19 Jan 09

33,429

Good start. Started writing at 0600, stopped at 2100.

Lots and lots of pretty words.

Most of it background stuff for Shtar stuff. And I am deleting stuff that doesn't fit, or that I don't like.

10,000 words on political makeup of a fantasy area, geopolitical stuff, and all the fun stuff that I like to do before I actually sit down and start writing. That way it is easy for me to actually write the story, because if I need to find something, I've probably done it. And if I add something, I have a master information document that I can plug it in, that way I can avoid the contradictions that I find in other people's work all the time.

But then, writing a series is an ongoing process, a constant evolving, and as you write, the world revolves, because you see problems in the things you wrote, or it doesn't fit as easily as you thought it did.

I did work on two Year of the Zombie products, heavy duty work, which pretty much finished the stuff up except for the stat blocks.

Then I did about 3,000 words in the NDA locked project, the collaboration I'm doing with another author. It's fun playing with someone else's world, following the strictures and guidelines built into their work, expanding on it and taking it further than it was. Some things, of course, won't make the final cut, because after all, it is their project, not yours, you're just brought in to help a little here and there.

I also did a few thousands words on the Nova Wars: Origins document, which is where Earth discovers the way out of the solar system, and some odd questions are answered. I did reading on Oort Cloud and the real density of the asteriod belt, and decided I'm going with Space Opera science, since reality is kind of... well... sad. But, the interesting thing about the stuff I looked at, is there is a minor debris field, left over from when the solar system was forming, that extends all the way out to about a light year out.

The distance is pretty massive, a whopping 5,878,786,100,000 miles. That's 5.87 TRILLION miles, and from Sol to Earth is only 93 million, and the distance from New York to Los Angelos is 2443 miles. So you would have to travel from LA to New York a massive 2,406,379,901 times to equal a single light year. That's the distance that a beam of light (of sufficent wavelength and energy) will travel in a year. (Of course, then you get into particle degredation, wavelength lengthening, and all that fun stuff)

Something really sobering, is just for educational purposes, I compared a light year to the United States National Debt, and here's the numbers:

$10,642,478,850,711 as of 19 Jan 09
5,878,786,100,000 miles in a light year.

So the National Debt is the equivalent of 1.8 fucking light years.

The US National Debt is greater than the tonnage of all the nuclear weapons on the face of the earth during the height of the Cold War.

And it's only going to get worse.

But hell, what do I care, I'm a writer of apocalyptic fiction. My father trained me as a survivalist, all I worry about is my kids and wife. But that's something for another post.

Anyway, so, today I worked on:

Shtar, background data
Year of the Zombie, sourcebooks
NDA Project
Nova Wars: Origins

So, one day in, and I almost finished a third of what I had set myself.

Lets see how I do tomorrow, when I get up at 0530.

Hopefully I will sleep well. The last few night have been hell on wheels. I've been dreaming of Ramstein again, more and more. I dream of the woman's eyes, the way I just scooped the kid up, and the way, in the end, I utterly fucking failed at what I should have been able to do. And yeah, I still dream of The Burning Man, and he still mocks me in my dreams.

So I'll push another bit up in my dosage, I'm allowed to go a slight bit further in my meds, according to my tech, but instead of jumping to that point, I'll approach it slow.

Hopefully, tonight, there will be no dreams.