Christopher McKitterick's Blog, page 47

Updatery stuff...

This weekend, I:
. Fixed the radiator leak under the Saab's hood.
. Finally washed that poor, filthy car.
. Fixed another leak, this one in my toilet.
. Oh, and I HAD THE RELEASE EVENT FOR MY DEBUT NOVEL!


It's a book! Holding the one and only existing hardcover at the release event.


Audience at the book-launch. That's SF Grand Master James Gunn on the left side, for whom I wrote this book in the first place. Thanks for coming, everyone!


Reading at the book launch in Jayhawk Ink, at the University of Kansas student union, in Lawrence, Kansas, on Friday, Nov. 5, 2010.


My editor, Eric T. Reynolds, snapped this shot in front of the Jayhawk Ink bookstore, a few days before the official release event.


TRANSCENDENCE release after-party, with MellyStu being trouble. Note how Daruma still has only one colored-in eye... that was about to change.


TRANSCENDENCE among some of my short stuff, on my bookshelves, at the release party.


Daruma finally sees TRANSCENCENCE published! An event 10 years in the making.
Click the photo to open a full-size image of the complete hardcover dustjacket. Art by Greg Martin, cover design by Melissa Lytton.

If you want to check out the book, click here to read sample chapters and stuff. Now available at fine bookstores and online dealers such as Amazon (hardcover and trade paper) and Powell's (trade paper only). Or order directly from the publisher at a nice discount with free shipping: Hadley Rille Books.

I cannot begin to describe how pleased I am. *beam*

Here's wishing you a fine day. Thank you SO MUCH to everyone who attended the reading, signing, and party. You made it an Event of Awesomeness™.

Chris

Astro-Porn of the Day: Spacecraft Visits Comet Hartley2

Wow, you know how I use the term "amazing" when making these Astro-Porn of the Day posts? Well... WOW! Here's some more amazingness! This photo of Comet Hartley 2 was taken by NASA's EPOXI spacecraft at a distance of only 435 miles. Notice the outgassing and just all-around coolness and dramaticosity of this shot:


Click the image to see the EPOXI news page.

And if that's not dramatic enough for you, how about a little time-accelerated Quicktime movie showing the hour of closest approach:
Video by NASA/JPL-Caltech/UMD/Brown University.

NASA sez: "This animation of the flyby is made of 40 photos taken from the spacecraft's Medium-Resolution Instrument during the encounter. The first image was taken at about 37 minutes before the time of closest approach at a distance of about 27,350 kilometers (17,000 miles). The last image was taken 30 minutes after closest approach at a distance of 22,200 kilometers (13,800 miles). The spacecraft was able to image nearly 50 percent of the comet's illuminated surface in detail."

What you're seeing right here is a series of photographs taken by a spacecraft we sent to a FREAKING COMET! Does it get much cooler than that? Well, actually, I'm fairly certain we'll see something within months that makes me think that again, and of course a few months later we'll have more, and so on and so on.

Rock'n'roll.

Chris

Life update. Book-release party tonight!

Gosh, I haven't made a life update for a while. Had an amazing week or so! Including:

Book release and after-party tonight, Friday Nov. 5! Release is at Jayhawk Ink in the KU student union, with the after-party at my house (1809 Indiana St.) from then until late. Hope to see you there!
Just got my auto-deposit from the feds. Paid the mortgage & bills and will help pay for tonight's party supplies!
Discovered I've been granted Special Graduate Faculty status for a renewable 5-year term. Woohoo! Now I can be instructor of record for grad classes, grad theses, and so forth, rather than needing to get another grad faculty member to input grades for me. It also means I can develop new grad classes - such as creating a line number for the summer SF Writing Workshop so that our grad students can get credit for it.
Discovered that my position is being made a permanent budget item. This means no more year-to-year funding nonsense. Woohoo!
I discovered a little brown bird who had flown into my sliding-door window. Not a happy moment, poor thing on its back, kicking and trying to flap its wings. When turned over, it flopped over onto its back again. Brought it to the vet to have the poor thing put down. Here comes the good news: The nurse who removed it from the towel in my backpack said the bird stood in her hand. Hooray! She's bringing it to Operation Wildlife for rehabilitation.
My stepsister just had a baby! I'm an uncle again!
This is a good week! And here's what's new over the past month:

Charles Beaumont films & talk next Tuesday, Nov. 9. Don't miss it!
Astro-Porn of the Day: Jupiter, Andromeda Galaxy, and Orion Nebula Brighten an Election Night.
We had an election and I asked, What the fuck has Obama done so far?
Several pumpkins were massacred at my Halloween party.
Weather-Porn of the Day: "Chiclone" over the Midwest
James Gunn and I flit off to Morgantown, West Virginia, where Jim gives a talk on Isaac Asimov and we're treated to all manner of gentility by WVU.
I haz a finished cover!
I reach a weight not seen since my undergrad years.
, wherein I go through absurd contortions on my quest to reshoe my Crossfire. And spend a fortune.
Post: Astro-Porn of the Day: Solar Eruption is awesome.
Robin Wayne Bailey, Susan Satterfield, and I gave this year's KCSFFS spec-fic writer's workshop at the Writers Place
Made a health update on my eating and exercise progress. Semi-paleo eating and regular exercise FTW!
I hope your month is going well!
Chris

Tuesday event at KU

The KU Center for Science Fiction Studies and the Department of Film and Media Studies Present
A Tribute to Twilight Zone's Charles Beaumont
Alderson Auditorium, Kansas Union, Tues November9
Meet science fiction writer William F. Nolan(Logan's Run) and documentary producer Jason V Brock.

This tribute to Charles Beaumont, who wrote more scripts for The Twilight Zone than any other writer, will include screenings of Mr. Brock's new film, Charles Beaumont: The Short Life of Twilight Zone's Magic Man (2010) and the Roger Corman/Charles Beaumont film, The Intruder (1961). There will be personal recollections by William F. Nolan and KU's James Gunn. Afterward there will be a Q&A, refreshments, and a book signing with William F. Nolan.

Click here for article.

I'll be there!
Chris

Book release party this Friday!

I'm super-excited about holding the real-live hardcover copy of TRANSCENDENCE in my sweaty palms! Here it is, along with two more novels coming out from Hadley Rille Books in short order, FINDER by Terri-Lynne DeFino and THE NORTHERN QUEEN by Kim Vandervort:

The release party will be held at Jayhawk Ink (in the KU student union) this Friday, Nov. 5, from 4:00pm - 5:30pm, then party at my place afterward. Come celebrate the release of my debut novel. Should be a blast!

PS: Some folks have asked about ordering the book if they can't make it to the book release. No problem; in fact, you can still pre-order directly from the publisher at a tidy discount (with free shipping). Amazon and other fine bookstores will have it in stock starting Friday, and the Kindle edition (among other ebook formats) will be available soon.

Woohoo!
Chris

Astro-Porn of the Day: Jupiter, Andromeda Galaxy, and Orion Nebula Brighten an Election Night.

To get away from compulsively checking poll results last night, I shut down the computer and went outside to do a little backyard astronomy. It was cold, but the sky was clear and the stars were calling.

(I should point out that my 12" Meade LS90GPS GPS telescope's drive is still dysfunctional due to a nuked hand controller. The one I purchased from eBay to replace it? Doesn't work with my particular model of drive, so I'll have to update the firmware in hopes that it might do me some good. So this means I was bouncing around the light-polluted Lawrence sky using only my Mark I Eyeball for object-identification. Happily, these objects are very simple to pick out among the stars.)

First up - and how couldn't I, what with it blazing as the brightest other than the Moon night-time object in the sky! - was Jupiter. I will never weary of its beauty and majesty, the drama of its bands and zones rushing past one another at hundreds of miles per hour, in their wake creating vortices larger than the entire planet Earth. As a kid who read too much Heinlein, my great dream was one day to explore the moons of Jupiter, to live in the realm of the Giant Planets, far from the Earth and all its attendant troubles. Can you imagine what it must be like to wake up, look out the window, and see something like this every day?


Click the image to see more of Jeff Bryant's astro-art.

Here's a video of Jupiter taken through a telescope like mine. He gets a little nicer views than one can see with the naked eye, but it's a good indication of what's possible to see with a backyard instrument:

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Click the image to see more great astrophotos by Mike Salway.

Because it floated nearby, I next moved on to the Andromeda Galaxy. This is one of the very first astronomical objects I ever photographed (and developed the film!) through my Crown 6" f/8 Newtonian German-equatorial reflector when I was 13, using a Minolta XRT201 (I still remember!) 35mm film camera. Visually in a city's light pollution, one doesn't see much, but here's what you can capture with a CCD camera and a little patience:


Click the image to see more of Leo Taylor's astrophotos.

Visually, not terribly exciting, but let your imagination conjure up hundreds of millions of stars spiraling around a suprmassive black hole at the core; think of all the thousands or millions of planets harboring life... a galaxy is an island universe (click to see what Andromeda looks like through an observatory 'scope), everything that we'll ever likely see in person should we go to the stars. Our galaxy is every star in our sky, every nebula, every globular cluster, everything within millions of lightyears. That's a galaxy. So even if it's just a smeary fuzz in the eyepiece, you know what you're seeing, and that makes all the difference.

Finally I pointed the 'scope over the roof of my house, through some tree branches, to catch a glimpse of the Orion Nebula. Not the optimal viewing scenario, so I didn't expect much, but figured I'd catch my favorite deep-sky object while it floated between some naked branches, then head inside. What I didn't expect was the phenomenal, dramatic, awe-inspiring view my 78°-field-of-view, 17mm eyepiece provided. Holy emission and absorption nebula, Batman!


Click the image to see more great astrophotos by Mike Salway.

It was so beautiful that my breath caught; it was as if I had never seen this nebula through a telescope before. In the foreground, dark lanes of dust and gas billow, partially obscuring the bright background nebulosity lit by the Trapezium cluster (those four bright stars at the core of the nebula). I'm sure I expressed my awe verbally. Just wow. I swapped out my eypiece for an 82°-field-of-view, 33mm unit in order to catch the companion cluster and nebula (below in the photo above), but reducing magnification hid some of the details, so next I installed my f/6.3 focal reducer into the back of the 'scope and re-installed the 33mm eyepiece... but by now Orion had passed into the trees. Time to call it a night.

So I went from disappointed and disgusted to filled with delight. This is why I love astronomy. When I need a lift, when I need to know there's something beautiful in the universe, when I need to feel that good ol' sensawunda, the sky never lets me down.

Chris

What the fuck has Obama done so far?

On this eve of a purported Republican takeover of the House of Representatives, I went looking for something to cheer me up - not that I think it'll make any difference, mind you, what with the Repubs having stalled and wanked the House around enough so that the Dems couldn't get anything done. Ahem.

Anyway, it's nice to know that, yes, actually some stuff got done. Check out What the fuck has Obama done so far?

Feeling better now. Though bitterly ironic. Verging on disappointed with the American voters. I mean, seriously folks, you're voting for the party that did nothing but prevent stuff from getting done? *sigh* I guess it's better than when they supported Le Shrub and his Campaign of Awful. 'Course, if we really get a House full o' Repubs, we can expect a whole lotta nuthin' good for the next couple of years.

Speaking of which, here's CNN's Election Center page, where you can watch the carnage mount. As of this moment, they calling 116 Dems and 171 Repubs for the House, 48 Dems and 44 Repubs for the Senate.

Chris

Boiling hot, just the way you like it!

Having friends over tonight, carving pumpkins, sipping Irish coffee, playing Starcraft II. It's a good life ;-)

Here's what we've done so far!



Chris

Weather-Porn of the Day: "Chiclone" over the Midwest

Wow, this is amazing. The massive storm that caused the huge storms all across the country earlier this week set a new record for low pressure in a non-tropical storm in the continental U.S. with a minimum central pressure of 28.24" or 956 mb, the equivalent of a Category 3 hurricane. Extratropical storms like this one occur in the spring and fall when the temperature differential between the north of the country and the south of the country is greater. This week's storm produced 24 tornado reports, severe thunderstorms, blizzard conditions, hundreds of thousands of power outages, and winds that reached 77 mph.



Shades of Day After Tomorrow.

Thanks, Bamm!

Chris

Weather-Porn of the Day: Chiclone over the Midwest

Wow, this is amazing. The massive storm that caused the huge storms all across the country earlier this week set a new record for low pressure in a non-tropical storm in the continental U.S. with a minimum central pressure of 28.24" or 956 mb, the equivalent of a Category 3 hurricane. Extratropical storms like this one occur in the spring and fall when the temperature differential between the north of the country and the south of the country is greater. This week's storm produced 24 tornado reports, severe thunderstorms, blizzard conditions, hundreds of thousands of power outages, and winds that reached 77 mph.



Shades of Day After Tomorrow.

Thanks, Bamm!

Chris