A speculative mind

I just finished reading Deepsix by Jack McDevitt. It is the second book in his Academy series, and no, you don’t have to have read the first one to enjoy this one. In this novel the scientific community has gathered to watch a planetary collision. A gas giant cast out of its own system is about to smash into the terrestrial planet Malevia 3 (now nicknamed “Deepsix” as its future is doomed). Everything is going to plan, as scientist and tourists have gathered to watch the event until one of the scientists observing the world through powerful imagery, notices signs of civilization on the surface. Now a team will have to investigate, and it will only have days to do so before the world is to come to an end. Deepsix a real potboiler of a novel. Plenty of action, plenty of risk. Strong characters that we care about, and others that we dislike. It struck me that this would make a wonderful movie or a limited series. But then, how many times have you heard that before. “This wo

I recently went on a journey through the Cascade mountains. It was a snowy trip. The snow in the mountains was fresh. There is something about fresh snow that looks different from old snow or late season snow. Why does fresh snow look so magical? Is it because we are not used to seeing it? I suppose that could be, if it is the first snow of the season, and you haven’t seen any for almost a year. Or if like me, you live in an area that rarely gets snow, it will always be novel and magical. Of course, snow can also bring inconvenience and travel headaches (we made it through the mountains okay . . . slowly) but I will save that discussion for another day. However, fresh snow has something else going for it. It has a chance to gradually accumulate on the branches of trees or bushes. Even bare branches can develop a seemingly impossible stack of snow that balances on the slenderest of shafts. Older snow after it has been around a while, begins to clump up and fall off making fo

I have been writing off and on for nearly forty years. Wow. When I say it like that, I feel old. When I say ‘writing’, I mean writing for my own pleasure. I am not counting required writing in school; everyone has to do that. One of the first things I ever wrote was a play called “Revenge of the Ant men.” A friend of mine and I co-wrote this masterpiece in Walker Junior High School when we were probably supposed to be doing something else. As you can tell from the title, it was pretty high-brow stuff. To this day, I can still remember one of the lines the monster said: “ooooooooffff!” I can’t imagine why it was never performed. But I started really getting serious about my writing in college. One tends to write in the genre that one reads. I was into science fiction, so that is mostly what I wrote. By the time I got to college I actually had aspirations to do something with my writing, so I tried to get my short stories published. There were only a few places you could get a