After my iPad post a few weeks ago, this picture cracked me up.

Quick Quiz

Is the phrase “T.M. Camp is mine.” either
(a) What the bill collectors whisper when I answer the phone late at night.
(b) The opening salvo in a cease-and-desist letter from the director of a Transcendental Meditation retreat.
(c) The start of a very, very, very nice compliment I received in a recent e-mail.

Answer below.

Birthday Book Bingo

Last week people on Twitter fought and kicked and clawed to get their hands on free copies of Assam & Darjeeling and Matters of Mortology.

Well, maybe it wasn’t that violent. But thanks for playing along anyways, kids. The books have all shipped. Hope you enjoy them.

And if you weren’t one of the lucky ones this time around, we’ll do it again sometime. I promise. It was too much fun not to.

Birthday Book Blues?

Don’t forget: If you really, really want to read one of my books you could always buy a copy. All you have to do is click on one of the covers over there on the right.

It’s worth noting that Lulu has free shipping all summer long, Amazon and Barnes & Noble are selling it with a big discount right now. And people are also ordering autographed copies directly. And there’s also a nice, crisp free-to-download PDF out there for each one, too.

Just saying…

Jay Garrick’s Lament, The Sequel

Back when my first child was born and I was supremely unprepared for the impact of a new baby in my life, I had a schedule that allowed for four to five hours of uninterrupted writing time every night. It’s almost sixteen years later and, boy oh boy, have times changed.

I have less time now, of course. And I’m way better prepared, having been through this a few times now.

Even so, Sophie is kicking the crap out of me.

She’s pretty darn cute, though.

Either the extremity of sleep deprivation utterly wiped out any memory of how hard these first months are, or she’s come to earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of ordinary mortals.

All of which is to say that the “forthcoming” joke on the Acknowledgements page of Assam & Darjeeling sounds less and less funny to me every day.

I started a short story just before Sophie was born — it’s the next Jee story, as a matter of fact — and the baby’s early arrival threw me off kilter for weeks. I did my best to chip away at the story a little bit here and there, but it wasn’t long before my momentum had flagged and I’ve been struggling to get it rolling again.

It’s driving me a bit crazy, to be honest. It’s not writer’s block. I’ve got it all together and ready to go. The story is right there, ready to be written. But it needs the full flood of effort and not the few rivulets I can squeeze out here and there.

(The delay hasn’t been a total washout, however. In the intervening weeks, I’ve made a few discoveries — minor things for the most part, little conversations and images scattered here and there. But they were worth the wait, so I shouldn’t complain too much. One bit in particular is something I’m very proud of, although I suspect I didn’t come up with it. Writing, for me, always feels like I’m eavesdropping on someone else, something Other. Metaphysical blog post on this topic to follow.)

Someone asked me about my process recently, specifically how I kickstart something that’s lost traction. Here was part of my answer…

“What works best for me is to start over. If I’ve been away from something for a period of time and find I can’t quite pick it up again — even though there’s no earthly reason why I shouldn’t be able to — I’ll read everything through as far as I’ve gotten and then do a quick sketch of the story: It’s overall shape, the sequence of events, an inventory of important things to include. Once I have that, I’ll start writing again from the beginning, transcribing my original draft and tweaking it as I go along, referring to my sketch whenever I have something new to incorporate. Usually by the time I get to the end of the previous text — the spot where it stalled — I’ve got a full head of steam built up again, and I can just keep chugging along.”

Hey, works for me.

Once the new story’s done, it’s time to wake up poor little Pantheon and get it rolling again. There’s a lot of work there, a big book waiting to be written — so it’s going to take a lot of work.

And, honestly, I’ve no idea how long it’ll take. I’d like to think I can have a first draft done by the end of the year. But there’s no way to know. All I can do is write as much as possible, as fast as possible.

Well. It’ll take whatever it takes.

Another Reason Why I Hate Summer

Now that it’s Summer, my coworkers enjoy opening the office doors in the afternoon. This brings in the breeze as well as large black flies and even the occasional wasp. They buzz around my head, retreating to tap against the top of the tall windows next to my desk. Eventually, they come back to divebomb me again. It’s maddening.

I have a deep, intense, and slightly pathological dislike of flying insects.

As I type this, my skin is crawling. I’m like Matt Cable over here.

On the Wagon

Speaking of which, I stopped drinking alcohol when Sophie was born. It’s not like I was a falling down drunk or anything, but I probably knocked it back more than most people usually do — typically late at night while I was writing.

So, faced with a unpredictable sleep schedule, an increasingly complicated set of priorities, and rapidly evolving stress levels… Well, the last thing I needed was “a psychoactive drug that has a depressant effect” (Shut up, Wikipedia.)

I haven’t really missed it at all. I find that I’ve got no desire for it. I’m not anti-drinking or anything like that. I’m just walking past that aisle in the grocery store now. And it’s become a little bit of an interesting exercise for me, even a challenge. I don’t have a set timeframe, so there’s a bit of “Let’s see how long I can go…” underlying it all. It’s also interesting to see how people react when the subject comes up. Some get a little twitchy and uncertain, as though I’m one Michelob Ultra away from becoming Montgomery Clift.

Really. I’ve just got a baby girl to take care of, after all. I pretty much did the same thing when her older brother and sister were born.

Recently, someone on Twitter mentioned they were reading Stephen King’s On Writing which led to an interesting conversation between a few of us about what we liked and/or hated about the book. I didn’t mention it at the time, but I’d already been thinking about King and his book. Parts of it are surprisingly personal and frankly confessional. I enjoy the memoir aspect of it most of all, and his revelation about his own addiction was startling.

However, one of my main points of irritation is King’s assertion that most (if not all) writers are drug addicts and/or alcoholics. He essentially claims that “we’re just wired that way.”

Call it denial, but I don’t buy that at all.

Tea on the other hand? Now that’s a drug I won’t be giving up any time soon.

And the answer is…

“T.M. Camp is mine. No I’m not a stalker and definitely not insane..what I mean is…well, maybe it’s a little hard to put into words but just like you I have shelves dedicated to Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman and Dave Sim…but everyone…everyone knows them…at least now anyway with the success of movies. But I DISCOVERED “Assam and Darjeeling” on the iTunes podcast. I don’t care if you wrote it and created it…I found you…”

I love getting e-mail like that. Seriously. That sort of thing makes my day.

Assam & Darjeeling is just starting to get out there and the early response overall has been very positive. We’re seeing reviews go up on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, as well as sites like Goodreads and LibraryThing. But more wouldn’t hurt. So don’t be afraid to put your own out there, if you’re so inclined.

And if you really want to help out, go into your local bookseller and ask them to order you a copy. Do it three or four times, tell them how much you like the book and that you’re buying copies for all your friends. Don’t forget to mention how much you wish I’d come to your town for a signing/reading.

You never know what might come of it.

Copies are going out to bloggers and reviewers as well. If you fall into one of those categories, you can request a review copy directly from Aurohn Press.

Coming Soon?

Some very nice people have asked me when my next book is coming out. Having blown through Assam & Darjeeling and Matters of Mortology, they’re reduced to subsisting on The Gospel of Thomas and whatever clever things I manage to say on Facebook or Twitter.

As I said above, the next novel is a ways off. If you listen in to The Gospel of Thomas, you’ll probably hear excerpts over time. And eventually it’ll have it’s own free audiobook/podcast. But we’re easily a year away from being able to buy a copy. Unfortunately.

However, it occurred to me recently that I actually have a few older books that are just a few steps from being ready for the world. I haven’t talked about them much here. In fact, very few people have even seen them. In all honesty, I’d forgotten about them until late last night when I was moving a few things around in my office.

Through no fault of their own, I don’t think about these stories much in the context of the rest of my work — although, upon reflection, they fit in rather well. I created them for very personal reasons, as one-off gifts for people over the years.

But a few of you had been asking for new work and I’ve been thinking about that. I read comics, after all. I know what it’s like to wait for the next thing to come out, and wait… and wait… and wait…

And there they were: Two books sitting on the shelf all polite and patient, just waiting for me to remember them.

So. That being said, Aurohn Press has tentatively added them to the 2010 schedule. If all goes well, the first “new” book will be released this August.

I should mention that it’s a children’s book, of sorts. A picture book.

It’s called The Jupiter Egg.

“The enemy of most authors is not piracy but obscurity.”

A few days back, Dave Charest posted that on Twitter, perfectly encapsulating a line of thought that’s been haunting me for the past nine months or so.

More on this a bit lower down in the post…

* * * * * *

In all honesty, I didn’t plan on taking a Summer Hiatus — and, really, given the amount of work I’ve gotten done over the past few months, I still could use a vacation. But if I went off somewhere for a week, you can bet I’d spend most of it writing.

Once the dust settled after moving earlier in the summer, I got sidetracked by the aforementioned secret science fiction project. If you’ve been following along on Twitter or Facebook, then you already know that the project is a comic book treatment/proposal called “Chimera” and that it’s been sent off to my friends in Singapore. So we’ll see where that goes.

(Speaking of which, let me offer a belated “Welcome to the World” to the lovely and perfect Ms. Prudence. And congratulations to her excellent parents, Gavin and WeeNee. Nice work.)

Interestingly enough, since completing the preliminary outline and scripts for this project, I’ve found a handful of upcoming movies and comics that share some of the same elements. There’s no direct correlation, just some interesting thematic parallels and plot points. But I gave up on getting frustrated by that sort of thing a long time ago. We’re all tapped into the same frequencies, so it’s no surprise when we resonate along similar lines.

In the documentary The Mindscape of Alan Moore, this is referred to as “Idea Space” and that’s just as good a way to think about it as anything else.

(For certain kinds of brains, that movie is a mind-stretching experience. I recommend it.)

Any time I didn’t spend on “Chimera” over the past few months was spent working on a poem.

That’s right. One poem.

I spent a ridiculous amount of time on this particular poem. And all I have to show for it are about twenty-three pages of handwritten gibberish, incomplete villanelle rhyming schemes, and no poem.

I am mad at this poem. It is in a time-out right now and if it’s very good, I might let it out someday.

Bah.

I also finally finished a new play that had been languishing on the back burner for what I thought would only be a few months but which, surprisingly, turned out to be a few years. But it’s done now and once I tweak some formatting, I’ll be posting it here for one and all to enjoy.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that it isn’t actually a new play at all. Truth be told, it’s actually a complete reworking of the first play I ever wrote. Hard to believe, but that was over twenty years ago. And the idea/premise for the play is even older, going back almost thirty years.

I always felt like that premise deserved somewhat better than what my nineteen-year-old self was able to do with it. A few years back something shifted inside my head and I said “Yeah… that could work.” So I threw out most of the story and characters, retooled everything, kept the bits that worked, and put it all into the hands of a girl named Elizabeth to see what she would do with it. As a character, Liz surprised the hell out of me and I’ve grown as fond of her as anyone I’ve ever written.

Most surprisingly, the things that didn’t work in the first version of the script — all those things I wanted to resolve and repair — are still present and problematic in this latest version. I’d blame Liz, but it’s obviously the writer’s fault.

At any rate, the name of the play is “Drawing Away” and I’ll be posting it sometime this coming weekend. Stay tuned for details.

In the midst of all of this, an old acquaintance from college got in touch via Facebook. Usually getting pinged by someone from the past is a bit of a mixed bag (I’ve whined about this before) but, for many reasons, that wasn’t the case this time. And, in a surprising degree of coincidence and convergence, twenty years ago this acquaintance had played the lead in the original version of the play that I’d just finished retooling. Coincidence? Alan Moore probably has something to say about that sort of thing as well.

Somewhere, I’ve got a VHS of that play floating around. I’ll try to pull a scene or two and post them here. If nothing else, there’s a high degree of nostalgia for me. That was at the beginning of it all, one of a very few specific milestones that I can point to and say “There. That’s when I felt my life shift on its axis.”

But, for once, I didn’t resent Facebook for reconnecting me with someone from the past.

As many of you know, I have a day job working in Advertising. Most of my time is spent helping my clients navigate the thorny paths of various online mechanisms for connecting with their audiences, customers, and so on. I’m reasonably competent at what I do, fortunately. And it’s a fairly enjoyable way to earn a living.

In the past month or so, I’ve had the opportunity to help one of my clients take their first little baby steps into social networking. What this means is that, for all intents and purposes, I’m spending a couple of hours a day on Twitter and Facebook as my client. Actually, there are three different and distinct brands that I’m managing, across two different networks (that’s six accounts total). I’ve got seven different browser tabs open at all times, a 3×3 TweetGrid that runs real time searches on related terms, and an ever-evolving strategy for helping my client participate in these conversations in a way that’s meaningful, human, and worthwhile.

It is, as you might imagine, a hell of a lot to keep straight onscreen — to say nothing of inside my chronically porous little Gemini brain. And I still have difficulty coming to terms with the concept that I get paid to do this sort of thing.

Fortunately, they haven’t heard about “Stripper Friday”.

Not a bad gig, really — at least, it’ll do until that whole “Writer” thing ramps up.

Although it does remind me of the old “First you do it for love…” thing.

And on that note, back to the beginning…

I have a couple of semi-announcements to share.

First off, I recently put together a portable sound studio similar to this one. Which means that, over time, I’m going to (a) Re-record both “Assam & Darjeeling” and “Matters of Mortology” to improve the overall production quality and clean up the rough edges in the original recordings; and (b) Begin a new podcast with an open format more suited to conversation, interviews, and shorter pieces. The re-recording could take a few months, of course. But I expect the new podcast to kick off sometime in October.

Second, if you’re one of the many people who’s written to me about getting ahold of a copy of either “Matters of Mortology” or “Assam & Darjeeling” that you can hold in your hands and read with your whaddyacall actual eyes, then good news is on the way. Starting with “Mortology” in a few weeks, both books will be released in a variety of formats: Softcover, Hardcover, PDF, and a few of the eBook readers (Amazon’s Kindle is for sure, the Sony Reader is a possibility as well).

It’s an . . . experiment, of a sort. I’m very interested to see how it goes.

Watch this space for details.

* * * * * *

Speaking of which, it’s time now for something I really should do more often…

I met author Tony Delgrosso on Twitter some long while back. Not sure how we connected but he’s clever and funny, so I bet that had something to do with it. Sometime last year, Tony began publishing his novel “Mr. Abernathy” online in installments. It’s a fun yarn and Delgrosso does a good job taking some of the classic thriller elements (Secret Nazi research, time travel, and [maybe?] UFO technology) and crafts an enjoyable, engaging book out of them. I wrote a review for it on GoodReads, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention it here as well.

Another reason I like this book is that it’s from an author taking steps to promote his work outside of the traditional (and increasingly, frustratingly hermetically-sealed) publishing industry. It’s a bit inspiring and, like the man said, “it is a comfort to the unfortunate to have companions in woe.”

You can pick up a copy of Tony Delgrosso’s “Mr. Abernathy” online.

All of this coincided with a comment from an offline friend/acquaintance who recently visited my website for the first time and expressed a friendly (albeit curmudgeonly) skepticism of all things online: “I worry (but not much) that we’re creating a generation of alienated loners and social misfits that substitute ‘linking’ for relationships.”

Well… thanks for stopping by.

Explaining things to other people often helps me understand them on a deeper level of my own. Apart from the strategic objectives we have for our client, I came away from the meeting with a clearer understanding of how and why I participate in these various networks. It also forced me to reevaluate my own internal rules and guidelines for that participation. I wasn’t particularly surprised to discover that I’d strayed a bit from my initial intentions, but it did give me cause to step back and think through whether or not I wanted to be where I was at now.

Twitter
Originally, this micro-blogging/streaming chat site started as a way for people to stay connected through mobile devices, by answering the question “What are you doing?” Since then, it’s evolved into an interesting little community of interconnected, micro-networks.

On Twitter, you “follow” people and people follow you. It isn’t, however, reciprocal; I can follow you but you aren’t required to follow me. And if you don’t want someone to follow you, you can “block” them (effectively rendering yourself invisible to them). You can also set your status to “private” which means you have to approve anyone before they can follow you or view your posts.

Users post single line “tweets” to the site, no more than 140 characters long. These tweets are streamed in a timeline, showing all of your activity and interaction on the site as a streaming conversation. So if I’m following you, I can see yours. And you can respond to someone else’s tweet by entering their user name preceded by the @ symbol, which adds your tweet into their timeline. You can also send a private message to someone as well, called a DM (or “direct message”).

Make sense?

I was introduced to Twitter by my friends at Fusionary a few years ago, and it seemed like a good place to lay a foundation to promote my writing and podcasting. But it wasn’t long before I was participating on a different level. The evolution from my self-serving intentions to being an active member of a community was due in no small part to the kind of connections I made on my first visit to Twitter.

I can remember picking out a few tweets from the public timeline, checking out a page or so of what those users had posted, looking at their related websites, and hitting the follow button. The first one I followed was probably Akelaa or DarkGracie. And I’m fairly certain that the first person to follow me was Mercy. It was the luck of the draw on those timeline picks, but it paid off. These are all people I follow even now, a few years after the fact, and I consider them to be friends.

One of the rules I’ve made for myself is that I can’t more than 100 people at a time on Twitter. This is more for logistical reasons than anything else. I just can’t keep track of that many other people — or, I can get way too distracted by chatting with all of them to get any real work done.

I’ve followed upwards of 200 people in the past, but I found that I continued to interact with the same core group no matter how many I was following. So I went through and distilled my list down. I find that the numbers can creep back up on me from time to time, so I try to clean it up again every few months.

It’s difficult to explain what that core group is to me. Many of them are readers/listeners who have taken the time to seek me out and chat with me about Assam & Darjeeling and Matters of Mortology — which pretty much makes my day every single time it happens.

Others are people who I think are funny or interesting… other writers that I enjoy eavesdropping on and interacting with… a few professional colleagues… some newswire alert organizations… and so on. I should mention that there are a few I follow who don’t follow me, and I’m fine with that. The list of people following me is somewhat high, edging closer towards 500. It isn’t uncommon for people on the big list to catch my attention and get added to my core list.

But the real core are those handful of people that say Good Morning every day, who share encouragement and support, who aren’t afraid to laugh or cry or rage at the sky in front of the rest of us. As such: A few nights ago I was up late and posted that I was feeling a little low, a little blue. It didn’t take long for a whole bunch of people to jump in to lend a hand — Dayngr, Mousewords, and Yvonner to name but a few. That was my core, taking care of me. Just like we all do for each other, now and again.

All in all, my interaction with Twitter is a mix of connections between a couple of overlapping mini-networks: My readers/listeners, the people I follow, and the people who are my friends. While it’s difficult to explain how that works to people “outside” of Twitter, it’s all genuine and I’m grateful for the people there… so much so, that I dedicated The Winter Chap to them.

Plurk
I found Plurk during one of many of Twitter’s “Fail Whale” moments. Plurk is a suitable alternative; consider it a variation on a theme. It’s a different kind of tool, a different kind of network than Twitter and there are some similarities, but it’s also got a number of features that are really quite nifty (inline image/video display and threaded conversations, for instance). The interactions there have a distinct quality to them, different than what’s on Twitter.

Although a lot of people have become factionalized, picking one over the other, I’m not too bothered by having a presence on both sites. I’ve got a few crossover friends who show up in both places — like Alousionist and Devyl — but Plurk is actually quite nice because it’s a point of contact with a number of my overseas friends/listeners/readers who don’t use Twitter — like Tenebrous Pau and Dakota Blackwater in England and Tere in Indonesia.

Over time, I’ve found that Plurk is a lot more work to keep up with. The conversations are longer and can go on for days. Oddly enough, my list of friends there is much shorter. But those few connections are what keeps me connected to that system.

Facebook
Facebook is a lot of things, to be sure. The use of “friend” to define connections in your network is a clever one. However, a lot of people on Facebook seem to be in a competition to collect as many “friends” as they can, as though the value of their online persona is measured by quantity.

That goes somewhat against my nature. I don’t have many friends, but the few I do have are very close to me. Thirteen years ago, moving from the West Coast to the Midwest, I lost a few of those connections that were important to me. And there are people I’ve known for years, going all the way back to middle school who are scattered all around the country. Facebook is one of many ways to renew and maintain some of those relationships.

As such, it’s the place where I’m perhaps most selective about who I accept invitation requests from. But it’s also a place where I’ve ended up adding a few of the people I’ve come to know on some of the other sites because, somewhat to my surprise, they’re people that I can call “friends” as well.

I never would have ended up on Facebook — or, at least, not so soon — if I didn’t have a teenage son. As a parent, you have to keep pace with where your kids are at and pay attention to what they’re doing, who they’re interacting with, and even engage with them in “their” world. I’m extremely fortunate that I have a very cool son with some very cool friends, who don’t get into too much trouble and don’t mind “friending” the old guy.

MySpace, Bebo, Pownce, Identi.ca, BrightKite, et al
There are lots of other systems and networking sites out there. I have a profile page on a fair number of them and I use Ping.fm to post updates to them all at the same time, but I don’t really consider them a part of my online community. First off, there’s just too damn many of them. And a lot of them don’t do it as well as the few I’ve mentioned above.

The one exception is LinkedIn. This is a networking site geared towards business professionals and that’s chiefly what I use it for. I have a profile there and actively make and maintain connections with people — mostly folks I’ve I’ve worked with — but I don’t stream my Ping.fm to it, for reasons which are obvious if you follow me on any of the other networks.

“What are you doing?”

Well, that went on a bit longer than expected.

But to come full circle, my discussion earlier this week made me take a step back and look again at my presence on all of these sites and networks. In my media ethics and mass communication classes in college, there was sometimes an underlying, McLuhan-esque concern about the dehumanization that came about from the adoption of technology.

Looking back, it does seem odd that someone teaching media classes made it a point to not watch television (he even had a “Kill Your Television” bumper sticker). This was almost twenty years ago, before personal computers were so common and certainly before the advent of Internet in society, so perhaps things have changed.

It certainly left me with an uneasy distrust (and even scorn) for popular culture and technology. But I got over it. Obviously.

And yet… there’s an echo of it in the comments my site visitor made earlier, and I have to admit that I slip back into that border-line Luddite mentality when I go through periodic reassessments like the one I did earlier this week. But if you’ve stuck with this so far, it’s obvious that there’s a lot of things happening in these places that are interesting and valuable to me on a variety of levels. If anything, the chief result of my self-audit was a validation of all of the good things I mentioned above. However, it did cause me to reassess and revise my friend/follower/following lists on the various sites.

In all honesty, there was just too much to keep connected to. The bigger those lists got, the less I enjoyed the interaction. The more of an obligation or chore it became. And there’s really only two solutions to that problem.

Since I wasn’t going to unplug entirely, I had to take a closer look at my lists.

This is a touchy subject. Lots of people feel bad on one level or another if their friend/follow request isn’t reciprocated. And being removed from someone’s list is often viewed as a personal rejection. Some people feel it, deeply. I admit, I’ve felt it myself from time to time. Which is why I’ve take the time to formalize my interaction along all these different channels, operating at a level appropriate to my relationship with people I know (and with people I don’t).

If you got filtered out on one of them, it’s possible that we’re still connected on another one. If that’s not the case, I can only say that it wasn’t personal. Most likely, we just didn’t share a whole lot of interaction, activity, or connection.

Who know? Maybe we’ll reconnect down the road.

It was there to find evidence of life.

After a dangerous descent through the Martian atmosphere, Phoenix finally came to rest in the Green Valley region of Vastitas Borealis near the Heimdall Crater on May 25th, 2008.

Heimdall, of course, is the Norse God who guards the bridge between Midgard (Earth) and Asgard (the home of the Gods). He will be the one who blows his horn to warn the Gods that Ragnarok has begun and their doom has come.

Heimdall is destined to be the last Aesir standing at the close of the final battle, when he and Loki will slay each other.

On May 31st, 2008, Phoenix reached out and first touched the soil of Mars with its robotic arm. It soon began analyzing samples from the surrounding surface using an ingenious series of on-board ovens and laboratories, sending data back to us here on its work.

It didn’t take long to confirm that, at some point in the past, Mars likely hosted an environment which would support the presence of liquid water. Later in its mission, NASA announced that Phoenix found evidence of perchlorate as well. While these salts are can occur naturally as well as in manufacturing, some believe they could preclude the possibility of life. There is also a chance that the presence of perchlorate is a by-product contamination from the Phoenix’s retro rockets.

Next to the American flag on the outer deck of the lander is a disc made of silica glass specially designed to last for thousands of years. On the disc are messages from Earth — including the works of H.G. Wells and Ray Bradbury as well as messages from Arthur C. Clarke, and Carl Sagan.

It is a remarkable achievement, to be sure. But you might well ask, why am I telling you all of this?

While Phoenix was still in transit, NASA began posting updates about the mission on the social networking site Twitter. The first of these appeared on May 7th, 2008: “Less than 20 days till I land on Mars!”

Note the usage of the first person — someone decided to personalize the voice of Phoenix and it was an inspired decision. It didn’t take long for @MarsPhoenix to amassing a following well over thirty-five thousand Twitter users.

I was one of them. I’d been on Twitter for a year or so and one of my friends there posted a message to @MarsPhoenix, which is how I first found out that it was on Twitter.

In the intervening months, I read @MarsPhoenix’s updates with growing enthusiasm and delight. It especially impressed me how it answered questions asked by other users, sharing in the ongoing dialogue and community of Twitter.

As odd as it sounds, it didn’t take long for me — for most of us on Twitter — to view @MarsPhoenix as one of us, just another person out there posting updates about their life. In the common parlance of the community, @MarsPhoenix was one of us. They were a friend.

And we were all shocked a few weeks ago when we got the news: Winter was coming. Without the solar power it needed to keep running, the Phoenix lander was going to shut down.

@MarsPhoenix, our friend, was going to die.

On October 30, 2008, @MarsPhoenix posted a few final words:

“In case we don’t get this chance again, thank you all so much for the questions, comments & good wishes over the mission. It’s been awesome.” [2:56 p.m.]


“Take care of that beautiful blue marble out there in space, our home planet. I’ll be keeping an eye from here. Space exploration FTW!” [3:55 p.m.]

I was at work when these messages came through and I managed not to cry at my desk. Driving home, though, I had to pull over because I just couldn’t see the road for the tears.

Later that night, with my wife holding me, I finally let loose the sadness that had been building inside since that afternoon.

Silly as it might sound, I was in mourning.

I suppose I still am.

But this is what we do, all of us. We live and make connections with each other, we reach out and try to make sense of things. We share who we are and what we have found. And, when winter comes, we grow cold and we fail. And then we die.

And the ones who are left, they mourn.

Apart from a few brief posts over the past few days, the account at @MarsPhoenix has gone silent. There is a slight possibility that NASA may be able to reawaken the lander once winter has passed — a “Lazarus Effect” built into the design — but it is a slim hope at best.

And yet, I’d like to believe that it’s possible — that this is not the end, that this winter will pass… that Demeter will be kind and reach out her warm hand to touch the face of Phoenix and bring it back to life once more.

@MarsPhoenix may be lost to us, but there are others: Cassini is cruising around Saturn and sharing what it sees with all of us. And Phoenix’s siblings, Spirit and Opportunity, are roving the surface of Mars even still.

Because this is what we do, even in mourning, we look to the life that has been left behind and we take hope in the future.

————————-

Addendum — In researching a few things for this post, I ran across an interesting piece of information about Phoenix that I did not know before: After a preliminary planning process, the mission received full approval from NASA to proceed on June 2, 2005.

Which means we share a birthday, my friend and I.

“We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.”
– Anais Nin

Been back home for a week or so — well, going on two weeks now — and I’ve been following up with the handful of contacts, leads, and introductions I made while at the BookExpo America.

Apart from some good connections, the only other notable thing to come out of the trip was that I started writing the next project, my third novel. If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you might have noticed more references to gods than usual. You might as well settle in and get used to it, because that’s what the new project is about.

It’s a bit of a shift, really. I’d had another project planned and plotted, ready to start writing . . . but it just wasn’t there yet. Anything I did felt forced somehow. After a few weeks of working but not feeling it, I decided to set it aside and let my subconscious work on it a bit more.

It wasn’t the project’s fault. There was something off in me and I just couldn’t get in the right position to flip the switch.

If the other project felt forced and difficult, digging out our old notes and sketches was like coming home . . . and I’ve already slid into the work with a sigh of relief.

Who knows, maybe in a few years I’ll come back to the other project and find it’s right there, ready to go.

The second project — the new project, the god project — was one from five years ago that was originally meant to be a collaboration with the excellent Keeley Geary (now my most excellent wife). Although she’s graciously relinquished the story and characters into my hands, I expect she’ll still be involved in the plotting and development process — if for no other reason than I’ll keep asking her annoying questions and trying out ideas on her.

LaDawn Driscoll (a new Twitter friend) recently twittered the quote from Anais Nin above, which serves as a perfect compliment to this one from Homer’s The Odyssey: “For the gods are never strangers when they meet…”

Taken together, Homer and Nin do a pretty good job of summing up where Keeley and I started with this new story, way back when.

I’m not in a position to say much more about the new project just yet, but suffice it to say that I’ve got a lot of writing ahead of me.

And I’m looking forward to it.