wear. The Imperial crest and official insignia announced her status in the higher echelons of the Palace staff, someone of high standing indeed in this provincial backwater. It looked like Brynwyn had intended to make a dramatic exit after the anonymity of her Meditation.

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I hope everyone is keeping well. When I was last here, I had recently published The Ashes of Home. Since then I’ve been keeping busy on the first draft of a new novel, The Long Dark.

I’ve also posted a lot more background material from Shayla’s world to my author website.
www.iansbott.com/behind-the-scenes
Ships, buildings, maps etc. Some drawn up in full detail, and a whole collection of original hand-drawn sketches that guided me through the writing process.

Is it safe to come out yet?

Now the mid-terms are over - finally! - I guess it was too much to hope that any kind of normality would take hold. On reflection, that was only ever a naive hope. No matter who won or lost, Trump was always going to:
(a) proclaim victory anyway,
and/or (b) claim conspiracies and witch hunts,
always with a dose of (c) blame someone else,
and (d) mock and insult anyone he doesn’t like.

The only difference would be the relative proportions of the above. So it’s basically business as usual in the kindergarten playground of American politics, and two more years of campaigning to look forward to before the next election.

*Sigh*

What I’ve learned over the past two weeks of unplugging from the online world is how toxic the world has become, and how badly that toxicity affects me. I should probably make a more permanent effort to ignore all news from south of the border, because it’s way too depressing and there’s nothing I can do about it.

So, turning to more positive thoughts ...

Writing is going well - steadily ahead of the target I set myself at the end of July. I’m just at the 50% mark for the first draft. I have a rough outline of the rest of the story, but still murky on some of the plot details. However that is normal for my writing process so it’s not a problem. Yet :)

I took part in a writers’ panel last week on the publishing process, which was a lively 90 minutes of questions and answers.

Several people at work bought The Ashes of Home (the workplace remains my main source of paperback sales) and I’m getting positive comments back.

I plan to reduce the e-book price of both Ghosts and Ashes next month for a Christmas promotion, so if anyone was thinking of picking up a copy it’s worth waiting a little while.

What happened to humanity?

I was planning on lining up more posts on worldbuilding, but the last week has left me feeling like normal rational life has taken its leave of this continent.

We have a spate of bombs through the mail, and then Pittsburgh - to add to all the other mass shootings this year. But what is most sickening is that, rather than genuine calls for strength and unity and compassion, the loudest voices on both sides of the divide are racing each other to the bottom of the sewer dredging the depths for any political capital they can gain.

I think I’m going to unplug from the Internet until after November 6, because right now a large slice of humanity has lost its humanity.

BTW - comments are off, 'nuff said

The Long Dark - plant life

A peculiar world is likely to support some peculiar life. What I’ve settled on is by no means original, but I’m trying to develop the basic idea into something unique to this story.

I’m entering new worldbuilding territory here, because up until now I’ve not dealt with any form of alien life. Even in Shayla’s world, they never encountered another inhabited planet. Everything there has its origins on Earth (even though they’ve long ago forgotten that Earth even existed.)

In The Long Dark, the planet Elysium is girdled by a single plant-like superorganism. The locals call it Sponge.

Like Earthly life, Sponge is based on carbon chemistry, with water as the medium, and an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere. During the summer season, Sponge photosynthesizes for energy.

But similarities end there. Sponge is not based on cellular structures like our plants and animals, and it has no DNA. I don’t get into these kinds of details in the story, but my basis is that there are other mechanisms possible for self-organization and replication.

Something I am fleshing out, though, is some insight into the inner structure of Sponge as that is important to the story. The plant mass forms a carpet hundreds of meters thick - kilometers in places - that covers the equatorial to mid latitudes, ending about 40 degrees north and south. Given the extreme conditions at the poles, I figured this was a reasonable extent for life to persist.

Map of Elysium, showing the active growth zones north and south, 

and the main north-south systems of veins

The name “Sponge” conjures images of a fairly amorphous uniform spongy mass. In the story I try to dispel that with images of specific and detailed structure at all kinds of scales from the microscopic to the gargantuan. There are vast structural ribs holding the plant’s shape, and complex networks of veins, aquifers, and chambers to convey liquid, nutrients, and air to where it’s needed. The mass is riddled with chambers, deep chasms, and vast hollows that would easily swallow a town, along with a variety of specialized structures that make up the living portions of the plant. It is these depths that the colonists harvest for a living.

Rock on, Taylor!

Some bizarre and contradictory scenes played out in the media last week.

We have Taylor Swift posting a political message to Instagram - something she rarely does:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BopoXpYnCes/?hl=en&taken-by=taylorswift

And then we have Kanye West in the Oval Office - transcript here:
https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/11/politics/kanye-west-oval-office/index.html

What first struck me was the blatant double standards at work in the highly-charged world today

When Taylor Swift posted her thoughts on Instagram, an angry hornet swarm of indignation buzzed into being.
“Why should the world care what a singer thinks?”
“What does she know about politics?”
“What gives her the right to voice an opinion?”
The implication is - you have no right to post this, shut up!

Let’s step past the obvious absurdity of these comments in the first place. Instagram is a social media site, along with many others. Millions of people post their thoughts to these sites every day. Who cares what you ate for breakfast? Nobody? Fair enough, but nobody castigates you for posting it. If you don’t care, shrug shoulders and move on.

The subtext seems to be, becoming a successful musician somehow cancels your right to a voice like the rest of the population.

The double standard comes into play with the sub-subtext - you’re not allowed to post something I disagree with. That same furious horde was strangely silent when Kanye West monologued in praise of Donald Trump.
Who’s he? A rapper.
Political qualifications? Zilch.
Equivalent condemnation on publicly voicing an opinion just because he’s an entertainment celebrity?
*Crickets*

Then we come to the content of their respective messages

Kanye West expressed outright and unequivocal support for Donald Trump. The message was exclusively partisan. That is his right.

In comparison, Taylor Swift did express her values and who she would be supporting in her state in the mid-terms, and she articulated her reasons clearly and succinctly. That is her right.

But beyond that, she didn’t exhort her followers to support Democrat candidates or to share her political beliefs. This was simply the lead-in to the real thrust of her post, which was an entirely non-partisan exhortation to educate yourself and vote accordingly. And, importantly, to make sure you actually do register and vote.

Why that message should attract such vitriolic condemnation escapes me.

To put it bluntly, if you have a problem with Taylor Swift’s post, then you appear to have a problem with the very foundation of democratic elections

The Long Dark - surface conditions

I’ve talked about the peculiar day/night cycle on a world with a 90 degree axial tilt. That much is straightforward observation of how the sun would look at various points on the planet’s surface. But the next part of worldbuilding is a lot more speculative.

Most of a planet’s weather is driven by convection currents caused by temperature differences in its atmosphere and oceans. With that in mind, think about a planet where the sun hovers directly overhead at the pole, baking it remorselessly for months, then disappears for a whole half of the year plunging that same pole into darkness. To me, that adds up to massive temperature fluctuations across the globe during the course of a year.

I know the same thing happens on Earth at the poles, with six months day and six of night, but the sun stays low in the sky and the days stay cold. The poles don’t turn into the tropics at midsummer, and most of the Earth’s surface sees a reasonable day/night cycle all year round. On this planet, by contrast, periods of light and darkness are taken to extremes across most of its surface, and everywhere gets a dose of tropical heat at some point in the year.

One thing I think we can safely assume - there will be some pretty violent weather going on. Beyond that, I certainly have no way of knowing how it would look, so the rest is pure invention.

Earth has many stable circulation patterns, but its axis only wobbles 23 degrees back and forth relative to the sun during the course of a year. My world does a complete 180 and then back again, so any circulation patterns would completely reverse, which suggests a lot of turbulence to cope with.

In this world, a ‘year’ lasts about thirteen Earth years, so that gives a lengthy season. My worldbuilding has global weather patterns switching through a series of states as the seasons change. Each state is reasonably stable - though not necessarily benign - for a long stretch of time as the planet slowly turns new latitudes to the sun, then the pattern becomes unstable and flips in a rapid and violent transition to the next season.

The height of summer is the calmest time, and this is when most of the outdoor work is done. Meanwhile, in the winter hemisphere, temperatures bottom out at minus two hundred Celcius, lashing the winter pole with storms of nitrogen rain.

The most violent conditions arrive some time after midsummer, as the winter pole starts thawing and the summer pole plunges into darkness. Through the mid-seasons, convection currents in the atmosphere undergo dramatic shifts powered from the poles. I’m expecting storms and winds that would put an Earthly hurricane to shame.

On top of this, a red giant star itself is pretty active compared to our tranquil sun. Outbursts of solar flares make nearby space inhospitable to orbiting craft much of the time, and the colonists long ago gave up trying to keep satellites working. I’ve given the planet a powerful magnetic field to shield the surface from the worst of the solar storms, but it’s still a dangerous place to be. And all this electrical activity makes communications tricky at best. The colonists rely on land lines laid between permanent settlements, and short wave radio when conditions allow.