It’s a Happy Friday, Thanks Everyone

At the beginning of the year I had a bout of Writers Block. I posted about it here and got great advice as to how to get passed it.

Just to get the creative juices flowing I banged out a little short story, “The Genie and The Breadsticks”. When I started writing it I never intended to show it to anyone, just write a little piece to get back into the flow of writing.

When I read it after I finished I thought it was kind of good, so I didn’t delete but shared it with the readers of this blog and got positive feedback so I looked around to humor magazines and submitted it.

The Cynic Online Magazine liked it and accepted it.

I’d like to thank everyone who offered me advice for my Writers Block and let them know that because of their advice another one of my stories has been published. Thanks again.

Darrell B Nelson author of “Invasive Thoughts”

Writing Wednesday: A neat editing trick

Reading my own writing objectively is impossible for me. I get too caught up in my own stories and know what I meant to say instead of what I said to seriously break my writing down and look at it objectively.

I came across a tip, at IO9, that really helps. Use the find feature on your word processor.

The author suggested 4 things to look for:

1) Adverbs (look to make sure they are not overused) do this by searching for “ly”.
My adverb use is decent about one in every three paragraphs. But it caught the fact that all my characters use the word “Really” a lot. I’ve been using this to go back through and change this to make the characters talk different from each other.

2) “It” It is a very flexible pronoun and because of that it must be used carefully.
This is a problem of mine, although I mostly manage to keep it consistent within a sentence, I seriously overuse the word and using the find feature helps me correct this.

3) “There was” This is a pretty weak verb that some people easily put in place of the “real” action verb.
Luckily this isn’t a problem of mine, searching the first 5 chapters of my book I used it once. There was no reason for me to run that search (lol).

4) “Was Being” A common mixed tense phrase.
This is another common mistake that I don’t seem to make but I know a lot of writers do.

The really nice thing about using the find feature is not only does it catch what you are looking for but also it brings up random paragraphs that you can read and see if they make sense on their own. If they don’t they might need to fixed.

I’m really liking the results I’m getting using this technique and I’ve been trying more searches like character names to see if they are overused, pronoun searches to see if they are consistent within paragraphs and so on.

If anyone can think of other things to search for let me know. I’m amazed at how this simple thing has made my revisions so much easier and better.

Temper Tantrum Tuesday: Hawking vs. Alien

Rarely do I get a chance to disagree with Stephen Hawkings, that’s my wife’s job (I can’t do math at that high a level). But he recently made a statement that I feel is wrong.

He said that we should avoid getting the attention of any Extra-Terrestrial Life because they might come to Earth to pillage us for our resources.

This might sound strange coming from the author of a book about Aliens taking over the Earth, but an advanced civilization wouldn’t need our resources. The Earth is a rich planet but as far as metals, gems, and minerals it can’t beat the asteroid belt.

A small asteroid 1-kilometer in diameter has more than twice the nickel/iron than we extract from the Earth’s crust in a year. All of the precious metals that we use for our industrial society originally came from asteroids hitting the Earth. So it would be foolish for an Alien society to raid our planet for stuff they would have to fly by to get.

If there is an advanced civilization close enough to worry about us the reason for them to come by and say, “Hi” is a little different. That reason comes from some of the mathematics done by Stephen Hawking.

In Newtonian Physics momentum is the product of the mass and velocity of an object (p = mv). If a one-ton object were to hit a planet the size of the Earth at one-third the speed of light, that planet would be broken to pieces.

Hawking looked at the effects that an object moving at that speed would have on space-time and noticed that it would cause gravimetric ripples. Currently we don’t have equipment sensitive enough to detect these ripples, but there is no physical reason they can’t be built.

Achieving the ability to send a spacecraft at one-third the speed of light would be the inter-stellar equivalent to nuclear power, it has great power that can be used for both good and evil.

In my book, Invasive Thoughts, the reason the Aliens came to Earth was to preemptively prevent us from developing this ability.

If there is an advanced civilization with inhibited planets within 100 light-years of Earth a major concern of theirs will be making sure we don’t use the power to send objects at one-third the speed of light at their planets. The best-case scenario is they will be like the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and force us to abide to treaties we never took part of. The worst-case scenario is they just take over like in my book.

At the moment we are simply not worth the trouble for aliens to invade us, but in the next few centuries we could have the power to get their attention. The most likely way we’ll get the attention of an advanced civilization comes from something Hawking envisioned, a small stable black hole that “leaks” Hawking Radiation to power a spacecraft at near the speed of light.

So Hawking is wrong about Aliens wanting to invade for our resources, but they might invade to save themselves from something based on the equations done by Stephen Hawking.

Darrell B. Nelson author of Invasive Thoughts