My short story “Two Strikes Against” was selected as the Winner in the inaugural Next Generation Short Story Awards! (Official list to be available next week.) UPDATED: Link here https://shortstoryawards.com/winners.php?year=2024
It will be published in an anthology later this year. (Not sure if an ebook will be available.)
Basically it’s a story about a Japanese baseball player on Mars, with a twist. It got rejected a couple of years ago by several scifi magazines, so I figured why not try the sports category.
Especially since there was no scifi category.
Just grateful and thankful for the award. I hope you all get a chance to read the story!
(FWIW “Marsball” is mentioned by characters in an early chapter of Bringer of Light. In fact, I was going to call the story that. Very glad that I didn’t in the end!)
This time I figured out how to import the slides directly into mmHmm, and I managed to update my MacOS to Sonoma, which allowed me to use my USB mic (yay). But I also called Ceres a “moon” at some point (it’s not a Moon but a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt near Mars). Oops. Not enough time to edit that bit out or record it again, so just word to the wise! Always fact-check videos, folks. Enjoy!
The asteroids in question are Iris (124 miles / 200 km in diameter) and Massalia (84 miles / 135 km). Both are in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Iris is about the size of the US state of Maryland, while Massalia is roughly the size of Connecticut.
Note that the same observatory also found water on the Moon, about a “12-ounce bottle” worth. Not nearly enough for a settlement, but where there’s surface water (albeit trapped in soil on the surface), there’s likely to be more underneath.
This time I tried “mmhmm” studio. Some bumps and bruises, but managed to survive!
Oh, and it doesn’t really have a “pronunciation guide.” Oops. The names (I thought) were fairly easy to pronounce. (Weng is not “wehng” but more like “wong,” or even “wung,” but otherwise straightforward…)
It’s also thought that water on Earth is largely (or entirely) the result of comets and asteroids bombarding it (it remains debatable to what degree Earth already had water, but since when it formed the Earth was first molten lava and then dry as a bone, I think it far more likely that water came here from elsewhere, and science tends to agree).
I’ve already blogged about the origins of Bringer of Light, when I (finally) finished the first draft back in early September. In a sense, I’ve been constantly blogging the science behind the story.
But I haven’t discussed the characters at all. And despite what some old-fashioned writers may think (just finished a particularly badly-written snarky “why your books don’t sell” piece of trash that claimed science fiction shouldn’t have any emotions in it…say what? sorry not sorry), if the characters of a story aren’t interesting, there isn’t much point in reading a story.
So for the next couple of weeks, I’ll write a bit about the characters — the crew of the Artemis, the crew of the Sagittarius, the UN flunkies (sorry, career politicos) on Mars and Luna and so forth. There are lots of characters, and their interaction is complicated. Or is it?
I would get into my scifi influences at this point, but long blogs are slogs. So I’ll come back to that tomorrow!
Coffee time. Also to finish up at least one unrelated project and also the hardcover manuscript (which needs to be a different paper size than the paperback for some reason).
The moment we’ve all been waiting for is nearly here!
Bringer of Light is finally set to be released on March 15, 2024! (Click the link to see a book synopsis and two brief excerpts; Smashwords also has an excerpt from the beginning chapters.)
Stop by Draft2Digital to see links to your favorite bookstore online!
UPDATE: I have some difficulty convincing D2D to distribute to Amazon. Therefore, I have decided to publish Bringer of Light directly on Amazon. Stop by here to order for Kindle (released March 15th). Paperback and hard cover are also in the works.
The so-called Big Ring has a diameter of about 1.3bn light years, making it among the largest structures ever observed. At more than 9bn light years from Earth, it is too faint to see directly, but its diameter on the night sky would be equivalent to 15 full moons.
This is important because it contradicts the so-called “cosmological principle” that everything in the universe is basically evenly distributed.
Just thinking about it, though, it makes little sense to assume that galaxies are all evenly spaced. Assuming the Big Bang was a single point should not imply even spacing of anything.
FWIW the “Big Ring” is evidently more a corkscrew shape, directly aimed at us. Evidence of “cosmic strings”? Maybe.
This is not as interesting as technology that will allow us to build hotels and colonies at LaGrange points or communities on Mars, but it’s still interesting. Sorta. Maybe?
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