Al Steiner: Blog

I have just posted the rewrite of chapter one of Homebodies so the backstory matches the rest of the Greenies/A Perfect World universe. I will continue to correct the errors in subsequent chapters and repost as I go. For those of you who feel the need to point out minor errors without otherwise offering criticism or expressing enjoyment of the tale, your day has come.

I just posted the epilogue of Homebodies minutes ago, thus finishing the first novel I have completed since A Correct Destiny back in 2008. This story has been important to me and my self-esteem as a writer. Back when I decided to start pursuing my RN degree and make a change in my life, I had to give up writing because I just did not have the time for it and something had to be sacrificed to allow my education to progress. I missed writing terribly and was not able to stay completely away from it. Over the summers I wrote short stories such as "A Lesson Regarding Humanity" and "The Minivan Man" just because I had to. Homebodies, I started just after finishing the hardest of the nursing school prerequisite classes, before I could start applying for nursing schools, but while I had the easier classes such as Human Development and Physical Education, and Speech to complete. That brought the story up to Chapter 7, but I never posted any of it for two reasons. One was because I knew if I got into nursing school soon I would not be able to complete it. Two was because I started the story with the intention of trying to publish it under my real identity. That was why some of the details of Chapter One and the backstory do not match the rest of the Perfect World/Greenies universe (I will correct those on re-write).

As things turned out, I did get into nursing school and I did have to stop working on the story for two years while I underwent the hell of working full time as a paramedic on the night shift while going to school full time for my degree in my new profession, all while at the age of forty-five. I plowed through all this, managed to survive and graduate, managed to pass my boards, and got an extremely well-paying position as a ER nurse at one of the local hospitals.

Two things happened after this. I had a lot of time on my hands thanks to my new job. My schedule was three twelve hour shifts per week, which meant four days off per week. Plenty of time to write. I picked up Homebodies again with the intention of completing it. I saw one thing at the very start. I was never going to be able to pass the story off as anything but an Al Steiner piece. Even with the changes I made, it was too obviously in the Perfect World/Greenies universe. Anyone familiar with that universe would recognize it immediately.

The second thing I found: I couldn't write anymore. I suffered a major case of writer's block after all that time. I tried and tried to pick up the thread and just couldn't do it. The words would not flow. I must have started chapter 8 a half a dozen times in a half a dozen ways and none of them worked.

Eventually, I decided I would start posting the beginning of the story under the Al Steiner name on Storiesonline. That was what I did to get Greenies -- another stalled novel -- flowing again and I thought the magic might kick back in. I was both right and wrong.

I posted the first seven chapters week by week and people liked it (with a few exceptions -- seriously, as an aside here, if you don't like the story but have no real specific reason why, other than it just doesn't do it for you, why bother to write me and tell me that? Do you think that is helpful? Do you think I'm going to abandon the story because one or two people don't like it? But I digress...) so I picked up chapter 8 again and tried to continue. I still could not. I began to fear my writing talent had been the price for my new job and my new salary. I ran out of chapters to post and had no new one to offer. I thought I was going to have to leave another unfinished story in the archives -- and Homebodies was a plot that I loved more than almost anything else I've ever come up with.

And then Fate stepped in. It was a mixed blessing. A major medical issue hit me. I came close to dying, and I am not exaggerating that in the least. I had to have major surgery that involved splitting my sternum open. Everything worked out okay (although the experience left me a little fucked up in the head for a bit) but I ended up with three months off work while I recovered--the longest I have gone without going to work since my first job at sixteen. I picked up Homebodies again, hoping to find a way to pass the time until I could go back to work, and this time, the story started to flow once again. I finally managed to get that elusive chapter eight done and posted. From there, things came out just like they always had before. I put out five chapters before I started back to work, sometimes writing twelve to fifteen pages a day, just like in my heyday. The chapter where Gath gets wounded is a direct reflection of my personal experience during this time.

And now the tale is complete. The story that haunted me and taunted me for so long has been told. I know now that I have not lost it and I will continue to write as long as I have the faculties to keep doing it.

So, that's my sob story. I hope you all enjoyed my tale. Please, if you can, refrain from asking me if I'm going to work on Intemperance 3 (I most likely will, and soon), or continue with A Lost Generation or Traveling Without Consequences (I probably never will). I write what I write when I feel like writing it, and no pleas or demands are going to change that. My next immediate project is to start putting the first two Intemperance books into Amazon format and selling them online in book and Kindle format, so look for that. Otherwise, I will go where the wind blows me.

Good night and good sex to all. Thank you all for hanging with me and for not forgetting about me,

Al Steiner

I just posted chapter 19, the final full chapter of Homebodies. There is an epilogue to the story that I have about three quarters written. I tried to get it out tonight with Chapter 19, but I just ran out of steam after writing nearly thirty pages today. I'm back to work for six out of seven days starting tomorrow, but I'll do what I can to get it out in a timely manner.

To all interested parties. My little three month vacation from work due to my recent surgery ends tomorrow morning and I get/have to go back to work. I probably will not be able to keep up with the pace I've set for the last three chapters, though I will write whenever I have free time as I am fully back in the game. I am blessed with a job that only requires three twelve hour shifts per week and I am no longer in school, so I hope to maintain the pace I set back in the days of Intemperance and Aftermath at the very least. I can tell you unequivocally that my passion for writing has most definitely come back.

It had been requested that I explain a little more about metric time as it is used in Homebodies. Here is the system I worked out when I started writing the story. I double checked my math just now-giving me a bit of a headache-and it still seems correct to me. I am sure if it is incorrect, someone will let me know and I can adjust. I welcome such critique, however, if you don't really understand math, time, and how I arrived at these figures, please do not bother writing me. I am probably correct, not you.

In any case, this is the standard system of time the spaceborn utilize-Universal Time-and all their habitats and ships follow it, no matter where they are or what system of timekeeping is used on the planets within a system (each planet where colonists live would necessarily have their own system based on the planet in question's rotation speed and orbit).

I realize there would be relativistic differences in Universal Time when ships are traveling at high speed between circuit points. At the speed the ships travel, however, the difference would be slight, certainly no more than a minute or two per trip, and it would only be a matter of recalibrating the ship's clocks once they arrived at their destination.

And, no, I did not do the math on the relativistic changes of time in my spacecraft. They travel at a maximum velocity of one tenth of a percent of lightspeed. My understanding is that this is not enough to cause any serious issues with time dilation. Anyone who even knows how to do the calculations on this is probably not going to be enjoying my work anyway.

So, without further ado… here it is:

Metric Time:

1 second remains standard base measure of time. A Metric second and a traditional second are the same.

100 metric seconds = 1 metric minute. 100 minutes = 1 metric hour. 10 metric hours = 1 day.

There are 86,400 seconds in a standard Earth day. There are 100,000 seconds in a metric day, making a metric day approximately 3.8 Earth hours longer.

A metric year is 300 days. A metric week is 10 days. A metric cycle is 100 days.

When all is added up, a standard Earth year is 365 days and a standard metric year is 347.2 Earth days.

31,536,000 seconds per Earth year.
30,000,000 seconds per metric year