Tag: Children’s books

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Sisters

Cassidy Byrne-Alli was the first child born on Mars. That had been almost five years ago—Martian years, which made her almost ten in Earth years. Her sister, Oriana, had been born one Martian year later. Other children had been born since Cas as well. Those who were old enough attended the first Martian school—currently just one classroom shared by all ages. That classroom, and the rest of the colony, was deep underground in caves left behind by ancient lava flows. Kids older than four attended Surface Training three times a week.

Shelter: Generation Mars, Book Two

Coming in March

(image: Luis Peres)

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Hellas Planitia

Hellas Planitia is an impact basin in the southern hemisphere of Mars. Impact basin is the term scientists use when they mean “really big crater,” and, as craters go, Hellas is huge. Mars has two of the largest impact basins in the solar system, and Hellas is one of them. The object that struck here, four billion years ago, was big enough to leave a crater 2,300 kilometers across and 7,152 meters deep. The tallest mountains of Earth could sit in the bottom of Hellas and barely peek over the rim.

Four billion years later, the impact of that object turned out to be critical for human existence on Mars.

Shelter: Generation Mars, Book Two

Coming in March

#mars #scifi #childrensbooks

(image: Luis Peres)

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Third book cover reveal

Oye! Just uploaded files to my printer for the third book. Now some back and forth, digital and print, to iron out the kinks before release. If all goes as planned, preorders start February 14 for a March 1 release. Time to reveal the cover!

illustrated by Luis Peres

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Busy busy

The bulk writing, the writing just to get traction and capture the story is long done. Now it’s finesse and fleshing out and filling holes and making consistent: the hard stuff. This is going to take some time.

In the meantime, here’s an outhouse on Mars.

Word count over the past few days: 3796

image: composite using artwork by Luis Peres from the second book and an image from https://www.flickr.com/people/scottkmacleod/

 

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Writing update

Today’s word count: 288

These counts will be very bursty and uneven for a while. Some days will see entirely new sections, with high counts. Others will see glue text, as I bring pieces together and smooth the edges.

(BTW, the images I post with these updates do, in fact, have relevance to whatever I work on that day.)

image: public domain

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Writing update

Today’s word count: -1461

I said changing tooling at this stage would be dangerous.

But I expected this. It’s all part of the Delta-v equation for putting a story together.

That figure reflects the 2063 words removed in redundant sections and the 602 new words I wrote today.

So far, I’m digging Scrivener. Splitting and moving segments around is trivial: exactly what I need as I start bringing sections together into a coherent whole.

image: Richard F. Penn (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Delta_V_Earth_Moon_Mars.png)

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Writing update (changing horses)

Scary stuff today: I am trying out Scrivener (https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview) for the first time.

I’ve always written my books in Word, opening a new file for every scene or thought, then pasting them all together into one document at some point when it felt right. This worked great for the first book (~5000 words), not as great but still ok for the second (~17,000 words), and will likely be terrible for this new one (currently ~21,000 words and growing). The proliferation of files and resulting loose-ends is becoming difficult to manage. Scrivener is a writing tool that is designed to help manage a large writing project. We’ll see.

Why is this scary? Well…

Today’s word count: 0

image: Chuck Dent (http://www.dentranch.com/index45.html)

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Writing update

My use of the word “finished” in the previous post, regarding a bout of research, was inaccurate. The research is never finished.
I got a little further on the writing today, but also realized I need more info on a key topic.
Today’s word count: 1237
image (Apollo era A7L Primary Life Support System): NASA
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Writing update

Just finished a huge bout of research: reading papers and contacting professionals in an effort to make sure the story fits with known science and technology. Today is the first day I’ve actually sat down to just write since my previous update.

Today’s word count: 1154

inflatable airlock image: NASA