I have a strong tendency to write. Unfortunately I’m a very busy person and as a result, I never really get anything done. These two statements, rolled together, are the only excuse I’m going to make for currently having two novels in the works, and neither anywhere close to completion.
Last updated 22. June, 2008.
The Dream Machine came to me during a bout of insomnia, to which I am prone, and has then evolved into a very complex story that I don’t know how to finish. It is currently more than 90.000 words long and about two thirds done. I want to finish it, but I can’t get it right. Help would be much appreciated.
Quote:
“The state of the Icelandic ships is terrible. So far this year forty-three ships were issued letters to marque for travels to Iceland, carrying a total of three thousand, six hundred and thirty-six brutto-tonnes of goods. Most of the ships only took only fifty or sixty tonnes per trip but a few larger merchantmen took up to one hundred and eighty tonnes…” Magnús was smiling as Sæmundur continued to recite what he had learned at the harbor master’s office the previous day. “… so that leaves us with the Icelandic ships that went to bloody Spain, for whatever reason.”
“To sell fish. Most of our fish exports go to Spain.”
“Ah, that explains that,” Sæmundur said. “Alright, if we tally the Icelandic ships, there’s sixteen Icelandic ships that the British have captured. The Anna Christina got caught by British but on it’s way to port it was captured by the French, so I suppose it’s somewhere in France by now if it hasn’t been sunk.
“The largest Icelandic ship is Ísland, one hundred and eighty-three tonnes. That’s owned the Flensborg Trading Union. The second-largest is Bedre Tider, owned by Niels Lambertsen of Eyrarbakki. I don’t know where it currently is, do you?”
“Not a clue,” Magnús said. He had started pacing back and forth in the room.
“Alright, well we at least know where De Tvende Søstre is. That’s the third largest, owner: Bjarni Sívertsen. There’s at least two ships owned by Adzer Knudsen, both currently stuck in British waters as far as I’ve been able to divine.”
“Both? When was the Juno taken?”
“September eighth,” Sæmundur said, looking for something in his pile of papers. “Ah, here. Taken by the British warship Clio.”
The chief justice of Iceland cursed under his breath. “Go on,” he said.
“Alright, let’s see. Ólafur Thorlacius, merchant in Bíldudalur, his ship is Bildahl. I haven’t any idea where it is right now, but there were some vague hints from the Danish consul in London that it may have been taken along with another ship, Svanen.”
“Okay, stop. This is pointless. Don’t you have any good news?”
“Well. Yes. We got a letter from Trampe.”
“How on earth can that be considered good news?”
“Depends on the contents, doesn’t it?” Sæmundur said, smirking. “It comes from London, going through our European channel.” Sæmundur meant Volta. “Jens Andreas Wulff had a ship, Nye Pröve. Well, it got captured a couple of months ago and was hauled into dry-dock upon arrival in England. I don’t know why, it probably sustained some damage from when the British captured it. Anyway, it was left unattended in the dry-dock and it rotted so much it’s been written off.”
“And the good news?”
“Wulff has been granted permission to take another ship to Iceland. Freden. It won’t sail for a few months, but it’s good news.”
“Is that it?”
“No, I’ve got a few more ships to mention, but they’re mostly small and detained or large and detained. At any rate, the British have captured most of the Icelandic fleet.
“I’ve been thinking, as for our own voyage. Should we perhaps try to secure a vessel from Norway and try and move the cargo there first?”
“For once, dear Sæmundur, I am ahead of you. Mark down eight hundred rigsthaler in your ledger and prepare to leave. I have secured you passage with the goods on the brig-sloop Marietta to Nidaros.”
“And what about yourself?” the watchmaker asked.
“I am planning to stay in Copenhagen until normal transit is reestablished, to organize further ships if necessary. Bjarni Sívertsen will be here too once he gets back from England, and we shall coordinate our efforts until either De Tvende Søstre or Das Renntier leaves Copenhagen.”
Bootstrap is something I was carrying in my head for a while and I didn’t want to start writing. Then during a three hour long ferry ride it emerged. It is currently at 30.000 words and the story is there, although there is very little in the way of character development, and there are a lot of fairly complex subplots going on that are condemnably terse and need expansion for clarification.
Quote:
“The problem is that RNA is pretty complicated stuff. You have four bases, nucleotides – adenine, cytosine, guanine and uracil, and they’re bound together by a phosphate. The Urey-Miller experiment in the nineteen-fifties showed that in the kind of environment we had back here on Earth when the solar system was young there was a pretty good chance of carbon and oxygen and all those basic components forming into what we generally call organic compounds. Not living compounds, mind you, just compounds that have a carbon basis.”
“Yeah, I remember my biochem.”
“Good girl. Then you might remember that all life on Earth is based on DNA or RNA, and proteins, and that all the proteins are just made out of twenty-three different amino acids.”
“Twenty-two in humans,” Roselyn added, trying to urge Gusty to get to the point.
“And a great deal of the carbon in the Urey-Miller experiment got bound into amino acids. Later people found all sorts of amino acids in certan meteorites, carbonaceous chondrites to be exact. The Urgueil meteor had about ninety different amino acids.
“So somebody suggested that perhaps the amino acids came first. That they made proteins, and that the proteins attracted the nucleotides, which then made the first RNA molecules, which later evolved into DNA.”
Roselyn’s eyes opened wide. “Prions?” she asked.
“More or less. Prions are self-replicating proteins, and for a long time there was this hypothesis that some prions might have the potential to generate transcription RNA.”
“And you’re saying this ain’t a hypothesis any more?”
“That’s right dear. I’ve been working on this for thirty years, and now it looks like it’s going to get it’s trial run. I don’t know what Elijah is thinking of using this for, but I know it’s big. He knows enough about this project to know how dangerous it could be in the wrong hands, he’s a smart cookie. I got a memory stick from him last night with a video, and in it he said he trusts you, and he wants me to give you the sequence. That’s enough for me. On two conditions.”
“What’s that?” Roselyn asked.
“First off, whatever you do, be careful to leave methionine out when you’re encoding the payload. Methionine retro-transcribes to a start codon, which could cause lots and lots of trouble. Trouble that would make cancer look like a sore throat. Secondly, when you’re done, you come back here and show me the results.”
