On Background: Dark Energy

In honor of me finishing the rough draft of Eagle (cause I totally did!) I decided to take a stab at writing a bit about the background of the Jacob Hull universe. Mostly I'm a bit burnt out and unwilling to start on Airships before next week, so here goes.

One of the cool things about science is that the more we've discovered, the more we realize how little clue we have about how our universe works. Dark energy, along with dark matter, is one of those things that currently proves that maxim to its fullest.

There are a variety of explanations about dark energy, but what it boils down to (to my, non-expert understanding) is a collective "Huh?" on the part of modern astronomers. You see, the Big Bang theory (not that one) has managed to explain quite a lot about how the universe was formed. We've discovered background radiation from that first initial explosion, and all the galaxies in the universe are speeding away from each other, just as that theory would predict. There's just one problem.

They are all speeding up.

Why is that a problem, you ask? Well, according to a little thing we call gravity, we know that all matter is drawn toward other matter at a certain rate. That rate is lessened by distance and depends on the mass of the objects involved, but the gist of it is that the mass in the universe should be attracting the rest of the mass in the universe--especially those big globs of stars and planets we call galaxies. The initial assumption was that--due to gravitational pull--all those galaxies would eventually slow down and reverse course, finally merging together in a big condensed clump for another Big Bang of some sort. That is not what is happening at all.

They figured that out by looking at the light coming in from those galaxies, and measuring what kind of light it was. Light coming from an object headed toward you has blue shift, thanks to the Doppler effect. Light coming from an object headed away has redshift, thanks to that same effect. People have measured the light from the various galaxies and have found that they have redshifts--and that the shift is increasing. Basically, they did to galaxies what traffic cops do to your car and found that not only were they speeding, they were freaking flooring it.

Now, the concept they are using to explain the phenomena is called dark energy. Basically, from what I can understand of the subject (which I admit is limited) is that they think it is either the energy cost that is paid by the universe's expansion to have more empty space, or that there must be a kind of energy called a quintessence field that provides the gravitic acceleration. There is apparently a high-level debate on what those theories imply, and we aren't anywhere close to figuring out which one is correct, but they have concluded that dark energy makes up about seventy-three percent of the energy and mass in the universe. That's right, we have no idea about the nature of about three quarters of existence.

So how does this relate to Jacob Hull? When I was writing Wolfhound, I was reading about dark energy and came across a description of it as a sort of 'negative pressure' in the universe. With the weird way that my mind works, I connected negative pressure with the air pressure systems on Earth which create winds. From there I jumped to the idea of a similar sort of wind system occuring between concentrations of high and low 'negative pressure' in space, which people could sail along using sails meant to catch the energy provided by those dark energy currents. From there I went to the Capistans capturing that energy like specialized windmills, and missiles and torpedoes using those same currents to accelerate as well.

Now I'm sure there are at least a couple of physicists who are crying out in horror at what I've just done to the whole concept of dark energy. I'm sure there are already plenty of theorems and explanations to describe why the direction I went with here is absurd and illogical. I'm fine with that; Wolfhound was never meant to be a science textbook after all, and I readily admit that it was not meant to be hard sci fi either. Still, there was the thought process behind the background, for those who are interested. Hope to be a bit more regular in posting here in the future. See you around!

On Background: Hector Kingsley Landships

So you tend to learn very interesting things about history when you are researching a steampunk book.

One of the things I was researching recently was the introduction of tanks during World War One. The reason for that is the tank gets invented a lot earlier in Hector's world than it does in ours. The Distillation kind of speeds up or alters a lot of scientific advancement, so the Germans (unified much earlier than in reality, and allied with the British during a fight with France) roll out their version of the tank during the 1860s or so.

Except they don't call it a tank. They call it a landship.

You see, the reason that type of mechanized war machine gets called a tank in the first place is due to some interesting stories behind its development. The British who were working on the device didn't want the enemy to know what they were making. After all, tanks had the potential to finally break the terrible stalemate of trench warfare; they didn't want to tip their hand too early. So they mislabeled the product of the Landship Committee as a 'water carrier', supposedly destined for Russia or the Middle East.

At which point they noticed that the acronym for water carrier is WC--otherwise known as the British abbreviation for toilet (water closet).

Probably knowing that soldiers would come up with enough off-color names for the things on their own, the British then decided to change the name to 'water tank'. Eventually the name was shortened to tank, giving the weapon of modern warfare its distinctive nomenclature. Not every language uses it of course, but English typically refers to the vehicles by that name consistently.

Unfortunately for me, in Hector's world that particular series of events would not have happened. Tanks would have come to the British through their German allies, so they wouldn't have had to resort to disguising the invention themselves. As a result, they probably would have stuck with the original term for the device--a landship. Interesting what changes a little tweak in history could create, isn't it?

On Bios

Bios are hard to write. I have now officially discovered why authors hate these things. I guess part of it is the fact that a bio is either a list of your previous accomplishments or a story about yourself, neither of which seems very comfortable to me at the moment. The list of credentials thing doesn't really work when your entire publication history consists of a contest I won at BYU and a degree that has nothing to do with writing. Not exactly the kind of resume that I want to introduce people to when I am just starting out.

The other way of doing it seems just as hard, but at least it has the advantage of being more personal. I think I will probably end up going with that one, since it would help readers get to know me and what I am doing. Still, it just seems weird to be writing something about myself rather than one of my characters. They're so much cooler than I am, after all.

In any case, hope all is going well for you guys and I will see you around!

The New Realm

So my most recent writing project is kind of a mix of things that I don’t think that I’ve tried before. It is kind of milieu story, which means that an awful lot of it is focused on the setting rather than the plot or character elements. The focus seems to be more on exploring the environment and the background than it is on anything else. Since I am more used to focusing on plot elements for the structure of my story, it has been a bit disconcerting to try and work with it.

Fortunately, the generation of the setting has been more than enough fun to keep me interested. It all started with Zelda. One of my first video games, the Zelda series has always been entertaining and interesting to me, especially the Ocarina of Time game that came out while I was in high school. In fact, I actually started up a small fan fiction once upon a time, and even dinked around with a few ideas along those lines in the MTC with a few other elders in my district.

In any case, my nerdity aside, at some point I came up with the idea that a Zelda game would be that much more interesting if the bosses at the ends of the dungeons could get out rather than sitting and waiting for you to come to them. I started building a world around that idea, tinkering with it and seeing if it would develop into something interesting. Eventually the world of the New Realm came into being.

Basically, it is a realm of magic that was abandoned a long time ago. The reason it was abandoned was due to an ancient war where a flood of demons tried to exterminate the inhabitants led by a great demon named Gogam. A group of warriors opposed Gogam, managing to lock away some of the demons before the final battle in the last remaining city drove the human inhabitants across the ocean. In that final battle, both demon and warriors vanished, while the refugees flooded into the shelter of more mundane kingdoms.

In the setting of the story, the people have started to come back to the Realm, colonizing it anew. The story follows some of the new immigrants and cataloguing the experiences and challenges they have in part of the New Realm as they struggle in a land of new opportunities and pitfalls. Without looking for it, they quickly stumble onto something deeper and darker than they had anticipated, and the story follows them as they try to protect their new home from the forces that would destroy it.

So what do you guys think? Interesting, or just another fantasy novel? As a coherent story, the book still needs a lot of work. Just looking at it as I finish the first draft, it’ll need at least two rewrites, and probably a lot more refining touches before it is anywhere near ready. Still, I think it has the potential to be fun, as long as I’m willing to struggle with it. Let me know what you guys think, and I’ll see you around.

On Myths

So I just wrote a creation myth for a completely fictional world. The world itself is a background for a game nobody plays, and likely won’t even contribute to any future stories for something like years in the future. Yet I still wrote it. Does that make me crazy, or just really, really nerdy?

I’ve always found the concept of a myth to be useful when I’m planning the background to something, though. It helps set up the culture of a setting in a very significant way, and helps me to get a definite feel for how the people would react to the situations around them. Some of the most interesting settings have always had some form of myth or something in the background that held them up.

One of the times I enjoyed it the most was during the Larinia project we worked on in the Quark writing group. Just the origin myths for the different elf tribes there were fun to write for some reason, and I felt like it gave me a really good grasp on each of the societies. Their characteristic feel just seemed more unique after that, so maybe I should do it for more of my stories.

So should I post it on here, or just let it gather dust in my document bin? Just wondering if anyone’s interested in it, if only to mock it. Hahaha. Hope all is going well for everyone, and I’ll see you Monday. Hopefully there’s some news about life by then.

The Game, part two

So last time I told you about some of the fun things about my former gaming habits. Unfortunately, the time has come to reveal some of the less enjoyable aspects.

The first, and largest, problem that the games I made developed was that nobody besides me could run them. Since it lacked the system of numbers and highly defined rule system, everything kind of depended on how much attention I could pay to it, and nobody else really developed the knack for running it. That pretty much limited its wider appeal to only those who had direct access to me, which meant The Game was never going to become any more popular than I was. Given my social skills, that meant it wasn’t going to be very popular. It also meant that I was responsible for providing that entertainment to whoever wanted it, which grew old quickly.

The second problem was that some of the abilities and skills the players could develop ended up being unbalanced or uninteresting compared to others. The manner of learning physical combat was very much a bland process compared to Archmagic and Battle Magic. Psychic was a little too straightforward as well, and while Enchanter tended to be interesting, at the higher levels it too got overshadowed. Technology rarely even got recognized as a separate field. So even the final version I came up with needed a lot more tinkering to make effective.

Combined, those flaws eventually convinced me to set the game aside during college. The fact that I didn’t want to seem like a total nerd to the girls around me might have had something to do with it as well. (Though I met my wife at a nerdy writing group anyway, so my efforts were in vain. Typical.) Yet lately I have been looking at it again and wondering what I could do to correct some of these faults.

Unsurprisingly, my crazed little mind has actually come up with a few ways. The best way I could see to correct the first problem would be to actually write up a game manual so that anyone with the time or inclination would be able to use it. Of course, the second one will take a lot more tinkering to fix, so it will probably take a lot longer.

So over the next little while, I will probably occasionally post up some of these ideas and corrections. I’ll ask you to repress your horrified reaction to my nerdy behavior. :) If a principle of it interests you, just let me know so that I get some feedback. Otherwise, just bear with it, and I’ll exhaust my material eventually. Until next time!

The Game, part one

That’s right, I’m posting twice in one day, since I just finished with the GRE and now have a bit more time. I’m sure it’s not the best way to go about posting three times this week, but oh well, you’ll just have to deal with it.

So, remember how I tend to get obsessed with gaming systems and the like? I mentioned at some point that after my initial encounter with Dungeons and Dragons, I started to make up my own role playing games. It was an enjoyable habit that I kept up over the years through elementary, middle and high school, though once I went to BYU I let things come to a close. There were various iterations of the system I worked with, but they all shared some common characteristics.

First off, I did away with the whole ‘class’ system that defines a lot of character roles. I didn’t like the fact that the fighter character always had a specific job to do, or had to choose from a set of skills, and that he couldn’t up and choose to be part wizard instead. I guess my limited experience hadn’t taught me about cross classing or whatever, but in my games I made sure that no matter who you were, as long as someone (or something) was available to teach you, you could build up pretty much whatever skills you wanted. It led to some interesting characters among the people who played, and gave me a lot of challenges as the game master to keep up with the different players who customized their characters effectively.

Secondly, my system didn’t involve any dice rolls. That is fairly weird, but it made sense to me. After all, things don’t always get determined by only luck. A lot of the time, things happen because of the choices people made. So before each player decided on their action, I planned out their opponents moves, and had them compared. For example, I knew the guy facing somebody was going to swing an axe at their head. If the player decided to attack, unless they were faster than the other guy, they would be hit in the head. If they blocked or dodged, depending on the angle or direction, they could escape.

Similarly, there weren’t any hit points involved. People got injured or incapacitated based on where their wounds were. Take a hit in the arm, and it was injured. Hit to the head, you had problems. Scarring and permanent damage was handled more or less the same way. Put together, it kind of helped make everything a bit more cinematic and fun to describe, rather than what felt like a bunch of math. Clever players could think up some pretty cool tricks, and we never had the experience of having to roll a bajillion dice just to figure out what happened next.

Another aspect of the games I came up with involved the campaigns. Players often didn’t have a specific objective, and they tended to have to wander in order to find something they found interesting. It gave them a lot more freedom than a focused campaign, and allowed them to have a kind of sandbox feel to what they were doing. There were enemies who built up forces and came after them, and plots that they could uncover or thwart, but how they did it and what order they faced them was up to the players, not me. It also allowed them to avoid any railroading on my part, though if they missed some of the hints I left lying around they occasionally got surprised by attacks from nowhere. They also occasionally wandered into places and situations where they could get killed easily, but I typically left them a way out after they faced the consequences of their actions.

Next time I’ll probably go into why I’m spending so much time talking about all this. Suspense! Or not…

On Gaming Systems

So I have a particular obsession with gaming systems. I don’t really mean videogames, though I enjoy those as much as anybody. I mean the mechanics behind the games, the things that make the game fun and interesting. I don’t know where I picked it up, but that interest has been with me as far back as I can remember. I was always the weird kid who would read through the instruction manuals for books, study the bestiaries for RPGs, that kind of thing.

Eventually, I found a friend who introduced me to Dungeons and Dragons. I played it for about fifteen minutes and decided I didn’t like how it worked. After that I started a habit of making up my own games. Another friend and I started out making simple pen and paper games, and eventually worked our way up to making our own role playing games. It was something that lasted part of the way through high school, and provided me with a lot of material for my earlier stories.

Nowadays, I still tend to get…distracted… whenever I find a system that interests me. I study it until I understand it, more or less, and then move on. It’s strange sometimes that I know so much about these games without ever having played them. I have the perfect Tau army and fleet planned out for Warhammer 40k, and I’ve never considered buying a model. I’ve planned out the character progress and ships I would use in Eve Online, and yet the closest I came to an MMORPG was a free to play thing that I gave up on. It’s that kind of a thing.

Does anyone else do this, or am I just weird. I guess one explanation is as good as another, but for some reason it is a habit I can’t seem to shake. Perhaps it is linked in with my own worldbuilding mindset, or at least the urge I have to find settings that I could use to tell stories. Oh well. I guess it is one more oddity that is part of my already strange life. :)

On Career Choices, Part Two

Falling back onto what I thought was a solid plan B, my wife and I moved to Texas, hoping that she could find work in her Latin teaching career, and that my molecular biology degree could land me a job in the nearby research labs, especially since we had some contacts that we felt could help us. As it turned out, something I had repeatedly told my friends and family came dreadfully true. A Molecular Biology bachelors isn’t taken seriously unless you have a graduate education, medical or otherwise, to back it up. I was soon out of work, and while we were fortunate enough to have savings and a job for my wife, it was a little discouraging.

Nevertheless, I reapplied to medical school, hoping that this time, as I had started volunteering in the nearby hospitals, I would be more successful. Interviews came and went, and then the long wait came. Medical schools don’t reply right away, and can more or less sit on your application until May or early June of the next year. The phrase “the anticipation is killing me” falls well short of what I was going through.

In the midst of this wait, I decided to finish off a story I had started in Brandon Sanderson’s 318R class at BYU. Sanderson is an incredible author, and I have always been impressed by his work. His class had us writing a new novel, which broke me away from the traditional story I had been slaving on for years, and focused me on something new. It was a horror story set in a fantasy world that I titled Brellan. I soon started pounding away at the fantasy novel I had not yet completed, and managed to finish it by late December.

I had not been writing in the preceding time, what with the stress of moving, reapplying and freaking out over my life’s shortfalls. Starting it up again was like breathing fresh air after being stuck in a cave for months. Another idea for a new novel, this time a science fiction one, popped into my head, and I started in on it. Before I knew it, the first draft of
Wolfhound was quickly taking up more of my time, effort and enthusiasm than Brellan was, and grew into a story that I was much happier with. I finished the first draft around the same time, and put it through a hefty series of revisions. Around the beginning of February, I had a draft I was satisfied could be shown to the public, and allowed my wife to read it. Though she hates sci fi, dislikes space battles in general, and has told me to my face on multiple occasions when she hates my characters and scenes, she liked it and encouraged me to try to publish it.

So at this point, I have had people read through it and give me their opinions, and put it through a few more rewrites. Currently, I am sending out query letters to agents and hoping my efforts there produce a bit more response than my medical aspirations thus far have. At the same time, I’ll be taking the GRE soon, starting to look at master’s degrees in Molecular Biolgy, and continuing to volunteer in a nearby emergency room and wait on the medical schools that are still considering me. Hopefully, I am not trying to juggle too much at once.

So that’s where I am right now, and where I hope to be going. Probably boring to most, but I figure a small update or background might help frame my future posts more clearly. Until next time!

On Career Choices, Part One

So, over the past half a year or so, I have managed to finish two different books, one of which I am currently trying to get published.

It sounds like quite an achievement, doesn’t it? After all, not many people can say they’ve written a book, certainly less can say they’ve written two. Still, it has been an interesting journey getting to this point in my life.

When I came back from my mission, it was initial decision to try to be a published writer. The reason for that came from my own personal desire to continue writing throughout my life, and advice I got from my mission president. I had an interest in writing since high school, where I had cobbled together a 360 page, single space monstrosity that I was eternally working on. Even during my mission, I would spend breaks tinkering with story plans and ideas, and the writing group I had joined during my freshman year and BYU had given me many wonderful experiences, including meeting my future wife.

The advice from my mission president also was fairly blunt. He had placed me in various leadership positions over the two years I’d served under him, and it was his observation that I didn’t much like managing people. I could do it, and I could enjoy some measure of success at it, but both he and I had noticed that I endured an awful lot of stress as a result because I tried to drive myself and everyone around me to perfection. Given that most jobs that are able to support a family in business, education, and research involve some level of management, and worse, bureaucracy, he felt I should pursue a less management oriented career. I agreed.

Then I got home. Life is much more complicated and less pleasant than a returning missionary likes to believe. I had to think a bit more seriously about where a future income was going to come from, and about what I could support a family on. Based on the advice of family and friends, I chose Molecular Biology for my major, and just kept working on writing as a hobby.

Years passed, I courted and married my wife, and my career goals continued to be refined. From the stories I was hearing from one of my mentors who I had worked under in high school, research was not exactly an encouraging place to go. Medicine quickly took the place of research, and seemed to provide me with everything I would want in a career. A way to help people in my daily work, a stable financial basis for my future family, and a real career I could grow and develop in.

Unfortunately for me, my medical aspirations quickly ran into some hefty obstacles. None of the members of my immediate family had ever really been involved in medical practices, and aside from a pair of cousins who were EMTs and also just barely applying to med school, I was kind of isolated from everyone else who did. The advice from the school career counselor was “do research instead” which must have seemed logical, because by the time I started seriously into premedical preparations, others in my class had been doing volunteer hours and job shadowing for years.

I soldiered on, confident I could win the med schools over. The MCAT came, and I did fairly well on it, which was a good sign. Other signs were less than stellar. To my dismay, I found I was applying later than I should have been, and I sorely lacked a lot of the volunteer experiences that I needed. While I rushed to catch up, rejection letters flowed back to me, and by the time I graduated, I had nowhere to go.