The Ghost She Killed

Portal travel’s a stone’s throw away

admin Books, Links, Other Worlds, Shahkara, The Ghost She Killed October 21, 2011October 21, 2011 2 Comments

Running late, I ignore the clothes strewn across my bed and dig through the kitchen junk mail in a desperate bid to find my keys. The Quartz clock ticks You’re late and I yearn to snap my fingers and conjure up a fairy god-mother who can transport me to my preferred destination. Within seconds.

Nup. No fairy god-mothers lurking in my garden or wardrobe. Instead, I’m hoping that quantum physics will one day create real-life wormholes (or portal travel), thanks to cutting edge research in superconductors and magnetic fields. Check out this quantum levitation experiment, presented by the Tel-Aviv University’s School of Physics and Astronomy’s Super Conductivity Group at the Association of Science-Technology Centers Annual Conference at Baltimore on the weekend:

Amazing, huh?

What is a wormhole? In physics, it is a hypothetical shortcut through spacetime – a connecting point between two far-flung regions of space (or time), a by-product of Einstein’s general relativity field equation. Madeleine L’Engle illustrated the idea in her YA novel A Wrinkle in Time (devoured while I was in junior high) where a tesseract (wormhole) was able to bend the space-time continuum to create a portal from one area of space to another. Although the two locations could be some distance apart, you could make them touch if you “wrinkled up” the space between them, enabling you to travel from one point to the other in seconds.

Okay, so it’s a huge leap from using magnets and superconductors to levitate a train, and using them along with silly amounts of energy to wrinkle up space-time, but hey, that’s what fictional super-scientists are for, right?

Wormholes are already a reality in my Shahkara trilogy, where Megalio scientists have invented Caladene, a fictional superconductor to outclass all previous superconductors. Half-human, half-Taloner, Shahkara is unable to return to her secret parallel world (Gorias) after losing the spell that conjures up the Twilight Mists. Instead, she must rely on the scientists to portal her home – until they reveal they need an address. Now, Shahkara is forced to check back into Hotel Earth until she finds the ancient coordinates to her homeworld.

I have always loved reading and writing about portals. There’s something about the wormhole concept that enables it to be recycled over and over again, each time with a new slant, each time bringing it renewed popularity – from earlier films and TV series such as Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Star Trek and Sliders through to Stargate, Torchwood and the Fringe.

For now, neither wormholes nor fairy god-mothers will save me from my deadlines. I’m forced to chain my keys to my bag to ensure a fast getaway. One day – maybe – our scientists will realise this technology and then all of us can experience the magic of a wrinkle in time. It’s an idea worth savouring or at least exploring through our own writing… and I suppose it’s time to get back to it now!

PS: Here’s the inside on how quantum levitation works:

The Strength of Injured Heroes

admin Creativity, Shahkara, Taloner Trilogy, The Ghost She Killed, Urban Fantasy September 17, 2011October 20, 2011 1 Comment

Hospitals are the pits – bad enough if you’re sitting by a loved one’s bedside for hours on end but even worse if you’re the victim wrapped up in starched sheets, the canula running from your arm and a catheter running from goodness knows where!

Earlier this month, I’d planned to do a speed writing weekend, rather like a delayed epilogue to Kate Eltham and the Queensland Writers Centre’s Down the Rabbit hole. I had three days to do nothing but write and I reckoned I could burn 20,000 words onto paper in that time. Easy… until my husband was rushed to hospital by ambulance.

Fortunately, his diagnosis was neither long-term nor threatening. Kidney stones are supposedly the closest a man ever gets to the pain of childbirth, but they are treatable. I spent the weekend by hubby’s bedside before and after he had an emergency operation. He returned for two more surgical stints to ensure all those noxious rocks finally met their match.

During my husband’s hospital stays, I didn’t get a lot of writing done, but we spent a lot of quality time together and I spent a lot of time reflecting about my characters, wondering how they’d react if they were forced to spend a night or two in a white walled room, sharp with antiseptic smells.

My Shahkara sees sickness very differently to most humans. After all, she gained Taloner healing abilities as a young teenager. From that time, she may have suffered pain, but her body had the natural ability to heal itself from most injuries.

At the start of my second novel, The Ghost She Killed, Shahkara has been turned human. She is no longer impervious to pain and her body cannot regenerate. She struggles to cultivate the patience to let her broken bones and bruised flesh heal naturally, believing that if she focuses on her next goal, she will heal faster.

But even in speculative fiction novels, we are not always superheroes. In fact, our favourite heroes and heroines have endearing and tenacious flaws. Shahkara’s Achilles’ heel, impatience, almost destroys her. Fortunately, more determined forces intervene, save her life and lead her on to greater challenges.

None of us know when we might have to fight against illness or other unexpected circumstances. An old Japanese saying once said, “Fall seven times, stand up eight.” A hero is forged by standing up after every time they fall. Sometimes, however, a real hero’s greatest gift is knowing when they must rest before they pull themselves back towards the quest. Maybe that’s a lesson that our heroes can teach our readers, as well.