Category Archives: Writing

Goddard, ENTERPRISE, and the Agent Scorecard

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Fifty years ago today — May 1, 1959 — The “Beltsville Center” was renamed the Goddard Space Flight Center in honor of the first person to launch a liquid-propellant rocket, Dr. Robert Goddard.

Thirty years ago today marked the first time the Space Shuttle pathfinder configuration — using the Shuttle Enterprise — was assembled in the Vehicle Assembly Building and transported to Launch Complex 39A.

(Shuttle Enterprise at the Udvar-Hazy Center of the National Air & Space Museum. Click to enlarge.)
(Image from Wikipedia by Ad Meskens, licensed under Creative Commons.)

Finally, after the first week here’s the tally on my hunt for a literary agent:

  • Agents queried: 9
  • Rejections received: 4

No expressions of interest or offers of representation yet. I’m still researching other agents to query. Wish me luck!

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Brief RavenCon Wrap-Up

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Had a good weekend in Richmond at RavenCon. All the panels I attended seemed to go well, the ones I was on also ran smoothly, and even the two I moderated. It helped that I had great panelists who had good things to say … it made it harder for me to mess things up.

The best part, of course, was seeing old friends and meeting new ones. I got to hang out with Edmund Schubert, James Maxey, Chuck Gannon, Bud Sparhawk, David B. Coe, Mike Kabongo, Hildy Silverman, Amy Sturgis, Misty Massey, Gail Z. Martin, Stuart Jaffe, Yoji Kondo, Larry Hodges, and lots of other people whose names I can’t remember this early in the morning.

At any rate, a splendid time was had by Gray. Kudos to Mike Pederson and all the organizers and volunteers for putting on a great con!

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Agent Hunt

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No, I don’t mean to refer to Ethan Hunt from MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE.

Tonight I started my hunt for an agent to represent my novel — a story of survival and sacrifice in the early days of the first lunar colony, tentatively titled* WALKING ON THE SEA OF CLOUDS.

Specifically, I sent out queries to five agents who have sterling reputations and accept electronic inquiries.

I’ll send more queries out, in batches, in the next few weeks, and I’ll post updates as I have them. Meanwhile, I need to finish getting ready to go to RavenCon.

___
*Tentatively because, if a publisher decides to take the book, they will decide the title based on what they think is most marketable. That, however, is far in the future.

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My RavenCon Schedule

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Two weeks from today I’ll trek up to Richmond, VA, for RavenCon. The con chairman, Michael Pederson, asked me to come as a guest after we were on a panel together at ConCarolinas last year. How could I turn down his gracious invitation?

Of course, he is making me work while I’m there. Here’s my panel schedule, as I know it now:

  • Artificial Intelligence (moderator), Friday, 3:00 p.m., Cardinal Room
  • Blogging for Writers, Saturday, 1:00 p.m., Cardinal Room
  • Military SF/SF in Military (moderator), Saturday, 6:00 p.m., Dogwood Room
  • Alternative Fuels, Sunday, 1:00 p.m., Rappahanock Room

In addition, I’ll do a reading of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Imp of the Perverse” on Saturday at 8:00 p.m. in the Rappahanock Room.

I look forward to it — it should be a good time.

(Meanwhile, if anyone has any suggested questions for me to ask as moderator on those two panels, send them my way.)

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Catching Up From a Busy Weekend, and a Near-Disaster Revealed

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I missed two space anniversaries this weekend, because I spent most of the time finishing a short story and most of the rest of the time either at church or preparing for the worship services. (Excuses, excuses.)

First, the space anniversaries I missed:

– Ten years ago Saturday — March 28, 1999 — Sea Launch launched their “DemoSat,” essentially a ballast-filled “dummy” spacecraft, from the Odyssey launch platform, a converted North Sea oil drilling platform. I had the pleasure of sailing on the Odyssey three years later for the launch of the Galaxy III-C spacecraft.

– Thirty-five years ago yesterday — March 29, 1974 — Mariner 10 made the first flyby of Mercury.

As for the near-disaster, Spaceflight Now ran a CBS News story Friday in which Robert “Hoot” Gibson recalled details of the damage sustained by the shuttle Atlantis on mission STS-27, which launched on December 2, 1988. The shuttle received more damage than on any other mission, and the crew worried that they might not survive re-entry. It’s a frightening story of miscommunication: the classified military mission was conducted under a communications blackout, so when the crew sent video of the damaged areas the encryption degraded the images so much that NASA engineers didn’t believe there was a real problem.

I checked into the mission a little more, and when I saw the mission patch this story became even more compelling to me. I didn’t realize it when I posted the space anniversary of the launch, but when Atlantis landed at Edwards AFB I was on duty as part of the AF Flight Test Center recovery team. We, of course, knew nothing about the damaged tiles or how close that shuttle came to not making it back at all.

(STS-27 mission patch. Click to enlarge.)

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Living Up to My Own Essay

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A couple of years ago I wrote an essay entitled, “Ignore the Tour Guides, If You Can,” in which I decried the tendency among some worship leaders, praise bands, etc., to distract the congregation’s attention from God instead of helping them focus their attention on God.

Then, in a supreme bit of irony, in January of this year I took over as the worship leader in our church (North Cary Baptist Church, if you’re interested). Which means now I have to remind myself of my own words:

How does a praise band, formed to lead the congregation in worship, become the center of attention? How do singers become vocalists vying for the congregation’s attention instead of leaders helping the congregation to sing the songs? It is, I believe, a natural human tendency to want to be recognized and appreciated for whatever form of expertise we have. And we may convince ourselves, if we believe our talents to be gifts of God, that the applause after a song is somehow directed at God rather than at us. But the human ego still appreciates it, and so the temptation to grandstand is very strong . . . .

For the worship leader, and especially the very talented worship leader, there is a distinction between relaxing into their own worship experience . . . and remaining conscious of the duty they accepted to lead the worshippers in the group setting. Too far in one direction and the other suffers, but the proper choice would seem to be always in favor of the congregation rather than the worship leader or worship team.

The only thing in my favor at this point is that my under-developed musical talent — I rarely even pick up a guitar any more, and my callouses are almost gone — means that I feel singularly unqualified to be in this position. As a result, I try to make myself invisible even in front of the congregation.

And maybe that’s as it should be.

___

P.S. That essay is still available, if you know of a venue that might be interested. (Although I’m thinking about just posting it on my web site and being done with it.)

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Why does the Chinese military need a space station?

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Back in the early days of space launch, the U.S. conceived the idea of the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, or MOL (pronounced “mole”), and built Space Launch Complex 6 at Vandenberg AFB from which it would be launched. But when unmanned satellites proved both capable and robust, DoD dropped the idea of a manned military outpost as both unnecessary and cost-prohibitive. The MOL program was cancelled, and SLC-6 mothballed until the next program came along.

I have to wonder, then, why the Chinese have apparently decided that they want to orbit a military space station as early as next year.

As I wrote yesterday in the Space Warfare Forum,

That’s right, folks: a Chinese MILITARY space station. Not a Chinese module on the International Space Station, not a Chinese civilian, scientific space station, but a Chinese MILITARY space station.

Here’s the story, complete with images of the model unveiled during Chinese New Year celebrations.

And here’s what we have in the works: .

Looks as if we’re giving up the high ground.

I haven’t seen much other discussion about this, and that bothers me. I can only hope that my old Air Force compadres are on the case, but keeping mum about it.

Meanwhile, maybe I’ll dust off the nonfiction space superiority book I wrote a few years ago and see if I can update it and interest someone in publishing it.

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Recent Space History: Cometary Explorer Launched

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Five years ago today — March 2, 2004 — the European Space Agency launched their Rosetta space probe on an Ariane 5 rocket from Kourou, French Guiana. Rosetta is headed toward comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which it should reach in 2014. Its study of the comet will include releasing the “Philae” lander.

(And, because I missed posting yesterday because of a raucous headache: 85 years ago yesterday, NASA astronaut “Deke” Slayton was born. I wrote an alternate history story which referenced an Apollo mission that never happened, but because of which Deke Slayton was a hero and inspiration to the main character. No one’s read that little story, because no one’s published it yet. But that’s how it goes.)

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Space History, Novel Update

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Forty-five years ago today, on January 29, 1964, unmanned Apollo test mission SA-5 launched from the Eastern Space & Missile Center. The mission was the first test flight of the new Block II vehicles, with the S-IV second stage. As noted on this page, the mission was postponed from a January 27th launch attempt, but was otherwise successful.

[Break, Break]

In only tangentially-related news, today I sent my manuscript to be reproduced so I can send copies to a few folks who have volunteered to read it and give me feedback. How much they find that needs fixing will determine how long it’ll be before I can start pitching it to publishers.

We shall see.

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