Working Title – Sunward

Posted on 2020-01-09 by arjaybe


My 2019 novel had the working title – The Prime. I ended up publishing it with that title unchanged. Last Fall I formatted it, recorded it and made it available for purchase. Then I took a break and had a nice rest. Now I’ve picked up my pen again and begun writing my 2020 novel with the working title – Sunward. It’s a sequel to The Prime and will be the completion of The Plainsrunner trilogy.

Back on my exercise ball as I write first thing in the morning, it feels pretty good. It’s always a concern when I get back to it. Will it still be there? Will the words still come? I’m happy to report, so far, so good. I gave myself a break, easing into it with 500 words a day. I’ll push it up to 750 next week. That seems to be my natural level.

The sun is shining this morning. We’ve had an unusually warm winter so far. Also, the weather has been bypassing us, dumping snow on areas north of us while leaving us bare and brown. The forecast calls for a cold snap next week. I don’t feel prepared for that.

rjb

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Which Hand is the Big Hand?

Posted on 2020-01-03 by arjaybe

“Clock with one hand” by Rick Payette is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0


I don’t know about you, but when I was learning how to tell time, it didn’t help me to be told about the big hand and the little hand. I didn’t know what they meant. When they said the big hand was on the 10 and the little hand was on the 2, did they mean it was ten after ten, or ten to two? (Let’s not even talk about the fact that they weren’t really “on” those numbers anyway, merely close to them.) Was the big hand the long one or the wide one? Was the little hand the short one or the thin one? This wasn’t helped by the fact that, on the kitchen clock in our home, the total size of the hour hand and the minute hand appeared to be roughly the same. That is, the short, wide one and the long, narrow one appeared to cover the same area, making them the same size. Now I really didn’t know what to think.

I’m still glad I learned on an analog clock, though. The shape of it and the positions of the hands lent themselves to concrete visualizations of the time of day and where in the hour one was. I think it had a strong effect on the form taken by my temporo-spatial synesthesia, as I explain in that post. There may have been some confusion in the beginning, but it worked out in the end.

When I was teaching my son how to tell time, though, I made sure to refer to the hands as “long” and “short,” to save him the confusion.

rjb

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Quantum Shorts – Flash Fiction

Posted on 2019-12-22 by arjaybe

Cover design and layout by N. Syafiqah

FREE BOOK

Review – Quantum Shorts

Available at the Quantum Shorts website.

No, this is not about indeterminate undies. Nor is it about exercise wear in superposition. You’re entangled in one of my mini reviews about a book of super short stories — Quantum Shorts. These stories are selected from the short lists of submissions to a writing challenge from 2013 to 2017. There are 37 stories by 32 authors who submitted their work to the international Quantum Shorts story competition. This competition is still active. On December 10, 2019 they announced a new call for flash fiction — in this case defined as being 1,000 words or less. The other constraints are that the stories must be inspired by quantum physics and must contain the phrase, “things used to be so simple.” Even if you don’t want to submit a story yourself, you can still download and read this free book. It’s available in PDF, ePub and MOBI formats, so you can read it on almost any device, and it’s released with a Creative Commons license, so it’s free to read and share.

See boring copyright stuff below.

Among these quick stories you will find Unrequited Signals by Tara Abrishami, where the lovers are not merely star-crossed, they’re multiverse-crossed.

Tara Abrishami is a mathematician who sometimes moonlights as a writer. When she’s not writing stories or solving math problems, she enjoys backpacking, cooking vegan food, going on road trips with her crazy friends, and playing with her two cats and her dog.

And Then There Was a Sun by Rebecca Baron, where the protagonist learns that life is meaningful even if it is nothing but particles.

Rebecca Baron, when she entered Quantum Shorts in 2013, described herself as a quirky, opinionated high school student in California who enjoys reading, soccer, and confusing her class with presentations on uncertainty and the delayed-choice experiment. Writing and physics are her passions, so this contest was perfect for her.

Dhatfield CC-BY-SA

And The Cat in the Box by Rebecca Montange, where we see Schrodinger’s famous thought experiment from the point of view of the cat, who’s not impressed.

Rebecca Montange entered the Quantum Shorts flash fiction competition in 2013.

These are tasty little morsels. Stories that can be ingested in a few small bites. Download Quantum Shorts and keep it handy for when you’ve only got a few minutes for a quick read. On the other hand, if you’ve got more time, take a handful.

Edit: If you prefer to listen to your shorts, you’ll find a growing list of recordings on the Audio page.

rjb

Boring copyright stuff.

The copyright holder is the Centre for Quantum Technologies, National University of Singapore, 2019. Their CC license is CC-BY-NC-ND (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives), so you can read it and pass it on, but you can’t take money for it and you can’t make significant changes to it before passing it on.

End boring copyright stuff.

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