U, V, and W -- Nonfiction

W Is for Writer 

I am a writer. I have one novel in print Murder on Ceres. It is available from Amazon as both a paper back and on Kindle. And I'm currently working on the next in what I plan to be a series of four.

At some point several years ago I decided to do what I've always wanted to do -- write a book.

Although my fiction reading is eclectic (some would say indiscriminate) my fiction goto's seem to be murder mysteries and hard science fiction. So I wrote a science fiction/murder mystery or maybe it's a murder mystery/science fiction like I would like to read. The story is set in the future when civilization is centered in the Mars colonies and Earth is truly the "old country" but humans are still humans and murder happens.

"Balancing the demands of his job and his responsibilities to his family, Rafe investigates the suspicious death of a Ceres Colony Consortium accountant. Suicide? Overdose? Homicide? Not his upcoming trip to Earth, not his independent and fiery wife, nothing will keep him from the case.

"Through a whirlwind of illicit drugs, space pirates, and secret identities, Detective Rafe Sirocco chases the truth all 266,000,000 miles from the shining cylinder of Ceres Colony to the alien landscapes of Earth. But will he make it in time to save the one person that matters to him most?"






My nonfiction reading is equally eclectic -- Stephen J. Gould, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov (yes, they wrote nonfiction which I actually like better than their fiction.) David McCullough, Carl Sandburg (his Lincoln and his poetry,) Maya Angelou, Shel Silverstein, Dr. Seuss, etc., etc., etc.

If I had written a U-blog, it would have been about the Universe just because it is so beautiful and I could use pictures from the NASA/ESA Hubble telescope like this one.

Close-up of M27, the Dumbbell Nebula

Their name for this photo. Imagine calling this a "close-up."  It is more than 1,200 light-years away. A light year is the distance light can travel in one Earth year which is nearly 6 trillion miles. Now multiply that time 1,200 and this is a close-up.  This glorious display of color is the result of an old star that has shed its outer layers. Discovered by French astronomer Charles Messier in 1764, a dozen years before the Revolutionary War, it was the first planetary nebula discovered.

And had I done V-day, it could have been Voyager 1. On September 12, 2013, NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirmed that Voyager 1 had indeed left our Solar System and entered interstellar space. Where is it today? Click here for a real-time odometer of Voyager 1's distance from the Earth and the Sun in astronomical units (AU) and kilometers (km).

Better yet, The Golden Record.



It is "a kind of time capsule, intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials. The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record-a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth."

     

#atozchallenge