The boron part of the story

I'm going with boron. It has the downsides of mostly being a mined material, but if I stick with the idea of Oberon station as a wormhole tap (for ridiculous amounts of power) you can still make the stuff the hard way.

In fact, the whole boron chain has some cool world-building aspects to it. First, if you've got the infrastructure to be pulling the raw stuff out of the ground, you can be using it in various high-tech materials; boron-fiber composites, borosilicate glass, etc. For fuel use, it has to be refined. It has to be extremely pure, and you need 11boron and leave the 10boron alone.

Which is easier than U238; with an atomic number of 5, the difference of a neutron or two makes a significant difference in mass. There's a couple different chemical isotope exchange distillation processes, the second one a "greener" one (aka fewer nasty acids to deal with). Or there's laser distillation.

And for that matter, you can breed the stuff by slamming a proton beam into oxygen-16. And I don't have any idea what the surface of Oberon might be like (it is an exotic star) you can always find some water ices or molecular clouds when you want them.

So that gives us three nice layers of tech. Oberon Station could be producing Boron out of pure, err, interstellar gas, purifying it with more lasers, and sending it straight (because it is purified in basically the same sequence of operations) to packaging up as starship fuel.

On other industrialized colony worlds, mine the stuff as borax or whatever (a lovely thing about boron is just how hydrophilic it is, meaning not only are there beds of concentrated deposits, but these are happening on planets with a water cycle (that is, probably habitable ones). And being as these are heavily industrialized colonies, those dark satanic mills can run the stuff through chemical distillation. And, as I said, turn a bunch of it out to local industry.

And then you have the worlds that could happily mine you some borax, but a twenty mule train isn't adaptable to the task of purifying and distilling the fuel, meaning you are getting the thing I wanted; the high tech worlds at the center of the web are exporting the power that makes the trade lanes possible.

And the stuff is a stable isotope, if it wasn't for oxidation and other potential contamination, you could shovel it like coal. Or like cocoa; pick your allotrope. How it is packaged I don't care but the only part of it that calls for special handling is the purity, and the consequent price.

And when you get it into your engine room, outside of confinement questions (they are still playing with inertial confinement) the short version is you superheat it into a plasma then fire an accelerated proton beam at it. Which you might be getting by blasting some hydrogen feed stock. And then the output is mostly aneutronic and as such not only less of a hassle, but you can use direct electrical conversion instead of running a steam cycle.

(Mostly. Biggest problem is 10boron poisoning. You are breeding the stuff in the reactor and you've got to get those products out of there because they do reactions which are much dirtier.)

(Which also might be with lasers.)

Today I also had a wonderful bit of serendipity. I was writing a test draft of the first scene. It felt like I needed to name my protagonist's home world. So, Keri Sinclair comes from an "ag-world"; a farming planet, breadbasket for the more centralized and population-dense worlds. They are your typical poor-but-proud. And as is already noticed, there's a bit of Celtic (and English) mythology going on.

I was thinking about Stirling Bridge, but I wiki-walked in the wrong direction and ended up on Bannock. Which reminds of Bannockburn. But is also a bread eaten in Scotland.

Oh, yeah, and connected to medieval Scottish breads there is some wonderful stuff about the manorial tenant farmers of Scotland, all sorts of thirlage and multure, grassum and quern-stones. And I'm probably not going all crazy with Scotts terminology and culture for Keri's world -- it is enough they are thought of by other worlds as hayseed farmers -- but that vassalage et al gave me a direction for her character other than joining the Navy (that is, the merchant fleet) for the education and a lack of any better options.

No, she joins because her people consider it an honor and an obligation. She doesn't need to find it later, translating from her dutiful role as middle child seeing after the young ones after the oldest children have gone off to college. No, she can walk in intending to serve her duty to the best of her ability.

The only problem is her idea of what that duty means may not quite match up with that of some of her bosses.

"The time has come," the Walrus said

"To talk of many things. Of starships and helium-3... "

And now I want to write a cozy fantasy and title it Of Cabbages and Kings. Apropos, the cabbage rules in Skyrim, second only in cooking utility to wheat (wheat, besides making bread, is a powerful alchemical ingredient.)

Yes, I re-installed Skyrim on my gaming PC, with a couple dozen graphics improvement mods.

More to the point, I was outlining a potential long-ish scene on Oberon Station, where possibly T4M is getting refueled. I went to look up physical properties of 3He. And you know what? It kinda sucks as a fuel.

The point of the exercise is that the core worlds are lousy with generated power, and can afford to produce extremely high-density fuels. And that FTL travel sits at the peak of my imagined pyramid of power usage, taking more power than can be accomplished economically with anything as simple as fossil fuels.

Helium-3 ain't it. The return for mass spent is small, and the kind of structure you need to get across the Coulomb barrier of 3He-3He is massive as well. The most common sources for the stuff are also as a byproduct of things like CANDU reactors (heavy water cooling) or tritium for bombs (going out of style). So in any near-future scenario, it would be a product of a robust civilian nuclear energy program and found in relatively small amounts.

Really, the big excitement for people is that it is technically aneutronic (practically? Well...)

So unless I reach for some sort of stable exotic matter for the power plants, it looks like antimatter is it. Or lower the bar until you can make it happen with fission, leaving antimatter for the military. Which is a distinction I was already thinking about for hand tools; those superconducting magnetic storage for civilian gear, and nuclear isomers for high-power or military applications. The latter is also essentially one-use in the field, whereas the former is ridiculously easy to recharge.

Incidentally, I've already got an inciting incident around those SMES cells. The mining camp is using a SMES bank in conjunction with solar panels. The lower-cost version that requires an outside source for refrigerant and you can see where this one is going...

Fission has a similar downside to fusion, in that everything that isn't a bomb is designed for duration, not peak power output. Except for, well, rockets. That aspect of delivering full power over a long time I guess you could crowbar into the FTL drives by having them charge for days or weeks and then having a jump limit defined by that stored power.

Anyhow, instead of cabbages and kings, I'm dealing with candy and spinach -- to borrow the terms from Mythcreants. And learning about the full glory of Dutch disease (not to be confused with Dutch Elm disease), rentier states, petro-aggression and how the resource curse can lead to stratification and even gender inequity (the short version is, a concentrated high-value resource lowers mass employment, concentrating wealth and refocusing government concerns from a taxable populace to the owners and often external investors).

The best insight I've had on Keri Sinclair over the past week or two is I'm going to make her earn that Candy. This isn't just character arc, though. Having her have to learn how to be a wizard hacker on-screen means more scenes, and more chances for world-building. I'm taking away physical conditioning before she realizes she needs it to keep use of the implant from hurting so much (and until she meets the Colonial Marines, who she still considers a bit mental on the subject).

And all in all I've chosen the slower start. Which is why I have plans for a sequence set on Oberon Station.

Cover to Cover

The Fiverrrr hire showed up and completed her work. I started the application at BookSirens to distribute ARC copies on The Early Fox, but one of the things they want is the final cover. So back to waiting on the cover artist to finish. They didn't like the desert, by the by. They liked my other concept better.

I will see. I'm itching to rough out comps for the other covers, but I need to see how the artist changes that cover so I can be going in the same direction.

I also am trying to rewrite all the book descriptions. I mostly got a pass on the one I have, but it needs a tweak or two I haven't been in the right mental space to finish. 

Rewriting the books, though... Well, I had a beta reader look through the first book, and there's no easy fix to it. I can't fix the structural issues without writing a completely different book. Fortunately, after the rewrite I just finished on The Early Fox, I feel more up for the challenge of fixing voice, cleaning up the emotional focus and plot beats, and trimming the excursions severely.

That all said.

I've been binging on Douglas Preston lately. He's got a whole series about a female archaeologist based out of Santa Fe and he's pretty much going down the line of New Mexico's biggest hits. The one I'm reading now is Roswell.

The previous, The Scorpion's Tale, was a bit too rich, combining the jornada del muerto/el camino real, the Victorio Peak treasure, the Pueblo Revolt, and the Trinity Test -- there were significant scenes at the (renamed) MacDonald ranch house. It also touched on the plight of the downwinders, the regrowth of the White Sands area after the military took it from the ranchers, and several other things I'd been writing about in The Early Fox.

The descriptions are dense and he captures the landscape better than I do (well, he lives there. Plus he's got forty-odd bestsellers to his name). But the plot sort of goes everywhere.

Really, density per se is not the problem. Preston, the Rivers of London series, the Trina Piper series, all go just as crazy for setting and history. My last beta reader said the only problem for her was the stuff was so fun she kept losing track of the plot. The beta reader before that didn't tell me to gut the stuff, just that I went a quarter to a third too far and just needed to trim back to where the stuff wasn't overstaying its welcome. Which I did, and a little more, in that two months of revisions.

Anyhow.

Made some progress on the space opera that is definitely the next thing I'm writing. My protagonist is finally coming alive for me. I was trying out some terminology to see if it felt right that people from farming worlds might be called "ag-worlders" or even "aggies." I tried a bit of dialogue in my head and the character I was using said, "Oi, farmgirl."

And Sinclair snapped back with "That's cadet farmgirl to you!"

Yeah, that's her. She's got that temper. Holding back, especially after the implant. Aware that fighting back is in her position the nuclear option. But she will make a smart remark, even if it isn't smart to do so.

And that same internal discussion (I do a lot of work and take a lot of notes during long walks) is having me change the rules slightly on cadets. Sinclair is fish and fowl; as a cadet getting what in some wet navies might be called the middy cruise or snotty tour, she is a student, is pre-commission and should not be giving orders or even stand watch without direct supervision. So much like the ratings (who are typical of wet navies in that so many are college age), but unlike them she has two parallel chains of command. The XO is who is supposed to be directing her training. Anything else goes through COB.

Which gets even more complicated as the Power Gang is sort of a world of its own. They are more highly trained and need to be, because not only does the ship not fly without them, with the kind of physics required to move faster than light, doing their job wrong means the ship explodes. They have their own top NCO (the Bull) and of course the chief engineer (officer on engineer track, like Sinclair), and unless it gets out of hand COB leaves them alone. Especially on T4M, the deck apes are his darlings and he'd prefer to be working with them then worrying about the power gang.

But I don't want to get too crazy with this stuff because while it sets up her character arc, I'm only doing a few chapters on the boat before the mining world sequence. The plan is that the abandoned mine Sinclair gets marooned at, and the refugee camp built at what was the landing pad and HQ for Atlas operations there, is the large middle of the book. Then the enclaves planet and some more stuff in space to finish things off.

In the Navy

Once again a Fiverrrr vendor has missed the deadline without a single communication. Meanwhile, I drew up two cover concepts and restarted my order at 100 Covers. I'd like to cut a deal and order the whole series at one shot, but I am still iterating.

I need to get that cover, finish the description, complete the front matter, upload to KDP, and then I'll be ready to apply at Book Sirens and see if they will let me do an ARC run before release. I'm moving slowly from book prep to publicity. And behind this book, there's clean-up and re-release happening on the previous books -- and the possibility of new books to come.

My old work called and I will be going in for a day or two this week to help with a project. Earnest is months away, at least.

And I am starting to outline the MilSF book (All Systems Blue).

The subgenres merge and blur, but within the SF genre one can generally point at something called Military SF, and within that (and also crossing over heavily with Space Opera) a story form that focuses on the career of an individual. These are books in which the character arc of that individual can only be understood within the frame of their military career. (In fact, it is often understood that their growth is entirely because of the military.) Which means, practically, there are a lot of pages of people doing military things. Not just fighting, but making bunks and having inspections.

The plot I've concocted for this book is mostly planetary setting, with no fleet engagements (at least not yet). I had hoped to start the thing on a planet. Even then, I was going to have to figure out something about how the ships work. Starting on the ship, which is the current plan, just makes that a more immediate problem.

So here's what I've got for a working premise:

A Merchant Marine. This is a system that sits at the heart of space operations, forming a centralized body of training and certification (under the Colonial Administration), operates maybe half the hulls out there, and those CA-flagged ships and people are also available to the CA in times of war.

But let's back up. Started with a colony of Earth. They built up one world and sent their own Navy as protection (strictly a military arm, this). It was an extraction colony, meant to send much-needed materials (partially-processed; FLT ain't that cheap) back to the Sol system. So it was always very industry-focused.

The colony grew, expanded, and in time won independence. By that point value-added had reached the point where the colony was actually competitive in manufactured goods. But standard of living, and the population, were enough that they'd started their own extraction colonies, which in time also grew sufficient populations to desire self-governance.

At this point we've got something more like a federation than an alliance, a strongly centralized government that is otherwise weak in comparison not so much to local rule, but to the large corporations, and the remaining structures of the old Colonial Administration.

The Navy is still there on tax dollars, their aging ships too large and expensive to crew and trotted out just enough to blow the dust off them. They and several other functions of the old CA are largely subsumed into the new government, just another bit of local rule as far as they are concerned.

So the hull and the crew of a typical Merchant Fleet ship come out of one or more of the various "worlds" (self-rule polities, aka states) but are built to Fleet standards and trained at Fleet-qualified and overseen academies, to be given the standardized Fleet certifications. The latter two being true of essentially every crew with an actual rating, and particularly important to officers.

And on paper they cooperate with the Navy, which still has some people out there serving the remnants of "Papa Earth will watch over you to make sure the big bad aliens don't bite."

And yes, that is a hell of a lot of agreements-on-paper and traditional cooperation and all sorts of interesting ways for things to fail. I am fairly sure it did get tested when fighting broke out between a couple of the secondary colonies but I haven't worked on that yet.

In structure, I'm mixing mostly American merchant marine with a bit of US Navy and particularly submarines. For no particularly good reason. Which means I'm bogged down right now with things like watches and titles which I wouldn't have to deal with at all if Keri were to spend the entire book dirtside trying to get back in contact with her ship!

Plus, as an engineering cadet...well, just figuring out watchstanding brought up the matter of the Power Gang. To figure out how the ship runs I need to know how the ship runs -- that is, what it actually looks like when we "take her out, Mr. Sulu, Warp 6."

Yet another wrinkle. So the Merchant Fleet is generically "carry stuff" for commercial trade, plus various government businesses (it ain't wartime so they are getting properly paid for it). The companies have their own vessels, of course, which vary more in design and have their own cut-outs but more-or-less follow the same regulations. The Academies are well-tested by time and the certifications are trusted so... why change what works?

They also have some more specialist branches. Support is the big one for the book here, a fairly vague category of repairs, setting up and maintaining navigation satellites and the like, probably wormhole operations, closely connected with the labs/yards that are busy testing safety systems and so on, rescue services most likely...

So our boat is T4M (Ln). Doesn't get a name (the crew calls it "Tammie.") Support Branch, built like a Swiss army knife for a little fire-fighting, a little repair, a little survey. There's a standardization taken a bit too far for Support, meaning flexibility was optioned over utility (not that they don't have very specialized and very effective single-role ships and crews). Support was really intended to support, well, Fleet operations. Most of them, especially the gopher ships like Tammie, were never meant to go all Starship Enterprise out into the wilds far from the core worlds.

Add one more thing into the mix. That moment when Earth figured out how to run an extraction colony far outside of the Solar System, that moment when the extraction colony really, really needed a bigger breadbasket and developed Keri's "Ag-world" home planet as basically a big-ass farm? Well, that moment has happened again.

Keri's world is now developed enough, and with a rising technical competence and population and rising living standard putting the lie to the "bunch of hicks on a farm" stereotype, that they are joining the clamor for markets (and mines) somewhere else other than their own scenic mountain ranges. So is everyone else. And the dendritic network has touched a whole new cluster of potentially rich worlds to exploit and/or trade with. Trade with, because they already have locals.

That's put everyone into running around with their own Bright New Ideas. The CA is jumping out from hiding with a "See, this is why you kept us around!" The Navy is being very wary and enquiring if perhaps they could get that increased budget Real Soon Now. The corporations are eager to show who is most bleeding-edge of the bleeding edge and some of them are going Full MacNamara in wonderful schemes for how they can make their crews safe and effective.

Which is how Keri gets yanked out of her career progression of getting her degree in mechanical engineering and a nice quite job in Fleet HQ running the future space equivalent of a Steiner Tunnel, or helping to develop the next better version of a Halon fire suppression system. Fleet needs warm bodies to fill those new hulls. (And Tammie is so new it still has that new car smell.)

And one of those labs she had hopes of joining has been brainstorming with big-brained Terry expats and has found a way to download terabytes of survival skills into an adult human brain. If they can just get it to work right, this will surely be exactly the thing for crews getting sent to the frontier in this new gold rush.

Blue Coal

The person that was advising me on genre placement -- and we'd just moved into cover design -- got vanished by Fiverrrr. Second time that has happened. Sure, I get the money back, but I've lost all the time I sunk into working with her.

So I've got a formatted manuscript, but no cover. I broke out my old drawing pad to sketch some ideas but that has been going slow. When I get out of this current sick I'll open up some maps and see if I can do something with that.

I need that cover before I can sign up for ARC, and I want to do that sort of thing before I release. So the book is still in limbo; essentially unread, unless you count two editors.

I am currently using a jigsaw puzzle model for the brainstorming portion of a novel. That is; that there are edge pieces which you already know you want in the book, and the more you fill the remaining open space, the more it is clear what shape the missing pieces will need to be.

When I finished the trunk novel -- Shirato -- I actually spread print-out over the floor to try to understand how big the chapters were, how many pages there were between events, and how much more needed to be written. Now I have that as an instinct. And my instinct tells me I'm missing about a third of the plot for All Systems Blue.

Except, this one it feels like it isn't going to add a chunk of new, it is going to elaborate on what is already there until it fills the space.

I just binge-watched Last Resort (it's sort of The Silent Service with an American boomer), a couple of movies so forgettable I can only remember the name of one of them (Moonfall), and read some stuff from Brett Devereaux about the antics of the "Statue Profile Pictures" crowd. And, of course and as always, reading the truly endless pages at Atomic Rockets.

That jostled things enough. Unfortunately, the fleshing-out is pushing me towards a slow burn opening. I wanted to do a Storm Over Warlock; start the narrative with Keri being marooned on a hostile world after her ship sent a small party to find out why a remote mining installation stopped transmitting.

Instead I'm needing to start back with T4M (Ln) still back in the Core Worlds, with time for discussion of their role in Fleet, and for Keri to get into a one-sided fight, plus we get to look at Oberon Power Station before we set out for the Frontier.

But the politics got a lot meatier, meaning there is plenty for my protagonist to do both on the mining world and on the "legations" world; a world where a whole bunch of different aliens (humans included) have set up enclaves for trading and politics. The "Corsairs" are absolutely are an agent of state policy (for much as the Klaathi have a state), and Atlas Metals is not just the victim of their raids; they are ready and eager to return in kind, and may have left the crew on the mining world out to dry for exactly those aims.

One big thing I haven't got, though, is anything cool for her to do with engineering. I've got some moments for The Thing, when she is left without good options and takes the explosive one nobody in their right minds would have considered. But those are mostly leveraging the situation. I want her to be able to do something crazy-dangerous and undoubtably destructive that comes out of the tech and science at play. The "What do you mean, bring up the hyperdrive inside a gravity well?!" sort of thing.

And the problem with that sort of thing is figuring out why people aren't already doing it.

Section 106 rule changes

 

Anyone who is in American archaeology knows exactly what that headline is referring to. Anyone who has been following the current administration has a pretty good idea what kind of changes are being imposed. Yes, imposed; no discussion, no consultation, just dropped with a typical DOGE chainsaw, administration fiat, hamburder-fueled late-night tweet.

That's Section 106 of the 1966 National Historical Preservation Act. The basis of CRM in the States.

And the changes are not what we could have expected. They are much worse.

Consultation no longer required with SHPO and THPO, as well as local agencies.

Public participation now discretionary. Of a process which now belongs, not to a historical preservation agency, but the contractor that wants to bulldoze that cultural property.

If that wasn't enough, a new class of "categorical exclusions." As in, coal mining gets a free pass, no discussion needed or wanted.

Natural features excluded from preservation rules (say goodbye to that sacred mountain). And there's more. Yes, more, including a clause that the President can at any moment unilaterally declare a "state of emergency" requiring waiving any and all remaining protections.

Basically, it is drill baby drill and who the hell cares about stewardship.

Hired Oscar Wilde

I got The Early Fox back from the proofreader. The main thing he did was change " -- " to "--" and add a trailing space to ellipses when they occurred in the middle of a sentence.

All of my style guides say that the em dash can be used with or without spaces; AP style likes the space, Chicago no space. But the trend is also spaces for journalism, no spaces for books. So I'll go for that. I had already switched to no spaces when used at the end of a line. Which, oddly, my proofreader missed in the one or two spots I hadn't it right myself.

He gave me about a dozen line notes. Of which half changed the meaning of the sentence on the way to making them more grammatical.

So did I get value out of the service? Well, the nature of the changes is a sign this was a human working, not a robot. (He caught the one place Penny returned to her hotel, after she'd kicked up a fuss all the way back in Chapter 3 that she was choosing to call it a motel.)

And he did pick up several annoying omitted words or extra/missing spaces.

But the thing I really gained is assurance. Most of the mistakes he caught were things I needed to learn, and now that I have, I don't need him. The even better thing is what he didn't find; the many pages that didn't have a single note on them.

I am dumping money down this drain, and I haven't even hired a cover artist yet.

The SEO person (that is, Kindle marketing person) has sent me an offer but I haven't signed it yet. She's the one who zeroed in on thriller over adventure, and mystery over archaeology.

Which brings me to the next book.

I'd really love trying to write on deadline. With five (six) books down now, I have a pretty good idea of the tasks and labor and I could break it down to milestones.

Had a bunch of ideas floating around for Penny. Today over brunch a bunch of them fell together -- but not in quite the forms I was expecting or hoping.

The stuff I wanted to do with a EPCOT-like planned community, and my Elon Musk stand-in, and a tech center somewhere in West Virginia or something, packed up, grabbed the science museum I had lying around along with an ex NASA engineer, and went to Greenland.

So now that's the over-the-top one -- but it isn't in conus anymore so wrong for the Bill Bixby arc.

What was left took the coal miners strike, went looking for a crime, and after a weird detour through urban fantasy heroine archetypes, leather coats, and vampires found itself a for-profit juvie center Penny can stage an intervention at -- after a contested election goes through the the help (and hindrance) of a modern-day Mother Jones.

And the only reason to put up with Penny going underground again is that I get to call one of the parts "Enemy Mine."

Anyhow, lots of fun, but not exactly what I was wanting for the next episode. Maybe I should just get that tagelharpa for her and do the viking story next...

If I only I was closer on Blue. I have the basic layout of the place. I have lots of tasty bits with my tech and aliens.

I lack a sensawunda. There's nothing about the place you could put on a cover or in the elevator pitch. They aren't on the back of a giant turtle or doing magic with hair plaiting or have laser shurikans.

I think the problem was going in the Honor Harrington direction. That is, Mil-SF with the focus being on one person's career progression. Because those things do love them politics and engineering but only from the numbers side. Which gets as excessive as their counts of missiles.

(I just read the first book of the Lost Fleet series. Space battles galore. The protagonist is the admiral of a fleet and the POV character. Through the length of the series, we get like five settings, tops. And two of them are his cabin and the galley.)

So I also have a plot currently that goes after one group of aliens and beats them up. I can't make it really go deeper into the politics or philosophy or theme of the place, much less the physics or whatever. It is just "oh, and we have to shoot at some bad guys."

The main reason I'm not quickly switching gears and cranking out the Tiki book instead, is I want to decorate my space to put myself in the right mood first. And despite retiring, I have yet to clean up my place properly.

Well, that and I actually cranked out 7,000 words already -- in one day! -- on a new, nonfiction book.