Writing

  • Meta,  Writing

    On Themes…

    Ashe Theme
    New Theme!

    Certain things stopped working on my old theme, Structure. Probably because it was from 2009. I mean…color me surprised, but apparently software — including WordPress themes! — does update from time to time, and if you don’t apply those updates, things stop working. Who knew? So my menus have been not working for . . . a long time. And I was too busy to worry about it, and finally today I just made time and dealt with it. Not that I didn’t like Structure. I loved it. I even had several people comment on it and say that they really liked the “simplicity” of it. And that was what drew me to it. But they wanted . . . a considerable amount of money to update it, because to do that I had to go to the pro version, and . . . well . . . not enough people read this blog for me to spend that kind of money. :) I’m already paying for six domains, and that’s more than enough.

    Hopefully, this will be a theme I like, and can be better about keeping up with updates. Assuming they don’t want to charge me to update.

    I’m still learning all the bits and pieces of the new theme. Seems that there are many new features of themes since the last time I spent any time playing with it, and I’m still trying to figure out how to get the footnote numbers to start over with each post on the main page, so until I figure that out, well . . . it’ll be easier to click on a title and go read the individual page instead of reading them from the main page. The whole menu situation is still not ironed out because there’s a ton of setup and I just need to figure out how menus work in this new decade of WordPress and just deal with it. For now, there is one menu, “About,” and the sub-pages associated with that. I’ve updated my Podcasts I Listen To page quite a bit, because I finally got the personal project I’ve been working on in my spare time working well enough to want to get it to output pre-formatted content for that page.

    Sure, I could make a comment, here, about the whole ‘gosh, it’s been over two years since I updated my blog’ thing, and ‘gosh, what a year 2020 was, huh?’ thing, or even the ‘writing? was that the thing with the blank pages that I’m supposed to fill up with words?’ thing. But that would be calling attention to the fact that it’s been over two years since I updated my blog and offering excuses, which I’m absolutely not going to do; that 2020 was a global hellscape of awful, which everyone already knows; and that I haven’t written substantially since early 2020, but no one but me and my writers group really cares about that, so I’ll not bore you with it.

    Suffice it to say, things happened, situations changed, priorities altered. We move forward.

    I have been writing, but not on a regular basis. I’m getting back to some stories I started and never finished, and I hope to Get Right On That™ Real Soon Now™ I have lots of ideas for stories and for changes to my neverending novel.

    With any luck, I’ll have more to share soon. I’m working on getting my home office set up and usable because as it turns out, I’m now permanently working from home, so there’s that. Once that’s done, I’ll have a dedicated place other than my dining room table and living room easy chair in which to dedicate time to working / writing.

    Watch this space. Or don’t. I don’t control you.

  • Meta,  Reading,  Writing

    Writing Report, April 2019

    Fountain Pen
    Writing

    As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been using a spreadsheet and a work-scheduling app to track words written and time spent. I decided to do a monthly wrap-up.

    April didn’t go quite as intended.

    On the one hand, I did cross another milestone: I wrote “The End” at the end(?) of my novel(?). Use use the (?)s because . . . well . . . it was the logical “end” of the story, although it does leave things in a rather prickly situation. Which is great if you know there’s going to be a book 2. Not so much if it’s supposed to be stand-alone. But I’ve never envisioned this as a stand-alone. And only once I get it rearranged and retooled will it be a novel. But as it stands as I write this between projects at work on April 30th, it is not a novel. “Novel” implies a sort of structure. A beginning, a middle, and an end. Character arcs. Coherent . . . ness. As it stands, it is 110,000+ words of . . . loosely related anecdotes involving the same characters and in the same universe.

    So, yeah, it is not a novel. There are threads left dangling, characters mentioned once and never brought up again, a suddenly appearing thirteen-year-old son of a secondary character who was convenient to use as a hostage in the final confrontation scene . . . Kid doesn’t even have a name. I called him [HAL’S SON].

    I discovery-wrote my way into some cool stuff, including finding the perfect location in which to set much of my action (and causing a huge difference in the different parts of the story as I have three locations. The final one is a place that is very Atlanta, which is what I want. If my story could take place anywhere, then what’s the point of setting it in Atlanta other than convenience? Most Atlantans will recognize the location I’ve chosen if they have ever driven through Spaghetti Junction, and those who aren’t in Atlanta can google the location and see the structure I’m describing. So it works out.

    Last month, I said, naïvely, that I wanted to finish the thing in April, “so that I can start on the rewrite.”

    Yeah.

    About that . . .

    No. :)

    What had happened was . . . I kept coming up with things to change the plot, not augment it. New ideas about how my magic system works. Who can do what and why. (More of) What my adversary’s reasons are for doing what he’s doing. Etc. So I work through those by free-writing them, and then I also have other ideas for stories, and I’ve written those down with enough notes to help me remember everything without inflicting another Skullcosm on myself.

    Because that was all infinitely more interesting than continuing to attempt to revise and submit some of my finished stories. I mean, I did spruce up one called “C Is for Clowns that Creep Through the Yard” (alt title: “Coulromisia”) and submitted that as my work to be critiqued for Write Here, Write Now, which starts day after tomorrow (as I type this). It’s one of the darker things I’ve written. We’ll see what the critters have to say. :) But that is the only story I did anything with in April. I didn’t even submit the rejected story from March to another market because, frankly, I forgot. <sigh>

    Here’s my report.

    April 2019 Writing Report
    April 2019 Writing Report

    Goal Progress

    Finish This Damned Novel – Yay!

    Rewrite This Damned Novel – . . .

    Three More Novel Outlines – Did that as one of my free-writing. So I have enough on all three to participate on a plot break on any or all of them. I think. We shall see which one I pick. :) The problems I have with all three is that they’re too similar to things that already exist, and I need more. Or maybe abandon the ideas if I can’t make them into anything coherent.

    Write Here, Write Now – I leave tomorrow (as I type this; May 1, 2019)

    Read Forty Books – Meh. Maybe if they’re really short books, I can catch up? I have read a lot of short stories and reference stuff. But those don’t count on Goodreads. Well, except the reference books. I have one on autopsies, one on blood spatter, and one on crime scene investigation. You know, a little light reading. :)

    Submit Things To Places – May. May is a good month to send Things out. To Places.


    1. The word I was fishing around for was ‘cohesion.’
  • Writing

    Writing Report, March 2019

    Fountain Pen
    Writing

    As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been using a spreadsheet and a work-scheduling app to track words written and time spent. I decided to do a monthly wrap-up.

    March was pretty decent. I crossed a milestone I haven’t crossed in quite a while: I wrote 100,000 words on a “novel.” I use quotes because although I did pass 100,000 words in the Scrivener project where I’m writing my novel, many of those words are not . . . good words. They are, in fact, crappy words. Words that I will end up deleting and rewriting because although they seemed the thing to write at the time, they no longer actually make sense in the full novel as I’ve come to understand it. Scenes I don’t need, repetitions of things I’ve already said, exposition that’s more for me than any reader it might eventually have. And I’m nearing the “end” of the “novel,” as well. I wrote the Big Climactic Scene™ — two of them, actually — and only have a the Final Confrontation with Evil™ where the Hero Triumphs™ but at Great Cost™ and then all that cleanup stuff. You know the ‘Bilbo and Sam go back to the Shire and it’s not the same place they left’ part that has to be written but whether or not I’ll keep it all is up for debate.

    I look forward to bringing this sucker to a close in April so that I can start on the rewrite. After I confiscate one of the big white-boards at work after hours and really make myself understand the different plot threads and how they all weave together. I know there are things I introduced that I never came back to. Characters I introduced and then forgot. Characters that I may not even need. And just tonight, I realized that a character I already introduced has a role to fill that cleans up a rather tidy piece of backstory that was bugging me. And would probably stand out instantly to any reader, as well, so that’s good.

    Another thing I did in March was to start looking at some of my older stories with an eye toward making them publishable. I got a rejection on a story from a market I want to eventually make it into. The story I sent wasn’t really in their wheelhouse, but it also wasn’t really out of it, either. So it was a gamble, and it didn’t pay off. I’ll be submitting that story to the next market on my list in April, and hopefully getting a second one ready for submission so I can have two out. And then three. And then four. And then . . .

    I did really well on writing from a consistency standpoint this month. Reading . . . slightly less so. But I read almost every day. When I visited my mother, I didn’t get any reading done, but I also missed a day or two later in the month because of various other reasons. It means it’ll take a little longer to “level up,” but I’ll get there eventually.

    Another thing I did this month was the create yet another spreadsheet (Have I mentioned how much I love Excel? Because I love it a lot.) that will “pretty-print” my little progress table. I tried going from Excel to HTML and it did . . . some odd things. So I abandoned that path and just took a screen shot of the ‘pretty-print’ for March and this is it, right here.

    March 2019 Writing Report
    March 2019 Writing Report

    Goal Progress

    Finish This Damned Novel – So. Close. Probably another 7500 to 10,000 words, and I”ll be done. And then the real fun of rewriting will begin.

    Three More Novel Outlines – Some of it happened? I have . . . things that resemble outlines of part of two of them. I have thirty-three more days to get something that resembles an outline for at least one of them written before . . .

    Write Here, Write Now – I can almost taste Baltimore. It tastes . . . like mouthwash.

    Read Forty Books – It was probably not a great idea to pick Jenn Lyonsepic 560-page tome The Ruin of Kings as the next book I read, but OMG YOU GUYS IT’S SO DAMNED GOOD AND YOU NEED TO BE READING IT RIGHT NOW. There are seventeen chapters of it up on Tor’s site for you to read for free. I linked to it up there! Go! Click! You can get hooked like I did! I’m sure I’ll catch up after I’m done with it and read lots of shorter things. :)

    Submit Things To Places – April. April is a good month to send Things out. To Places.


    1. I do not say this to ‘shame’ my mother, who will read this. I say it because I genuinely would rather spend time with her than read. And I did read some while I was at her house, but it was mostly web pages, and those are hard for me to track. :)
    2. Ten Internet Points to anyone who actually gets this. You can spend them precisely nowhere! But they’ll be yours to keep and be proud of for literally minutes to come!
  • Reading,  Writing

    Writing Report, February 2019

    Fountain Pen
    Writing

    As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been using a spreadsheet and a work-scheduling app to track words written and time spent. I decided to do a monthly wrap-up.

    February was productive, but it wasn’t as productive as previous months. I wrote, but not a lot. But I did write every single day, rain or shine, in the mood or not, tired or perky, and made progress on short stories and my novel. I even <gasp> liked some of what I wrote! I KNOW! It’s so not me. I even submitted one of my older stories to another market in the hopes that it’ll find a home. Yes, I should submit more stories and more often. Working on that. Maybe an addition to my spreadsheet . . .

    In addition to writing, I gave myself the goal of reading every day, as well. I added another spreadsheet (because who doesn’t love spreadsheets?) and started tracking minutes of reading, using a level system similar to the one I use for the writing, and also rewarding myself for reading more than one type of thing. My categories are “Audiobook,” “Short Story,” “Novel,” and “Non-Fiction.” Any reading I have to do for work or if I read a long article on a website, that goes in “non-fiction.” Anything shorter than a “novel” falls in the “short story” category, even if it’s ~40,000 words. I may add another section for ‘gaming’ because I find myself now playing Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition online with friends biweekly, and there’s a lot of reading involved. But it’s not really a novel or a short story or audiobook, and it’s certainly not non-fiction.

    I have daily issues of Daily Science Fiction going back many years. I’ve made an actual dent in that since I read quite a few of them per day, now. I also have issues of Clarkesworld that have been collecting, as well as Crossed Genres and I just became a patron of Flash Fiction Online, so my short-stories itch is being scratched! My friend Jenn Lyons also just had her book The Ruin of Kings come out, and it’s next on my list! I was going to read the e-book version, but the footnotes plays havoc with the e-format, so I’m just gonna have to go old-style and read the dead-tree version. :) As a note, I attended Jenn’s book launch party at Eagle Eye Book Shop here in the Atlanta area, and she had the most amazing cake. Red velvet with raspberry filling. To. Die. For. And it was a 3-D rendering of her book cover.

    For February, 2019, my stats are

    • Words: 22,608
      • Daily average words: 807
    • Time: 1,250 minutes (20 hours, 50 minutes)
      • Daily average time: 45 min
    • Average words/hour: 1,085
    • Chain: 151 days
    • Level: 6 as of 22 February
    • Quota: 450 words per day until 21 February, then 500 words/day

    For February, 2019, my Reading stats are

    • Minutes: 1,495 (24 hours, 55 minutes)
      • Daily average minutes: 53
    • Days on which I read:
      • Audiobook: 0
      • Short Story: 23
      • Novel: 5
      • Non-Fiction: 3
    • Chain: 40 days
    • Level: 2 as of 22 February
    • Quota: 20 minutes per day through 21 February, 25 minutes per day thereafter

    Goal Progress

    Finish This Damned Novel – I’m writing the first pass at the first really huge scene where the protagonist and antagonist meet and there are fireworks. Now I have to figure out what happens after that, and what he tells his companions. Not everything is something he’s proud of or wants to admit.

    Three More Novel Outlines – I wrote down a bunch of thoughts on one of them the other day, in preparation for the next item on my list. I’d like to do a plot break on it, and for that to happen, I have to have . . . you know, some kind of vague idea of what happens in the story.

    Write Here, Write Now – I’m getting excited about seeing a bunch of friends I haven’t seen in a while and be in a room for several days with other writers talking writing and playing a lot — a lot — of Cards Against Humanity. And Werewolves. And maybe other stuff. But also writing.

    Read Forty Books – I’m behind, but at least I already have read several books. Better than last year. :)

    Submit Things To Places – I sent one out! So. Many. More. To go.

  • Meta,  Reading,  Weekend Warrior,  Writing

    Writing Report, January 2019 + Goals

    Fountain Pen
    Writing

    As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been using a spreadsheet and a work-scheduling app to track words written and time spent. I decided to do a monthly wrap-up.

    This month I had incentive to write beyond just wanting to write. I belong to an online writers discussion forum called Codex Writers. Each year beginning the first full Friday-Sunday weekend in January, we have something called Weekend Warrior. I’ve talked about it before, but rather than giving you a link and making you go elsewhere, I’ll just explain it here, again. On Friday night, we’re given six prompts. By Sunday night, we write a 750-word (or less) flash story using one or more of the prompts and upload it anonymously to the site. Once the deadline has passed, participants download all the stories in our divisions (no one can read all the stories, so we’re divided into smaller subgroups randomly, to make the task easier and more enjoyable), read them for critique, rate them (again, anonymously), make a short comment explaining our rating, and upload those ratings by Friday evening . . . at which point the next week’s prompts go up and we start all over again. It’s like a slush pile, only better because you get comments. :)

    The prize at the end? Five new stories, assuming you participate each week. And the knowledge that you can write a story to spec in just over two days. And the completely anonymous feedback from a plethora of readers — who are also writers — some of whom loved your story and some of whom . . . didn’t. But now you know why they did or didn’t.

    So far, we’re in week four, which means I’ve written four flash stories in January. Two of those have already been turned into longer stories and one of those (now 4700 words) has been taken to my Tuesday night critique group for a more thorough examination. It needs some editing based on what my group said, and then I’ll put it through one more round of critiques before obsessively editing it for a couple more weeks and then, finally, sending it out into the world even though I hate it, now, every syllable. Such is writing. :)

    The way I do Weekend Warrior, now, is to get the prompts and just do a free-association on each one, seeing what sticks and what doesn’t, until something gets past the part of my brain that filters out bad ideas and starts to tickle the creamy center. Then I elaborate on that one (or those ones) until I can’t think of anything else. That’s all on Friday night. By Saturday, I probably have an idea what I’m writing, but sometimes I don’t write it at all, but continue to freely associate. I like to let it marinate and dry-age in my brain until Sunday, at which point I start writing the actual story . . . and find out that the story I have in my head is not what comes out of my fingers onto the screen at. all. but is usually better in some ways. I then submit it sometime after 10 pm and spend the next couple of hours obsessively proofreading and tweaking it to get it Perfect™. So for a single 750-word story, I can generate a couple thousand words over a three-day period before it gets submitted. Which is awesome from a word-count and consistency point of view. :)

    In between writing for Weekend Warrior, I’ve continued to work on my novel. It’s a giant, swirling, incoherent mess that I hope to clean up into a coherent, slightly less swirling . . . neater-thing that . . . is readable. <gestures vaguely>

    I also noticed something that started to really bug me. I use Goodreads to put in all my books. In past years, I’ve read a lot of books in a given year. But in the last couple of years, I’ve read less and less as I listen to more and more audio and watch more YouTube. This is bad. I love reading, but I’ve let it slip away. So I made another sheet in my spreadsheet for time spent reading, come up with my own formulae for levels and points and such, and am now tracking that. It’s helping me to incentivize reading something every day, whether that is a single short story, part of a novel, or something non-fiction. I also count audiobooks, because regardless what anyone says, I count that as reading. Is it exactly the same thing? No. But I still absorb the story. My comprehension is still high. I remember where I left off just like I do with dead-tree or dead-electron books. So it counts as reading, for me. Your mileage may vary.

    I also thought it might be informative if I made another spreadsheet with all of the stories I have in various stages of completion, regardless of length, subject, or whatever.

    there are over ninety

    Twenty-six of those are the Alphabet series I wrote. Another 30+ are from Weekend Warrior.

    Also? I love making spreadsheets. So there’s that. :)

    For January, 2019, my stats are

    • Words: 31,362
      • Daily average words: 1,012
    • Time: 1,645 minutes (27 hours, 25 minutes)
      • Daily average time: 53 min
    • Average words/hour: 1,143
    • Chain: 123 days
    • Level: 5 as of 21 January
    • Quota: 400 words per day until 20 December, then 450 words/day

    For January, 2019, my Reading stats are

    • Minutes: 2,148 (35 hours, 48 minutes)
      • Daily average minutes: 77
    • Days on which I read:
      • Audiobook: 7
      • Short Story: 12
      • Novel: 9
      • Non-Fiction: 7
    • Chain: 13 days (I missed 3 days; 13 was the longest chain, of which there were 3)
    • Level: 1
    • Quota: 20 minutes per day

    Goals

    Yeah. I’m not big on ‘goals’ because they sound too much like ‘resolutions,’ but here’s some vagueness.

    1. I want to finish this damned novel and finally have something for my novel-writing group to read. I’m the only one who hasn’t had at least one novel put through the group, and some are working on a third. So I’m behind. By April 1, I want the rough draft done. The one no one will ever see. The one that gets turned into the alpha and beta versions.
    2. I have ideas for three more novels unrelated to the urban fantasy series for which the current WIP is book 1. It’d be nice to at least start outlining those.
    3. I’m attending one writing-related fun-thing this year, in May in Baltimore. Since I pay myself minimum wage for writing and I’m now writing every day, I have enough put aside to indulge one trip.
    4. I want to read at least forty books/audiobooks this year.
    5. I know this is a vague, non-SMART goal, but here it is anyway: submit, dammit. Stop self-rejecting.

    1. For each contest on Codex — and there are quite a few — ‘anonymous’ is achieved by selecting what we call a nom de guerre, which is used instead of our real names, so you may be reading a story by “George, Absolute Prefect of Saturn” and find out later that it was <insert famous author’s name here> and you never knew. Or you may find out that you absolutely love the writing of “Lulu, Queen of the Zorgs” and find out it’s someone whose name you’re unfamiliar with, but now you know to look for it in all the publications.
  • Meta,  Writing

    Writing Report, December 2018 + Year-End Wrap-Up

    Fountain Pen
    Writing

    As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been using a spreadsheet and a work-scheduling app to track words written and time spent. I decided to do a monthly wrap-up.

    December was a fairly decent month. In spite of a somewhat major holiday and spending quite a bit of time with my mother both at her house and on a vacation trip to south Georgia, I managed to write at least the minimum number of words every day, even when I had Internet speeds that reminded me of 110-Baud modems.

    I had some interesting revelations about a couple of my characters and made copious notes to go back and add some conflict between my two main characters to set up something that happens about halfway through the novel.

    I also finally managed to figure out exactly what my antagonist is doing and why. Like, the details of it. I know that seems silly that I have an outline and am writing on the novel and only just now figured that out. I had the gist of it — with the understanding that it would probably come to me during the writing, which it did — but not the reasoning behind it or the exact order of events. Once I figured out some stuff about the magic in my universe and how it’s used by different mages (and therefore what my antagonist is doing), I was able to make that leap. My notes are in-line in the document itself, so it’s not like I’m going to lose it. :)

    The whole Safari issue is really frustrating. My self-control has never been good, so knowing that I can get to Facebook on Safari means I might as well not block it on my other browsers. I hope they fix that issue (which is a feature they added). Many is the night I’ve gotten my writing for the day done at 3:00 AM because I procrastinated.

    Maybe I can make that part of the ‘game.’ If I go to Facebook after 8 PM, it’s some sort of penalty. Hmm. I’ll work on it.

    For December, 2018, my stats are

    • Words: 27,492
      • Daily average words: 887
    • Time: 1461 minutes (24 hours, 21 minutes)
      • Daily average time: 47:08 min
    • Average words/hour: 1129
    • Chain: 92 days
    • Level: 4 as of 18 December
    • Quota: 350 words per day until 18 December, then 400 words/day

    Yearly Wrap-Up

    For 2018, my stats are

    • Words: 127,701. That’s well over a novel’s worth.
      • Daily average words: 946
    • Time: 9356 minutes (6 days, 11 hours, 56 minutes)
      • Daily average time: 58:29 min
    • Average words/hour: 819
    • Longest Chain: 92 days
      • Number of chains: 2
      • Total Writing Days: 160
    • Level: 4 as of 31 December
    • Points: 5472 as of 31 December

    There were days prior to August that I wrote and recorded my time, but not the number of words (Really, past me?), so the totals above include that writing time, which is why the words per hour are probably a bit off. In 2019, I will count words and time each time I write, so those numbers won’t get “off” by too much.

    My best (most productive) month was September, with a grand total of 37,243 words written. My worst month was August with only 15,649, but I was only writing for 13 days in August, so that could probably be prorated, but I’ll let it stand. :)

    The most time I spent writing was in September, as well, with 2048 minutes, total, but a surprise is that January was second with 1546 minutes, total, but I didn’t record the number of words I wrote. I suspect a good bit of it was while Weekend Warrior was going on. This was well before I rediscovered the magic writing spreadsheet and started using it daily, but I was using the time-tracking app and kept track of how long I wrote, because that makes sense.

    I plan to keep this going for 2019. I have a good chunk of a rough draft of a novel that I’ve been trying, unsuccessfully, to write since 2008. It has gone through a number of massive changes as I’ve learned things about writing and revised my characters and my world and figured out a plot that I hope makes sense. Well over half of the total 127,701 words were on short stories, blog posts, the outline, and free-writing to get to something outline-like. Right now, the ‘novel’ is a hopeless mess that needs a lot of help before I would consider letting eyes other than mine see it. I hope that by . . . let’s say April? . . . I might have something resembling a rough draft. <crosses fingers>

    Oh, and you bet your sweet bippy this blog post is going towards my words for 1/1/2019. :) Let’s get the new year off to a decent start with some extra words!

    Magic Writing Spreadsheet 2018, complete
    Magic Writing Spreadsheet 2018, complete

    As a final bonus, if you’re at all interested in what the spreadsheet looks like, here is a screen shot of the 2018 worksheet. You can’t read it as is, but if you click on the image, then click on it again to get the magnified version, you can see every cell, should you feel the desire to do so. :)

    If anyone is interested in obtaining a copy of the sheet . . . well, I could be persuaded to share a blanked-out version. Probably. ;) Alternatively, you could use the one I link to way back in another post, the truly shared one that exists as a Google Doc where you can see everyone else’s progress as well.

    Just know that I found and corrected a major bug in it today as I was preparing the 2019 sheet for the first entry (this blog post), and that extended to the 2020 sheet. If I give you a copy, you’d be on your own for fixing stuff like that.

  • Meta,  Writing

    Well, It Was Supposed To Be a Sale

    On January 27, 2018, Johnna, a friend of mine who is in my Tuesday night writing group (The Forum Writers), sent me a link to Spectacle Magazine with a note that said, “Have you tried here? When I saw this, I thought of you and your short stories. I think you could submit something here and have success.”

    I looked at the site and discovered that they had literally just published their first issue, and that they were paying nicely.

    I had just finished editing two short stories and thought, “Why not?” One of them got sent off to Spectacle and one elsewhere. Both deadlines were sufficiently into the future that I didn’t obsess (much) over checking (much) my email (much) every day to see (much) if I had a response (much). Nada (MUCH).

    On the evening of February 15th (the submission deadline), just as I was about to shut down my computer to head upstairs to prepare for bed, *ping*.

    A new email on the account I use exclusively for writing. Well, I mean . . . it wouldn’t hurt to look, right? A rejection just before bed is nothing new, after all. So I called it up. Yep. From Spectacle.

    “Dear Gary,” yadda yadda blah blah blah “loved your submission” blah-de-blah-de-blah and here it comes . . . “and want to publish and illustrate it for an upcoming issue.” Yep! Exactly what I figured. Crap. This story is– <sound of record being scratched>

    Wait. What?

    I read it again. It still had that last sentence. And again. Still had not changed. I — and I’m a little embarrassed to admit this — got on Facebook and sent the email to a trusted friend and said, “Does this say what it looks like it says?”

    I’ve been through this before, after all. My acceptance into Viable Paradise went much the same way, including taking a printout of the email with me on the plane up to Boston just in case somewhere along the way it changed to “Psych! Your writing sucks and you should be ashamed for making us read that dreck,” so I could just slink off to a different hotel and hide for a week. I wish I were kidding.

    Impostor Syndrome is . . . yeah.

    I held the news while Spectacle worked out some issues with its author contract. The original one was . . . very rights-grabby. The second one was . . . better. Then they started working with SFWA and I figured time would tell. It was clear that the publishers were new to publishing and were trying to do better. So we were hopeful.

    By the end of April, however, I was getting worried. They were still replying to emails and saying, “We’re almost there!” Then, at the very end of April, they sent an email with the new contract (blank) for us to look over, and a note that said they were going to get the new contracts sent off to all the writers who’d had stories accepted “within the next day or so!”

    So, I waited. And I waited. May. June. The publishers stopped replying to tweets and emails. Still, I waited. And then, it was July. I withdrew my own story from consideration because it was clear to me that they were never going to send anything. I never received a response to that email. I can’t prove that they ever knew I’d retracted my submission. Issue 2 had not come out. In fact, their website had not been updated since before April. In fact, their podcast had petered out at episode 5 in May. It concerned me at the time that only one of the two publishers bothered to take any time to say a few words on the podcast, but I thought, “Hey, it’s probably a small, two-man shop and he’s busy.”

    Finally, in September, one of the other affected writers confronted them and got them to admit that they were shutting down after one issue. None of the writers whose stories had been accepted were going to see print. And those who’d been paid were the lucky ones because they got free money. But they asked the confronters to keep it under wraps so they could “reach out personally” to inform all the other writers. So they kept it under wraps. Nothing was said publicly.

    Well, now it’s December. A full year since they opened for submissions. They still have said nothing in public. They didn’t bother renewing the SSL certificate on their website, which speaks volumes. As far as anyone can determine, no writers were informed. Not even the least effort was made. So it was deemed safe to go ahead and say it: Spectacle Magazine is gone. Kaput. Done. If you got paid, keep the money and resubmit the story elsewhere. If you signed a contract and didn’t get paid, you should probably consider the contract null and void and resubmit that story elsewhere. And if you never heard squat, move on. Everyone probably already had (like me), but it reflects really poorly on the publishers to not own up to anything to the people who they kept saying they wanted to work with and communicate with. I don’t know what status the signed contracts are in from a legal point of view, but it would be truly interesting to see what the law would say about the validity of a contract that one party had no intention of ever keeping.

    So much for that. So my “first sale” turned out to be a “first bad experience” instead. Huzzah?

    Does it leave a bad taste in my mouth? Yes, it does! Does it mean I’ll never submit anything ever again? No! Does it mean I’ll be less trusting of new markets in the future? <sigh> Probably? Maybe? A little? Will I still submit to them? Probably, yes. But will I give them the benefit of even the most minuscule doubt? Hell no. Spectacle has removed that gene from my writer DNA. At the first sign of flakiness, I’m outta there.

    Back in July when I posted about this on my Facebook page and very carefully didn’t name the magazine, I said, “I think they bit off more than they could chew, and are probably scrambling to figure out what they can salvage. If they ever get their act together, I’d still like to one day publish something with them.” Well, not any more. If I ever see the names of the publishers of Spectacle associated with literally anything else, I will avoid it. Because they’ve demonstrated their true colors. They’ve shown us who they are in the most honest way possible: their (complete lack of any) actions.

    To be crystal clear: I don’t fault them for biting off more than they could chew or being not savvy in the publishing industry. Those could happen to anyone. And they seemed to be trying very hard to make their contract work, including listening to experienced writers and SFWA. What I fault them for is not behaving like responsible adults when it became clear that they were going to call it quits.


    1. This was not mere speculation. Their bios said as much. They were, if I recall correctly, software people from Silicon Valley who decided to publish a magazine.
  • Writing

    Writing Report, November 2018

    Fountain Pen
    Writing

    Full disclosure: I’ve written this post after-the-fact. In December, 2018, but later than it looks like it was posted. But I decided to take a cue from podcaster Chris Lester and sort of do a ‘writing update’ thing. And why let a little thing like ‘it was a month ago’ stand in my way?

    As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been using a spreadsheet and a work-scheduling app to track words written and time spent. I decided to do a monthly wrap-up.

    Disaster struck! Apple, in its wisdom, updated Safari, and they broke the extension that kills Facebook after a certain time. <shakes fist at sky> Why? Why?

    There were two days when I had to write a bunch of documentation at work, and it sapped my desire to write fun words, and so I counted that as my writing for the day. Not emails, mind you: actual documentation for QA so they could test my code and know what to expect. So I count it. It’s not creative (although QA might take an opposing view on that . . .), but it was words on ‘paper,’ and I counted it. So there.

    I did not do NaNoWriMo this year. I added the capability to my spreadsheet, because it was there and needed to be done (for certain values of ‘needed’). So in 2019 or 2020 (or going forward), if I decide to do NaNoWriMo, I have a mechanism in place to calculate, for each day of November, how many words per day I must achieve to meet the 50,000 word goal, and a switch to flip to turn NaNoWriMo Mode on or off. If it’s off, it just goes with the number of words required for the current level. And, even though I drove a grand total of sixteen hours over Thanksgiving weekend and visited friends and family in four different towns in Alabama, I by-God still managed to write some words every day. Yes, I did just pat myself on the back, because I freakin’ deserve it. :)

    As a note: I have completed NaNoWriMo a number of times, and don’t need to prove to myself that I can write 50,000 words in 30 days. I wrote 122,400+ words one November. I think I deserve a pass if I choose not to participate. :)

    For November, 2018, my stats are

    • Words: 27,142
      • Daily average words: 905
    • Time: 1443 minutes (24 hours, 3 minutes)
      • Daily average time: 48:06 min
    • Average words/hour: 1,128
    • Chain: 61 days
    • Level: 3, on the 10th
    • Quota: 350 words/day beginning on the 10th
  • Writing

    Writing Report, October 2018

    Fountain Pen
    Writing

    Full disclosure: I’ve written this post very after-the-fact. In December, 2018. But I decided to take a cue from podcaster Chris Lester and sort of do a ‘writing update’ thing. And why let a little thing like ‘it was two months ago’ stand in my way?

    As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been using a spreadsheet and a work-scheduling app to track words written and time spent. I decided to do a monthly wrap-up.

    I had a really hard time with several scenes in my novel, and several days of struggling before I realized I didn’t have to write sequentially and started skipping around. I wasn’t feeling it as much in October as in September, but I persevered. On several days when I couldn’t be bothered to write in the novel, I wrote something else. Anything else. Journal entries about why I was struggling to write, etc. But I kept at it every day, at least. And don’t think I didn’t count the words I wrote on two blog posts (one, two). ;)

    For October, 2018, my stats are

    • Words: 20,175
      • Daily average words: 651
    • Time: 1268 minutes (21 hours, 8 minutes)
      • Daily average time: 40:54 min
    • Average words/hour: 954
    • Chain: 31 days
    • Level: 2
    • Quota: 300 words/day
  • Writing

    Is Anyone Out There?

    Disclaimer: I’m about to throw a lot of high-concept stuff in your direction. And some of it involves, like, math. I am not a mathematician. It is not only possible but probable that I’ve made a mess of any calculations involved in what is below. It also involves a lot of science-stuff. I did some research to make sure that I had it as right as I could get it, but I have inevitably made some mistakes. Don’t take anything I say below as gospel. Feel free to point out my mistakes, and please bear with my wilder flights of fancy. :)

     

     

    Thought experiment.

    I take you and a random stranger aside on separate occasions.

    I hand you a nice telescope. I say, “Every night for one year, I want you to take this outside any time you like, after dark, but before dawn. Point it in any direction you like for exactly ten seconds and watch carefully. If you see a small, bright light blinking once every second, call me.”

    I hand the stranger an extremely bright LED light. To them, I say, “Every night for one month, I want you to take this light outside at any time you like, after dark, but before dawn. Go to the same place every night. When you get in place, hold it above your head and blink the light on and off ten times, spaced one second apart.”

    To both of you (but separately), I say, “You can start doing this any night you want. Try not to miss a night, but if you have to, make it up at the end. And don’t talk to each other.”

    What do you think are the chances that I will get a phone call from you because you saw the stranger’s light blinking?


    I first wrote a version of this on my old website many years ago. This version is, I sincerely hope, clearer and better explained. It was to point out the difficulty of looking for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence using our then-current method of pointing a satellite dish at a star and “listening” for a short while, then moving on to another. Basically at random. If there truly were any ETs out there making an interstellar — or intergalactic — call, what are the chances they’re talking while we’re listening? What are the chances that we happen to be at the same level of technology (more or less) during the same span of time? What are the chances that both our species are long-lived enough (as a species) to have a meaningful dialogue? What are the chances that both our species’ version of ‘government’ or ‘research grants’ would fund something of that sort?

    At the time I wrote the original, we had discovered maybe two or three planets outside our own system. And those were all hot Jupiters, massive worlds orbiting so close to their stars that they were too hot to support any kind of life that we would recognize as life. Now we know of thousands of exoplanets, and we believe (with evidence) that planets are common, not rare. We even have telescopes in orbit — Kepler Space Telescope and TESS — designed specifically to look for new planets. The methods we used to find those very planets suggest ways to improve our search for ET if he’s out there. We can detect planets around other stars best if the extra-solar system is ‘edge-on’ to us — in other words, we spot planets by the dimming of their sun’s light when the planets’ orbits put them between Earth and their star, dimming the light enough that our computers can detect it.

    It means that we can refine our search to those stars like our sun around which we have detected at least one planet. We can direct our search at stars for which our system is edge-on.

    Our signals are designed for our equipment, of course. But EM (electromagnetic) radiation is ubiquitous across the entire universe. From radio to gamma, it’s all just light. We mostly use radio and microwaves in our communication (radiation starts getting dangerous at x-rays and up). Depending on the type of signal and the intended receiver, the information (audio, video, etc.) is coded by modulating the waves. It’s probable that these are obvious enough that an alien species would figure that out. I mean, we did pretty quickly after realizing EM existed and how it works.

    EM radiation spreads out from its source in a spherical wave. The strength of the signal gets weaker in proportion to the square of the distance from the source. At interstellar distances, the signal is so weak, we might not even recognize it as a signal; it might get lost in the random noise between them and us.

    There may be ways to overcome the loss of strength. Consider a civilization advanced enough that they have figured out how to encode their information using some physical property of the photons themselves. For instance, the “spin.” Although the number of photons arriving at the destination would be few, the “signal” would still be “strong” unless something interfered with the photons’ spins between the source and the destination. Would we even recognize this as a signal at our level of technology?

    We have a narrow band of the EM scale we use to encode radio and television. Radio is electromagnetic waves (light) that we use to encode sound. The light is then re-translated into sounds (vibrations in a medium, and that medium is 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and 1% trace elements (at atmospheric pressures comfortable for humans)) detectable by human ears, roughly 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz (20 kHz). Our evolution dictated the range in which we can hear. Other animals here on earth hear in vastly different ranges, some very low sounds (elephants, for example (14-16 Hz)) and some teeth-gratingly high ones (bats, for instance (up to 115 kHz)). How different might an extra-solar species senses be? Would they even know to interpret our signals as sound? Would their atmosphere even conduct sound waves in a similar way to ours?

    A TV broadcast is, at a simple approximation, one of those audio signals paired with a synchronized video signal broken into rows and columns (arbitrary values, which are different even in different regions on Earth) designed to be decoded into brightness values (on arbitrary scales) for the colors red, green, and blue. Red, green, and blue are specific frequencies of light in a very narrow band that humans evolved to perceive with specialized cells in our eyes, based on our specific environment and evolutionary pressures. Other animals here on earth see colors very differently because of different evolutionary pressures. Some (like cats) see a drab (to us) subset. Some (like mantis shrimp) see a profusion of colors we wouldn’t even have names for. Others (insects, birds, etc.) can see in frequencies we know are there, but can only see by false-color approximations (rendering infrared as varying shades of red, orange, yellow, blue, and violet based on temperatures (that are comfortable and meaningful to our particular species, using arbitrary scales); ultraviolet in shades of green, indigo, or violet).

    Some species here on earth communicate via the medium of water instead of air (whales, dolphins), in which sound propagates differently. Others communicate with each other via smell and/or body posture. Others “taste” their surroundings (snakes, lizards). Still others use senses we don’t have an analog for, such as platypuses, which detect electrical signals with their bills. Others can sense the variable strength of the magnetic field of the planet. No one is even quite sure how birds and butterflies and fish find their way while migrating. We have hypotheses, of course . . .

    If we received a signal from another civilization that was encoded for body posture and smell instead of light and sound, how would we interpret that? Could we ever decipher it? This is why the signals we have sent out deliberately are encoded in a “universal” language of math. The first one thousand prime numbers, for example. Math is math is math, pretty much anywhere you go in the universe, and as long as they could interpret binary, we would at least be able to say, “Yo! We’re here and we know the first 1000 prime numbers! We’re intelligent!”

    We can’t understand the communications of any of those animals here on earth beyond a rudimentary level, and we share ~3.8 billion years of evolution with them. You are more closely related to an Ebola virus than you would be to any species that evolved on a planet other than Earth. We are all related more closely than we would be with any extra-terrestrial or extra-solar — or extra-galactic — life. Sure, we’ve modified some of our companion species to be able to better understand us, and we’ve become attuned to them, but do you really know what your dog is thinking? A cat? A raccoon? A cow? A snake? What about a whale, dolphin, mole, bat, or eagle, who exist in a three-dimensional world we have no real concept of? Or an octopus, squid, or cuttlefish, with no skeletal structure and the ability to change shape, texture, and color at will?

    And if we could communicate with these animals, how would they describe things to us that are natural to them, but for which we have no basis for understanding? Sonar, pheromones, 3-dimensional movement, chromatophores, flying, swimming, air bladders, electrical sensitivity, magnetic sensitivity, etc.

    Given all of the above . . . what are the chances that an alien intelligence, evolving on a different world with different evolutionary pressures, would have any concept on which to approach understanding us, or we them? Or, as put succinctly by Deanna Troi on the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation entitled “The Ensigns of Command”:

    Troi: We are stranded on a planet. We have no language in common, but I want to teach you mine.
     
    [she holds up her clear tea glass, partially filled with hot tea]
     
    Troi: S’smarith. What did I just say?
     
    Picard: “Cup” . . . “Glass.”
     
    Troi: Are you sure? I may have meant “liquid.” “Clear.” “Brown.” “Hot.” We conceptualize the universe in relatively the same way.
     
    Picard: Point taken.

    And Troi forgot “refreshing,” “invigorating,” “aromatic,” “ceramic” (if the cup weren’t glass), “caffeinated,” “tannin-containing,” “full”/”half-full”/”half-empty,” “to your health,” “relaxing,” “sleep-inducing,” and a host of other concepts that one might mean when one brandishes a cup of tea in the way she did. Some of which we might not even be able to conceive of. Imagine an intelligent dog holding up chocolate and meaning “agonizing death.”

    Now, let’s talk about time. Time is a huge factor, here. It took life roughly 4 billion years on Earth to go from raw amino acids to Homo sapiens sapiens, capable of contemplating ET. Many stars with planets will have gone off the main sequence during that time. Others are still forming as you read this. Perhaps a billion years ago, a civilization was looking for life elsewhere, but we weren’t yet able to hear it, being mostly ocean-dwelling, tiny eukaryotes at the time. A billion years from now, after the Earth’s surface is likely uninhabitable, perhaps some far civilization will spot our signals, but there will be no one home to receive their reply, much less engage in a conversation.

    Now, suppose we find someone. Assuming they are farther than about 25 light-years from us, having a “conversation” with them would be unlikely in a single human lifetime, as we would have to detect and decode their signal, then compose a response, and it would take the same amount of time for our reply to make it back to them as it took for theirs to make it to us. We’re talking about a simple two-line conversation

    “Hello! We’re here!”
     
    “Hi! So are we!”

    taking at least 50 years. Quite a commitment of time and resources. Speaking of that . . . what are the chances that any civilization would want to spend the time and resources to even look for us? We’ve been listening for several decades, and our own governments here begrudge every cent spent on the endeavor. And rightly so. There are many better things to spend time and resources on than looking for ET.

    And all of that doesn’t take xenophobia into account. The late Dr. Stephen Hawking famously pointed out that any civilization that we were to discover would more than likely be ahead of us, technologically. Would it even be smart to announce our presence, given the history humans have amongst ourselves when an advanced civilization encounters a more primitive one? So far, it has never yielded a positive — or even neutral — result for the less-advanced civilization. What makes us think a space-faring alien species would be benevolent? What makes them think we would be? Realistically, we’d be better off hiding all evidence of our existence and hoping that no one detects our radio signals and follows them back to the source.


    Why does all this come up? I thought you’d never ask! :)

    A while back, it was announced that SETI had gotten a boost in the form of generous support from a private investor. SETI has been around for a long time and has been . . . well, let’s just admit it: they’ve been kind of a joke. No one really expects to find anything, and I’ve outlined above my understanding of how unlikely it is that we will ever find a message decipherable by us. So SETI has been underfunded for a long time. Given very little time on telescopes, relegated to the short bus even amongst the other science nerds.

    It’s had some amazing support over the years, mind you. Stephen Hawking, Frank Drake, Carl Sagan, others. Drake’s famous equation

    N = R* ⋅ fp ⋅ ne ⋅ f ⋅ fi ⋅ fc ⋅ L

    gives us the ability to very roughly calculate an estimate of how many extra-solar civilizations we might reasonably expect to exist in our own galaxy. When he first developed the equation, we didn’t know hard values for, really, any of the factors. We know “N” is “at least 1” (us). Now, we’re able to fill in a lot of those factors with real numbers, or at least much narrower ranges.

    All the Drake Equation gives us is an estimate of the number of civilizations (of our level or greater) that we might expect to “find” (in some way) in our galaxy. What it does not cover is all that stuff I mentioned above. If we’re not listening at the right frequency or in the right direction, or if we can’t comprehend the message as a message, then what hope do we have of ever learning the answer to that question I put in the title? Is anyone out there?

    Our civilization is leaking signals like a . . . leaky thing . . . that leaks. Come up with your own simile. We have, however, sent out two deliberate physical messages and ten deliberate electromagnetic ones I can find a record of. The physical messages were in the form of gold records attached to the outsides of Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. You can read about the ten EM signals here. The total broadcast time of all ten messages is certainly less than thirty minutes, and spread out over almost forty years. They were also aimed at specific spots in the sky, so would be undetectable for most of the universe. Remember my thought experiment way up at the top of this post, with the telescope and the LED light?

    One of those signals was beamed at Gliese 581 in 2008. Our signal will arrive in 2029. Assuming there’s anyone there to receive it, and they somehow decipher it, perhaps they will answer, and by 2050 we’ll have a positive answer to that perennial question.

    In spite of the astronomical odds against it, I certainly hope it to be the case, even given the xenophobia factor. Unfortunately, unless medical technology (or the ability to upload our consciences to computers) improves before then, that’ll be all I could realistically be around for. By the time the aliens could receive our reply and reply back, it would be 2092, and I’d have to find a way to live to be 127 years old.

    On the bright side, I might be done with my novel by then. :) (HaHa! I brought this sucker back around to writing after all!)


    Why did I write this? Full disclosure.

    1. I first started writing this rewrite of this post in 2015. I wrote the original sometime between 1998 and 2002.
    2. But it’s not the usual kind of thing I publish on this blog because this blog is about writing.
    3. This article is only very obliquely about writing. But it’s also among one of my favorite things I ever wrote.
    4. So . . . here we are. :)

    But to bring it actually around to writing, I love me some science-fiction, even though I typically write more fantasy and . . . I’ll call it ‘horror’ because ‘dark fantasy’ and ‘dark fiction’ sound . . . weak. Generally , it’s very mild horror. One of the things that has always rather bothered me about science fiction is that it makes the assumption that the galaxy — and by extension the entire universe — is teeming with life, including FTL-capable, intelligent species who, for some reason, have an interest in contacting us. Sometimes to conquer/consume. Sometimes to uplift. Sometimes as equals.

    As soon as I was old enough to understand the vastness of the universe and the realities of space travel, I realized that most of what I was reading was more science fantasy rather than science fact. Even though shows / films like Babylon 5, Star Wars, and Star Trek are among my favorite things ever, I still realize that it’s very unrealistic. And one day, I got the idea of explaining why.

    Do I think we will one day discover life elsewhere than Earth? Maybe?

    Do I think there is intelligent life in the universe? Maaaaaybe?

    Do I think we will ever talk to it if it is? No.

    Do I think any of it has ever been here? No.

    Doesn’t stop me from wanting to tell the stories where those things do happen. But I try to keep all of the above in mind when I do. :)


    1. I think at the time we were using the dish at Arecibo in Puerto Rico, which is only useful over a span of about thirty degrees of the sky (it is limited because it’s built into a sinkhole and is spherical instead of parabolic), so that narrows our range even further. And, thanks to Hurricane Maria in September, 2017, that dish is damaged, and its future is uncertain.
    2. It’s called “the transit method.” There are other methods, of course. One of which is to look for the “wobble” in the star as its planets orbit and their gravity pulls it slightly. We can detect the incredibly subtle difference in its redshift and determine the number and sizes of planets that would cause the star to wobble in that way. Science! :)
    3. We could further refine it once we discover more planets that are located within the “Goldilocks Zone” (not too hot, not too cold, but juuuuuust right) of the parent star. Those are the ones most likely to have liquid water, and therefore life that would be most likely “similar” to something we could recognize as life. Life could probably evolve using some other solvent than water, but would we even recognize it as life? The Goldilocks Zone will be different for different types of stars, and there could be more than one planet in the Goldilocks Zone of a given star (Venus, Earth, and Mars, for instance). It is also sometimes referred to as the “habitable zone,” “comfort zone,” and “circumstellar habitable zone.” And of course, it goes without saying (so I’ll say it anyway) that ‘habitable’ means ‘for humans.’
    4. In other words, stars located within a few degrees of the solar system’s ecliptic plane, the relatively flat plane in which all of the planets orbit the sun. Ours is remarkably flat, except for Pluto and some of the other dwarf planets.
    5. The signal strength at the source is some value “A,” and as it propagates outward from that source, the “A” is spread evenly over the surface of the sphere centered on the source. The formula to calculate the surface area of a sphere is 4Πr2 (4 times Π times the radius squared). So at 10 miles, the sphere has roughly 100 times the surface area it does at 1 mile, so the signal is harder to detect. At 20 miles, it’s 400 times the surface area. Etc. This is why radio stations on Earth’s surface have to be so strong in order to serve a wide listening area, and the farther out you get from the station, the worse the signal is. Voyager 1 is less than 20 light-hours from Earth, and its signal is tiny, but still detectable. But we also know where to look and what frequency it uses. It still takes very large radio antennae to pick up its weak signal.
    6. By “understand” I mean natively. We can interpret the different barks and meows and neighs and bleats, but we know some of those animals only use those sounds around humans. Fully interpreting what two cats are “saying” to each other is beyond our abilities. We literally have no basis for understanding.
    7. And of course, by “all,” I must include plants, fungi, bacteria, viruses, archaeans, etc. Humans are more related to fungi and ebola viruses than we could ever be to any extraterrestrial life, unless you want to get into Panspermia, which is a whole other discussion. :)
    8. It is estimated that the Earth’s surface will become uninhabitable in about 500 million years because of a slow, but steady, increase in the sun’s heat output. The surface will be dry and unable to support life. Whatever species might be around at that point will likely have to leave Earth in order to remain viable. Or burrow into the planet itself. Which will be fine until about 5 billion years from now, when our sun will expand into a red giant and consume Mercury and Venus and possibly Earth. Even if it doesn’t consume Earth, the surface of our planet will be so close to the sun, it will make Mercury look polar by comparison. I doubt if even cockroaches and houseflies could survive that. At that point, perhaps Mars will experience a rebirth, if we (or whomever) can find some way of enabling it to retain an atmosphere and gain a magnetic field. Or maybe Ganymede, Europa, or one of the other outer moons.
    9. Even if we were to discover an intelligent species around the closest star — Proxima Centauri — each line of the conversation would separated by a bit over four years. “Hi!” <4 years> “Hey!” <4 years> “How’s it going?” <4 years> . . .
    10. The value of the equation lies not with the value but the contemplation of it.
      • N is the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which radio-communication might be possible (i.e. which are on our current past light cone)
      • R* is the average rate of star formation in our galaxy
      • fp is the fraction of those stars that have planets (we now know this number to be much higher than we once believed)
      • ne is the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets (this is the number of planets in the Goldilocks zone . . . for humans, because we’re kind of biased)
      • f is the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life at some point
      • fi is the fraction of planets with life that actually go on to develop intelligent life (civilizations)
      • fc is the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
      • L is the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space

      The above information came from the Wikipedia entry on The Drake Equation

    11. Come on. You didn’t expect me to ignore the low-hanging pun entirely, did you?