The Other Side of Space: 2nd Draft

I finished the second draft of my MG/YA science fiction novel a couple weeks ago. Alas, it was too late in the year to follow Dave Farland's example. He says that he'll go to a grade school or middle school and work with teachers who will ask their students if they want to read the book. Dave will pay each student to read and simply mark any words that he/she doesn't understand. Once all the participants have done this, he'll meet with them, and it usually leads to an active discussion about all aspects of the book. He says it works very well.

Unfortunately the school year is over. Still, my number one target audience (my son!) now has the book in his hands. I've never been more anxious about someone reading my work. I'm trying to keep myself from pestering him about what he thinks so far, but it's tough. I've been keeping busy with other projects, as well as getting back on the agent-research train.

Part of that research has included reading more MG/YA/SF (runnin' out of letters here!), with my most recent being Marissa Meyer's Cinder. I'm about two-thirds through the book, and it's been a terrific read. The story is a creative twist on Cinderella, with the heroine being a cyborg in a world where they are property. I won't give away plot points, but Ms. Meyer has so far very nicely succeeded in 1) making me care about Cinder and 2) cranking up the tension with multiple instances of jeopardy and emotional suffering for her. Good job!

The Other Side of Space Completed!

Okay, so it's only the first draft, but it feels fantastic. The final fourteen to fifteen chapters (out of forty-one) went pretty quickly. More importantly, I enjoyed writing them more so than any other large chunk of text I ever produced. I'm not saying it's my best work, but I had such fun writing it, even the more challenging bits.

I'm feeling a strange mixture of pride, relief, and to a certain extent a little bit of loss. I'm reminded of what Churchill said about his History of the English Speaking Peoples.

"Writing a long and substantial book is like having a friend and companion at your side, to whom you can always turn for comfort and amusement, and whose society becomes more attractive as a new and widening field of interest is lighted in the mind." --  From Churchill's The Gathering Storm.

Not that I'm suggesting my little fiction story is worthy of even cleaning up Mr. Churchill's cigar ashes. It's simply the idea of a long piece of writing being a friendly comfort that resonates. Of course my friend and companion is still there, patiently waiting to have his face mashed and his limbs twisted as I begin the second draft, but it's not the same thing as fresh creation.

I hope to finish the re-write in short order, and then present it to my son Alex. I wrote this one for him.

Forbidden Island, Universe Sandbox, and Falling Pianos

George, Alex and I played a game of Forbidden Island last Saturday night. This is a very good game in which all the players must work together to a) retrieve four treasures from the island, and b) escape the island together. Meanwhile, the island is trying to kill you by flooding!

The cooperation aspect is unusual and a nice change of pace from most games. As in real life, however, even well-meaning teammates can occasionally grind each other's gears, especially under the pressure of imminent death. It can be remarkably intense -- but very fun! -- for a cooperative game that lasts maybe a half hour.

One thing we've learned in about ten different sessions: We always discover a new rule or detail of the game. I'll admit that the rules aren't super simple, but neither are they a complex web. Nevertheless, we've never failed to be surprised by some little feature. For example, we just realized that each treasure can be picked up at either of its two possible locations in any given game, even though there is only one treasure figurine of each type. We've dubbed this "quantum entanglement of treasures." We didn't exploit this feature, and Alex hates it, but it's there and we'd always missed it before. Maybe we're just dense.


A couple of years ago I bought the Universe Sandbox astrophysical simulator. I also purchased Newton's Aquarium, and another program whose name I can't recall at the moment. U-Sandbox is my favorite. I'm a physics geek so I'd have wanted them anyway, but I specifically went looking for easy software to help me work some problems in The Other Side of Space. I did so when I was first outlining the book, and it gave me a good jump start with the plot. Now that I'm closing in on completing the first draft of the novel, I've had to dive into the sandbox again. (Things change during writing.) I won't spoil anything of the book here, but I just crashed a 500 kiloton teapot onto the Moon, multiple times! If you have clear skies, you might see the impact craters next time you look.

One interesting observation I made is that your initial velocity doesn't have as much affect on your impact velocity as one might think. For example, suppose you start from the radius of the Moon's orbit and you drop a tungsten piano onto the Earth, maybe with the Coyote as your target. When it hits his head, it will be traveling about 11.1 kilometers per second. This is almost enough to kill him. (By the way, this is just slightly less than escape velocity for Earth.) On the other hand, suppose you throw the piano down really hard, at 5 kilometers per second? The Coyote is done for, right? It must hit him at 16.1 kilometers per second. Except it doesn't! It brains the poor slob only doing about 12.2 kilometers per second.

I leave it to the student to think about why this should be the case. Don't worry about details, unless you're really interested, just the general concept. I'll offer this hint: A constant acceleration (or an accelerating force) operates on an object to change its velocity. Near the Earth's surface this acceleration is 9.8 meters per second per second toward the Earth's center. What that means is (ignoring air resistance) that  for every second that an object falls near the Earth's surface, it goes 9.8 meters per second faster. You drop a hamster hammer and it starts falling. At the end of the first second it's falling at 9.8 meters per second. At the end of the second second it's falling at 19.6 meters per second, and so on. The same basic idea is true even if the acceleration isn't constant, such as starting far away from the Earth's surface and falling for a long time.

No animals were harmed in the writing of this blog entry. All coyotes and hamsters were simulated. Teapots and Tungsten pianos were real.

Willingham, Correia, and space opera: Oh, my!

Item 1) I received my "Greetings from Fabletown, NY" postcard from Bill Willingham. You only get one if you write a real, paper letter to Bill. Remember those? One swell piece of news from him is that he's planning on returning to GenCon next year, along with a significant comic book writers track that he and Marc Tassin are working on. That's not what I write, but I'll be in the front row anyway. Bill's a great panelist.

Item 2) I've now read the first two Monster Hunter novels (Monster Hunter International and Monster Hunter Vendetta), the first Grimnoir novel Hard Magic, and I'm a third of the way through the second, Spellbound. Larry Correia sure knows how to make you turn a page!

One thing he sometimes does that violates conventional wisdom, or at least oft heard admonition, is "head hopping." That's switching point of view from one character to another mid-chapter if not mid-scene. The worry is that it can confuse the reader. So far, however, Larry seems to do it pretty seamlessly. I've not had the chance to study his technique yet because I've been too engrossed and turning those pages, but I'll try to back up sometime and analyze.

Item 3) I've completed about three fourths of the first draft of The Other Side of Space, and I can see the finish line. What a terrific feeling! I'm in that groove now where you've got all the parts laid out on the table, and you think you know how they're all going to fit together to make a beautiful, purring mechanism. Well, maybe not that beautiful for a first draft, and maybe growling instead of purring, but at least functional, and doing kind of what you'd visualized at the start. If you squint hard, and don't look at your original notes.

GenCon 2014 continued: Westerfeld and Deadly, Unna?

I got to meet and chat with Scott Westerfeld after one of his panels. [BTW: His Q&A session was terrific. Scott was smart, and wise, and very funny. Alex was surprised at how funny. And Beth Vaughan did an excellent job moderating!] Fortunately I had something besides, "I love your books" at hand to open the conversation.*

The Other Side of Space (TOSS) includes a character who is an Aboriginal Australian. During my research, mostly on slang phrases, I ran across a few blogs and bulletin boards with some truly vile, racist diatribes against the Aboriginal people. Really virulent stuff. I mentioned this to Scott, and asked how the racism in Australia compares to the U.S. [Scott was born and raised in the U.S., but has lived in Australia for the past 12 years.] I couldn't imagine similar comments about blacks in the U.S. surviving for long. Maybe I don't hang out at bad enough water coolers.

Scott told me that in some rural areas where a mostly white town was near an Aboriginal reserve or former reserve, things still could get pretty awful. Not to say that the cities are racism free, but the kind of stuff I'd mentioned was more likely to be found in the sticks. He then recommended a YA book titled Deadly, Unna? by Phillip Gwynne. Even though it was first published in 1998, Scott felt it was reasonably up to date for my purposes, and a good read. He didn't say so, but it was chosen by the Children's Book Council of Australia as "Book of the Year: Older Readers."

As Nadia Wheatley of the Sydney Morning Herald wrote, "Combining humour, politics, fine writing and football, it's pretty hard to beat."  It's a very good book. The first five paragraphs had me hooked on the main character's voice. I'd be willing to hear any story from Blacky.

So I learned a few things about Nungas and Goonyas (blacks and whites) in the book's world, spent many very enjoyable hours, and now I'm looking forward to reading more of Mr. Gwynne's work.

Thanks, Scott!

*Note to my Future Fans, if any get created: I won't ever mind hearing this!

WorldCon 2012

Four of the five members of my writing group went to WorldCon 2012 this year in Chicago. We had a fine time with some nice surprises, a little disappointment, and an odd experience booking rooms.

Beth, Helen, Bob and I represented our group. Alas, Marc couldn't make it this time. Bob was also accompanied by his girlfriend Alice who turned out to be a lovely person with deep roots in Chicago like my own. (BEAR DOWN CHICAGO BEARS!)

Altogether we booked three rooms at the Hyatt. Without going into detail, the billing wound up being optimized to be as wrong as possible while still involving the people who actually stayed in the rooms. Still, they were very nice rooms and the Regency Club on the 35th floor was swell.

My disappointment was that I had arrived prepared to pitch Knights of the Full Moon as well as Shattered Home to any appropriate agent, editor or publisher who wasn't fast enough to run away. I had my 5 second elevator pitches locked and loaded, as well as brilliant half minute synopses almost guaranteed to leave the victim potential ally breathless for more. Alas, despite my pretty good efforts, no such opportunity arose. The closest came while I attended the Night Shade Books presentation of what's new. Turns out, however, that they don't publish YA stuff. :-( While SH is actually YA/adult cross-over, KFM is definitely YA, and my work in progress (currently titled The Other Side of Space) is for MG to YA.

One of the good surprises was seeing Teresa Frohock at Worldcon. She's a very nice lady whose work I had the pleasure of critiquing some time ago on the Online Writers Workshop, and whose comments from long ago you can find here somewhere. Her first book is titled Miserere--An Autumn Tale. Here's her site: www.teresafrohock.com

Another excellent surprise was having Neil Gaiman show up for the Hugo ceremonies! His Doctor Who episode (The Doctor's Wife) won for best dramatic presentation, short form. Quite interesting that three nominees were from Doctor Who, with a fourth (an episode of the U.S. sitcom Community) apparently inspired by Doctor Who.

Coming up some time I'll talk about an amazing writer named Jack Skillingstead!