Tonight it went well. I’m getting numb-bum from sitting in the office chair, but I got clear of 1200 words in an hour and a bit. I’m working on the story of a woman trying to broker a peace treaty among the far-flung descendants of the human race, on an Earth lit by a red giant sun, two and a half billion years in the future.
There was a moment when I feared I might have to scrap the whole story, but then I was listening to a song by Corb Lund and this line gave me some inspiration:
half heard voices from the ghosts, from the graves
grandfathers tell us at the mouths of the caves
Can’t tell you yet how it’ll all end, but here’s a scene that I did tonight:
The black plain had been called Panthalassa, and it had been called the Pacific Ocean, and the Broad Sea, and the Grey Swamps, and any number of other names, names recorded or lost to history’s sweeping indifference. Now it was a desert of black glass, a shifting surface layer of fine dark sand blowing across a deep bedrock layer that had been baked for a billion years by a swollen, murdered sun.
Overnight someone had planted a garden. It had to have been one of the AIs, or one of the robots, and they probably had used time shapers, something Lady Schrone was certain she’d marked down as proscribed. But it was hard to be angry, because the garden was beautiful: flowers, flowers of all descriptions, radiating away from a central point like the spokes of a great wheel, and at the wheel’s center, a tree reached for the heavens. Leaves the size of her body unfurled themselves at the tree’s top, nearly twenty meters from the ground. They were sharp and green against the blue of the sky.
The garden was a perfumery, a green oasis in the glittering black desert, and Lady Schrone was ill inclined to hunt down and punish the mechanism or mechanisms that had given it birth.
I almost don’t want to quit writing, but it’s getting toward bedtime, and I have company, and I’ve discovered that the best place to quit is right before I write something that I’ve been waiting to write for a while. That way, I’m eager to go the next time I sit down to write, and the scene has time to percolate and distill and it tends to come out even better that way.
Usually, anyways.
So: written anything good lately?
Only problem: if Sol became a red giant, Earth would be swallowed in the process, as its orbit is inside the circumference that a red giant star would have. Even if it were not, the photosphere would come so close to the planet that nothing recognizable would remain on Earth’s surface.
Well, that’s true, but one of the references I ran across in my search for information on stellar evolution (can’t remember right now where it was, but if I find it, I’ll link to it) said that there is a theory that, due to Sol’s loss of mass over the gigayears, Earth may have moved far enough out that by red giant time, it won’t be swallowed. It would be a dangerous place to be, though.
Also, the beginning of the story has Earth being re-seeded with a temporary atmosphere in order for the delegates to be able to survive there for a few months.
I will probably have to re-write some of the story, though, bearing in mind how huge the sun would look from Earth…