12 Sep 2013

Writing Retreat Report

posted in: personal news, trains, work in progress, writing retreats | 0

This retreat has been one of the most productive ever. I’m getting good pages written every day, and more importantly, I had a conceptual breakthrough that showed me what I was doing wrong in several chapters as we approach the end. The realization meant I had to back up and go at those chapters differently, but that’s how these things go sometimes. This change will affect how I write much of what is to follow. I feel so confident of this that I’m going to give you a sneak look at a crucial scene near the end of the book. Here it is. Don’t tell anyone what happens, though. This is probably about 850 manuscript pages into the book.

I’m also getting outdoors and exercising—alternating between rollerblading and biking on some of the excellent bike trails around here. I rode for the first time on the lovely Cape Cod Rail Trail, which winds through the central part of the Cape. It was on this ride that I saw my dream setting:

House by a lake (okay, a pond), with private floatplane drawn up to the shore. Does a dream house get any better than that?

Several times now, I’ve taken to the Cape Cod Canal bike trail, which is about the most scenic and relaxing afternoon/evening outing ever. It’s also an outlook of choice for the Cape Cod Central Railroad’s excursion trains. Here’s where they stop to turn the trains around for their return to Hyannis. And by that, I mean that they uncouple the engine from the front and take it around and attach it to the rear, making it the new front.

Here they are, hitching it up.

And away they go. I don’t know what that E-unit locomotive is doing on the back end. It looks like it’s acting as a booster. But I wouldn’t have thought the train long enough to need it. Anyway, it’s a nice-looking engine, grumbling farewell as it moves off.

I didn’t think until too late that I could have taken a nice movie of its departure. Oh well, maybe next time.

12 Sep 2013

Space Travel for Animals?

posted in: animal friends, quirky, space | 0

Being on retreat doesn’t mean I don’t still get interesting links. First, we have a frog joining the space program, probably not voluntarily:

That’s from The Atlantic, which has more details. This is the recent launch of the LADEE moon probe, on a Minotaur rocket, from Wallops Island, Virginia. Pity the poor creature. But it did have a fleeting moment of glory.

And second, we have some cows who did not seem to enjoy the test launch of a SpaceX Grasshopper rocket. Looks like they didn’t stick around to watch the landing. But you should.

 
A rocket landing on a tail of fire is how God meant us to come back to Earth! All that’s missing is tail fins on the rocket to complete this Golden Age SF vision of space travel.
The retreat is going very well, by the way. Making good progress on the book. 
9 Sep 2013

Off to Do Some Writing

posted in: personal news, work in progress, writing, writing retreats | 0

By the time this posts, Lord willing, I’ll be on Cape Cod beginning another writing retreat. Among the things I like about the Cape, besides the chance to leave daily cares behind and focus on my book, are the great seafood, local micro-brews, and wonderful bike paths for exercise, fresh air, and positive reinforcement for making progress, whether it’s getting words on the page or thinking through some stubborn plot or character problem. This time I’m taking rollerblades and my recumbent bike. I hope to have good things to report, a few days down the line.

8 Sep 2013

New Ebooks You Should Check Out — Chris Howard

posted in: ebooks, publishing | 0

Continuing my series on new books by author friends, I want to highlight Salvage, by Chris Howard. Chris was an early participant in the Ultimate Science Fiction Writing Workshop that I’ve run with Craig Gardner. Chris immediately stood out as a student; the man is basically a geyser of creativity and imagination. Some students need coaching in bringing out their muses. With Chris, it was always more a matter of helping him direct the fountain. He’s a highly talented visual artist as well as a writer, and he always illustrates his own work. (He’s also a prodigious blogger and app-builder. He also works full time at a job doing things with software that I don’t understand. But let’s leave all that aside for now.)

Salvage, from Masque Books, continues the world introduced in Chris’s Seaborn series, set around and in the ocean. He describes it as a techno-thriller/fantasy. You can read all about it here on his book’s website.

So many books! So little time! Better get reading!

5 Sep 2013

Speaking of Biking . . .

posted in: outdoor fun, personal news | 0

I don’t know if I mentioned this earlier, but I’ve added bicycling to my own exercise routine. I still love rollerblading, but it’s so weather dependent (you want the path to be really dry and relatively clear of twigs and leaves, etc.) that I was losing too much outdoor exercise time to weather. Yes, I walk Captain Jack every day, but that’s not the same thing.

Regular bikes hurt my back, but last winter I took advantage of a sale to buy a recumbent bike. I love it! There was a definite learning curve in riding it: the balance and steering feel very different from a regular bike, but after a while I got the hang of it, and now I get out on it at least as often as I do on skates. Here’s what it looks like:

It’s low slung, and I do feel a little vulnerable riding on the street with it. But practically all the riding I do is on the bike path that starts two blocks from our house, and goes for eleven miles, so mostly I’m off the street, anyway.

If you hear a ding behind you, that could be me! Passing on your left!

 

3 Sep 2013

Frederik Pohl, 1919-2013

posted in: farewells, publishing, science fiction, tributes | 0

We’ve lost another giant—maybe the last of his generation of Golden Age science fiction. Frederik Pohl, along with Clarke, Heinlein, and Asimov, occupied a central position in my formative years as a lover of science fiction. More than any of the others, he kept growing in maturity and ambition as a writer—showing a burst of enormous creativity in his late 50s, with two of his finest books, Man Plus (1976) and Gateway (1977). I consider Gateway one of the top five books in all of science fiction, and I’m not sure what the other four would be.

I first encountered his work, I believe, in The Space Merchants, which he coauthored in 1953 with C.M. Kornbluth. (I didn’t read it in 1953; I was only four years old at the time. I started reading him in my teens.) I still have many old paperbacks of his earlier work on my shelf. Just scanning a list of his titles evokes all kinds of feelings of golden-age sense of wonder: Search the Sky, Gladiator-At-Law, Drunkard’s Walk (which I was especially fond of as a teenager because of the tastefully drawn naked woman on the cover), Starchild, Rogue Star, Turn Left at Thursday, Starburst, The Siege of Eternity, The Case Against Tomorrow….

And yes, the title of my own work in progress, The Reefs of Time, is a knowing echo of his The Reefs of Space.

Pohl did just about everything there was to do in the SF world. He was an editor (Galaxy magazine), an agent, a solo writer, a collaborative writer, a futurist, a columnist and blogger, a president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, and a SFWA Grandmaster. He was also a perfect gentleman, and a fascinating speaker. I only met him once or twice, but he treated me, a fresh upstart, with graciousness and warmth.

You can read more about his life and work at the New York Times and the Guardian.

I hope he’s enjoying a perfect view of the stars from where he is right now, perhaps sitting around a table with some of the other departed greats, in the observation lounge of a heavenly starship. Godspeed, Frederik Pohl, and thank you for all of the visions.

2 Sep 2013

New Ebooks You Should Check Out — Victoria Merriman

posted in: ebooks, outdoor fun, public affairs | 0

Continuing my recent series…

My friend Victoria Merriman is an avid bicyclist. So much so that when her professional and romantic lives simultaneously imploded, a few years ago, she decided to bike across the United States, to get it out of her system -and, as they say, see the U.S.A. She blogged about it, and later decided to transform her blog recollections into a memoir. That memoir is now published, in ebook in the Kindle store, and in print in the Createspace store. It’s called Finding Spoons: A Love Story on Two Wheels.

If you visit her website, you can read a sample chapter, and also about how through September, $5 from every sale is going to the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.

You can also get a little more back story on the blog of another friend, Erica Charis.

1 Sep 2013

The Roof (Part 1) Is Done!

posted in: personal news, solar power | 0

The roofers came as promised on Friday. The whole job, including scraping off three ancient layers of asphalt shingles, took just seven hours, maybe a little less. Here are some pictures I took as they worked.

There was a certain amount of noise inside the house while this was going on. 
There isn’t enough money in a politician’s slush fund to get me up on a roof like that.

This high-wire act involved installing a ridge vent.

And there it is, all done! Well, except for my spending what seemed like forever vacuuming out the attic, and walking the grounds looking for stray nails. The workers have these cool, rolling magnets that get most of the nails. Nevertheless, we found probably a dozen more that they missed. The magnets did find the great little pocket flashlight that I lost in the grass a couple of months ago. Unfortunately, by the time I thought to ask the crew boss to be on the lookout for it, it was already deep in the dumpster.

So one side of the house is done. Next step, putting up the solar panels, sometime in the next few weeks. And after that, we turn our attention to the far side of the house.

30 Aug 2013

New Ebooks You Should Check Out — Richard Bowker

posted in: ebooks, publishing | 0

My friend Richard Bowker was away from publishing for many years, prior to his recent resurgence in ebook. He is a fine writer, whose mystery/thrillers (Replica, Senator, etc.) earned him considerable notice when they were published by houses like Bantam and Morrow. The winds of publishing turned against him for a while, but in the last year, he’s returned with a vengeance, bringing all of his backlist into ebook, and publishing several excellent novels that his old publishers idiotically passed on.

His latest is The Portal, an alternate history of a New England that might have been, if a lot of things had happened differently. War between New England and Canada? Late 18th Century technology in the “present”? Like the Harry Potter books, this one has young protagonists, and can be viewed as either an adult novel or a YA novel. I was privileged to read it in manuscript, and am delighted to see it appear at last as an ebook and, still to come, a print-on-demand p-book.

Kindle | Nook

(Hm, doesn’t seem to be in the Nook store yet. Should be, soon.)

Why not take a ride into an America that might have been?

29 Aug 2013

New Ebooks You Should Check Out — Craig Shaw Gardner

posted in: ebooks, publishing | 0

My friend Craig Gardner, well known as a writer of funny fantasy (among other genres), has indie-repubbed the fantasy trilogy that made his reputation: The Ebenezum Series, concerning a wizard who is allergic to magic and his bumbling young apprentice, Wuntvor. The books are great fun, and recommended for young readers of all ages. I especially love how our heroes escape being eaten by a kraken. Here they are:

Kindle | Nook

Kindle | Nook

Kindle | Nook

You can even pre-order his forthcoming new book, Temporary Monsters!

Kindle | Nook

Kick back and have a little fun.

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