Adrift Amongst the Stars
For better or worse, my entry to Baen Books is finished.
I had such high hopes for this contest. I do not feel as though I have half-assed anything with it, but I also know that I have zero hopes of coming in top three.
One of the most crucial things that you can obtain with any story is feedback. When you are writing for yourself, when it is only your eyes upon the paper, you miss things. You become so wrapped in the story that facets of it are so known to you that you cannot communicate them effectively. When you’ve been picturing the bad guy in your minds eye for a few weeks straight, having to actually describe said bad guy to someone who hasn’t the faintest idea who they are or what they look like takes a fresh pair of eyes.
You have to force yourself back down to earth, and reassess how you’ve been building things. This is by no means a bad thing, but it is a thing, and one that you can’t do solo. I turned to a lot of people around me, and by the time my last shot at editing came and went, I had received nothing from any of them.
I cannot and will not drag any of them specifically, either here or anywhere else. They are all adults who have lives and deadlines and hopes and dreams and holidays of their own to live. All of those explanations do nothing to change the fact that this was a huge opportunity, and it will slip through my fingers because in the three years that I have been writing, I have yet to build any consistent base for feedback.
I have nothing, and no one, to whom I can come whenever there is a need for writing to be reviewed. I write as I ever have, as my doubts and fears tell me I forever will; alone, screaming into the internet which is so full of noise and words that I may as well be shouting it to myself.
I will keep trying. I will continue to stand back up, and as time goes on I am sure that I will look back on moments like these without the pain and despair which haunts me now. That is cold comfort in the here and now, however.
I’m going to work on a new story this evening. I’m not in the right space mentally for Jen’Alliah. Writing young adult fiction requires a more young adult mind-set. Right now, things are dark and bleak and sad, so I’m going to bleed myself of these emotions in the only way I know how, and swing back around Friday once I’m not where I am now.
I hope all of you had a fantastic weekend, no matter your personal relationship with Easter.
Adrift Amongst the Stars
The safety line hummed. The hum grew louder, becoming a full-throated roar that no one could hear in the vacuum of space. The line began viciously snapping to and fro, whipping the helpless figure back and forth like a terrier worrying a rat. With a snap, the line reached its limit, and the human at the end of it was sent back, the momentum of the last swing throwing them into the infinite abyss.
The hapless man lay still, unconscious from the combined might of the initial explosion and the flailing which he had endured afterwards. His suit contained several safeguards which would allow him to re-position in zero-gravity, but there were limits, and the safest and most effective propellant was the oxygen tank attached to the suit.
Without a scream of protest or a wail of despair to mark the moment, he silently flew past the point of no return. His nearest companions on the Kuiper Belt were hundreds of thousands of miles away, and even if they could get to him in time, he was still too asleep to signal for help. So he drifted, safety line fanning out behind him as he swam through an ocean of stars.
Far too late for it to matter, he awoke. His first thoughts as he reached for rational thought was that he must be dreaming. He had suffered nightmares similar to this before; all astronauts did. The memory of the explosion came back, and as his heart hammered an alarm, he brought up his wrist pad and began typing in a frantic call for answers. The heads up display on the interior of his helmet showed one damning chart after the next. Oxygen at thirty percent and falling, distance to his ship well past any hope of salvage, and too little time in the tanks for him to await rescue.
He had two hours, max, then it was time for his curtain call.
Tears fell then, and though he worked diligently through the solutions, starting at the top and working his way down, each negative brought a fresh wave of anger and grief. Finally, after ten minutes and a solitary ping so that they could find his suit and give him a proper burial, he accepted the inevitable.
Two hours. He’d survived a dozen missions, lived through countless close calls, spent a lifetime among the stars. And now he was drifting through space, his home, his love, the whole of his life, counting down the seconds until there would be no more.
Memories came as he cranked up the heat within his suit. Space was cold, real cold, and the last thing he was going to deal with as his time ran out would be the almost-tolerable temperature designed to conserve energy and provide maximum wakefulness.
What am I going to do, fall asleep and slip off my safety line?
The thought made him smile, and as the absurdity of his situation claimed him, he guffawed until he couldn’t breathe, bent double as he drifted in the night. All of his years of experience and cunning, and it hadn’t mattered at all.
Peace came then, a tranquility that seeped in and filled all the spaces that fear or anguish might have occupied. It hadn’t been a bad life, really. Sure, he didn’t have anyone he would leave behind. Oh, he’d had his share of lovers, but missions were measured in years, not months, and that was too much for even the most devoted soul.
Mostly, he knew his life had been one full of meaning. Humanity had done it at last, working around the shackles of Earth’s gravity and their own myopic greed, they’d finally taken the stars as their own. Mars had thirteen major colonies and was home to half a billion souls. The armored bio-sphere had been completed around the Moon, and he’d personally lain in the lush gardens which grew there now, basking in joy as the Earth had filled the sky.
He flicked a few buttons on his wrist pad, and the familiar tones and sights of Aliens began to fill his helmet. While Ripley’s escape pod was cracked open, he took one last look at the glorious vista around him. Pinpricks of light surrounded the whole of his vision, larger dots signaling the planets, and out here the smaller disk that was the sun. As he pushed down his blast visor and gave the authorization override for his suit to administer the narcotics normally reserved medical emergencies, he got busy taking in the sights and the sounds he loved one last time.
The End
Alienfully,
The Unsheathed Quill
