Demosthenes: Blog

The vast majority of feedback I've received for Longshot has been enthusiastic and supportive, even when it contains criticism. To everyone who has contacted me in this way over the last few weeks, my sincere thanks; I've tried to get back to everyone who has written.

However, a few correspondents have been nasty, brutish and/or confusing. Unfortunately, it is the nature of creative work that while supportive messages can lift one's spirits for days, snide, thoughtless comments can utterly crush motivation.

If you truly want to read something better or different from a writer, then it is in your own self-interest to provide helpful, constructive feedback; dismissive comments are less likely to be taken seriously or acted upon, while the emotional damage they wreak can be profound. (This cannot address the troll, who writes with the deliberate goal of causing harm.)

All this is a long way of saying that the next installment of Longshot will be delayed by a few days. To be clear, this is not entirely due to a few pieces of negative feedback - pressures from fulltime work are much more to blame - but it is certainly a factor. My desire to complete the novel remains, and it is not dependent on receiving only "nice" commentary.

However, I could not let the opportunity go by without this one plea: whenever possible, be thoughtful, be kind, and be helpful… especially when you're receiving something for free.

Keeping to my one-chapter-every-two-days posting cycle, SOL has just published Chapter 20 of Longshot. Six chapters remain until the first part of the novel ("Flight") is completed. Some of those chapters require quite a bit of work before they can be posted, but I hope to maintain my writing schedule so that they may be published on time.

After that, I have a half-dozen chapters of Part 2 that can be published, with a little work. And after that I will almost certainly need to take a break due to demands of full-time work.

Notes for chapters 19 and 20:

"It was something done all the time by the saps."

Saps: short for homo sapiens. Somewhat derogatory.

Readers may notice that several new story codes have been added to Longshot, reflecting developments in the just-posted chapter 18. The inclusion of "Indian female" as a tag is debatable: in the language of Longshot's culture, Ananya's phenotype is Indid-Hallstatt, roughly equivalent to "Indian Swedish" today. Whether that is considered "Indian female" I leave as an exercise for the reader, but I thought the code was worth including.

Nibbling kernels the colors of stained glass from a steaming corn cob...

Glass gem corn is a thing. The varieties that exist in our time can't be eaten directly off the cob, however.

Each chapter of Longshot receives an "Author's Notes" entry in my SOL after it is published, providing backstory and further explanations. When the novel is complete these will be compiled into an appendix and glossary; for now, any reader interested in learning more about Askr's world can read details here.

Chapter 15

falling through infinite divisions of femtoseconds

1 femtosecond is one quadrillionth (one millionth of one billionth, or 10^−15) of a second. By way of comparison, the wavelength of most forms of visible light is around 2 femtoseconds. As suggested in the prose, a femtosecond is not the smallest possible unit of time: that honor belongs to Plank time, or 10^−44 seconds.

Woven from the webs of golden orb spiders

The silk actually exists, and is spectacular.

x = 16 sin3 t

y = 13 cos t - 5 cos(2 t) - 2 cos (3 t) - cos (4 t)

Ananya's formula is a parametric function that graphs a heart shape.

Lifted from the heating elements of our small radioisotope thermoelectric generator

RTGs are a form of nuclear battery that use radioactive decay to generate a continuous charge of several hundred watts over an extremely long period of time (measured from decades to centuries, depending on design). Entirely self-contained, with no moving parts, they are highly reliable, and are frequently used to power deep space probes.

Shamed by Longshot's status of "incomplete and inactive" on SOL, I've returned to writing, posting chapter 15 yesterday.

My absence was solely due to a change in personal priorities: deciding to work on illustration left me with little time for writing. Ironically, my decision to concentrate on visual art was partly inspired by Longshot itself: while it's my goal to bring scenes to life through words, I'd very much like to add illustrations to each chapter. My artwork skills still fall short of the quality I'd like, but I feel that I'm getting close. However, I didn't want the delay in my own growth to forestall reader's potential enjoyment of the novel any longer.

Chapters 16 and 17 are ready to go, and I plan to publish them Thursday and Saturday, respectively. This schedule should provide me with the opportunity to complete scenes in chapters 18 and 19. While the three chapters after that are ready to publish, the remainder of the first section of Longshot still needs extensive work before it can be posted. With luck and fortitude, I should have the ability to finish off the first third of the novel ("Flight") and post at least one chapter of the next ("Coast") before other work fully occupies my attention.

As before, I plan to add "Author's Notes" blog entries covering chapters as they are published. These function as a guide and behind-the-scenes look at story creation until maps, illustrations and a glossary can be provided; you can expect to see the first of those in the next few days.

To the many of you who have written during my absence and upon my return, my sincere thanks: I will be replying to all I can.

Sincerely,
D.