"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.

Go home, LTXV2.3 you're drunk!

...but you have crazy taste in music!

I finished the edit, then handed the manuscript off to a proofreader who will be finding many, many things I missed. In fact, while I was compiling I realized I'd been inconsistent with my hot peppers, and had to find the New Mexico standard spelling for the things. (It is "chile" there, not "chili.")

And celebrating with a short break. I've actually got Wan 2.2 running pretty good on a three-step ksampler with the latest lightX accelerator. SmoothMix high and low, with a fast move Wan 2.2 in the first slot. Then upscaled to final resolution. 

(Especially since I learned on a subreddit that when using lightX (lightning LoRA), 121 frames will quite often return a seamless loop. I did experiment with making cuts, but it is the nature of generative AI to decay over time. Think of it as the xerox effect stitched into a video. Short clips, alas, remain the best option.)

Anyhow, I wanted to try out LTX 2.3. Because LTX also does sound.

Shames me a little, because I used to design sound. I enjoyed designing sound. And neither quality nor control of sound in LTX 2.3 is high. But it does do foley, which is just annoying to cut in to a rendered video. (Without a pro toolset, that is. Doppler and worldizing and stretching to fit are just a pain with something like, say, Audacity and the free filter set.)

However, even a negative prompt won't keep it from adding music. Which is a downside, especially as, if not specified, the music falls into a narrow range of choices that become increasingly familiar over time. Specified, though, it does a lot better than the version of Ace-Step I was playing with a while back. I was able to tell it to give me some lute and recorder and it did. Of course, when I told it to give me some bright pop, my cast started singing. There's that.

Really, the Will Smith is still the stuff that's most fun about AI. Not when it gets it right, even though it can be quite startling how close it can come when it does. But the times it just goes way, way off script into a "please tell me the name of that drug" territory.

(I was in img2vid mode for the first experiments and didn't have much in the folder I could play with. So I was taking some very random stuff and seeing what I could do with it. Got the jet bike to take off quite nicely; that one worked. Another one gave me a power walk that made me laugh out loud. Before I shut down the PC, I'd found something appropriate for "render me this in the style of a 1970s British sci-fi television show" and the results were so hilariously bad in exactly the right way...! The music, in particular, was spot-on.) 

(I also had some water-acrylics-on-white-paper style "renders" I'd done to generate ideas of the various aliens in the Blue universe. I animated those, giving them some dialogue. And I tell you, I have worked with voice actors who were less on the ball in giving me the kind of voice I wanted. The Dren was perfect by take #2. The gestures the AI gave to that vocal performance, though; well, those have given me some character ideas.)

Also turns out it can handle 400 frames without significant degradation. At least, in the more compressed fp8 checkpoint!

Cutting room floor

My beta reader had concerns about pacing and I agreed. I do tend to write fat and then trim. One big reason is I let Penny babble. Both of us love to analogize, and when I do her narration as a stream of consciousness a whole bunch of "this reminds me of" gets in there.

For the pop culture references, I had a plan. I was going to start with her going to that well too much, then have the solitude of the desert quiet that internal monologue until she didn't need it so much. That...didn't happen. So in the last two or three edit passes I've been throwing a lot of it out. I'd trimmed a quarter before the beta reader got there. That was her note as well, and with new confidence, I took out over 2/3 of the remainder.

The "heroes" scene, for instance. That one is all about a bully at a retro diner that drags Penny into thinking and reacting like she's in an '80s movie, and consciously having to move off that.

What survived the last cuts? Flashdance. And that was just in the opening. The whole confrontation and resolution is down to...none.

Similarly, for the whole sequence from the diner to the end of Part III, Penny is complaining that everything is reminding her of a movie, from the Escape from New York street scene of Albuquerque's "War Zone" to the Damnation Alley of entering the Atlas-F missile silo. But my choice in the revisions was to let the reader pick the movies or visuals. I might have hinted in a place or two (she thinks about giant scorpions while she is exploring the illegal radioactive waste dump) but it is stronger if the reader makes the connections.

Besides pop culture, Penny does the history/anthropology thing. The "monkey dance" squeaked through. Most of agriculture went away. The Face of Agamemnon stayed, barely. From things that weren't her: Pueblo language groups and Permissive Action Links went poof. Much of MAD went away and, sigh, the knife in the briefcase never made it in. Ham narrowly missed getting memorialized; the Challenger Memorial (roughly thirty feet away) was less distracting to the flow of the narrative.

Somehow, the Daisy Track, Colonel Stapp, the refrigerator and all managed to stay. 

Another big cut was that almost 2/3rds of Penny's "Now lets go over the facts of the case" stuff went away. In the final chapters, everyone but the White Sands girl, the Juan de Onate, and Lozen got cut -- even Joan Hinton, her words moving to "Ginny." And almost all of the explicit discussions of theme went, stripped down to one thin paragraph in the last scene.

Some of them my beta reader complained about, and my feeling is now that this is a bit like describing emotions. Don't feel the emotions for the reader. Let them take those emotions from what has happened. And by analogy, let them make the connections, understand why a character acted a certain way.

Anyhow.

I extended the WIPP sneak-in with a longer sequence of stuff. I couldn't quite get her into the mine itself, but how I staged it let me at least mention the Salt Hoist and the Salt Room and the Transition Line (yeah, there's a lot of salt involved). The climb out of the missile silo is also longer and harder, but mostly different; she's doing it with a hurt shoulder now.

With all of that, I'm still at 73,000 words. Hell of a lot of work for a book that's shorter than today's publishing norms...

Half way through running ProWritingAid across the revised manuscript. And, what have they done to my boy? ProWritingAid is sucking in new and surprising ways. I have decided, for instance, that it has no idea and no ability to understand when a semicolon or a full colon is better, and so is programmed to alert on all colons and wait for the user to do something about them.

In the early iterations it (like most grammar checkers) couldn't figure out dialogue punctuation. Now it has over-corrected. If I write; "I have finished." Tom closed the book and stood up? Well, PWA will flag that first period. "This should be "I have finished," it tells me. Because Tom can't possibly be doing an action that follows a closing punctuation; he can only be there to be followed by "...said."

(Or would that be, "...concluded?")

The death loop is back with a vengeance. And not just for clauses; now it will argue with itself over tenses. Wrong word use "sent." Wrong word use "send." Wrong word use "sent." Wrong word...

And stuff so blindingly weirdly wrong. We're talking Grammarly level wackiness. I need to go back to their site and make sure they haven't changed how they use AI again. And find out how to switch off the increasingly aggressive "We can rewrite this sentence for you, just press the AI button..."

Or maybe it is time to dump that subscription. In any case, I need a human editor. Spend thirty minutes fixing capitalization of "colonel" until I realized I had done most of them wrong and put them back again. I hate capitalization. And hyphens.

It saddens me that software can't be relied on to capitalize "Sir" correctly, put a comma after dialogue followed by "said," or determine if it should be "desk top," "desk-top," or "desktop." Because these seem to be simple things.

Where I would want a human editor is with ungrammatical speech, especially when it is conscious, mixed, and rapidly changing formality levels. Half my cast are archaeological field techs, which means they switch from precise and technical to slangy and casual at the drop of a trowel. Penny more and more admits to doing a sort of Valley Girl act to put others off guard. And that's before you get to Jackson and Sanchez, who speak distilled 1980's Army.

And tense, because story-telling tense is peculiar. One of the ways of achieving the effect of events happening as they are narrated is for the free indirect speech to be in present tense. I am tempted to say that tense in a mystery is almost as bad as tense in a time-travel story; "Now I knew that I wouldn't have given Richard the locket then because all the while I had been searching the mansion I had thought it was there, and not, as I knew now, on the boat -- or at least I hoped it would be when I'd finished searching there tomorrow."

Finis

I just one minute ago typed the last word. The Early Fox is now revised.

What remains is to edit it again. I think I can't face the round of beta reading et al again. Sure, making a good book would and should take more than one round of revisions, but a self-published mystery that will be lucky to sell ten copies?

Maybe All Systems Blue will get the proper beta reader treatment.

I am telling myself that the process took as long as it did this time because, like almost everything about writing The Early Fox, I was re-learning how to write. Having a detailed set of notes from a beta reader let me take a long step back and look with new perspective on a lot of the things I was doing.

Some relatively easy to spot, like big chunks of lecture. Some harder, things I needed the Golgi Stain of a beta reader's notes to pick out from the text, like the way I belabored certain points in repetition. That one is also an indication of a problem in process; writing small chunks with long intervals between them meant I couldn't always remember if I'd already done a thing.

But it is done.

The next step is debridement. I left all the trimmed bits in the manuscript. Some of them inline, even; when I had a line or a full paragraph or two I'd decided (based again on those notes and that new perspective) I didn't need, sometimes I'd leave them in place and just mark them with a highlighter.

Really, I should re-read from the top and make sure I don't need those little bits after all. Maybe I will.

Right now, I'm just happy to be done with the hard part.

 

You Arc This Carology?

I realize I don't want to leave the tombs behind. I was just looking over some notes going back from before I dreamed up the first book, and I'd been wanting to do the history and the exotic places and the crazy stunts.

And even this mid-course correct to more of a Mystery mode is still a bit, well...

So the Paris book -- the laid-back, talking-art-in-cafes book -- Penny did a parkour chase through one of the galleria, broke into the Paris Opera House (and quoted Phantom while she was there) and finished up ascending Notre-Dame de Paris with a steampunk grappling gun.

This latest book, she breaks into a nuclear waste repository by riding one of the trucks in, gets run off the road by someone in the nuclear industry, nearly dies climbing down an abandoned missile silo, chases a horse across the New Mexico desert (through the aptly-named Jornada del Muerto) and finishes off having a fight at the site of the first atomic bomb...with a stone knife.

(I'm finally at the Atlas-F chapter in my revisions. Boy, revisions are not fun!)

So maybe I've been playing too much Tomb Raider lately (just did a cherry-tapping run on Rise of the Tomb Raider. Pistol only -- but I make exception for bears. Yes; the automatic shotgun with Dragonfire rounds is exactly what that bad-news bear deserves.)

Even in my Bill Bixby schema, there was some Old Gods and hints of secret history. I don't want to lose the grounding and I'm not going to give her a gun and an off-screen training montage to black belt in waif-fu. But I am willing to have the world get a little weird. Not just in letting her get into (and survive) increasingly cinematic situations, but in outright Masquerade-type stuff, secret organizations and all.

And the Atlas chapter is done. I'm on to the final part of the book now. Maybe a week of revisions left.

Zenshu

Had to write a new scene with new research, too. Spent a while watching videos on the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, NM. Annoying how many would show me the token board but not which room it was in. I won't say I worked out the geography of the place, but I came up with a geography which was plausible enough to write the scene.

I think that's the last one of those. I do have one more almost completely new scene to write, but it is all geometry and random; I need to actually detail Penny climbing out of the missile silo, only this time with a hurt arm.

As far as I can tell, although there are a lot of words getting changed from where I am to the end of the book, they are mostly simple changed. What was killing me over the past couple of weeks was scenes where major plot threads were being obscured, or didn't work in the first place.

There's two of those spots left, and before I even get out of Part III. The sequence as she flees to Albuquerque after getting run off the road is another almost complete re-write, and I have to revisit understanding of the plot, and her reactions and intentions. And then again at the bottom of the missile site, with her talking herself back down from the wave of paranoia that sent her to the War Zone.

I really wish I was writing something else.

Even another Penny story.

I'm still juggling the parts for Blue. I'm simultaneously finding the genre I want to be in, and deciding what kind of things dominate the story (right now, it is leaning towards the space opera side with a lot of hand-to-hand -- or at least close-quarters -- action). And coming back from those with how to make an overall plot that hits the right places, and that in turn influences some basic premises of the world and her personal story in it...and that comes back around to feed into what the genre is.

So that's not quite where I can start pushing prose. I'm more than a little tempted to just start typing on the New Orleans story -- because the game there is that Penny doesn't know what actually happened or even what the town looks like, having to reconstruct from notes and news articles. Meaning the framing story could, potentially, excuse a lot of errors and omissions. 

***

Started a scene in my mind. Was thinking POV for Blue and had the idea for an introductory chapter with the scientists that developed the experimental mental implant thing. And almost immediately my brain went into that particular cadence of Military SF, with all the backgrounding. Not quite How David Weber Orders a Pizza -- but not far off, either.

Might be better than the Jeffries Tube scene I've got now. 

Fix All

I watched two things recently which touched on the nature of creativity.

The first was The Minecraft Movie, really only because it had come up as free on the Prime Video rotation. I can barely remember what happened in it. Creativity is brought up in regards to two characters. Jack Black's character (I don't remember the name -- basically he's just Jack Black on a sugar high) loves the world of Minecraft (a real place in this movie) because it allows him to create.

He spent twenty years at it, covering the world in his creations, then was captured by the bad guys. When the rest of the cast fell into the Minecraft world I sort of hoped they'd see and explore all these strange ruins and wonder what was going on. Such was not to be.

The other character is the kid, and I can't be bothered to remember character or actor name. He's okay. He does what is required. He is called creative but being stifled by the world. This creativity he shows by, among other things, putting a jetpack on a still-life banana. This bit bothered me because I half agreed with the arts teacher. Drawing what you already know and love, in the style you already know, is what exercises like that are intended to break you out of.

But the part that really stuck with me is that the drawing shown (and the drawings shown from some of his classmates) are totally wrong. They are the practiced render of school-trained artists. There's a style of rendering in pencil that isn't instinctive but really has to be taught, and they are all using it. So...it looks bad and fake and this "has little left to learn from you" rendering completely defeats any of the purpose.

And when it comes to the environment of the movie? There's no process of creativity. He just builds stuff that works, end of story. 

The other thing I watched had a more interesting take. I ran into it because I'd taken on as a research project to learn something about Isekai (and the often-related LitRPG genre.) I found enough to become quite familiar with Truck-kun:

Zenshu isn't really an isekai (despite what Natsuko says when she first wakes up in another world). Of course, so many isekai are deconstructionist it would be more accurate to call deconstruction of the idea of being reincarnated as a hero in another world the "standard isekai" plot.

It follows some of the template of superpower stories in that Natsuko's new-found ability turns out to be a liability, gets her in worse trouble, she gives up on it, then returns to it to finally save the day.

But even that is not quite right. Natsuko has been dropped into the favorite anime of her childhood, the one that made her want to become an animator herself. And, itself, A Tale of Perishing is not standard golden-age fare. The Nine Legendary Heroes become one by one the dead heroes, until Luke Braveheart breaks under the strain of seeing his friends die and the Void win over and over, and going mad, destroys the last Soul Future himself and ends the world.

Natsuko's power is completely OP, but that isn't the point, nor is it enough, as the world contrives to reshape itself to ensure the original bleak ending remains. Until she breaks through; leaving behind her unthinking adoration of the original's director, her imitation of other works, and her fear of her own failures.

And yes, one of those failure is she died of bad food and overwork while tasked with directing a high school romance -- something she had so very little personal experience with she went as far as charging down the corridors of the studio with a piece of toast in her mouth.

In her final victory, she first draws Luke from memory; the same lines she drew thousands of times while teaching herself from the work of others. That holds off the Void for a little, but what wins the day is drawing the Luke she has come to know, and even love; a real person in a world she thinks is worth saving for itself, not as a memorial of the animation director she idolized.

Oh, did I say draw? Because that's her power in this world. She gets a full-on Magical Girl transformation, only her henshin stick is an animation peg bar, there's no costume change, and what it does is summon her drawing desk (which then exists as a real-world object and can be interacted with during the fight scene).

And that transformation goes so hard some of the MAPPA animators might have keeled over from overwork themselves...!

Hi ho

I've got a verbal agreement for Earnest in July. I have a meeting over a possible gig. And the email chain has re-started on a thing I might come back to my old workplace to work on. I've got most of the things signed over even if I haven't quite figured out what to do with the 401k, but I have yet to get those new glasses.

Or clean the apartment.

Based on current pace, revisions on The Early Fox will take another month. I wish it was faster. I wanted to do all five books. More than that, I feel the process is so good I want to be using beta readers (and editors, if I can afford it) from here on in.

If I could kick them out the door faster... Six months, maybe. Would help with less research. I mean, I like the big questions, but I spent hours checking the color of the awning on a burger joint that I don't even name in the novel (it's the Blake's Lotaburger in Albuquerque).

Maybe I don't have to do this. Maybe I can be a little...looser.

While I was taking a nice walk I realized that, IF Early Fox gets some traction, and IF I can kick out a book every six months, I've a stack of plot ideas for that series that actually seem to line up in a sensible way.

First, I have to keep her in the small towns. Do the coal mine thing. That's when she joins an amateur preservationist and gets involved in old sins of the Ludlow Massacre.

Then a wacky experimental one. It is told in third-person because the framing story is Penny waking up in a hospital with amnesia, and being handed news clippings that lets her try to reconstruct just what strange things she was up to over the last few months. Like, getting injected with a zombie drug, taking up boxing, falling in love, and doing a b-movie armed assault on a burning drug lab. And, oh yeah, since she doesn't remember any of this, the New Orleans setting can be largely "without reference material."

Probably stay in the small town for one more (the Big Easy ain't small, but...) and do the tech center in the backwoods.

Then go weird again, hanging out with an ethnomusicologist, learning to play the talharpa, and ending up with a Viking-folk band on the circuit. There's the Kensington Runestone, there's people muttering "Winter is coming," and there's a big hint of old gods.

And possibly stay with the gods and get her out of the States again. This is the one on the boat; a repossessed millionaire's playpen in international waters, filled with enough dubious antiquities that multiple nations are arguing repatriation and have flown out their worker bees to identify the stuff.

And I also have more ideas for Blue. Including some idea of what happens in the second book. But I'll leave all that for another post.

The six-pack abs of the beast

Egyptian hieroglyphs contain determinatives; special characters used to indicate whether characters are meant to be taken for semantic value or phonetic (or for a non-literal value that has become common).

This is true of all logographic languages. Learning how to make a rebus is the innovation that allows them to become full languages, capable of capturing new words and foreign concepts.

In many other written languages, forms have grown that allows one to disambiguate; from the typography of computer languages that distinguishes a string from a command, to the use of balloon shapes to give context to the text floating over a comic book page.

AI doesn't have this.

I think it is a philosophical choice driven by this Apple Computer-like idea that the machine should be seamless. The illusion of the power of "natural language." No special grammar like the nested parentheses of LiSP or technical vocabulary as is used in law, science, and every trade. 

No, an ordinary unspecialized person can just talk to the computer and it will magically understand what they need.

And yet such is already creeping around the corners. In the Stable Diffusion community, there is a primitive grammar, such as using two types of bracket to emphasize or de-emphasize keywords. It is more straight-forward, and less risky, to use ((big)) rather than attempt to rank synonyms, guessing whether the particular combination of checkpoint and LoRAs will weight "gigantic" or "gargantuan" as bigger.

And there is a specialist vocabulary that crossed over from the Danbooru image board, appearing in enough third-party anime-friendly checkpoints shorthand like the ubiquitous "1girl" have migrated into the major models.

The point is, this natural language thinking is crap. There's a reason we have specialist language. Jargon. And grammar to make distinctions that can be unclear even in face-to-face conversation.

This is already obvious in our search engines. But then, the primary driver is not to satisfy your search, but to satisfy the need of the advertisers to sell you something. AI, as currently implemented in so many customer-facing applications, from phone trees to Siri to search to queries, is an over-eager salesperson with a short attention span. They aren't listening for context. They are looking for keywords they can jump on.

It is democratization in the worst way. "It just works," but only if you were looking for whatever the mainstream is at the moment. This is why the "help" systems at something like the phone company are entirely designed around assuming you have made one of three common mistakes. Not that, maybe, something slightly less usual happened, like their equipment being broken.

What I'm saying, is that when I play around with generative AI at home and for my own amusement, I am seeing just how terrible an idea all this AI crap is. When it wants to find "the crook" somehow, it will grab on to any recognizable and repeatable element in the camera it monitors. The agentic systems aren't properly antagonistic, like a court proceeding, they are incentivized for results at any cost, even if the result is a whole bunch of false positives.

This means the entire history of metaphor and simile is out the window. Our speech is littered with terms of phrase and terms of art. Phrases that are each made up of individual words, and the underlying token philosophy of AI, and the way the limitations of data handling means language needs to be broken into the smallest possible pieces, means words are more likely to be taken out of context than in context.

I'm not saying this couldn't be addressed. After all, that's the point of agentic AI. Assign some agents to look for phrases and to weight them higher than the other agents looking at words. You can tokenize any semantic or conceptual item, after all. It doesn't have to be a word. But it isn't being done now, because it isn't useful. What is being sold to us now is something that will always answer, confidently, even if it is wrong. That will always find the right line to connect you to or the evil-doer on the security footage or the product you need to buy (even if you weren't searching for that in the first place).

Where movement is happening is in smaller user bases, more technically oriented user bases. Not the people stuck with whatever stupidity the iPhone is pushing with the latest mandatory update (speech to text gets worse with every iteration. It is so afraid of not having an answer, it prioritizes on whatever is the common answer. Invite a friend for pizza, it will be your pal. Take notes from a history lecture, and it will make a complete mess of it. No, Celine Dion did not speak at the Council of Ephesus. Or perhaps that will be the "Council of ePayments," since after all commercial interest is the only thing important here.)

AI, and Generative AI, has potential. I still think it is a brute-force attack on problems that are much subtler, and being grossly oversold, but when we wake up and start using it sensibly it can be useful.

I've been wasting time again with image generation. Hey, I got a novel concept out of it. (But that's nothing to do with how "creative" AI is -- I did exactly the same thing with pen and paper).

There were times when it felt collaborative. The downside to using Generative AI this way is that it is too easy to chase new discoveries. AI is a lootbox (especially now as the price of tokens are beginning the turn towards approximating actual cost). At any point, it can throw out something that totally isn't what you were working on, but is so "Oooh, shiny!" you want to stop and work on that instead.

(The rest of the analogy of lootboxes is that the house usually wins, giving you not-quite-right results that give you enough of the endorphin boost to keep playing, but also force you to pay up more tokens and roll again. Even with a free generator, it turns too easily into doomscrolling. With a home rig, a doomscrolling that takes fifteen minutes per generation and blasts hot air at your feet. Not a good way to waste a weekend.)

But when I started with a concept that lay inside the models I had available, and I was careful of the no man's land of things the model wasn't trained on and wouldn't understand, I could iterate and repaint until it was pretty close to what I had visualized.

And yes, the trick is to be relentlessly literal. This is a good trick in a lot of design anyhow; don't do concept, do appearance. Write out not the back story, but what you want to appear on the screen. And always be aware of keywords. Negative phrases, for instance, are counter-productive. "It is cloudy but not raining" is a terrible prompt; you will get rain. "The monster is as large as a house" is likely to get you a house-shaped monster. Or a random house.

Using the image-to-video pipeline (Wan2.2 mostly,  lately the Smoothmix checkpoint), a key is that the AI can create anything that isn't currently in the frame but could be. It has great difficulty changing what is already in the frame -- and that includes difficulty not interpreting what it sees, including the smallest artifacts, as something that needs to be there.

More than once a stray fleck on the wall has turned into a fly buzzing around the scene. The negative prompts get longer and longer. But want a lion to walk in through the door? No problem.

Still a waste of a good weekend...but fun.

RDA

So the RDA for potassium is 4700 mg. There is concern in the medical profession over damage to the intestines from high-dose supplements so they advise strongly to go with dietary potassium. "Just eat more leafy greens and fruits."

I checked out the USDA's own list. The first raw fruit to show up on their list is kiwifruit. When sliced, each cup contains 542 mg. The first leafy green is bok-choi, cooked and drained, at 631 mg per cup (spinach shows up at 538 mg/cup).

That's a lot of greens.

So let's go up to the top of the list. The first whole natural food is a baked russet potato in the skin. Large, three to four inches in diameter. 1644 mg. So that's almost three large baked potatoes. For one day's potassium.

You can get there with orange juice if it is made from concentrate; three cups. So the cheapest carton of OJ at the super will get you maybe two days of potassium. Dried apricots also concentrate it down to a similar measure, but here, we are talking a good ten bucks a pound. Trail mix is on the list but you'd have to eat two bags.

And remember, these are the top of the list. You were thinking maybe a little spinach with your balanced meal of bread, black beans, pork round, whatever? Move over Popeye, that RDA requires you slug down five cans of the stuff.

Forget the piece of chicken, piece of broccoli, corn tortilla. The USDA loves this medical advice because they'd like you to eat well and keep American agribusiness solvent. But we're not talking one hot here. We're talking Christmas Dinner every day.

And over in the other corner the AMA is confused as why, according to their measure, some 90% of Americans fail to reach their daily potassium target.

(My doctor is a little smarter. She's authorized me for potassium chloride tablets, 10 mEq, which translates to 600 mg. So that's one can of spinach down).

(And, yes, I'm in the yellow zone on both. Getting a blood draw once a month while we work on that.)

Operation Begonia

I was stopped for a day in editing The Early Fox, and went so far as to read a pdf from NASA on economical testing of small-scale NTRs (Nuclear Thermal Rocket engines).

My beta reader had complained about "Site Theta" and wanted something that sounded more military and foreboding. I agreed in that I wanted a more official-sounding name for the test pad out in the desert that could be used consistently in dialog and narration.

(That reader also complained about Major Robert Flowers, but I just haven't been able to come up with something that isn't either too boring, or too on-the-nose. I'm settling for reducing the number of times he gets reduced in the narrative as "Major Bob" -- instead of undercutting his power and menace, the narrative will more often call him "The Major.")

Anyhow, after all of that; VICTOR-7 is what I came up with. It ain't wonderful. It will have to do.

(VICTOR-7 is the codename for the test pad and associated. The actual non-code project name for the rocket was KITFOX.)

***

The other progress of the past few days is I've put Blue in uniform. There really is a mode in Military SF of the career progression story. Space Hornblower stuff -- not necessarily with ships that behave remarkably like something Wellington would use. (Only, you know, in space.)

This one is engineer career path, which should change things up a bit. She's not aiming for command and I don't intend for her to spend a lot of her time in the big chair. Plus the setting is more corporate security than front-line Navy -- her first adventure is an SAR mission tasked to a nearby Survey ship.

Strangely, one thing that held me back was the rule-lawyer thing.

Let me explain. Given that protagonists protag, even in military SF those protagonists inevitably have to break the rules. That's fine, but the repercussions are often unsatisfying. Either like Captain Kirk they get conveniently tossed into the briar-patch of being forced to command a starship again (instead of flying a desk as an Admiral), or they manage some crazy rules-lawyering by which everything they did was actually legal if you consider this sub-clause of a seldom-read paragraph that only applies when giant mole-rats are eating the sun...

Okay, sometimes they do get put on the beach, or on half-pay. Honor Harrington herself suffered from being taken off active duty (she wasn't cashiered because she has friends in high places. Which is another typical get-out-of-Leavenworth free card). So did Alexis Carew, but that was less for what she did and more because peace broke out.

That both makes a bit of a mockery out of all that insistence on honor and chain of command and respecting the regulations, and also is stuff I just don't feel like trying to figure out (aka, why exactly IS there a rule about giant mole rats?)

But outside of that, putting Blue in uniform is very genre-suitable. And there are good story beats I can get out of Blue having to work within a military-like structure.

Better than that; it provides familiar foundation for the story arc. Her having to survive on a frontier world is one thing. Her having to save herself, rejoin her crew, get their ship back, and finish their mission...that's a lot more structure to work with. Even if the story was headed that way originally, making that her duty makes it a lot more direct.

Good news is bad news

I'm half-way through revisions on The Early Fox. I am appalled at how slow it is going.

At the same time, I am learning so much. I've not really engaged with a text at this level before. I've revised at the top level, when major plot points were obscure or dramatic arcs were broken, and I've spent time in the trenches of sentence-level fixes, but what I got from my beta reader is in the space between those. That was where her notes were focused. And that is the stuff her notes gave me confidence to attack.

And one of the things I'm seeing is that I've gotten stronger as a writer, with this being my tightest book so far. And that I've finally found the heart of the series. This just works better; the mystery format, the smaller-scale setting, the personal fears and doubts, the pressure and suspense. All of it works better for me than the over-the-top Indiana Jones type stuff I originally aimed this series, and this character, at.

I really should have been remembering how much I liked Travis McGee and Jim Chee,  Spenser and V.I. Warshawski. Not Lara Croft and Sydney Fox. (Well, okay, I like them too. But maybe that isn't what I like to write.)

Especially now, when the amateur sleuth has gravitated towards people who have technical skills. Sometimes directly adjacent to police work (such as forensics, for Temperance Brennan), sometimes not. And, probably due to increased female readership (and female writers), not just an increase in female-led stories, but a shifting away from primarily fisticuffs to more social skills.

The genres always bleed into each other, as do the characters. V.I. is about as hardboiled as they come.

In any case, this works for me, and I would love if I could just crank them out. And I think there's a market (as much as there is a market for anything, in this attention-deficit, AI-flooded present).

Trouble is, the other books aren't a good fit. That leaves me in awkward position.

***

I haven't had time to do full research on re-staging into "mystery-suspense," but a brief session with Publisher Rocket. I thought the metrics on Space Opera would be better, but turns out they are both flat for growth, the average earnings are similar, but the competition is actually a bit stiffer in Space Opera. In the right category of Mystery you might only have to sell a hundred books to get into the top 10.

But then, Project Hail Mary currently dominates in both categories. Which tells you a lot about how firm Amazageddon is with this category and keyword stuff.

Brane and brane, what is brane?

FTL is a necessary weasel of Space Opera. Not all space opera, but it is as generally accepted as is the ability of terminal tuberculosis sufferers to sing an extended aria in that other form of opera.

All of the methods and terms are essentially hand-waves. Some touch lightly on ideas in physics that might do something that, if you squint, vaguely resembles faster-than-light travel, but we skate over all the impossibilities and, in the end, it is no more scientific than reversing the polarity of the neutron flow.

In any case, I'm gonna use wormholes.

The main thing they give me is one big hand-wave that ties together multiple implausibilities into one pill to swallow. In a way I hope will be amusing enough that the readers will go along for the ride.

So we've got the quantum foam, tiny vacuum energy fluctuations. Where we part from physics is that in this universe, they can "clump." Anisotropic distribution forming semi-stable solitons. So, basically, tiny wormholes are constantly forming, lasting for a short time, then coming apart. They are largely outside the cosmological universe and thus exist in multiple places at the same time.

(And yes, black holes, especially quantum black holes, aren't handy tunnels. Well, shush.)

Now, to get them to do what some of the plot requires, they have to have a very selective distribution. Have them everywhere in the universe and the effects would be visible on cosmological scales. Have them clump around gravity sources and they'd change stars in ways that would be astronomically observable.

I could give them a goldilocks zone; assume the radiation of active stars inhibits formation of the solitons, for instance, but that they also don't form well in interstellar space. For reasons. I'd really rather not use the old saw that they are attracted to "life" (however we define that), but it would certainly be handy.

For the purposes of story I'm saying they aren't conventionally gravitational but tend to go where dark matter goes. Which is also anisotropic, but only in certain places (so that part isn't cosmologically significant). 

In any case, it can get very clumpy around these dark matter concentrations, and if you are clever monkeys, you can do some technical things and open a stable wormhole. It still requires such difficult steps as making exotic matter, and the chaotic nature of the clumpy wormhole foam plays out a lot like a particularly rambunctious nuclear reactor; quantum embrittlement and point failures, meaning not only does it cost a lot of tech to build the thing, but you have to have a well-developed industrial base keeping up with replacement parts and other maintenance.

But on the flip side, you get power back. Lots and lots of power. Basically vacuum energy extraction and there is some fear this is destabilizing the entire universe (the old false vacuum problem) but so far the practical thing is that these wormholes tend to rip the universe a bit.

That is, the micro-holes start appearing down a spreading dendritic network, like roots of a tree. And eventually nodes appear where the right civilization could start up a new wormhole.

The first one might not have been artificial. Or might not have been on Earth. But anyhow.

Hand-wave, hand-wave, and a starship can, by applying enough power (and maybe a little exotic matter) open semi-stable wormholes long enough for it to pass through. Which since this is based on encouraging the naturally clumping micro-wormholes, means the best routes to take are along the  Lichtenberg figures spreading from a stable wormhole.

So there are lanes, or maybe currents. 

The idea of the vacuum energy -- done through maintaining a stable wormhole -- is that it puts a top level to the energy pyramid I was getting into with the battery stuff. Ships are largely possible because they carry some very dense fuel (H3 possibly) that is possible because the civilization sending them out has the power available. Power that is essentially a natural resource, and a rare one at that (that is, a place where the holes got really clumpy). So it isn't an exportable technology. They can only send out stored power.

I might not even need gates for travel. Given the right dendritic lanes, ships pretty much explain everything. Oh, and they might get some kind of artificial "kick" if launching from around a node.

The other silly thing you get from this is that the unstable micro-holes happen at planetary surfaces just often enough, and are just big enough, they provide a weird sort of panspermia. The interesting thing here is that they aren't just transporting primordial amino acids. They can transport seeds, possibly even small animals.

As long as the transported material is intact enough and advanced enough relative to its new surroundings, it provides the ability to Galapagos fresh worlds with, let's face it, terrestrial analogs. Since the wormholes are random and rare and more developed life is going to be influenced rather less by small numbers of competitors, the ecologies do diverge, especially the more evolutionarily developed examples. 

There's more hands I can wave at this one, horizontal gene transfer etc. etc., but basically this means the film can be shot within a day's drive of LA. After humans have encountered a few biomes, they've even identified a few template biomes; "This part of the planet is falls within the parameters of a Vc template; temperate rainforest, coniferous analogues, cool and humid."

And means once you get done playing with tamed wormholes on your bottled energy, you can set down on a place with breathable atmosphere and possibly even edible flora and fauna.

And lastly, since you can't bottle them, create them, or carry them, you can only make use of this wormhole stuff where it is already occurring. No black hole grenades for you.

Starbase

Revisions on The Early Fox are going so very slowly. It isn't a lot of fun to go back again and again to a thirty-page document on everything you got wrong, then try to figure out how to apply those fixes to an 80,000 word novel. I keep having to take a break, both because this takes a lot of concentration, and because it takes a lot of emotional stamina.

No closer to starting the next book, then. Which I still think should be SF. But wading around in Penny's adventures, spending a big chunk of the day with her narrative and working in her voice, I can't help but want to see her in another one.

I have three images right now. Or call them fragments of scenes. There's a novel drifting somewhere between them, but one that still lacks a central plot.

A dying tech billionaire, a man with strange ideas about transhumanism. He wants to do a thing that sounds on the surface insane -- something about "mental renewal" or regeneration -- but after long conversations and some other things she has learned, Penny supports him.

Penny's friend Amelia, the American comic-book fan she met in Paris. Several phone calls over the course of the book, with Amelia exploring her own peculiar comic-book like theory of what has really been going on behind the scenes through Penny's adventures.

Penny serving at a consciously retro diner. That is, it wears a futurist '50s dress, chrome and rocket ships, but is actually serving soy beef patties and smart drinks -- expensive ones, too. And she's not here because she needs work; she's here to investigate something scary that's happening behind the Happy Days mask.

What ties it together is something that looks a lot like a data center; a tech center, an industrial park, served by a company town which is a utopian designed community. Yes, with all the failings of that paternalistic approach that have been well-known for about a hundred years now. 

You know, Elon Musk actually built one? Yeah. We really don't learn from the past, do we.

BTW... that company town in Texas has a tiki bar, too.

Rewrites

 I've just gotten to chapter two.

This is new to me. Having a detailed set of notes, but more than that, having notes that came from an outsider. So it took a week just to digest them and try to shape them into what I was actually going to do to the narrative. And get everything in order and compiled into a single file.

The first chapters are hard because first chapters are always hard. You are trying to simultaneously give the reader enough to understand what is going on, and give them some reason to care. You can't get to "Bob is in trouble and you like Bob," without explaining a little of what the trouble is and who Bob is. But every word you spend on the latter, is time in which the reader still doesn't care.

I've revised before, but usually on a larger structural scale. Even if that does require re-doing entire chapters because the way they were before didn't support the new vision. What I've never had is a chance to revisit those opening chapters with all the knowledge I gained through writing the rest of the book, and really pick and chose what to show the reader and in what order to entice them along.

Aiyla's lakeside stroll just got more urgent, and more dangerous. And she got a name.

Penny is getting slightly more backstory. The way I set up the first chapters to begin with, I was heavy on atmosphere but let the reader pick up on the clues about what was going on the same way Penny was. Now I've got more explanation. And I'm making her more active, too; on the surface, a passive filter, but inside, being analytical and smart. 

But it is slow going.

I'm also still adjusting from leaving my full-time job of the last ten years. Lots of paperwork to do. I've still got NDAs to sign and phone numbers to transfer. Adjusting to new schedules and also trying to figure out how to spend less on food. Finally getting around to re-arranging my place (didn't have the time or energy before) and making some appointments (like optometry) I was also putting off.

Plus, you know, three days in the hospital with an infected leg.

My latest Fiverrrrrr hire is starting to worry me. She promised me a dialogue. She's got a deadline of the 12th and she's had the materials in her hands since the 5th. I'm beginning to think "dialogue" is going to be her doing the whole thing at the last minute, and shooting me a final package with a "any questions?"

At least one of my prior artists is still around. She did good work, we got along fine, she's up to draw me a nice Clovis Point. For the dinkus.

***