The Hardest Choices Lie Between Things We Love

Last week I turned sixty, and my gift to myself was a gift of time — lots of it.

After twenty years in IT, I'm retiring early to put my time and energy into writing. I'm not stopping work, and I don't intend to for decades yet. It's just that from now on, the work is writing: creating, editing, marketing.

The first order of business is Seven Drifts — a space opera set aboard a drifting city-ship, where an amateur sleuth named Anita finds herself investigating murders while a rebellion builds around her. It's in advanced revisions. I'm giving myself a full year to get 7D ready for publication, and probably another to launch it properly.

Right now I'm adjusting the world Anita lives in, and I've been mulling over the weather.

Houses in Seven have a wet side and a dry side. You can put a patio where it almost never rains, but you have to put the garden where it does.

Here's why. Seven is built from rotating cylinders eight kilometres across, and the spin is what makes gravity — more of it the further you get from the axis, so people live on the inside of the shell, four kilometres "down," at a comfortable Earth-like one gee. But spin also shoves sideways on anything moving up or down inside it. That's Coriolis, and it doesn't care what's moving — rain included. Any given shower can be blown any which way — but the push is always in the same direction, and the wind isn't, so over years it wins. That's why the houses have a wet side. Nobody in Seven says "the spinward wall," though. They say the east wall is the wet one, and every child knows it.

Which is the kind of thing that ripples. The weather systems have to sit low enough for rain to fall at all and high enough that the sky still reads as sky — which matters more to the people under it than you'd expect. Elevator cabins have to be gimbaled. So do the seats on the city-rod runners.

So back I go. Expect rain that always falls the same way, weather that misbehaves, and a bunch of small adjustments that don't change what happens — only what it's like to be there.

This is an exciting time for me, and also a little sad. I'm in a small period of grief over saying goodbye to people I worked beside for years, learned an enormous amount from, and came to value immensely. But life is made of choices, and the hardest ones lie between things we love.

This will be a lot of hard work. Good — I love the hard work.

My friend and fellow author W. D. Kilpack III helped me find the perfect line to end this post. We went down a rabbit hole together, hunting down famous quotes about luck and hard work, and their provenance. A favourite of mine is often credited to Thomas Jefferson: "I am a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more of it I seem to have." Turns out Jefferson never said it. The trail runs back to a 1922 collection of adages by a man named Coleman Cox. Either way, I intend to prove the line right, over and over — but in the end, my perfect line came from W. D. Kilpack III himself.

"So, good work and more of it, my friend."

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I write about all of this in my newsletter, Writing Notes. From September through the end of the year it goes out every other week — process, craft problems, dispatches from the drift, and the occasional interview with another writer. If you'd like to follow along while this book gets built, you can sign up here — you get a free story in the process.

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