Categories
Book news

Book giveaway. Who wants to win a copy of Confluence?

Advance reader copies, or ARCs. Also known as galleys.
Advance reader copies, or ARCs. Also known as galleys.

The advance reader copies of Confluence arrived on Thursday. These are books but without the final proof read. They have typos. Hopefully not too many.

(I opened the book to a random page and the first thing I saw was a comma that shouldn’t be there. I hope we caught that one in the final proof. )

Beautiful white books with coloured covers. We were expecting plain green covers, as that’s what we’d had for the other two books.  Look at them. Aren’t they great?

We’re giving a book away.

If you want to win, comment on this blog post.  (i.e. Leave a Reply.)

If you’re reading this through Goodreads or Amazon or Facebook or any other feed, please note that you must come to the blog site to comment. Click on this link to get here.  (We’re asking you to come to the blog because last time it was hard to be sure that everyone’s comments got counted. Here they’re all in one place.)

Also, your comment must be on this blog post. Comments on other posts won’t count.

There are no location restrictions. We’ll send the book anywhere in the world.

Competition is open until next Sunday’s blog post (10am Australian Eastern Standard time on Sunday 2 October).

Once the competition closes, we’ll use the wholly scientific method of putting all names into a hat (or in our case it, the big aluminium mixing bowl) and we’ll draw a name out.

So if you want to read Confluence early, comment here.


confluence_giveaway_2Thanks to everyone who entered this giveaway.

We ended up choosing three names.

O. Jimenez, Kristine Friday Ahlskog and trishhenry–we’ll be in touch soon.

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Categories
On writing

Measuring time in space

Twenty four hours isn't a logical time period in space. What would we use instead?
Twenty four hours isn’t a logical time period in space. What would we use instead?

Yesterday was a beautiful spring day here in Melbourne, Australia.  After a week of heavy rain leading to one of the wettest Septembers on record, the day was glorious. The sun was out, the clouds were white(ish) and there were flowers in every garden.

It’s spring. The weather is getting warmer, the days are getting longer.  And it’s light outside when we leave for work.  Not yet light when we leave work for home, but that will come.  We’ll finally be able to see our garden—which we only see on the weekends in daylight right now.  (Thank you, Helen, for making it look so immaculate.)

Like I say, the days are getting longer.

Longer days in summer happen because of the way the Earth tilts toward the sun.  The day itself is the time it takes for the Earth to rotate on its axis.  A year is the time it takes the Earth to orbit the sun.

Each planet has its own day and year. It may or may not tilt (although tilt is good if you want seasons).

In a spaceship, days, seasons and years are less relevant. When you’re travelling around the galaxy, you don’t care how long the local day or year is.  When you move on, the next world will have a different day and year.

So how do you keep time in space?

Human beings have a diurnal rhythm of around twenty-four hours.  That’s basically because we are used to Earth’s twenty-four rotation, with its period of light and dark. We tend to wake up in the day, and sleep at night.

In the book we’re currently writing, we use twenty-four hours.  It’s an easy time period for readers to imagine.  We imagine that ships would have a ‘day’ period of around fourteen hours where the lights were daylight brightness, and a night period of eight hours, where the lights are low.

But is it really a logical period to use?

Probably not.

Years won’t make any sense because each world will have its own year.  You’re more likely to have a centralised date, based on multiples of some lesser time periods, and that will be the standard across the whole galaxy.

Think Star Trek star dates.

But what are the lesser multiples that will make up the years?

One thing is likely. Given the human numbering system, it will probably be some variation on a multiple of ten.

Probably the best date system I have ever come across is Vernor Vinge’s seconds, kiloseconds and megaseconds, from his Zones of Thought books. A second is a second. A kilosecond is a thousand seconds.  Given there are 3,600 seconds in an hour, this comes out to roughly a quarter of an hour.

Thus a megasecond is 11 days, 13 hours, 46 minutes and 40 seconds, which is roughly of the order of a week. A kilosecond is 16 minutes, 40 seconds, or the length of a short break. A gigasecond 31.7 years, so typical human lifespans are 2 to 3 gigaseconds.

Wikipedia Second

Vernor Vinge's Zones of Thought series.
Vernor Vinge’s Zones of Thought series.

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Categories
Writing process

How many power points do two writers need?

Electric lights. Something only half the house has at the moment. Look on the bright side. It's just finished winter here. It's dark when we go to work, dark when we get home. We can't see how those rooms need cleaning.
Electric lights. Something only half the house has at the moment. Look on the bright side. It’s just finished winter here. It’s dark when we go to work, dark when we get home. If those rooms are dusty, we can’t see it.

How many power points do you need for a computer?

Let’s see.  There’s the one for the computer itself. One for each of the two screens. A printer. The backup hard drive. That’s five already.

There are two computers in the office. That’s ten power points.  Plus the point for the laptop charger, one for the phone charger, and the one for the iPad. (Actually, we plug the iPads into a point in the dining room, for there are no spare points in the office.)  Then there’s the router, and the stereo.  The list goes on.

This is the second office we’ve had.  We added extra power points a couple of years ago we switched the then-study with the dining room.

Our house was built post-World War II. The switches aren’t that old, but a lot of the wiring is.  The fuse box is full of empty fuses that even the electrician has no idea what they do.  Not to mention, the fuse box itself is no longer legal.

We know the lighting and power needs work. We’ve known that for a while.  We’ve had a lot of electrical problems.

So last week, when half the lights in the house went out, and the electrician spent all day trying to find the fault and couldn’t, we weren’t surprised at the verdict.

“You’ll need to rewire the house.  And put a new fuse box in.”

“Sure,” we said.

The head electrician came around to inspect the electricals and give us a quote.

Let me tell you, people, if you’re going to get an estimate for rewiring, make sure the power points are accessible (and it’s a good idea if your house is cleanish).  The electrician goes into every room.

I got a bit embarrassed about all the power points in the study and the former study.  “Twelve power points along that wall.  Six along that wall. ” And in the other room.  “Ten on that wall, ten on the opposite. Do you want them all put back?”

“Yes,” I said, because we’re actually thinking of shifting back to the old study.  It has better light (or until last week it did, now it has none), and it looks out onto the garden, which makes a nice ambience for working.

I’m sure he thought I was crazy.

“And while you’re here, is there anything you’d like added?”

“Well, the kitchen light’s terrible, and we wouldn’t mind a heat/fan/light in the bathroom, and …”

“I’ll send you a quote,” the electrician says.

The quote arrived yesterday.

Ouch.  That’s all I can say.

But I’m looking forward to having working lights again.  And there’s an added bonus.  If we buy new lights they’ll put them in for us as they do the rewiring.

So tomorrow we’re going shopping for lights.

Categories
Book news Progress report

First sighting in the wild

The first glimpse of our latest book -- in the wild, as it were.
The first glimpse of our latest book — in the wild, as it were.

It’s just under three months until Confluence is released.

And look, advance reader copies are starting to surface.