Tumble Into Darkness

The hand-off of 2009 to 2010 was accompanied by a full moon (a full blue moon if I recall), and I love that image as a visual metaphor of year's end: one orb setting just as another rises, with you at the fulcrum, balanced between them, the past calling from one horizon, the future from another (Marilynne Robinson describes this much better than I in the opening pages of Gilead). The sky becomes a mirror of the mind. We watched the moon rise from the bluffs of the Arkansas last year, came home, celebrated the New Year six-ish hours later.

This December's lunar eclipse didn't fall on year's end, but it came the day before solstice, the day before the darkest day, and mirrored my own mental landscape so well it follows me into January, as I write this. Perhaps the sky is not the mirror. Perhaps I am the mirror.

Skies were cloudy, it was cold out, and I wasn't expecting much. But clouds began to clear as the eclipse started, just before midnight, so I fired up the clay stove and set up the big dumb telescope. Just before totality I woke the rest of the family up, dragged them outside.

Eldest lasted about a half an hour, til totality began, then stumbled back to bed, familial obligations fulfilled. Hux fared much better, well into the thing, but she too wandered back inside after an hour or so. And then it was down to me and youngest. We snuggled close to the stove, talked some, went to the telescope a couple times, but mostly just watched as the moon turned eerie red, then dull brown as the moon slid fully into shadow. It was a long, cold wait for light after that, but light, when it came, was dramatic. It was preceded by that same weird red glow, and then, not quite suddenly, the edge of the moon lit up, and light slowly spread across the surface as the red glow faded. Lovely, startling, moving.

After that even youngest gave up the ghost, went to bed. I tucked her in, poured myself several fingers of good bourbon, and went out to watch the end. Things were about half in shadow by then. I sipped my bourbon and smelled the woodsmoke and watched the moon slide into sunlight, surrounded by darkness, and thought about that tumble into darkness, that long cold time in shadow, and the slow but inevitable progress back into the light.

Free Show

Glorious crescent moon, Venus, Mercury grouping in the sky tonight.  Right after sunset.  

As a bonus, Gordo sez the possibility of aurora borealis is high tonight, due to a giant solar promenance.  So turn off your TV and step outside.

Wah.

So.  Not much forward progress on getting an agent for the novel.  It has admittedly been only a couple of months.  And there are lots of feelers still out there.  Still.  I fear I am writing in a vacuum, with no one reading my novels but a small circle of friends.

That said, a new novel is slowly rearing its head.  I'll take the characters out for a test drive in a short story soon.

Got a flash fiction posted a few weeks back, here.  Not my best work.

At least the short stories are getting a little attention. 
 

---

Below, a hole in the moon.  Really.  It's about 200 feet wide.  The theory is, a hollow lava tube got punctured by a meteorite.

That, or space worms.

Picture taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter,  I grabbed it from Bad Astronomy.

Balance

I loved the fact that the old year ended and the new year began with a full (and blue!) moon. I've talked here in the past about how a full moon always rises just as the sun is setting, and the magic inherent in that moment. That feeling that you are balanced between moonrise and sunset, night and day, is just delicious. So to feel the old year and the new year caught up in that same teetering moment was gravy. We drove to the banks of the Arkansas, watched it rise, all bright and round and coppery. Just lovely. Wonderful way to end the year.



We told the girls they could stay up til midnight, if they could stay awake. They did, barely. Their first New Year's Eve. Or first one awake, anyway. We banged pans on the front porch to celebrate the moment. They were asleep by 12:05.

My only resolution last year was to write the novel.

My only resolution this year is to do my best to sell it.

Wolf Moon

Met my first blogger in person (except for Dancehall, who I've known for at least a couple lifetimes, it seems). Eric from My Heart's Porch came through our corner of the southwest on his way back from Monument Valley. He brought a fellow traveler with him, who we will call the Rock Star, as that is exactly how the little clowncars treated her. It was like having Hannah Montana in the house (except she's not a registered trademark of Disney; always a plus). She has a great love of bad horror movies, so she fit right in.

They were cold and tired and hungry from spending the previous night in 17 degree weather sans tent (they did have sleeping bags), and it felt good to be able to offer them tamales and green chile and a warm place to sleep. We drank a little bourbon, talked a little writing. We agree on a great deal (Cormac McCarthy, Marilynne Robinson, Hemmingway), disagree on a little (Don DeLillo, Annie Proulx). I attempted to turn him on to TC Boyle, he attempted to turn me on to Nick Acosta.

The subject of God and randomness made a brief but notable appearance, late in the evening, as it tends to do.

All told, it was Big Fun.

Sadly, the meeting was marred when I savagely beat him in Wii tennis, bowling, and baseball, back to back to back. He tried to hold it together, and almost succeeded, but his anguished, wrenching sobs filled the empty halls of our home as he cried himself to sleep that night. He was wearing an eyepatch the next morning. He said his eyes were bothering him, but clearly it was the result of psychic wounds sustained the previous evening.

---

We've fallen off the full moon wagon the last few months, so it was nice to go out as a family and see the first full moon of the new year, the wolf moon, this Saturday. It was also the biggest full moon of the year.

Though in my view, they're all pretty big.

The symmetry of having the setting sun at my back, just as the full moon rises, never fails to impress.

Pink Moon

Lil Hucky, the little Clowncars and I ventured out at sunset to watch this month's full moon (called the pink moon, Hux tells me, named after trees that bloom pink blossoms this time of year). We do this fairly often. It was cloudy, so the moon was less than spectacular, but I learned a little trick. We always park in the same spot to watch moonrise, and we always guess where on the horizon it will come up (the person with the closest guess "wins"). And while we were sitting there in the car, an extremely simple way to predict where the moon will rise occurred to me: look where your shadow is pointing! That is where the moon will rise. Cool, eh? And so simple. This'll only work for a full moon (as the sun and the moon are only directly opposite each other then), but, at least this time, it worked like a charm. My obsessive interest in orbital mechanics pays off!

Sadly, I told my family immediately upon figuring it out and thus cannot use my newly-gotten knowledge to win the moonrise guessing game. I can only use my powers for good, not evil. I'm like Gamera!

---

In other news, I found an answer to the baseball-thrown-from-the-space-shuttle question at the Straight Dope. Not an unimpeachable source, but a pretty good one. And amusing to boot. According to them, throwing the baseball toward Earth, or away from Earth, will not affect the orbit of the baseball at all. As Larry Niven (a GREAT sci-fi writer) puts it, "East takes you out, out takes you west, west takes you in, and in takes you east." Orbits depend upon speed. If you don't change the speed of the baseball, you won't change the orbit.

So, the only way to change the orbit of the ball so that it'll fall to earth is to throw it straight back from the shuttle, to slow it down. But (and the math here is seriously over my head, so I'm trusting the Straight Dope) a ball thrown at 92 mph wouldn't come close to getting it out of orbit - you'd be able to drop the orbit a 100 miles or so, but not all the way to Earth.

Atmospheric friction would eventually bring it down. But our premise here is a crowd at Yankee Stadium waiting for the ball to fall so the ump can shout "Play Ball!" And unless the crowd is willing to wait a few years, it's not gonna happen. Those Yankee fans are a notoriously impatient lot.

Full Moon

There's a total lunar eclipse tonight, from 7 p.m. til 10 or so, Mountain Time. But that's not what I'm writing about.



Lunar eclipses always occur during full moons. And full moons always rise exactly at sunset (if that seems mysterious, a pencil and paper will help you figure out why). And that's what I'm writing about: that exact moment when the sun is perched on one horizon, the moon on the opposite. Happens once a month. It's a charged moment, as if the moon, sun and Earth are all in precarious balance for a brief instant. Time seems to slow down to accommodate it, balanced as well. Then the moon goes up, the sun goes down, the moment is over, time snaps back, life goes on. We try to experience it firsthand several times a year, by driving out to the bank of the Arkansas River to watch the full moon rise. The girls, predictably, are more interested in playing with the car radio than watching the moonrise.

In "Gilead," one of my favorite books ever, Marilynne Robinson does a much better job of of describing it than I:
"Then I realized that what I saw was a full moon rising just as the sun was going down. Each of them was standing on its edge, with the most wonderful light between them. It seemed as if you could touch it, as if there were palpable currents of light passing back and forth, or as if there were great taut skeins of light suspended between them. I wanted my father to see it, but I new I'd have to startle him out of his prayer, and I wanted to do it the best way, so I took his hand and kissed it. And then I said, 'Look at the moon.' And he did. We just stood there until the sun was down and the moon was up."

Such clear, simple writing.

So bundle up and go outside tonight (or stay in the car with the heater on like we do) and look up at the sky for awhile. See the moon and the sun and the Earth at play.