Time traveling journalist Talie Tappler is usually the one interviewing people, but today she’s the one being interviewed.  The blog Reality Skimming does a regular feature called “Continuing Characters” where they interview a recurring character from a fantasy or science fiction series.  They usually ask the author a few questions too.

Talie is the main character in my Tomorrow News Network series.  Each month, I’ll be publishing a new short story about her and her adventures.  The first story, “The Medusa Effect,” is already up.  The next will be published Monday, February 6^th.

See what Talie has to say for herself at Reality Skimming by clicking here.

You can also check out Talie’s adventures with the Tomorrow News Network by clicking here.

The first story in my Tomorrow News Network series is set on a moon orbiting the planet 55 Cancri f, which the characters refer to as “Cancriph.”  Cancriph is a real planet, one of the first discovered in the habitable zone of any star.  Since Cancriph is a gas giant, not a rocky world like Earth, it cannot support life as we know it, but there is no reason to believe it doesn’t have habitable moons like the one in my story.

Now astronomers think they’ve learned enough about exoplanets (planets outside our Solar System) to start looking for exomoons.  Using data already obtained by the Kepler Space Telescope, a team of researchers hopes to find subtle differences in the orbits of known exoplanets which might be caused by their accompanying moons.

Make no mistake: this is going to be painstaking work.  It’s hard enough to find exoplanets, even gas giants like Cancriph; finding their tiny moons is next to impossible.  But our planet detecting techniques have improved over the years.  Just recently, scientists announced the discovery of exoplanets smaller than Earth and the possible discovery of an exoplanet with Saturn-like rings.  With time and practice, I’m sure they’ll be able to find moons too.

And when they do, I hope someone takes a good, long look at the second moon of Cancriph before we send people there.

For more information on the search for exomoons, click here.

To read “The Medusa Effect,” set on Cancriph’s second moon, click here.

Today is a big day for me.  I’ve posted the first story for The Tomorrow News Network, a series of short stories featuring Talie Tappler, a time traveling journalist.  I’m planning to write nine more stories this year, publishing one a month until October.  I suspect I’ll be very busy from now until November.

The first story is about a boy living on a colony at the frontier of space.  He’s seen Talie Tappler’s reports before and knows the kind of story she covers.  Her arrival cannot be good news.  If he could just get a little information out of her, maybe he could save the colony, but as a journalist Talie only reports the news, she must not interfere and must not change it.  Click here to read the story FOR FREE.

Also today, I have the honor of being a guest blogger at Clarion Blog, where I wrote a short piece on how my past experience with acting and film production helped with my writing.  Clarion Blog is associated with the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, an organization to help teach new speculative fiction writers.  The blog is a great resource for aspiring authors like myself, and I often take advantage of the information they provide.  Click here to read my article.

2012 is off to a great start, and you can expect to hear much more from me about The Tomorrow News Network, but I’ll keep posting on this blog too about various sciency and science fictiony things.  On Wednesday, it’ll be dinosaurs.  Do you think you’re smarter than them?

Doctor Who does it, it’s happened a bunch of times on Star Trek, and my new Tomorrow News Network series is all about it.  But is time travel really possible?  I don’t know.  I’ve never done it myself, and most likely neither have you (if you have, please leave a comment and explain).  Many physicists say it’s impossible.  Many other physicists disagree.

There are two big ideas in modern physics, both of them well beyond our everyday experience.  One is Relativity, which deals with very large things like stars and galaxies and very fast things like the speed of light.  The other is Quantum Mechanics, which deals with very small things like atoms and subatomic particles.  Both defy common sense, including our common sense understanding of time.

Relativity tells us that as we approach the speed of light or enter the enormous gravity of something like a black hole, time stretches.  A minute from our perspective could be a day, a year, or even a century to the rest of the universe.  Even when you’re driving down the highway, time moves at a different rate for you than for someone standing still; the difference is just too small to notice.  Click here for a video on how Relativity makes time travel work.

In Quantum Mechanics, time is at best irrelevant.  Subatomic particles spend their lives doing all kinds of crazy things, existing in multiple places at once, popping into and out of existence for no apparent reason, and entangling with each other so they can do even weirder stuff.  Sometimes when particles interact, a few of them appear to turn around and move backwards in time.

This is a diagram of subatomic particles interacting.  Don’t panic, you don’t have to understand it.  I only want to point out two things.  Notice the line across the bottom marked t, which represents the forward motion of time.  Now notice which way the two arrows I’ve circled are pointing.  Scientists have other ways to explain this kind of interaction without time travel, but for some reason they seem to find this way easiest.

I am not a scientist.  I am a science enthusiast and sometimes a science journalist.  What I have learned from all my research is that time is flexible, both on the large scale of Relativity and the small scale of Quantum Mechanics.  If time is flexible, it’s easy to believe that someday someone like Dr. Who, Mr. Spock, or Talie Tappler will find a way to manipulate it.  Maybe they already have.

Science fiction nerds like me have a lot to be excited about in the new year.  Here’s a short list.

• Filming begins on the next Star Trek movie, and I’m sure we’ll hear lots of juicy rumors before its release in 2013.
• The Star Wars movies are returning to theatres, this time in 3D.  The Phantom Menace comes out in February.

• The movie adaptation of The Hunger Games comes out in March.  It looks like one of those rare and exciting cases where Hollywood decided to stick to the original book as much as possible.

• Ridley Scott’s Prometheus comes out in June, and looking at the trailer it seems like a prequel to Alien.

• Doctor Who, Series 7 comes out in the fall.  Matt Smith will continue to play the Eleventh Doctor, and Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill (Amy and Rory) will make an appearance, but it is not yet clear if they will be the Doctor’s companions through the full series.

And of course, starting January 9^th you’ll be able to read my new short story series, The Tomorrow News Network (click here to visit the website).  Each month, I will post a new story featuring time traveler and journalist Talie Tappler and her cyborg cameraman, Mr. Cognis.  I hope you’ll have as much fun reading about their adventures as I’ve had writing them.

Everybody have a safe and happy 2012.  May the Force be with you, live long and prosper, etc, etc…