One more day…
One more day til NaNoWriMo starts. It’s very strange for me to *wait* to write, rather than pushing myself to write.
Work has no power right now, so I’m cleaning, and thinking about what to write when I start.
Stay warm, everyone!
Ah, New England…
You never really know what the weather’s going to be, though we did have a few days’ warning of the snow storm yesterday. It’s odd to look in the back yard and see leaf-covered snow, instead of snow-covered leaves. 
We got off pretty easy here – still have power, only a few branches down, no noticeable damage. (Many) Others were not so lucky – I’m hoping that the utilities get the power back on soon for the 3 million+ households in the Northeast who are currently doing without.
Stay safe and warm, New England friends! And here’s hoping everyone has a good day.
Happy Birthday!
Happy Birthday to Brian!
In honor of my wonderful, dearest love, here are a couple of fun links.
New Pictures by Tolkien Published
I wonder if any of the local bookstores have this in stock – after all, Brian hasn’t picked any birthday presents yet!
And, because he loves bicycles and biking:
I love you Brian!
Scintilla – Subspace
scintilla [sin-til-uh] (noun) 1. A spark; a flash; a trace amount. 2. A small piece of writing intended to inspire wonder, curiosity, or amusement.
Worldbuilding notes:
Travel by subspace is both incredibly safe and incredibly dangerous at the same time.
Incredibly safe because the bubble generator creates a bubble of realspace around each transport before it dives, and no known weapon or tool or even signal can penetrate that bubble. More importantly, every system involved is designed with times-ten redundancy, and transports automatically transfer back into realspace at the first sign of trouble.
No one is foolish enough to bypass the safety systems and continue travel on their backups. Stopping to fix even the most minor problem is standard, and all it takes to silence objections is the images of what happens to the human body when a bubble fails in subspace.
Subspace travel is so fast because you’re popping out of our universe into another one, one where Alpha Centauri is a five-minute jaunt from Earth. One with different physical constants and laws.
It’s that last bit that’s the problem. Not even the hardiest microorganism can survive the transition to a world where the forces that hold their very atoms together are different. Just imagine what it does to a delicately balanced system like the human body.
Even the slightest flicker in the bubble field, and everyone on board dies horribly.
No one knows what happens to their souls. No one wants to know.
Scintilla – Eyes
scintilla [sin-til-uh] (noun) 1. A spark; a flash; a trace amount. 2. A small piece of writing intended to inspire wonder, curiosity, or amusement.
They were always watching her. She didn’t know who “they” were, since they borrowed other creatures’ eyes with impunity. If she spoke to someone staring at her, asked what they were looking at, either politely or with the real hostility that she felt, they acted like she was crazy.
Like she was the frightening one.
No one ever knew that their eyes had been borrowed.
© 2010 Catherine Wechsler, used with permission.
