Category Archives: Uncategorized

Fireball Sighting

Posted on by
Reply

Yesterday, as my family was driving down the freeway, I saw a bright light in the sky.  Initially, I thought it was a helicopter with its lights on, but it was moving too fast and disappeared midair.

Since watching meteor showers and trying to “catch” a meteor with my camera is a hobby of mine, I suspected I had seen a stray fireball, so I took note of the time and our location (and wished we had a dashcam that would have caught the event).

When I got home, I checked the American Meteor Society web site, and someone else in the area had reported seeing a fireball at the same time!  So I contributed to science and added my observation.

I also checked my favorite satellite visibility web site, and the time and trajectory did not match up with any visible satellites or Iridium flares (and I think it was moving too fast to be either).

That event is now AMS event 1149 with three observers to date.

http://www.amsmeteors.org/fireball_event/2013/1149

Did anyone else in the Houston area see it?  Do you have any stories of other fireballs you have seen?

The most amazing one I’ve ever see was over Florida almost 20 years ago.  Amazingly bright and I was convinced that one landed somewhere.  Unfortunately, I didn’t know how to capture or report that data at the time, but I’ve always wondered what happened to it.

Human Characteristics in Aliens

Posted on by
1

Seasaucer002

I am working on revising a short story I wrote about sea aliens earlier this year.

The sea aliens are, physically, nothing like humans.  They look like saucers, move by sucking in and blowing out water, and communicate by wrinkling their surfaces.

Even though it is critical to the story that the sea aliens communicate with one another, I missed two obvious opportunities to have them do so.  In both cases, the aliens are in a dangerous situation.  If humans were in a similar situation, we would be nattering away to each other about what to do.  I live on the Texas gulf coast, and whenever a hurricane comes into the gulf and especially when Hurricanes Rita and Ike were headed for us, we were continuously talking about what the hurricane would do, what we should do, and what we could lose.

So why didn’t I have my aliens doing the same thing?

After all, part of the fun of creating aliens is to think about what life would be like for a different type of intelligent being.  What would threaten them? What would be important to them?  What goals would they have?  The answers to these questions depend up on the aliens, of course, and I find them fascinating.

And yet I didn’t have my aliens communicating when they would be.

I think that is because I fell into the laziness trap and didn’t think through how the aliens would behave in these situations.  And, because I didn’t think, I had them behaving like the animals they look like instead of like the aliens they are.

That was wrong, and I am fortunate that some excellent critiquers pointed that error out to me.  I will be fixing it in the rewrite.

Have you thought through how the aliens behave in your SF?

Have you read any SF where you thought the aliens were too much like animals?  Or too much like people?

Broken Collarbone Inspiration

Posted on by
6

A month ago, on a rainy day, I slipped and fell on my tile floor while walking into my own house.  I was so stunned when I fell that I think my brain stopped working for a few minutes because I could not do anything.  When my brain cranked back into gear, I had a hard time getting up because my right arm (my dominant arm, of course) hurt so much.  A trip to the ER revealed a broken collarbone.

The bad news is that this has cut into my writing time because I haven’t wanted to do much.  The good news is that I’ve had lots of time to read.

I’ve been enjoying the Maisie Dobbs mystery series by Jacqueline Winspear.  In the author interview at the end of the first book, she says that she had an accident while writing the book that kept her from using her right arm.  Apparently a friend asked her, “Well, you’ve got a left arm, haven’t you?”  So she wrote much of the book with just her left hand.  Inspiration!  I still have a left hand, too, and I can even use my right hand some of the time.  I need to get back to writing.

It has taken a month, but I am finally able to get through a day without taking pain medicine (NB: I hate taking medicine, so that doesn’t mean pain free).  And so far today has been a 830 word day.  Yea!

What inspires you?

April Stats

Posted on by
Reply

Here are my stats for April.  Late and low this month, for reasons that will be explained in my next post.  My words/hour ratio is better than March, mostly because I was writing something new instead of revising.

 

WORDS WRITTEN: 3053

HOURS SPENT WRITING: 12.1

WORDS/HOUR: 252

New Ideas

Posted on by
Reply

Whenever I get an idea for a new project, I write it down in my Ideas file.  Usually, by the time I’ve finished the first draft of a project, I’ve already had several ideas for the next one.  Usually, one of them is banging around my head, ready to get out.  If I don’t have one clamoring to get written, I can read my Ideas file and see what sparks my attention.

Last month, that didn’t happen.  I was ready for a new project, and nothing sparked. 

Of course, I can always spend my writing time editing.  And I considered going back to the last novel I started and working on that.  In fact, I did start working on it.

And then I read something online that made me mad.  And while considering my response to what made me mad, I came up with a science fiction analog for the situation, a setting, a character, a problem … and a new story. 

It’s going to be a fun April.

How do you come up with story ideas?

March Stats

Posted on by
3

Here are my stats for March. Less productive than February. I’ve found that trying to write 100 words a day is not a good metric when I’m in revision mode, which is where I am now on two stories. It’s also not a good metric when I’m in deep thought mode, which is where I also was on one of those stories. But, when I’m in writing mode, it works insanely well. And, since I’m now in writing mode for a new project … I’m hoping April will go well!

WORDS WRITTEN: 2261

HOURS SPENT WRITING: 16.9

Published: Stupid Manuscripts

Posted on by
Reply

I am very pleased that Interstellar Fiction has published a story of mine called “Stupid Manuscripts”.  You can find it here:

            http://interstellarfiction.com/fiction/stupid-manuscripts-by-antha-ann-adkins

The idea behind “Stupid Manuscripts” – that a computer could generate random scientific articles, one of which might be close enough to right that a scientist could use it – is one that I had in my files for years and years before I found a fun way to write it.

The ability of a million monkeys to randomly type out Hamlet (or any other work of Shakespeare) sooner that the heat death of the universe has been proven to be almost impossible.

            http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem

However, computers have been used to generate text a word at a time a number of times.

In fact, a computer wrote a book in 1984:

            http://www.ubu.com/historical/racter/index.html

And computers have written fake science articles to test how well science journals and conferences screen their papers:

            http://thatsmathematics.com/blog/archives/102

            http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17288-crap-paper-accepted-by-journal.html

And a computer was used to generate a chapter of the “world’s worst novel” which was written to show that Publish America will accept anything:

            http://www.travistea.com/

Unfortunately for my character Hugh, in reality all of these generated works are nonsense.

The likelyhood of a computer generating a close-to-right scientific article (particularly one with equations, where you’d go back to the case of the infinite monkeys typing a character at a time with an even bigger alphabet of symbols) is still highly improbable.  So Hugh really had a lot of work to do …

And I had a lot of fun playing with acronyms.

I hope you enjoyed the story.