#1 The Beginning Part 1

This is my first blog entry and I through I would start by talking about how I started writing for something other than my engineering work.

The year was in the fall of 2005, the place was a room in the Crystal City Hyatt, VA. It was early in the evening after a day spent driving round trip south to Dahlgren, VA for meetings.

I hadn’t communicated for a few days with my youngest daughter and I had seen an impressive display of trees lining the highway just before reaching Dahlgren. I sat at my computer and wrote her a short email starting with:

“The wind blows the fall fire from the trees and flashes the colors past the road, the trees shake in the thought of the winter that is on its way. The bright leaves mix with the flags as they are held at attention on the flagpole by the warning that winter will soon be blowing across the land.”

It was a whimsical statement about the trees I had witnessed that day. My daughter was currently in school in California trying to decide between a career in writing and one in art (art won). She knew I had never had a hobby. Since I had been divorced around a year before and lived on the road for my job, she worried about me and responded to the email with “Dad, you need to try writing for a hobby.”

That simple statement engaged by engineering mind into a thought about writing. I write a significant amount as a Navy Combat System architect, but this would be a different type of writing.

By the next morning, I had decided it might be a worth-while endeavor, but what type of writing? That became an easy answer, Science Fiction. I had graduated in 1972 with a degree in low energy nuclear physics. I was always engrossed with stellar objects such as black holes, neutron stars and galaxies. But what about a storyline?

I would not write about a simple cowboy/space fight. I needed something I could write many stories on the same base storyline. I wanted it somehow based on science, not magic (although in some ways, magic and science can be considered close relatives). The search began.

One night in the hotel room, I spent time while working to listen to the science channel. The discussion centered on M Theory. Having taken Thermodynamics in collage and studying Quantum Physics, I had continued to followed developments in string theory in my free time. There are many different advance theories trying to find the “answer to everything” like String Theory each has many problems, String Theory problems lays in not resolving to a single solution. M Theory became engrossing in that by adding another dimension to the equation base of standard String Theory, indications were that it condenses to a single solution. After the show discussed the possibility of the Big Bang being caused by the brushing together of two universes, I started my information quest. I looked at a number of books as the answers pushed towards the existence of an infinite number of universes.

During a science show in 2006, the discussion on multiple universes talked about how the infinite number of universes are separated. I began to ask myself a “what if” question. M Theory seemed to point to universes that could co-exist next to us, but would not be noticeable due to the differences in the multi-dimensional design of their universal constants. One theory presented on the show points to a universe from which our universe feels the effects of gravity. I asked myself the question, “What if a new universe was born just outside our universe, but with the same multi-dimensional design with matching universal constants?”

With asking the question, one focus of my writing became set.

#fruits