The Moon with Jupiter

Posted on by
1

Driving home this evening, I was struck by the beautiful sight of the nearly full Moon with Jupiter.  With the dynamic range of the human eye, Jupiter looked quite bright while the Moon had some detail.  With the more limited dynamic range of the camera, I could not capture the range.  The picture of the pair below was taken with two two-stop graduated neutral density filters, and yet Jupiter (to the left) is hard to see and the Moon lacks detail. I was pleased with how my unfiltered pictures of the Moon solo turned out. Enjoy!

MoonAndJupiterFiltered20140114

Moon20140114

Clever Bubble

Posted on by
2

I am very pleased that Perihelion Science Fiction has published my story “Clever Bubble.”  You can find it here:

http://www.perihelionsf.com

One of the fun bits of writing this story was designing the game that the aliens play with Will.  I wanted to have something like soccer, but with four teams and played in three dimensions.  (Actually, I had originally considered having eight teams, but it got too complicated.)  Each team has their own goal (the arrows’ mouths) at one corner of a vertical square, and each team has their own ball (Will is the ball for his team).  After each time a team scores by getting its ball into another team’s goal, the goals can be re-arranged to make it more difficult for a team to score where they need to.  In order to win, a team has to have scored on all the other teams more recently than they have scored on it.  So it’s a game of strategy as well as motion.  Will, as an intelligent soccer ball, only figures out how to score and not how to keep score.  But now you know how to do both!

I hope you enjoyed the story.

December Stats

Posted on by
Reply

Words/hour was way up this month; I think that was due to writing a novel instead of short stories.  I was doing a good job keeping up my writing streak until Christmas hit.  I’m ready to start a new streak with the new year!  How about you?

WORDS WRITTEN: 4823

HOURS SPENT WRITING: 12

WORDS/HOUR: 401.9

November Stats

Posted on by
Reply

Although I did not participate in NaNoWriMo, I did start a new novel and write two and a half chapters this month.  I’m pretty pleased with my stats, where I wrote every day, averaged more than an hour a day, and wrote at a pace that suggests I could write a novel a year. 

WORDS WRITTEN: 8489

HOURS SPENT WRITING: 33.1

WORDS/HOUR: 256.5

Saturn hovers over Mercury

Posted on by
Reply

MercurySaturn20131127Med

As Murphy would have it, we’ve had heavy clouds and rain this week, so we weren’t able to look for Comet ISON.  The clouds finally blew away this morning, so we braved the cold morning to see if we could spot the comet through the colors of the sunrise.  We didn’t spot the comet, but we did see Saturn hovering above Mercury.  It was quite striking, don’t you think?

Happy NaNo!

Posted on by
Reply

To all those participating in National Novel Writing Month: good luck!

In spite of having a novel-length project ready to start, I will not be participating this year.  This year is the first year I’ve tracked both words and hours, so I know that writing the 1700 words a day required for NaNo would be a full time job for me, and I already have a full time job [1].  Further, I know that I have never written that many words in a day, even when I was deeply involved in a project.  So reaching the goal would require a radical change in my writing process, and it’s not a change that I either need or desire to make.

However, since it is National Novel Writing Month, I will be working on the novel-length project, plodding along at my 250 word/hour pace.  I won’t be crossing the finish line with all the NaNo hares, but I hope to cross it eventually, turtle-style.

**

[1] And I am very relieved that the government reopened so I could keep my job.  If the government had stayed closed, I was planning on making NaNo my full time job and seeing how that worked out.  I’m glad to not be doing that experiment.