Journey into the unknown

A tornado warning, usually meaning that said type of storm had been spotted and yall gtf underground, drove us into my office in the basement. 2 sides are full height concrete walls. The 2 framed sides are both 18 feet inboard from other concrete walls. Diesel the dog has joined us. Actually by now the ladies have returned upstairs. I don't think a tornado had actually been spotted. Big walls of storms always break up when they get near Clinton Lake and part miraculously around Lawrence like carwash flaps sloshing around an SUV. I really want to take my shitty old truck to a carwash and see the employees flip out that the bed is full of compost and has been for over a year. It's petrified, buddy. Relax. This phenomenon has been called "The Tonganoxie Split." It's named after a city 25 miles east of here that is said to have mystical powers that deflect storms to protect Kansas City. Why you'd protect Kansas City is beyond me. And furthermore, the split more regularly happens around Clinton Lake where I am in a nearby basement. You know what else is right by Clinton Lake? You guessed it: Stull, Kansas. One of the purported gateways to hell and popular Spring Break destination of Satan. Slade Craven didn't try to crash an airliner into Tonganoxie did he? Slade Craven saved everyone on that plane I'll have you know. It was a lookalike that hijacked the plane. You think I don't know that? I've seen TURBULENCE III more than I've seen my family since COVID. It was just a cool-sounding shorthand to describe the scenario without having to unpack a bunch of pointless plot mechanics to people who think Yorgos Lanthanides is an artiste. Stull is much more mystical. Now it is just Charlie, Diesel, and myself down here. Boy basement! Charlie is feverishly drawing each step in Elsa's transformation from newly crowned queen of Arendelle to self-exiled ice queen. 

I was reading TOTAL DESTRUCTION for a minute but then was like hey I already wrote this. Why not keep writing? You have a blog, right? I probably wrote 8 words on the Jupiter book in about 45 minutes earlier today. Why Jupiter? The fictional person who's curious about my life asks? Several years ago, probably on the now defunct @trefryesque account, I queried about science fiction books without people in them. I like science. I like fiction. But the authors who seem to be drawn to the genre seem to have a pretty tenuous grasp on subtlety and realistic characterization. Take for instance some of the names these writers come up with: Duncan Idaho, Blast Hardcheese, Bastard Noise, Moist Lipwig, Archimandrite Luseferous, Big McLargeHuge, Arvid Engen, Sergeant Major Major Major, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Hiro Protagonist. Not surprisingly these are all dudes. Women fare far worse, essentially being ogled at best or factory bred. The first writers' crit group I joined in Atlanta had a dude writing a scifi book about a guy who crash lands on a planet of women. Lord. You can imagine where it goes from here. He fixes their cable? If you're looking for a genre to sink your slide-rule into, why clog it with cardboard humans? I got a few responses. STAR MAKER by Olaf Stapledon stands out. Also B.R. Yeager recommended reading a Warhammer 40k players' guide, which was great. Still these were from the POV of somewhat living entities. I grew up with a father who was an academic scientist. I've read his papers. I still read scientific papers. I mostly don't understand them. I miss that feeling when I read novels. The attraction of Jupiter is that the human mind, the human storehouse of experience, the context of Earth cannot help us elaborate on what is going on beneath the clouds of Jupiter. Even the data we have is largely theoretical. So how can you write about it? I still don't even know. I've started with the things we do know. At the moment that is the rings that surround the planet. But once I get beneath the cloud deck, I anticipate the text will need to come apart quite significantly. Not that it would be illegible or disobedient, but it's values would need to unshoulder the desperate anthropocentrism that has characterized literature for its entire history. I don't even know. I will think about it when and if I get there.