March 31st goal

My gosh, I have ONE page left to write to reach my goal of finishing the second draft of The Lord of Lightning. But it is a hard page to write.

I am agonizing over this page. When you read the book, you will know exactly which page I am talking about right now.

It has to be right. It has to work. It has to be... just so. It has to be...  perfect.

When you read this page, if I have written it as it needs to be written, it will rip your guts out.

I have one more day to reach my goal of finishing this crucial second draft.

So.

I'm going to sleep on this, and hope the Muse clonks me on the head with her magic wand during the night.

I am certain I will get there. Don't worry. It will be beautiful.

A poem of mine...

A poem I wrote has been featured and criticized by a poet I respect very highly: Angel Uriel Perales. 


The poem is The Train Out of Bangor, a favorite of mine.

click here to go to the blog where my poem has been featured.


enjoy,


Kurt








Post-Script. In the poem look at two things: The use of slant, or half rhymes 'Bay/gain' 'heart/hurt'. I love these types of rhymes because they exact a little more effort from both the writer and teh reader. And, that seems to add an extra, emotional spice to the verse. Second, the use of place. Where are we? We're travelling, not just physically, but also in our relationship. So look for allusions and direct references to movement, place, and geography. KJH 3/3/12

Today and Tomorrow

Today and tomorrow I will be spending all day on the Plains of Syrenf.


The place in Wealdland where it all goes down, the Final Battle.


Today and tomorrow the fate of the Wanderer is decided.


Some will stand. Some will fall.


Maybe the Plains of Syrenf, where Deifol Hroth has constructed his new citadel, is somewhere near here:


copy and paste this to Google Maps: 


A344 junction, Amesbury, United Kingdom


;)


Kurt

Sunday Musings 3-18-2012

Life Out in the Rest of the Universe

I believe there is life out there. I believe in the banal, the mundane, the ordinary. It's why we, as humans crave the extraordinary. I believe, however, that AVERAGE is a universal constant. Now I may sound like Douglas Adams here, but I believe that as a species, we humans, so astounding with our intelligence and capabilities, are very, very, boringly average.


Think about it. All of the requirements for ascension to sentient life are, statistically speaking, the same: opposable digits on extending limbs for tool creation; upright posture to explore and conquer; organs for gathering information, eyes, ears, nose, mouth, skin; digestive tract to process calories into energy; sexual reproduction; large brain capacity used in a variety of ways for problem solving. 


Stack up the cards however you like, intelligent life, somewhere out there, is going to look depressingly, exactly like us. Occam's Razor: the simplest answer is usually the correct one. We are intelligent life. Intelligent life looks like us; other intelligent life will look pretty much like us.


You can answer until the barman throws us out that we, as a species, may not qualify as intelligent. But, you are arguing criticism, which is just subjectivity. I'm talking about cold hard data. We are at this amazing distance from the other life on our planet in terms of problem solving and creation. Life, at the same distance, on other planets, is going to look and behave sadly, exactly like the human species.


But why then, haven't we heard from the stars?


It's true radio signals take a long time to travel the vast distances of interstellar space. We have been diligently scanning the radio band for approximately fifty years now. Not a very long time to be listening in on the infinity of space. But, surely we would have heard something by now, I hear you slur into your pint. Look at the figurative ton of radio, laser, microwave and digital signals we have been vomiting out into the Great Blackness. Surely we should have detected something similar if the other races out there are as cryingly average as we are. Maybe and maybe not.  


What if.


In all the television shows I've ever enjoyed about ETs; ancient aliens; possible galatic life, never once have I heard the equivalent of Occam's Razor to the question as to why we haven't heard anything from  our assumed neighbors in space. I think there are two possibilities that fill the bill.


One: The don't want US to hear THEM. Now, admittedly, this is a paranoid approach. Why wouldn't they be interested in us? When I hear some skeptical scientist ask "Why WOULD aliens want to talk to us?" I think to myself, "Why are you a scientist?" Doesn't curiosity and discovery compel you? Wouldn't it compel a similarly intelligent species? Why do we risk life and limb to go stare at gorillas in their reserves in Africa? Because we are fascinated and curious. I believe, again as an average quality, that intelligence is naturally inquisitive. 


So, they don't want us to hear them. Why? Are we dangerous? Only to ourselves. To a species as little as a light year away, not even remotely. Are they cooking up such super secret plans that they don't want us to know about the interstellar treehouse they're building in their back yard, and they don't want us in their club? The No Humans Club. Puh-leez.


So. The paranoid answer is pretty much ridiculous. It's akin to worrying that someone in Denver with his hand to his ear is going to somehow take advantage of you because of the physical conversation you're having on the street corner with someone in Moscow.  


So that brings us to an answer that I think is pretty close to being the reason we haven't heard from the big headed aliens and why they aren't out there abducting people. Occam's Razor: The simplest answer is usually the correct answer.


Two: We are the oldest intelligent life in the universe.


I'm going to go get a cup of tea while you pick up the shattered remains of your mind, which I have just blown.


It makes complete sense. Life is ubiquitous. We already know that. What does that mean? When life CAN find a way to survive and thrive, it WILL survive and thrive. Accept it. Life is a constant and ordinary construct of our universe. So therefore, there must be life similar to ours out there. But not necessarily as old.


It stand to reason that some life will be older, some younger. Again, the power of the average. But hold on. In any subset, there is a first. Why can't that first be us? 


But the universe is 13.75 billions years old! Life on earth is only 4 (or so) billion years old!


Oh, uh, wait... it took a third of the age of the universe to get to where we are. Assuming that in the first 5 to 6 billion years radioactivity in the universe was so high, no life was possible, that still puts us right at the front of the race track, only a measly billion years or so for someone to be ahead of us!

Yes. There could be intelligent life out there that is older than ours. Further along. Assuming they haven't blown themselves to smithereens in a nuclear holocaust, which we flirted with for nearly forty years. But we would have heard from them. Something. Anything! But all we have is silence.

Again there is a caveat: What if a race evolved just like ours and blew themselves up? The window for radio waves would be rather short, time-wise. We only began to pollute the universe in earnest at the turn of the century. A hundred years of inadvertently yelling, "Hey! We're over here!" is a drop in the bucket when considered against the millions of years spanning out in the age of the universe.

It could have been that the sitcoms and military communiques of a distant race briefly bathed our planet, in that hundred year window, when we were swinging iron swords at each other. But then you have to consider the distance in terms of time.


If an alien race was ahead of us, maturity-wise, then you factor in the time it takes for their 'radio-vomit' to reach us, and you get to a fine balancing act of pushing evolution maturity to that time period when life was even possible.


Instead of running to your chalkboard to pound out the math, consider Occam again... 


We haven't heard from them yet, because they have yet to develop the capability for us to hear them!

That's not to say, in relative terms, they haven't already. Again we factor in distance against arrival of signal. It takes only four years for a radio wave from Alpha Centari, our closest neighbor, to reach us. If there is life there at a similar level to ours, we would have detected it by now.


But what if life advanced and flamed out a hundred light years distant? We probably missed it.
If life advanced and continued more than a hundred light years distant, we would have heard them by now, or we very shortly will.

Again, the odds are for picking up the simplest radio waves from an advanced race as every day here on earth passes. Because, like a land surveyor on a speeding train, the area available to search increases with every passing day. Time equals distance. As more time passes with our search, the farthest stars become available to reach us with a radio signal.


So. A hundred light years out? A drop in the bucket, galactically speaking. The milky way is estimated to be between 100, 000 to 120, 000 lightyears wide. We have only heard from a thousandth of just our own galaxy. 


What does that mean? Of the sample available to us, so far, zilch, nada, zip. Even just a thousandth of a pretty awesome piece of pie is still a pretty good statistic to draw conclusions from. They may be out there, but they're either all dead and we missed it, or they haven't developed to the level we are currently at.

And please don't bring the but-we-may-not-understand-what-their-signals-look-like argument to the table. I will pour Occam all over that shit. Life advanced as ours will look boringly like us, and behave depressingly like us, and their technology will be tediously, exactly like ours. We will immediately recognize the radio wave signals when they come. The sporting events, advertisements, and soap operas will be astoundingly, heartbreakingly familiar.


And they will come. I believe that. The radio wave signals will come. And their sitcoms and military communiques will be studied and enjoyed for centuries before we can respond. And they will study and enjoy the 'radio-vomit' we've been spewing, too. 


And I think, after we get a good look at each other, the banal similarities taken into account, we probably both won't want the other in our own treehouse.


cheers,


Kurt

The Lord of Lightning release date

I'm feeling really good about this second draft of the third book of the Wealdland Stories, and so...


I am tentatively setting a release date of May 1st, 2012 for The Lord of Lightning.


I hope this brightens your day, even if just a little.


cheers,


Kurt