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Mars Will Send No More

~ Comic books, art, poetry, and other obsessions

Mars Will Send No More

Category Archives: MeteorMags

short story draft: Gods of Titan

03 Monday Oct 2022

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in MeteorMags

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

meteor mags, octopus, Patches, science fiction, self publishing, Titan, writing

Chronologically, this episode comes before the one I posted earlier this week. It just took a bit longer to get everything sorted.

art generated by Midjourney

Meteor Mags: Gods of Titan
© 2022 by Matthew Howard. All Rights Reserved.
Episode 37 of The Adventures of Meteor Mags and Patches.

Mags, Patches, and Alonso travel to Titan to check on her errant octopus babies, only to discover their eight-armed friends have other plans.

4,500 words.

Now all you merry blacksmiths,
a warning take by me:

Stick to your country horseshoes
and your anchors for the sea.

When the gods of war come calling,
promising you gold,

they’ll take your hammer,
take your anvil,
take your very soul.

—The Longest Johns; Hammer and the Anvil; 2022.

🏴‍☠️

March 2032. From the letters of Meteor Mags.

Lonso and I had a blast partying on Isla Salida with the friends we left behind.[1] Patches did, too, but she seems to have fun no matter where we go. She couldn’t give a single fuck, so long as no one lets her dishes go empty.

I’m convinced she doesn’t need to eat anymore—or drink, or breathe. I think she just does those things because cats prefer routines, and maybe she finds comfort in familiar things that make her feel normal instead of like some kind of freak. I know what it’s like to be thought a freak. But maybe she just likes screaming at her bowls to remind everyone we exist to serve her.

It took so long to get to Titan that Lonso and I weren’t even hungover anymore. In fact, we’d had a few too many hairs of the dogs that bit us, and we were a drunken mess by the time the Saturnian moon came into view. We’d been listening to my massive collection of chanteys—what some people call “sea shanties” without realizing that every bloody chantey is a sea shanty by definition. Most of the damn things are older than me, and that’s saying something.

Lonso especially liked a tune that warned blacksmiths about working for the war machine. We listened to a bad-ass rendition in a minor key about five or six times in a row, and I knew why he liked it. Lonso was just a kid from the hood when I met him, and after the fascists slaughtered his bandmates, he got a fake identity and went to work for the interplanetary Port Authority.

Whenever he talks to me about those days, he makes a show of how he got all this awesome pilot training and combat skills, and so many high-tech toys to play with. He’s quick with a story about his drunken brawls, black-market entrepreneurship, and breaking all the rules.

But like most guys, he’s not so quick to talk about the emotional pain behind the funny stories. He doesn’t talk about how it was eating him from the inside out to be working for the man after so many years of rebelling and playing kick-ass rock. He doesn’t mention how serving the war machine and the incompetent bureaucracy that killed his friends took something away from him every day of his life.

Not that I want to paint a picture of Lonso as some sort of broken soul or wounded warrior. Fuck that noise. He’s right as rain these days. In ’29, I accidentally rescued him from all that Port Authority bullshit, and the time he spent rocking out with my telepathic octos did him some good.[2] Hell, that kid’s way more level-headed than me and far less cynical. Lonso’s happy to be alive, doesn’t sweat the small shit, and seems to make friends everywhere he goes—even in places where I’d make enemies.

But he did cry a little at that blacksmith song. I gave him a hug and another can of ale.

I’m an only child. I never had sisters or brothers. But even though Lonso still calls me tía after all these years, he’s the closest thing I ever had to a brother. I’d move heaven and Earth for that kid, even if he’s nearly fifty now. Even if he found my microphone and is drunkenly screaming along with the Dead Weather album Horehound.

Curse me for a papist. Patches is howling along with him now. She doesn’t even know the words.

What an ungodly racket.

I guess I better join them.

🏴‍☠️

Our space-bound karaoke trio had exhausted most of Jack White’s side projects and all but the last bottle of rum when we landed on Titan. The last time I’d been there with Patches and Plutes, a faction of twenty octopuses had teamed up with an object of unimaginable power we called the triglyph, and they’d merged their mental skills with its god-like abilities to terraform Titan, destroy Enceladus to get its water, and build a monumental radio from a star core and materials they found in space.[3]

Don’t get me wrong. The crazy shit they started broadcasting is awesome, and I still tune it to years later thanks to Plutes playing a couple of hours of it every day on his radio station. It’s the sound of the cosmos. But we had a bit of a misunderstanding last time, when the octos tried to dissemble me and Plutes and Patches to join a group mind and leave our bodies to die.

I don’t love any radio station enough to die for it, unless it’s the PBN. Fortunately, Patches showed those unruly octopuses who was boss, killed a few of them to make her point, and saved the day. We figured they’d be up to typical octopus things when we visited again.

We were so very wrong.

Listen, I’ve heard all the criticisms about how I should have known about this shit earlier. Get off my bloody case. I had a lot going on the past few years, and this shit on Titan wasn’t even on my radar. Why would it have been? When you have telepaths doing whatever they want, they can easily hide it from you.

We set down on the shore of nowhere, on a lake no one had ever named—not even its creators.

🏴‍☠️

The whole reason we went to Titan was that the octopuses living there had been members of the batch of genetically altered babies I helped get born and liberated back in ’29, and all the other members were approaching the ends of the lives. Lonso and I got the rest of my babies sorted on Earth, but we’d been out of touch with Titan for a couple of years. In ’32, I didn’t want them dying on me, either.

Lonso, who insisted on driving long past the point where he should have been in control of a space vessel or even a bloody tricycle, set us down on a flat spot near the beach. We came to an abrupt halt as the Hyades rocked back and forth from her off-kilter landing and settled onto the rock. I accused Lonso of trying to kill us. He pretended that was his plan.

He’s lucky I love him.

We were hardly out of the ship before the octos contacted us. It’s hard to explain what it sounds like when telepathic space octos get inside your brain. It’s like a language made of math and music, sensation and emotion. You feel yourself dissolving into that weird group mind they have. But somewhere in the center is something you still consider yourself.

I’m pretty sure it would melt your circuits and give the octos total control over your thoughts and feelings, but me and Lonso and Patches had been dealing with that shit for years. We knew who we were and what to expect.

What we did not expect was the society my errant babies had created.

🏴‍☠️

<Welcome, friends.> The octos spoke directly into our minds.

Thanks to the telepathic group chat, I knew Patches was offended they didn’t call us “mothers”. She had helped them get born just as much as I did. But she let it slide.

<We have been waiting.>

“For what?” I surveyed the sandy beach and the species of crabs, anemones, and the empty shells of lesser mollusks populating it. Strands of kelp lie strewn above the waterline. I picked up a sand dollar and held it in my hand. It was still alive. Tiny hairs around the opening in its shell struggled to bring food to its mouth. I whipped it back into the saltwater. It skipped along the incoming waves and disappeared.

Patches and Lonso were checking out stuff in their own ways. Lonso said, “Are we even on Titan? Because this beach is like the ones in SoCal.”

“They changed it.” Patches ran to my side and bared her little fangs. “They changed the entire moon. They used the triglyph to teleport some décor from the oceans of Earth so they could have a home. This is the result.”

“Trippy,” said Lonso. “Is that lake, like, real water or some kind of methane bullshit?”

“It’s water they got by destroying Enceladus. They salinated it using the triglyph to create a miniature sun on the far side of Titan—an energy source they used to fuse elements they needed to transform the atmosphere, raise the temperature, and do damn near anything else they wanted.”[4]

“Sweet,” said Lonso. He stripped off his clothes. “I’m going for a swim!”

“Lonso,” I said. “We don’t—”

But he was already in the water.

Patches jumped in after him.

From the beach, I watched them frolic and splash in water that shouldn’t even exist in liquid form that far out in the solar system. I must be getting old, because there was a day when I would have been the first one in. I stripped off my combat boots and arranged the rest of my stuff in a pile on the sand before plunging in.

🏴‍☠️

From every direction, octopuses swarmed me. Their suckers gripped my skin, and their arms embraced me. The added weight pulled me down, but upon sensing my distress, they brought me to the surface for air. Lonso and Patches bobbed above the waves beside me.

I sputtered and flung wet strands of hair away from my face. “You bloody bilge rats! I can’t breathe underwater!”

<Apologies. Everyone here lives in water.>

“How do you forget something like that? After all we’ve been through?!”

<Apologies. But we have never met before, though our grandmothers are legends among all the tribes of Titan.>

“Grandmothers? What the—” Then it hit me. Those little squidlings weren’t my babies at all, but their sons and daughters. If that were true, it could only mean one thing.

The octos followed my train of thought as fast I could think it.

<Their final thoughts were of you. As the light of life dimmed inside our parents, and we were tiny things taking shape inside our eggs, they communicated their knowledge and history to us.>

Patches had made herself at home, curled up and purring on the squishy, bulbous head of an octo who appeared perfectly content to be her throne. She let out a polysyllabic mew.

<Yes, even your languages.>

“What about math?”

<Would you like to hear our proof of the Riemann hypothesis?>

Hell. Even I hadn’t cracked that one, and I’d made a hobby of proving or disproving unsolved math problems. The Riemann hypothesis proposes that the non-trivial zeroes of the zeta function—oh, bloody hell. I’ll explain later.

I said, “Of course I do. But something like that could take hours. Maybe we should—”

<No. It’s simplicity itself.>

They sang me the solution. Objectively, it took no time at all. Subjectively, it was fucking epic. Imagine you took every Beethoven symphony and compressed them all into a single second, and you’ll have an approximate idea of what I experienced.

Poor Patches and Lonso. They got hit with it, too, and neither of them has my understanding of higher-level math. We’re lucky they didn’t get their brains burned to a cinder.

The solution itself was gorgeous. Intricate, complex, and rigorous, it involved a kind of math no one on Earth had ever seen before, even the nerds working on Monster set theory and higher-dimensional topology.

But the way the octos laid it out, from the basic premises to their surprising ramifications, it all made perfect sense. Compared to Beethoven it was, to my mind, even more rapturous—a beautiful re-imagining of how the universe works, a million melodies intertwined, a fundamental re-thinking of math itself that at first felt like gazing into the sun until you go blind. Then everything came into focus again, with crystal clarity and the last echoes of a symphony lingering in my ears.

“Curse me for a papist,” I said. “When did you come up with that?”

<Ten minutes before you landed. We sensed your approach and felt we should have an appropriate gift for our grandmothers.>

“Right, then.” They did all that in ten minutes? The Riemann hypothesis had stumped everyone for two hundred years! “I don’t even know what to say. That was—that was perfect. Perfect in every way. You should be proud of yourselves.”

Lonso looked like he had been hit by an eighteen-wheeler. I think if my babies—sorry, my grandbabies—hadn’t been holding him afloat, he would have sunk to the bottom. “Tía,” he said, “what the fuck was that? I saw fractals and crazy shapes and colors, and all this music and—”

“I’ll explain later,” I said, “but that’s what it’s like when they’ve solved a math problem.”

“I saw the music. I tasted it. That was math?”

“That was brilliance.”

“Whatever the hell it was, it was fuckin’ rad. Made LSD look like a cup of coffee.”

Patches meowed her agreement. Not that she’s ever taken LSD. Not that I know of.

But something my grandbabies said raised a question. “You said ‘the tribes of Titan’. Who are these tribes?”

<Would you like to meet them? We wanted to introduce you, but we forgot you would drown.>

“They’re underwater.”

<Yes.>

Lonso said, “Hey, I got an idea. We got some spacesuits on the Hyades. There’s no reason we couldn’t use them for an underwater dive. I mean, except for Patches. We don’t have a cat-sized suit.”

“Something tells me she’ll be fine. Baby kitty?”

She squinted at me a couple of times to show she was totally fine with the idea.

That’s how the three of us became the first mammals to explore Titan’s lakes.

🏴‍☠️

Titan had lakes long before the octos arrived. The lakes were made of liquid methane and, in some cases, ethane. Titan had, for millennia, possessed clouds that produced rain and snow, too—a complete “water” cycle like Earth’s, but with elements made from hydrogen and carbon instead of hydrogen and oxygen.

The largest of Titan’s ancient methane lakes dwarfed Earth’s largest inland, freshwater seas—at least as far as surface area goes. On the other hand, many of them were incredibly shallow, only a few meters deep. The deepest was about 170 kilometers to the bottom. All those lakes had familiar forms around them: tributaries, gullies, deltas, fjords. Some contained islands.

But the giant lake basins were not carved by glaciers. Instead, they formed from underground gas explosions, sort of like volcanic crater lakes you might have seen before.

No one could dispute the natural beauty of those lakes, but they were unfit for life from Earth’s oceans. When the octos and the triglyph had their terraforming adventure, they filled in dry lake beds and depressions in the surface with good old dihydrogen monoxide—H2O. They also made their fusion factory work overtime to convert the atmosphere, because what’s the use of having some nice saltwater to swim in if methane is just going to rain down and poison it?

I explained all this to Lonso as we suited up and prepared for our dive. Some of it I knew from my own research, and the rest I gleaned from my babies’ group mind on my previous visit.

Soon, we were soon ready to go exploring with my little grand-mutants. The only delay was coming up with a harness and tether to connect Patches to my suit. I mean, she can swim just fine, but we decided it would be easier if she wasn’t constantly struggling to stay submerged and could just swim at my side—or, you know, be a total lazy butt while I handled the swimming.

Finally, I needed suitable weapons to strap to the suit. I had no idea what we might encounter, but I wasn’t going into the unknown unarmed. The problem was that the fingers of my suit were too bulky to handle the trigger on a standard pistol or rifle. I settled on knives, grenades, and a sawed-off semi-auto I’d modified for use with a spacesuit.

I got a machete and grenades for Lonso, and we were ready for a night on the Titanic town. We locked up the Hyades and waded into the lake where the octos waited.

🏴‍☠️

On the way down, we discovered there were way more than the original twenty octos I’d left behind. Octopuses lay anywhere from hundreds to thousands of eggs. On Earth, most of those babies are eaten by natural predators. On Titan, they had none.

Sounds nice, doesn’t it? But if nobody is culling your species, then food becomes a major problem. After all, octos need to eat, and if no one is eating you, then you either need to get smart right quick about raising food or die from starvation.

They chose the former.

As the octos guided us down through the Titanic waters, they introduced us to gardens of meat. They had become farmers of the lifeforms they needed to survive: crabs, polychaete worms, clams, and other basically brainless animals they loved to snack on.

All up and down the craggy slopes below the surface of Titan’s new seas, thousands of octopuses tended their gardens. The aquaculture extended far beyond my field of vision, beginning in the light from our headlamps and stretching into blackness that might as well have been eternal. Hunger knows no bounds.

Lonso and Patches wanted to make sushi. Not that I blame them. But I had a bit of a problem with the idea of mind-controlling every species in sight just to make them into food. I mean, it was a crazy efficient idea, but was it right?

We dove deeper.

🏴‍☠️

I checked my oxygen to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating. I called out, “Patches? Lonso?”

Lonso responded in my helmet.

Patches drifted by my side. I sensed all the seafood was making her hungry. Iridescent scales of a thousand colors dashed around us in a living rainbow constantly shifting and reorganizing into something never seen before. I reached out a hand and almost touched the beauty before it sped away.

My grandbabies explained that we had entered the zone of fish they did not eat. They had tried to teach telepathy to those fish, with mixed results. Most fish, despite their ability to feel emotion and pain, are not intelligent enough to maintain telepathy on their own.

But the octos, in the years I’d been away from them, had discovered the fish could achieve a rudimentary group mind with the proper support.

Debate about that development had gone on for some time. It would have taken you and me several years. But when you are dealing with telepathic octos, it only takes a few minutes. The speed of thought is an amazing thing.

The short version is: They left the fishes alone to cohabitate in all their colorful glory and decided against extending their telepathic gifts to the species they needed to eat. None of the octos had the stomach to grant self-awareness to their food.

Lonso, Patches, and I descended past the coastal farms and the deeper realms of those independent tribes the octopuses allowed to survive. All those organisms were known to us. Then my grand-squiddos revealed their biggest surprise.

🏴‍☠️

They presented me with a single glass bottle. Where the hell did they get glass on that godforsaken rock? It must have been something they crafted in those brief days when they had the triglyph at their beck and call to make anything and everything they imagined.

Even more mysterious was the horde of tiny microbes inside the vessel. I have better eyesight than most, but I couldn’t see them without the octos zooming in my vision and telling me just what the hell I was looking at.

Inside their little vial swam hundreds of thousands of single-celled organisms. Every one of them thrived in a methane-rich environment that would have instantly killed any organism on Earth.

Those little bastards. My octos had discovered an entirely new lifeform, and they hadn’t even bothered to call me.

“Lonso,” I said, “check this out.”

He said, “Is that methane?”

“Yeah.”

“Nothing can survive in that.”

“No,” I said, “it can’t.”

He drew closer. Patches seemed unconcerned. I guess when you can survive in any environment, evolving to survive on Titan probably isn’t a big deal.

But it was a big deal to me. “Babies,” I said, “where did you find this?”

I’ll spare you everything they told me. Cephalopods are notoriously long-winded. The short version is: Their parents discovered native life on Titan in the form of unicellular animals. Before the triglyph buggered off to parts unknown, they preserved a handful of specimens.

A tentacle full? Whatever.

Even after the triglyph disappeared, my babies reached out with their minds and contacted a million billion organisms living in the methane lakes around them. It wasn’t the easiest telepathy. Imagine trying to teach kindergarteners about calculus.

But the octos were nothing if not patient, and far more patient than I’ll ever be. They tried to connect my mind to those methane microbes, but it wasn’t really working for me. It was like trying to explain Jackson Pollock to a cockroach. Or chess to an ant.

Lonso, however, was undaunted. He said, “Micro bros, what the fuck? How long you guys been living here?”

They gave him an answer that compressed hundreds of millions of years into the present moment and just about fried his circuits. I grabbed the shoulder of his dive suit and shook it as hard as I could while screaming at him.

His eyes sprang open.

I locked my eyes on his. “Puta madre! Look at me!”

His pupils bounced back and forth for a second before he locked onto my gaze. “Tía,” he said, “we gotta save them.”

Fuck. I was afraid he’d say something like that.

The problem with the brilliant new lifeform was that it had evolved to live in methane lakes. Other than inspecting the tiny sample I held in my hand, my grand-octos hadn’t studied the animals other than telepathically, at a distance from a lake beyond the horizon behind jagged peaks and unconquerable terrain.

To make matters worse, microbes have never been the best conversationalists.

The octos worried that the long-term effect of interfering with the hydrocarbon “water” cycle would result in Titan’s first extinction. H2O would completely replace methane in the atmosphere and bring an end to native life on Titan.

They had set out to create a utopia, but they had begun a genocide. The octos appealed to me to do something about that tragedy.

The only solution was for us to take a large supply of the methane “water” containing those organisms so I could sequence whatever crazy strands of chemicals they used instead of DNA, record their biological processes and structures, and preserve the endangered animals.

I admit I wasn’t thrilled about the idea. But Lonso wouldn’t let it go, so we did it anyway.

🏴‍☠️

Lonso removed his helmet and set it on the pilot’s seat inside the Hyades. “We can do it, you know.”

I said, “We need a way to transport a bunch of methane, cooled to a liquid state. Maybe we could convert the old octo tank?”

“Word,” said Lonso. “I got an idea.” He picked up the journal I had lying beside my bed.

“Don’t touch that.”

“Just look.” He sketched out his idea in pencil.

The diagram made a lot of sense. I spent a moment in thought with other questions. What would happen if anyone else found about this? What kind of scumbags would start going to Titan to exploit these animals? How the fuck did those things make chromosomes without any phosphorus?

“Lonso, how many hours will it take for us to build this?”

“Depends on how much Anarchy Ale we’re hiding on this tub. The real question is: How much is it worth to you to get in on the ground floor of a whole new lifeform?”

I took a seat beside him on my bed and snatched my journal from his hands. “Don’t ever touch that again. I need a lab, and a fuckton of staff.”

“That sounds like a yes.”

Patches leapt into my lap. “Fine. Will you tell the octopuses?” I brushed a stray lock of hair away from my face. “Nevermind. They already know.”

Lonso said, “It’s funny. Most people think of you as a killer. Look at you now.”

I rubbed my eyes. “Lonso, I never wanted kids. But somehow, I ended up being a mother to all these goddamn species.”

“Life’s fucked up, tía.”

“Ain’t that the truth.”

We smoked a joint then got to work.

🏴‍☠️

EPILOGUE

“Puta madre,” said Alonso. “That was the last of the rum.”

“No worries,” said Mags. “We’ll be at the Jolly before you know it.”

“I hope so.”

In the vast darkness between planets, Mags lit a candle and placed it in a candleholder. She set it on the back of her keyboard. She played a couple of chords, adjusted the volume and EQ, then played the chords again. Satisfied, she closed her eyes and sang.

On Earth, stars twinkle in the atmosphere. In the vast emptiness of space, they stare unblinking at everything in the reach of their ancient gaze. They never flinch.

Alonso wiped tears from his face. On the last chorus, he joined his oldest living friend in harmony. He lent a rich baritone to her soprano, and though she had intended the performance as a solo piece, she could not have been happier that he was there to create a moment with her.

Titan faded into the distance. Saturn faded into the distance.

Mags felt closer than ever to her friends.


[1] Mags refers to the events of Pieces of Eight, which immediately precede this story.

[2] A very general summary of events in Blind Alley Blues and subsequent stories such as Small Flowers and Farewell Tour.

[3] As recounted in The Crystal Core.

[4] Mags refers to the “far side” of Titan as the one that permanently faces away from Saturn. Titan is tidally locked with Saturn, so one side of Titan is always facing the ringed planet—which appears quite a few times larger in its sky than Earth’s Moon does on Earth.

short story draft: Reborn

02 Sunday Oct 2022

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in MeteorMags

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

genetics, meteor mags, Patches, science fiction, self publishing, writing

While I work on finishing Episode 37, enjoy this draft of the much shorter Episode 38. Despite being only 2,500 words, it is an important bridge to what comes next for our criminal crew.

art generated by Midjourney

Meteor Mags: Reborn
© 2022 by Matthew Howard.
Episode 38 in The Adventures of Meteor Mags and Patches.

Mags assembles a genetic research lab in her old hangar on Vesta. Her first experiment is a complete disaster. After much bloodshed, she tries again.

As for the fish of the sea, their names dispersed from them in silence throughout the oceans like faint, dark blurs of cuttlefish ink, and drifted off on the currents without a trace.

—Ursula K. LeGuin; She Unnames Them, 1985.

🏴‍☠️

In April 2032, Meteor Mags flipped a switch and turned on the lights. Patches ran past her feet. The hangar on Vesta had stood dark and unattended for the better part of two years—but not silent. The recently re-named Planetary Broadcasting Network played over the speakers non-stop, powered by the free-energy system Mags installed on her test run in 2030.[1]

Mags turned up the volume. “Baby kitty?”

Patches scampered here and there, sometimes stopping to listen and smell the faded traces of once-familiar scents, sometimes to carve gouges in the furniture with her indestructible claws.

For a moment, the weight of memories overwhelmed Mags. Her shoulders slumped forward as she removed her glasses and polished the lenses unnecessarily. She remembered the hangar filled with the survivors of the invasion that destroyed her club, killed so many of those dear to heart, and almost ended in her death.[2]

But even in the aftermath, her crew had found ways to celebrate the fact that they were still alive. To celebrate each other. Mags recalled the impromptu drum circles and singalongs.[3]

She lifted her head and got down to business.

After the invasion, Mags protected Vesta by installing a killer satellite network built by her friends on Mars. But she had never decided what to do with the lonely asteroid. Ceres kept her busy.

The experiments she had in mind required privacy and distance. If they went wrong, Mags didn’t want them happening anywhere near a Ceresian city. The more she thought about it, the less she wanted them on Ceres at all.

With one leather-gloved hand, she brushed the dust off an old console. Mags had often bragged that her private hangar was nuke-proof, but nothing could conquer an asteroid’s constant dust. Lights flickered below her fingertips, then shone brighter as she wiped them clean. She typed instructions to check all the systems.

“Patches? Patches!”

A howl came from a far corner.

“Be right back.”

Mags returned not once but three times pushing a pallet jack loaded with stacks of crates. She wiped sweat from her brow and lined them up against the wall.

Patches, content with her scouting and marking, sprawled on the warm green lights of the console. She licked a forepaw and laid her chin on it.

Patches purred.

Mags uncrated a few things, plugged a storage drive into a machine, and lit a smoke. She raised her hands above her head. “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the new headquarters of GenetiCorp!”

Patches typed the word into a search engine on the touchscreen beneath her. She mewed.

“What do you mean, ‘It’s already taken’?” Mags frowned. “Way to ruin my big moment.” She paced back and forth, and the sharp smack of the soles of her combat boots against the floor echoed in the empty chamber. “Weyland-Yutani? SkyNet? Omni-Consumer Products Corporation?”

She interrupted Patches’ typing with a hand on the bushy calico’s torso. “I was just kidding. Those are definitely taken. Oh, well. Fuck the name for now. Scoot over. We have work to do.”

She cracked open a bottle of rum, took over the typing, and posted several jobs on darkweb.

🏴‍☠️

Four months later, the lab was in full swing. Fifty staff members had joined, all individually vetted by Mags, and paid for with the interest she was earning by loaning her ill-gotten fortune to Solana’s central bank on Ceres to be loaned out again to start-up companies.

The staff lived in newly constructed apartments built by a Ceresian company Mags partially owned. Though small and decidedly functional, the residences were posh by the standards of the asteroid belt. Mags knew the accommodations weren’t as much fun as the former club, but they got the job done.

Her net worth, by her closest estimation, had ballooned to more than seven trillion dollars, not counting the value of Vesta itself.

Not that she ever filed taxes. That was the least of her crimes.

In August 2032, on an asteroid rarely visible to the naked eye on Earth, and only then under the darkest conditions, Mags made a poor decision.

She set a hand on her lead technician’s shoulder. “Sure,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

Her staff got to work.

🏴‍☠️

Cloning is never an easy process. To grow an animal from a pair of cells or a strand of chromosomes requires a womb. At some point, the blastula becomes an embryo and needs a mother in which it can grow.

Mags’ lab workers had settled on Komodo dragons. The scientists believed the reptiles’ robust and occasionally parthenogenetic reproductive systems resembled the ancient wombs that first gave birth to the ancestors of the dinosaurs Mags intended to bring to back to life. Plus, the massive monitors tended to mate between May and August, giving birth in September. The timing seemed fortuitous.

Mags visited her dragons several times each week and joined them in their pen which mimicked the dry, open grasslands and low tropical forests they preferred. She knew she was committing an unspeakable act upon them, but she pet the fearsome beasts and spoke to them in soothing tones only they could understand. They trusted her. They welcomed her touch. They laid eggs.

🏴‍☠️

The first birth began when Mags was away. A leathery, reptilian egg cracked open, and something the solar system had never seen before shoved its face through the shell and screamed. The infant clawed the atmosphere in a rage.

The scientists called Mags. That did not save them.

They had placed an embryo cloned from Odonata’s genes into one of the dragons to see what would happen. Unfortunately, all of them saw what happened.

🏴‍☠️

Mags set the Bêlit on the rocky Vestan surface and called out, “Patches!”

The lazy calico groomed herself. Humans, she had long since decided, had a knack for turning every event into an emergency. Surely there was nothing on Vesta she could not kill.

Still, she loved her best friend. She appeared at Mags’ feet and loudly mewed while showing her fangs.

“About time,” said Mags. “Everyone on this rock is apparently dead—everyone except one malevolent arsehole.”

Patches chattered as if she had seen a bird through a window.

“You and me both. Let’s send this motherfucker to hell.”

Patches rubbed both sides of her face against the smuggler’s boots.

“Alright,” said Mags. She pressed a sequence of numbers to open the side hatch on the Bêlit. “You go first.”

🏴‍☠️

Most of the Vestan experiments had gone well. Besides fully sequencing the alien genes of the methane-based microbes Mags brought back from Titan, they showed quite a bit of promise for resurrecting Mags’ unusual space pets, including her cybernetic mantas and the reptiles she had once abandoned on Earth.

Sadly, for the fifty dead members of the laboratory, Mags had underestimated the human cost of bringing one particular alien species back to life. She and Patches encountered a monster who grew out of control with a single-minded focus on destroying everything it encountered.

The unnamed clone had been born with six limbs. It sprouted more in its personal torment. Eyes spread across its face and sprang into existence up and down its limbs and torso until they defied counting. Spasms wracked its body. It dripped with the blood of those it had killed. The flesh it had consumed fueled its growth. Already a meter and a half tall, it grew with every passing second.

Mags introduced it to a spray of .50-caliber hollow-point rounds from a Desert Eagle. Like a mosquito in a camping tent, the beast took to the air on a chaotic path and evaded death. Mags shouted, “Patches! Can you take him down?”

Borne on four diaphanous wings like a dragonfly, the monster sliced through the air and divebombed Patches. But to the cat, it was merely a game. Her claws rebuked his attacks. His violence was met with even greater violence in a white and coffee-colored blur.

Mags holstered her pistol. The Benelli shotgun slung over her shoulder flew into her hands. “Go for the wings!”

Patches launched herself into the air and shredded every part of him she encountered. A whirlwind of destruction, she swarmed over his head and dug her claws into his back. Once she broke his wings, he plummeted to the floor. Patches landed on her feet and pounced on him. She howled her triumph. The nightmare struck out with flailing limbs and sent her sprawling.

Mags stepped up with the shotgun and blasted the monster in the face and chest until she ran out of buckshot. The clone’s brains and blood and shattered carapace decorated the floor and walls. Even in death, its remnants writhed and grew new organs. Mags stomped it without a shred of mercy.

“Motherfucker!” Mags swept a sticky lock of hair away from her spattered glasses and spat on the corpse. “Don’t you ever touch my fucking cat!” She knelt and held out one hand. “Are you okay, baby kitty?”

Patches rubbed a paw across her face and demanded petting.

Mags scratched the fuzzy face. “I guess it was a rhetorical question.”

Patches flopped onto her side with no regard for the rapidly expanding pool of green blood below. She licked her fur. It made no difference to the tufts of her unruly coat. Her enemy was dead. Her friend was alive. Her bowls were empty.

Such was life.

🏴‍☠️

Mags filled Patches’ bowls and scrubbed the hangar without any help from her friends. She did not want them to know what had happened. After the remains of the alien clone were taken outside and burned to ash on the unforgiving Vestan surface, bleach water destroyed all the errant DNA in the lab. Mags mopped every centimeter of the floor three times, wiped down every other surface, swept up broken glass, patched bullet holes, and deleted several terabytes of incriminating audio and video evidence.

She collected the bodies of the slaughtered humans and Komodo dragons, stacked them on pallets as best she could, and took them outside for a proper burial attended only by her and Patches. Through her friend Solana’s bank on Ceres, Mags paid out fifty generous pensions to next of kin who electronically signed non-disclosure agreements, per the staff’s original contracts.

The process took three days, and she almost ran out of rum.

Then she posted some job listings on darkweb.

🏴‍☠️

One month later, Mags’ new employees began what they believed to be their first project. Neither Mags nor Patches disabused them of that notion. Using the cells Mags had harvested from the remains of her cybernetic mantas, they created embryos they injected into rays imported from Earth.

The scientists supplemented the mother mantas’ diets with minerals they hoped would support the development of the metallic and electric components that defined Mags’ original mantas. The animals grew not from DNA but from a similar chemical spiral that had replaced one of our mammalian nucleobases.

That unfamiliar structure was the blueprint for the clones, and the main problem for the staff was providing raw materials for construction.

The mother rays floated at first in narrow glass tubes that rose from floor to ceiling. Mags decided that was unacceptable and ordered the construction of a gigantic tank to hold them all. On more than one occasion, she dove into the tank to have words with them.

Those words were not anything another mammal would have understood. But after three years of telepathic bonding with an odd assortment of species—from the normal to the mutated, from the cybernetic to the prehistoric—Mags had become adept at talking to more animals than just humans and cats. She swam and cursed and conversed like a space-age Doctor Dolittle with a penchant for profanity.

The rays understood. They spoke to her about their lives in Earth’s oceans, gossiped about their simpleminded yet effective cousins the sharks, and spun poetry about what it was like to be a beast made of wings and cartilage. They told her secrets no mammal had ever heard, oceanic mysteries much older than humanity. They whispered legends mantas had passed down to their children since unrecorded eons, and the meaning their species had found below the surface of the seas.

Mags listened, learned, and told them secrets of her own.

Manta ray gestation takes about a year before—unlike their egg-laying cousins the skates—they give birth to live young. In September 2033, Mags and Patches attended the birth of a new generation.

🏴‍☠️

Mags stood before the massive tank. Mantas swam in oddly geometric patterns that conveyed meanings to her but not to her staff. She would explain later.

Some of the mother mantas possessed wingspans greater than three meters, but their newborn pups were much smaller. Such tiny things, born alive.

Mags said, “Come to me.”

She had not controlled a manta in nearly four years, not since she summoned them to help her during the attack on Vesta. Still, the baby mantas responded. They swam to the top of the tank.

“Come to me.”

One by one, they broke the surface and breathed air for the first time. They survived.

Mags held out her hand and beckoned them, curling her fingers toward herself until they formed a fist. “Come to me.”

One by one, the baby mantas descended and gathered around her. They swarmed in the air, swimming in the atmosphere as gracefully as their mothers swam in water.

Patches batted them with her paws, but her claws remained sheathed. As if she were gathering her own kittens toward suckle and shelter, she herded them into a ring around Mags.

Mags said, “Show me what you got.”

The shiny, silvery mantas crackled with electricity that threatened to destroy the laboratory. Lightning bolts cascaded across every surface. The employees dove for cover below their desks.

In a storm that lit up her face in a stark relief of light and shadow, a sinister smile spread across the smuggler’s black-painted lips. She produced a cigarette and lit it on the hot, sparking wing of the nearest manta.

Mags took a puff. The tip glowed as red as a dying star.

“Bloody hell,” she said. “It’s good to see you again.”

Her mantas agreed.

🏴‍☠️

“Earth,” said Mags.

“Get the fuck out,” said Celina. “You can’t conquer a planet with only a handful of your fucked-up pets.”

“No?” Mags stretched out on the bed and crossed her arms behind her head. “Watch me.”

Celina brushed her hair in a mirror and thought about that. “You do realize it’s just you against thirteen billion people?”

“Fourteen. And fuck them,” said Mags. “Their nations have been at war for thousands of years and caused more suffering than anyone can comprehend. I’m fucking sick of it.”

“So am I, magpie.” Celina set down her brush and turned away from the mirror to face Mags directly. “But we always made a lot of money on those conflicts.”

“We did,” said Mags. “We absolutely did.” She lit a stolen cigarette. “But now, we can end it.”


[1] See Small Flowers for the test run. The PBN was renamed in Infinite Spaces.

[2] As told in The Battle of Vesta 4.

[3] As seen in Hunted to Extinction.

Patches IRL

01 Saturday Oct 2022

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in MeteorMags

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Tags

calico cat, cats, cookie, meteor mags, Patches

A year ago, someone posted this photo of Cookie the calico cat on Reddit, and they gave me permission to share it here with you. This is exactly how I’ve always imagined Patches when writing her scenes, right down to her fluff and color patterns. Like Patches, Cookie was homeless before being adopted, and she is very intense about getting people to feed her. Rock on, Cookie!

Meteor Mags: Permanent Crescent – now in print and ebook

Featured

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in MeteorMags, science fiction, writing

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books, meteor mags, permanent crescent, self publishing, writing

For sale on Amazon in ebook, paperback, and hardback editions.

The ebook is also for sale on Smashwords and other major ebook retailers.

Might be unsuitable for children and other forms of carbon-based life.

After the events of The Second Omnibus, Meteor Mags and her hard-rocking space-pirate crew confront new enemies, old rivals, and the final fate of the interspecies band, Small Flowers. Permanent Crescent and Other Tales continues Mags’ evolution from a rogue pirate to a leader with far-reaching plans, and her choices will have major consequences for the future of the solar system. This collection contains six all-new episodes totaling 57,000 words.

Permanent Crescent: The Moon is about to die, and it’s all Mags’ fault. Join a hell-raising space pirate and her indestructible calico cat as they confront a lunar death cult whose alien leader plans to take vengeance on humanity by destroying Earth’s ancient satellite.

Odonata’s Revenge: Mags faces double trouble when an alien menace and an ex-mercenary converge on Ceres to end the pirate’s life and steal her secret technology.

Infinite Spaces: Mags and her crew discover signals emanating from the depths of the subterranean ocean on Ceres and risk their lives in uncharted waters to find the source. What they find makes Mags reconsider her role in humanity’s evolution and the final fate of her universe.

Farewell Tour: A band of telepathic octopuses and their interspecies friends bring a message of liberation to the solar system one last time. Mags and Patches fight to rescue them from the forces of law and order.

One Last Night on Death World: On the last night of Gramma’s life, Mags takes her drinking at a west-coast bar to shoot pool and have fun. Between games of billiards, they discuss the future of the solar system and reminisce about their past, revealing details about Gramma’s childhood, her relationship with her piratical mother, and the development of GravGen technology.

Pieces of Eight: Mags and her friends in Small Flowers return to Earth to seek a new home for the dying octopuses, but what they find is not at all what they expected.

reflections on writing: One Last Night on Death World

06 Wednesday Jul 2022

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in MeteorMags, writing

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Tags

billiards, memoir, meteor mags, pool, reflections, self publishing, writing

art generated by Midjourney

On the last night of Gramma’s life, Mags takes her drinking at a west-coast bar to shoot pool and have fun. Between games of billiards, they discuss the future of the solar system and reminisce about their past, revealing details about Gramma’s childhood, her relationship with her piratical mother, and the development of GravGen technology.

July 2022 Update: The story is now collected in Meteor Mags: Permanent Crescent and Other Tales. For sale on Amazon in ebook, paperback, and hardback editions. The ebook is also available on Smashwords and other major retailers.

About seven years ago, I started compiling notes for a Meteor Mags story that would take place on the last night of Gramma’s life and, through flashbacks, fill in a lot of details about Gramma’s history and how they relate to the main narrative in the series. While the series is ostensibly science-fiction, this tale was more like historical fiction.

If you’ve ever written historical fiction, you know it takes an incredible amount of research into historical fact. Otherwise, you end up with unintended anachronisms, inaccuracies, and all kinds of things any expert in your chosen time period will absolutely tear apart.

This problem almost killed my story.

Since it involves the history of billiards, I got involved in the history of France and a man named Francois Mingaud. He invented the leather tip we all now take for granted on a cue stick.

The first indication that I had serious problems was that my research turned out to be contradictory about when and where Mingaud was held prisoner, and the inaccuracy of him being imprisoned at the Bastille years after it was demolished was repeated in dozens of billiards-related websites where I sought information about his life.

I solved the discrepancy by emailing Mike Shamos, author of The New Illustrated Encyclopedia of Billiards (an excellent resource rivaled only by the work of his friends Victor Stein and Paul Rubino in the massive Billiard Encyclopedia). Dr. Shamos was kind enough to provide historical documents that set the record straight about Mingaud’s imprisonment. I am such a Wikipedia nerd that I corrected the mistakes in Mingaud’s article and included a note about why the widespread inaccuracy about his imprisonment was impossible.

That’s just one of the complications of the history I was trying to construct. Eventually, it all became so overwhelming that I relegated my story to being one of those ideas I would never get around to writing.

But last month, one of the authors from my old workshop group was kind enough to listen for a few minutes to all the reasons I had never written the story I wanted to. In the days that followed, I thought about those reasons; the chief of which was that I simply did not want to invest another year of my life researching the time period to write the novella I had planned.

As I have said many times before, being able to articulate our problems often leads to them solving themselves. I’m indebted to the author who took a few minutes to listen, because thinking about my so-called “reasons” led me to trying some narrative solutions to those problems.

I played with a few ideas, cut some scenes that were too involved and slowed the pacing, engaged a few characters to summarize events that could have filled a novel, and ended up with a short, fast-paced tale that accomplished damn near everything I ever wanted from the “sweeping historical epic” I would never get around to writing.

You can judge for yourself whether it succeeds or not.

I’ve written before about my love for various games of pool, so I have only one more thing to say about the title of this story. Years ago, I saw an infographic about the most-used words in book titles. People online ripped this thing apart as an example of the most cliché and crappy book titles.

But to me, they looked like damn good words, so I came up with several fun titles based on that silly infographic and decided to use “One Last Night on Death World” as the name of a pinball/videogame Mags would have distributed on the west coast of the USA in the 1990s as a cover for her smuggling operations. (It’s introduced in a flashback in the previous story, Farewell Tour, which fills in the early years of the friendship between Mags and Alonso.) The name also fit the idea of Gramma Margareta’s last night on Earth, so I ran with it.

What did I learn from all this? First, it helps to have other writers to talk to when you are having problems with a story. Second, you can get a lot of mileage from emailing an expert on a subject. Third, the problems you encounter when telling a story can often be solved by taking a different approach to narration and engaging the characters to solve your problems for you.

I’m tempted to add a fourth lesson about “Stop making excuses and write the damn thing”, but I can’t help but feel that compiling notes for all these years until I had a chance to bend a sympathetic ear was the right decision. It was like I had been dissolving minerals in a solution for seven years and then all of a sudden—Boom! All it took was one little grain for them to gather around and become a crystal.

In addition to borrowing Francois Mingaud from real life, this tale guest-stars Scott Safran, a young man history also remembers for his accomplishments in a game. Both of their lives play out a bit differently due to meeting Mags and her ancestors. The hotelier Jonathan Hathaway is a complete fabrication.

reflections on writing: Odonata’s Revenge

29 Tuesday Mar 2022

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in MeteorMags

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Tags

memoir, meteor mags, reflections, self publishing, writing

art generated by Midjourney.

Mags faces double trouble when an alien menace and an ex-mercenary converge on Ceres to end the pirate’s life and steal her secret technology.

July 2022 Update: The story is now collected in Meteor Mags: Permanent Crescent and Other Tales. For sale on Amazon in ebook, paperback, and hardback editions. The ebook is also available on Smashwords and other major retailers.

Episode 32 in The Adventures of Meteor Mags and Patches was intended to be 33, but I got bogged down in the original story for 32 and couldn’t quite put my finger on why. As you probably know, I don’t believe in writer’s block, because you can always write something. So, I re-directed my energy into what was speaking to me at the time, and I also worked to articulate exactly what my problem was.

My recent post on why Finishing Matters resulted from gathering my thoughts on why it is important to power through completing a draft. My post on the difference between Active Versus Passive Characters arose from trying to articulate why I wasn’t happy with the original thirty-second episode.

I realized that the episode’s problem was, at its root, that I had originally conceived the middle of the story as a plot that needed to happen to my characters, instead of a plot driven by character choices. I knew where the story started and ended, but I felt like I was enforcing a plot on my characters in the middle, and that was causing friction.

So, I set it aside and focused on something that’s been simmering on the back burner for a couple of years: introducing a new rival for Mags. It’s an idea I kept returning to despite numerous attempts and thousands of words that failed to excite me. But gathering my thoughts on active characters proved to be the key. Last month, I added to my massive pile of notes on this rival by asking questions and answering them, then dropping her into situations and letting her choose the outcome. I let go of the idea that I needed her to fit into some mold, and I let her choose her own adventure.

Several scenes I wrote for her ended up on the cutting-room floor. You will never read them. But the process of going beyond notes and writing actual scenes for her revealed what really captured my imagination about her, and I enjoyed getting to know her and anticipating what kind of choices she would make. She stopped being a thing I wanted to force into a plot and became a person who could drive a plot through active choices.

Once I began letting her choices take an active role in determining the plot, she became not just easy to write but an absolute joy. In the end, it only took me about a month to write the episode featuring her, even though defining who she was had been frustrating me for a couple of years. The breakthrough came when I started treating her the way I do Mags: not as someone who life happens to, but someone who happens to life.

Also, I wrote thousands of words you will never see about her childhood, her appearance, and her motivations. We might explore those things later in the text of the series, but the important thing was that I really needed to get to know her.

I don’t need to necessarily publish words about those things, but I needed to be able to confidently write from those things. The difference between the two is the subtext an author needs to have a firm grasp on a character. Not every detail about a character’s history needs to be explained through exposition to a reader, but the author needs to know those unpublished details to create someone who feels real, consistent, and grounded. You can judge for yourself how well I did.

On a more personal note, the episode briefly includes a billiards game called nine-ball. The game will always be dear to my heart because in 2006, I joined a nine-ball league at a local pub/pool hall. I had always enjoyed shooting pool, but I was terrible at it. When I joined the league, I started practicing regularly, using an amazing book called Byrne’s New Standard Book of Pool and Billiards. It had great, practical exercises and showed how to make shots from the most simple to the increasingly complex.

A few mementos from my league days.

But learning pool from a book can only do so much, and it was through the generous instruction from other people on the league that I advanced enough to not be awesome but to at least not embarrass myself, and to win enough matches to feel a sense of accomplishment. When I played against casual players at other bars outside of league, I won more often than I lost.

The people in my league who guided me and showed me how to correct what I was doing wrong were not just my teammates but sometimes my competition from other teams I played against in matches. Despite our friendly rivalry, we were not enemies but people who enjoyed the same game and wanted to help each other improve, have fun together, and generally raise the quality of every player’s ability. For years, nine-ball league was my primary social group where I formed many friendships, some of which remain to this day. We often gathered for house parties, bar crawls, road trips, concerts, and other events.

It’s a good thing we rented a van and a driver for this pub crawl.

In many ways, it was like the writer’s workshop I founded in 2017: a somewhat random assortment of people gathering around a shared enthusiasm with the aims of both helping each other improve and having some fun along the way. In both cases, my years with the groups helped me grow in ways that would not have been possible on my own.

These days, my billiards game is rusty from a lack of practice, but I still love to play. The same is true of my guitar skills. But if you ever wonder why I write so many billiards and concert or jam scenes into my stories, it’s because they are hobbies I have loved for many years, and I can’t imagine writing about a fictional world where they don’t play a role.

reflections on writing: Permanent Crescent

29 Wednesday Dec 2021

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in MeteorMags, writing

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

memoir, meteor mags, Moon, Patches, permanent crescent, reflections, self publishing, writing

art generated by Midjourney.

The Moon is about to die, and it’s all Mags’ fault. Join a hell-raising space pirate and her indestructible calico cat as they confront a lunar death cult whose alien leader plans to take his revenge on humanity by destroying Earth’s ancient satellite.

July 2022 Update: The story is now collected in Meteor Mags: Permanent Crescent and Other Tales. For sale on Amazon in ebook, paperback, and hardback editions. The ebook is also available on Smashwords and other major retailers.

Permanent Crescent was the story I worked on while also putting together The Second Omnibus, so it bears the responsibility of setting the tone for what comes next. It was fun to write and took about three months based on notes I’d compiled throughout the year.

The first scene I wrote was a nice way to open the floodgates for writing, but it ended up on the cutting-room floor. You will never read it! I also drafted scenes which got heavily revised in terms of their points of view, tenses, and even which characters were involved. Hardly any scene survived in its original version.

As you probably know, I don’t believe in writer’s block. Even when I felt unsure about what direction to take for the story, I figured, “What the hell? Let’s wing it and see what happens!” Eventually, the results of that “anything goes” approach got ironed out into a single story.

After trying things a few different ways, I settled on three points of view to tell the story: the hero, her nemesis, and my standard third-person omniscient narrator for the series. I felt multiple POVs were necessary to convey the ways in which the hero and the villain are similar in their general attitudes but intractably opposed.

By letting both the protagonist and antagonist tell parts of the story from their unique perspectives, I hoped to draw parallels between the ways they perceive their world and their situation. Some hints are obvious, such as the way they both refer to “vermin”, but with each considering the other to be the vermin. Similarly identical phrases and judgments are woven into their narratives.

Several scenes are written in first-person present tense, which I rarely use. In Permanent Crescent, my intent was to use that POV to create a sense of immediacy, to put the reader in a moment where anything might come next. In Mags’ first-person scenes, she mostly abandons her conventions from the first two omnibuses where she wrote in a journal or a letter. This time around, she speaks more directly to the reader, and her only epistolary contribution is a journal entry from 1966 where she gives relevant background about developing artificial gravity.

Getting all that sorted was a world of fun, but writing the story took me to dark places involving crime, cults, and the human (and feline) condition in general. At some point, I realized I wanted Mags to narrate a few scenes in a pulpy crime/detective style. So, I re-read the entire Criminal series to get that flavor and tone in my mind.

Permanent Crescent also reflects my feelings about the kind of urban decay I’ve lived in or visited many times in my life. The descriptive scenes about lunar cities are basically me writing about neighborhoods I’ve had the misfortune to experience. If I had to pick one song that sums up everything about that, it would be Spinal Tap’s Hell Hole.

I was a bit disheartened to discover an anime series has already blasted the Moon into a permanent crescent. It’s getting so that you can’t even blow up the Moon without someone else having done it first!

A planet in space

Description automatically generated with medium confidence
I don’t know what “Assassination Classroom” was about, but they trashed the Moon.

Finally, I should mention how hard I tried to do the actual math for launching Patches out of a space cannon. I read a ridiculous amount of articles and papers about the problem, most of which were beyond my grasp. I tried multiple times to get scientists to help me, to no avail. I even created a spreadsheet full of formulas to do the math. At last, I needed to admit I had no idea what the hell I was doing.

But one way or another, we were launching Patches from a space cannon, and we damn well did it. If anyone wants to email the solution to me, I’d be thrilled.

Rebel Girl: Notes on Writing Mags and Her Music

25 Thursday Nov 2021

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in MeteorMags

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Tags

guitar, memoir, meteor mags, music, writing

A few years ago, I read a draft of a scene from the Meteor Mags stories to my workshop group. In the scene, our space-faring criminals turn on the ship’s radio in time to hear the DJ back-announce a few songs and say what comes next.

During the feedback session, one of my workshoppers asked, “How do you come up with all these crazy song titles and band names?”

I’m rarely stunned into silence on matters of writing, but that question hit me like the asteroid collision that killed the dinosaurs. It took me a moment to realize that when it comes to music, I might as well be from another planet than some of my writing comrades.

My answer? “I didn’t make them up. Those are all real songs and real bands! And they kick ass!”

You can find a list of all the real songs the characters in the series have broadcast, performed, or just plain argued about on the unofficial soundtrack page of Mags’ website.

I like to think those songs might be played if Mags and Patches ever get made into a film or a cartoon. Nothing could make me happier than seeing and hearing Mags perform Porcupine Tree’s Trains as a solo piano piece in the dead of night by candlelight from Red Metal at Dawn, or her brilliant, butt-naked rendition of the Hoodoo Gurus’ Down on Me with a tribe of space monkeys and telepathic space octopuses in Small Flowers.

I have always felt that when the end credits roll on Mags’ first film, the song that must destroy the theater’s speakers is Bikini Kill’s Rebel Girl.

It’s a fuckin’ barnburner.

I don’t know if Kathleen Hanna and the gang in Bikini Kill had in mind an even older song to which Rebel Girl traces its roots: a pro-labor, feminist acoustic jam by Hazel Dickens called The Rebel Girl.

Decades before Loretta Lynn’s Coal Miner’s Daughter became a country-music hit in the States, multi-instrumentalist Hazel Dickens was singing pro-union, pro-people, and pro-women bluegrass songs in a folk-music vein, advocating through music and direct activism for America’s miners. She also eulogized her brother in song after he died of black lung disease.

Born into a coal-mining family, Hazel died in 2011, and you don’t hear about her very often these days. But she loved rebel girls, and I love her for that. The social problems she fearlessly addressed nearly a century ago have not yet been solved in our country, and maybe they will never be. But music gives me hope.

Most songs on the unofficial soundtrack page have a similar bit of history behind them and a thematic or emotional relevance to the stories. They appear in the text for a reason—even if the only reason is because Patches is obsessed with gangsta rap.

But my workshoppers were right to suspect that I have been making up a hell of a lot of other songs for my imaginary bands: the Psycho 78s (named after a line in the Misfits song Horror Business), the teenage Dumpster Kittens (who are some of the nicest kids you’ll ever meet despite singing about suicide, murder, interplanetary death armies, and nuclear infernos), and the Sterile Skins (a ska-punk crossover band that filled its choruses with the British “Oi!” despite being mostly Chicanos from SoCal).

But what I’ve never told my workshoppers (or anyone else, until now) is that for every imaginary song whose lyrics appear in the series, I put together real music.

And for that, I blame Greg.

Greg was the awesomest drummer I ever had the good fortune to share a house with, and it was a unique pleasure to hear him bashing away for hours in the basement. He was in a number of ass-kicking bands whose shows I enjoyed, and we’ve kept in touch over the years despite being thousands of miles apart now.

I miss that guy.

Back in 2015 or so, I sent him a message about how I wanted my characters to have their own unique songs, not just other people’s material they referred to. He told me, “Then you need to write those songs.”

He always had a way of cutting through my apparently complex problems with straight-forward advice.

That evening, I picked up an acoustic guitar and bashed out chords for the song that appears in the episode Whipping Boy. Ever since, I have done the same for every absolutely bonkers “imaginary” song that gets its lyrics printed in the series. It’s now a fundamental part of the creative process.

Whipping boy! What’s your name?
Whipping boy! A life of pain!
Maybe you should take the cash and run.
Maybe you should get yourself a gun,
before they kill your soul. Alright!

Most of the earlier songs can be played on a standard-issue acoustic guitar using basic power chords. After all, despite teaching several aspiring musicians about music theory and performing in small jazz combos, I still enjoy a straight-forward, punk-rock approach to songs you could perform drunk around a campfire.

But a few years ago, I got a baritone electric guitar from ESP. With its longer neck length and scale, and a weight that’s somewhere between a guitar and a bass, the baritone is designed to be tuned a fourth below standard guitar tuning, with a low A instead of a low E.

I tried that tuning, but after Wo Fat convinced me that C minor is the heaviest key in all eternity—and considering my love for Jimmy Page’s open-C tuning from Poor Tom on Led Zeppelin’s Coda—I tried a low C instead, keeping the standard string intervals from a normal tuning.

As far as C minor goes, one of my favorite heavy pieces in that key is Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto. Ukrainian pianist Anna Federova brings even more life to it than my concert recording of the composer performing it.

When I ran my C-tuned baritone guitar through a Logan Square Destroyer distortion pedal, ultimate heaviness resulted: crisp treble and gut-punching bass. I bought this pedal because I am a raving maniac for the first four or five Queens of the Stone Age albums (and their predecessor, Kyuss), so I thought it might help me get closer to that sound.

It did not disappoint.

To push heaviness a little further, I sometimes keep the C-based tuning but drop the low string to B flat—just like how you would tune to Drop D on a standard guitar. That gives me a power chord on the low three strings, and if I throw on a capo, I get some stupidly heavy sounds from the ESP in a variety of keys.

I am all about truly stupid levels of heaviness. If your riffs don’t give me permanent brain damage, then you’re wasting my time!

Maybe someday I’ll produce an album of these imaginary songs. But as much as I love to sing them, we need Mags or her teenage friend Sarah on the mic—not me.

I’m no brilliant singer, though I’ve never let that stop me from performing or recording. But I often fantasize about hammering the hell out of my baritone axe while someone more talented than me takes over on vocals. I like to think we’d give Alice in Chains a run for their money.

Happy Thanksgiving, Martians! This year I am thankful for ripping riffs and brutally heavy jams, for that annoying pain I get while building up my guitar callouses again, and for music in general. It remains one of the great joys of my life.

We own the sky! And don’t you ever forget it.

Watch Mags Come to Life: Digital Art Process Video

05 Tuesday Oct 2021

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in MeteorMags

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art, digital art, drawing, meteor mags, second omnibus, vamkire trannel, video

Vamkire Trannel posted this video of his process for creating the illustration for the cover of Meteor Mags: The Second Omnibus. I love seeing how he made Mags come to life! You can enjoy more of his work on Reddit, YouTube, DeviantArt, and Instagram.

Meteor Mags: The Second Omnibus. Now in Paperback and Ebook!

03 Sunday Oct 2021

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in MeteorMags, writing

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books, meteor mags, Patches, science fiction, second omnibus, space pirates, writing

Thanks to Vamkire Trannel for the cover illustration!

The Second Omnibus collects and updates volumes 7-10, plus two all-new stories, previously unpublished interviews, scenes, drawings, a mini-comic, and more!

In the aftermath of the disaster that nearly wiped out civilization on Ceres, a hell-raising space pirate and her indestructible calico cat get set to throw the greatest birthday party of a lifetime—until alien death rains down from the sky!

Join Meteor Mags and her criminal crew, including the hard-rocking Psycho 78s and the teenage Dumpster Kittens, as they rage against the forces of law and order, struggle to control the future of the Asteroid Belt, and confront the total destruction of their beloved home on Vesta 4. Some will live, many more will die, and nothing in the Belt will ever be the same!

In fifteen episodes of relentless anarchy, sci-fi madness, and violent revolution, the pirate crew comes face-to-face with betrayal, annihilation, telepathic octopuses, evil space lizards, cybernetic murder wasps, game-changing technologies, objects of unlimited power, and much, much more! Strap on your battle armor and get ready to rock, because the asteroid-mining frontier is no place for the faint-hearted.

What readers are saying about the series:

“A violent, feel-good space romp. An irreverent, rocking series.”

“A lot of guns and bloody battles. Fast-paced and full of action.”

“Anarchy, asteroids, and rock music abound. A great read.”

“The swashbuckling spirit and generous—but murderous!—hearts of Mags and her cohort are endearing and engaging.”

“So insane.”

578-page paperback edition or Kindle ebook

(154,000 words plus illustrations).

BUY IT ON AMAZON.

Infinite Playground of Imagination

13 Friday Aug 2021

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in MeteorMags

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memoir, meteor mags, Patches, reflections, science fiction, writing

art generated by Midjourney.

An updated version of this essay appears in the second edition of Virtually Yours: A Meteor Mags Memoir.

Back in 2017, in the first few months of my writers workshop, I received feedback from a science-fiction writer I respect and admire. As you might already know, many of the first thirty episodes of the Meteor Mags stories take place from 2027 to 2030. The feedback I got was that science-fiction stories should be set at least forty years into the future.

I think the idea was that this buffer of time gives some plausibility to the development of “futuristic” technologies. It might be a decent rule of thumb for aspiring SF writers. But futurism isn’t a central concept or concern in Mags’ stories, and as a lifelong reader of comic books, I could list dozens if not hundreds of sci-fi stories set in the present or the distant past.

I won’t belabor the point but merely offer an example: The Manhattan Projects by Jonathan Hickman and Nick Pitarra was published from 2012 to 2015, but that absolutely insane sci-fi epic was set in the 1940s through the 1960s.

You can probably think of many more comic-book examples, such as the 1980s Watchmen series set in an alternate 1980s universe. Or you can go back to early prose classics from H.G. Wells and Mary Shelley. Any fan of steampunk can come up with science-fiction tales set in the Victorian era, and any Ray Bradbury fan knows that many once-futuristic dates in The Martian Chronicles have long since come and gone.

Science fiction’s future is old news.

The Meteor Mags stories take place in a solar system that shares many aspects of ours but is clearly different. One of the more obvious clues is how asteroids are named with their number after their name: Our “4 Vesta” is Mags’ “Vesta 4”. Call it an alternate universe, an alternate timeline, a Marvel What If scenario, or, for you Robert Heinlein geeks, a “ficton”. I don’t care. It’s just where Mags lives, and while it sometimes offers a commentary on or satire of our solar system, it’s unique unto itself.

In terms of satire, a few examples come to mind. The Musical Freedoms Act of 2019 is an obvious satire of the “Religious Freedom” laws that recently plagued the United States. In Jam Room, Mags mentions that Ted Nugent ran for President in 2020 but was assassinated. In Hunted to Extinction, Mags concludes a parody of gratuitous female shower scenes in SF movies with a comment about the Alien franchise.

Her solar system and ours have a few things in common, but they also have many differences.

In terms of divergent timelines, the divergences go back at least a few hundred years in the backstories about how Mags’ ancestors affected the golden age of Atlantic pirates in the 1700s and the economic landscape of Europe in the 1800s. Some of those events have been specifically mentioned in the text, some have been implied or alluded to, and some remain in my massive pile of notes for unwritten historical tales.

The history of space exploration and asteroid mining were influenced by Mags’ presence in her solar system, especially in terms of her contributions to localized gravity control. I do not expect that humans in our reality will have a lunar base established in 2023 nor be mining asteroids on a massive scale a few years later. We certainly will not be colonizing Mars and building major metropolises there in our current decade. These “futuristic” concepts overlap our timeline and are a direct consequence of the existence of Mags and her illustrious and unusually long-lived maternal ancestors.

A futuristic approach to science fiction is based on the idea that readers expect a story that is set in the future of their personal reality where scientific and technologic advancements have materialized. It’s a place where our dreams and aspirations about tech have come true. It’s a fantasy about where our species is headed. We might be headed toward utopia or dystopia, but these are somewhat distant futures that science fiction speculates about; hence the term “speculative fiction”.

That isn’t my approach at all. My approach is to consider myself as being Mags’ biographer. That position gives me not just the future to play with, but the past. The events relevant to her life include—as Carl Sagan liked to say—”billions and billions” of years, from the earliest days of her solar system to the heat death of her universe.

Even that timespan and location is too limited. I’ve already published a story about Patches that suggests the end of the universe is not the end for Mags and Patches, and I have notes for a story where Mags gets a glimpse of every possible alternate universe where she existed.

So, we’re way beyond guidelines to set these stories at some arbitrary number of years in our future. They don’t take place there. They take place in the infinite playground of my imagination.

The series has always—first and foremost—been about the characters and their friendships through the insane adventures they encounter. The science-fiction aspects are far less important to me than that emotional core. My intent is not to make fantasies about future technology seem plausible. I only want each story to be fun—fun for me to write, fun for my characters to live though, and fun for the readers who might consider the adventures of a hell-raising, shotgun-wielding, piano-playing, feline maniac with an odd assortment of space pets to be a nice break from the drudgery of everyday life.

As I’ve said before: This isn’t science fiction. It’s rock’n’roll wearing science-fiction clothes. Feel free to take yours off and join the party.

Reflections on Writing Dekarna Triumphant

17 Saturday Jul 2021

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in MeteorMags

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dekarna triumphant, memoir, meteor mags, reflections, writing

art generated by Midjourney.

An updated version of this essay appears in the second edition of Virtually Yours: A Meteor Mags Memoir. The story appears in Meteor Mags: The Second Omnibus.

In the recent stories Antipodes and The Martian Revolution, things have not gone according to Mags’ plans and desires. In Dekarna Triumphant, she runs into trouble at the South Pacific station she founded back in Small Flowers. Mags thinks she has the situation all under control and expects Dekarna and the baby reptiles will be part of her personal army, but that rug gets pulled out from under her, and Mags must battle a fearsome nemesis whose rage is completely justifiable.

The resultant story is an ass-kicking freakshow full of brutality, but with moments of descriptive natural beauty.

With The Martian Revolution, I had an absolute blast returning to the heart of the series by featuring Mags, Patches, and Tarzi in a series of violent, vulgar, comedic action scenes. But after that, I felt emotionally drawn to the plight of my evil space lizard and how she rages against it.

I love how Dekarna is so remorselessly evil but is all about her babies! I love how she would stop at nothing to protect and feed her young, but she is the last reptile you want to mess with.

I think that’s why she makes a good villain for Mags, because Mags is the same way—just a more mammalian version. Mags would happily bulldoze a billion people into a ditch if she thought it would save her cat. Dekarna would do the same for her babies.

Finding that heart of the heartless reptile really brought her to life for me. I also empathize with Dekarna’s quest to be free and happy. She has been used and abused by everyone in her life—from her former commander to Meteor Mags—and every time she almost achieved freedom, some other asshole came along to enslave her. It reminds me of trying to make a living in my twenties. All I wanted was to be free.

That’s Dekarna’s life in a nutshell, and I wanted to give her a story where she was, at last, completely free. Free, unleashed, and totally fucking evil.

In the confrontation, Mags faces defeat. While I love it when everything goes Mags’ way, struggling against overwhelming odds and sometimes failing makes for a more compelling story, especially in an ongoing series. I’ve often felt that many of the early stories in the series made it too easy for Mags to get what she wanted. Though they are fun adventure tales, the dramatic tension isn’t very heavy. It wasn’t until the tornado in Blind Alley Blues that Mags really began to confront enormous, high-stakes problems she couldn’t entirely overcome. And that is where, in my opinion, the series began a major improvement.

So, I was a bit shocked by the reaction when I told a member of my workshop group that Mags would be totally defeated in this episode. The response was, basically, “You can’t do that!” I have never in my life heard anyone get so angry over one of my plot decisions.

It didn’t upset me or sway me, though. I mean, The Empire Strikes Back would have been a much less significant film if everything went great for Luke Skywalker at the end. Instead, his secret base is destroyed, his training is interrupted before he gets any real skill, his best pal is kidnapped and frozen, his scumbag nemesis turns out to be his dad and kicks his ass, he gets his frickin’ hand chopped off, and he falls to his doom.

Now that’s a story!

So, no, I didn’t change my plans for Mags’ defeat. But the angry reaction to those plans made me happy. It made me happy to know that someone else in the universe loves Mags so much that merely the thought of her being defeated would upset them! Because you know what? It upsets me too. Every time I throw a dramatic monkey wrench into Mags’ plans or write her into awful situations where she suffers pain and loss, it upsets me.

I think it was Alan Moore who said that no matter how much you love your characters, you must do horrible things to them. But that advice doesn’t make it any easier to do. I go through a whole range of emotions when writing about Mags’ struggles, including anger and sadness.

The emotional payoff for me comes when she triumphs, or is rescued by her friends, or maintains her (mostly) unshakeable attitude of rage and defiance even when the odds are against her. I like seeing what she’s made of. I admire her strength—not just her physical strength, but her emotional and intellectual strength—and I believe her qualities are best illuminated when she faces the greatest challenges.

I confess that in this episode, I intentionally “painted myself into a corner” by writing Mags into a situation she could not possibly escape. I did it on purpose, to make things more dramatic, but it was not a decision that made the writing any easier! That was okay because both Mags and I needed a challenge. But the result was that I eventually had the entire story written except for half of one scene, because I didn’t have a clue about how to get Mags out of what happened to her.

One of the recurring themes in the series is how Mags’ rash and reckless overconfidence gets her into trouble she can’t escape without the help of her friends. So, confronted with an insurmountable obstacle in writing this episode, I asked a friend for help. I explained the situation to her, and we brainstormed ideas for about half an hour. At the end, we had come up with an idea so bonkers, so absolutely insane, that I knew I had to write it. Even though I had my doubts about the idea, I couldn’t not write it!

Anyway, I wrote it, loved it, and the rest is future history. But like Mags, I needed the help of a good friend to make it happen.

Dekarna Triumphant is a kind of Empire Strikes Back ending to what will be the second omnibus collection of stories. It concludes a story cycle that began after The Battle of Vesta 4. In my reflections on Battle, I explained how that story essentially wrapped up all the ideas I originally had for the series when I first started writing it seven years ago. I mentioned how completing that story left me with a solar system where anything was possible, and I was looking forward to indulging my imagination with subsequent tales.

The twelve episodes from Hunted to Extinction through Dekarna Triumphant represent three or four years of playing in those fields of imagination, taking characters in directions I never originally planned, incorporating different narrators and narrative techniques, exploring the consequences of what the early stories established, introducing new concepts and characters, and bringing additional depth and growth to old ones.

And you know what? I loved every minute of it. I had a lot going on in my life that I was unhappy about, but writing the adventures of Meteor Mags and Patches was always a pleasure. I hope you enjoy their stories as much as I do, and I look forward to writing more. In the meantime, I’ll be putting together the second omnibus.

Reflections on Writing The Martian Revolution

25 Tuesday May 2021

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in MeteorMags, writing

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martian revolution, memoir, meteor mags, reflections, writing

art generated by Midjourney.

An updated version of this essay appears in the second edition of Virtually Yours: A Meteor Mags Memoir. The story appears in Meteor Mags: The Second Omnibus.

My recent story about the Martian revolution in 2030 is a fairly quick read at only 16,000 words, but it took six months to finish. I’ll tell you a bit about what happened along the way—both the challenges and successes—but let’s start with the two main lessons I learned.

First: The more moving parts you have, the longer it takes to assemble the machine. When plotting a story with two or three characters in a limited setting, you have fewer things to keep track of. Seven years ago, I used to crank out first drafts over a weekend, from 5,000 to 15,000 words long. They took a lot longer than that to revise, but most of the first drafts went quickly.

Those were simpler times in The Adventures of Meteor Mags and Patches. Episodes had only three to six main characters in only one or two settings. Plus, I was free to make up things as I went along, because so much of the “universe” was unexplored, and I could invent unresolved plot threads on the fly to set up stories I wanted to tell in the future.

As the series progressed, it encompassed many more characters and settings, and those dangling plot threads needed woven into the fabric of everything we already knew about Mags’ life and her solar system. When writing about any event or character, I needed to bring my internal continuity editor on board to make sure I hadn’t contradicted any previous facts in the more than 300,000 words of established history.

Plus, I chose more ambitious settings as I went along. I started with what you might call “stock footage” for the early stories: things I’d seen in movies and comics that I basically stole or used as blueprints. But after boiling those stolen bits in my own kettle of ideas for a few years, they became a stew with a flavor all its own.

As a result, I sometimes needed to step back from writing the story and return to planning—which leads me to the next lesson. The suggestions I’ve given other writers for years once again proved their usefulness. Finding renewed success with so many of my basic methods reinforced my confidence in publishing them for a wider audience.

In My Life as an Armadillo, my recent book about writing and workshopping, I assert that writer’s block is a myth, because you can always write something—and I give suggestions about the fundamental, foundational pieces of writing you can do behind the scenes to overcome any feeling of being stuck.

I needed to take my own advice a bunch of times for The Martian Revolution. I reached points in the narrative where I realized I had not fully developed my own understanding of a setting or character. I needed to step back and write about those things “off the record”, behind the scenes. That empowered me to come back to the main narrative and write through several scenes and character-driven moments from a deeper understanding and keep moving forward.

Not that I wrote it all in order, from start to finish. Instead, I started from a series of scene synopses built from several thousand words of notes I’d compiled while writing earlier stories that led up to these events. From the scene summaries, I picked whichever I felt most emotionally drawn to when it was time to write.

The challenge of that approach is that you end up whittling down the unwritten scenes to the ones you feel the least emotionally involved with. But that helped me discover, as it has in the past, what it would take to get me emotionally involved in those scenes. After all, if I am not captivated by a scene as the writer, what hope is there of involving any readers?

To get to the emotional core of some things, I did a ton of exploratory writing and description of characters—not just physical descriptions, but about their true motivations, their likes, dislikes, strengths, flaws, histories, relationships with and feelings toward each other, even things that remain unspoken in the narrative but formed a subtext for my own understanding of these characters.

All of that takes time, and no one really gives you credit for doing it as a writer, just like no one gives you credit for studying an instrument for years and practicing for untold hours after giving a great concert performance.

But it wasn’t like I spent every day of six months working on one story. I published the previous collection (The Singing Spell) in October 2020, but then I needed to move at the end of January and didn’t have a place lined up. So, I packed all the stuff that would fit into a rented 10×10 U-Haul truck, threw out everything else, and drove to another city a couple hours away. I hoped for the best, but total disaster was also a possibility.

The resultant upheaval of my life made it difficult to focus on my story, so I decided not to worry about it. I found solace in writing about something every day. During my week in a hotel, I used my mini-tablet and wireless keyboard to type thousands of words of ideas for the next couple of episodes. During the subsequent saga of three weeks with no Internet in my new place, I revised and edited the collection of essays about writing and workshopping that became the book I published in March 2021. Sometimes I just wrote letters to friends to gather my thoughts.

Plus, my neglected blog needed a shot in the arm, and I had a million things to do to get my new life started and reconnect with my clients. In the meantime, I let The Martian Revolution simmer on the back burner of my mind, and every now and then I felt inspired to make more notes about it or write a scene. Those notes and the extra time proved helpful when I got around to finishing the first draft in mid-March 2021.

I never saw this as being “blocked” as a writer. It was more of a question about where to direct my writing and editing energies on any particular day during a series of life challenges that disrupted my groove. It helped that I had multiple ongoing projects to choose from, some of which were more analytical, some of which were more creative and free-flowing, and all of which were in various stages of development from brainstorming to hammering out a final draft.

Maybe that is the third lesson. I often meet writers who are struggling with a single work, and they feel disheartened when they run into obstacles in their life or with the story itself that prevent them from making progress. But if you have a few irons in the fire at the same time, you can usually find one that strikes your fancy on any given day. Not everything in the universe depends on your finishing your current novel or short story when you have a few of them to tinker with at once. Having options gives you freedom, and having options you truly care about means you can always find something to write.

The Secret Origin of Donny

23 Monday Nov 2020

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in MeteorMags

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donny, jimmy, memoir, meteor mags, Ypsilanti

An updated version of this essay appears in the second edition of Virtually Yours: A Meteor Mags Memoir.

One of my favorite supporting characters to write in my fiction series is Donny. He’s uncouth, rough around the edges, blue collar, likes to fight, and sometimes says off-the-cuff, offensive things despite generally having a good heart. He’s a fun character when I need comedic relief, and he’s almost always played for laughs. Occasionally, he says something really wrong, learns a lesson from it, and grows as a person.

But Donny wasn’t cut from whole cloth. I spun him out of fond memories about a real-life Donny. Though I lost touch with the real Donny decades ago, I think he would be happy that his fictional namesake is a bad-ass musician and a valued crew member with hilarious scenes on the rock-and-roll adventure of a lifetime.

The fictional Donny combines the real Donny and his cousin Jimmy. I met Donny and Jimmy around 1998 in Ypsilanti, Michigan. I was twenty-four and had my own apartment in a five-unit building on the edge of town where rent was lower compared to living near the college. Donny and Jimmy were fourteen, and I met them because Donny used to hang out with the even younger kids who lived next door: Dennison (literally the son of Dennis) and his little brother Jack. These kids were always playing in the yard and riding bikes up and down the street—as kids do—and I was often in my yard working on some visual art project that involved messy painting, or just playing guitar in the sunshine.

Kids are curious about that kind of stuff and ride by to check it out, so I got to know them. Then they found out I had a pet python who ate mice, and they wanted to see that, so I ended up spending a lot of time entertaining the neighborhood boys. My embarrassingly simple apartment was, to them, some kind of treehouse or clubhouse with a wildlife documentary, an art exhibit, and a killer soundtrack. And why not? At age forty-seven, I’ve accepted that part of my brain will always be fourteen and see my living spaces as exactly that.

To be fair, they entertained me, too. Donny and Jimmy were hilarious! They had the kind of insane tales of reckless adventure, injury, and embarrassment that working-class midwestern boys thrive on. I should know, since I was one and probably, at heart, will always be. But it wasn’t just stories and jokes. After Donny and Jimmy had dropped by a few times, they invited me and my girlfriend to meet their family in the trailer park down the road and hang out for an evening.

My girlfriend—who had endured a couple surprise visits from Donny and Jimmy, rolled with the situation, and found them as hilarious as I did—was beyond awesome and handled the evening with grace and aplomb. She dressed up extra cute for that night and was a hit with the girls and wives there. After a tour of the trailer, which was basically some rooms and a hallway, we ended up drinking cheap American lager and playing cards with the adults and teens all night long. It was a chain-smoking, midwestern good time, and I don’t think either of us will ever forget it.

Somehow, Donny and Jimmy—at age fourteen—acquired a piece-of-shit Datsun that they took on wild rides through the nearby fields. They would come over to my place after their hell rides and tell me Datsun stories. They were trying to learn to power shift it, because the clutch was broken. And what fourteen-year-old has money to replace a clutch?

That fucking Datsun. We laughed so hard about it.

One day, Donny came over with this idea to write a song about the Datsun. All the kids knew I played guitar, so he brought lyrics. I will never forget them. “Datsun. It’s a good car. It’s a fast car. DATSUN! DATSUN!”

That was it! I threw together some riffs and recorded it on my old cassette-based Tascam four-track. We did another song which was something like Donny’s imaginary wrestling theme song: Daemonic Don. He pronounced it “Die-monic Don”, and that cracked me up. You’ll find a nod to that in the Meteor Mags story Old Enough. I assembled some distorted, drop-D riffs. It came out surprisingly well, and Donny loved it.

In 1999, I moved from Ypsi to San Diego. For a little while, I tried to keep in touch with the kids by sending them postcards. I’ve long since lost their addresses and can’t recall their last names, if I ever knew them at all.

But a few years ago, when I needed a name for a supporting character, I remembered Daemonic Don and his cousin Jimmy, and I thought it would be fun to channel my memories of those two teenage hellraisers into that character. They also inform more than a little bit about the adolescent character, Tarzi. The way those characters’ dialogues bounce back and forth with their older but equally reckless and so-called “auntie” Mags has a lot to do with my imagining how Donny and Jimmy would chat with me as their older guy neighbor—a role that ended up being somewhere between an adopted big brother and an uncle.

I think I filled a role in their lives because I was into all kinds of art and music, and so obviously not like their parents. They felt comfortable just being themselves, asking awkward questions about adult life, or making off-color jokes. In that sense, it wasn’t all that different from hanging out with the people I was in bands with or worked blue-collar jobs with at the time. I think the boys liked that I talked to them in the same no-bullshit style as I did with my friends. I know I always appreciated that in adults when I was a teenager. At that age, you want to be talked to, not talked down to.

Even if you are stripping the gears out of your Datsun by trying to power shift.

It’s a good car. It’s a fast car. Datsun.

Anyway, I doubt I will ever hear from Donny and Jimmy again, but I like to think they’d enjoy knowing they inspired one of my favorite supporting characters and might even enjoy reading his adventures. Hell, if those two were here right now, they’d probably be pressuring me to plug in my baritone guitar and write a new theme song.

And I would do it.

Reflections on Writing The Crystal Core

22 Saturday Aug 2020

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in MeteorMags, writing

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crystal core, memoir, meteor mags, reflections, writing

An updated version of this essay appears in the second edition of Virtually Yours: A Meteor Mags Memoir.

Some of Mags’ adventures began as basic plot ideas, some grew out of an idea for a scene or a piece of dialogue, and some started as a concept about an object or situation I thought it would be fun to write about. The Crystal Core is an example of all three of these possibilities combined.

The plot inspiration goes back to The Battle of Vesta 4, where I realized I had given my pirate crew a too-powerful object: the multidimensional “triglyph”. If I had included the triglyph in that story, the conflict would have been far too easy for the crew to overcome. Rather than address the situation, I decided to ignore it for a while and come back to it later—hopefully with a plausible explanation. Along the way, I wrote 1,000 words of notes on possible narrative paths to take with the triglyph.

While writing Small Flowers, I planted the seeds for the triglyph’s return. Plutonian questioned Mags about why she didn’t use it, and she revealed she had forgotten about it. The epilogue ended on a minor cliffhanger. Mags discovered the triglyph was missing from her armory where she placed it at the end of The Lost Crew of the Volya IX. By then, I’d reworked my original notes into an idea to use the triglyph to terraform Titan.

But as I mentioned in my reflections about Small Flowers, I watched a ton of documentaries that influenced that story and the shorter pieces published with it. I’ve been reading about space, stars, and black holes since I was in third or fourth grade, but I don’t recall learning about the diamond cores of white dwarf stars until early 2020. My mind was blown by the idea that these huge diamonds are burning in outer space, but I didn’t know what to do with that concept. So, I asked a friend what she would do with a huge crystal from space.

She said, “Build a radio.”

That was the moment my plot ideas and my “high concept” intersected, and I knew I needed to write that story. I started cranking out more notes and scenes around the concept, but I was confused by some aspects of crystal radios.

Fortunately, a member of my writers’ workshop (the illustrious Jeff Duntemann) is a ham-radio enthusiast, so I called him. He cleared up my misconceptions, enlightened me about a few missing pieces of the puzzle, and showed me where I needed to patch up the science to achieve some minimum standard of plausibility.

This is one of the best things about having writers, artists, and musicians as friends. I can call them unexpectedly and, without much preamble or small talk, say crazy things such as, “Can you help me build a giant crystal radio from a star core?” That’s how I end up having intriguing and educational conversations for an hour or more about things most people never think about.

The Crystal Core became a unique episode in Mags’ adventures. It has long passages of narration about terraforming Titan and building the giant space radio, scenes where I flexed my prose muscles to see if I could write about science but keep it poetic, beautiful, and interesting. Those scenes alternate with discussions that focus on dialogue and character interaction.

But I wanted to do something even weirder with the story: use multiple narrators. I wanted to get inside the characters’ streams of consciousness when they encountered the new rulers of Titan and got their minds messed with, telepathically.

I’ve read a ton of science-fiction prose and comic books that did similar things, but I sometimes find them difficult to follow. I like challenging narrative techniques in prose and film and comics, but I don’t like it when I feel the author is wanking instead of clearly telling a story in the most effective way possible. As I’ve written before in essays on narrators and points of view, the choice to get creative with narrators or structure needs to be more than a demonstration of how clever the author is. I’m not impressed by being incomprehensible. I’m impressed when the choice of a narrator or structure is perfect because any other choice would not tell the story as effectively.

You can judge for yourself how well I lived up to my own standard. Sometimes my reach exceeds my grasp, and that’s a normal part of growing and improving as a writer. Much of my writing in Mags’ adventures is a journey toward being able to live up to my own expectations about what makes a good story, or what makes beautiful prose, or what is entertaining to read. I feel I get closer to my ideals as the series progresses and, like most writers, I’m sometimes frustrated that I didn’t quite have the “chops” to do justice to some of my earliest stories. But with each story, I work on improving everything from descriptive language to comedic timing, from plotting to character development, and the myriad other things that make up a great story.

The Crystal Core continues a trend that began in the opening scene of Blind Alley Blues, which is a diary entry from Mags. In Small Flowers, I incorporated the idea that Mags writes letters to her somewhat-deceased great-gramma, which gives Mags more opportunities to narrate events in her unique voice. These letters have often been “behind the scenes” projects that never saw print. I wrote a good letter for Voyage of the Calico Tigress, but it didn’t quite fit the overall structure, so I cut it from the final version. With Small Flowers, I tried to weave the letters into the story in integral ways, and The Last Patches Story completely hands over the narrative reins to Mags so she can tell an imaginary bedtime tale about Patches. (One of my original ideas for that story involved using Patches as a first-person narrator, but I didn’t care for how that played out.)

With The Crystal Core, I wanted to extend the boundaries of what was possible with using other members of the pirate crew as narrators, too. Other than Hang My Body on the Pier, which featured excerpts from Great-Gramma’s memoirs, Crystal Core is the first story where anyone but Mags gets a shot at narrating. Dr. Plutonian narrates a scene and, like the scene of Mags’ narration that follows it, it takes place while the telepathic octopuses are disassembling his mind. I set myself the challenge of showing this confusing state of mind while making it absolutely clear to the reader who was talking, what was happening, and why.

I feel like it worked, and initial feedback told me it worked, so I considered why it worked. The text contains details that help, such as Mags’ straight-up telling the readers exactly what she thinks is happening to her mind. But in terms of remaining true to a character’s unique voice when slipping into first-person internal monologue, I think the key to success was the amount of time I have spent living in these characters’ heads for more than half a decade now.

They might have started out as comic-book caricatures, but over the years these characters have become more complex and real people to me. I suspect any writer who spends a serious amount of time on long-form stories will tell you the same thing. When you, as an author, share and invest so much of your life and your thoughts and your feelings with your characters, they undergo what I think of as the Pinocchio Effect. At some magical point or phase in the journey, the characters stop being puppets on your strings and become real to you. They take on a life of their own. They place demands on you. They help you understand yourself in relation to them. You know they are mere fictions, but like the golem of Jewish mythology or the monster of Dr. Frankenstein, they become imbued with their own lifeforce, their own desires, their own path in this world.

I’m lucky, compared to some novelists. Many novelists go through the pain of creating and bringing to life a set of characters that will never be seen again after the novel’s final page. But because I am writing an open-ended, ongoing series with roots that stretch for hundreds of millions of years into the past, and branches that extend beyond the end of our universe, I don’t feel any need to finish working with my characters or close the final page on them. I have all the time in the world to get to know them—or at least, all the time I have remaining on this planet.

By the time I got around to giving Plutonian a scene to narrate, I had spent so many years with him that I felt confident I could write in his voice. He delivered an extended monologue in The Lost Crew of the Volya IX where he told Mags about an event in his past. That was the first scene I ever workshopped, about four years ago now. I love a good monologue, but that’s different from being inside the character’s head, which is what happens in The Crystal Core.

I didn’t know for sure how The Crystal Core would end when I started drafting scenes, but my workshoppers will attest to the fact that I am a big believer in writing the ending before the story is finished. As a writer, I’m not interested in taking a mysterious journey into the unknown by simply starting with the first page of a story and writing until it feels finished. The mysterious journey is the reader’s experience, not the writer’s.

People who write by the seat of their pants often encounter the same problems over and over again: not knowing where they are headed when they are in the middle of the story, and therefore not knowing what scenes or moments of character development matter, or how to advance their plot. They often arrive at unsatisfactory endings, assuming they don’t give up in frustration halfway through—something that’s happened to many writers I know.

My advice? Once you are clear on the characters and their motivations and central conflicts, write an ending! Know where you are going! Writing without knowing how your story ends is like trying to play a game of darts while wearing a blindfold. You might hit the bullseye out of pure chance or luck, but it’s doubtful. If, instead, you draft the ending earlier in the process, then you know what you are aiming for, and you can construct a story that inevitably leads to that conclusion. Yes, the ending might need to be revised by the time you finish the rest of the story, so don’t sweat too many of the little details. A draft of the ending is only there to give yourself the gift of direction and purpose.

For The Crystal Core, I had about half of it drafted before I tackled the ending, but I knew I needed a firm finish to guide me through the middle. I asked myself, “What would be the most logical and consistent ending for a quasi-intelligent and supremely powerful object, especially after it encountered my octopuses?”

The ending is influenced by my love of science-fiction comic books where the fate of the entire universe (or even the multi-verse) is at stake on a daily basis, and it’s a logical development of my push to constantly expand the scope of possibilities within Mags’ adventures. The Crystal Core, like The Last Patches Story, is an attempt to connect the lives of the pirate crew to huge, cosmic-level events.

It was a fun story to write. I enjoyed expanding the boundaries of what I could do with these characters and their universe, connecting the cosmic experience to the personal stories, and seeing how big I could go in fewer than 8,000 words.

My only question is, “What’s next?”

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