…I hope to write faster than this one!
I am also shoveling through the office.
Answering 2 month old correspondence.
Finding OMGs in same…when we were on the road we had our mail held, and when we got back, we were snowed under and desperate.
I’m getting round tuits everywhere.
We have a house guest arriving just before the con—Nina Kiriki Hoffman is coming in. And we’re so hoping the kittehs behave!
I sent you a picture of a different kind of Bren today….don’t know if you got it, though.
Can we ask which story line?
Tommie, was that question directed to me? If so, it was actually supposed to be a joke for CJ, it was a picture of two British soldiers manning a Bren gun. I said something to the effect that I doubted this was something the paidhi would be using….
No, not in your direction, just a cross posting. There were no replies on my screen when I posted.
Tommie, same arc. Not saying where.
That tells me not Russia, not Nighthorses, etc. Since that’s what I was so clumsily trying to ask, I thank you for a full answer to what I didn’t quite get across! There will be no falling to the floor, foaming at the mouth and drumming of heels here. >snork!<
Er, I’ve clearly missed the first part of that somewhere, Tommie and CJ.
But does this mean there is or might be a non-Foreigner story brewing, besides the newest Foreigner book?
May I encourage this development? I am sure many fans would also love to see other stories, brand-new or in existing CJ-verses.
One is happy to see whatever appears. One likes, er, *salads* the many CJ-verses. One would be also delighted if there’s something not seen before, a new CJ-verse. One would be equally pleased with more from existing CJ-verses.
Aw, heck, as long as it is (they are?) CJ-stories, I’m gonna bounce a happy-dance. :bounce: :bounce: :bounce:
Oh, right, one should refrain from over-bouncing until one knows what’s, er, bounce-worthy. Bounce-able?
(One does, however, intuit that it does not require a Bounce-Point or Bounce-Mass. Though that probably has nothing to do with…. Oh, right, I’ll just sit here quietly, patiently. Library etiquette. Yes. Beg pardon, ma’am.)
From CJ’s reply, I’d say it’s still a Foreigner book (same arc) but she’s not telling where it’s set. I could be mistaken though.
CJ — Ignore this communication….
Attention all members of the Wavy Navy! We know you probably want to attend ShejiCon IV but are not able to attend due to life circumstances. We understand. You can still participate by helping to fund the hostess gift we fortunate attendees will humbly offer our hostesses. Please email me at bajio[dot]kabisu[at]gmail[dot]com to get the particulars (Shhh! It’s a secret.)
Speaking of kitteh behavior…..Aloysius just embarrassed me, somewhat. I did give warning that my very friendly kitteh likes to bite so be careful about picking him up. Neighbor picks up Aloysius who then proceeds to give said neighbor a good hard nip on the nose!
@ Ready, I PM’d you at Shejidan.
Oh, I sympathize with the “get round tuits,” CJ…we just got back from an extended hotel sojourn. Not the fun sort, unfortunately…
Our pipes failed – the drainage pipes for our kitchen and laundry rusted out, no chance of repair. Turns out the damn things were cast iron, laid down in the 70s, concrete foundation poured over them…a total disaster if we had wanted them pulled up and replaced. Fortunately, the men we got to repair them had a better solution.
The sad part is, the whole tragedy could have been over within a week.
But the insurance…
Home owner’s insurance is supposed to be a lifesaver, you know? I mean, you expect that after years of paying them money, they’d at least come to your aid without a complaint. Instead, we got delay after delay; the agent never answered his phone OR returned our calls, never responded to messages, emails, nothing seemed to work. The relocation agent (who wasn’t even in our town!) showed more concern for our well being, AND got more done on our case, than the man who was on location. Completely ridiculous. He also tried to force us to accept repairs from a sub-standard contractor, one not bonded OR insured (because the fellow was “a friend of mine,” as if this was some type of qualification). We didn’t accept his “recommendation,” and got the guys we wanted on the job, who got the job done, done right, and done in a day less than they’d originally projected (partially because in order to meet the dumb insurance guy’s bid, they’d left out the “cosmetic” part of the work).
But after THREE WEEKS in a hotel – and not even the sort with kitchenettes, no, a plain hotel, and we were lucky to have room fridges – and during the first two weeks, no work whatsoever was done on our house – we were more than just happy to see our home again.
And so much stuff was left undone – we were shuffled out of the house in a hurry because no one was 100% sure there wasn’t black-water involved in the drainage failure. So now, we too are getting around to allllll that junk.
Gah.
There is a company called Insituform that blows in plastic liners.
That’s when you tell the company that if they don’t give you a better agent, you’ll shop around for a better insurance company….there’s no excuse for that, at all.
I had a severe thunderstorm blow shingles off my roof. I called the insurance company the next day, the assessor called me right back, sent down a roofing company who put tarps on the roof, and then they arranged to come back and reshingle the roof. Not a complaint, other than it was cold, and they couldn’t work on the roof when it was cold, or they’d chance breaking the new shingles. All in all, I think they did a pretty good job….only broke one of my low-volume sprinkler heads (they stick into the ground, and I just replaced it….)they probably didn’t even know they’d broken it, and neither did I until much later….
Sounds like the insurance runaround my parents got when a neighbor sent their car backward-diagonally across the street into the house. It wasn’t that the agent wasn’t available, or didn’t do anything, but the construction guys he got weren’t licensed for anything except painting and carpeting, and apparently were his buddies, and were using crap lumber. And my mother had to threaten them with a stop order from the building inspectors (who would have looked at their work and written one on the spot). She sent photos of the work to the president of the insurance company, and he straightened out the mess really, really fast.
They were using 2x4s that were, you wouldn’t have used them for a chicken coop: knots and cracks and generally the minimum grade available. And the siding on the house wasn’t anywhere close to matching (it was select-grade redwood, really beautiful, and I was sorry it had to be stained – they couldn’t match it for dimension, but the did match the grade).
OMG, what a mess. We’ve finally got everything with The Hartford, after one experience of no-pay (our kitchen floor, which flooded and warped)—can’t presently recall what company; but if you have an insurance commission in your state, that egregious a behavior should be reported, including the cronyism.
Washington is an intensely regulated state. You have to have a license to be a roofer, you have to have a permit to build a fence, even to rebuild one. DIY’s are exempt but if you hold out to be a carpenter or whatever, you have to have that license, and complaints of that sort you report will do you in. I recall in Oklahoma going through at least 4, maybe 5 expensive roof repairs, all failures and finally getting one guy who was from Washington—bingo! Fixed the problem at one go and pointed out the original building flaw which caused the perpetually reappearing leak.
Living in Washington, when you call anybody, especially off, say, Angie’s List, they’ve been super.
An orbit is a fall toward a planet that is balanced by energy of the object headed past said planet. If he tossed the satellite in the direction of their travel it would have the energy of the spacecraft plus the energy of the pitch. If he tossed it contrary to their travel, it would be the spacecraft speed minus the energy of the pitch. WHich is all I can think of right now, on painkillers…
I have a newbie-writer’s problem: I am now certain-sure I have a “grand unified theory” multiverse to hold all (or nearly all) the SF&F story ideas I have going. Great! I’m thrilled! Only…I have to figure a way to revise and merge that concept. And I have various stories withn those that, somehow, I need to revise to get their chunks within those story-universes. The connecting multiverse is at least a conceit for collection / anthology purposes, or body of (eventual) work. But I have a good idea of how that could connect. I think.
That multiverse idea came out of planning for the Toy Box Tales, which I now think will morph into something else, though similar.
In other newbit-writer news, I still have a “retro” 50’s-like space story I’d like to do, but any time I’ve started in on it, planning or writing, it wants to be more serious and modern. Only I’d like to do that as a fun thing, elements of comedy and parody in there. (And I see it as independent of the multiverse idea.)
Late August. Oh, for cold weather. I would not mind a few days, really cold, to wear a sweater I still have never worn, for instance. Cold enough to kill off some of the bugs and weeds. But not the people and four-legs, they’re fine. Squirrels, however, are exhorted to seek residence elsewhere, not in my attic. Unless they will pay rent and keep the place clean and tidy. Then we can talk!
Speaking just as a reader, I wouldn’t worry too much about unifying different story ideas into a multiverse. A story should stand or fall on its own merits. The ultimate horror is what I think happened with end-stage Heinlein. He invented a framework of multiple universes to explain futures that had already become pasts yet didn’t turn out the way his early work had predicted. Part of this is I suspect he cleaned out his bottom desk drawer and linked all sorts of leftover odds-n-sods and tried to squish this into the matrix. The results are painful, though likely financially rewarding for him. Just thank your lucky stars that you live in the era of cut-and-paste, not the literal dark ages of cut and paste with 3 carbons.
It’s like wrestling an octopus. I come up with ideas while I’m doing other things. Or I write and something may head in another direction I hadn’t planned on. It’s very likely there’ll be more changes before anything gets finished to see the light of day.
Most of what I have is in one story-universe, but in which, starship travel is early and they’ve had strange things happen before. But I started seeing connections with a couple of other story-universes set on alternate worlds or alien species. Then I came up with more than one thing involving some kind of travel that way. So most of these have been standalone concepts, separate story-universes that might intersect.
Then while thinking of background on the story-travel-device for Toy Box Tales, inspiration struck. I think I have a way that works to connect story-universes as in the lead-ins in an anthology of short stories. (The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone basically did this but disconnected. Sliders did, but it was all one alternate universe connected by the sliding wormhole and gadget.)
I think what I’ve got is workable, but I want to have my cake and eat it too. I want to do these as mostly standalones, but provide for connections to the overall multiverse travel in other stories, or as a conceit for an anthology series.
Mostly, I want to get focused on *one* story and get it to completion and get it out there so people can read it. 🙂
The issue of continuity across a series or a body of work then gets tricky. An auhtor’s ideas on a single story-universe are bound to change over time, and on a body of work, there are bound to be things where the author runs into sticky situations where something else happened, and that’s now a problem, or the author can’t remember every detail and a continuity error (story-universe paradox? anachronism? temporal / alternate universe branch point?) happens when the author wasn’t looking or didn’t remember. Heh.
Hmm…. Then again, it’s science fiction. It could be a branch point to allow more than one storyline. Heh. Which strikes me as more intriguing for a writer than worrying if it means retconning something or staying in one line only.
I…see? Brain’s trying to get me in trouble, thinking up stuff again. 😀 — One of the problems is how to coalesce down to what’s the best, most interesting combination for the story or universe, what belongs in which one.
Sketching two nights ago clarified characters in one story, which had been sitting because it needed rewriting, another draft, or to yank out a chapter or two and rewrite. That may be next. It’s that or in the main story-universe.
There have been a number of topics dealing with large moving objects in our solar system in the past few weeks so I started to reread Heavy Time and Hellburner.
I highly recommend both of these works by Ms. Cherryh. Neither is a casual or easy read – you have to use your mind to read them as they require the reader to work. It is sometimes hard work but well worth the effort. Scary, occasionally funny, extremely good characterizations.
If you like the way Ms. Cherryh puts Bren on the edge you will like these books.
Hammerfall also deals with that topic.
Anybody note the “launch” of that Peruvian satellite, and wonder about the consequences? They carried it outside and gave it a push. Which direction does one push it? Foreward? Is that OK?
Orbital dynamics ain’t what most think it is! 😉
Yes, I just read a short piece on the launching, or perhaps I should say the “throwing” of the small, couple pound Peruvian satellite (kilogram or so: it was an American newspaper and I don’t remember the poundage well, so can’t give a more specific metric weight for non-American readers).
A Russian cosmonaut doing a space walk off the space station flung it out and away. The Boston Globe (although they must have picked the story up off the AP wire and certainly didn’t write it themselves) reported that “soon it was moving away from the space station faster and faster and getting smaller and smaller” in the distance. It made me wonder about the orbital mechanics and how much thrust in the form of a “throw” it takes for an object (small or larger) to accelerate. Clearly it was light enough in comparison to the cosmonaut that it didn’t take much to overcome its inertia.
Pretty cool: maybe APOD will do something on it in a few days and provide more details on how a mere throw establishes it in a proper orbit. Seems a chancy, unmathematical way to to go about setting up a reliable orbit, at least on the surface of things. I wonder if the cosmonaut practiced.
That’s truly…hahaha…. “Is beisbol. Is easy! Throw satellite out, satellite makes orbit, big beisbol star!” :: grin ::
Somehow, it’s very Firefly.
Mathematically, I’m surprised and puzzled. I didn’t think they did *anything* without running it through umpteen high-level engineering calculus runs. The first thing I’d think of is, does the danged thing circle back and run into its origin point too near the station or whatever vehicle?
But on the other hand, as an experiment, “You know, what happens if…? Because someday, somebody’s gonna screw up and throw something….” That might be interesting to find out how a guided-but-random throw does for an…uh…sort of an orbit…. :: scratches head at the lack of formal math. gasp! oh, the casualness of the science! ::
Could be kinda fun!
Will someone give Vanya a dang baseball jersey before he sings the one about Casey at bat and Mudville again?
So…Yankees shirt for a cosmonaut? …. Bwahahaha! :: grins ::
(They’ll probably get back at NASA by sending them an ushanka or a Russian sports shirt. Hockey sticks? Hockey jersey? I have no idea.)
Could also be fun!
At least part of the equation is the orbital velocity already imparted to the Peruvian satellite, just by being in orbit already. The velocity imparted to the satellite is actually a very small amount of radial velocity, that would push it into an orbit along an angle from the original orbit that the astronaut is in. Unless the angle is straight “down” toward the gravity well, an orbit can be established that could last from days to centuries depending on the amount of atmospheric friction and solar wind at the starting altitude, and how eccentric the orbit is. I would suppose that for a hand-tossed satellite, the incremental difference in orbital velocity is nearly inconsequential when we’re talking thousands of miles an hour as a baseline. Even a vector straight down into the gravity well, or directly against the orbital motion of the astronaut (backwards) would likely only move in a few miles an hour difference. It should take a good-long time falling towards the Earth. (Pardon, my very vague numbers as I know nothing about the actual release altitude, its vector, and the force applied by the astronaut/cosmonaut releasing the satellite.) All my orbital mechanics work was nearly four decades ago.
If one is interested in orbital dynamics on a practical level, there is a book about it, Integral Trees.