I posted in January about the snow hanging around like an impervious, unwelcome house guest; this week we’ve just seen the back of the latest batch! Some gloomy forecasters predict the UK will have a white Easter; I choose to ignore these pessimists (with fingers crossed).
It has been an unseasonably cold late winter and early spring, but we took a chance and booked a city break to Bruges a couple of weeks ago. This was my first visit, and I was delighted with the “Venice of the North”; if you enjoy lots of very tall, very old churches, museums, galleries, canals, fine chocolate and beer, you’re in for a treat in Bruges. A word of warning for vegetarians like myself though, or Vegans – like their German neighbours, the Belgians love meat, with some fish thrown in. If you eat Flemish, expect lots of beef and rabbit stews, mussels and pâté. Desserts are wonderful and I made up with lots of waffles and pancakes, and a wonderful apple pie flambéd in Calvados.
Back in the frigid climes of England, I decided to update this site; I trawled through WordPress themes for writers (WordPress seems to think that a writer’s main occupation is posting lots of pictures, but I digress!), and I found a nice clean theme (Dara). I’m really pleased with the results. Let me know what you think!
In terms of writing, I finished a 6,000-word short story, that started life in my mind, as many of my stories do, as a piece of flash fiction. The theme for a short fiction site I frequent was “Lovecraftian”, and being a lover of all things HPL, I had a story in mind. I work in an area of London that’s an interesting mix of very modern, a hot revitalisation area that sits cheek and jowl with some very old and somewhat out-of-the-way corners; rivers, canals, and docks that wind through some undeveloped or just uninhabited corners of the capital. Anyway, that’s where my story was based, and it grew into a Lovecraftian homage monster of a tale that I’m really pleased with. I’ve submitted it to some respected Cosmic Horror publications, and I really have big hopes that it will be published soon, so watch this space; this would be my longest work of fiction published to date.
Last but definitely not least, as well as imagining horrid things happening to hapless Londoners, I reviewed where I was with my first draft of my Sci-Fi work in progress, The Bondage of the Soil. Reading the obituaries of the late Stephen Hawking, the beloved theoretical physicist whose A Brief History of Time I first read in the early 1990’s, I went on to spend hours reading of all the developments Stephen Hawking was instrumental in pushing forwards, especially theories of how mankind (or alien species) would achieve interstellar travel.
Without giving too much away, interstellar travel happens to be one of the core plots of The Bondage of The Soil. I have the main plot points sketched out, but I’ve been struggling with a couple of points; I want my story to be hard science fiction in as much as the ideas are theoretically possible in the near future, but I’m very much a dilettante when it comes to theoretical physics. I came across a couple of articles that helped me out in how interstellar journeys might be feasible, and in doing so I came across some more invaluable help! My story involves a visit to earth and a trip home; I had no idea how my protagonist was going to help her interstellar friend return home, but in reading about Nanoprobes, star chips, and star wisps, I learned that one suggested approach to interstellar travel is that of uploading a person’s brain via software, creating an “uploaded” astronaut. This will be the way my story goes – in effect its deals with some of the core concepts of Transhumanism (and trans alienism?)
I wondered: if an astronaut’s brain and personality were captured in data, it should, in theory, be possible to “transmit” it back home as data. To cut a long story short I came across an amateur radio forum discussing bouncing data off satellites, moons and planets, and one very helpful poster was so good as to get back to my crude and simplistic questions, giving me a wealth of ideas and options which have morphed into a much more realistic and even emotional plot! I’m now busy capturing some of these points for more research; it’s reinvigorated me to get this story finished and look for a publisher.
One last note before I wrap up for now: one of the nuggets of info my radio correspondent shared was just how many observatories there are in the UK; by a beautifully serendipitous coincidence, one is within a few miles of the location in my story!
Writing is considered a solitary experience, and in terms of the mechanics it often is, but I’ve had so many people help me on my writing journey – friends and family who understand (or tolerate!) my need to be alone and google the most fantastic things, kindly colleagues and strangers who give their own time and knowledge to check my writing, editors who help me to edit and thus publish my stories, and experts who give their own time and knowledge to help me write the best fiction I can. My heartfelt thanks to all!