The tenth book in the Meniscus Series and the first in the upcoming Trilogy is available on Amazon here. Meniscus: Rosetta Stone tells the story of Abra and her travel to Hath-men, centre of The Resistance, a movement to rid Humans of cruel treatment under the Dock-winder overlords.

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The next book in the Trilogy will be Meniscus: The Struggle. This book will bring together many of the previous characters in the Meniscus world. Tagret, chemist, and Abra, historian, will study the Dock-winder manuscript to discover its secret. But perhaps not everyone wants to see the end of the Dock-winder hegemony.

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Enjoy your reading!

Alexandra (a.k.a. Jane)

Meniscus: Oral Traditions is a great entry point to the Meniscus Science Fiction Series. Each Meniscus book is written as a readable long poem and is illustrated by the author. The books are a quick read, and include both adventure and romance. Oral Traditions tells the story of Tagret’s first days on the planet and her meeting with Rist who has a secret that will challenge their growing love.

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For five days this week (August 5 to 9, 2019), I am running a Kindle Free Book Deal and the e-version of Meniscus: Oral Traditions is free at Amazon.  here

Meniscus? Isn’t that something to do with knees?

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Perhaps it was inexperience, perhaps a streak of author-stubborn. But when I started my science-fiction series, the name of the planet was, had to be, Meniscus. I probably should have paid attention when Amazon, pairing my key words with advertisers, chose to link my books with books about knee surgery.

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The names of far-off worlds (real or fictional) are always a little strange. Keep in mind that planet names may be many:

• the name of the planet according to those who live there [for example, peoples of Terra call the planet Earth (English), Gaia (ancient Greek), Tellus (Latin), Bumi (Indonesian), Erd (German), Maa (Finnish), Suravani (Sanscrit) and so on].
• the names assigned to the planet by those in other solar systems and galaxies [perhaps the little green folk out there refer to Earth as Marble, Cloud-dance, Roil, or ²¯°±¥’%’].

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As of June 2018, there are 2,841 stars known to have planets (known as exoplanets). There is a naming convention for exoplanets, adopted by the International Astronomical Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoplanet_naming_convention. Following the rules gives exoplanets names like HD 10180 j  and PSR B1620-26 b.  Proper names have also been assigned to some exoplanets, including Arkas, Dagon, Orbitar, Poltergeist and Spe.

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So why did I choose the name Meniscus for the planet in my science-fiction series?

There are three main definitions of the noun ‘meniscus‘:

ANATOMY
a thin fibrous cartilage between the surfaces of some joints, e.g., the knee.

PHYSICS
the curved upper surface of a liquid in a tube.

OPTICS
a lens that is convex on one side and concave on the other.

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I chose the name of the planet because, in some way, each definition of meniscus addresses a liminal space or a boundary where transition occurs. This liminal surface (a meniscus) separates bone from bone, or water from air, or changes the way light is bent as it moves from air to glass. In each case two surfaces collide at the meniscus and change is the result.

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The word meniscus can also be a metaphor for two world-views colliding – the Human world with the Dock-winder world. Human ideas about freedom and equality are in direct conflict with Dock-winder dedication to superiority and servitude. Change (escaping servitude and building a life of freedom and equality) is at the centre of every Meniscus story.

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Trivia about the name Meniscus as applied to my science fiction series:

• Water does not behave on the planet Meniscus. As a result of certain chemical and physical properties, it falls up rather than down. In a container of water on the planet, there is no formation of a meniscus.
• Odymn, the heroine of the story, is a practitioner of parcour, sometimes called free-running. Her ability to move quickly and quietly through the Themble Wood is critical to her freedom. What happens to freedom (spoiler alert) when she breaks her leg (Meniscus: The Village at Themble Hill) and, on top of this, dislocates a knee? You can find out in the next book in the series Meniscus: Karst Topography, coming in September.
• The Dock-winders, who actually named Meniscus, named it for the word in Gel-speak meaning ‘unruly water’.

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Eventually all of the known planets in the real world may have names. Perhaps someday there will be a real planet Meniscus.

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For a list of names of planets (named or unnamed) in real-life or science-fiction, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_planets

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All my best,

Alexandra

You know the old saying: you can live three minutes without air and three days without water. Once you are breathing on an alien planet, water is the next priority.

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On Meniscus, the human characters are relentless in their search for water.

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Water on the planet Meniscus misbehaves. It falls upward. Effervescence and aerosol are two great words to describe its behaviour. In an upcoming volume of the Meniscus Series, Tagret, recently captured and brought to Meniscus, finds out how hard it is to take a drink of Meniscus water.

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Aisha stops her sweeping

to give Tagret a drink

from a folded crummnel.

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Water refuses to go down.

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“Even a drink of water

comes hard on this planet,”

says Aisha.

“Water wants to climb, not fall.”

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Aisha shows her

how to tip her head

to take a drink.

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In the first book in the Series, Meniscus: Crossing The Churn, as they travel through the Darn’el Desert, the Slain shows Odymn how to capture water in a kemet bladder.

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When Zachary chooses a site for the new Village of Themble Hill, a water source is topmost on his mind.

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What else can you drink on Meniscus?

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Other drinks available on Meniscus include slag-fern beer, honey mead, zed (a tea-like beverage made from the leaves of thief-bush) and colax (a coffee-like beverage made from berries of the same plant). But, of course, they are all produced with water as the main ingredient!

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Never take the water we have here on Earth for granted!

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All my best!

Alexandra

Since 1990 I have worked to improve my writing. It was always my dream to assemble enough work to publish a book. In 2012 I retired from my work as an environmental planner and six years later, I have six books published. Two are poetry  books with a traditional publisher (Chapel Street Editions) and four are published independently (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform).

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The two sets of books are quite different: ‘within easy reach‘ and ‘in the shelter of the covered bridge‘ are traditional poetry books. The four books in the Meniscus series are science fiction (romance/adventure). People I talk to about my writing are curious about my rather two-minded choice of writing both traditional and genre.

The answer I give is this (explaining my writing in science fiction):

1. I love science fiction. Because I have been drawn so deeply into the worlds of Star Trek, Firefly and Stargate (and others), I feel I have lived both now and in the future. And now I have ‘lived’ on the planet Meniscus.
2. World-building is of great interest to me. As a biologist, I have learned how connected living things are to the environments and landscapes where they live. I can bring my knowledge as a biologist to build worlds I will never see – worlds that might have a chance of ‘working’.  The midlars in the Themble Woods of Meniscus are perfectly adapted to their tree-top existence.
3. My interest in landscape is the result of my dual experience as a biologist and a planner. Since the first step in building my fictional worlds is drawing a map, I can locate various landforms and populate them with plants and animals that have adapted to live there.  I love the landscape of Meniscus, especially the ‘entag’, a mat of vegetation that establishes itself in the air above the ground since water on Meniscus tends to ‘float’.
4. In the last years of my environmental work, I became interested in community planning. To me, any story about Humans living on an alien planet would involve building a community. My story about the Slain and Odymn begins as two people travelling together, but in no time, they are joined by others. I loved telling the story about their first settlement together (my upcoming book Meniscus: The Village at Themble Hill).
5. As I learned about planning communities, my environmental background pushed me in the direction of sustainable communities. For this reason, I think a lot about where people get their food. My characters in Meniscus are always food-gathering. Odymn is particularly good at foraging and discovering new sources of food. And she teaches others what she knows.

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Are there any similarities between my science fiction books and my traditional poetry books? Certainly. The themes of biology, landscape and sustainability are in both. My poetry book ‘within easy reach’ is all about finding and gathering wild plants as food. My book ‘in the shelter of the covered bridge’ is about how the communities we build interact with the environment.

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And Odymn carries a copy of my book ‘within easy reach’ with her, way up there on Meniscus!

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I hope my books about life on Meniscus will help my readers pay better attention to their own existence here in Earth!!! Where does your food really come from????

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Best Regards,

Alexandra …

Recently I read an insightful post about map making in fiction. In his blog post, Alex Acks discusses the impossible geology behind Tolkien’s map of Middle Earth. http://www.tor.com/2017/08/01/tolkiens-map-and-the-messed-up-mountains-of-middle-earth/

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Maps are a welcome addition to almost any book. In science fiction or fantasy, maps are part of world-building, a tool for the writer as well as the reader. But a map is much more than a river here, a town there. To be believable and to ‘work’ when the story is told, the creator of a map should think about six components of a workable landscape map.

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1. Basic Geology

Geology is the study of the hard structure of the earth, of the component rocks and sediments and the processes forming and changing them. Geology provides the basic bones of the landscape. Geological features such as mountains are formed when tectonic plates collide or slide beneath one another, causing big wrinkles in the landscape. Deciding the locations of these wrinkles is the first step in making a realistic map.

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2. Geomorphology

Geomorphology is the study of the elements of landscape and how those elements are created and changed. When the basic bones of the earth are modified by movements of air and water, landscape elements such as hills, river valleys, deserts, and cliffs are formed.  Thinking about the origin, evolution, form, and distribution of landforms will help create realistic landscapes and maps. For example, if you want a desert on your map, imagine how years of erosion might have worked to create it at the base of a mountain range. Look at maps of actual terrain and see how rivers snake across the landscape, and how tributaries join the main stem in patterns.

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3. Ecology

Once you have built the geomorphological elements of your landscape, you can arrange the living components, the plants and animals. Keep in mind concepts of diversity (how many different kinds of plants and animals there are) and habitat preference (for example, some plants and animals prefer wet environments, some dry). Plants and animals needing the same conditions tend to group together in communities (forest, wetland and desert, for example). To make your world consistent and predictable, create profiles for the plants and animals in your world, just as you would for the sentient characters. Of course you world may not have the same ecology as earth … instead of plants and animals, you may have gootangs and elastiboes!

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4. Settlements

If you have sentient characters in your world, they need somewhere to live. Your map can contain individual dwellings or settlements and villages, towns and cities. When you locate these settlement features on your map, consider how sentiments beings choose where to live. They need the basics – food and water; rivers and coastal areas provide some of this. They may also need a way to transport goods, another reason many communities are situated along rivers. They may be located strategically, on a ridge or in a protected valley. Sometimes there are spiritual reasons for choosing a village site – in full view of a mountain for example.

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5. Details

Once the landscape of your map is decided, and it is populated by vegetation, animal life and settlements, you can add details for realism. Roads, trails, picnic sites, crossroads, monuments, sacred sites, cemeteries, gathering places … the possibility are endless. You can also add a scale and a compass to the map (if there is a magnetic north in your fantasy world).

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6. Places

Place names help your reader situate the action in your story. Some of these names will be set when your story is first conceived. Others may need additional thought. A couple of ideas: unless you have a world where every place begins with the letter ‘m’, diversify the names as you would for your characters. Consider using words from geology and biology when looking for names – cauldera, drumlin, marl … copse, thallus, meristem.

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In general

Of course, for science fiction and fantasy, processes may not work as they do on Earth. On my planet of Meniscus, for example, water flows up rather than down and water features such as rivers and their tributaries are not a component of the landscape. Your maps should reflect the ‘realities’ of your fantasy world!

The actual drawing of a map is a subject for a different post. I usually draft my maps first with pencil and paper. Then I refine the details in layers using GIMP.

For more information on making fantasy maps, have a look at Lauren Davis’s pointers at http://io9.gizmodo.com/10-rules-for-making-better-fantasy-maps-1680429159

Have fun with your map-making!

Alexandra

Where do ideas for writing come from?

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Last November, 2016, while I was busy working on a manuscript of poems about one room school houses, another idea intruded. Within a few days, I was writing a science fiction long poem about two characters adventuring on an alien planet. The sudden urge to write this story surprised even me.

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Looking back, I can identify several precipitating factors:

• For the previous three or four months, I had been thinking, off and on, with no intention of ever writing it down, about how humans might survive on an alien planet.
• I have always been interested in science fiction; first on TV with series like Star Trek and Firefly; then in reading of the various Star Trek series, and books by Douglas Adams, Orson Scott Card, Stephen King and many others.
• I keep a file of older writing – including a few pages of my scribbles from the 1990s about character encounters on an alien planet.
• My writing group, Fictional Friends, planned to hold a Saturday workshop in sci-fi and fantasy and I had nothing new to present.
• The weekend before, for the first time in a decade, I participated in a Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game.

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With this background, I wrote the first chapter of Meniscus:Crossing The Churn and read it at the Saturday writing workshop. I think my friends thought I had lost my mind. Three weeks later I had completed most of the first draft of Crossing The Churn.

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Some of my own interests and knowledge became basic to the story:

• my knowledge about edible wild plants.
• my interest in parkour; I have arthritic knees but I have watched practitioners of parkour in Halifax and I have never forgotten the impressive way that they move through the landscape.
• my interest in geomorphology and landforms. One of the first things I did was create a map of Meniscus and much of the plotting and writing was done with the map in front of me.

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Now, eight months and three published books later, other writing demands are tugging at me. So I will take a break from the Meniscus Series for a few months (four more books are in draft form and I intend Book Four to go live in January 2018).

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Writers are inspired in different ways, but my experience tells me that ideas flow from six places:

• Keep the ideas that float around in your head; jot them down.
• Keep older bits of writing you have done; someday they may become part of something bigger.
• Keep having new experiences; you are never beyond learning something new.
• Join a writing group; their encouragement or incredulity may urge you onward.
• Mine your own skills, experience and interests.
• Read, read, read, in a variety of genres.

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These six points only scratch the surface of where stories come from.  I think there is an important seventh point.

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In each of us are basic principles and beliefs we hold important. On the surface, my Meniscus stories are fanciful adventures on alien landscapes. But deeper motivators are at work: the desire to build strong, independent female characters; concern and respect for the human condition; the need to champion diversity; and distain for those who would enslave people and minimize their importance as individuals. I would like to think that these ideals and others like them are the basis of all stories. They are certainly the underlying motivations behind my writing of the Meniscus Series.

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Best always,

Alexandra

‘alien moons’, acrylic, Alexandra Jane Tims, 5″ x 8″, May 2017

My next book in the Meniscus series, Meniscus: Winter by the Water-climb will be released in 24 days (July 14, 2017).

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In the third book first of the Meniscus series, Winter by the Water-climb follows Odymn and the Slain as they try to survive a winter apart from one another’s help and protection.

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Winter on the planet Meniscus is brutal — the plenty of other seasons gives way to scarcity and desperation. Unprepared for the months ahead, Odymn and the Slain find shelter with the generous Argenops, furry, friendly creatures. When Odymn has to survive without the help of the Slain, she must depend on her own wits and her skill at parkour to survive the alien landscape of the Themble. But she is not prepared for new arrivals in the Themble Wood, a group of survivors, freed from slavery when their transport crashes in the Darn’el Desert. On a planet where Human relationships are not allowed, ten people and an alien child take the first steps toward building a community.

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Even in the dead of winter, you can build another home.

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See you soon!

Alexandra

(Copyright 2017)

On the planet Meniscus, two humanoid species dominate – the Dock-winders (see my post  June 7, 2017) and the Gel-heads.

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Gel-heads are barely sentient, driven by greed and the search for gratification. They are humanoid, but their skin is green and gelatinous. Through the skin, internal organs, musculature and skeleture are visible.

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Gel-heads plague my Human characters, showing up when least expected. Gel-heads regularly molest Human women with red hair and so are particularly dangerous to Odymn and Vicki.

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Only one Gel-head has proven herself to be helpful to the Humans … a vendor named Wenda keeps a textile stall at the Sintha market and she is always willing to share information, for a price!

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Copyright Alexandra Tims 2017