WiP Wednesday: Monad
This week it's been so hot that I've found it difficult to concentrate. Nonetheless, I've accomplished a few things (very early in the morning, before the heat knocks me into a siesta). I've finished the artwork for two more Tarot cards (Moon and Sun), which means I was also able to finally finish the cover for The Moon Bunny & the Sun Lion, the latest Arcana Glen novel. I've also been working feverishly (literally, in this heat!) on the final edits for the last three books in the Arcana Glen Major Arcana series.
I'll be honest. I have not worked on The Unfinished Song this week. I needed a mind-refreshening, a break from fantasy, so I've been working on Science Fiction for a while. In my experience, nothing induces "writer's block" more than trying to force the mind to a creative task. Creativity comes from the subconscious. Like the huntress in The Moon Bunny & the Sun Lion, you have to hunt down your own creativity by sometimes appearing to run away from it. Make the story chase you down--then turn around and catch it!
The best way to make a story chase you down is to work on another story. You make the first story jealous, I guess. ;P
I already mentioned another SF series I'm working on, the Seastead Series, which is Young Adult.
This book is from another trilogy which is very different. It's "Galactic Far Future Hard Science Fiction." This is actually a trilogy I've been researching on and off for over a decade, probably almost as long as I've been working on The Unfinished Song. It's very much a labor of love, since I know that the readership for Hard SF, especially Far Future SF, is miniscule. But I don't care. I love Biology, I love speculating about how evolution works, and might work. The book is set a billion years in the future because I needed a large enough canvas to let evolution do its work.
But in order to give the reader a relatable narrator, the main character is an astronaut from closer to our own era who wakes up from stasis much, much further in the future than ever intended...
Here's a sneak peek at the first chapter. Just a snippet:
01. Dream
“Sometime on lonely mountain-meres
I find a magic bark;
I leap on board: no helmsman steers:
I float till all is dark.”
—Alfred Lord Tennyson, Sir Galahad
"I am a tiny seashell that has secretly drifted ashore and carries the sound of the ocean surging through its body." —Edward Hirsch
Before you can wake, you must dream.
As life began existence unconscious of its own nature, so I began my journey to save humanity in a deep and frozen sleep.
I spent most of the journey across interstellar space in a form of stasis—not only frozen down to nearly zero degrees Kelvin, but in a state of cellular hardening, induced by my silicon symbionts, akin to fossilization. “Frigidurus” was the official term, but that’s just the fancy way of saying, “very cold and hard as a rock.” I was encased in a carbonate-silicate substrate near as cold as space and as hard as diamond, like a fly in amber. In that state, more still than death, I did not dream. Temperature and immobility made any neural activity, even subconscious, impossible.
But as the ark that bore my encapsulated body drew closer to its destination, a star called Avalon, my stasis capsule began its pre-programed transition to a warmer, wetter condition. Frigidurus surrendered slowly, for too rapid a transition would have crushed my fragile organic cells rather than revived and rehydrated them. In the interval between stillness and wakefulness, the oldest parts of my brain roused first, long before conscious control
I, the warden of humanity’s dream of space travel, guardian of humanity’s future, dreamed of Earth’s past, and of my own past when I had lived among the men and women who needed me, who created me to save them, but yet who had feared and rejected me.
* * *
If you are one of those rare, wonderful souls who enjoy Hard Science Fiction, and you'd like to be alerted when this book comes out, you can sign up here and also receive a FREE HARD SCIENCE FICTION novelette, which is about the very beginning of the universe... it's set in the first micro-seconds of the Big Bang, before hadronic matter even formed. (This is not part of my normal newsletter list, so if you are already on my regular newsletter, you need to sign up here separately.)
Yeah, that's how I roll when it comes to Hard Science Fiction. I love the weird.
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