Tag: A to Z Challenge

#IWSG: Ulterior Motives

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 27 Comments

Hello, friends, and welcome to this month’s meeting of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group.  If you’re a writer, and if you feel in any way insecure about your writing life, click here to learn more about this amazingly supportive group!

I don’t know about you, but my writing productivity crashed and burned toward the end of March.  Right now, I’m feeling insecure because I’ve done virtually nothing to prepare for this year’s A to Z Challenge.  I’m also feeling insecure because the timeline for publishing Tomorrow News Network, book one, has totally fallen apart.

I have no one to blame but myself.  Wait, no, that’s not true.  The coronavirus deserves a lot of the blame too.  Not all of the blame, but a lot of it.

So here’s my plan.  Even though I’m as ill-prepared for the A to Z Challenge as I could possibly be, I’m doing the challenge anyway.  My theme is the story universe I created for Tomorrow News Network.  Obviously, I have an ulterior motive for doing this.  It’s my way of saying: “Buy my book!”

Except the first book of the Tomorrow News Network series isn’t out yet. It won’t be released until (checks timetable, mutters curse at the coronavirus)—okay, I still have to figure out what my new release date will be.  But it’s coming soon!

I have a second ulterior motive as well.  You see, book one is more or less finished, but I still have to write books two, three, four, five (etc, etc, etc).  So as I tell you all about this fictional universe I’ve created, your feedback, dear reader, will be invaluable as I plan out the rest of the Tomorrow News Network series.

And lastly, my third ulterior motive may be the most important of all, given my current mental state during the coronavirus crisis.  As I said at the beginning of this post, my writing productivity crashed and burned near the end of March, and I’m having a tough time getting back into my creative groove.  I’m hoping that by participating in the A to Z Challenge—and by writing, specifically, about my own story universe—I’ll jumpstart my writing brain.  I guess we’ll have to wait until the end of April to know if that works.

In the meantime, please click here to check out the first Tomorrow News Network: A to Z post.  Today, A is for Alkali Extraction Incorporated, a faceless mega-corporation that’s mining alien planets for their resources.

A to Z Reflections

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 13 Comments

You don’t really understand something until you can explain it to somebody else.  There are lots and lots of quotes out there to that effect, sometimes attributed (or misattributed) to Einstein, sometimes attributed (or misattributed) to other great scientists.  Regardless of where all those quotes really came from, that sentiment has long been the guiding philosophy of this blog.

For this year’s A to Z Challenge, my theme was the scientific search for alien life.  Obviously I’ve written about that topic before, many times over, but I still felt a bit shaky in my knowledge.  So I wanted to dive deep into the science of astrobiology and the closely related field of SETI.  I wanted to double check the things I thought I already knew, and of course I wanted to add to that knowledge.

Writing those 26 blog posts was the final step, the final test. Have I learned this stuff well enough to explain it clearly and concisely?  I suppose only you, dear reader, can be the judge of that. But based on the responses I’ve gotten so far and the conversations I’ve been having with people in the comments, I feel like I must’ve done a decent enough job.

With this year’s A to Z Challenge now behind me, I certainly feel more confident talking about astrobiology and SETI than I did before. More importantly, I feel a whole lot more comfortable incorporating what I’ve learned into my science fiction. After all, I started this blog with one purpose in mind: to force myself to do the kind of research that, in my opinion, a science fiction writer ought to do.

If any of you came away from my A to Z series feeling like you learned something, or even if you just have a newfound sense of wonder for the stars—for all the things that might be out there in the cosmos—I consider that a bonus.  Thank you for reading, and thank you especially to those of you who commented.

On Monday, I’ll be back to my regular blogging schedule.

#IWSG: Alphaburn Out

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 21 Comments

Welcome to the Insecure Writer’s Support Group!  If you’re a writer, and if you feel in any way insecure about your writing life, click here to learn more about this awesome group!

Umm, hi.  This is James’s muse.  My writer is… unavailable for writing today, so I’m just going to take care of writing this post myself.

The good news is that my writer finished the A to Z Challenge. His theme was the scientific search for alien life.  My writer has always been laser-focused on writing science fiction—he’s not interested in writing anything else—so it should be obvious why he wanted to dedicate so much time and effort to this topic.

My role in all this was, of course, to feed my writer inspiration.  But it’s also my job to help my writer manage his time and to give him that vital push to keep going when he needs it.  And getting through those last few letters of the alphabet… my writer needed a lot of help with that.  I had to push him really hard, and I had to make him give everything he’s got.

So now my writer’s kind of burned out.  He’ll probably need a few days off before he gets back to his regular writing routine.  Muses should not do this to their writers on a regular basis, but in this case I’d say it was worth it.  And whenever my writer wakes up from his nap, I’m pretty sure he’d agree with me.

#IWSG: Can You Trust Me?

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 11 Comments

Welcome to the Insecure Writer’s Support Group!  If you’re a writer, and if you feel in any way insecure about your writing life, click here to learn more about this awesome group!

So what am I feeling insecure about this month?  Well, I’m doing the A to Z Challenge.  To be honest, I’m not too worried about finishing it.  I’ve done A to Z before, and this year I feel like I’m well prepared for what’s coming.

But I do feel insecure about the theme I picked: astrobiology, one of the newest and awesome-est branches of science.  But here’s the thing: I’m no astrobiologist. I’m no scientist.  What authority do I have to talk about this stuff?

You see there’s a lot of misinformation out there about the search for alien life.  A lot of the actual science gets misreported in the popular press or coopted as “proof” by U.F.O. conspiracy theorists.  So I really, really, really do not want to spread any of that misinformation around.

Recently, I saw something that kind of surprised me: a bunch of well respected educational channels on YouTube have posted videos admitting their mistakes and promising to do better in the future. This one from Adam Ruins Everything is my favorite.

I don’t have the kind of research team behind me that Adam Ruins Everything has, or that Kurzgesagt has, or that SciShow has.  It’s just me.  I do a lot of reading, and I fact check myself as best I can; but even so, you probably shouldn’t trust everything you read on this blog.

But you can trust this: I love space, and I love science. I think the reality of our universe, as revealed to us by science, is way more interesting than anything our human imaginations might dream up.  And I’m really excited to share all the cool science stuff I’ve learned with you.

At the same time, I’m also eager to keep learning.  So if I make a mistake, or if there’s some important point you think I’ve missed, or some perspective you feel I’m overlooking, I absolutely do want to talk about that in the comments.

And now, I have more A to Z Challenge stuff to work on. In today’s A to Z post, C is for carbon chauvinism.

Sciency Words: A to Z Theme Reveal

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 14 Comments

Hello, Internet friends, and a very special hello to those of you who will, I hope, become new Internet friends!  Today I’m revealing my theme for this year’s A to Z Challenge, and that theme will be Sciency Words.  Specifically, I want to talk about scientific terms related to the search for and study of alien life.

Now before we go any further, I want to make one thing clear: when I talk about the search for alien life, I am not talking about this guy:

No, I’m talking about legitimate scientists doing legitimate scientific research.  No conspiracy theories, no pseudoscience.  The search for alien life is part of a relatively young branch of science that was originally called exobiology and was later renamed astrobiology.

Now some of you may be thinking there’s a problem.  As American biologist and paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson said in 1966, “[…] this ‘science’ has yet to demonstrate that its subject matter exists!”  That’s not an unfair criticism.  We have yet to discover a single alien organism for astrobiologists to study.  Not one.  And as of yet, we have no credible evidence that there are any alien organisms out there to study at all.

Yet astrobiologists already have a lot of work to do trying to answer what might be called preliminary questions.  Questions like:

  • Where might alien life be hiding?
  • What should we be doing to find it?
  • How will we know we’ve found it, assuming we ever do?

That last question may be the toughest of all. At the moment, we only know about life here on Earth.  Aliens might turn out to be so biochemically dissimilar from us that we might not even recognize them as alive!

So starting on April 1st, I hope you’ll join me on this adventure into space.  Hopefully we’ll all learn something about the universe, and about the kinds of life that might be living in it. Or at least I hope we can all expand our scientific vocabularies together!

P.S.: I did a lot of writing for this ahead of time, so fingers crossed that astrobiologists do not announce the discovery of alien life before the end of April.  If they do, it’s going to be a nightmare for me to rewrite all this stuff!