Throw Away These Numbers

Throw Away These Numbers is a story written by Himawari. It ran in Issue 52 at http://s2b2.livejournal.com/, and will be mirrored Wednesday at http://www.shousetsubangbang.com/.

Summary

Cameron Darling: father, industrialist, widower, solar sail pilot. He puts on his best smile for the cameras, but some folks know better.

Connections

This story includes a character from $LoveStory and {Holographic-synthesis-waltz}.

Author's notes

I needed to write about these men, but the story just wouldn't come together, so ultimately I had to figure out what I could put in place so that you could see EMINA's amazing illustrations. I could have done an entire story about the re-entry jumping if I could have figured out how to make the whole thing about that, but I'm also fascinated by the idea of yacht racing with solar sails, so you got a hodgepodge. I'm going to ramble about how I got there.

If you've read "The 100th Thing about Caroline" by Lois Lowry, which was one of my favorite books as a child, you'll recognize the bit about Cameron's socks.

There's an Arthur C. Clarke story called "The Wind From the Sun" which is about a solar yacht race. I've never read the whole story but it was made into a comic here: http://240plan.ovh.net/~upngmmxw/imag/bd/bd_a.htm

There's also a great P.J. O'Rourke piece that I read bits of: it's called "At Sea With the Americas Cup" and it's in "Holidays in Hell."

Ultimately, I got more excited about the hard SF ideas of implementing a space elevator and solar sail test project than anything else. I got a lot of information from the UP3 website: http://www.u3p.net/admin/qqm_a.htm

Sometimes the answer isn't to kill your darlings, exactly, but to split them out into stories of their own, because it's important to make use of the passion that causes you to have a darling in your writing. (Also I just read the bit about this in Saga today.)

I was in my friend Ben's living room, having come back from a run while he was making muffins or something, to hear live on NPR as they were reporting on the shuttle Columbia's landing and finding out that something had gone horribly wrong. It was February 1, 2003. I can remember reading, about a year or so later, that Dr. Jonathan Clark, the husband of Dr. Laurel Clark who had died in that event, was not only on the panel investigating what happened

Much later, I was fascinated by the RedBull Stratos mission. These guys might have a liiiiiittle in common with Felix Baumgartner and Joseph Kittinger, who were the jumper and the CAPCOM for that project. One of the