GET YOUR BAD ASS OVER HERE FOR SOME SCI FI !

Are you ready?  I don't know if you can handle this.

HALTERES IS ORIGINAL!  Is every aspect of it original?  No.  Is every aspect of any science fiction, fantasy, or anything for that matter original?  No. 

It's not a sequel.  It's not a remake.  It's not fan fiction.  It's a whole new realm.  An entirely new mythos. 

AND IT'S BAD ASS!

THREE SPECIES

TWO WORLDS

ONE PLANET

INFINITE POWER

Let's get excited for HALTERES!  So, what do you want?

We have aliens!  Lots and lots of aliens.  Only aliens, for that matter.  Three different sentient species (four if you count Stigma).

More bad guys than you can fit on Ceti Alpha V!  We have Archon, Kyrios, Foulsooth, Dux, and Smin, just to name a few (more if you count Stigma).

Monsters everywhere!  Thoraksys, Annelanche, Xile, Cryptomorph, Cannibals, Rouge-bots, and emergent cities...and Noctvyl (including Stigma).

Kick ass vehicles and weapons!  Hover-liths, Battle-dozers, A.P.E.S., Skidders, Noccs, Proton Evaporators, Cry-viscerators, Judgement and Justice, and Dae-mit (the stuff that comes out of Stigma).

Exotic locations!  Octor Sulcus, the Foculus, Urwald, Ergae Syn, Olys and the Tholos, the Naos, and Noctvyl Lairs (where Stigma lives).

Natural and unnatural wonders!  The Arca Trochia (organic circuitry), Pagos Nefos (floating clouds of ice), and Dae-mit (the stuff that comes out of Stigma).

Atosentient powers beyond our comprehension!  The Kynoi.  What, nothing about Stigma (Hmmm-abey)?!

A planet unlike anything ever imagined!  HALTERES; the center of it all (and Stigma's home planet).  Did I bury the lead?

and Stigma!

Would you like to know more?  

Read.  Experience.  Enjoy!

Until next time; don't bother me.  I'm pluggin' a book!

 

Stigma's Young Kaiju Relative

BAD ASS SCI FI DREAMS

Hear me out.  Not everything fits together perfectly.  In fact, most things don't.  But isn't it ironic that when you force things together, their hold is stronger?  No, you figure it out.

Now on to my disjointed ramblings.  I have dreams.  I have aspirations.  I am definitely not giving them the attention they deserve, nor the respect.  I am, however, very protective of and defensive about my dreams.  It's one thing to neglect them myself, quite another to allow them to be dismissed.  The act is reciprocal.  Dreams require buoyancy; spiritual and emotional loft.  Just as with the physics of creativity, they need momentum.  I know this isn't an advice column, but my advice; clothe yourself in your dreams and revel in the dreams of others.  Encourage one another whenever possible, but most of all, encourage yourself.

At my stage in life, I can say with much certainty, I was put on this Earth to write.  I was put here to write first and foremost about Halteres.  Of course it's a shambles, of course it's rough, but I've forced a lot of pieces together...and their hold is strong.

That brings me to the FATAL 4-DEs (as I term them).  Behaviors that are messing with my dreamscape!

DE-NIAL- A dream denied is a dream deferred...forever (I know, I know).  (damn, it should have been 5-DEs...in a couple years it will be)  I can't tell you how many times I've put off till tomorrow what I should have done today.  (seriously, it's been decades of tomorrows for me)

DE-FLECTION- The big brush off.  You gotta a grab hold of your dreams and ride them to the nether regions of the future.  Like a cow-catcher through a sea of distractions you must be.

DE-CEIT- There's no need for it.  There's no use for it.  Being open and honest in every aspect of your life is a quality I hold above all else.

DE-LUSION- Let's be realistic.  Reality sucks.  Reality kicks me in the yarbles on the daily.  Dreams must be balanced with practicality.

So come dream with me.  Halteres needs true believers!  New, new, new, NEW chapter 1 coming soon.  All part of the process, baby.  All part of the process.

Anyway, until next time, don't bother me.  I'm dreaming about a book.

THE PHYSICS OF CREATIVITY

Now I don't claim to be any kind of physics genius, I just thought it'd be interesting to use some hard science as an analogy for the creative process.

Let's start with Newton's Laws of writing (I mean motion).

First Law: When viewed in an inertial reference frame, an object either remains at rest or continues to move at a constant velocity, unless acted upon by a net force.

i.e. An object at rest stays at rest, and an object in motion stays in motion, unless somebody uses the force on it.

As for the creative process, the comparison is pretty self-explanatory.  Just keep writing and you’ll keep writing.  Don't let the force stop you, let it keep you going...accelerating!

Second Law: In an inertial reference frame, the vector sum of the forces F on an object is equal to the constant mass m of that object multiplied by the acceleration vector a of the object: F = ma.

i.e.  If a body is accelerating, then the force is being used on it.

This all has to do with momentum.  It’s easy to consider the body of work (writing) as mass and the process as acceleration.  The more of each you have, the more force…and momentum.  Lately I’ve felt like a giant lead ball in a puddle of mud; a lot of mass, but no acceleration.  I need to gain momentum and keep it!

Third Law: When one body exerts a force on a second body, the second body simultaneously exerts a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction on the first body.

i.e. For every action, there in an equal and opposite reaction.

Recently, the actions in my life have caused net negative reactions to my writing.  I need to make sure that the actions I take on a continuous (not continual) basis have positive net reactions on my writing.  I have to remember where I am and why I’m there.

A little foray into the Second Law of Thermodynamics:

Second law of thermodynamics: In a natural thermodynamic process, the sum of the entropies of the interacting thermodynamic systems increases.

i.e. Entropy- lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder.

So, without a massive input of energy, or equally huge transfer of entropy, my world gradually declines into a state of disorder.  My main challenge, as far as writing, consists of maintaining a lack of predictability while diminishing disorder.  In order to do that, I need to put tremendous amounts of effort into keeping entropy at bay.  It needs to put elsewhere.  I need more focus, and less distraction.  Don’t worry, once I add some equilibrium to my homeostasis, I’ll be fine.

Damn, out of space and time, and just as I was about to get into writing and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.  Hail Heisenberg!

So until next time; Don’t bother me, I’m threorizing a book.

BAD ASSPHYXIATION

Doubt is like death
By suffocation.
So take a breath
Of inspiration.

Well, we're almost through August; the literary agent's 'dead month'.  I gotta get chapter one revised by September so I can start shipping it out again.  It's gonna be huge!

Until then, I've been biding my time, minding my vibe, straddling the cusp, and destroying the misconception that there's a point of no return.  Because in the end, everyone goes back to their origins.  Yeah, it's been all about deli meats and county seats (I don't know what the hell that means, but it'd probably make a pretty good country song).

Anyway, I'm just sitting here in a deli in Idaho Spring waiting for my karmic Uber to arrive.  Maybe I should meet it half way.  Stay tuned for more updates!

Oh yeah, I started rewriting my other book; Opposable.  It's some Bad Ass Sci Fi as well, but I think it's a little too racy for this forum.  No this part.  It's just some brainstorming from the other night.

I'm alone in the cabin.
It's almost midnight.
The power is out.
It's raining.
It's a full moon.
I'm wide awake.
I can't move.
There's something in the woods.
Pinecones are falling on the roof.
Mice are crawling in the walls.
I'm wide awake.
I can't move.
There's something scratching at my bedroom door...
Dexter...
He's coming to kill me...
Why did I give him thumbs?

Until next time; sweet dreams and don't blink, I've got my eye on a book deal.

HALTERES- CMEs and EMPs and ATIs- OH MY!

I hope you don't mind indulging me in my little forays into tangential background information.  It really helps me sort out some of the details that may need sprucing up in my novel, and I hope it gives you some insight and piques your interest in this Bad Ass Sci Fi project!

As you remember (probably not, I originally posted Bad Asstronomy about four months ago), Halteres exists in a fictional solar system orbiting within the habitable zone of a fictional star; Hestia.  It has one known celestial partner (not a moon) that orbits a little deeper in Hestia's Goldilocks zone.  This Earth-sized, waterlogged planet is known as Clach Nearth.

So...CMEs, EMPs, and ATIs???  Okay, Okay!!!  I'm gonna summarize the poop out of this, I've got a book to revise!

Halteres' orbital distance from Hestia is about 0.6881 AU (or 64 million miles).  Due to its tremendously unique structure, its orbit adheres perfectly to Hestia's orbital plane with almost zero inclination.

Clach Nearth orbital distance is 0.6968 AU (or 64.8 million miles).  Clach Nearth's orbit is slightly askew of Hestia's orbital plane.

Based on the relative orbital periods of Halteres and Clach Nearth, they achieve syzygy every 30 years.  When this occurs, the two planets are but 800K miles apart.  Pretty close by cosmic standards.  When the alignment occurs on the orbital plane, a super syzygy results.  This happens once every 3000 years.

SO!?  So, during the last super syzygy (almost 3000 years ago), massive tidal forces threatened to tear Halteres apart and triggered devastating Coronal Mass Ejections (solar flares) that rendered Halteres electromagnetically impotent.  Even the smaller syzygys bear theses effects out to a lesser effect and to this day, no standard electronic devices are operational on over half of Halteres.

I do ramble.  Anyway, someone has designed devices that concentrate and control the CME effect.  EMPs are now being used to test the functionality of the SCATHE.

But everyone knows that the only way to construct operational electronic devices on most of Halteres is through the utilization of ATI (Arca Trochial Induction).  Thank the Kynoi the Arca Trochia is accommodating.  But Why?

Don't ask me,and don't bother me, I'm disambiguating a book.

NOCTVYLS- HALTERES' DEATH SHADOWS

Again, pardon me; the thought to word transition isn't always a smooth one.  I can picture these demons who perch themselves atop Halteres' web of food.  I can write them into a scene and give their stories an arc.  But excising and describing them independently might be quite a different challenge.

And remember; evolution is universal, the eye has gone through several lines of convergent evolution, dying stars provide the ingredients for life, and I'm a reader.

Most obvious noctvyl visual cryptomorphing- A 20 foot long, 12 foot tall cross between a acteon beetle and a horseshoe crab.

Ventral view of a horseshoe crab.

So, the simple anatomical breakdown is as follows (let's not go crazy here):

• The noctvyl are arthropoids and exhibit comparable characteristics such as:
• Bi-lateral symmetry
• A Thick, black exoskeleton
• Six sets of jointed appendages
• four sets (3-6 if we're going front to back) for locomotion
• one set (2) that can be used much like arms on a human
• one smaller set (1) that holds wonderful and deadly secrets
• Three body segments
• An oversized cephalic segment
• A thoracic segment that houses the appendages, sustenance hole, and gut
• A caudal segment that houses the tail
• A ten foot, fully articulating, spiked tail
• Two mouths
• One under the head for communication
• One under the thorax between the legs used for ingestion much like a gnathobase
• Nine eyes
• four sets of rudimentary eyes
• One central endoparietal eye whose vision amalgamates the others and may see beyond our dimensions

There are other things that make the noctvyl special and horrifying, but let's keep it short.  We can also get into the universal nature of evolution, cosmic biogenesis, the irreducible complexity of the eye, and other small talk later.

Until then, don't bother me, I'm slapping together a book.