Yeah, yeah, I know. Shut up. 😉

– S.

As if it wasn’t cool enough that NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft passed within 435 miles of Comet Hartley 2 about 10 a.m. EST on Thursday, November 4, soon after it turned its high-speed antenna toward Earth to beam back the photos it had taken.

And now some enterprising YouTuber has made what’s described as a “morph animation” of the close approach images. The comet approaches slowly and in perfect silence, just as if you were there with it in deep space.

The Deep Impact spacecraft officially completed its mission in 2005 after it visited the comet Tempel 1, letting loose an 800-pound piece of equipment that crashed into that comet as it passed by. The collision allowed scientists to identify some of the minerals beneath the surface of Tempel 1.

But the spacecraft still had plenty of maneuvering fuel left, so NASA approved a second mission, called Epoxi, that included a visit to a second comet. Three years ago, the mission had to shift course when the comet it was aiming for, Comet Boethin, could not be found. The backup target was Hartley 2.

This is animation of a comet is very cool, especially because in the novel I’m outlining this month two comets play very important roles…

– S.

A strong first week! But…I’m thinking that was the easy part. See, what I worked on this week was just the stuff that I’ve had rattling around in my head for the last year or more. So I’ve outlined all those scenes and events that immediately leaped to mind when I starting thinking about this novel.

But there’s only the vaguest hints of order. Still missing are all the little connective bits, like sinew that hold muscle to bone. The great yawning chasm of The Middle is still unknown, and while I think I have a denouement I don’t yet have a climax.

Hmm…I’m wondering now if 30,000 words is going to be long enough for this outline. I’m beginning to worry about just how long the book itself may end up being.

Oh well. Nothing to do but keep calm and type on.

I’m anticipating the next several weeks being more difficult than this one…

– S.

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.