Posts Tagged ‘Moon’

8
Feb

TANSTAAFL – There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch

   Posted by: Dave    in Writing

TANSTAFAAFL

“There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” – attributed to Robert Heinlein in his 1966 book The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.  It is a great book.  Buy it and read it if you haven’t already.

When I set out writing this blog one of the things that I fully intended to avoid was giving bad or unsound advice.  Therefore as a beginning writer I feel that I have no business writing “How to” articles for example.  Unfortunately I nearly broke my own code recently in a fit of enthusiasm.

Every day I trawl the internet for ideas for this blog; creative writing, science fiction, general education and such like.  As is typical for the internet some of what I come across is rubbish and occasionally some of it is gold.

Well, I recently came across what I thought was gold and was tempted to blog about it here.  Of course the idea seems like a good one and there is a huge urge to share, but I have absolutely zero idea if it actually works!

While I was writing a long and enthusiastic post Heinlein’s words were ringing in my ears along with other wisdom such as “If it looks too good to be true, then it probably IS too good to be true”.  Maybe the cynical old goat in me won in the end.  Accordingly, I will explore the truth or otherwise of the situation and only post when I have some facts.

So what was my great idea?  It is hardly a new one, but it is something that I hadn’t actually seriously considered before.  It relates to writing articles online for cash, for sites like:

http://hubpages.com/

At the moment I am writing maybe one blog post a day, one short story a month and a novel maybe later this year.  The blog is mostly a labour of love, although I might kid myself it will help me become better known.  The short stories, even if all were published they will net me maybe £2-300 each.  The novel and its mythical advance payment is a totally unknown item.  None of these things are going to reliably feed me.

The sensible side of me knows that if I am to earn a living as a writer (one of my long term goals) then it will likely be damn hard work, so when a website offers me hard work and a little cash I jumped at the idea – only later considering if it was a real offer and not just hype and a con job.  Even writing this now I am no wiser.  The only solution is to try it and see.  Maybe I can make some lunch money?

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2
Feb

Truth can be stranger than fiction

   Posted by: Dave    in Writing

As you may be aware I am still a writer wannabe.

The reason I consider myself a wannabe is that I don’t (yet) have a published book.  Obviously I write (you are reading this aren’t you?), but I don’t feel that I will be a writer “proper” until the first book is published.  Blog posts, short stories, business reports and graffiti on public toilet walls do not count!

Anyway, the book I am currently struggling to grind out is set in the near future where space exploration has basically been handed to the big corporations by the US administration due to lack of cash, drive and insight into what the program means for humanity.  This is contrasted with Chinese and European attitudes.  The idea is to show the absurdity of a US administration trying to regain “control” over the space program when they effectively opted out of it some years earlier, just like the United Kingdom did in the 70’s in fact.

The idea behind this was simply that historically the US space program has seen tax dollars wasted on a truly epic scale.  Items “for the space program” have had massively inflated prices (eg over $200 for a .97c wrench).  It therefore seemed more likely that a successful space program will come from business and not from government if the government will only underwrite the successful ventures.

Imagine my surprise when I read on BBC News that Obama really is cancelling parts of the US space program.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8489097.stm

I thought I was writing fiction, maybe not.

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