There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.
― Ernest Hemingway
Jack
About Jack
Posts by Jack McDonald Burnett:
Researching the future
A colleague asked me today how I research what the near future is going to look like for my books. I don’t. I try to keep the story relatable and keep the whiz-bang jetpacks and flying cars to a minimum. You have to be realistic, however and acknowledge that the future is going to look different. I try to be strategic about it and drop in some new tech here or there for example which grounds the story in the future. Beyond that I’m no Asimov or Heinlein in predicting what the future will look like. Not that anyone could really do it the way they did.
Scientists find a hot spot on the moon
Scientists have discovered radioactive granite on the moon. Granite needs water and plate tectonics to form on Earth. A much rarer and more powerful process would be necessary to produce it on the moon. They think it involves volcanoes. The area where the granite was detected is warmer than it should be, perhaps providing credence to the volcano theory.
A short excerpt from Fight the Future
If you went back in time, would you contact your younger self? What would you say?
Of course I used the infosphere to research myself and my parents, my family of four (including my brother) in Oregon. I stopped short of trying to contact myself, though. Nothing good could come of it. Your dad is going to die on March 3, 2035—try and keep him in the house all that day, I could imagine myself reading at ten years old. I would need therapy the rest of my life. And what if I saved my father? Would something like that change the future so drastically that I would disappear? Surely my life would have been different if my dad had survived to old age. Would I have ever met Dr. Tellus? Worked on time travel at Northwestern in the first place?
Volunteered to go back in time?
India’s launch went well
The Indian Space Research Organization launched Chandrayaan-3 today on a mission to land at the moon’s south pole. It went off without a hitch.
Rocketbook
I got a small Rocketbook notebook to go with my larger one. Rocketbook notebooks are erasable and reusable, you write stuff in them with a special kind of erasable pen then scan the pages with your phone and they get sent to the destination of your choice, in my case OneNote. They’re neat. I think the small one will be good for archiving writing related things I think of when I’m not at my computer. I have Joplin on my phone but I often prefer to write ideas down in ink.
E.L. Doctorow
Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
– E.L. Doctorow
Six lunar landings in the next six months
Probably.
We are about to see a flurry of missions that will attempt to land on the Moon. During the last decade, dating to China’s Chang’e 3 lander in 2013, there have been six attempts to land on the Moon. Three of these missions have been Chang’e landers, and all were successful. Three other attempts, one backed by Israel, another by India’s space program, and a third by a private Japanese company, ispace, have failed to softly touch down on the Moon.
Now, in the next six months, as many as six more landing attempts may come.
Don’t perpetrate hooptedoodle
Elmore Leonard’s ten rules of writing, number nine:
9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.
Unless you’re Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language or write landscapes in the style of Jim Harrison. But even if you’re good at it, you don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.
I take a lot of the ten rules to heart. Your mileage may, of course, vary.
Evernote
It doesn’t sound like Evernote is going away, though it’s laid off its entire U.S. (and Chile) staff in favor of running the operation out of Italy. I’ve always had the best of intentions when it comes to Evernote, but I could never get in the habit of using it as my “external brain.” What use I did make of it was productive, it was a great way to keep notes and links organized by novel or story.
I’m going to give OneNote a try, mostly because I recently bought a lifetime license to Microsoft 365. I’m planning on making more use of my Rocketbook notebooks, which support saving to OneNote. The best of intentions.