this breaks my heart

Posted on By Wil

James Doohan’s son Erich wrote an essay about the failure of SpaceX to take is father’s ashes into orbit last week. It’s absolutely heartbreaking.

There have been many attempts to send my father on his way. On Saturday, the latest launch attempt by SpaceX, with a portion of my father’s remains aboard, failed to achieve orbit. While there are many complicated reasons why this is a disappointment, mine is simple: I’d like to finish saying goodbye.

Every launch attempt is like reliving his funeral. There’s a lot of pomp and ceremony, and a retelling of his deeds in life. But at the end of these funerals, something goes awry, the body doesn’t get buried, and you know you’re going to have to come back to do it over again.

I knew Erich when we were kids, because he was good friends with my younger brother. He was around our house all the time, and I really liked him. I can’t imagine the pain of having to say goodbye to your father over and over again, and in public, no less.

Space shuttle astronauts are allowed to take small amounts of personal items with them into space. Surely there is someone on an upcoming mission who can help give Jimmy a proper burial, right?

this is the heavy heavy monster sound

Posted on By Wil

I’m still in head down mode until I finish Scalzi’s intro, which is due today, but I had that magical moment yesterday when I moved some things around, added a few paragraphs, then sat back in my chair and said to the empty room, “There it is! I can finally say ‘it’s coming together.'”

Once I get to this point in a project, it’s like I’ve been flailing around in a twisty maze of passages, all alike, and I’ve finally been handed a torch and a map. I never know when it’s going to happen on a particular job, but I’m always relieved when it finally does. One day before the deadline isn’t the best time for it to happen, but it’s not the blurst time, either.

This is one of the reliable steps in my writing process, like the “this sucks, I suck, everything I do sucks, I’m the suckiest bunch of sucks who ever sucked” step*. There are other, less-amusingly-named-but-equally-reliable steps in my writing process, and even the frustrating ones give me reassurance, because I know that I’m on track. There’s being stuck, and then there’s being stuck, you know?

These steps come in random order, and the ones where I feel stuck usually last from a few hours to a few days. There isn’t a reliable trick to get through them, but knowing that there are these mile markers along the road has given me a lot more confidence as a writer.

Currently, I’m in a step I call “I really need to finish the thing, but I think I’ll write something else instead.”

Yep. Right on schedule.

*This is the step where I constantly repeat my own advice to myself: Don’t be afraid to suck. It’s easier to fix something that’s broken than it is to fill up an empty page.

calling all geeks

Posted on By Wil

I’m in Head Down mode while I race to the finishdeadline for the introduction to Your Hate Mail Will be Graded, which collects ten years (!) of John Scalzi’s blog, Whatever. I care about this particular project more than I do the average project (which is already a lot, mind you) because John is my friend, and letting him down is not an option.

So there’s not going to be a whole lot of stuff here (well, stuff with any deep commentary or extended content) until the deadline passes.

However, in this hour’s (hours’? hours? stupid grammar is almost as hard as math) 12 minutes of “do whatever I want” time, I wanted to share a new group I created at Propeller 2.0, called the Geek Group:

This group is for me and my fellow geeks. There will be overlap with Science, I’m sure, but we can watch and share stories about comics, science fiction (books and movies), hobby games like D, geeky television shows like Heroes and LOST, and events like Comic-Con, GenCon, Dragon*Con and PAX.

This, I think, is the coolest part of Propeller 2.0: users can create and join groups that are tailored to our various interests, so we can find stories, information, and other people who have those interests in common. It dramatically improves the signal to noise ratio, and creates a more “social” social news experience. We’ve got 67 members, and some cool stories are starting to fill up our “stories this group is watching” thing, so come on down and get your geek on!