Oh, yes, No Rain. Yup, today we tie the record here in Phoenix, no rain for 101 days. Personally, I don't mind. The last time it did rain the flooding nearly destroyed my car.

I digress, I shouldn't be blathering about the weather so much. There are more important matters to discuss. Last week I finished the final edits for Data and Text Processing for Business Intelligence. It's off to my publisher for copy editing, so sometime this spring it should be coming out. This was seriously the hardest thing I've ever done, and I'm incredibly glad to have done it, even though I'd rather have teeth extracted without anesthetic than relive the experience.

Now I no longer have any excuses for not working on the two novels I've started. Fiction is a hell of a lot less daunting than technical writing - but still, I guess I want the stories to be tight, interesting, and intelligent and I'm always afraid of being boring (that's what blogs are for). A good story should be an emotional rollercoster ride for the reader.

The two novels are "Terran's End" and "Rio Sinter". I started TE back in 1998 or 99 after a contentious flame war on a message board with some troglodite who reamed me out for thinking that other species could evolve to dominance on Earth if humans somehow bit it (it was probably a bad idea to use cats as an example). I thought it was obvious that nature likes to fill voids, but the real issue was that he put humans on a pedestal, unconnected to other life on Earth - and I realized later that he didn't believe in evolution. I was shocked, it was the first time that I realized that the majority of people don't believe in evolution, don't believe that other animals are capable of thinking, and put people alone on a near-divine pedestal. I realized it would be difficult to present evidence to the contrary to anyone who believed this - it would be a waste of time. TE explores this near-divine pedestal, and what it means to be "human".

RS got started sometime last year - it kinda came in a flood (of the non-weather variety). I started thinking about how you would go about colonizing a nearby star system (in this case Epsilon Eridani - the same star Roddenberry chose for Vulcan). I started thinking about how big the space ship would be, what it would look like, and how long it would take to get there. It ended up being a very long tube, assembled in orbit in modules, with rocket engines on both ends to accelerate and decelerate. I fudged the time it would take to get there (11 some odd ly), and picked 40 years to help the plot, but this was pretty disrespectful of actual physics. The acceleration would render the characters into a mass of jelly at one end of the ship. So I chose a level of acceleration that more or less mimics Earth's gravity (I hate the standard "artificial gravity" solution. Come on!). Anyway, the journey isn't really the story, it's the destination.

In all of the scifi I've read or seen, alien life is pretty deriviative of life on Earth. In recent years, as extrasolar planets have been discovered, a debate has raged over the likelihood of life evolving on other planets, and what it would look like, etc. Ever since the monk Giordano Bruni got torched at the stake for saying that there ~had~ to be planets filled with life around the other stars in the sky, the concept of alien life has percolated through western though. Unfortunately, all the aliens we've imagined are more mirrors of us than realistically alien. Except for the ever popular human-looking robots, the aliens at least have faces. Faces however, come from a body plan that developed in the Cambrian explosion. Of the several animal body plans that developed then, everything on Earth with a face evolved from a single common ancestor (its written in our DNA). So this makes faces somewhat improbable for alien life. I do think however that sense organs would develop near nerve organs - it would make sense that they are nearby, it benefits an organism to have sense messages travel quickly to the brain.

Anyway, the other issue in this, occurs at a more fundamental level - cellular evolution. Scifi aliens tend to be animals - again, possibly a fluke of Earth's evolution. According to one of my favorite scientists, Lynn Margulis, there are five kingdoms of life on Earth - essentially, bacteria, nucleated single cell 'animals', fungus, animals, and plants, in order of cellular complexity. She states that this diversity is a result of what could be called symbiotic ingestion - a bacteria ate another bacteria, and instead of destroying it, it lived inside the other symbiotically as an organelle, and they reproduced together. This is a contentious theory in the scientific community (I've already lost the creationists a couple of paragraphs ago so it's okay to speak of a theory as a hypothesis), but it makes sense to me. I also liked the fact that it puts plants, which are inarguably more robust and more complex than us on a bit of a pedestal. So, I think, what an alien looks like depends largely on the cellular evolution that occured on a particular planet.

This is one of the things I wanted to explore in RS - it's an opportunity to make a truly alien world - which really hasn't happened yet in all the scifi ever written. I also thought it would be fun to dump a handful of stressed out, resource strapped colonists on a completely alien world and see what happened. How do a handful of people colonize a planet? I have an answer for that, but I don't want to reveal that part of the story since it is an important plot point. That question is visited in two different ways in TE as well, but there are many more "people" involved.

RS right now is a stronger, tighter story, with a straightforward plot (lots of action-adventure stuff too! Fun to write!). I'll probably focus on it, and try to get it done by the end of the year. Then there will be the whole adventure of trying to get a publisher to actually read the manuscript.

My mom also requested that I write a story about someone trapped in a elevator who gets whisked away to an alternate universe (her big phobia is elevators). That might be worth exploring in a short story. Oh yeah, my mom has written a children's book, and my sister-in-law is in the process of illustrating it, so I will be helping them try to find a publisher.

Other than that, I've been thinking about a story about immortality (via stem cells!). I started a screenplay about 2 years ago called Helios Rising that explored this, but it's kinda lame, mainly because the act structure of a screenplay is too confining. A couple of months ago, I started reading the book "Not in Kansas" which is about the rise of alternative 'religions' in America. There was some interesting stuff on 'vampires', basically people who pretend to be vampires (and who deeply believe they are). I got to thinking that these people would take a different moral approach to how stem cells are used than what is accepted as politically correct in America today. The main character of this story, patiently loitering in my head, isn't a 'vampire' but deeply wants immortality, mainly to see what happens with humanity in the future (which is exactly why I would want immortality - though humanity would probably break my heart in the end). She basically provides the means for the vampire 'community' to become essentially immortal. It would be a neat cross-genre story. I also have to finish a straight vampire short story I wrote called Texas. Lots of humor/horror fun.

Which reminds me, I also back-burnered another horror screenplay idea that I ought to, um, flesh out (titled Last). That is next to a couple of other screenplay ideas on the backburner beyond that. I had a lot for fun writing The Death of Duncan Aimes, the format is fast to write, and of course is very visual. I'd like to do more, but Hollywood is harder to crack than the fiction market.

Anyway, this short post on the weather has turned into my writing plan for the year (my apparently evil plan to implant socially contentious thoughts in the minds of hundreds, if not thousands of pliable readers). I need to get back to actual work that makes money to pay bills so I can support my shameful writing habit.