Peace on Earth! Goodwill to All!
Green shirts by Karen Hallion. Red academic robes.
Christmas 2014
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Author Archives: acubedsf
Athena’s Daughters 2 – Guest Post from Tess Tabak
As part of the Athena’s Daughters 2 Kickstarter campaign, the authors and editors are doing a blog tour. Today I am delighted to be hosting Tess Tabak here at acubedsf.
Tess Tabak is a writer, filmmaker, and co-editor of The Furious Gazelle. She is a recent graduate of Purchase College, where she won the Ginny Wray award for fiction. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her most recent film, BEANED, recently premiered at the Williamsburg International Film Festival in Brooklyn.
Here she is to talk about writing science fiction and fantasy:
How is your story SF/Fantasy?
My story in Athena’s Daughter’s II, “The Miraculous,” has elements of fantasy because it is set during the zombie apocalypse.
Why did you write this story/do you write in general in this genre?
A lot of what I write is non-fiction, or satirical. If it suits the piece I’m writing, I’ll incorporate science-fictional or fantastical elements. It’s not something that I set out to do on purpose.
I started to write this story just by describing a place, and then before I knew it there were zombies there.
How did SF/Fantasy help you explore the themes/ideas you were trying to explore?
Aside from adding external pressure to the plot, zombies fit really well with some of the philosophic issues I wanted to explore in this piece.
Sounds intriguing! I can’t wait to read it!
If you’re interested in following Tess, you can find her at:
Twitter: twitter.com/tesstabak
If you’re interested in The Furious Gazelle (with a name like that, how can you not be?), you can find it at:
Web Site: thefuriousgazelle.com
Twitter: twitter.com/furiousgazelle
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Furious-Gazelle/189327471251948?ref=br_tf
Note that the Athena’s Daughter 2 Kickstarter has a special incentive for those who back the project today (Friday, December 19) to see if we can get to 425 awesome backers by the end of the day.
Bryan Young, one of the founding authors of Silence in the Library and the editor of Apollo’s Daughters, has offered up his novel The Serpent’s Head as a gift to everyone who has backed this project by 11:59pm Friday, as long as that number is 425 or greater.
It’s a space western, and I’m looking forward to reading it. Here’s a little summary:
The man called Twelve is a hired gun, taking his laser pistol from planet to planet, hiring his services out to the highest bidder. He finds himself on Glycon-Prime, a new colony at the edge of space. On the hunt for work, Twelve blows into a small, frontier town only to find a massacre. The only survivors? A trio of young children, devastated by the murder of their families and hellbent on hiring the gunslinger to help them get revenge on the leader of the vicious mutants responsible, the man known only as “The Serpent’s Head.”
So, check out Tess Tabak, the Furious Gazelle, The Serpent’s Head, and the Athena’s Daughters 2 Kickstarter!
Athena’s Daughters 2
The Kickstarter for Athena’s Daughters 2 is live and is already meeting some of its stretch goals! If you’re interested in pre-ordering the book, which includes a story by yours truly, now is the time! It’s worth the click just to go watch the video, which is tons of fun.
2014 Geminids
The 2014 Geminids were the best meteor shower I’ve seen in years.
I live in a suburban area with light pollution, so I knew not to expect the maximum number of meteors per hour predicted by the press.
When I went out Friday night (the night before the shower peak) to practice meteor photography, I saw 5 meteors in 37.5 minutes. That’s better than I’ve seen during the peak of some other showers.
When I went out Saturday night (the shower peak), I saw 35 meteors over 3 hours. That’s pretty good given that the clouds were coming and going and I spent some time inside processing pictures whenever the clouds got discouraging.
Two of the meteors I saw were pretty spectacular. Both had a greenish color to them, and one widened and brightened as it crossed the sky. Unfortunately, the camera was turned the wrong way, so I only captured the start of the first one.
Here are the pictures I captured (camera geek information below for those interested):
The first meteor with Gemini and Orion:
The start of one of the really bright meteors:
My last meteor picture:
To get these pictures, I used the following equipment and settings:
- Canon EOS 60D in manual mode set at 4.0 F-stop, 15-second exposure, ISO 1000
- Sigma 10-20 mm lens, set at 10 mm, manual focus at infinity
- Intervalometer set to trigger a new picture every 18 seconds
- Tripod
Because meteors are so fleeting, I needed to capture as much light as possible. So I started with the smallest f-stop to set the lens wide open. Then I wanted to have as long of an exposure as possible so that I would catch an entire meteor trail and not spend too much time on the overhead of triggering the next shot. I started with 30 second shots, but the ISO I had to use to not wash out the pictures was pretty low, and although I should have seen meteors in some of the shots, I didn’t. So I switched to 15 seconds with a higher ISO. I managed to capture some of the meteors that I saw, but not others. I think when I try it again I may go to 10 seconds and an even higher ISO.
Unfortunately, it looks like it’s going to be cloudy tonight, so I may have to wait until the next shower to try it out.
Orion EFT1 Mission
I got up early yesterday and again today to watch the launch of NASA’s newest spacecraft, Orion. This flight, Experimental Flight Test 1 (EFT1), is, as its name suggests, a flight test to check out critical Orion systems before we send it further away with people on board.
I cheered when it successfully launched this morning and did not get any writing done because I was too intrigued with the Orion TV feed.
Here were the thoughts I had while watching:
– I’m conditioned to watch Space Shuttle launches and know the event timing, and it was odd for me to watch a launch with different timing and steps. Shouldn’t the side rockets fall off after two minutes? Apparently, no.
– I saw some insulation popcorning off the Delta IV in the rocket cam video feed, but I didn’t have to worry about anything hitting Orion since it’s on top of the stack. That’s a big benefit to the top of the stack design.
– I was furious with the idiots who kept tweeting Orion had blown up. Can I tunnel through the internet and terminate their connections? Please?
– I cheered when we started getting good telemetry off Orion via its own communication system and the Tracking and Data Relay Satellites (TDRSs).
– I loved the views of Earth from the Orion cameras.
– I was happy when I saw the Orion animation showing Orion was passing the Texas Gulf Coast. Unfortunately, I hadn’t thought to use my screen capture program to catch it. And it was raining here at the time, so there was no point in going out to wave.
– Once Orion was up in its elliptical orbit, the view of the Earth was a tri-color Earth much like my tri-color Moon from my lunar eclipse photos: white limb, blue middle, and black in shadow. I need to figure out if that’s just an effect of the camera’s dynamic range because if not I want to capture the tri-color effect in the story I’m currently writing.
– Orion did, as expected, experience a communication blackout when the reentry plasma got too thick.
– The video of the landing and splashdown – from the Ikhana drone and Orion itself – were awesome. I loved the infrared point of the approaching Orion and getting to see all the parachutes deploy.
– It was great that NASA TV and ustream broadcast the entire mission, and I enjoyed sharing the event with the twitter community. I don’t tweet often, but this event seemed made for it.
I spent the whole morning watching the flight. What an awesome day!
Congratulations to the NASA and Lockheed Martin Orion teams on a flawless flight! I am such a NASA fangirl! Luckily for me, I work for a NASA contractor and occasionally get to do work for Orion. But today I just got to be a fan. 🙂
[1] Ground track picture from NASA Flickr.
[2] Tri-color Earth picture screen shot from ustream NASA TV feed.
November 2014 Stats
I think WriMo (Write More) month went pretty well. Now I need to keep up that pace! How did your November go?
WORDS WRITTEN: 7227
HOURS SPENT WRITING: 18.6
WORDS/HOUR: 388.5
New Collective Noun
Last night I took my daughter downtown to practice nighttime city driving [1], and we encountered crowds of people crossing the streets [2]. Sometimes we had to wait quite a while for a gap in the pedestrians so that we could turn. I decided that there should be a collective noun to describe a group of pedestrians, so I invented one: an amble of pedestrians.
Now I want to find a way to fit that phrase into a story. What’s your favorite collective noun?
[1] She did a great job negotiating the crowds, handling the traffic with patience and poise.
[2] It turns out the Rockets game had just ended.
Yesterday’s Sunset
When I walked out of my building yesterday, I was greeted with this stunning view. Happily my iPod camera did a good job of capturing the color.
Ursula K. Le Guin Writing Challenge
Ursula K. Le Guin in her acceptance speech at the National Book Awards set a challenge for writers:
“I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right of kings. … Power can be resisted and changed by human beings; resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words. I’ve had a long career and a good one, in good company, and here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. … The name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.”
Are you writing something about a better way of living? Something that gives the reader hope for the future? If so, tell me about it in the comments below! I want to read it.
WriMo
It’s the month of November and time for the writing frenzy known as NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month – where writers try to produce a 50,000 word novel in a month.
Since I’ve been collecting statistics on my word count per hour for years, I know that 50,000 words in a month would be close to a full-time job for me. At least it would be given my style of writing.
I tried a word war with a friend last weekend (you set a timer for a given amount of time and see who can write the most words), and it was a lot of fun. I wrote 700 words in 20 minutes. (We tied, BTW.) So it turns out that I could perhaps produce 50,000 words in a month without it being a full time job.
However, I’m used to doing a lot more word crafting while I’m writing, and I’m not at all satisfied with this dashed-off 700 words. Further, I actually enjoy doing the word crafting, and I missed being able to play with the words while writing. So my task for the week was to turn last weekend’s words into words that I was happy with before going on to write new stuff.
For those who get something out of NaNoWriMo, more power to you, and the best of luck in reaching your goal. Me, I’m not doing NaNo, I’m doing WriMo – “Write More!”
Space&Aliens 