Now, I’m not going to write a post answering that question. Instead, I invite you to explore that on your own and I’m talking about Habitable Worlds online course. It’s going to be launched soon.
HabWorlds is a powerful adaptive learning platform with scientifically accurate simulations and informative lectures, and will allow you to experience science beyond dry observations and facts.
What I like about the idea here is that the course is organized around the Drake Equation and puts together stars, planets, habitability, life, intelligence, technology, and sustainability. (Not to mention that I really enjoyed the music from this video.)
Just like beautiful planetary alignment in late winter/early spring of 2012 when you could see Venus, Jupiter, Mercury, Mars, and Moon rolling in the skies pretty close together, next year’s sky is going to be even more spectacular with two bright comets — C/2011 L4 (PANSTARRS) and C/2012 S1 ISON — approaching the Sun. Unfortunately, at their brightest next year, both will be quite low in the sky.
Comet PANSTARRS: A Great Comet In 2013?
This comet was discovered by the 1.8-m Pan-STARRS 1 Ritchey-Chretien telescope (Haleakala, Hawaii, USA) on June 6, 2011 with magnitude 19.4 at a distance of nearly 7.9 AU from the Sun. PANSTARRS will pass closest to Earth on 2013 March 5 (1.10 AU). It could be very bright in March, heading north and passing close to the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) in early April in the early morning sky.
Passing perihelion on March 10, 2013, at the distance of only 0.3 AU from the Sun, this comet might reach the brightness from 0 to -1, and some even say up to -4, shining as bright as Venus.
Path of comet C/2011 L4 from now until next April. Credit: Dave Eagle @ http://www.eagleseye.me.ukComet PANSTARRS around April 7, 2013. Credit: Dave Eagle @ http://www.eagleseye.me.ukComet PANSTARRS, sky path from 12 March 2013 till 7 May 2014
Comet ISON: A Daylight Great Comet In 2013?
This one’s pure awesomeness.
Discovered at magnitude 18.8 on September 21 by the two astronomers, Vitali Nevski from Vitebsk, Belarus, and Artyom Novichonok from Kondopoga, Russia, in about a year from now, Comet C/2012 S1 (ISON) might become the brightest comet anyone alive has ever seen.
According to predictions, the comet will approach to within 0.012 AU of the Sun at the end of November 2013. Then, in January 2014, the comet will approach to within 0.4 AU of Earth. Sometime in late October or early November 2013, ISON should cross the naked-eye visibility threshold. From there, it may reach — or even exceed — the brightness of the Full Moon.
Path of Comet C/2012 S1 over the next year and a half. Credit: Dave Eagle @ http://www.eagleseye.me.ukComet ISON on 10 December 2013. Credit: Dave Eagle @ http://www.eagleseye.me.ukComet ISON, sky path from 14 November to 20 December 2013
I decided I’m going to write a couple of reviews here and there. However, since my blog is mostly about worldbuilding, I’m going to start with reviewing docufiction and adventure memoirs. These are the books I read out of enjoyment to be soaked in the first-hand experience of people who were places I could never go and seen things I could never even imagined exist. And I find myself not lacking in imagination department. 😉
From worldbuilder’s perspective these books are the best reference for something otherwise missing in other types of literature. I strongly believe it is the best source for learning to master descriptions that have author’s character interwoven in them. That character could be your fictional character as well. So you are killing three birds with one stone: you learn to describe something well; you learn how to show character through the description; and you learn how to move the story forward. Because it’s an adventure.
The fourth bird to kill is to gain knowledge and experience in certain areas. The necessary and very specific bits of information to incorporate into your own fiction.
Sometimes I caught myself thinking “Damn, I want my fiction to feel this real! How do they do that?”
They live it.
I’ve never been to the mountains, let alone Himalayas, but Matt made me feel like I had been climbing the Everest along with him and his team. Slowly, a few steps at a time, catching my breath, learning along the way, acclimatizing to the altitude before going for the summit.
Matt is a film-maker and writer who specializes in adventure documentaries. He is a seasoned traveler, but by no means he is a professional high-altitude mountaineer, and Mount Everest’s North Face is one of the most technically demanding climbs on the world’s highest peak. This alone rises the appeal of this book, since the person ‘on the other side’ of this most challenging adventure is a regular sea-level dwelling person like you and me.
The term Death Zone was invented in 1952 by a Swiss physician and alpinist Edouard Wyss-Dunant, in the book called The Mountain World. In it he described with high accuracy the effects of altitude on human body. At the 6000 meters it is still possible to acclimatise in the short term. At 7000 meters no acclimatisation is possible. The zone above 7500 meters received a special name. Above that altitude, not only human life can not be sustained, it deteriorates terrifyingly fast. Here no living creature belongs and the cells of vital organs are eliminated in their millions each hour. With the oxygen levels only 1/3 of that on the sea-level,
Matt’s expedition, a British attempt on the North Face via the North East Ridge, was at camp three (6450 meters), poised at the edge of their own summit attempt when on 10 May 1996 just before 4 p.m. the storm thundered in.
At speeds touching 80 to 100 kilometers an hour, the storm whipped into the [base] camp [5360 m] just minutes later, plunging the temperature down by ten or fifteen degrees in as many seconds, ripping into the tents in a blinding fury of driving snow. The storm swept up the southern flanks of Everest engulfing the ice-clad slopes effortlessly in a swirling mantle of hurricane-force winds. Within minutes it had the northern side in its grip, and then it rose to take the summit. The mightiest mountain in the world disappeared from view as the storm took control.
And it got worse for those who were on the mountain, where more than thirty climbers were fighting for their lives.
The temperature had dropped approximately twenty degrees in as many minutes.
The full wrath of Everest’s fury was unleashed all around us, with a blizzard potent enough to lift a climber off his feet and blow him off the mountain like a scrap of paper.
Wind speeds over 100 miles an hour [more than 160 km/h] are not uncommon on Everest during such storms and by 5 p.m. the snow was driving horizontally through the air with sufficient velocity to draw blood from exposed flesh.
The snow became granulated hard ice as it flew, beating a relentless drumming tone against the tight nylon skins of the tents, a mind-numbing white noise like the hiss of static.
It was the worst twenty-four hours in the history of the peak. That storm claimed may lives, and Matt’s team survived only because they did not attempt to summit that day.
“You see those clouds?” Barney [Martin Barnicott] pointed up to the north where a milky haze clouded the upper atmosphere. “The whole system is unstable.”
The weather window is the fragile and elusive moment of opportunity. It can turn into weather trap in moments — conditions change rapidly on Everest. That, more than supplies and tent space, decides who will make it to the summit and return alive.
This book is a remarkable tale of a disaster and human triumph.
I’ve been writing this post forever. I’m slowly working on the second part of the series and most of the time I’m stuck in that world. So I’ve neglected my blog and other things a bit. The good news is I’m past 10k on The Pit; the bad news is I’m nowhere near done. Oh well, let it flow. I was thinking 30k, but it might turn out 45k or something.
Now, onto the main topic.
I’m a native Russian-speaker, born and living in a non-English-speaking country (Latvia), so English dictionary and thesaurus are my intimate friends. (No, I don’t read books or science papers with a dictionary; I need it to write.)
Some call my story gritty, so I was thinking about it a lot recently. This word was stuck in my mind for quite a bit, but I wasn’t paying any attention to what it actually means. Gritty. It’s obvious. Right? Well, not quite so.
What does the word gritty mean? What makes a story gritty?
2. courageous, game, dogged, determined, tough, spirited, brave, hardy, feisty (informal, chiefly U.S. & Canadian), resolute, tenacious, plucky, steadfast, ballsy (taboo slang), mettlesome, willing to face danger, able to face and deal with danger or fear without flinching (a gritty determination);
3. realistic, hard-hitting, unsentimental, unromantic (a gritty film); this can be further expanded to
hard-hitting – uncompromising, tough, critical, vigorous, no holds barred, strongly worded, pulling no punches, unsparing;
unsentimental – not tending to indulge the emotions excessively; facing facts or difficulties realistically and with determination; tough-minded; tough, not given to gentleness or sentimentality; a tough character;
unromantic – not of, related to, imbued with, or characterized by romance; neither expressive of nor exciting sexual love or romance; unloving, not giving or reciprocating affection.
This is what we get to work with.
How does this translate into genre or story? Into a world the writer creates? The characters? What is grit?
“Grit in psychology is a positive, non-cognitive trait, based on an individual’s passion for a particular long-term goal or endstate coupled with a powerful motivation to achieve their respective objective. This perseverance of effort promotes the overcoming of obstacles or challenges that lie within a gritty individual’s path to accomplishment and serves as a driving force in achievement realization. Commonly associated concepts within the field of psychology include “perseverance,” “hardiness,” “resilience,” “ambition,” “need for achievement” and conscientiousness.
Grit is defined as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.” Gritty individual is a high achieving individual, he/she also possesses “zeal” (fervent or enthusiastic devotion, often extreme or fanatical in nature, as to a religious movement, political cause, ideal, or aspiration) and “persistence of motive and effort.” Individuals high in Grit are able to maintain their determination and motivation over long periods of time despite experiences with failure and adversity. Their passion and commitment towards the long-term objective is the overriding factor that provides the stamina required to “stay the course” amid challenges and set-backs. Essentially, the Grittier person is focused on winning the marathon, not the sprint.”
Gritty stories are character-driven stories. Characters, their motivations and actions are what make a story truly gritty.
Terrifying, bleak, dark, depressing, pessimistic, gloomy or powerfully disturbing is not gritty. Nor is gore and all the gruesome detail – these are decorations.
With this said, I embrace my weirdness, because I LOVE this music video. This is also an example of a good, but not gritty short story. 😉
CONTENT WARNING: Kids and fragile adults, shoo, shoo! (No, it’s not sex. This is not a fanservice either. Don’t come crying WTF???!!! later.)
A gritty story is a passionate story. It might be unromantic, but it’s a story driven by passionate people, and that passion for something defines them pretty clearly. It’s the power core of the story, or even larger, gritty might also be a matter of the whole world being a certain way, not specific to kinds of character or action; or perhaps a matter of how events are described.
Gritty is the opposite of the literary style of Romance. It lacks otherworldliness, or heroic themes, accents and morals; it doesn’t invite you to aspire to these gritty ideals, like a romantic tale would (e.g. myths, parables, epics, legends, etc.) It is also possible that you, the reader, need to be gritty (in sense 2, obviously) to endure a gritty story safely, because a truly gritty story might exhaust you to the bones. Passion is exhausting as well as exhilarating.
Grittiness increases the believability of fantastic elements in particular and the story world in general.
The word gritty warns us that within the book is a kind of truth; truth in the sense of human nature and experience. The story and its characters have some of the roughness, imperfection and complexity of the real world. People change, but don’t necessarily grow or improve. Not everything is going to turn out pretty, there is violence within and the characters are not black, white or even grey. Sometimes there’s no neat little resolution at the designated ending point of the story. Because gritty story doesn’t shy away from the nastier side of things. People willing to do bad things, knowing they are bad, and not necessarily for the “greater” good. The personal good is good enough, no justification is needed. It’s them or you and no one else is going to do it for you, so characters do things without agonizing or lamenting or spending too much time thinking about them.
Gritty is also about showing the consequences rather than concentrating on the pretty elements like battles, mass-destruction, love affairs, etc. We get to see the consequences for all sides, including the protagonists. If a protagonist did something not very moral, in a less gritty book this would just be skipped over. In a gritty book he will be hit by a truck. Twice. Maybe more. Not necessarily literally.
Hope I was helpful in some way and happy writing.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I got to get back to my head and talk to myself again and put some more letters into the story file.
