The voice of Captain Harold Burns filled the room. His voice, forever immortalized in human history for his fateful first contact with the Rak’Lan, was a gravelly bass, slightly distorted from the attenuation of the radio waves traveling from the orbit of Jupiter. “Earth Control, this is survey ship Mojave Sunrise. You’re not going to believe this, but there’s a space station between Europa and Jupiter.” There was a pause, in which he was obviously talking to his crew. “Are you guys sending the video feed back? Record everything from this point on and beam it home.” Burns cleared his throat, his voice straining to sound more official. “I show our current distance from Earth to be about 4.8 AU or just about 38.5 light minutes. Sound general quarters. I want all off-duty personnel at their stations now.”
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Pete on October 30th 2006 in Writing Samples
The next post is a two-parter that finishes up the human perspective of the Rak’Lan first contact. Enjoy! (It’s a long read.)
As an aside (and as a joke to my wife and my family), I have posted my Amazon wish list in the sidebar. My gift desire(s) should give a keen insight into my character. It should also convince you how hopelessly nerdy I am.
Pete on October 30th 2006 in Random Ramblings
Hi! I’m still here! *waves*
The good news: There will be three complete sections to post this weekend. I have been working my arse off to get some serious, hard-core writing done. Check back Sunday to see them in their full effect.
The bad news: I am going to be slammed with my “real” job over the next week. I’ll be traveling, trying to run a lab remotely, and meeting customers, all of which leave my brain feeling like hammered mush. There will probably not be a whole lot of writing occuring next week.
Thanks for the show of support so far for “Loss.” I can promise you won’t be disappointed with the way things turn out. I’ve shared the entire outline with one lucky reader, and they were flabbergasted at the outcome. I can only hope I can implement it in a fashion that is as cool in written form as it is in my head.
Stay tuned, dear readers!
Pete on October 27th 2006 in Random Ramblings
One of the most interesting aspects of our training was the weekly seminar titled “The Psychology of War.” What it amounted to was a semi-moderated bull session in which teachers, drill instructors, and would-be NCOs participated in a verbal free-for-all, debating topics ranging from current events to exobiology. The seminar was required for all students, but it wasn’t graded. My personal feeling was that it gave the instructors another way of evaluating us outside of classroom instruction and morning combat drills. I also noticed that if any one student remained silent for too long, the moderator for the week would be sure to call on them either to submit an opinion or critique one that had already been given. Continue Reading »
Pete on October 22nd 2006 in Writing Samples
There has been a lot of stuff happening lately.
Perhaps the most important thing is that I have an editor looking at the serialized Loss of Innocence. They want the complete novel (150,000 words) by December first. I think I will use this to correspond with NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and see what I can do to get it done in that time frame. I’m working my arse off to try and finish this thing, so the updates may be few and far between.
Electronic Arts, the makers of BF2142, have announced their intent to have in-game advertising. I think it underhanded that this was announced after they raked in the cash from all the pre-orders, most of which were non-refundable. After the initial community panic that these in-game advertisements would serve banners and billboards from the darkest secrets of our internet history and cookies, the excitement waned a bit when EA clarified their position that no personal data would be collected. You can take that with a grain of salt, I suppose, when you have no way of breaking down the packets that are being sent back to EA master servers. If you see a split billboard advertising Furry videos and Crate and Barrel, don’t say I didn’t warn you. And as an aside, since the elite sales people at Best Buy wouldn’t refund my pre-order money, I can firmly tell you that BF2142 still remains an incomprehensible pile of steaming turds.
I have high hopes for Neverwinter Nights 2, which is coming next week. Surely it will be better than BF2142. I also pre-ordered this title (I know, I know, I’m such a sucker). The preorder allowed me to get their toolset early. I had a great deal of fun making custom modules for the original Neverwinter Nights, but this toolset is an order of magnitude more complicated. Even though all of the structures and graphics are pre-fabricated, the sheer variety of them (and the amount of skull sweat to use the C-analogue scripting language to do truly unique things) is daunting. Constructing modules fills the same creative urge that writing does for me, so I must decline to initiate myself into its cunningly tempting fold until the Rak’Lan are safely defeated.
A Meeting at Corvallis by S.M. Stirling was all that I had hoped it might be. He has a penchant for devious endings (misunderstood as cheating by some readers), and this book is no exception. It is deeply detailed with rich characters that are not easily definable as black or white. Personally, I cannot wait for his next series that is due to be released in November. It would be difficult to review the novel without providing spoilers, so let me just say that if you like alternate history novels, this entire trilogy is worth your while.
Battlestar Galactica: Right back where we started from? Grrr…
Pete on October 22nd 2006 in Random Ramblings
The afternoons were spent in classroom instruction. For four separate periods after lunch, we were instructed in math and science, logistics, small-unit strategy and tactics, weapons systems, logic, game theory, military history, and rudimentary computer programming. I was told that the course we were put through gave us the same knowledge level as a bachelor’s degree, lacking only art, philosophy, and language.
We were expected to plough through nearly two hundred pages of material per night. Not for us was the easy way out of most college students, where we could study Cliff’s notes or the notes we took in class. We were responsible for every piece of information whenever an instructor would demand it of us. Continue Reading »
Pete on October 20th 2006 in Writing Samples
This next section firmly puts the action of the story into the ”R” Rated category. I feel that if you’ve followed it this far, you deserve a word of warning about the content. I’ve put all of this section of the story in the “Read More” tab just to keep it off the front page.
Let me also say that just because I portray a drill Sergeant to the best of my ability based on real-life accounts of modern day and past events, it does not mean that I share or condone the slurs used in the story. This is a work of fiction, and should be treated as such. The words are dialogue (and carefully studied and crafted dialogue, at that). Nothing more, nothing less.
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Pete on October 15th 2006 in Writing Samples
