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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TobiasBuckell/~3/UFoJ5QAyOec/ http://www.tobiasbuckell.com/2009/12/08/where-things-stand-what-im-writing/ In October I wrapped up the last of my freelance nonfiction project obligations and various short stories (like Dirt for the latest Halo book) owed to various people. That got my medical bills paid and money buffered in the bank so I could get serious about what was next on deck.
In some ways, 2009 got eaten up by the craziness. Both because I didn’t have the energy to do all those projects and work hard on novels at the same time. And because I needed money quickly to pay for almost 10 grand worth of bills.
But since late October I’ve been working steadily on two novels.
Arctic Rising saw its start in March (you can read all about the novel here), after my editor gave the thumbs up to it in February during a trip to New York. I workshopped what I had with my peers at the SF/F novel workshop Blue Heaven in August. I heard back very solid feedback, but got a very solid point about the nature of the book’s split styles due to the two different stories by two different characters it held. I realized the truth of that, and changed the POV back to one, while keeping the outline and story the same. Brainstorming the last 1/3 of the novel out with friends got a suggestion that will make for one of the coolest ends I’ve written for a novel yet. Love it. In September I stripped it down to 3 chapters to restart it from a single POV, and very much like it. There’s been little time to work on it, however, until just late October. Over the last month I’ve worked on rewriting those 3 chapters to allow more character voice through and nail the tone of it, something I think I have in hand now and really like. As for when I’ll wrap it up, I’m not fully sure, but if I’m still working on it come this summer, I’ll be really disappointed with myself.
The other novel is The All Tree. This is something of a departure, but one I’ve had on the backburner for years. It’s a young adult (probably middle grade) novel. One of the things my little brush with mortality did last year was sort of get me all hepped up to finally write a young adult novel (I’ve had ideas, chunks written while doodling, and you can see the influence in Sly Mongoose, Crystal Rain, in particular, of YA voice in POV strands of the books). Part of the process of figuring all that out, during one of those ‘where is my life going/what am I doing’ sort of phases I had, was to find Joe Monti. Joe’s an agent with a long history in the YA field, and we hit it off. And I split my career and agents down the middle. JABberwocky handles my adult SF/F (and with the awesome foreign sales and general work Joshua and Eddie do for me I don’t see that changing), and Joe handles my YA now. So I gave Joe a look at the 7 or 8 ideas I wanted to write and we both settled in on The All Tree.
The All Tree is Have Spacesuit Will Travel meets Rendezvous with Rama, if I had to pin it down. I’m about 1/3 of the way through it, and I’m hoping to finish it before, oh, say January.
All Tree has been interesting, as it’s a first person POV novel, which I’ve never done, and I’m really working hard at mastering voice in this one at a level I haven’t played at for this length. I love the results, but the day-to-day work is making me stretch a bit. That’s good! But it’s meant instead of days where I write thousands of words, I’m more often writing hundreds, though it gets easier each passing week.
When I hit tough patches on each book, I spend a couple days with the other, and it’s been a very nice process. I picked that idea out of an Asimov biography I was reading, where when he hit a rough patch on one book, he’d turn to another, and just keep them juggling. I’ve always been terrified to do this, because you meet those writers who’re always starting something and never finishing, but I think at this point it’s worth a try.
There are a couple novellas I’ve agreed to do, but I can talk more about them later. This is my focus and dance card right now.
As for when either book will come out, I’ll know more about that once I finish them!
So my family and I decided that we all love this dee-lish wine from Italy. It's a Chianti Fiorentini, year 2006, from Fattoria di Lucignano. It went absolutely perfect with our pasta and marinara with meatballs. Rich, dry, refined and full-bodied, a perfect blend and not too bad a price at $13.99. I wanted to share this in the community because I'm not a big wine connoisseur (and neither is the rest of my family), but we all have very different preferences in wine as far as taste is concerned, and yet all agreed on this one as the top pick. I picked it up in my neighborhood liquor store so hopefully it's available everywhere. Enjoy! Also: This is what the label looks like, for possible future hunters: 
Ruel S. De Vera has a book launch tonight for the anthology Connecting Flights: Filipinos Write From Elsewhere, an anthology of travel essays, fiction and poetry. It's at 7 pm, National Bookstore, Glorietta Makati. Interviews Advice/Articles NewsAnd from Prime Books:
Only nearly a week later, LiveScience does a much better job than the Telegraph at explaining the implications of the recent Kew paper on protocarnivorous plants. Naturally, this isn't any surprise to anybody familiar with carnivores: let me introduce you all to the Devil's Claw, which is definitely going to be an essential part of my next garden this coming spring.
http://cuteoverload.com/2009/12/08/this-just-in-pampered-kitten-distrusts-nooks-crannies/ http://cuteoverload.com/?p=36115 King of Prussia, PA – Bengal kitten, Champion Tippy-Toes McWhispersons (street name: Chuck), got the surprise of his life when he awoke to find himself stranded on a crochet throw.
Never setting foot on anything less than Frette, Chuck was obviously dubious of shabby chic. Frozen in place, Chuck uncomfortably sat in fear that these weird indentations would throw him off-balance, should he dare stick a paw out.
Surrounded by this sea of suspicious fibers, Chuck took matters into his own paws. He stared at it and willed it to transform into his beloved soft, velvet smoking jacket.
That’s one brave kitten, Katia.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged: Kittens, This Just In!      
http://oklo.org/2009/12/08/that-golden-age/ http://oklo.org/?p=716 
I’m nostalgic for ‘97, when the discovery of a new extrasolar planet was literally front-page news. What’s now cliche was then fully viable poetic sweep. Epicurus and his multitude of worlds. Bruno burning at the stake. In that frame of mind, it’s fascinating to go back and read John Noble Wilford’s extended New York Times piece, written at the moment when the number of known extrasolar planets equaled the number of planets in our own solar system.
Some of the hyperbole still seems fresh, especially with regard to the frequency and diversity of planetary systems:
And the discoveries may be only beginning. One recent study suggested that planets might be lurking around half the Milky Way’s stars. Astronomers have already seen enough to suspect that their definition of planets may have to be broadened considerably to encompass the new reality. As soon as they can detect several planets around a single star, they are almost resigned to finding that the Sun’s family, previously their only example, is anything but typical among planetary systems.
At the recent Porto conference, the Geneva team not only reiterated their claims regarding the frequency of low-mass planets, but actually upped their yield predictions. According to a contact who heard Stephane Udry’s talk, the latest indication from HARPS is that between 38% (at the low end) and 58% (at the high end) of nearby solar-type stars harbor at least one readily detectable M<50 Earth-mass planet. This is quite extraordinary, especially given the fact that were the HARPS GTO survey located 10 parsecs away and observing the Sun, our own solar system (largely in the guise of Jupiter’s decade-long 12-m/s wobble) would not yet be eliciting any particular cause for remark.
It also looks like planets beyond the snowline are quite common. In yesterday’s astro-ph listing, there’s a nice microlensing detection of a cold Neptune-like planet orbiting a ~0.65 solar mass star with a semi-major axis of at least 3 AU. The microlensing detections to date indicate that Neptune-mass objects are at least three times as common as Jupiter mass objects when orbital periods are greater than five years or so. Microlensing detections are an extremely cost-effective way to build up the statistics of the galactic planetary census during belt-tightening times. Much of the work is done for free by small telescope observers.
Yet another dispatch pointing toward a profusion of planets comes from an article posted last week on astro-ph by Brendan Bowler of the IfA in Hawaii. Work that he’s done with John Johnson and collaborators indicates that the frequency of true gas giant planets orbiting intermediate-mass stars (former A-type stars like Sirius that are now in the process of crossing the Hertzsprung gap) is a hefty 26% within ~3 AU.
An embarrassment of riches? Certainly, the outsize planetary frequency means that the cutting-edge of the planet-detection effort will be shifting toward the Sun’s nearest stellar neighbors, as these are the stars that offer by far the best opportunities for follow-up with space-based assets such as HST, Spitzer, JWST et al.
As competition for ground-based large-telescope RV confirmation of run-of-the-mill planet transit candidates orbiting dim stars heats up, the threshold magnitude (at a given bandpass) at which stars become largely too faint to bother with will grow increasingly bright. We’re talking twelve. Maybe nine. Pont et al., in their discovery paper for OGLE-TR-182b refer to this threshold as the “Twilight Zone” of transit surveys:
The confirmation follow-up process for OGLE-TR-182 necessitated more than ten hours of FLAMES/VLT time for the radial velocity orbit, plus a comparable amount of FORS/VLT time for the transit lightcurve. In addition, several unsuccessful attempts were made to recover the transit timing in 2007 with the OGLE telescope, and 7 hours of UVES/VLT were devoted to measuring the spectroscopic parameters of the primary. This represents a very large amount of observational resources, and can be considered near the upper limit of what can reasonably be invested to identify a transiting planet.
What I'm doing: fooling around with social networking sites. (I made a "Kaja & Phil Foglio" fan page on Facebook!) What I SHOULD be doing: lettering tonight's page, which I should have done ages ago. (It's not like I don't know what it says...) What Phil is doing: drawing something that he thinks is funny. What Phil SHOULD be doing: finishing the cover art for Volume 9 so I can send the info to Diamond.
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Rose Hilliard at St. Martin's just sent me a pic of the AWESOME cover!
WHOA, BABY! HAWT!! We may have to invent a whole new genre called URBAN SEXY!
That's the good news.
The bad news is it won't be released until July 2010!
Waaaah! The wait, the delicious agony of the WAIT!
But hey--plenty of time to get in a pre-order!.jpg)
This is barely a game. There's no way, so far as I could tell, to lose at it. It's basically an exploration piece. The graphics are brutally basic, but when you pull back they have a minimalist beauty about them. The music sucks you in. And the different environments and the way you explore them is very nicely pulled together. It has, at its heart, a sense of wonder. It's 20 minutes I'm glad I spent, which is more than I can say for a lot of things. |
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chipper
busy
giddy
– This Christmas
