Texas: my new favorite state in the Union.
The Texas Supreme Court has cited Mr. Spock in their opinion in Robinson v. Crown Cork and Seal. The quotation (taken from dialogue in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan) is in reference to Texans’ “distrust of intrusive government and a belief that police power is justified only by urgency, not expediency.”
This effectively makes Spock a legal authority for interpreting the Texas Constitution.
Fascinating.
Full details here.
– S.
What’s that you say? You’ve heard of NaNoWriMo–National Novel Writing Month, the kamikaze approach to writing a novel that begins November 1 with the goal of writing a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30–but you’ve never heard of NaNoOutWriMo?
“What is NaNoOutWriMo?” you ask.
NaNoOutWriMo is National Novel Outline Writing Month, a contest of my own devising and of which I am (thus far) the sole participant. Anyone similarly inclined is welcome to join me. Whoever loses has to buy drinks for the winner(s).
I’ve been working endlessly on getting the research transcribed and the outline written for my long-awaited First Novel. Having finally made the journey to New York City (where the book is set) I no longer have any excuses (you know, besides friends, family, a love life, work, household chores, this blog, etc.) So given that November is NaNoWriMo, I’ve decided that it will also be the month in which I choose to make a sprint and finish my outline.
“But Steve,” you might say (as my writer’s group did this past weekend), “why not just use NaNoWriMo to write the actual book?”
Fair question. The answer is: well, that’s just not how I work, sadly.
I have bits and pieces, sure. I have some scenes that popped into my head immediately when I started thinking about writing this book. But for most of what happens…well, so far I don’t know any more about it than you do.
Whenever I try to sit down and write without an outline, some firm idea of characters, plot, subplot, themes, direction of the story… Well, it ends up a terrible mess. It takes forever while I try to figure out what happens next and that delay stresses me out, makes me angry, frustrated, doubtful of my ability and talent, and usually devolves into heavy drinking. I get very little done and almost never go back to finish whatever it was I was working on.
But whenever I’ve had a whole outline the process is so much more enjoyable and doesn’t seem like such bloody hard work.
The way I work things out (scene by scene, on little cards) is very similar to the way Tim Powers described his process to us at Writers of the Future. And I remember Kathy Wentworth saying that she’s one of the ‘sit down and start writing’ kind of authors. When she gets stuck, she says, she kills a character and sees what happens. She said she wasn’t able to do the kind of detailed outlining that Tim did and that to do so required a deep connection with and trust in your subconscious.
To me, though, it seems the opposite: it’s much easier to know where you’re going if you have a map. Just sitting down and starting without knowing where you’re headed is relying tremendously on how connected you are to your subconscious. You have to trust that without your conscious self knowing, you’ll somehow ‘get’ what the story is about, where it’s going, and what happens next.
So NaNoOutWriMo begins! As you’ll see from the counter above, I’m guestimating that my completed outline will end up being around 30,000 words. Maybe more, maybe less. But either way, I’m going to have a completed outline for the novel by the end of this month if it kills me.
Updates every Friday in November. See you on the other side.
– S.
Amazing!
In celebration of Hallowe’en, and definitely in the treat rather than trick column, I give you and incredible sci-fi jack-o-lantern: THE DEATH STAR!
You can find complete carving instructions for the Death Star Pumpkin here.
Happy Hallowe’en!
– S.
Sweet!
I’ve been invited to receive a Prix Aurora Award Nominee’s pin at a presentation ceremony to be held at SFContario, the new Toronto SF convention. I’m thrilled to be getting a pin!
Nominee pins are a long-standing tradition for both the Hugo and the Nebula Awards (you can see the little rocket ship-shaped Hugo pin attached to this WorldCon badge, and you can see one of the Nebula pins about halfway down this post by nominee Sarah Beth Durst), but they’re a new thing for the Auroras.
At the Prix Aurora Awards ceremony at the 2010 KeyCon, special pins for the winners and nominees were awarded for the first time, an initiative sponsored by Conadian A. The Canadian Science Fiction & Fantasy Association (CSFFA, sponsor of the Aurora Awards) Board of Directors has decided to award these mementos to all past winners and nominees at conventions across Canada this year.
The new pins take as their shape the primary element of the Aurora Awards, from the design by Frank Johnson. The gentle curve is intended to evoke the waves of the Aurora Borealis, for which the award is named.
The presentation of Nominee pins will continue in future years, as well, starting with next year’s nominees during the Awards Ceremony at Canvention 31, when it is hosted by SFContario in November of 2011.
For people who are not a member of SFContario and weren’t planning to attend (but you know you want to), a membership in SFContario is not required to attend the Presentation Ceremony. In other words, if you are in Toronto that weekend and would like to come see yours truly along with many of the bright lights of the Toronto SF community recieve the pin but don’t want to attend the con, you should be able to get in for the ceremony.
There are 30 years of short-listed Aurora Nominees that are being honoured at five Conventions across the country this fall. The Nominees’ Pin Ceremony at SFCONTARIO will be held Friday, 19th of November at 9:00 PM in Ballroom BC, at the Ramada Plaza Hotel, 300 Jarvis Street, Toronto ON.
See you there!
– S.
Well, it looks like Middle-earth is staying put after all.
Having secured, at long last, the right director and the right Bilbo, it looks like the right locale is now secure as well.
As reported in today’s New York Times, Warner Brothers has agreed to keep Peter Jackson’s production of “The Hobbit” in New Zealand after the government promised to change local labor laws and offered extra financial incentives.
The deal came after two days of talks between Prime Minister John Key and other government officials and executives from Warner and its New Line Cinema unit.
Filming of the two “Hobbit” movies, which is expected to start in February, had been threatened by a dispute over whether a New Zealand branch of an Australian union could engage in collective bargaining on the Hollywood films, which they have not been able to do in the past.
A New Zealand actors union, backed by a larger union, the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance of Australia, had demanded collective bargaining for work on the films, but both Warner and government officials contended that collective bargaining with actors was barred by New Zealand law.
You find all the details of the new law and the various financial incentives the Kiwis are offering Warner Bros to film ‘The Hobbit’ in New Zealand here.
Now they just have to get the rest of the principles onboard and actually make a great movie that stands up to the LOTR. That should be the easy part, right?
– S.
X: “Five minutes!? I thought it was three?”
Y: “How long have you been in this group?”
=-=-=-=
A: “What’s the horror?”
B: “Cannibalism.”
A: “I guess that’s sorta horrifying…”
=-=-=-=
“You want the treasure? Eat this. You’re the fourth guy we’ve got this year. We’re running out of families…”
=-=-=-=
“Why? Because it was a TV show I saw.”
=-=-=-=
1: “When I found out the protagonist was a mug I was…disappointed. Just a personal thing, I–“
2: “He hates mugs!”
=-=-=-=
Blue: “That’s what I wrote: object sex!”
Purple: “After she’s done she’s filled with Earl Gray’s double bag…”
=-=-=-=
According to findings reported in the New York Times there’s relatively abundant water at the bottom of a very deep, very dark crater near the moon’s south pole. There’s so much water, in fact, that this region of the moon appears to be wetter than the Sahara.
“Well, that’s not very wet,” you’re saying.
Okay, yes, it’s pretty dry. But, given that the assumption until recently by many planetary scientists was that the moon was utterly dry this is considerably damp.
The Sahara sands are 2 to 5 percent water, and the water is tightly bound to the minerals. In the lunar crater, which lies in perpetual darkness, the water is in the form of almost pure ice grains mixed in with the rest of the soil, and is easy to extract. The ice is about 5.6 percent of the mixture, and possibly as high as 8.5 percent of it.
That’s so much water, in fact, that if astronauts were to visit this crater they might be able to use eight wheelbarrows of soil to melt 10 to 13 gallons of water. The water, if purified, could be used for drinking, or broken apart into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel — to get home or travel to Mars.
This discovery was made by NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite — or Lcross, for short — which made the observations as it, by design, slammed into the Moon a year ago.
The $79 million Lcross mission piggybacked on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which was launched in June last year and has been mapping out the lunar surface for a future return by astronauts. Lcross steered the empty second stage of the rocket, which otherwise would have just burned up in the Earth’s atmosphere, onto a collision course with the Moon.
Last October, as it neared impact, the Lcross spacecraft released the empty second stage and slowed down slightly so that it could watch the stage’s 5,600-mile-per-hour crash into a 60-mile-wide, 2-mile-deep crater named Cabeus. A few minutes later, Lcross, quickly transmitting its gathered data to Earth, met a similar demise.
You might recall that for people who watched the live Webcast video transmitted by Lcross, the event was a disappointment, with no visible plume from the impacts. But as they analyzed the data, scientists found everything they were looking for, and more. Last November, the team reported that the impact had kicked up at least 26 gallons of water, confirming suspicions of ice in the craters.
The new results increase the water estimate to about 40 gallons, and by estimating by amount of dirt excavated by the impact, calculated the concentration of water for the first time.
A series of articles reporting the Lcross results appeared in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.
– S.
Now, when I first heard the news on the radio this morning that an actor had been cast to play Bilbo in the upcoming live-action adaptation of THE HOBBIT I was, admittedly, two-thirds asleep. So I thought at first that Morgan Freeman had been cast in the role.
Then, when I realized the news reader was saying Martin Freeman I thought: “Who?”
A quick look on the internets revealed a familiar face behind the unfamiliar name: “Oh, Tim from the British THE OFFICE! Arthur Dent from THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE movie! Oh, cool! He TOTALLY looks like a hobbit!”
My friend Dana, in fact, has been hoping against hope that Martin Freeman would be Bilbo since it was announced that they were finally filming THE HOBBIT.
So, much as I did when the STAR TREK reboot movie was announced, I’ve put together a photo line up of the announced cast (incidentally, that STAR TREK page was for a long time the most visited page on my blog. Curious to see whether the experience repeats with this post…)
Appearing as Oin will be John Callen, who apparently doesn’t exist on the internet…
Now some of these guys clearly look like dwarves already (I’m looking at you Stephen Hunter…) but I’m sure the rest will look the part once the prosthetic and beards are applied. It might help for now to imagine them looking more like this:
I, for one, can’t wait to see how they handle the dragon, Smaug.
Part 1 of THE HOBBIT is tentatively scheduled to begin making a fortune in December 2012.
– S.
Continuing with this week’s Saturnine theme, the chemical “letters” used to write the basic code for life on Earth might exist on Saturn’s largest moon, according to new research presented earlier this month. The findings suggest the building blocks of life on Earth may have originated in the air, not only in primordial “soup” on land.
Based on lab experiments, scientists concluded it’s possible the thick atmospheric haze on Titan contains the five so-called nucleotide bases used in DNA and RNA, as well as some simple amino acids—the building blocks of proteins.
That’s not to say Titan is any more likely to host birds, fish, or even microbes like those on Earth, emphasized study co-author Sarah Hörst, a graduate student at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.
“If there’s life on Titan, it probably—for a lot of different reasons—would not use the molecules that life on Earth uses,” she told National Geographic News. For starters, Titan is much colder—an average of -180 degrees Celsius.
“Also, life on Earth is based on water, and there’s no liquid water on Titan’s surface available for life.” Though Titan has lakes, they’re believed to be filled with liquid methane.
Instead, Hörst and colleagues think their results might mean that earthly life arose in part from atmospheric components, suggesting the popular idea of a primordial soup on Earth’s early surface might be joined by an image of a primordial haze in the sky (a purple haze, if you will…)
“One of the reasons we think this is exciting is that Titan’s atmosphere gives us a window into what kinds of molecules a similar atmosphere is capable of producing,” Hörst said.
“With Titan, we can study the process, because it’s ongoing right now. But there’s lots of evidence now that early Earth might have had a Titan-like haze, and there’s probably a lot of exoplanets that have similar chemistry going on.”
Full article is here.
– S.
Blofeld: They told me you were assassinated in Hong Kong.
James Bond: Yes, this is my second life.
Blofeld: You only live twice, Mr. Bond.
– You Only Live Twice
Sad news (again) for authors and fans of short SF: Realms of Fantasy is defuncted again after a brief, 18-month revival.
According to Warren Lapine it was the economy that did RoF in again:
“Ultimately, I believe Realms failed because of a terrible economic climate. When I purchased the magazine I did not believe that the worst economy since the Great Depression would actually get worse; that was a mistake.”
But, things have been shaky at RoF again for a while. Earlier this year, Lapine sent around a letter urging people to buy submissions or else the magazine would fold again.
Guess they didn’t get enough…
I had a story under consideration at RoF, a story I’m really proud of and which had made it past the slush reader. I was waiting, hoping expectantly, that Shawna McCarthy might buy it and thus give me my first magazine sale.
Alas.
Now it’s time to send my brave little story off to another market. The way things have been going lately, let’s hope there are some left to buy it…
You can read the farewells of RoF editors Shawna McCarthy and Douglas Cohen here and here, respectively.
– S.