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Red Dwarfs

I’ve always found red dwarf stars fascinating. With all the initial focus on the G class sun-like stars in the search for life, the long-lived and numerous red dwarfs seemed to have an enticing promise.

Most of them are too dim to be seen with the naked eye – adding to their mystery. It is estimated that 20 of the 30 closest stars to Earth are red dwarfs, yet no one of them can be seen without a telescope. The closest star to the sun is Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf 4.22 light-years from Earth. Through a telescope you can find it about four full-moon diameters away from Alpha and Beta Centauri, which appear as a single star in the night sky.

Compared to 10-billion-year expiry date suns like our own yellow G-class sun, red dwarfs can have lifetimes up to a trillion years. Am I the only one who is immediately imagining ancient civilisations glistening in the light of their red suns?

One way or another we will end up there anyway. Red dwarfs will outlive every other stellar cousin. If humanity survives that long, our star-faring descendants will have to migrate to nearby red dwarfs to stay in business as our sun fades to a white dwarf and then finally a black dwarf in a few billion years.

Any they do indeed have planets. In 2010 Gliese 581g was discovered around red dwarf Gliese 581 and dubbed the “first potentially habitable planet”. The fifth planet discovered in this system, it is thought to have a period of between 26-39 days and have a mass 2-3 times that of Earth. It’s orbit puts it somewhere similar to where Mercury orbits our sun, but with the lower intensity of the red dwarf, this should still allow liquid water. The Gliese 581 system is also tantalisingly close to Earth – around 20 lightyears away. So the Gliesians might be tuning in to watch 1993 TV on their satellite dishes as we speak.

One potential wrinkle for habitable planets around red dwarfs is the potential for tidally locked planets in close orbits to their suns. In this case, it is theorised that almost all the water would end up frozen on the cooler “dark side” on the planet. If you have enough water, then you would end up with a liquid water ‘ring’ along the temperate zone between the hot and cold sides. Because of the massive pressure of the ice sheets piling up on the cold side, you would get melting underneath, perhaps creating an ocean under the ice that would connect with the vast lakes around the terminator. How it all looks would depend on topography, the temperatures and exactly how much water you had. But somewhere in there would be zones suitable for life.

Anyone else got any fascinating red dwarf facts? Anyone set a story on a world orbiting a red dwarf?

I hope everyone is enjoying their free Calvanni ebook. Stay tuned for a free Scytheman (book 2).

Cross-posted at chrismcmahons blog.

Advice for the Lost Cause

So, sometime last week, Sarah found this page of alleged advice to writers, produced by someone who is not a writer. The list of egregious faults in said page is truly mind-boggling, and I’m reliably informed that members of the Hoyt Collective invented new forms of swearing due to reading this.

So don’t come whining to me about your brains exploding from the sheer quantity and execrable quality of the wrong in this thing. You have been warned.

On to the alleged advice. It comes in the form of one of those ever-popular “Ten things” lists. Presumably there’s something magical about having ten of them, since 9 or eleventy-bajillion never seems to happen. The 10 things part on its own would overload the WTF-per-minute-ometer but the explanations for each “thing” really blew the poor thing to pieces – and my WTF-per-minute-ometer is the best model you can get, specially optimized for antique, quirky software.

Thing one: Spend a day being a troll (under your own name, according to the advice section), then end the day by sincerely apologizing for being such an obstreperous wanker. This, the good lady tells us, is necessary to teach us to endure shame and shut down the inner censor.

Really? Sweetheart, if you saw half what my inner censor blocks, you’d run screaming into the night. As for enduring shame, if you need an external source to teach you that, you haven’t lost your moral compass: you never had one in the first place. Aside from which, this kind of thing is only appropriate for journaling as therapy. While I’d be the first person to say that writing fiction can be wonderfully therapeutic, that’s a side benefit. The main thing I’m trying to do is tell a damn good story as well as I possibly can.

Thing two: Spend a day being silent. This is apparently an exercise in self-awareness, although as a raging introvert who’s spent years living alone, only one day of silence is easy. I might exchange ten words with people during a normal day – and I’m married (the husband and I share some remarkably eloquent silences). One of my favorite activities is to find myself a pleasant location and sit and just absorb it. I’ll talk when I need to – like when the supermarket checkout girl wants to know if I’m going to use paper, plastic or something else. I’m not going to make the poor thing’s life any harder by going through some stupid pantomime in the interest of becoming more self-aware.

Thing three: Spend a day as a “student of reality” (I’m not making this up, you know) This, the editor-female says, is to teach us to write in our readers world. That’s all very well, but I don’t think I have any readers in alt-history late 1400s Eastern Europe. I’m damn sure I don’t have any in my other universes with the possible exception of the con vampire ‘verse and only because that one leaks like a busted sieve. I don’t know about you, but I happen to enjoy observing people and stuff so long as I’m in a sufficiently clear space. I don’t need to spend a day taking notes on the exact consistency of the cement tiles in location X when I’m going writing about someone whose only concern is that her shoes don’t get dirty.

Thing four: Spend a day with the lyrics of your favorite songs. By this our precious snowflake means to take a verse of said song and attach a honking great splat of details from your current circumstances (in excruciating detail, of course) to the lyrics, then analyze the results to see what kind of weird new meanings arise. The goal is to learn subtext.

Now aside from the unfortunate little fact that subtext is going to be different for everyone because of their history, if you haven’t figured out as a writer that you can set up a whole cascade of subconscious cues with the right words or the right little details, this exercise ain’t going to help you. It might be worth doing for drunken party games, but that’s about as far as I’d take it.

Thing five: Spend a day writing and rewriting a single scene. Apparently to teach hard work.

Darling, I know what hard work looks like. This isn’t it. This is nothing more than wankery pretending to be hard work. If a scene works, it works and it doesn’t need to be taken apart, much less rewritten five different ways to show up how a different perspective can make it totally different. That’s newbie stuff. As the whole “even more honestly” thing? Not everyone lies to themselves the way you do. But then, not everyone writes about themselves, either. I sure as hell don’t.

Thing six: Spend a day on research. Okay, this might look like a valid idea, until you look at what Ye Almighty Editor actually means by it. For starters, she doesn’t actually know what research is. For seconds it’s not going to teach deeper understanding the way she thinks it will. Oh, no… her exercise will generate a facile overview of a few topics, and some shallow essays of the sort I routinely pulled from unlikely portions of my anatomy all the way through high school and three degrees. Three and a half, actually, but who’s counting?

Thing seven: Spend a day watching children. Now aside from the fact that for some of us this is a highly refined form of torture, the reason for this exercise is allegedly to teach compassion for all your characters. That sproinging sound you heard was my WTF-per-minute-ometer finally giving up under the strain and blasting itself into spare parts.

To start with, I don’t need compassion for all of my characters. The fellow behind the bar who sells my main character some ale? He’s a bit player. I don’t need to know anything more about him than that he’s there doing his job. Same for the third enemy soldier from the left whose sole purpose in the book is to die horribly in a failed attack. Of course, I’m writing stories, not self-indulgent navel gazing literature, so I’m probably not the proper audience for this.

Thing eight: Spend a day crying. To learn – wait for it – courage. Lady, I live with depression. I have spent entire weeks crying. I do not need to do more of it to learn to be courageous. Courage is what gets me out of bed every damn morning and takes me to work every damn day. That and being a responsible adult, which is something I suspect our magnificent editor has not experienced. Or at least, not experienced much of.

Thing nine: Spend a day laughing at things only you think are funny. To learn to accept your uniqueness.

Honestly, this woman has no idea she has no idea. If you can’t accept that you’re a unique person with value no matter how good or bad you are, this exercise in futility ain’t going to change a thing. About the only good it will do is the purely physical good that comes from laughing, and you can get that by telling dirty jokes any time you please.

Thing ten: Spend a day being grateful. Okay. Gratitude for the good things in your life is not a bad thing. The kind of bullshit Pollyannaish nonsense this woman talks about as gratitude is just literary onanism – but then, to judge by the entire list, the dear lady’s entire career is editing various examples of literary onanism, and worse, loving them.

So, if you feel inclined to actually do any of these, don’t blame me when they don’t do you any bloody good whatsoever, and don’t come whining to me about it. You’re all adults, you’re all capable of taking yourselves to hell or heaven by any means you choose.

And that is something this person clearly does not understand.

Write It Like It’s Hot

There comes a time in the affairs of men – and women too.  PARTICULARLY women – when you find an object so wonderful, so resplendent, so … perfect, that even the most honest of us can’t help but say “oh, I want to steal that.”

If the object in question is an emerald at the local museum’s exhibit on jewelry, we do not advise you to attempt it.  No, not even if to the age of ten your #1 son was convinced you were an international jewel thief.  (No, he’s never been able to explain why.)

However, if the object in question is a setting, plot or another bit of narrative “oooh, shiny” go right ahead.  I’m going to give you a quick course in not getting caught.  (And will be open to specific questions for a follow up post.)

In my own writing life – and this will be shocking for the woman who has stolen from Shakespeare, Dumas and Jane Austen – this whole idea of copying/stealing someone else didn’t occur to me until I’d been writing for about ten years.

What happened is that our entire group decided – for an exercise and to have a deadline – to enter the Strange New Worlds contest.

Now, one of the group stories (Rebecca Lickiss’ and my If I Lose Thee) won the contest, and I think one other place in the book, but that was it.  That left us, over four years or so with about twenty short stories that were set in the Star Trek universe, and which we couldn’t therefore submit anywhere else.

We were whining about this to Kris Rusch and Dean Smith and they looked confused and said “but why don’t you file off serial numbers?”

Which was the first time I heard of the concept.

Say you have your standard Star Trek setup, with a Starfleet crew, and a violation of the prime directive.  Star Trek did not come up with that idea, and really, all you need to do is change the character names/descriptions, throw in a bit of history that shows your Star-Troop is NOT AT ALL like the Starfleet.  Either change it to all-human or make the aliens REALLY alien.  And then have some rule about not contaminating indigenous civilizations.  Do not call it The Prime Directive.

It’s not even particularly hard.  It is however tricky, and you want to have one of your betas be someone who knows the world and the references and who reads with a gimlet eye for things you forgot to change.

It can be done at several levels, and it depends on what you’re aiming for.  If you want to stay on the windy side of the law, but want people to still know what you’re referencing, then your filing of the serial numbers will still let people see there were serial numbers to file.  On the other hand, if you want to make it sound whole new and shiny you’d build in a lot more of the individual history of your world, etc.

It also all depends on the length of the work, and whether you feel you can sell it elsewhere.  If I had written, say, a star trek or star wars novel, I’d engage in A LOT MORE filing of serial numbers, than if it was a short-short and I was never going to make more than $50 on it.  But that’s because I’m a professional, which is known as “someone who likes to get paid for her efforts” and also “someone who doesn’t like to work for nothing.”  (Okay, it also means “someone who likes to be able to pay her mortgage.” It’s just a thing.)

Those are fairly obvious instances of filing serial numbers.  But what about the more serious ones.  First of all, you cannot read any Regency Romance without finding that half of them are Stolen-From-Heyer, with sex added in.  Sometimes the level to which they are stolen from Heyer would seem to me to be actionable, except no one is actioning, and I think it’s because it’s become so common, you can’t take the whole genre to court.

However, to stay on the safe side: if you’re stealing location or setting from a writer, don’t steal the plot from the same writer.  Also, for the love of BOB (Heinlein, who said “If you’re going to steal, steal from the best.”) unless it is an HOMAGE do not steal names or physical descriptions.

At any rate, the plot is something cumbersome to steal at least if you change the characters, because that will change what drives the character.  (Which is why so many Regencies sound odd, like no human being would ever do that.)

Yes, I know “there are only three plots” or two.  Or a dozen.  Or twenty.  You can’t help but run into that when you are in a writers’ group, particularly when someone is in the bloody habit of stealing your plot.  It’s always the people who don’t so much feel the temptation in the face of something perfect, but who think creativity is kind of leaning on someone else’s work and changing a thing or two, who bring out that chestnut.

Yeah, if you abstract enough elements, you can say there is only x number of plots – or even one.  Character has problem, character struggle, character solves problem.

Let’s not be silly, though.  If one of your group mates just wrote a story in which this man lands in a planet of all women, and has adventures that result in his either escaping by the skin of his… never mind.  Or staying on as a curiosity – NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU THINK HE/SHE BOTCHED THAT STORY IT’S NOT OKAY to bring a story the next week about a woman who landed in an all male planet.  No, not even if the result is different.

You’re probably not violating any laws, but you’re violating a rule about not pissing off people.  You’re also letting yourself be lazy. Also, if you’re all submitting to the same markets (or putting it up electronic) people will notice and it will be talked about.

If you really, really, really, think the person botched the story and you want to redo it, wait six months, okay?  I know that social relations are not the strong point of most writers, but try to put yourself in your colleague’s position.

(Exempt from this are stories explicitly slapping some award winning story, say, by turning it on its head.  That’s known in the field as “dialogue” or, more honestly, as “My dick is bigger than yours and I know what to do with it better too.”  It’s a behavior protected by tradition.)

In fact, unless you really are doing something interesting with part of our traditional culture – say Dumas or Shakespeare – it is better to have all your own ideas and settings.  BUT if you absolutely need to steal something, make it small, inconspicuous, hide it in your own creativity and for the love of BOB (Heinlein) do not call things by the same name.  (Unless you’re me, and just can’t help it, in which case make their function slightly different – I swear to Bob I didn’t realize how much I stole from him in vocabulary.  But hey, I have my own future history, so there.)

At the other extreme, a lot of you seem to think it’s wrong to say, take the story from a song, or an old movie, or even real life, and use it in fiction.  Oh, please.  Again, unless you’re using the same names/settings/phrases, it’s probably okay.  Just treat it like a piece of Star Trek Fic, file off the serial numbers, give it a different history and Write Like It’s Hot.

Next Week “Shared Culture versus New New Stuff.  How much of each is too much.”

Apologies

I will be back with a post after lunch. I forgot a doctor’s appointment this morning for my mother and have to leave the house in just a few minutes. I will, in the words of the Terminator, be back.

Stiff Necked

I come from two long lines of stiff-necked bastards, who fitted in to the established order the way Godzilla fits into the Bolshoi Ballet troupe (in a tutu, naturally), which is why my ancestors tended to go (mostly by their own volition) as far as possible from those who might like them to bow and fit in just because they were told to – or they got killed off trying to change that requirement. I suspect you could trace that line and attitude all the way back to a little valley in Africa, long, long ago, when the world was so very young and all. There’s a fair amount of it about, still.

If you put a whole lot of big lumps of hematite in a crucible until it is full… and then pop it the furnace because the boss told you he wants a crucible-full of molten iron, prepare yourself for a thick ear from the furnace-master. Big lumps of iron aren’t particularly bendy, nor do the spiky lumps fit together like a neat 3-D jigsaw without an impossible effort of reconstruction.

Basically if you want to crowd it together, you have to crush the big lumps, and then melt it, to make them nice and flexible and, um, pretty uniform. Of course if you go on crushing and heating too much the whole lot explodes or the crucible breaks.

Which has a lot in common with people in urban environments. The more crowded they get, the less space there is for big lumps who just won’t bend their necks to fit in. If there’s a boss big-lump there you can bet he isn’t living in a 2 X 6 sleeping strip, or using a bed in shifts, because his neck doesn’t bend that far.

Still, for oh… 90%? of humans, the reality is that we’re crushed, melted and poured into little boxes, which are pretty much the same because they have to fit as close as possible into the next little box and there is no space for a lot of awkward sticking-out bits. If you’re an awkward sticky-out bloke that doesn’t crush easily, the only place for you is on the frontiers, or breaking the crucible – that’s why the frontiers are a good safety valve, IMO.

We’re good at deceiving ourselves, and even kid ourselves this is much better than being the irregular spiky lump. After all, self-deception is why fiction sells. Good… but not perfect, because the inverse is true about what popular fiction is: its lead characters are almost inevitably spiky lumps (and on the occasions when they aren’t the book is about them becoming spiky big lumps). Rarely do books about those spiky big lumps becoming ground down and fitting into unique-just-like-everyone-else mold sell well (I can’t think of any that appealed to me anyway. Maybe I am not the best judge.)

Now it would certainly look like some people like fitting in, like taking orders, like not thinking for themselves. Some people, it seems, crush and melt easily (and surprise, they tend to live where having to accept the myriad rules that make closest possible packing work, and nice for the big lumps doing the crushing). Conformity is their middle name. If it’s the accepted mode where they fit to be oh, say racially xenophilic, they will be. And if the big lump on top says tomorrow ‘But we hate the Chinese because they’re bad (and we owe them money)’ they’ll be screaming ‘death to the yellow peril’ at the top of their voices, and be the first to turn on their Chinese neighbor Ah Foong, who was their best friend yesterday.

Except in fiction (well rarely, in real life too. Rarely enough that when it happens it is news) the neighbor will stand up for Ah Foong, will not obey City Hall’s ridiculous no water-tank-without-a-plumber, will make compound bows and not play golf, and will not fit in. In fiction they will either triumph against the crushing or escape it, possibly with Ah Foong’s brave and lovely daughter, for some place where they can be different spiky lumps without being crushed. And despite this being the inverse of what usually happens, we love to read it. We love the stiff-necked who will not bow their heads.

So: why? And what do we do as writers to capitalize on that why?