100 Days of Writing: Days 22-26

Day 22 of #100daysofwriting and I have moved from the bear to the stars. Started a story about what will happen to sailors 5 billion years from now. The Earth will be dead, half the universe will be extinguished and we will be moving into a cosmos full of dead stars and black holes, how can anyone sale through the darkness without the stars? Who will sail through stars? Welcome to Mausu, a bead liner. Don’t ask where she came from, she just arrived half formed back in 2012 and has been waiting for me to take notice of her. I am now seeing the universe like a cat’s cradle.

The bear story is being read by someone else, and when they get around to reading it, I will finish off the edits under a stormy roof. Listen to that wind! How Ophelia blows!

Just when you think you have escaped Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he creeps back into your fiction:

‘Without a bead line meant you could float away from the other beaders; mechanics travelling between stations strengthening the lines. Her mother called the lines by another name, longitude and latitude, and that sooner or later anyone who traveled them became another mariner boring wedding guests.’

Yes, it’s day 23 of #100daysofwriting and I have found my albatross and my mariner’s tale. Hello Mausu, tell me your story.

Day 24 of #100daysofwriting and part of the story that I am writing now taps into my earlier desire to work at an astro-physicist. I had a particularly interest in pulsars, don’t worry I am not going to start explaining pulsars to you or their spectacular way of communicating with the rest of the universe, you can listen to one of my favourites below. I have an interest in PSR0833-45, which is the Vela Pulsar, first studied in 1968 in relation to formation of neutron stars.

I have always seen pulsars like beacons, similar to light houses, and as a possible way to navigate the universe, literally like a homing beacon. Radio-waves out there will be as important to navigate by as the stars, again I’m not going into how space curves, bends and folds in on itself or how radio-waves can give us a fixed point even in a vacuum. To give you an idea, the fastest thing we have ever built are two probes called Helios (70.220 km/s (252,792 km/h; 157,078 mph). They’re dead now, the expedition long forgotten but they bookmark my first year of life. If sound traveled in space, you’d hear the two Helios satellites screaming as they whips around the. Though they are moving fast it would still take Helios A and B 19,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri.

Now, we can hear pulsars as radio-waves, which as I remember travel at the speed of light, well to be truthful they travel as 3 x 10/8 m/s – told you I did physics by the way that 10 to the power of 8 but Facebook can’t do equations. In the sense we interpret these emissions from pulsars and therefore they become beacons to me. What if you could catch a lift on those emissions? Yes, I know that’s fiction but what if? The Vela pulsar is important to my story, it is the beacon home for my characters in what is largely a starless universe. Anyway, enough science, listen to Vela here http://www.astrosurf.com/luxorion/Documents/pulsar-psr0833-45-zoom-1pulse.mp3

Day 25 of #100daysofwriting and I am reading/researching.

Day 26 of #100daysofwriting and I am collecting scientific info on neutron stars and wonder if a story could be constructed the same way.