To Walk Again

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FIRST BLOOD DRAWN

The next day at Mr. Sheridan’s class Joey assured Frank that he felt somewhat better, so he would follow through with a plan they had made in the car on the way back from Big Sur, to go to the skateboard park near Frank’s house and practice tricks. Joey didn’t ride his skateboard around because he preferred his bike; he just wanted to learn competitive tricks at the park so he kept his board at Frank’s house. Both of them had only three weeks of experience since they bought their skateboards new at their local mall. Joey rode his bike to Frank’s after school but as soon as he entered Frank’s room. 

Frank’s mom heard Joey’s voice and called out, “Frankie dear, could you straighten out your room a little bit before you go out?”

“Okay mom, I’ll do it right now, then we gotta go.”

Joey saw that he was stuck hanging around for however long it took for Frank to comply with his mother’s wishes so he wandered down the hall to Freddie’s room where Freddie was sitting at his computer as usual. Freddie’s back was to Joey, so he entered stealthily and pulled up a cloth covering a dry erase board next to the door to peek at what was written or drawn on it. Freddie kept the board covered so his room would look more like a normal kid’s room rather than the habitat of a total academic egghead. Written with a marker were long were long chicken scratch formulas with symbols of all sorts – lots of x’s and y’s along with an alphabet soup of other characters and only one distinct equation:

g = R (π X rpm)2
____30____
9.81

“Hey, Freddie, what’s up?” Joey asked, turning away from the board towards Freddie. He walked forward and plopped himself down on the bed, which was adjacent to the computer chair where Freddie was sitting.

“Oh yeah, everything is cool. Hey, do you know about the nano world?”

“You mean small, right?”    

“Yeah, super small, subatomic. Our laws of physics don’t apply to that world.”

“You mean like the speed of light, gravity, stuff like that.”

“Right. For all we know, there could be different realities in the nano world, black holes containing other universes – phenomena we can’t even imagine. Some cosmologists even say that there may be trillions of Big Bangs just like the one that started our universe happening every second and creating universes like ours or even exact duplicates of ours.” 

The thought occurred to Joey of showing Freddie the very strange object that was in his back pocket, but he decided it would be premature. Freddie was a genius, so he might know or could maybe figure out what this stone really was. But Joey decided he would show it to him later after examining it himself; he hadn’t really done this in spite of what had already happened with it, just nonchalantly carried it around in his bag or pocket; Joey was nonplussed about the stone, simply hoping no more strange events would occur. 

All of these thoughts came to him in a blink of any eye, quickly enough for him to set them aside for the moment and ask Freddie, “So, what are you going to do about it?”

“Well, I can’t actually do much about it, but scientists are finding out more about it by doing experiments with supercolliders. For instance, in our macro world, everything can only be in one place at one time, but in the nano world a particle can be in two places at the same time. As you can see on my screen, I’m trying to depict a subatomic particle arriving at two places at once, but I’m not good at this 3D software. You know how to do 3D?”

“Not really, but I can make a 3D screen saver.”

“That’s actually pretty good, but not enough for what I’m trying to do. Hey Joey, are you into cosmology? Do you know different adjectives for describing the cosmos or the universe? How about inexorable, which means like, not possible to challenge, and immutable, for unchanging, and what else?“

”How about UnBigWordAble, which means there’s no word that’s big enough to be able to describe it.” 

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Grab your copy on Amazon

 

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Of Humans, Chimps and Neanderthals
 
I recently saw an intriguing NOVA episode on PBS called ‘Decoding the Neanderthals’. The subject of human evolution has long fascinated me though I was never bright enough to pursue the study as a career. I stll prefer stone tools and cave paintings to the iPhone and social media.

Here’s the basic premise. The study of human evolution up until recently concluded that Neanderthals, our beetle-browed predecessors, were an evolutionary dead end. Their own ancestors had migrated out of Africa about 800,000 years ago. Until recently, it was believed that modern man followed the Neanderthal out of Africa about 40,000 years ago and that, ten thousand years later, the Neanderthal was gone, pushed or killed into extinction. But the recently completed decoding of the Neanderthal genome has proven otherwise.

In fact, most humans carry some Neanderthal DNA, a small amount to be sure– from 1% to 5%. What this means is, Neanderthal and modern humans mated. Not on off weekends either but on a regular basis. The theory then goes that Neaderthal was simply bred out of existence over a period of ten thousand years.

But I wonder. Doesn’t that leave open the question of where modern man came from, aside from the fact that we are told he or she came from Africa. Modern man could not have evolved directly from something more primitive than Neanderthal, miraculously jumping from Home erectus to Wall Street banker. Modern man, Cro-Magnon, whatever you want to call her/him, had to go through a phase just as Neanderthal did.

Perhaps, the migration of humans was an on-going affair, never stopping, back and forth for hundreds of thousands of years, with the various groups interbreeding all along, not just forty-thousand years ago. Change, the evolutionary process, is a constant trial and error process that may have produced many dead ends that we will never know about, but the process proceeded unhindered for millennia, leading to us. It is still going on. What, I wonder, will we look like in ten thousand years?

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How to Make Your Characters Believable

I think to make your characters believable you have to believe in them. They have to come alive in your mind. So that you can see them, hear the way they talk, and smell their scruffy clothes. There are plenty of techniques to do this—you could write down everything you know about your character. His likes, dislikes, fears, hatreds, loves, personality type, and more. These are excellent ways of learning about your character, and are a great way to flesh out the details, but I think that the first step is to see the character in your mind’s eye.

Once when my wife and I were taking a trip and she was driving to let me work on a story, I read the portion of what I had written to her. In the process of reading, I got choked up at what was happening to the character. She looked at me in disbelief and said, “You’re acting like the character is real.” And my response was, “He is, to me.”

I could feel his pain and his anguish at what I, the author, was putting him through. And I gave the character free reign to lead me into the story. Often the characters behave in a way I don’t expect, but I have learned to let them tell the story, not me. I believe only someone who has written a book of fiction can possibly understand an author feeling this way.

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Can a book be labeled as Young Adult & New Adult?

• Doubt’s main characters are former child prodigies, geeks who socialized mainly online.
• Cristal and Harry are 22 years old, just graduated from university with their PhDs
• They have never had a “boyfriend”, “girlfriend” relationship before.
• Emotionally they are more like young adults.  Virgins, with little or no experience physically with anyone.
• Doubt can appeal to young adults because the content is clean and safe. No sex scenes, no swearing (just implied swearing with censored out letters)
• Does New Adult require the book to have “sexual scenes”?

What qualifies as New Adult?

Feedback and Comments from the article

As a big fan of the show Fringe, this book appealed to me tremendously. The writing was well done, and the way the "supernatural" forces were introduced was great.

A good, clean read for any age.

It was an excellent story that I'm sure both adult and teen urban fantasy fans will enjoy. You don't have to be a gamer or know one to identify with the characters. They're very well developed and definitely feel like people. I would definitely recommend it to a friend and I'm really looking forward to the second book.

...the novel is written in such a languid style, it moves on effortlessly and absorbs the reader into the story completely. Although the story itself revolves around the online gaming industry, one does not have to have an in depth knowledge as it is ably explained and discussed within the plot line.
OMGosh! I just finished reading "Doubt" INCREDIBLE! I couldn't put it down.

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