Fantastic Future Friday: Tomorrow

I was planning on writing about SpaceX's launch but that is postponed until tomorrow, so my post will be as well.

By Darrell B. Nelson author of Invasive Thoughts

Writing Wednesday: Back in the Saddle

When Isaac Asimov finished a book he used to put a fresh piece of paper into his typewriter and write a short story, then if he had time a science article that way he didn’t have to make two (or three) trips to the mailbox.

I tried that (sort of) after I wrote my first book, “Invasive Thoughts” I jumped right into a second, which I started to hate after 100 pages. After I wrote this little piece for TIBU “The Scariest Conspiracy Ever” and it received over 30,000 hits, I switched and started writing, “Project: Sparerib” based on that piece, which was a chore as I needed to do as much research for it as a non-fiction book and could never get a good balance of action/character/infodump. I’ll do some heavy revisions on it sometime.

After getting done with that book I enjoyed myself by writing an old school science fiction tale, “The Setting Earth” focused on a cold war 200 years in the future between Earth and the colonies that were set up throughout the Solar System. That was a fun couple of months.

Then I had a lot of ideas for stories and novels but just couldn’t get them onto paper.

After a little research I found a lot of writers go through this postpartum depression after finishing a book. So this time I planned ahead. After finishing, “The Pizza Diaries” I forced myself to take two weeks off. I went to the library and got a couple of books I had been meaning to read. “The Time-Travelers Wife” to check and see if it was anything like my tale of time traveling romance, it wasn’t. And “Time Enough for Love” not to compare it’s just one of the few Heinlein books I haven’t read.

Now that my mind has had time to idle a bit, and get the characters and tone of “The Pizza Diaries” out of the foreground I’m about to start on my fifth novel. This one is actually a Young Adult/Science Fiction novel, if 18 year olds are considered Young Adult. It features a college student, “Howie” who is having his mind stolen and the only one who can help him is “Vivian” a girl with extreme Bi-Polar disorder who has nearly lost her own mind.

This should be different enough so I don’t have to worry about mentally comparing it to my other novels, but still have a lot the weird dark tones that I’ve put into the others so if someone likes it they won’t be to disappointed if they pick up my other books.

I’m looking forward to writing again. Hopefully in three months, or less, when I finish this one I won’t need two full weeks off. Forcing myself not to write was tough.

By Darrell B. Nelson author of Invasive Thoughts

Temper Tantrum Tuesday: Phoenix from the Oil Spill

The oil “spill” in the gulf is tragic, it has the potential to inflict nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars per year for the next ten years in direct damages, as well as a fucktillion in indirect damages. So it’s hard to look at the bright side, but I found one.

A large part of the damages to the gulf come from the oil-eating bacteria, they eat as much oil as there is available oxygen. They consume all the oxygen around the spill leaving the water unlivable for most organisms.

Once the oxygen is sucked out of seawater one of the few things that can survive is algae. The algae sucks carbon dioxide out of both the atmosphere and the water, then releases both cyanotoxins and oxygen into the water as well as pulling the atmospheric nitrogen into the water making the water deadly to most organisms. Not too cheery yet.

One promising new alternative energy source is biofuels made from algae. It is economically competitive with oil and can be used in existing flex-fuel vehicles.

Because of the oil spill the gulf is going to turn into the largest algae bloom since the Proterozoic era. All it will take is some seeding the area with some of the least toxic strains of algae and they will grow and reduce the damage that would occur naturally, as the bloom grows boats could skim the top layer and bring it on shore to be processed. It could replace a substantial amount of our oil based fuel consumption as well as putting oxygen back into the gulf, speeding up the ecological recovery.

As the gulf recovers over the next decade and the algae bloom subsides, algae can start to be made inland in controlled environments, like in the desert. We can switch a lot of our oil use to algae use and have a cleaner economy.

Unfortunately, it took a huge disaster to give us this opportunity to change our economy from being oil based to a cleaner alternative, lets not waste it.


By Darrell B. Nelson author of Invasive Thoughts