Category: About Writing

4, About the Lodestar Series

Representing ‘The Lodestar’ by Rita de Heer
an image sourced from light shining on stainless steel

Although I began writing this series well before the others, the Lodestar featuring was always the alien spaceship. The people making Souzadelay Island their country had no inkling of the Lodestar’s reality. They saw it as a peculiar stationary star that sometimes grew bigger, as when it came nearer to Earth, and sometimes shrank.

At the end of the Back to Earth series, the alien spaceship-in-a-doughnut situation resolved itself the hard way. It was Kosi Lionhair’s uploaded mind, you may recall, who in a moment of boredom, wedged the alien spaceship in the center of the Ark Ship’s torus.

When the amalgamation touched the Earth’s atmosphere, the torus tore loose. Parts of it burned, parts fell to Earth. Jeb and some of her people landed on Aerk Island in the Australia Archipelago where they then lived for millennia, watched over by Kosi in the starship that, with time and forgetting, became known as the Lodestar.

Remember that this is all imaginary, Space Opera ‘science’? Though Earth is, of course, a real planet!

The series begins with the SkinGifters, an unfortunate people who had to make more and greater sacrifices than seem possible for them to continue to exist.

I: Ahni SkinGifter is the main character, as well as the title of her story.

1.-a-dark-fate-1Download

3, Half Shaman in Space

Some good scenes in this, some nasty events, and all the sometimes hard-to-understand stuff in between where I tried to explain what life was like in the alien starship, also known as the “Octahedron”. If you’ve been reading along, you’ll have met this starship in Earth Girl, a mysterious object hanging low in the sky.

In this installment of what was to have finalized the trilogy, Jeb the half shaman meets Kosi Lionhair, the once-upon-a-time Earth Girl. Jeb and her people are in survival mode. As the human ‘face’ of the starship’s bored alien AI, Kosi causes Jeb and her people plenty of grief in the name of fun. A dramatic mix.

What follows is a taster … I’m having to learn a few more moves in the Compile section of Scrivener

Chapter 1: Entry
I’m aware. I’m awake. My breathing sounds loud. The space I’m in sounds big, so I’m not in the shuttle. I fall … but only a short distance. My legs seem too long.

I feel around me. Carpet or something under me, my hands and my thighs. I don’t hear Mongoose breathing beside me. I don’t feel him.

Snap! I open my eyes. Mongoose isn’t beside me!

I’m wearing a thin white tunic. Mongoose isn’t beside me!

I kneel up. Stand. I’m in a group of animals, still-as-statues, sitting or standing or frozen in a leap. Each on its own brown carpet square on a raised area in a huge white hall. What is this place? Where’s Mongoose?

Tiled white walls. White ceiling. White floor below the … carpeted podium? Among the statues I see animals I know. There’s a meerkat. A puma. A bear. A woodchuck. An orangutan. They are all life-sized.

No. They are all the size of human beings! There’s a thylacine with a front paw that is a different brown to the other. In the square next to the place where I was, is a mongoose. Sweat springs from me, is soaked up only where the skimpy tunic touches me. Everywhere else it rolls down me. I’m clammy in seconds. My heart hammers in my chest.

To be continued

Installment 2

Dryad after the Clear-felling, mixed media by Rita de Heer

This gig … of dumping 20 years worth of my work online … is turning out to be harder than I thought it could be. I had real trouble today just going to a File, saving it as a pdf, then inserting it here. This morning I first trapped myself thinking up a good title for this project. “A Broken Universe” sums it up quite nicely, I decided, since I could never get the timeline to gel.

I spent a couple of hours chasing through my Documents File for the long version of the Half Shaman in Space for Installment 3. As if it matters whether I post long or short, or anything in the order of the events, or anything.

But it does. There seem to be a few readers out there. Installment One did quite well.

Could only find a very short version. And I edited a couple of Files. And I did Delete a few odds and ends. Not a wasted day. Finally found what I was looking for in the Trash. Did retrieve it.

But anyway … installment two of the whole story is Half Shaman. One of the two published volumes, as it happens. Go to this Page for the details. https://wordpress.com/page/ritadeheer385131918.blog/1007

‘Ideas Debt’

Ideas shining like stars and dulling past their use-by-date
mixed media, Rita de Heer

I’ve been reading quite a bit about the ‘ideas debt’ (Jessica Abel) that many creatives allow themselves to be burdened with. Me included. And what to do about it as new creativity is slowed, and even stopped, while you figure out what to do with all this material that owns you, and what you owe it.

A form of emotional blackmail that you lay over yourself, I’ve started to think. Include here the people who know and love you, who know how much you invested in your project. There’s a chorus. But? But?

In my case this is where I spent twenty years learning to write novels, and then writing about a dozen interlocking science fantasy novels, most set in the same universe if not time span. Only one, maybe two, have been published. I see that I’ve left them behind so far already, that I don’t even recall whether I published that second one or not? Tch tch.

The recent two year gulf, gap, hiatus in my life put paid to any more work in that arena. I have no energy for finishing them … most are in the final chapters, or as far as beta drafts. The getting ready for marketing, and the marketing itself … exhausting.

I wonder if I have enough energy to turn each one into a pdf and post it as a blog installment, for example? Prefaced one and all with the same little letting-go story?

Watch this space.

Anxiety Rears its Head

David Gangur’s Stormy Sunset

So I read an article about World War III, how it’s already begun. I respect Stan Grant, the author, for his integrity so don’t find the content suspicious. Link included below for your interest. But the content of this article just aggregates with all the other anxiety-inducing news I’ve read since the Northern NSW floods.

I have an anxiety disorder and owe it to myself to not to step back onto the anxiety/immune system problems/inflammation treadmill after all the work I’ve done to get off it. I realize that to dampen down my increasing agitation, I need to back off from negative social media sensationalizing world problems.

I’m already doing what I can in relation to the primary challenge of our times–extreme climate change– and can’t do anything about the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. From this point on, I won’t be writing any letters to politicians, and I won’t be re-posting frightening, Earth-shattering scenarios.

I will be scrolling past all organizations asking for donations. I have my charities and will stick by them. I may post about real-world efforts towards mitigation, when and where I find them. I will continue to blog about science, art, story telling and story making, music and all the other things that tickle my fancy.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-04-10/russia-invasion-ukraine-rumblings-world-war-three-decades-ago/100977334?utm_source=abc_news_web&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_campaign=abc_news_web&utm_content=link

Tech Problems, xyz

Digital Illustration of a Cyborg Neck: A puzzle, because I am confused

Having internet problems meant no posts, again. All my best intentions went astray. Over here, on the east coast of Australia, we are in a La Nina weather pattern. Meaning that in Peru and Chile, people are suffering drought. In between the odd sunny day we had rain, wind, storms, more rain. Flash floods. River floods. Landslides. Road closures. Communication outages. Mobile phone towers down.

You get the picture.

My confusion is about the reason why I had a personal communication outage for two weeks longer than anyone else living in my patch. I’ve taken the modem off the power. Put it back on. Reset it.

I’ve read every Help page and FAQ on my provider’s website … I could do that by Hot Spotting my laptop to my mobile. I discovered that possibly the laptop is having battery problems but that shouldn’t affect my internet connection, what do you think?

I’d do the Hot Spot thing 24/7 and cancel my ISP contract if I had the same level of service. But I don’t. An ISP connection gives me the ability to write this blog and marshal imagery to my fingertips. Without it I can only read blogs.

The Hot Spot gives me wide-ranging shallow paddling. An ISP connection gives me the ability to dive deep into the virtual surf, through the wave and come out the other side where there are new things to discover.

Yeah. I missed my connection to the world.

For some inexplicable reason, when I reset the modem again this morning, the little light for the internet flashed, then steadied, and I suddenly have connection? Huh? Why didn’t it work the first or second time I did it?

Well, better not look a gift-horse in the mouth …