Destiny! Destiny! No Escaping That For Me!

Every year I have the same fantasy. And every year it seems more unobtainable. For the holidays, just before Thanksgiving, I dream of going away – to Hawaii, or Tahiti, some place warm. Some place beautiful. Some place where they never heard of Thanksgiving, or Christmas, or New Years. Some place where I won't be expected to cook, or send cards, or show up Christmas morning even though I'm dead tired. And every year I think, Oh well. Maybe next year. And I imagine the sensation of warm sand between my toes and sunshine on my smiling, worry-free face.

I never examine this fantasy too closely. Otherwise I might notice that OF COURSE they have Christmas in Hawaii. They've got freakin' Walmart there. I'd have to go somewhere really remote to get away from Christmas – and the more remote the place is, the less comfortable it's going to be. It might even be downright dangerous. Hey, I don't have to brave the malls or schmooze at the Christmas parties, but those guys in the camouflage-colored jeep keep shooting at me.

Not that I could afford to stay away as long as I'd like to, anyway. It's hard to get November 20 to January 2 off when you work retail. In fact, it's hard to get that block off for just about any job you could think of. And even if I could get the time off, I don't have the moolah for my dream escape. I couldn't afford a trip to Tucson, let alone Tahiti.

I suppose I could buy a sandbox, fill it full of volcanic sand, position it under a sun lamp in my living room, lock the doors, and play South Pacific and Beach Blanket Bingo movies all December.

But I actually like my family. And they sort of like me too. They could probably get along without me for the holidays. But I wonder – if I bow out, will I miss my chance to see them for the year? Because we don't tend to get together for Groundhog Day. Each year I have to wonder, is this the last time I'll see them?

And each year I sigh and think, Hawaii. Tahiti. Timbuktu.

Maybe next year . . .

Every Librarian Knew One Basic Fact

Every librarian knew one basic fact: classification precedes organization. If you wanted to put together a library people could use to find things out, you had to figure out which categories to put the books in. Hawkeye’s library didn’t contain nearly as many categories as most. At least three-quarters of her hard copies were about the Disappearance or related subjects – including the Neighbors.

Boss and his comrades zeroed in on these immediately, especially the one written by John Davies, Neighbors And Their Spirits Of Glory. According to Davies, when Neighbors die, their comrades petition the Spirits of Glory to allow the departed ones to enter into their company. Hawkeye had memorized the Genparl approximation of the ritual, assuming it must be genuine, but now that she was about to travel with real Neighbors, she wondered if they would agree with anything that had been written about them in her library. They stood looking, as if they could read the entire content of the books simply by reading the spines.

-from Spirits Of Glory, by Emily Devenport

Speaking Of OCD . . .

Most people who know anything about Obsessive Compulsive Disorder are familiar with its more common forms: Scrupulosity, where people are anxious about germs and constantly wash their hands, and Checking: where people worry that they've left some appliance on, and the house will burn down if they don't keep going back to check it, over and over. Another common manifestation is Counting: having to count up to some astronomically high number before you can go through a door, or turn the light-switch on and off a certain number of times. There are actually quite a lot of dimensions to OCD, and as many varieties of symptoms as there are sufferers. And though OCD can seriously undermine the happiness and mental health of the people who experience it, an Obsessive Compulsive condition can actually be helpful to some people. The most obvious example I can present for this is the writer.

Many writers joke about it, but most of us agree that our vocation is kind of peculiar. It's an offshoot of Compulsive Thoughts, which drive some people to worry about things that haven't actually happened, but that maybe COULD happen. Technically, writers tell stories about people they don't know, doing things they never witnessed, set in places they've never been. If we do it well enough, we can convince the reader it's all true. It's a win-win situation – we get to channel this nutty drive that compels us to make stuff up, and the reader gets to be entertained. But sometimes, odd side effects develop.

I first noticed one of these side effects about 14 years ago, when I was writing Broken Time. I'm a four-finger typist, and I make a lot of mistakes when I'm typing. I usually look at the keyboard instead of the screen while I'm working – a bad habit. During the writing process I go back every few sentences or to see if I've goofed. And of course, I have. So I fix the boo-boos, eliminating some letters and adding others. Pretty straight-forward, right? It would be for a sane person. But while I was writing Broken Time, I kept accidentally duplicating letters. And I didn't use the mouse as much then as I do now, so I'd use keys to get back to the boo-boo and delete one of the letters. And sometimes I would be too lazy to go all the way to the last redundant letter, and swoop down on the first, instead.

Notice my use of the term, swoop down. The metaphor is telling. I have too much imagination for my own good. I started to think of those letters as creatures who cringed as they waited to see who would die in the claws of the delete button. And if I grabbed the first letter instead of the last, I'd think, That letter thought he was safe. And then – BOOM.

I knew this was irrational. I even joked about it at first. This is the insidious thing about OCD – you can be perfectly aware that it's irrational, yet still be helpless to shrug it off. The harder you try, the worse it gets. In my case, the notion of the cringing letters distracted me enough to make my four-finger-typing method even more laborious than it already is. It continually knocked me out of the peculiar mental state all creative folks enter so they can concentrate on crafting a story out of multiple threads.

Creativity is a double-edged sword. But creativity is also the answer to the problem. I couldn't fight the silly notion that the letters were cringing. So I decided to make up a story about them. And it was fairly simple. When the letters get deleted, they're not dying. They're simply being transferred into a waiting room until they get used again in another word. While they're in the waiting room, they can read magazines, watch re-runs of Dr. Phil, whatever. Every time I had to delete a letter, I pictured this.

It worked. I no longer picture swooping and cringing. I picture letters who read too many magazines and watch sleazy daytime TV. Happy letters. Happy Em.

Happy ending. If you can make people believe that, you've succeeded. Whether or not it's because of your OCD or despite it depends on your point of view.

See you in the waiting room. I'll save you a good magazine.

THE PICKUP PICK-UP / MYSTERY MISSILE ROAD TRIP

Check out my husband's new blog on mondoernesto.com – I helped drive . . .

Free Sample Of Spirits Of Glory

Here's a link for a another big, fat sample . . .

Free Sample Of The Night Shifters

Here's a link for a big, fat sample . . .

Notes From A Dreamed Life

Please check out my guest blog on loveromancepassion.com . . .

Such A Deal I Have For You . . .

NOTE: THESE COUPONS HAVE EXPIRED. WATCH THIS SPACE FOR FUTURE COUPONS!

In a previous blog I mentioned that you can generate coupons to help promote your e-books, and post them on Twitter, Facebook, etc. You can also post them on your blog, and that's what I'm doing today. These coupons are good until November 29, 2010.

(Scribble down the codes before you click on the links):

The Night Shifters:

Spirits Of Glory:

The books are free with the codes, just enter them during the purchase process. You can download them onto your Kindle, Sony Reader, Nook, iphone, etc.

My books have made it to most of the major e-book sites – except for Amazon. It looks like I'll have to get my format wizard to do an Amazon version after all . . .

About Spirits Of Glory

One morning, the people of the North woke up and the people of the South were gone. That’s the first thing every child learns on the colony world of Jigsaw. But for one girl, knowing about The Disappearance is not enough. Hawkeye wants to know why. That's why she spent half her life researching The Disappearance. And that's also why eight Neighbors show up on her doorstep, demanding that she accompany them into the Forbidden Cities ruled by the Southern gods – to speak with the Spirits of Glory. Everyone thinks Hawkeye is an expert on Neighbors, these almost-humans who move, talk, and think as if they were born inside one of the Time Fractures. But she can't imagine what they want to ask the ghosts of their ancestors, or why they need her to go along. The Southern gods caused every human inhabitant of the Southern cities to disappear overnight – what else might they do?

But the Northern gods say Hawkeye should go – and her curiosity won't let her refuse, even though she's going into more danger than she can imagine. Pain and puzzlement wait along the broken interstate, along with scavengers who want to kill them all. Hawkeye's questions only generate more questions as they move farther and farther into the South, right into the heart of the Disappearance, until Hawkeye's questions have all been answered.

Even the ones she was afraid to ask.

Publishing Ebooks

For over a year I've been blogging about my intention to publish ebooks and record my own audio books. Now I've finally published a novel on Smashwords, and I thought I'd better write a bit about what I expected and what actually happened. Some things that I thought would be easy turned out to be fairly difficult, but some aspects of the process have surpassed my expectations.

First, let me make it clear that I do not expect to get rich by selling ebooks. I didn't get rich by selling hard copies through conventional publishers, either. Nothing squelches your high expectations like a royalty statement. But I had some new novels I wanted to publish, and this time around I wanted to be in charge. So I made some rational decisions.

First, I knew I needed a good editor, so I contacted Elinor Mavor, who edited AMAZING STORIES magazine for a few years back in the 80s. She went over my manuscripts with a fine-tooth comb and pointed out the problems. Using her feedback I rewrote, fine-tuned, tweaked, and read the manuscripts aloud until I felt confident that they were well-polished and up to professional standards.

Ellie is a wonderful artist and graphic designer too, so the second thing I did was contract with her to do my covers. Some writers might be really good at designing their own covers, but I'm not – though I recognize a good one when I see it. I love what Ellie came up with. Now I have attractive images connected with my new titles – I can splash them around the web and attract some attention.

I felt I was ready – I figured the next step was to log onto Smashwords and amazon and publish my first title, The Night Shifters. And that's when I ran into the wall. It was like that dream I had about Godzilla (ending with a resounding SPLAT). I found out that a manuscript formatted for printing does not work on an ebook reader. You end up with text in odd places, no indents, no centering, page numbers that no longer relate to reality, one-word pages, and all kinds of other baffling and ugly complications. And fixing it isn't just a matter of going in and dragging stuff back where it belongs. I thought I was going to have to learn HTML and become an expert on Word, just for starters. I could see weeks of hard work stretching ahead of me. I would have cried if my eyeballs hadn't already been so fried.

Then I noticed something in Mark Coker's How To Publish guide on Smashwords: he has a list of formatting professionals he'll email you if you'd rather not struggle with it yourself. He sent me his list, and I contracted with Elizabeth Beeton of B10 Mediaworx (who also writes as Moriah Jovan). She was affordable, and she did a marvelous job formatting the two files I sent her. She is now my go-to gal for all my formatting needs.

So I had all my ducks in a row. I published my first ebook, The Night Shifters, with Smashwords. Very soon I'll be publishing my second ebook with them too: Spirits Of Glory. They have an attractive site, and they have a feature called meatgrinder that renders an ebook into other formats for distribution on major sites like Kobo, Sony, Diesel, Barnes & Noble, and (coming soon!) amazon. This means a book published through Smashwords can be purchased and read in several different formats, on lots of different gizmos (like the Kindle, the Nook, and your iphone, ipad or itouch). One-stop shopping is one click away.

Now it's my job to market my books. I have offered coupons for free copies to my friends on facebook (begging for reviews in return), blogged about my new books, and looked for my name in google-search and contacted sites that mentioned me. I also bought an ad on facebook (and will be doing so again once my ebook makes it onto amazon). It will take time to build an online audience, but I'm nothing if not patient.

I mentioned audiobooks too. My first attempt at recording one on my Garage Band program was a success – except when I tried to turn it into an MP3 file. Then I found out my files were too big. So I get to do it over again in smaller chunks. But I'm not too upset about it – making my own production improved my self-confidence. I haven't learned enough about the process to offer advice about it yet, so I'll stick to what I DO know.

Hire a professional editor to go over your manuscript ($200 to $500, depending on the length of the book). Don't be afraid to contact artists and ask them how much they would charge to do a cover (price varies, but I paid around $500 – and please understand that you're not buying all the rights to that image, just the right to use it for that edition of your book). Once you've got a book and a cover you can be proud of, get it properly formatted ($40 to $75 if you don't have a lot of images, tables, graphs, etc. in the book – anything really complicated may be up to $200, and I have no idea what a graphic novel might be).

Once you've published, understand that there's a fine line between promotion and pestering. Think about the commercials on TV that you always want to mute or speed past. Don't be one of those commercials! Don't make your facebook friends wince every time they see your name in their email.

Even when all publishing was done the old, conventional way, the people who had successful writing careers were not always the people who were the most talented. They were the people who persisted. So in a nutshell: Learn your craft. Contract with Professionals.

Persist!

About The Night Shifters

“Hazel – promise me you won't give up on your dreams.”

“I won’t, Mom!” Hazel swears, assuming Mom means that she should try to be whatever she wants to be – a doctor, or lawyer, or even a mermaid. Hazel is just nine, but she really means to keep that promise.

Seventeen years later, she wonders if she’s broken it – or maybe just failed to fully realize it, because she hasn’t become a doctor, or a lawyer, or a mermaid. Or anything much, really. Yet, in one way, she has kept her promise – because Hazel is a Grand Champion Dreamer. When she’s asleep, she dreams a dazzling universe full of heroes and monsters, princesses and goddesses, cities and temples and gardens that make the most wonderful places on Earth seem dull in comparison.

During the day, she does what she has to do to pay the bills. At bedtime, she turns in, confident that she will dream, and that the sun will come up in the morning. So on the evening of her last day, she embraces the night wholeheartedly and drifts into the universe of her imagination.

But when the alarm goes off, she opens her eyes to darkness. The sun hasn’t come up, the world outside has become a City of Night, and the dwellers there are Night Shifters – gods and elves, daemons and djinns, dreamers and wizards. All of them have their own agendas, all of them are chasing Hazel – and as she fights to understand this world of dreams and her place in it, she can’t help remembering what her mother said.

And she wonders. All those years ago, when she swore to never give up on her dreams, did she really understand what she was promising?

The Night Shifters

Just a brief announcement here – I've published my new novel on Smashwords: The Night Shifters (by Emily Devenport). Smashwords will feature it on their site, but (best of all) they have converted the document to different formats and will distribute it to other online vendors like amazon and Sony. My next blog will describe the steps I had to take to reach this point, and profile the professional folks who helped me along the way with cover art, editing, and document conversion. I hope to have an audio version available soon – that bit of techno-wizardry is still making my head spin.

Please take a look at The Night Shifters – I opted for the sampling feature, so you can read up to 50% of the book and decide whether you like it enough to shell out the $.99 cover price. It's a humorous Urban Fantasy that puts a whole new spin on the advice that you should never give up on your dreams . . .

Ancient Astronauts My @## !

Reality TV shows usually leave me cold, but one show has captured my attention: Chasing Mummies, with Egyptologist Dr. Zahi Hawass. Dr. Hawass is a leading authority on Egyptology – that would be enough to get me to watch his show. But he also reminds me of my Uncle George, who was an Egyptian Greek. I get a serious bang out of watching him run his graduate students all over the Egyptian landscape.

But it's not all fun and games. The graduate students often provoke some well-deserved wrath. I can understand that the students seem extremely ill-prepared for the demands of field work. Even if you've worked sites in the U.S. And Central/South America, Egypt is a challenge unto itself. These students are lucky to have Dr. Hawass to guide them through this extraordinary experience. What actually surprised me the most was when one student, after crawling into the heart of the Great Pyramid at Giza, expressed the theory that the pyramid was built by ancient astronauts. Dr. Hawass was thunderstruck – but only for a second. Then the Wrath of Hawass descended upon this benighted young student. “That is stupid,” Hawass replied, and went on to thoroughly and succinctly refute the Ancient Astronauts hypothesis.

I could only shake my head when I thought about this privileged young student, who must have earned excellent grades in order to qualify for the program that delivered him to Egypt, just so he could voice his lame-brained hypothesis to one of the foremost authorities in Egyptology. Yowza. What was this guy thinking? How could he call himself an archaeologist?

But my own knowledge of the subject was lacking when I posed that question. I've since learned a bit about another wacky hypothesis that used to be all the rage in the Americas: that the mounds found all over the Eastern U.S. could not possibly have been built by Native Americans. Some lost super-race must have built them, after which they either moved on or were murdered by the Native Americans currently living in the area. Educated, intelligent people formulated this hypothesis. By expressing his belief in Ancient Astronauts to Dr. Hawass, the young graduate student was continuing a tradition of confabulation and disrespect that has always haunted the field of archaeology.

Math and the hard sciences can be proven with mathematical formulae and experimentation, both in the lab and in the field. But archaeology is one of those fields that has to combine the scientific method with a certain amount of imagination and inspiration. The evidence left for archaeologists to examine has often been tampered with and plundered by yahoos, idiots, and charlatans – they have to work very hard to preserve the integrity of sites. These are smart and dedicated people, and they try to err on the side of caution.

But intelligence has a negative side: arrogance. Smart people often underestimate other people. When early archaeologists began to survey the mounds and study their grave goods, they had little or no respect for the Native Americans who lived in the area. They reversed the scientific process and came up with a “theory,” then looked for evidence that would support it. When they found evidence to refute that poorly tested and unproven “theory,” they explained it away or stuffed it out of sight into drawers. Eventually, skull measurements confirmed that Native Americans living in the area were descended from the Mound Builders. Grave goods and excavated sites presented evidence that the pattern of agriculture, economy, and technology changed in the area, shifting the people into a different pattern of living.

The premise behind the Ancient Astronauts hypothesis is even dopier than the confabulations surrounding the Mound Builders. It is simply that ancient men weren't smart enough to engineer and build the pyramids. I would have thought this silly notion no longer held any power over students interested in archaeology. I'm sorry to learn that it does.

Visit Tonto Natural Bridge, Arizona

We all have wonders in our back yard that we never had the time to visit -- mostly because we didn’t make the time. Last year I resolved to stop running the rat race so hard and visit those places. Since then I’ve hiked in some ancient mountains near Phoenix: Piestewa Peak, South Mountain, McDowell Mountains, and The Superstitions. I’ve driven highways 60, 77, 87, and 17 past amazing roadcuts that reveal sedimentary layers -- twisted, intruded by volcanic sills and dikes, metamorphosed by a landscape that was accreted, uplifted, compressed, and/or stretched.

I’ve seen schist and igneous rocks that formed when terranes were sutured to North America about 1.7 billion years ago. They are topped by layers of limestone, sandstone, and shale that formed in the Paleozoic Era, when Arizona was covered by an inland sea. I’ve seen footprints of dinosaurs who walked in muddy riverbanks of rare streams that cut through a desert dominated by dunes. I’ve hiked through floodplains and basins full of sediment and conglomerates -- and ash from volcanoes. And now I’ve seen something everyone in Arizona should visit: Tonto Natural Bridge. Better visit soon, because it may close because of funding problems before you get the chance.

The oldest visible rocks under the natural bridge are the deep red rocks that look like solid play-dough.

They are actually a volcanic rock known as rhyolite, a mixture with a lot of silica in it, stained red by hematite. They are generally thought to have formed about 1.7 billion years ago. A sandstone layer formed on top of this parent rock -- then the beds were faulted and tilted. Limestone formed up against that tilted ridge during the Paleozoic Era when a shallow sea covered parts of North America. You can find fossils from this era in the Payson area and below the Moggollon Rim. Finally, basaltic flows capped the whole shebang when Arizona moved over a hot spot in the mantle, about 30 million years ago.

A fault in the area broke the basaltic cap and allowed it to be eroded, forming a valley. Water from rain and melting glaciers percolated through the limestone and formed a travertine dam in the valley. The trapped water from a creek bored a hole through the travertine, and the bridge formed.

We hiked the Waterfall Trail to a spot where a spring tunneled through the side of the canyon and built new travertine structures with the aid of some moss.

Then we walked around to the Anna Mae Trail and hiked down to the bed of Pine Creek. From there you have to pick your way through and over rocks, but it’s totally worth it. I went ahead of my hiking buddies (who were busily taking pictures), and had the good fortune to see the bridge in what seemed like complete solitude. A waterfall poured over the other side. The sight brought tears to my eyes.

Eventually, hikers from both sides of the bridge caught up with me -- we advised each other about which paths were the least treacherous. We made our way under the bridge and hiked out to the Gowen Trail side of the bridge, then out of the canyon. A storm was building on the horizon as we drove home again, reminding us of the erosional forces that helped form the bridge in the first place.

Arizona is struggling with the some poisonous politics these days -- it’s possible to forget the amazing beauty that surrounds us, and how incredibly lucky we are to live in a state that hasn’t been completely carved up and turned into piles of ash and rubble. State funds to maintain our parks have been raided recently, reduced to almost nothing. If we want to keep these sacred places, we need to craft legislation that won’t allow politicians to raid those funds again. But we also need to visit those places -- pay our fees, buy our year passes, shop in their gift shops, place donations in their boxes, sign up for their classes and events, volunteer for them .

Tonto Natural Bridge only costs $5 to enter! You can drive up out of the heat of Phoenix in about 1 1/2 hours and have the experience of a lifetime.

Whether you live in Arizona or you’re just visiting -- take the time to see Tonto Natural Bridge. You’ll never forget it.

Read Your Work Aloud

In The Unstrung Harp, Edward Gorey’s character Mr. Earbrass has gone over his manuscript so many times, he’s heartily sick of it and hopes to never see it again. I know exactly how Mr. Earbrass feels. By the time a novel gets published, a writer has edited it at least five times. This doesn't count the dozens of times the manuscript gets revised during the writing process. You read it, and read it, and read it – and by the time you're through with it, you can't really see its warts anymore. Your brain glosses over the mistakes. And you never want to see the damned thing again.

But you do see it again. Eventually you pick up the book it's become (or these days, the e-reader), and morbid curiosity prods you to read it. If you're lucky, it's a pretty good book and you don't see many mistakes. If a professional company published it, copy-editors went over it with a fine-tooth comb and the glitches are minimal. But these days, we're all jumping into the self-publishing ring – we're completely responsible for the finished product.

In a previous blog I mentioned that I hire a professional editor, Elinor Mavor, to go over my manuscripts. She has made a huge difference in the quality of the finished work. She gives me a valuable perspective that allows me to take a story from inspiration to finished book. But after Ellie has gone over a manuscript and made her notes on it, I still have to go back and revise. By this time, I'm WAY past fed up with the story. But I've found a way to make it fresh again – read it aloud.

Maybe you've heard this advice before – I heard it years ago, and I even thought it was a good idea. But when I wrote my first nine novels, I had those wonderful, professional editors to go over the manuscript after I did the revisions. Now I've got to do it myself. Ellie reads it one last time, but I'm the one who does the quality control before it goes to book format. My eyes are crossing as I plod through, over and over.

I already had plans to do audio versions of my books. I've done readings, and people seem to like my speaking voice. So as I tested the waters with these new books, reading them aloud to see how they sounded, I remembered that advice I'd heard years ago about reading a manuscript aloud as part of the editing process. I found out it works really well.

But what if you don't have a voice people like – what if you stumble a lot when you read stuff aloud? Surprisingly, it's not a problem. Reading aloud for editing is not the same as doing a reading for an audience or recording an audio book. You can pick your way through the manuscript like a hiker going from rock to rock in the middle of a stream. Sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, you sound the thing out. When you stumble, you just go back and read it over. If you keep stumbling over a particular passage, you ask yourself if it might need a bit of work. You end up re-writing those clumsy passages and sounding them out again, until they sound right.

You will also notice mistakes you didn't see when you were just eye-balling the manuscript. You'll see faulty punctuation and spot words that are repeated too often, overused, misused, or misspelled. You'll notice when you've accidentally called a character by another character's name. And you'll even see holes in the plot. Somehow, reading the thing aloud gives it another dimension, makes it more real.

One more piece of advice – don't try to act the story out and make all the characters sound the way you imagined they must. You may end up feeling you have to keep doing it until you get the acting right. Save that approach for the audio book, if you're planning to record one. This reading is for another purpose; allow yourself to be casual and even clumsy. You'll learn more about the story that way.

You may be wondering – do I read these blogs aloud to myself before publishing them? This is the first entry I've read aloud. I won't necessarily do that every time with a blog. But from now on, I'll be doing it with my novels and stories. They're so long, they need the extra work.

I'll be publishing my first books online very soon with Smashwords and amazon (among others). I don't know how many sales my editing techniques will generate (or my writing and plotting techniques, for that matter). I'll have to learn new marketing techniques, too.

But I like this process better than the old publishing model. It's empowering to be in charge of your own book from start to finish. I enjoy writing again, even the pick & shovel work. For that reason alone, it's worth it to go over the manuscript that last time, reading it aloud.

Who knows – maybe even Mr. Earbrass would find it helpful.

Yardzilla

Summer in Phoenix has to be experienced to be believed. The heat can reach up to 123 degrees Fahrenheit, though the average is between 104 and 117. Most of the time the humidity is around 6%. We’re supposed to have a monsoon season, but lately global climate change, or long-term weather patterns, or the heat island effect, or all of the above have conspired to cancel the summer monsoons more often than not. The summer heat in Phoenix isn’t the most uncomfortable, by a long shot -- I think folks in the Eastern part of the U.S. suffer more than we do in the Southwest. But it can be deadly. People and plants feel the withering breath of the dragons of summer.

You might think that’s a problem for gardeners. But it can be helpful, too. Take my yard, for instance, otherwise known as Yardzilla. For 8 years now, I’ve managed to make a happy place for plants. The problem is, it’s TOO happy. When I started out, I had a nice, Martian Garden. Now it’s turned into a Venusian Jungle.

The reason is simple. I planted a bunch of water hogs in my yard, especially roses. I made raised beds out of bricks, which was actually a good tactic. But I had so many tubs full of water-sucking flowers, so many beds full of roses, that the heavy clay soil in my yard became saturated over the years, and that allowed a pernicious devil to enter the picture: grass.

In Phoenix, the grass that survives the best during the heat has an amazing talent for sending tuber-like roots deep into the soil. I once tried to dig it out of a bed it had invaded. When I had dug down 3 feet and still hadn’t found the end of it, I realized that I could theoretically dig down many more feet than I would care to dig, perhaps 10, or 100, or even 1000. This stuff doesn’t need sunlight to survive, it can go dormant for years. Once it gets water, it begins to spread in all directions. When it reaches the surface, it can grow trailers for several feet. That’s what it has done in my yard.

Roses are lovely things, and you can easily get addicted to them. But eventually, a rose bush gets old and wretched, featuring more thorns and barnacles than blooms. That’s for the best -- it’s easier to dig them up when they look that bad. I dug up every rose bush but one in my front yard (the English rose Grahame Thomas is the sole survivor -- it’s a great rose). I’ll do the same in the back. I’ve banished other flowers that want too much water and have shifted toward desert/xeriscape plants that only need to be watered once a week in the summer. The grass is beginning to die from lack of water.

But I still have to dig it up, and I suspect this will take all summer. I can’t work all day at it, because the heat is exhausting. If I’m not careful, I can end up in trouble before I know it -- it’s too easy to get wrapped up in what I’m trying to do and end up overheated. My husband Ernie checks on me constantly, and insists on dragging the big stuff to the trash pile when he sees me struggling. By then I usually have to call it a day and go inside.

But, what the heck. This year, because I’m pouring a lot less water into the yard, the dry summer heat will help do my job for me. And I get to plant all sorts of weird cactus and succulents, a new addiction. Desert shrubs are gorgeous, and my resident hummingbird loves the flowers. And I still have a couple of roses -- just not 24!

And my water bill is lower. That probably should have been my number 1 consideration. Live and learn (and yank grass until the cows come home) . . .

DON'T Drill, Baby -- At least, Not On Earth

Mineral resources on Earth took millions (in some cases, billions) of years to form and are non-renewable, yet the demand for them is increasing along with human population. There are some who might argue that we should dynamite every mountain and dig up every canyon and valley that might conceivably hold even small amounts of the metals we need to maintain our technologies and our lifestyles. But there is a better alternative. We should begin developing a program that will allow us to mine Near Earth Asteroids now so we can have an orbital mining industry in place long before we begin to experience shortages on Earth.

Any mining operation has high, up-front costs. The costs connected with an NEA mining operation would dwarf the costs of current, Earth-bound mines, but the profits and benefits of successful NEA mining would far exceed those that result from conventional mining. An M-type asteroid with a diameter of 1km could contain approximately 2 billion metric tons of nickel-iron ore, about twice the amount of world production of iron ore in 2004. NEAs may also contain other industrial elements and precious minerals like cobalt, gold and platinum, as well as water ice that could be used to make fuel for spacecraft.

The quality of ore in these asteroids is currently unknown, but that is also true of ore deposits on Earth. Though up-front costs are important, there are several other excellent reasons to create an asteroid mining industry, not the least of which would be the new jobs that would be created. Geologists, chemists, engineers, astronomers, astrophysicists, and professionals from related fields would work with mining technicians using a range of equipment and obtaining a level of training previously unheard of in the mining industry.

Another factor to consider is simply the fact that we’re going to be in space anyway, building and improving the International Space Station, sending scientific missions to the moon, Mars, and other planets, and protecting national security. If we can wrangle our raw materials from NEA’s, we’ll improve our ability to live and work in space.

Once we’ve mined minerals from NEAs, a lot of it can be refined and processed in space. The materials we need on Earth could be lowered into our gravity with space elevators. These would stretch from the surface of Earth, at the equator, into a geostationary orbit. Ore could be lowered to the surface, and personnel and equipment could be shuttled to orbit. The carbon nanotube material needed to construct the space elevator does not currently exist -- it would need to be 100 times stronger than steel. We also need to develop space-tether technologies, both for anchoring miners to the asteroids and for the space elevators, to learn how to wrangle long structures in space. High-speed electro-magnetic propulsion technology would also have to be developed.

These are huge challenges, but there is one last, very compelling reason to pursue mining of NEAs, and that is the possibility that someday we may need to intercept a large asteroid or comet that is on a collision course with Earth. If we already have experience changing the trajectory of asteroids for mining purposes, we’ll have a much better chance of nudging one out of a destructive path. And while we’re at it, we might as well carve some cash out of its hide, to pay for the expenses of the mission.

We’re going to be there anyway. Let’s make some money while we’re at it.

The Attack Of The Divergers

Organisms must evolve and adapt to habitats on Earth if they are going to survive to reproduce and pass on their DNA. The human species is the result of evolution, we are descended from simpler life forms whose variations allowed them to survive in changing environments. Yet it can be argued that humans are no longer exposed to our environment. We have machines, clothing, and drugs that minimize our exposure to temperature, weather, and predators. But there is one thing from which we cannot isolate ourselves, and that is gravity (or the lack thereof).

Currently, most of the people who leave Earth’s gravity well are astronauts, who suffer a significant loss of bone and muscle mass, as well as a reduction in bone density, because of long-term exposure to zero gravity. This occurs because in zero gravity there is a shift in body fluids, resulting in decreased blood flow, which in turn makes it harder for the cardiovascular system to get nutrients to the bone. Exercise is known to counteract these effects, but the astronauts must spend large amounts of time doing the exercises. This leaves them much less time to perform the duties for which they went into space in the first place. For this reason, long-term habitats for humans in space would have to include artificial gravity, which would probably be simulated “by using a long-spin arm and a slow rotation." This implies a rotating space station with higher simulated gravity at the outer edges and zero gravity at the center of spin (like the space station in Babylon 5).

If the humans in space are going to diverge, they must be isolated from Earth and never (or almost never) spend significant amounts of time in our gravity well. They would be living and working in space and/or on moons and planets with lower gravity. It’s tempting to predict that these Space Humans would be smaller than us, with smaller, less dense bones. But that assumption is more in line with Lamarck’s Theory of Acquired Characteristics: the first generation of people who colonize space lose bone and muscle mass because they’re living in lower gravities, so their children are born smaller. According to modern evolutionary theory, it’s not their parents’ loss of muscle mass the children would inherit, it’s their DNA and (specifically) their cardiovascular system. Therefore the Space Humans who are most likely to pass their characteristics on to their children will be the ones with a cardiovascular system that can deliver nutrients to their bones (not to mention certain other body parts necessary for reproduction) in lower gravities.

Variability is the most important factor in the survival of any species, and those who can adapt to rapid change are the ones most likely to survive. Size and bone density are physical characteristics that can change even within the lifetime of an individual organism, depending on the amount of nutrients that organism receives and the outer forces (like gravity) acting upon that organism. People who live in space may very well be smaller than people who live on Earth, but any actual divergence will spring from differences that evolve in their cardiovascular systems. Since this system delivers oxygen and nutrients to the entire body, these changes could cause their organs to be different -- including their brains.

When that happens we may begin to see the emergence of a new species, one that can no longer (or no longer wants to) reproduce with us.