A speculative mind

This is another little excerpt from my sci-fi novel Star Liner. Jan and Sara are doing work they did not sign up for, when they discover Simon is missing. I worked away and we both finished at the same time. Then we went to work in the conference room where we had our meetings. We had finished the forward lounge when it was time for lunch. Sara called Simon to find out how he was doing. There was no answer. She tried again. No answer. “Can you locate his pad?” I asked. Sara did a check. “It is in the cargo hold.” A sudden thought filled me with foreboding. “I wonder how many unprotected vents there are in the cargo hold.” “Let’s not get crazy,” Sara said. "There could be a good reason he is not answering.” I could think of a couple of reasons, but I did not say them out loud. ”Let’s go down and check.” We made our way down to the forward part of Deck A where the cargo hold was. We opened the big door. We stepped in. It was dimly lit. The pallets cas

I decided to write about Shirley Jackson, not that I have read a ton of her stuff, but that which I have read has had an impact on me. When I say I haven’t read a lot of her stuff, that is partly because she didn’t write a whole lot of stuff. Just 6 novels. Her short stories might be a better representation. She wrote over 200 of them.   Who is Shirley Jackson, some of you are asking? She is an author from the 1950’s and 60’s (she died in 1965). Her influence on such writers as Stephen king is obvious. She did write horror stories, but not exclusively horror stories. Yet many of her stories, even some of her non-horror ones, had a certain creepy feel to them. That did not stop her from being witty and humorous at times.   Her most famous novel was The Haunting of Hill House which has been made into a couple of movies and a television series. It has been called the best ghost story ever written. Another novel, the dark mystery, We Have always Lived in the Castle , was made

Foreshadowing is the act of giving the reader or viewer hints about what is to come. That cat with glowing eyes from Act 1 is probably not one the hero should take home with her. Some foreshadowing tips are equivalent to downright spoilers. In Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare tells us in the prologue that the young lovers are going to die. He also calls them “Star-crossed” lovers, in other words, ill-fated. So, everybody in the audience knows from the very beginning how it will end. So, logically, why bother to watch the play? Foreshadowing as in Romeo and Juliet adds tension. It makes every moment the lovers spend together more important, more frantic. It heightens the stakes. If it didn’t do these things, how can you explain why the play keeps selling out performances 400 years after it was written.   Stephen King utilizes foreshadowing to great effect. Again, sometimes it almost seems like it is to the point of being a spoiler. In his Dark Tower series, the fourth book