Mission to Gomury

Some astronauts are on a mission to a new planet. This writing is a reflection on what the life of an astronaut might be like!

Ellen woke up. Mission day 23 out of 187. Being a talented mathematician, she automatically knew that this meant 164 more days until touch down on Gomury. Martin and Tabitha were still asleep, whereas George was cooking porridge in the zero-G pot in a lively manner. At first she had thought pre-made food would be a better choice for the Mission, but George was a great cook and it was nice to have freshly made food.
    Her daily message from family arrived. A smiling toddler greeted her: her adopted child. By the time she would be back, he would probably be of school age. Luckily the rocket's antenna was of high specification, and could be used to send and recieve personal video messages during the less critical phases of the Mission.
    She looked through the telescope. That was Ellen's favourite passtime during the early days of the mission, but by now the earth was just a speck and not much could be seen. What to do now? That was the question.
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    Martin's eyes opened for a few seconds, and then shut again. He wished he could sleep until touchdown, but unfortunately that wasn't how the human body works, and the films he saw with cryogenic sleep (aside from them being science-fiction) ended poorly for the sleepers. Could he pretend to sleep? Maybe, but that would be boring, and he would rather be awake and bored than pretending to sleep and bored.
    "What should we do today?" he asked Ellen.
    "I don't know any better than you. The daily report will be sent over at 2pm as usual."
    Martin looked at the clock. That was three and a half hours away. What a bunch of time!
    The astronauts always looked forward to the daily report, sent over from ground control, and containing the findings of the finest scientists. The planet Gomury had been intriguing ever since its discovery. The emission and absorption spectra indicated the presence of water, but a thick layer of cloud prevented anyone from seeing anything on the planet's surface. That was the purpose of the Mission: to see what the planet was all about.
    The Mission was exciting - no doubt about that - but completing it was more than five months away, and they had to find something to do in the meantime. The first few days were spent enjoying the joys of zero gravity, but now the novelty had worn off. George handed Martin his share of porridge.
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    "Is Tabitha awake?" asked George
    "I don't think so" replied Ellen
    "You'd better wake her up otherwise her porridge will get cold"
    George carefully transferred what was left of the porridge into Tabitha's squeeze bottle. Eating porridge out of squeeze bottles seemed strange at first, but in zero gravity it was necessary. The pot was unusual too: shaped like a doughnut, it span as it heated up.
    "So what will we do today? Have you got any ideas of something fun we could do?" asked Martin
    "Cooking is fun" replied George
    "Yeah but we can't exactly cook more than three times a day or we will run out of supplies"
    "How about cleaning the nuclear reactor?"
    Besides cooking, George had taken up wiping the outside of the nuclear reactor with a wet wipe. He said it got rid of the dust.
    "That's boring, why can't you think of something interesting"
    By now Tabitha was awake. "What's going on?" she asked.
    "Trying to think of something to do" replied George
    "We're bored" complained Martin
    "It's all because of Chad" retorted Tabitha bitterly.
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    At first Chad had seemed like the perfect employee, full of confidence and winning over the senior management with his big smiles. For a while he was put in charge of propulsion, but when it became clear his scientific knowledge was not up to scratch, he was transferred over to the entertainment division. Books were not allowed to be brought onto the rocket, in order to economise on precious kilograms. Movies were another matter though: stored in purely digital format, thousands of them could be stored on the rocket's hard drive (whose capacity was in the petabytes) without adding any weight. On Mission day three Martin decided to watch one of the Avengers movies, but had trouble finding it on the drive. The others had a look too, but none could track it down. Eventually they sent a message down to ground control asking Chad where the movies were to be found. They waited. The next day came, and then the next again, and still there was no reply from Chad. Eventually (on the evening of Mission day five) they received a message from Dona, Chad's secretary, informing them that Chad had forgotten to put the movies on the drive, and so they were left without movies.
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    There were some early attempts to keep the boredom at bay. Martin had sneaked in a pack of cards, but they couldn't find a way to make the deck stay where it was, it kept floating off. They tried telling jokes, but soon ran out of jokes they remembered, and despite a hearty effort on George's part, the jokes they came up with themselves simply weren't funny. Finally, they tried arm wrestling, but that lost its charm too when they realised Tabitha would always win.
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    "Yes, I know what you mean: Chad has really let us down, but you've got to also blame Roger Priestley" said Martin.
    After Dona's bombshell, Martin had asked his family if they could send him the Avengers movie as part of their daily message. What he received was not the movie, but a message from Roger Priestley, the Officer for Deep Space Communication. The message informed them that the Deep Space Antenna was not to be used for such frivolous things as movies. "May I remind you that our Deep Space Antenna costs us a very large electricity bill. As per the Space Agency's constitution, it is only for use for a ten minute family message, and the daily report."
    "Well you can't really blame him, he was just following the rules" replied Ellen.
    "Well those rules didn't take into account Chad's forgetfulness" said Martin.
    "Of course, the rules were made before Chad did that" said Ellen
    "But now they should change the rules" said Martin
    "The constitution can only be changed in an emergency" said Ellen
    "This is an emergency though, we're bored!" said Martin, but even he could see that the Space Agency would be unconvinced by his argument.
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    After breakfast, the astronauts continued to sit around the eating area (except they weren't sitting on chairs as chairs are unnecessary in space). They were just twiddling their thumbs, apart from only George was really twiddling his thumbs, the others were only metaphorically twiddling their thumbs. George was putting one thumb on top of the other, then the other on top of the first, and so on and so on. Martin was the first to speak.
    "So what shall we do?" he asked
    "I don't know" said Ellen. She looked at Tabitha. "Any ideas?"
    "I don't know any better than you!" replied Tabitha. Then she looked at George. "We could twiddle our thumbs just like George is doing" she said with mild sarcasm.
    "It's not really that interesting" said George, but he carried on twiddling his thumbs none the less.
    "This is terrible! Let's do something!" said Martin.
    "Well the daily report recommends a few activities for us" said Ellen.
    "Like what?" asked Martin.
    "Yesterday's report came with some data sheets. They say we could look through those" said Ellen
    "Have you had a look?"
    "It's full of the melting and boiling points at different pressures for the molecules we know to be on Gomury. Carbon dioxide, Sulfur dioxide, water"
    "Sounds boring!" said Martin
    "You never know, Ellen likes science more than the rest of us, maybe she found it interesting!" interjected George.
    "No, even I got fed up after five minutes. I'm not going to go and memorise all those facts! We can just look them up as needed"
    And so passed the astronauts' morning, trying to find something to do and getting more and more bored by the minute. Eventually it was time for the daily report.
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    The daily report came as usual at 2pm. It started off with a summary of the activities of the Space Agency. They were looking to take on 15 new employees ahead of touchdown on Gomury. Then there was the scientific section, with some interesting news: they had analysed the spectra further, and confirmed the presence of ammonia in Gomury's atmosphere. Finally, there was a section that really caught the astronauts' interest. It read: "We hear you have some free time on your hands, so we thought we would send you this", and had as an attachment a zipped file with an unpronounceable name.
    Hype caught hold of the astronauts. Finally, something to do! "Finally, something to do!" exclaimed Martin. Ellen saved the file to the hard drive and unzipped it. It was a resource to help people learn to speak Chinese.
    The mood was anticlimactic. None of the astronauts had any reason to speak Chinese. They weren't planning to go to China, nor did they have Chinese relatives to speak with: the closest was Tabitha's nephew's fiancee. They grumbled and moaned.
    Eventually, the boredom got the better of them, and Martin asked Ellen to load the first lesson. They were presented with a screen that had a few recognisable words, and a profusion of garbled characters.
    "What's this? Is this Chinese?" asked Martin
    "I don't think so, it's probably a mistake" Ellen replied, "I'll try and figure it out"
    The Astronauts sat around, waiting for Ellen's tech expertise to solve the problem. George continued twiddling his thumbs. Eventually Ellen turned to face them. "I see what the problem is, they've made the lesson in unicode but our computer only supports ascii"
    "What does that mean?" asked George
    "Basically, there are two ways of turning text into digital format. One is called ascii, and only supports the English alphabet, and the other is unicode, which supports lots of different alphabets. They've written the lesson in unicode as it has Chinese characters. But our computer can only handle ascii."
    "So is that why it says things like 'xe4xbdxa0' in the middle of that sentence?" asked George
    "Exactly, it's a bunch of nonsense!" said Ellen
    "So we basically can't even learn Chinese?" asked Tabitha
    "That's right"
    "Typical" said Tabitha dejectedly, and it seemed like boredom would set in again.
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    George was the least downcast of the astronauts-still twiddling his thumbs-he started to think about the daily report. Ammonia. Where had he heard of that before? It was a long time ago, but he seemed to remember studying it at school. The Haber Process, that was what it was called! A chemical process to turn nitrogen and hydrogen into ammonia. But what was the point? At school, the point was to get good marks on the test, but that wasn't the point in life. The Haber process. What was it good for? Ellen was the scientific one, he would ask her.
    "What's the use of ammonia?" He asked
    "It's used to make fertilisers that help plants grow" replied Ellen
    "Oh cool. Does that mean we might be able to grow plants on Gomury?" said George
    "I don't know. It might, you know. We'll have to see what the soil is like." said Ellen
    "Soil! Or rocks! No-one's seen the surface of Gomury yet." said Martin
    "It could be full of volcanos" said Tabitha
    "I hope we can grow stuff, that would be fun" said George
    "Who would the land belong to though?" asked Tabitha
    "Us! we are explorers and pioneers!" said Martin, "Bagsy I get the northern hemisphere."
    "Hey, that's not fair" said Ellen, "We should get a quarter of the land each."
    "What would we do with the land?" asked Tabitha
    "Rule over it! the governments on earth are too far away to have any jurisdiction" said Martin.
    "We would need to make a good constitution for the new nation we'll create" said Ellen seriously "Future generations may settle in our state"
    "But what will we do if the land is already taken?" asked Tabitha
    "How do you mean?" asked Ellen, "We're the first mission to Gomury"
    "There could be aliens!" said Tabitha
    "Ooo aliens!" said George, "We should tell them we come in peace", and then a serious look crept across his face. "We don't want to get into a fight."
    "I reckon the aliens will be friendly" said Ellen, "Not like all those Alien invasion movies-they might be simpler than us"
    "That's right, they could just be mushrooms" said Tabitha
    "We should observe what they're doing, then use our technology to help them achieve their aims" said George, "Then they will like us"
    "Yeah, but what if we insult them by accident?" asked Tabitha, "Like going up to a fancy French person and referring to them as 'tu' instead of 'vous'?"
    "Well hopefully we will have some rights on this new planet" said Martin, "Just like how we gave rights to Aliens in the Extraterrestrial Rights Act of 2061"
    "I definitely hope so" said George "I wouldn't like to be experimented on"
    The topic of what to do on Gomury fascinated the astronauts. Both the possibilities of meeting aliens and starting their own states had manifold intriguing ramifications. They talked about science, law, politics, philosophy, and many other topics in between.
    The conversation went on and on-I will not record the rest of it here-but suffice is to say that the hours went by and the astronauts barely even noticed.
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    No more boredom! A happy end!
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Reviews

[JayG]

You’re working hard, but your profession and background is working against you, as my life as a logic designer handicapped me when I turned to recording my campfire stories.

Universally, we forget several critical points:

Firse, all professional skills and knowledge are acquired in addition what we get in our public education years.

Next, is something we never notice, related to the purpose of public education: Its purpose is to provide employers with a pool of prospective employees who possess a set of useful, to them, skills. And what do employers mostly want us to write? The equivalent of what we spend so much time writing all through school: reports and essays—in other words, nonfiction.

The goal of nonfiction is to inform and explain—to provide an informational experience. But fiction? Its goal is to provide an emotional experience. We don’t tell the reader the protagonist cried. Instead, we make the reader weep. And no way in hell can that be done with a report.

Like me, the writing you do for work is nonfiction. And not knowing that there is another approach you never looked for it. Added to that, our own writing always works for us because we begin reading with full context, backstory, and, are guided by intent. So for you, as you read, every line acts as a pointer to images, emotion, and situation, all stored and waiting in your mind. So it will always work.

The reader? For them, every line acts as a pointer to images, emotion, and situation, all stored and waiting in *YOUR* mind. 😁 Unfortunately, with you not there to explain… A very good editing technique that catches things like that is to have the computer read the work to us. It's the second to last edit I do before releasing anything for publication (the last step is to check for words/phrased I tend to overuse, and crutch/filter words).

Look at a few lines of te opening to see how different what the reader gets is from what you get:

• Ellen woke up.

Opening a story with someone waking is a guaranteed rejection, I’m afraid. Everyone wakes. So unless that waking develops character, sets the scene, meaningfully, or moves the plot, avoid it. But of more importance, you just established that we are not living the story, we’re hearing about it second-hand, from you. But if you're on stage with the actors talking to the reader about them, can you make that reader feel the rain by telling them it’s raining?

• Mission day 23 out of 187.

When opening any scene, in order to be certain the reader has context, we address who we are, where we are, and what’s going on. But not knowing anything but her name, we could be anywhere, doing anything, for any purpose. For you, who do have those three things, the line makes perfect sense. For the reader, it’s data, meaning uncertain.

See how different what the reader gets is from what you do as you read/edit?

The trick is that we’re not telling the reader a story. We focus on the protagonist’s response to the events, not the events.

As an example In your first line it’s you telling the reader someone we know nothing about woke, for unknown reasons. But suppose I say:

“An insect buzzing around her ear brought Ellen awake, cursing, wiping away sweat and wishing a replacement for the bed's torn insect-netting wasn’t on another damn planet.”

In 28 words, the reader knows who they are, that we’re probably not on Earth; that conditions are less than ideal; and supplies scarce. We know Ellen is in a bad mood, and have had a trace of character development for her (her reaction of "another damn planet, rather than "another planet." We also know it's hot, and that we're not in housing that has screens. And, it was 100% Ellen noticing and reacting that provided the information. She’s real, and reacting to a a cause the reader is aware of, instead of someone not on the scene or in the story reporting what happens in overview.

Think of yourself. From waking to sleeping your life is an unbroken chain of cause and effect. Can hers not be the same and seem real?

My point? It’s not a matter of how well you write, or talent. It’s that you’re handicapped by things we aren’t aware exist when we turn to writing fiction. And, I have the perfect solution. You can use the Library's fiction-writing section as a resource. But personally? I’d suggest starting with Dwight Swain’s, Techniques of the Selling Writer, which recently came out of copyright protection. It's the best I've found, to date, at imparting and clarifying the "nuts-and-bolts" issues of creating a scene that will sing to the reader. The address of an archive site where you can read or download it free is just below. Copy/paste the address into the URL window of any Internet page and hit Return to get there.

https://archive.org/details/TechniquesOfTheSellingWriterCUsersvenkatmGoogleDrive4FilmMakingBsc_ChennaiFilmSchoolPractice_Others

You study when you have time and inclination, at your own pace. There’s no pressure, and no tests. What’s not to love? So try a chapter or three. I think you’ll find yourself whacking yourself on the forehead as you say, “But that’s so… How did I not notice that for myself?” That’s fun for the first ten times. After that you're more likely to curse as you say, “Again? Really?”

But the best part? Once you master those skills, the act of writing becomes the act of living the story, in all details, and in real-time. The protagonist becomes your co-writer, whispering warnings and suggestions in your ear. And then, one day, that character will straighten, shake their head and say, “Seriously? You expect me to do THAT in this situation? Hell no. Not with the personality and background you gave me, and not with all this going on. So, change the situation so I’ll want to do it, or, change my behavior all the way back to the beginning (much harder to do).” And until that happens, your characters aren’t real to either you or the reader. But afterward? I once wrote for over 32 hours straight, stopping only for bathroom breaks and the food my darling wife dropped on the desk with orders to eat. I HAD to know how the scene came out, because the protagonist, not me, was in charge.

I love when that happens, and wish you the same.

So…I KNOW this wasn’t what you were hoping to see. But we’ll not address the problem we don’t see as being one, so I thought you would want to know.

Hang in there, and keep on writing.

Jay Greenstein
https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/