{"id":1096,"date":"2009-12-01T09:56:19","date_gmt":"2009-12-01T14:56:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.starshipnivan.com\/blog\/?p=1096"},"modified":"2010-04-11T10:28:56","modified_gmt":"2010-04-11T15:28:56","slug":"planetfall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/?p=1096","title":{"rendered":"Planetfall"},"content":{"rendered":"

Traveler from afar who sailed to our shores \u2013<\/em>
\nask the Sea Rose for a gift\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Flight\"<\/p>\n

Most of my friends know that I write fiction.\u00a0 Publication started fifteen years ago, when five of my stories (collected in the file In the Realms of Fire<\/em><\/a>)<\/em> appeared in After Hours<\/em>, a venue pointed out by my friend and fellow writer Calvin Johnson.<\/p>\n

Since then, in addition to writing The Biology of Star Trek<\/a> and the essays here and elsewhere, I spun six novels in an alternative universe where the Minoans<\/a> survive the explosion of the Thera volcano.\u00a0 The saga starts in the Bronze Age and extends into the far future.\u00a0 A small press is interested in the first novel in the series, Shard Songs<\/em>, which gives me strong motivation to finish it.\u00a0 The trouble is that the entire opus needs global editing \u2013 a full-time job that requires focus and calmness of mind.<\/p>\n

Several friends saw parts of the saga as it unfolded.\u00a0 It inspired two of them (Heather D. Oliver and Kathryn Bragg-Stella) to create the beautiful artworks that grace the site\u2019s cover<\/a>, blog logo<\/a> and gallery<\/a>.\u00a0 However, none of it had officially seen the light of day till this August and I had serious doubts about its publication potential.\u00a0 This was in part because it doesn’t fit into any category and ignores several recipes… er, rules.<\/p>\n

In it, legends, songs, vision quests and geasa intertwine with genetic engineering, wormhole travel, planetary settlement and sapient aliens.\u00a0 Some portions have multiple narrators, the cultures are not Anglosaxon and an invented language whispers through it: my version of the lost Minoan tongue.\u00a0 Worse yet, in an era where dismemberments earn a work a PG rating, kudos and awards whereas glimpses of a nipple earn it an NC-17 rating and snide sniggers, my saga contains as much sex as it does war \u2013 and though it’s not romance, love is a powerful engine in it.<\/p>\n

Then, in August, Crossed Genres<\/em><\/a> accepted Dry Rivers<\/em><\/a>, a brief story from the\u00a0 saga that takes place in Minoan Crete.\u00a0 The just-released issue 13 of Crossed Genres<\/em> contains Planetfall<\/em><\/a>, a much longer braid from the saga\u2019s tapestry.\u00a0 Planetfall<\/em> consists of five linked stories whose human protagonists are descendants of the characters in Dry Rivers<\/em> and Shar<\/em>d Songs<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"Basin\"I don’t know if any of these novels will ever get published.\u00a0 But these two green shoots have given me great joy and hope.\u00a0 It was my tremendous luck to have devoted friends who urged me to keep writing the saga; to meet Kay Holt and Bart Leib whose vision of Crossed Genre<\/em>s<\/em> focused exactly on hard-to-categorize works like mine; and to enjoy the unwavering certainty of Peter Cassidy, who’s convinced that one day the entire saga will emerge from its cocoon and unfurl its wings.\u00a0 Dhi k\u00e9ri ten s\u00f3ran, ir\u00e9 keth\u00e1ni.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Traveler from afar who sailed to our shores \u2013 ask the Sea Rose for a gift\u2026 Most of my friends know that I write fiction.\u00a0 Publication started fifteen years ago, when five of my stories (collected in the file In the Realms of Fire) appeared in After Hours, a venue pointed out by my friend […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,6,10,13,5,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-biology-and-culture","category-science","category-science-fiction","category-space-exploration","category-writing-and-literature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1096"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1096\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}