The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Ah, those warm, sultry breezes of Summer, the ones from the south that bring heat and humidity that makes the evening hours so wonderful…except for the fact that my apartment’s sliding-glass door faces north, and we are situated near the entrance of the community.
Which means, folks, that on nights like this, we are downwind of nearly every barbecue and grill in the settlement.
The scents are driving me out of my mind….
All-righty, time for a small fiction sample again. This one is the opening of an untitled space-opera project that I started noodling with a year or so ago, and since then has been not so much on the back-burner as stashed in a Ziploc Freezer Bag and stuffed way in the back of my freezer, underneath two of those awful-tasting low-cal, low-fat meals that the commercials would have us believe are culinary bliss. Originally I was toying with the idea of doing a blog-serial, adding to the story every couple of weeks or so, but I’ve vacillated between attempting an online tale and, well, not attempting an online tale and simply saving this story for a later time. So, I’ll just stick a chunk of it here and see if anyone is sufficiently intrigued to beg me to continue with it.
(Did I mention that I’m hot, bored and undercaffeinated today? Ah, I see that I did, a couple of posts down….)
Untitled Space Opera, Episode I: The Phantom Title
[Editor’s note: Actually, not quite. I had toyed with the title Arras of the Stars, but I’m not sure if that would be for this story or for the Amazing Grand SAGA of which this would only be a part. What you see below could not possibly be any more of a “work-in-progress”, except to the extent that it’s not even, really, “in progress”.]
ONE DAY late in the year 4763 OC, the Royal Family of Gavinar Five – Queen Ryann the Third and her two daughters — prepared for the journey to Salengarde Prime to pay tribute to His Magnificence, the Most Holy and Revered Lord and Protector of the Galactic Realm, Zantor the Second, who was to mark his fiftieth year on the Throne of Stars as High Emperator of the Salengarde Imperium.
It was certain to be the most magnificent celebration the Imperium had ever seen, watched and joined by every one of the Imperium’s one hundred and eleven member star systems as well as a hundred or more of the pseudo-independent systems which nevertheless allied with the Imperium. Even the Oxcillan Protectorate, the Imperium’s most powerful rival in the Galaxy, would pay its grudging respect to the man who was about to become only the fourth High Emperator to achieve his fiftieth year. Every place in the Galaxy would mark the occasion, but nowhere would it be grander than on Salengarde Prime itself, when the amazing gifts for the Emperator would be presented for the first time – although most of them were already known to some degree. There would be, for example, a cycle of songs by Welf A’nibra, generally held to be the finest composer in the Imperium. There would be carvings by Jantina of Renald Three, carvings not just remarkable for their make by one of the greatest of sculptors but by the fact that they would be made from the golden bark of Renald Three’s migratory trees. There would be a new poem by Shinn Darhyl, the venerable poet of Dasken Seven who had not composed a single new verse in the nearly twenty years since he had become even more reclusive on his private moon. And there would be so much more! The festival, which was to last one Salengarde month (fifty-one days), would be the most amazing event that anyone could remember – even the Cyborgs of the Outer Reaches, whose communal memories were said to reach back hundreds of years.
Princess Tarina, at sixteen the older of Queen Ryann’s daughters, had dreamed of going to Salengarde Prime all her life and she had awaited this particular journey since a year before, when the Emperator’s Envoy – in all his prim and proper military bearing – had presented to the Queen the official invitation, signed in Zantor II’s own hand. Of course, father had known in advance; that was why he had prevailed upon the Queen to have a new Royal Cruiser built just for the occasion. The ship had been built and christened, its test runs had been a smashing success, and the day had at last come for Queen Ryann and the two Princesses to board the Royal Shuttle and go to their new cruiser which had been named The Jewel of Gavinar. Everything was packed, and the farewell ceremony was just two hours away. For Princess Tarina, the whole day was like a dream – a dream that suddenly turned sour, when one of the Queen’s consorts brought the word that her other daughter, Princess Margeth, had announced that she did not want to go.
“What?” shouted the Queen. “How dare she! Two hours until we board….two hours! Gods forbid that I have any peace from either of my two daughters! At least I could have sent two Princes away, but Princesses? By the Seven Holy Suns!”
She said quite a bit more than that; Queen Ryann’s tantrums were the stuff of legend. A standard joke — never told in the Royal Court, of course, lest word get back to the Queen – was that her husband had set aside his title as King Regent to take his seat on the Emperator’s Council simply to get away from the eruptions of Ryann’s anger. At this moment, Queen Ryann was still going on about the difficulties of Princesses when Princess Tarina, who had been standing there for all of it, hazarded to speak.
“Mother, would you like me to talk to her?”
“You?” The Queen stopped and stared at her older daughter. “Tarina, please. Margeth has a hold over you. You would do anything for her….if I sent you in there, she’d convince you not to go.”
“Not this time, Mother.”
The Queen furrowed her brow and stroked her chin. “I suppose I could always order the Royal Guard to bring her by force,” she said. “Though it would be quite the scandal. I would be laughed at in my own Court! I suppose that I shall have to go.”
“Mother!” Tarina stepped forward into her mother’s path. “Margeth isn’t going to listen to you.”
“Nonsense, girl. Margeth will listen….”
“Mother, Margeth never listens to you. Maybe she’ll listen to me. I think I can talk to her. She knows what this journey means to us.”
“You mean, to you.” The Queen put her hands on her hips. “I know that you’ve dreamed of going to Salengarde all your life. But Margeth is my child, and she is to be treated….”
“Let me try, Mother!” Tarina was pleading now, something which usually failed miserably with her mother. “If I don’t succeed, you can fill her room with stun gas and have her carried aboard the Shuttle with the rest of our luggage.”
The Queen stopped to consider that. “Stun gas….the idea has merit.”
“Mother!”
“Oh, very well,” Queen Ryann snapped. “Go and talk to her. You have thirty minutes, and then I am having her sedated. We can suggest to the news outlets that she was taken with a bit of fever….yes, it is that time of year….” The Queen was still scheming how to cover up the unwilling sedation of her younger daughter for a spaceflight as Princess Tarina bowed for her mother and then made her way to her sister’s chambers.
Fifteen minutes later, it was not going well.
[At this point, fifty Ninjas would enter and do battle with Wonder Woman and Lara Croft.]
Greg has a couple of interesting posts today (well, two that I’m citing, anyway. He’s never not interesting):
:: There is, apparently, a strange new trend in job interviewing: puzzles and brain-teasers. I probably don’t know enough about this kind of thing to know if it really has the expected results (i.e., does it actually help determine things like “problem solving” and “creative thinking”) or not, but it sounds a little creepy, anyway.
:: Greg also speculates on whether President Bush will consent to debates in 2004’s fall campaign. It seems to me that if he does find a way to scuttle debates, timing will be the excuse, given the late date (the latest ever) of next year’s Republican National Convention and the 9-11 anniversary observation, to come soon thereafter. Wait and see, I suppose….
Charlie Stross, he of the “My God, I’m tired because I’ve written six hundred thousand words since breakfast” life, is changing his lifestyle a bit. Congrats to him, and best wishes.
I’m hot, bored, and under-caffeinated. ‘Tis a combination that inevitably leads to babbling about Star Wars….
:: The clamoring as to the title of Episode III has apparently begun, over on AICN. As usual for AICN, the “TalkBack” provides some fine nuggets of amusement (Star Wars Episode III: All Your Base Are Belong To Us) amongst the throngs of “Star Wars sucks, God bless The Matrix” posts. Oh well. As for me, I think that trying to guess the title for Episode III is a pretty useless exercise, because in both of the last two cases, the titles eventually announced were not titles that anyone would have thought of before. The only Star Wars film to have an obvious title is The Empire Strikes Back, and I don’t expect things to change now. So I’ll just wait and see.
:: Over on the rec.arts.sf.written newsgroup, a thread recently kicked off about “Sequels that ruin the original”, which eventually settled on a number of haughty, “literate” SF-fan types savaging The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, with no one complaining that those discussions were off-topic in a written SF newsgroup (but just try discussing any other SF movie there and see what happens). Anyway, one mini-debate within the larger debate is on Han Solo’s well-known “gaffe” when he claims that the Millennium Falcon is “the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs”.
Most people assume that Han is using “parsec” as a unit of time, which it is not — a parsec is a unit of distance — which most people therefore take to mean something like, “I drove between Buffalo and San Francisco in less than two hundred miles”, an absurdity. The obvious explanation — that Han somehow found a much shorter, and more dangerous and therefore more impressive, route for executing the Kessel Run — is usually rejected, because well, George Lucas is a hack and just couldn’t have come up with anything clever like that. Whatever.
I do recall, though, that when I grew up in Western New York, my family would occasionally drive to visit my grandmother who lived in New Jersey, just outside of Philadelphia. This involves moving southeast — but the problem for us, from a driving perspective, was that there is no good south-east route between Western New York and Southeastern Pennsylvania. So we’d do a “stair-step” kind of route, going a bit east then a bit south then a bit east then a bit south and so on, until we reached Philly. Thus, a trip that was about 300 miles “as the crow flies” turned into a 400 mile drive. Of course, my father never gave up the dream of finding the “Southeast Passage”, which usually involved narrow country roads through the hill country of central Pennsylvania (think Deliverance, but farther north). So we were trying to make the “Philadelphia Run in less than 400 miles”.
Thus, Han’s claim has never bothered me. Go figure.
Today is the first day of significant heat in Buffalo — right now it’s something like 83 degrees out, and tomorrow’s supposed to be a bit hotter before a cooldown. What’s nice is that later on this evening, when I reach the point where I’m hottest, I can fire up the central air (which we haven’t had in any of our previous domiciles). Hooray!
By the way, all of you people in “warmer climes” who think of Buffalo as an arctic snow-palace, remember: in all the time that weather stats have been kept, not once has Buffalo’s temperature topped 100 degrees. So there.
(And you folks in Arizona or some such place, stop telling me that it’s a “dry heat”. 110 degrees is friggin’ unpleasant, no matter how dry it is. Harumph.)
Here’s one of those ultra-cool “VR” tours, of an Egyptian Pharaoh’s tomb. Ultra-cool, even at 56K. (Yeah, I’m still on dial-up. And I’m quite happy with it, because I do very little downloading of big video files and I don’t do filetrading of any sort. So there.)
(Crossposted to Collaboratory — but not yet, as Collaboratory is apparently now under conversion to New Blogger.)
Long-time readers will know I spent a good amount of time last winter complaining waxing poetic about the amount of snowfall Syracuse receives, which is significantly more than Buffalo’s, despite the national perception of Buffalo as being only a tiny bit less wintry than, say, St. Petersburg, Russia. And Syracuse’s snowfall is exceeded by a town called Oswego, which is right on the shores of Lake Ontario and perfectly situated to receive the brunt of the lake-effect snowstorms.
How much snow did Oswego get last year? Well, one of the things that will be familiar to people living in areas of heavy snowfall will be the gigantic piles that accumulate in fields, empty lots, and abandoned parking lots where the snow from the roads is dumped after being removed from the streets. These snowpiles, owing to their impressive size, can last long past the actual end of winter, into April…into May…
…or, if the winter dealt enough snow, past the summer solstice.
Wow.
What single actor, more than any other, has made his index fingers such a vital part of his thespianic arsenal?
Why, this fellow, of course!
(Somehow this page showed up in my referral log — probably another case of someone looking at this page immediately before looking at mine, since the Gallery in question obviously doesn’t link me. But this is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen on the Web.)
Things That Never Happened In Syracuse, no. 2376: while at Party City this morning, buying DragonTales-themed plates, napkins and balloons for my daughter’s belated birthday celebration, I glanced at the guy behind me in the checkout line, who along with his wife and two daughters was buying a fistful of balloons including a giant one shaped like a ladybug, and realized that he was none other than Jim Kelly, NFL Hall-of-Famer and former quarterback of the Buffalo Bills during the team’s run of four consecutive Super Bowl appearances.
Somehow, I managed to contain my excitement at such a brush with my town’s greatest sports hero without betraying my cool exterior. (In other words, I didn’t start going, “Holy crap, it’s Jim Kelly! Oh my God it’s number twelve! Wow! I can’t believe it! You are so cool!!”) Score one for the Good Guys.