Click Your Heels, Come Home

After visiting the Ham Radio Festival two weeks ago, my father and I attended the 30 Year Celebration Festival at the US Space and Rocket Center. 

I’ve been going to the Space and Rocket Center since I was a kid. I can remember racing my small plastic space shuttle on the asphalt outside the Space Center, grinding the little plastic wheels on the sidewalk to make the ignition sparks light up.

Living away from my hometown for years, and coming back without having really planned to, has changed my perspective on the city.   

The Space Center was one of the many things I took for granted about living in Huntsville.

The Celebration at the Space Center was huge. There were tons of people everywhere. We had to park in a grassy field and ride a school bus to the Space Center, because the usual parking lot was completely full. 

We picked up free Mission Badge stickers and listened to a band play songs from The Sound of Music as we wandered beneath the Saturn V rocket. Then we lined up and waited for the big deal - an astronaut autograph signing. 

We’d been out and about since 9am, and we were getting a bit tired. But there was a whole separate building of the Space Center we hadn’t been in - a building with a traveling Dinosaur exhibit! So Dad settled into the theatre to watch a short film about the last space shuttle mission, and I walked over to the museum building in search of dinosaur awesomeness.

But the dinosaur exhibit was mainly an excuse for small-child friendly activities, like digging in a sand box to excavate fake dinosaur bones. I spent a minute staring at a cast of the T-Rex Sue, the mainstay of the exhibit, and then wandered down a hallway, hoping for some more grown up dinosaur fun. 

Instead I walked into a hallway that somehow survived the museum’s recent overhaul. The Space and Rocket Center used to be packed full of archival goodness. Amazing objects from the space program. Things that filled you with awe and excitement and the desire to know more.

Doesn’t it just make you want to read up on the history of the space program? Or at least watch Apollo 13?

But I guess models of Space Lab and displays of spacesuits don’t bring in as much money as traveling exhibits. So all of these archival bits were whisked away, and the empty space filled with activities for the very, very young.

Except for one, small hallway, one I spent a lot of time in when I was younger, because it held the only Hugo Award I had ever seen in person.

 

The one that belonged to Wernher Von Braun. 

Seeing his Hugo Award motivated me to keep writing when I was younger. It let me know that yes, there are other people out there who love these stories of space and science and strange things as much as you do. 

My parents took me to so many kid-friendly museums when I was a child. We went to one nearly every time we took a family vacation.

I cannot remember any of them.

But I remember standing in front of the dinosaurs at the Smithsonian. I remember being awed and frightened by the wingspan of a pterodactyl.

And I remember wandering through the Space and Rocket Center, the models of people in Space Lab and the International Space Station sparking within me a burning desire to leave Earth and go into space.

How can we inspire the next generation of star voyagers if flimsy traveling sideshows push away the images, the excitement of discovery? 

Time to Level Up - With SCIENCE!

Last Saturday was my father’s birthday, and as per our tradition, we went to the Huntsville Ham Radio festival together. 

This is a picture from the end of the Hamfest on Saturday, as everyone eagerly awaits the prize drawings. 

I studied for and received my Technician Class license in 2008, and I’ve been meaning to upgrade to a General Class License. With a General Class license you can get on the HF bands and talk to people who are much farther away. 

We went to a panel for YLs (Young Ladies), and I was the only Technician Class level person in the room. A few others were General Class, but most were the highest level - Extra Class.

This calls for action.

I’ve already printed out the questions for the General Class exam.

I’m going to level up. 

I’m in love with the aesthetics of old technology. All things Heathkit make my heart go pitter patter.

But I don’t want to just be in love with the visual, the appearance of old technology. I want to be able to work with it, get inside, know how it functions. 

At the Hamfest every year there are women selling jewelry, and every year I walk past those booths. I like jewelry. Jewelry is fun and great. But at a technology festival I don’t want to be part of the pileup to look at bracelets and earrings.

But this time I broke my promise for a moment and stopped to look at some lovely earrings made out of capacitors. (I didn’t take a picture, but they looked similar to this.)

Very cool. But the thing is, these earrings don’t DO anything. They’re made out of capacitors, but they might as well be made out of beads. More aesthetics without function. Without meaning.

My challenge to myself this year is to write more science into my science fiction. I’m gong to take classes, read books, and have a general Seeking Mind when it comes to finding out more about the technology behind the beautiful. 

I want to write a story that my second week Clarion West instructor, Nancy Kress, would consider viable. I’ll keep writing my weird-reality fantasy stories, but I’m going to regularly push myself to write science based stories as well. 

The only idea for a novel that I’ve ever been excited about has tons of technology in it. I’m going to give myself a few years with short stories to get all of the mechanics down, and I want to be ready with more techno savvy by the time I’m ready to start my novel. 

Books I've Loved: TVA Baby

Read my review on Goodreads

Locus Awards, 2011

Today we went to the Locus Awards Ceremony. Neil Gaiman came over to our table and said hi. Later at the Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony he read a lovely piece about Harlan Ellison. We rode the bus there and back, and I spent the evening critiquing the first full stories that we'll workshop. An amazing, exhausting, wonderful day. 

Isaac Asimov, Total Badass

Clarion West 2011: Raising the Funds

Time slows down between applying to Clarion West and getting your notice of acceptance or rejection. But if you are accepted, then time accelerates. Into Warp.

We were allowed to share news of our acceptance on April 2nd, so I made the mistake of postponing fundraising until April. Then my day job became really busy, and now it is almost the end of April, and I'm just getting started finding ways to raise the funds for tuition, airfare, and living expenses while at Clarion West.

I can already tell that this is going to be a great class, full of innovative people, just from the ways that we take this first step towards Clarion West:

• Here's a kickstarter project by one of my classmates. 
• And another of my classmates is making an amazing, beautiful statement of just how much this workshop means to her.

In the next few weeks I plan to hold a yard sale, a bake sale, and apply for a loan in case all else fails.

But today I had some fun. I went out into my backyard and made a video for my kickstarter project. You can watch it here.

I have no idea if this will work at all, but it seems like a good first step.

Clarion West 2011: Getting the Phone Call

I got the call in the middle of March, the day after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. I was on the phone with my father, a retired Nuclear Plant Trainer, and he was explaining to me the likely scenario at Fukushima. I lived in a little town near Hiroshima for a year as an undergraduate, and still have friends scattered around the country. My partner has aunts and uncles and cousins in Tokyo. I've been dreaming of going back for years. So when my phone started beeping, letting me know there was a call on the other line from a number I wasn't familiar with, I let it go to voice mail. I reasoned it was probably a call from work or a wrong number. I joked to myself, "Ha. Maybe that was Clarion West."

It was.

I had a voice mail waiting for me from Neile Graham, who has a lovely, friendly voice. I called back, calming myself, listing all the possible reasons I might have been called that were NOT about acceptance.

My application was incomplete.
I hadn't sent in the application fee.
I was an alternate.
They were calling to ask me to please never apply to Clarion West again.

But Neile told me I had been invited to attend. After squealing and jumping around and running into the kitchen and telling my partner, "It's Clarion West!" I finally calmed down enough to tell Neile, "Yes! I will be there."

I love that Clarion West calls the new class to let them know they've been accepted. It's that first jolt of connection, of waking up your mind to "hey! this is really happening!" But even after speaking with Neile, I couldn't accept that I'd actually be attending the workshop. I began to think it might be reality when I received a confirmation email later that night, but then I had to wait all through March to find out who my classmates were. I began to think that the release of the class list had been delayed because they had decided they didn't want me to attend after all, and were trying to figure out a way to tell me.

Now that it's April, and we've got an email list set up where we're talking about Clarion West preparations, it is beginning to feel real at last.

I've sent in my deposit to secure my place at the workshop. I'm waiting for Monday to roll around so I can buy my ticket to the Locus Awards. And there's a packet of information coming in the mail soon.

But I don't think I'll believe it until I arrive in Seattle and enter the mysterious sorority house, and sit down to workshop the kind of stories I love with people who love them too.