Wife came down with something, ended up coming home early because of it. I think my mood is related. Generally, been feeling kind of "punk" the last couple of days--down, low energy, "not safe for fabrics", etcetera. Slept a lot Monday, more than usual; slept in after writing the blog post, then slept more after my wife got home and we had dinner.
Stator arrived Monday afternoon, a couple days faster than promised. I was going to go install it and see how the bike worked, but Mrs. Fungus wanted to be held, so I went to bed with her instead and we ended up sleeping for 2.5 hours. So it sits on my desk, being all new and shiny. Well, I'll get it done.
New stator doesn't differentiate between coils. Old one has three different wire colors; new one has three yellow wires. I'm led to understand that later models are all-yellow, and in fact it really doesn't matter which stator coil gets hooked to which leg of the rectifier as they're all electrically identical.
I really, really hope this fixes it.
We made the annual pilgrimage to Indiana on Sunday, which was the day after the anniversary of our second date, on which we...went to buy fireworks. Yeah. And went to a car show, and had ice cream. That was in 2012, so it's already been five years.
Fireworks will be fun. That's next week, though.
Had an idea for a story that might fit in the (still unwritten but for one story) Piss-Poor Judgement series, in which Kerr Mansfield and the eponymous ship end up hired by a guy who is looking for ancient artifacts. The guy is not what he seems, and the only real problem is that this story requires aliens in a universe where there aren't supposed to be any. Adding aliens complicates things, and I don't know if I want to make that change--but the story is tailor-made for PPV.
The first artifact they go after is called, by the guy, the "Jericho Shield". The aliens don't want humans to have it, and they go to a great deal of trouble to attempt to keep the humans from getting it without actually shooting at them. There end up being some other bits and pieces, like the "Wings of the Seraphim" and such, all built and left behind by ancient aliens etc.
The more I think about it, the more I realize this needs to be in a different universe entirely, because KM and PPJ aren't from a universe with aliens. Well, it was a nice thought while it lasted, anyway. So it'll be a new world I write this story in, something probably closer to Babylon 5 in tone.
Could be worse.
Apocalyptic Visions continues to stall.
There are a few things I could do to fix this. The first is, simply, to cheat: pick up action in the next chapter with, "Well, that certainly didn't go well, did it?" Backfill a bit and then forge onward, completely skipping over the actual ground combat scenes. This is a time-honored method of storytelling and there's nothing wrong with it, but I find it unsatisfying.
The second is, skip over it for now (maybe with some annotations) and write it in later when I've got it figured out. I've never liked doing this.
The third is simply to start writing it, with the knowledge that it'll need heavy editing to make it useful. I used to do this more often than I like to admit, which is why I have a bunch of computer disks littered with 2- or 3-chapter stories which peter out in the middle of the narrative: I had an idea, but when I got started on it, it didn't turn out to be as good an idea as I'd thought it would be, or it just didn't capture my attention. This runs the risk of me writing myself into a situation where I just don't care any longer.
The fourth is for me to leave it alone until the ideas come naturally. This is fine when you're not writing to deadline (and I am not) but when you have aspirations of actually being an author, you have deadlines to meet.
Bah.
You know, when I was a kid and first starting on teaching myself to write fiction, I had the usual adolescent fantasies about my book being a best-seller. A lot of people told me I'd never write a best-seller--certainly that pile of hash will never make it!--but now I don't even care about that as long as people buy the books and I make a little money on them. (Granted: the money from a best-seller would be nice. I'm not going to hold my breath.)
I am now told, by people whom I trust, that the stuff I write is very good and worth reading. And my own clinical assessments, where I try to keep my bias to a minimum, have shown that I certainly write well enough to be a pro (and considering that some really crappy books get published...). It's just a matter of making that first sale.
Marko Kloos managed to do quite well by self-publishing his first novel, but he had a larger audience than I do, and word-of-mouth sold a lot of copies of his debut novel. Which got him noticed by an agent, which got him a contract, etc, etc.
So I go outside and look up at the stars until the afterimage of my monitor goes away. I think I see the faintest indication of the Milky Way overhead, something usually invisible through light pollution and humidity, but tonight is very cool and dry. I realize that living here on Earth, in this time, I am only going to ever see the surface of this world, and won't travel beyond it. And in reality, that's likely to be the fate of 99% of the people ever born, whatever world they're born on, even when space travel is routine, someday.
None of which helps my mood any.
Ultimately, of course, the prescription for all this is pretty simple, and one I know well by now: You're not going to fix anything by staying up to all hours and moping about it. Go to bed and get some sleep; you've got things to do tomorrow.
And so, as usual, I retire for the night.