Journal Entry 31
December 16, 2008
We spent most of the past week in Kennesaw, GA, where my younger son, Chris, graduated from Kennesaw State University. He was an anthropology major, and plans to be an archeologist. And if you’ve been reading either the Priscilla Hutchins novels or the Alex Benedict series, you’re probably smiling at that bit of news. During the celebration, I finally realized that I’m not entirely comfortable with the notion of taking a year off from writing. I suspect I could still get some short fiction done, read the books I’ve been saving, and still complete a novel. All I have to do is stop playing Free Cell. It’s addictive. I had to go cold turkey on it a couple of years ago in order to meet a deadline, and I should probably do the same again. Get it out of my life.
A curious aspect of this is that I don’t think I’d recognized that writing is also addictive. Writers are always going on about how stressful it is, and how they keep a bottle of scotch in the lower right hand drawer. But that’s all talk, and it’s designed to discourage the competition. To persuade potential rivals that it’s not worth the effort and they should get jobs at Woolworth’s. When I look back over the last twelve months, while I was working on Time Travelers Never Die, some of the year’s most exhilarating moments came out of the writing. Hey, Maureen, look, it’s 1937 and we’re in a restaurant in Durham, North Carolina, planning to meet Aldous Huxley, who’s visiting the area, and will be in at some point this evening with friends. But who’s that college kid who just took over the piano? That’s not really Dick Nixon, is it? Can’t be.
Or when Dave and Kate, the time travelers, stop in Dodge and have a few drinks with Wyatt and Calamity.
The year before, it was The Devil’s Eye, and the same sort of ride. My original intention was to end the novel when Alex discovered why he’d received the call for help from Vicki Greene. I had a big time playing around with the various incarnations of haunted places across Salud Afar, the beach where the ghostly aircraft shows up every year, and the haunted forest, and the decimated time lab. All great fun. But then the day came when I realized the narrative wasn’t done. The solution to the mystery presented an opportunity to take a few more steps, and I couldn’t just walk away. We celebrated that night.
Speaking of celebrations, Maureen and I will do one this evening, as well. It’s our 41st anniversary. Hard to believe. Seems like last week we were singing Just Get Me to the Church on Time.
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The January issue of Astronomy has an especially interesting cover story: The year’s top ten astronomical events. Among them: The discovery that a substantial number of galaxies are ‘flowing’ in the same direction, apparently toward a common destination, beyond the edge of the visible universe, which means, of course, an area so far away that light hasn’t had time to reach us. It would have to be a source of considerable gravity, unless something else is going on. (I can’t imagine what.) Also, NASA’s Swift satellite spotted the brightest gamma ray burst ever seen. Gamma ray bursts happen when a massive star collapses into a black hole. There’s a process that would be interesting to watch. But even given FTL technology, how would you arrange it?
Other stories of special interest: Princeton astronomer Alicia Soderberg, using the same Swift satellite, was watching one supernova when she saw another starting. It’s the first time we’ve caught one of these things from its first moments. And of course the Phoenix Lander found water on Mars, and organic molecules in the soil. I’ve thought for a long time that the discovery of extraterrestrial life, if it happened at all, would be made through a spectroscopic analysis of the atmosphere of an extrasolar terrestrial world. It seemed as if it was just a matter of waiting for the technology that would allow us to get a look at these places. At the moment, small worlds are lost in the glare of the home star. But we’re working on a system to block off the light. Last I heard we were getting close. But maybe, in the end, it’ll be Mars after all.
Which raises an intriguing question: Why do we want so desperately to find someone else?
Jack
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