Bring out your WIP!

It's NaNoWriMo time again. I am rewriting a novel whose first draft I started in April's NaNoWriMo and finished sometime around Midsummer. While there were definitely elements in there I really liked, the plot ended up being kind of a mess, the characters being illogical, and the settings unsatisfying. So pretty much everything goes into the rewrite bin and NaNoWriMo is perfect to help with getting that done!

All this being said, here is the first page or so of my second seriously written novel, The Avatar Legacy.

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The sight of the corpse told Miki Kim that it was time to leave home. Again.

Victoria Bleedwell wasn’t the first corpse Miki had seen, nor was she even the first corpse of a friend and crewmate. Victoria’s wasn’t even the worst she’d seen. But as she stepped fully into the chill of the medical bay currently housing Victoria’s body Miki promised herself that Victoria’s would be the last corpse she would ever see.

Victoria’s nanocolony swarmed over her body, visibly making the remainders of her clothes shift. They were looking for something to fix, just as their programming directed them to. There was nothing wrong with Victoria anymore. Beyond her being dead.

Miki cupped Victoria’s cheek.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

She half expected Victoria to grin and wink at her like she had so many times. When nothing happened, Miki took her hand away and squeezed it into a fist. No room for sentimentality. Not in this life, or this home.

She walked around the table, keeping her eyes off the body. She pushed a wall cabinet open and grabbed a habitat container. She turned to another cabinet and added some feed into the habitat before turning back to the body to coax the colony inside the habitat. They would need to be fed by something and Victoria was no longer producing new skin cells to create dead ones. Miki had once seen what a colony could do to a body when left to sit too long and she wasn’t eager to try that again.

The colony moved into the habitat in waves and soon Miki had to brace the container against the operation table to make sure she didn’t drop it. The colonies always weighed more than she expected them to.

Once no more visible waves were forthcoming, Miki took the container away and sealed it. It would automatically maintain a suitable environment to keep the colony relatively active while also lowering their mobility to the point that they wouldn’t burn out before they were applied to someone else.

Birthday Outing to see the Space Shuttle Endeavour

A little over ten years ago I started to realize that I'd lived in this fascinating city of Los Angeles for my whole life and there were still things I hadn't seen or done. Between this and getting sort of bored with just going out to dinner for my birthday, I started a new thing amongst my friends. Now, on my birthday, we go see or do something that's specific to Los Angeles. It started with a trip to the La Brea Tar Pits. Since then, we've been to the Watts Towers, found a little Tibetan/Nepalese restaurant, ridden horses in Griffith Park and gone to the LA Arboretum, amongst other things. This year, we went to see the Space Shuttle Endeavour at the California Science Center. For a science fiction geek like me, this was awesome!

First off, the Science Center is a fun place. The exhibits have all sorts of interactive things for kids to do in all different areas of science. Us big people enjoyed them to, when we could get to them. There's also an IMAX theater where we watched a film about repairing the Hubble Telescope. It was very cool, though I wish they'd have shown a few more deep space shots. The 3D even worked for me, which it usually doesn't. There wasn't enough time in the day to see everything. We did find time to ride the shuttle flight simulator. It was tame (kids, remember) but well done with a good sense of motion.

The shuttle itself is in a temporary hangar. If you're in the LA area I recommend going to see it now because in about four years they're going to upright it, add the boosters and have a three tier observation area. While that sounds great, the opportunity to get as close as you can now is not one to pass up. You can see just how big the shuttle is, or isn't, in its current state. And it sits, just out of reach over your head.

One of the funniest things that struck me was the "Cut Here for Rescue' sign with the big arrow. It was only the big arrow that made it funny. Needing rescue in space is serious business. It made me think about what it would mean for everything to have gone so wrong that the crew would be hoping for someone to come along and cut a hole in their ship to get them out. How long would it take to get a rescue ship up to them? What would be their hope for survival? Astronauts are a brave bunch, that's for sure.

The volunteers in the shuttle hangar are full of useful information. My bf and I got to talking to a retired engineer that worked on the shuttle and he had all sorts of quirky stories. One in particular about a mysterious scorch mark on the top of the shuttle wing and a mystery black blob that was discovered only after partial disassembly. After lab analysis, they discovered that someone had accidentally left a roll of tape inside the wing. Fortunately, no harm was done.

Seeing the shuttle, and the IMAX movie and contemplating the vastness and mysteries of space give insane perspective on how small we really are. It makes me glad I write science fiction because I'm reminded that the possibilities are infinite and so is the human imagination.