Thought For The Day

The use of certain words is unavoidable when you write bad characters.

Thought For The Day

Never annoy an author.

From chapter five of the current novel project:

He would fly to Washington was on American Airlines flight 23.  The Boeing 727 aircraft would make a stop at Chicago and then Stone would stay overnight at a Washington hotel before speaking to the committee.

But there was an interruption.

Stone sat in an isle seat in the coach class and was writing in an open notebook.  This was another chapter in the novel which described the construction of five sublight starships: Exodus, Humanity, Courage, Achievement, and Guardian.  They were two stage vessels propelled by an inertial confinement fusion drive that used Deuterium and Helium-3 for fuel.

As he roughed out the details of vessels Stone heard shouting from the middle of the coach class section.

A tall bearded man in his mid-twenties with long dark brown hair, blue eyes, and glasses, had taken one of the flight attendants as a hostage with a small automatic pistol.  The hijacker was also shouting Marxist slogans.

Great, thought Stone, another Hero of the Proletariat.

Stone closed the notebook and shifted the pen to the left hand to serve as a makeshift dagger.  With the notebook in his right hand He watched as the hijacker moved back towards the rear of the aircraft.   

The hijacker spun with his hostage as he moved down the aisle.  As the hijacker was faced away from Stone he suddenly stood up and stepped into the aisle As the hijacker turned to face him he threw the notebook at the face and surged forward.  The pen was pointed down in the left fist and with the palm of the right hand to guide and add force to the blow he stabbed the hijacker in the right eye.  With the open palm of the right hand he made another blow to drive the pen further into the brain.

The hijacker fell to the deck.

Stone reached down and picked up the weapon.  It was a Walther PPK, the Polizeipistole Kriminalmodell, in the original 7.65 millimeter caliber.  The weapon still had the Waffenamt stamp for weapons issued by the Third Reich.

Nice.  He thought.  Perfect weapon for a murderer.

He pulled back the slide and ejected a round.

Loaded.

At least six rounds.

I think.

With the weapon in a two hand grip at the eye level Stone moved forward into the first class section.  There he found the two other hijackers.  They were screaming at the passengers and each one was holding a PPK to the head of a flight attendant and the closest of the two was facing away from him.

Stone aimed at the center of the back and fired two rounds.  As the nearest hijacker dropped to the deck he now focused on the other.  He carefully lined the sights on the right eye of the assailant.

Focus.

Hold breath.

He pulled the trigger. 

A red spot appeared below the eye.

Blood and brains sprayed from the back of the head and the assailant dropped to the deck.

It was over.

Stone knelt down and gently laid the weapon on the deck. He then stood and spoke.

“Could someone tell the Captain that the situation is resolved?”

On the ground he was personally debriefed by the head of the FBI field office in Chicago, who in turn was stunned to hear that Stone wanted no publicity about his actions on the aircraft.

“I don’t understand?”

Stone replied.

“Sir, we are at war.  Our enemy sees us as either things to be used or trash to be disposed of.  And they absolutely hate those who raise a hand in defiance.  They are driven by emotion and the primary objects of their hatreds are those who stand against them.  Any publicity on my actions in this incident will be an effective death sentence.  Do you understand, sir?”

The senior agent stared for a moment before answering.

“Yes...yes, sir.”

Stone would stay overnight in a hotel near O’Hare Airport before moving on to Washington.

So Anyway

My other project at the moment is to write a science fiction novel.

Here's the prologue:

Reality is real.

Her parents had taught her this before she learned to read.    

Know this and you can know everything.

But there were those alive who did not want to know.  They sought not to know.  Only to destroy knowledge and the products of knowledge.
    
The destroyers have returned.  Someone had stepped upon her world with the intent of smashing it to nothing.  There was nothing that would be gained from this act.  It would be the sacrifice of everything to nothing.

Absolutely nothing.
 
The woman had witnessed too much of the horror over the course of her life.  She had seen her parents taken from her simply because they were the only sane people on an insane world.  See had seen her husband and two sons murdered because they were her husband and sons.
 
Would it never end?

She stared at the world outside of her office window. 

It was raining in the night of an alien world.  This world was not the home of Mankind but it was now the home of her people.  It was here they should have found sanctuary.

She gave thought to window before her.

It was both a thing of beauty and a thing invisible.  It separated her from the outside environment and allowed her to see it in all its glory.

The winter thunderstorm that crashed upon the city was a thing of beauty in itself.  The flash of lightning illuminated the streets and the buildings beyond the window with a blue glow.  And the flash of light reflected from her face back upon the inside of the window.  From this image she could see the winkles beneath her eyes and the streaks of gray in her dark hair.

She could watch the passage of the storm from the safety of her office because of the applied thought of a man.

The destroyers could not conceive of a pane of glass.  Nor could they be taught how to make it.  The thoughts of rational men were nothing to them.  And the works of men that followed the thoughts were seen only as abominations to be smashed into dust. 

They did not see and they did not want to see.

How does one deal with such beings?

Any resemblance to my policies as President are purely deliberate.

Progress Report

I've just finished the fourth chapter of the current draft of the novel project. The total word count thus far is a bit over 9,000. Which is about one ninth of the minimum word count for submission to a publisher.

If I do resort to publication on Kindle this should be the cover for the work:



I do want to finish this one.

Update

Initial submission to a semi-pro magazine rejected.

I submitted a revised version to Analog.

Let's see how that works.

Addition

Even though I submitted a short story for publication I rewrote it a bit.

It includes this new line.

Well. That was nice. An equal opportunity Armageddon.

Oddly enough I'm actually looking forward to a rejection slip.