Daniel M. Bensen's Blog, page 79

Reactionless

Let’s talk about radio-frequency resonant cavity thruster, a reactionless drive. You generate microwaves inside a tapered cavity, and the whole taper pushes that way. Very very slowly.

So my question is, what good would it do us to have these things? They don’t have anywhere near the oomph of a classic rocket, but they don’t need any propellant. You can slap on some photo-voltaic panels or a nuclear reactor and that thing will just keep thrusting forever.

The way spacecraft maneuver in the real world is to coast until they hit a critical point in their flight plan, then aim their rocket nozzles in the proper direction and burn for as little time as they can, using as little fuel as possible.

A taper would work differently: very small constant acceleration. They’d make sense for distant targets, which would allow a longer time to build up speed. Or you could launch your spacecraft with rockets, then immediately turn on the tapers and bleed off momentum until you finally coast to a stop at your destination.

Any other ideas?

Alpha- and Beta-reading

So in case you didn’t notice, I just finished the beta-version of Junction, my new wilderness-survival murder-mystery with alien beasts and geopolitics. You can let me know if you want to be a beta-reader in the comments, but what I want to talk about now is my alpha-readers!

I prepared to write Junction through the summer so that when September rolled around and I was back on my work schedule, I was already ready to start writing. My goal was to finish the novel in 6 months, and I actually did!

A big part of my success was my alpha-readers, who received each chapter as I finished it and then gave me feedback. I was afraid at first that showing such raw wordage to other people would scare me and slow me down, but the exact opposite happened. Their comments made me shut up about my self-doubting (because they told me what was working), caught potential wrong turns in the plot before they became entrenched, gave me ideas for the next chapter, and gave me a really great motivator to keep writing. I can’t stop now! Little Timothy won’t be able to sleep this weekend without knowing what happens to Our Heroes!

So I am definitely going to write my next book with alpha-readers…probably starting next September.

Tales from the Universe

A happy announcement:

My story, “The Devout Atheist” appears in the Tales from the Universe Anthology by Inklings Press.

“Ten new voices in the world of science fiction cast their minds open wide and bring forth visions of tomorrow. Science fiction stories that deal with love, and fear, hope and despair, the ugliness of mankind and its beauty. Tales that reach to the farthest edge of the galaxy, and that face startling futures right here on Earth. These ten stories deal with artificial intelligences, cloning, aliens, war, peace and humanity’s place in it all. We give you Tales From The Universe.”

Buy it here (or here if you’re in the UK)

My walk from the metro

Junction’s  beta-draft is REALLY close to completion and I’m not having any ideas that aren’t related to either it or Renaissance Express. But you can’t give the same excuse twice and I do have a bit of extra time today, so here goes something different.

One of my commenters asked me to write more about my daily life in Bulgaria, which I don’t usually do because I write for escapism and my daily life is boring. But today I was listening to King of Vagabonds and I was thinking about how I admire Neal Stephenson’s ability to take the daily life of a person in whatever place and time and make it sound interesting.

So I reached up past the collar of my jacket and fumbled around in my shirt and undershirt until I found my necklace. The necklace is silver and was a present from my wife (then girlfriend) who gave it to me attached to a konski oko or “horse’s eye,” the Bulgarian term for a nazar. When the first nazar, a classic blue, white, and black eyeball, broke off the necklace some time in college, I replaced it with a simple torus of blue glass, like a lifesaver candy. When that one broke, I replaced it with an iPod.

The iPod looks a lot like a nazar, a silver rectangle with a black ring of plastic embedded in one of its faces. The ring is marked with certain symbols, but I don’t need to look at them, all I have to do is find the damn thing in my clothes and press it between my thumb forefinger. Somehow this action closes a logic gate in the ipod’s mysterious solid-state workings, and electrical pulses cease flowing through the insulated wires that run from it into my ears. Tiny magnets there stop vibrating, and the voice of Simon Prebble stops narrating.

I am on Shishman street, on my way back from my last class, and the St. Cyril and Methodius University metro station, to my office, and an organic food store. Shishman, named for the tsar who failed to resist the Ottoman invasion, is a cozy little street of trendy snacks, tchochkies, and steam-punk jewelry. People keep talking about making it a pedestrians-only street, but it keeps not happening, probably because of those maniac parents who like to pick up their kids from the Russian school and smash their cars into people trying to park in front of the Radisson Hotel.

For the time being, school is still in session and I’m safe as I make my way across the stained gray slabs of the sidewalk, past my old office, now painted a cheery red and white. The wind must be to my back because I smell each store after I pass it: nothing but wet concrete next to the banitseria, baked dough and cheese at the florist, hyacinths at Ali’s doner place, French fries and rotisserie chicken at whatever is next to the doner place.

There was a time I visited Ali’s so often that he knew my wife by sight, and yelled “don’t bother cooking dinner for your husband, we already fed him” at her. He also gave me free doners on my wedding day, in exchange for some leftover cake, and we feel a certain comradely since we are both foreigners who married Bulgarian women.

Both of our marriages also resulted in children, which is why I don’t see much of Ali any more and why (I assume) I accumulated so much stress that my body rebelled against me and refused to digest lactose any longer. Which is why I’m not stopping at either Ali’s or the Starbucks on my way back from my last class, but the health food store, where I have to buy a carton of soy milk and a raw food bar.

The soy milk is Italian (“con vaniglia”), which makes the secretions of the office coffeemaker bearable. The food bar I buy mostly because I’m paying for the 7 lev soy milk with a 20, and I don’t want the old lady behind the counter to glare at me. What I forget to buy, I will realize later, is coffee grounds, which means I am fated to drink hot water seeped through yesterdays dregs.

I rush toward this doom and my office in an apartment building, which dates back to some time before World War II (its elevator still proudly bears the name “Schindler”) and was heavily modified by the Communists. The lock on the door sticks, and I my key is torqued like a corck-screw from the time I wasn’t paying attention and twisted before I jiggled. My shoes clomp across the marble floor of the dark, chilly foyer, which today is half-way filled with wooden planks from the reconstruction of yet another one of the neighbors’ apartments.

My second key is in my hands as I climb the marble stairs, just a bit lower and a bit further apart than is the modern standard. The office door is modern standard, though, a metal behemoth with a heavy deadbolt system that crunches to life below the surface as I wrench the key counter-clockwise, as if I have activated a mechanical golem. I have to grasp the knob (which does not turn) and pull firmly to force the door’s hidden apparatus into alignment. Alignment is attained and I gain entry.

My next class is at 5:30. I have an hour and a half to write.

Who wants to beta-read Junction??

Junction’s beta-version is ready for readers. It’s pretty rough, but with at least the most egregious plot-holes filled. I’m sure there are more lurking in there, though, so be brutal! Tear into this manuscript with your acid-spewing mandibles and rip it apart with your flailing tentacles. Scream your criticism to the cold, unfeeling stars! Skreee!

Ahem. Also, if you know know someone who knows something about Japan, Indonesia, Australia, or biology, and might want to read a scifi manuscript, please put them in touch with me. I’d love some help making sure I got the details right.

So. Anyone interested in beta-reading this beast? Let me know in the comments.

Tyrannosaur Queen reviews

Here are the reviews of Tyrannosaur Queen I’ve been able to find. If you know of any others, tell me in the comments.

Amazon: “It’s the kind of book that hits the ground running and doesn’t stop.”

Goodreads: “both characters soon transcend type to become real individuals, and their romance is sweet and moving.”

Immerse or die: “Today we see a great premise weakened by a bit of sloppy spelling.”

Sales report

Tyrannosaur Queen became available to the unwashed masses at the beginning of January, which means I now have an exciting new graph to show you!

That’s SALES, people. Sweet, digital cash. I had a few pre-orders, then “sold” about 500 copies in a free giveaway that first week. Sales since then have been slow, but I did get a noticeable uptick after an essay of mine made it onto Mary Robinette Kowal’s “My Favorite Bit” blog. I’m writing a lot of essays about dinosaurs for other people’s blogs right now, such as my favorite so far “Yes, your Velociraptors must have Feathers and Other Concessions to Reality“.

The essays don’t seem to be generating much in the way of sales, but they are doing some important work for me. One, they’re tying my blog to the blogs of other people, people I’d like to continue working with. Second, the next time a publisher googles my name, they will have a wide menu of interesting things to look at. Lastly, I’m proving that I can run a little media campaign for a newly-published book, which is a good thing to put on my resume.

Which brings me to how you can help splatter my name across the internet. If you’ve read Groom of the Tyrannosaur Queen, why not write a review? It can be on Amazon, Goodreads, your own webpage, or (dare I hope) all three! No, the review doesn’t have to be positive. I actually want criticism. It’s the only way I’ll learn.

well here’s possibly the first line of my next novel

Sorry guys. Finishing up Junction has just blasted my brain.

And as if in proof, here’s the first line of my next novel.

“The future arrived on a Thursday afternoon.”

The Renaissance Express: A saga of crime and family

Coming…like…next year? Jesus, Junction is still cooling on the slab and I’m already sending Igor out for more brains? What the hell is wrong with me?

Looking at 2015

Here’s what’s happened on the website this year.

That spike in January was from a great podcast I did with Lars Doucet and James Cavin about computer games. Some more of those spikes are another podcast I did with Ferret Steinmetz about obsession, a podcast about tie-in novels with Josh Vogt, Stephanie Lorée, and Gary Kloster, yet another podcast with Eric Schwitzgebel about philosophy, and a pair of short stories about human evolution. That general upward bulge in the summer was because of…fairies? I don’t know. Do you guys have any better theories?

The trend is pretty clear: people are attracted to great content. The problem is content is, like, hard, man. My health got so bad staying up late to record those podcasts that the podcasts themselves suffered (it’s hard to be witty when your intestine is punching you from the inside). And usually when I write a good short story I want to try to sell it to a magazine. The rest of the time, I’m writing my next novel or proofing/publishing my last novel.

Because that’s the name of the game: novels. I don’t want to grow up to be a podcaster or even a short-story writer. I want to be a novelist, and when my time and energy is in short supply, I have to be careful about where I invest it.

So my resolution in 2016 is the same as it was in 2015: write a better novel than last year.

 

DONE!

Junction’s first draft is done.

February 3rd in Sofia, Bulgaria. 101,504 words.

Last line: “Daisuke held Anne’s hand and smiled from his heart.”