Rogue Planets
Want to know my biggest fear? It used to be bees. Whenever one buzzed around my ears, I ran away like a bombing raid was sounded and I needed to hide. I suppose this is because I’ve never been stung, nor do I intend to be. It seems that the things that haven’t happened scare me the most.
Most of my fears are celestial. A beam of gamma rays from a quasar finally reaching the earth and cooking it alive is terrifying to think about. Solar flares, storms on our sun that could flicker the atmosphere, that could fry protective layers of oxygen and nitrogen…yeah, that s*$% is scary.
All of these fears are unlikely to occur in the grand scheme of things. But along with basic insecurities (“Did I say the wrong thing? Why don’t these people like me?”), the unlikely things are what keep me up at night.
My biggest and most real fear, by far, is something hidden in the darkness. A rogue planet, soaring through the solar system unannounced and undetected. Why? Because these star-less worlds are out there, in the pitch of the cosmos, soaring through the dust and debris of space. Should one of these planets collide with one in our solar system, the entire balance would be disrupted. Orbits rely on the gravitational hold of our sun, but also other planetary bodies. This disruption, this slow receding from orbit, being kicked out of the solar system…
Yup, this is my biggest fear.
And never mind a planet! What about a star racing through our celestial neighborhood? The star doesn’t have to make contact with anything, just pass by close enough to pull on the planets with its gravitational influence. The result would be a slow and imminent trip away from the sun as our orbit widened and the earth slipped further and further into the greater cosmos.
Terrifying, right?
That’s why I love thinking about my fears. They are exciting stories with gripping narratives. Why do you think so many stories are written about zombies, world-wide destruction, horror, and grand governmental catastrophes? One of the best stories anyone could write is the thing that horrifies them the most.
Like rogue planets and stars.
There happens to be a wonderful video that explores the circumstances of a receding earth done by the team at Kurzgesagt. Along with cosmological concerns, Kurzgesagt posts all kinds of videos ranging from nuclear winters, mental health, and the safety of drinking milk (to name but a fraction of their content).
Check out the video below to see my greatest fear illustrated with bright and cheerful animation.
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Literary Revue
At a coffee shop in Grand Haven, I flipped through my local community college’s literary publication that was available for purchase at the counter. It’s a yearly collection of essays, poems, and short stories. I paged through the selection of stories, reading quickly, and was immediately bored.
I couldn’t figure out why.
These stories likely weren’t bad or in poor taste, just not resonating with me. In this way, I’m reminded that short stories really are like songs; you either like them or you don’t. Maybe there was nothing wrong with what I was reading, or I was reading writers who took too long to get to the point. Some were too emotionally explorative, like the writers’ feelings were mannequins that stood in place of characters and events in the story. Some paragraphs had startling disconnects between the narrative and what a character was physically doing.
For example (not from the literary publication, of course):
“Samson felt a blackness, a feeling of nowhere, and the universe itself could not combine any array, any pattern of atoms to make him whole again. This spatial divide was all-consuming, and the further his mind raced away from the present, the deeper the pitch became. He was errant, alone, and mortified at his existence…
So, he bought an ice cream cone. It was tasty. He liked the sprinkles the most…
Perhaps not as erudite an example, but how does buying an ice cream cone resolve or continue with what we’ve just read? Does it continue the theme of losing one’s soul? Does an ice cream cone denote that only the lost buy those sorts of treats?
Perhaps ones with sprinkles. I don’t know.
Either way, I wasn’t connecting with the story and this bothered me. I wanted to champion these stories, to see the building blocks to something greater for young writers.
But instead, I was left wondering this: who am I to judge these stories?
Whenever I have criticisms of other writers, I turn the argument back on myself; what do I really know? Maybe what I write is just as trite, or that someone else would think so of my work. I can easily believe that. I like my stories, but who is to say I’m not delusional or oblivious to why they are just as bad? Maybe I like what I write and that’s all I know.
Never mind that, look at pedigree. Have I really earned the right to say I’m a published author, here’s my advice, and all should listen to it? No, of course not! I would never impose my experiences as anything to follow. All I do is post stories on a personal website on the internet, something anyone with a blog and completed draft of a story could do. There’s no gatekeeping system, no one to flag what I write and say, “Hey, how about rewriting this section…” The only standard I adhere to is my own—and, hopefully, it’s high enough to challenge the writing process with every new thing that’s written.
That’s all I have to go on.
So, while it’s easy to pick up a yearly literary collection (and a college one at that, written by young people; because who is proudest of their writing when they were younger?) and start nitpicking, I don’t really know what I’m talking about. I just know how to write like I write. By claiming that I know something else, something more, I’m trying to justify that all the years of built-up experience, all the writing that is done through instinct alone, must mean more than the other guy.
Which is ridiculous.
I only know how to do as I do things.
That is the essence of anyone’s craft.
And it’s also why I generally keep my mouth shut when I have criticisms.
Like Socrates, I also know that I don’t really know.
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Wishing everyone as well as they can be. You’re not alone out there,
