Cometary Tales Blog,Craft Success as an author?

Success as an author?

Depends what you mean by “success”

One of my writing groups (the one that isn’t a critique circle) has set a blog-post prompt of ā€œHow do you measure success as an author?ā€
We’re supposed to introspect, come up with wise words to inspire and console others. I don’t know about y’all, but the past two years have been a low-rising roller coaster, beginning with a brief burst of elation that my first book (my ā€œdebutā€ if you want to get precious about it) was coming out.

WIte, red, and blue award ribbons from a fair

Only then we had a little bit of a pandemic to deal with.

And now it’s two years later.

All That Was Asked has never had a book-launch party (it slightly predates online launch parties), a signing session, a reading at a convention—none of those things. Not uncoincidentally, it hasn’t made much dough for me or for my publisher. At least the print copies are mostly print-on-demand, so no one’s staring at a warehouse full of unsold copies and calling a shredding company.

But is selling a ton of books a success? To stay sane in this business, I think you have to measure success more on the basis of what you are doing than what you have done. If you’re making oodles of money in the publishing industry, that’s mostly a matter of luck, so is that success? I’d call it good fortune. It’s very much a lottery. I’ve read absolutely stunning work in critique circles, listened to mind-blowing readings by little-known writers, and I’ve even had people tell me after a reading ā€œwow, that was awesome!ā€

What makes sense is to measure how this work—writing—impacts your life. Is this what you live for? Not in a rosy-eyed, dreamy way, not ā€œI luv writing <3ā€ but ā€œwriting is what drags me out of everything elseā€ and ā€œwriting is my food, drink, and sleepā€ and ā€œwriting is how I exist in this universe.ā€

What I’m doing right now is working on projects that I’ve wanted to tackle for years—no, decades—but never could due to the vicissitudes of child-rearing, day-job workload, personal upheavals, and disability.Ā  I’m not whining. These are just facts. I chose to raise kids, and it was satisfying work (and, yes, frustrating, too, but in all the right ways). However, doing the best job possible involved more than dropping them off at our barely-adequate schools. It meant advocating for them, fighting an uncaring administrative system, volunteering, fundraising, and, as a last-resort, homeschooling. At least in the pandemic age, there are more parents out there who understand that homeschooling—at least not ideally—isn’t a romp in the garden, it’s serious work. And, like most of us, for me that was work that had to take place in parallel with earning a living.

So right now, I’m successful. Every morning (afternoon?) I wake up, and there’s writing to do.

  • This kind of writing, which is off-the-cuff, barely edited, and hurled into the interweb’s event horizon, never to be seen by human eyes.
  • Critical writing, where I’m critiquing work by fellow writers, trying to help them make their stories the best they can be.Ā 
  • Social-media writing—mostly Twitter—where I practice being concise, kind, and thoughtful.
  • And, finally, yes, writing my own stories, the ones I’ve been wanting to read.

What I’ve been looking for—and yes, I’ve found some, but far too few—are stories led by characters who have trouble communicating, who don’t fit in, who think differently than others but find a way through life anyhow. I’m tired of hero’s-journey stories and chosen-one tales that take themselves too seriously. I don’t mind playing with the tropes. For instance, one of my WIPs has a seeming “chosen one” in it, but the whole thing is a crock, a scheme worked up by a person who’s trying to change society and is using an old myth to get buy-in. Not that the “chosen” person isn’t worthy, but there’s no magic in the process—they’re carefully selected for capability and then trained for the job.

I’m not writing to market. I admit that. So I can’t complain about sales, not too much. It may take time for people like me to find the stories I’m writing for them. That’s OK. I waited a long time. A little longer—I can deal.

Well, I’m trying to, anyhow.

In the meantime, I’m keeping on. For me, that writers learned to use remote meetings to connect for critiques, discuss craft, conduct conventions, and more has been a compensatory gain during the pandemic. It’s not a benefit of this horrible time; it’s a thing we could should have been doing all along, and only just now learned to value. When the pandemic’s over, we’ll keep connected this way. That’s a good thing, but we don’t get to pretend it’s all right that millions of people died while those of us privileged to live were fumbling our way to this belated discovery.

I’ve leveraged that new learning, because I’m an engineer and tech things come naturally to me. I’ve let myself get roped into volunteering to help others less comfortable with the technology—and that’s OK, because participating with other writers helps me connect more deeply with my writing community.  I value the friendships I’ve formed with people I’ve only met in Zoom rooms. This is not a trivial feeling—I dedicated my Monday afternoons for half this past year to help a Zoom friend whose critique circle had lost their only zoom-capable member. That meant stepping aside from one of my other critique circles, one that needed me less. I’m returning to my prior group as of this month, because my friend’s old zoom-host has returned. I’ll miss the new friends I made in her circle, even though we only ever saw each other in little boxes on our computer screens.

Am I a failure because I had to defer my writing career? Looking back through my drawer of shelved and partly-done stories, one thing is strikingly clear—I was so young, so ignorant, so clueless. Much of what I’m writing now, I couldn’t have done when I was younger. In technique, I’m much better than my younger self; some of that gain I can attribute to years of writing science and engineering reports and papers, working collaboratively with colleagues on phrasing, structure, and word choice … plus coping with deadlines. Beyond the technique, older me is able to imagine more-complex characters, see worlds with more-different people in them. Through personal experience, I know most lives—most real stories—don’t have a ā€œcall to adventureā€ or a ā€œsupreme ordeal.ā€ There’s no wise mentor waiting to guide us. We have to muddle through, try to survive in an irrational universe, and deal with the fact we’ll never quite make sense of it all.

Sure, I’m still learning. You have to keep learning. It’s the key to growth in every respect. Even there, though, I’m doing better, working actively to learn more of what I need to continue improving.

In my next posting, I’ll demonstrate my success by sharing a list of what I consider to be my 2021 accomplishments not only as a writer but also as a member of the writing community.

I’ll warn you right now: it’s a longer post.

You might also like to read:

On Aisle 42, Universe Components: One Will Make You SmallerOn Aisle 42, Universe Components: One Will Make You Smaller

 

Or

A Top-Down Search for the Strange Charm of Putting Up With Those Quarks at Bottom of the Universe

For part two of our universe-construction project, while the helium models dry, it’s time to delve into the depths of the sub-sub-atomic universe.

Consider those carefully-constructed model atoms.Ā Ā  Each contains protons, neutrons, and electrons.

As it turns out, with electrons, there are (so far as physics can determine at present) no smaller particles needed to build an electron.Ā  Electrons are part of a group ofĀ  six elementary particles called leptons.Ā  Some of these leptons–the neutrinos–were predicted to not even have any mass, but experiments have shown that while they are incredibly low-mass, neutrinos do have some mass.Ā  Interestingly, these experiments leading to even more new developments in fundamental physics and the Standard Model theory.Ā  Still, electrons are by far the most numerous leptons (at least in our corner of the multiverse.)

In our candy-based model, we have more than one proton crammed into in a nucleus.Ā  Each of those protons has a positive charge, but we all know that objects with the same charge repel each other.Ā  Why does the nucleus stay together?

In our model, of course, there is all that sticky candy.Ā  But in the real atom, there is also something that, in its own way, makes protons stick together.Ā  These other particles are one type of another class of matter, called mesons.Ā  These strange, essential, particles are stable only inside the nucleus, where (like our sticky marshmallows) they act as a “glue” to hold protons and neutrons close together.

Given that extremely tiny leptons have been observed, as well as tiny mesons inside the nucleus, protons and neutrons may begin to seem too big to be elementary particles.Ā  Sure enough, it turns out that protons and neutrons are also made of smaller particles.Ā  And those mesons, too, are made of those same even-smaller particles.Ā  And, while it took thirty years to search them all out, a total of six more fundamental particles (on top of the six leptons) have been found.Ā  Most of the matter we know about only requires two of those particles–plus the electron–but modern physics predicted six, and sure enough, there are six of them.

Meet the QUARKS.Ā  Their six kinds are: up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom.Ā  Each kind comes in a matter form and an antimatter form.

Intriguingly, the terminology for “kinds” of quarks is flavors. Other characteristics of quarks and leptons include color, another clue to the pleasure scientists find in these discoveries.Ā Ā  For now, we’ll experiment with the flavors of quarks.Ā  Unlike real quarks, we will use macroscopic objects that also happen to taste sweet.

As usual, if you’re working with youngsters, begin by reassuring everyone that there will be plenty of time to eat their quarks later.Ā  Each person gets one each of the six flavors of candy…quarks.Ā Because the candies will be handled a lot during the first stage, tell them not to open the wrappers yet.Ā Ā  Observe the candies.Ā  One side has the brand name on it, and the other side is plain.Ā  If we put the candy name-side up, we’ll call it a quark, and if it has the plain side up, we’ll call it an antiquark.

Quark vs Antiquark

A meson is formed by pairs of one quark and one antiquark.Ā  Give the group some time to see just how many combinations can be made of such pairs.Ā  (A few special mesons combine two or three such pairs, in quark combinations.)

A Small Set of Mesons

This will take some cooperation–participants will want to get together and different groups will organize their tests differently.Ā  Meanwhile, if you have access to a whiteboard or poster paper, you can sketch out a list of simple mesons shown below.Ā  For smaller (or older) groups, you can also pass out copies of this grid and let everyone check off the combinations as they are discovered.

quark antiquark candy (name) candy (plain)
bottom eta b b pineapple pineapple
Upsilon b b pineapple pineapple
charmed eta c c purple purple
D+ c d purple peppermint
D0 c u purple red
J/Psi c c purple purple
Strange D c s purple green
Charmed B b c purple pineapple
Kaon0 d s peppermint green
B0 d b peppermint pineapple
Phi s s green green
Strange B s b green pineapple
pion u d red peppermint
kaon+ u s red green
B+ u b red pineapple
Charged rho u d red peppermint
Kaon*+ u s red green

What’s important from this exercise is realizing that all of these two-quark combinations can really happen.Ā  Some of the mesons are the ones that help stick nuclei together.Ā  Others are found in outer space, as cosmic rays.Ā  Others are only found when scientists smash other particles together to find out what they are made of.Ā  Recently, the last of the mesons described by this model was detected by an international team of physicists, using the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, in Ā Switzerland.Ā  This prompted huge celebrations by physicists and the process inspired a documentary film about the search for the Higgs Boson, Particle Fever.

When I ran this project at BayCon in 2017, one of the young participants scanned the list above and said, “What about the top quark?”Ā  Trust a science-fiction fan to spot an anomaly.Ā  Indeed, none of the known mesons make use of the top quark, which is the most elusive one of all, and in some ways the most peculiar.Ā  The top quark is extremely unstable–even more ephemeral than the strange, charm, and bottom quarks–and it requires a large particle accelerator to observe one. (Fermilab managed it first; now CERN‘s Large Hadron Collider holds the record.)Ā  Even then, once produced, a top quark vanishes in 1/1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000th of a second.Ā  The top quark is also amazingly massive, fueling the deep interest in the nature of mass itself, which many think is one of the functions of the Higgs boson, which itself has only recently been (tentatively) observed.Ā  Scientists at CERN hope to use the relatively massive top quark as a test laboratory to verify their (provisional) Higgs boson observations.

Three-quark particles are called baryons–the most common of these are protons and neutrons.Ā  The next step for our own quark exploration is to find the combination of up and down quarks that yields the proton and the one that forms a neutron.Ā Ā  Each person has 2 peppermint and 2 of one other color to play with. Each group can also pool resources (still keeping those candy wrappers on) to mix and match groups of three using only 2 colors of candy.

To sort out which of these combinations works requires one extra piece of information.Ā  We know that an electron has a charge of -1, a proton has a charge of +1, and a neutron is neutral, with a charge of zero.Ā Ā  Another cool feature of quarks…and one of the hardest things their discoverers had to come to terms with…is that they have fractional charges.Ā  Before quarks, everyone used to think of a charge…equal to the electric charge of an electron…as an indivisible thing.Ā  Just like an atom.Ā  But just as it has turned out that atoms aren’t indivisible, neither is charge.

Up quark’s charge:Ā  Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā +2/3

Down quark’s charge: Ā Ā -1/3

So, with just a little arithmetic, we can find out which of our combinations makes a proton and which makes a neutron.Ā  Here’s the cheat sheet:

uuu

2/3 + 2/3 + 2/3 = 2

Positive…but too much for a proton
ddd

(-1/3) + (-1/3) + (-1/3) = -1

Negative, so it can’t be a proton or a neutron.

Note:Ā  it’s not an electron either–remember, an electron is already an elementary particle.

uud

or udu

or duu

2/3 + 2/3 + (-1/3) = 1

OK!Ā  It’s a proton!
(Just a reminder…the order the quarks are listed in doesn’t matter.)
ddu

or dud

or udd

-1/3 + (-1/3) + 2/3 = 0

Yes!Ā  We have discovered the neutron!

 

Aha, it’s a proton.

Aha, It’s a neutron!

So, the charge calculations show that protons and neutrons are made of two ups plus one down for a proton and two downs plus one up for a neutron.

It’s possible to have participants glue their protons and neutron quark groups together.Ā  A dip on the water cup from the atomic marshmallow project will make a candy piece sticky.Ā  However, these sticky messes will need to sit aside for a while to dry.Ā  If your participants include young children, you might want to skip that possibility, as a glued-up stack of Life-Savers could be a choking hazard.

Speaking of glue, the same BayCon2017 participants also suggested some ideas for incorporating gluons into our model.Ā  To cover the topic of quantum chromodynamics would be a fun challenge, but for the present, those lonely orange LifeSavers we’d set aside as those transient top quarks can be added between the red and white candies in our proton and neutron models to represent the color exchanges among the quarks.

So now we have established that everything in matter is made of tiny (and flavorful) points of dancing energy called quarks and leptons. How can we visualize the true relative sizes of these quarks, protons, nuclei, and atoms?

Poke a pin through a piece of paper and hold it up to the light, then pass it around, so everyone can see how tiny that hole is.Ā Ā  Think of that bright speck as an electron or a quark.Ā  To be at the same scale, our helium nucleus would be about 3 feet across.Ā  A handy meter-stick or yardstick will provide a sense of scale, but for drama, bring out a huge balloon (the 36-inch size).Ā  It won’t be edible, but it will be fun to play with afterwards.Ā  If that big old balloon is the tiny nucleus, then to build a whole helium atom we’d need a marshmallow about seven miles (ten kilometers) across!

So let’s check back on our atom model from the atomic marshmallow project.Ā  It’s mostly nothing, just that airy, fluffy marshmallow.Ā  Remember how thin the ā€œshellā€ of the electron cloud is, and how surprisingly hard it is to notice the tiny nucleus once the two little protons and neutrons were placed inside.Ā  Even so, in our model, the protons and neutrons are huge compared with the atom.Ā  Imagine how fantastic the resulting candy treat would be–and how many people could enjoy it–if we’d tried to make this marshmallow atom model to scale.

Monday at BayCon 2013Monday at BayCon 2013

There are fewer options on the final day, and the available time is short, so opportunities for plans to stray from reality are fewer.Ā  We’d expect less divergence…here are the results of our field test:

Time Frame What the Plan was What really happened
Monday morning Sleep in a bit, then go to session on James Bond vs Dr Who, and finally pick up art if I win any auctions.

One of Patricia McCracken's Little Dragons came home with me!  Find your own here http://www.patriciamccracken.com/miniprint.html

One of Patricia McCracken’s Little Dragons came home with me! Find your own here .

Did sleep in.Ā  Fed horses & scooped manure, too.Ā  Didn’t arrive until close to noon.Trekked to the Art Show first to pick up the two pieces I’d bought, but then also discovered my single bid on the dragon-butterfly print was the winning bid.Ā  So paid and went to look for that panel talk.Ā  JB vs DW still ongoing, but after a half-hour I figured I’d had about all I needed on the topic.Ā  So no regrets about turning up so late. 

My next move was to get my art safely into the car, though I did make a detour to make sure there was no boffering available today.Ā  Dang.Ā  Just another panel talk going on in what had been Boffer Central.

 

So I betook myself down to the Gaming Room to buy a coke and eat lunch.Ā  Two older teenagers who had joined in on the dancing last night were there playing some form of D&D.Ā  The one thing I haven’t done at this convention is play games, and it looks like that will have to be another time.Ā  For now, I just have to settle for having spent some time hanging out in the Gaming Room.

Monday afternoon Go to session on “how to build a spaceship.”Ā  Go home!

First firing of the Falcon 9-R advanced prototype rocket. Via Elon Musk on Twitter. Read more: http://www.universetoday.com/102692/spacex-tests-falcon-9-r-advanced-reusable-prototype-rocket/#ixzz2WVt42LYG

First firing of the Falcon 9-R advanced prototype rocket. Via Elon Musk on Twitter.Ā Ā  At least there is a good place to read about the topic I skipped:Ā  start here.

 

MKB's latest novel in the Star Wars universe

MKB’s latest novel in the Star Wars universe

 

 

California Autism Foundation

California Autism Foundation

 

diy

 

 

 

 

 

It was easier to walk to the media tie-in panel from the Gaming Room, so that’s where I went.Ā Ā  I hadn’t actually looked at the list of panelist, so it was a pleasing surprise to see Maya Kaathryn BohnhoffĀ  there, in her capacity as a leading author in Star Wars novels.Ā  Her panel partner, Kevin Andrew Murphy, works also in gaming tie-ins and had a much more positive spin on the quality of that literature than the board-game guy in yesterday’s panel.Ā  Overall, I gained a much better picture of life as a tie-in fiction author.Ā  And an appreciation for authors who can face intense fans in the middle of a panel.Ā  Ā Ā Btw, about half the people in the audience are people I recognize.So things were winding down, including the dealer’s room.Ā  So I went on up to the closing ceremonies.Ā  In between that and the “hiss and purr” session, there was some dead time.Ā  I poked my head into the Art Room to see how the art auction had wrapped up.Ā  One of the women I remember from dancing last night was clutching the steampunk flamingo.Ā  Turns out it hadn’t had any bids, so the artist had offered it to her at a lesser price in order to avoid hauling it home.Ā  Good for her! 

Next stop:Ā  the Gaming Room, for one last donation to the California Autism Foundation (the beneficiary of the Charity Vending machine) from which I gained a Coke for myself and an accidentally-vended ginger ale which I could donate to one of the nearby volunteers.

 

I was determined to stay for the critique session because I wanted to praise the DIY idea.Ā  The downside was having to sit through a huge laundry list of facility complaints and an equally lengthy recitation of praises for hotel staff.Ā  However, managed to retain my nerve enough to actually participate in the “programming” discussion.

 

After that subject was concluded, I took off for Nob Hill.Ā  Not the SF landmark, the grocery store.Ā  Got home before the guys and even fixed dinner for everyone.Ā  Does tacos count as dinner?

 

Marichka Explains Etheric EngineeringMarichka Explains Etheric Engineering

Explain etherics? Hah!

Nobody can explain etheric engineering. Or the stuff that makes it work: aether.

The best anyone can do is describe aether. To our faulty three-plus-temporal-dimension senses, aether is nothing but a dark brownish fluid. It seems to bubble, giving off flashes well into the UV end of the spectrum.

That’s why one’s advised to wear goggles (or install UV-protective mods if you’re likely to encounter the stuff regularly). Relatively cheap, those. Even I have ’em, and you know what my finances are like! If you get the stuff on you (I strongly advise against it!), it tends to adhere.

так.

Is sticky. You don’t want it stuck to you, trust me.

If aether gets loose, you want to corral it fast. Every compartment at risk of an aether spill (that is, any compartment etheric conduit passes through) should be equipped with an aether net. When deployed, it becomes a fine, gauzy web that attracts aether. Not to worry, it’ll draw off whatever’s stuck to you as well as gather up the globules floating in your face. So, no, it’s not a “net” so much as an “attractor.” I’d be happy to argue semantics with you any day.

Don’t get in my face about why it’s pronounced ay-ther in Standard. Open your chem reference, search for (C2H5)2O, and shut up already.

A swril of orange with a black ball at the core, and a bright blue jet

Aether’s the stuff that wormholes tunnel through. So no surprise that aether’s about as safe to play with as your average gravitational singularity. Aether is all places at once. That is, it knows only one where and one when.

The aether in the conduits of my ship is the aether flowing in yours. That’s why our comms people can talk to each other in real time. That’s why skipships don’t get lost, navigating the galactic byways, why the big ships that barge through gate-boosted wormholes don’t crush us as they pass. We’re all floating in the same ocean of aether.

There are…entities…out there who can perceive and manipulate aether directly. Some of them invented devices that make use of it. We lesser beings—humans, our allies, our enemies, our uncanny neighbors—have taken it on ourselves to copy those devices. Nobody knows what happens when you make a mistake copying Ancient etheric devices.

Nobody knows, because nobody comes back from those experiments. I like to think they’re gently transported to a parallel universe, given a kindly lecture on interfering with things they know not of, and sent off to some alt-universe pastoral countryside to learn…I dunno, painting, country dance, noveling, harmless little hobbies.

It’s nicer to imagine that than the alternative. Aether is dangerous stuff. A seemingly innocuous ball of cute fizzy brown goo can happily float straight through your ship’s hull. Try breathing vacuum sometime. Not fun. Not fun at all, no matter how well trained your crew is or how good your mods are.

And that’s just for starters.

So take it from me: don’t mess with aether without proper training. Even then, keep all the tools you might need right handy. You never know when you might need them.

Image Credits:

  1. Detail from cover of “Coke Machine,” by Niki Lenhart.
  2. Artist’s depiction of a black hole at the center of a galaxy. NASA/JPL-Caltech. (Modified for effect)

In certain portions of this timeline, Marichka Zelenskyy (no relation) may be found fixing things at the Truck Stop at the Center of the Galaxy. In other portions of the timeline, she is busy elsewhere.

© 2012-2025 Vanessa MacLaren-Wray All Rights Reserved