Night Music (Part six)

With this, the sixth and last installment of Night Music, we reach the end of our journey. Not all questions are answered (are they ever?). Still, all the main character arcs are resolved, and I take my cue from some of my favorite SF books and films (2001, Rendez-Vous With Rama, Ringworld [the first one], etc.). In those works, I rather liked that questions were left hanging; the universe is not a place which lends itself to tidy resolutions to all of the queries we put to it.

Will I ever go back and revisit this tale, and flesh out some of the threads which dangle at the end of this one? Maybe. Time is not as forgiving as it was when I wrote those words (hell, it was borrowed time as it was!). I'd like to, and have rather extensive notes on a potential sequel. Still, all the best SF (and fiction in general) is less about the situation and the setting than it is about the characters, and I do think that Seth and Nadia have achieved a resolution to the journeys they were set up to take. I would love to get into Nick's Masai heritage, his love of speed, the tension between his promising athletic career and his love of space (a second part would probably start with Nick running round the rim of the backward crater lake, with the languid, low-gee waves of the Northern Sea rolling up to its shore, reflecting on his history and bringing us up to date...). I would love to get into Ellison's alcoholic family and the origins of his self-designated role as peace-maker and facilitator. I'd really like to get into Luczac a lot more (one of my favorite characters...could you tell?), and his rebellious early life of unwelcome privilege. And that's not even getting into the Zubrin Base inhabitants (I feel like I could do a lot with Yuri).

And what's up with the Waves and their Senders?

Yah, a lot there. But at some point you have to pare it down to the essentials, which in this case was these people and the things they have to learn in order to create the conditions for them to become the fully-integrated humans they were blocked by history and choice from developing into. I think the tale stands on its own...for now.

For those who have taken the trip with me, thanks! And for those who may have been waiting till all installments were up before diving in, please have at it now. Let me know what you think.

UPDATE: Since posting these, I have taken the step of self-publishing Night Music for the Kindle platform. Since it is now for sale ($3.00 US), it seemed a mite counterproductive to keep it up here for free (hence the now-broken links). But hey, if you read the rest of this blog, you'll see that the idea of being a Capitalist is not exactly alien to me! Hope you'll have a look at the sample, and, if you like what you see, download the Whole Thing. Here's a link to a suite of free Kindle reading apps for those who don't have a Kindle reader, but do have a smart phone, tablet, PC/MAC, or Blackberry.

Night Music (Part Five)

Home stretch time for our tale of intrepid explorers on a radically transformed Mars. This is the part that took me the longest to write; things start to get a little weird.

So without further ado, here is Part Five (of six) of my noveloid, "Night Music."

Here's the folder with this and all previous parts.

UPDATE: Since posting these, I have taken the step of self-publishing Night Music for the Kindle platform. Since it is now for sale ($3.00 US), it seemed a mite counterproductive to keep it up here for free (hence the now-broken links). But hey, if you read the rest of this blog, you'll see that the idea of being a Capitalist is not exactly alien to me! Hope you'll have a look at the sample, and, if you like what you see, download the Whole Thing. Here's a link to a suite of free Kindle reading apps for those who don't have a Kindle reader, but do have a smart phone, tablet, PC/MAC, or Blackberry.

Night Music (Part Four)

Big Things are afoot on the terrestrial political front today. What better reason to take a jaunt into outer space!

This week's installment of Night Music brings perils and revelations and other intriguing developments. We're two-thirds of the way through....

Here again is the folder in which this and previous installments reside.

UPDATE: Since posting these, I have taken the step of self-publishing Night Music for the Kindle platform. Since it is now for sale ($3.00 US), it seemed a mite counterproductive to keep it up here for free (hence the now-broken links). But hey, if you read the rest of this blog, you'll see that the idea of being a Capitalist is not exactly alien to me! Hope you'll have a look at the sample, and, if you like what you see, download the Whole Thing. Here's a link to a suite of free Kindle reading apps for those who don't have a Kindle reader, but do have a smart phone, tablet, PC/MAC, or Blackberry.

Night Music (Part Three)

Another Wednesday, another installment of Night Music. Last time, the crew of the good ship Conestoga had fallen into orbit of Mars, only to find that it jealously guarded its mysteries, including the fate of the Zubrin outpost. Meanwhile, tensions begin to appear in the curious equilibrium formed by the crew itself.

Again, here is a link to the folder containing this and previous installments.

UPDATE: Since posting these, I have taken the step of self-publishing Night Music for the Kindle platform. Since it is now for sale ($3.00 US), it seemed a mite counterproductive to keep it up here for free (hence the now-broken links). But hey, if you read the rest of this blog, you'll see that the idea of being a Capitalist is not exactly alien to me! Hope you'll have a look at the sample, and, if you like what you see, download the Whole Thing. Here's a link to a suite of free Kindle reading apps for those who don't have a Kindle reader, but do have a smart phone, tablet, PC/MAC, or Blackberry.

NIGHT MUSIC (Part Two)

As promised, here's the second installment of Night Music).It's been kind of a trip re-reading these words I wrote so long ago. I've resisted the urge to dive back in and start editing and tweaking, knowing that at some point you just have to let the work stand or fall on its own merits (or the lack thereof!).

Here's a link to the folder which I'll be populating with the installments as I put them out.

Enjoy!

UPDATE: Since posting these, I have taken the step of self-publishing Night Music for the Kindle platform. Since it is now for sale ($3.00 US), it seemed a mite counterproductive to keep it up here for free (hence the now-broken links). But hey, if you read the rest of this blog, you'll see that the idea of being a Capitalist is not exactly alien to me! Hope you'll have a look at the sample, and, if you like what you see, download the Whole Thing. Here's a link to a suite of free Kindle reading apps for those who don't have a Kindle reader, but do have a smart phone, tablet, PC/MAC, or Blackberry.

NIGHT MUSIC (Part One)

In the Spring of 1998, I was watching an interview with noted SF author, Harlan Ellison about the process of  writing. He has this little gimmick where he sits in the window of a book store and customers drop off story ideas. He then busily types away, producing a story based on that idea within a few hours. The idea is that a writer writes, and there is no excuse for him or her to do otherwise.  I was shamed, and sat down with an image in my head (a guy maneuvering a small spacecraft in low earth orbit, while listening to Mozart), and started typing what I was determined would be a short story which would be completed within a week.

Two years later, I put the last period at the end of a 90-something page noveloid which, as it turns out, was precisely too long to publish as a short, and too short to publish as a novel. In the process of researching it, I'd read Bob Zubrin's excellent The Case For Mars, as well as a host of other books and articles, learned a lot of cool stuff, and got mixed up in the private spaceflight advocacy community. So, not wasted effort...but I was a bit bummed that only a couple of people got to read the story.

So, I've decided to post it on line and link to it here, broken up into six parts (which I'll make available approximately every week). Because I can.  Of course, in the highly unlikely event that I get a chance to publish it "for real," I'll be yanking it from here in a hot minute.

Also, I'm a rank neophyte when it comes to hosting files on the Web, and categorically refuse to pay a cent to do it. So, I'm trying a free file hosting service from Microsoft. This may change if anyone's got a better idea (...). It's in PDF format, so you'll need Adobe Reader to read it (is there anyone who doesn't have that on their machine?).

Anyway, here it is. Hope you enjoy.

Night Music, Part One

UPDATE: Not unexpectedly, the Microsoft "Skydrive" annoyed me one too many times (i.e., once) by deleting my files. I have moved the file to a free box.net account. The link takes you to a shared folder which I will populate with the parts of the story as I make them available.

UPDATE 2: Since posting these, I have taken the step of self-publishing Night Music for the Kindle platform. Since it is now for sale ($3.00 US), it seemed a mite counterproductive to keep it up here for free (hence the now-broken links). But hey, if you read the rest of this blog, you'll see that the idea of being a Capitalist is not exactly alien to me! Hope you'll have a look at the sample, and, if you like what you see, download the Whole Thing. Here's a link to a suite of free Kindle reading apps for those who don't have a Kindle reader, but do have a smart phone, tablet, PC/MAC, or Blackberry.