We are celebrating New Year’s Eve with our traditional time travel movie. This year’s picks: Star Trek IV (“the whale movie”) and Doctor Who: The Husbands of River Song. Happy New Year!
Happy New Year 2016!
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Yearly Archives: 2015
Peace on Earth! Goodwill to All!
Halloween Costume – Lise Meitner
A friend of mine hosts an annual Halloween party, and I always struggle with coming up with a costume. Another friend posted a link to Take Back Halloween! and I found they had a costume for one of my favorite under-appreciated female scientists: Lise Meitner.
Lise Meitner worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI) from 1912-1938 as the physics expert in the physics-chemistry team researching radioactivity. She and Otto Hahn (the chemist of the pair) studied a variety of reactions, including what happened when a uranium atom was bombarded with a neutron.
Unfortunately, in the middle of their research, the Nazis rose to power and annexed Austria. As an Austrian of Jewish decent, Meitner’s position at a German institute was precarious. Banned from leaving the country, she managed to escape anyway.
She continued to correspond with Hahn. Hahn and fellow chemist Fritz Strassman had discovered barium was a result of bombarding uranium.
Meitner, the physicist, then figured out with her nephew that if they used the liquid drop model for the uranium nucleus, the nucleus might split, and they could calculate the energy needed to split the nucleus and the other resulting fragment: krypton. It all fit! They coined the term fission to describe the split. Their paper describing this discovery was published seventy-five years ago.
In recognition of her work, an element was named for her: Meitnerium (109).
Should you wish to read more about her, I highly recommend the biography Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics by Ruth Lewin Sime.
The Take Back Halloween! page features a young Lise Meitner, but I am going as the Lise Meitner who escaped from Germany. Although in real life she did not really escape from Germany with the secret to the atomic bomb in her handbag, in my costume I am including a handbag with a diagram of fission, a train ticket from Berlin to Groningen, the periodic table entry for Meitnerium, and a slide rule.
Happy Halloween!
September 2015 Stats
I’ve been working on editing short stories.
HOURS SPENT WRITING: 17.8
HOURS SPENT WRITING WORDS: 17.8
WORDS WRITTEN: 2553
WORDS/HOUR: 143.4
August 2015 Stats
A friend hosted two write-ins, which were hugely useful in terms of getting words written.
HOURS SPENT WRITING: 6.3
HOURS SPENT WRITING WORDS: 6.3
WORDS WRITTEN: 1494
WORDS/HOUR: 237.1
New Haircut
There’s a stranger in my mirror …
July 2015 Stats
Spent some time on research last month, but I think I’ve got some things better nailed down and understood … building a world from scratch is a lot of work.
HOURS SPENT WRITING: 10.9
HOURS SPENT WRITING WORDS: 3.2
WORDS WRITTEN: 741
WORDS/HOUR: 231.6
March – June 2015 Stats
One reason I keep and publish stats is to hold myself accountable … another is to develop a feel for how long it really takes for me to write things.
But I run into quandaries about what I should count. Counting words are easy – they’re there or they’re not. Even with editing, I can count new words. But what about other things? What about research to understand the physics of what’s happening in the story? What about writing an orbital dynamics program so I can see what something will actually look like? What about writing a program to start with a certain colony population and propagate it forward N generations? What about reading books to learn about the culture or science background I need for the story? It’s all work, and it’s all work I need to do to write this story … but it’s not writing, so it’s something I haven’t counted in the past.
Starting this month (July), I’m going to start also counting research hours.
But due to all the research activity above, the count for the last four months looks light. I need to get back to actually writing.
March “Apparently I did write down some research hours”
WORDS WRITTEN: 0
HOURS SPENT WRITING: 5.5
WORDS/HOUR: 0
April “But not consistently”
WORDS WRITTEN: 0
HOURS SPENT WRITING: 0
WORDS/HOUR: 0
May “And when my writer’s group met I got motivated to write some words”
WORDS WRITTEN: 1443
HOURS SPENT WRITING: 4.9
WORDS/HOUR: 294.5
June “But not, sigh, consistently”
WORDS WRITTEN: 0
HOURS SPENT WRITING: 0
WORDS/HOUR: 0
July will be better!
Hard SF Homework Set
So a long, long time ago when I was studying engineering in college, we were assigned “homework sets” where we practiced solving the particular sort of problem we were learning about, often with sets of problems where each built on what you worked out in the last. I just finished a self-assigned homework set to understand the physics of what happens at the start of my current novel. It felt good to exercise my brain, but I am pleased that it is done. Now maybe my brain will let me get back to writing.
ApolloCon 2015 – Pictures
I had a blast at ApolloCon 2015, moderating one panel (whose topic was my suggestion!) and participating in three others. As an introvert, it’s tough for me to talk in front of groups and speak on the fly. This actually means that moderating a panel is much easier for me than being a panelist. But for the first time, I felt that I did a good job sitting in both chairs at all my panels. Maybe it was because we had such fun topics.
My first panel was my suggestion: designing aliens. I got to discuss aliens with Larry Friesen (a veteran of many cons and a last-minute addition – thanks!), Kathryn Friesen (a new writer at her first con – welcome!), and Martha Wells (whose books are fantastically rich).
My second panel was about good (and bad) science in science fiction. Of course, it’s more fun to trash the bad than to praise the good. Lots of suggestions from our audience on this one. On the panel with me were Deborah Davitt and Alan Pollard.
My third panel was on What if We *Are* Alone? We all agreed that we’re probably not, although we could be alone *now*, and we may never be able to reach anyone else. Are we the last ones? Could we be the first ones? So much story fodder. On the panel with me were Alan Pollard, D. L. Young (a friend from the Houston SFF Writer’s Meetup), and Marshall Ryan Marcesca.
My fourth panel was on Translators and translation mishaps. Given that alien communication is one of my favorite subjects? Fun. On the panel with me were Tex Thompson, Kathryn Friesen, and Keri Bas (a friend from the Houston SFF Writer’s Meetup).
In addition to talking myself, I also enjoyed panels about traveling beyond Mars, dealing with Near Earth Asteroids (with Stan Love – seriously, if you can ever hear this fellow speak, do it!), and blogging with the Guest of Honor, Jim Hines (who I learned about from his blog, and whose fiction – especially his recent Libriomancer series – I have really enjoyed.)
I’m looking forward to next year.
Space&Aliens