Current Work In Progress.

Hi Guys,

This time I thought I'd return to my writing. Its been a while. So I thought I'd give you the cover and the blurb for my current book - Days of Light and Shadow. In this book I've returned to my love of traditional fantasy with elves and dwarves and magic etc, but I think woven a slightly darker tale. At present its a little over a month or so away from being finished, and as always all comments happily received.

The High Lord’s sister has been brutally raped and slain. An act of unspeakable foulness. Her brother Finell sits upon the Heartwood Throne, filled with grief and rage. His heart knows only the unelven need for vengeance. A need that will threaten a war of extinction against the humans. At his side his advisor Yaris works diligently to bring that war to life in the most terrible way possible, as he plots to take the throne and cleanse the world of human kind.

Arrayed against them a few innocents will have to stand, alone and unready. They will sacrifice all and they will be sacrificed in turn upon the altar of hatred, and still they will have to stand.

And all the while the spider demon eagerly awaits his feast of souls.

Cheers, Greg.

Bell's Palsy and Me - Not a Love Story.

Hi Guys,

Once again no time travel post this time, as once more life has intruded. This time it took the form of Bell’s Palsy, a rather frightening looking condition that causes paralysis of the face, just one side usually thank goodness. But still waking up one morning three weeks ago to find that the right side of my face had started sagging set my pulse racing and made my palms sweat more than a little.

Naturally being of middling years and advancing waistline, my first thought was that I’d had a stroke, and I raced down to the emergency department where I spent an exciting few hours being asked all sorts of embarrasing questions and being poked and prodded. Eventually though they kicked me out with a scrip a mile long and the comforting words that it would probably come right in a few weeks or months. It was the ‘probably’ that didn’t impress most.

Still some valuable life lessons were learned and I’m trying to lose weight and do a little bit (sadly a very little bit) of exercise.

By the way if any of you should wake up one morning with half your face paralysed as mine was, my advice is to scoot down to the emergency department as fast as you can. It may be this, and by gosh you should hope and pray it is, but it could also be a stroke and that is a medical emergency.

Now for the fun stuff. What’s life like with Bell’s Palsy? And believe me it has been an experience.

First, it looks bad. Actually it looks worse than that. I personally don’t spend a lot of time looking in mirrors, - most of them aren’t wide enough to properly reflect my full beauty, but I did after this happened. Mostly out of horror. You see the facial muscles aren’t just paralysed, they sag, especially around the mouth, and you end up with a shocking droop. This looks worse when you try to speak since only one side of your mouth works, making the problem even more obvious.

In my case I slurred my words for a few weeks, a little like a drunk, but regrettably without the alcoholic high to make it all seem so much better.

The good news is that it doesn’t hurt, at least at the start. However for me as my seventh nerve has slowly started working again, I’ve been experiencing pins and needles around that side of my face. My right eye also hurt, though that was due to the eye drying out as I couldn’t close it properly. They gave me eye drops and cream for that, and a patch that I refused to wear. My pirate days are behind me! It was easier to tape my eye shut at night and keep using the drops during the day.

Taste was and still is compromised as half of my tongue had also stopped working. This is a difficult thing to explain, but the best way I can describe it is to say it was like having a small sheet of cling film over my tongue. It felt distinctly odd. However, a lack of taste also helps with the diet, which is a good thing in my case.

Eating and drinking were embarrasing. With half my mouth including my lips not working, I tended to chew like a cat and occasionally food would fall out of my mouth. Drinking was worse as I dribbled like a baby. Now, three weeks on, this is much improved, but I still wouldn’t go out to eat in a restaurant. By the way, the pain nerves aren’t affected by the condition so when I bit my tongue or my lips as I often did, it still hurt.

Hearing is the other thing that went weird. My right ear became hypersensitive, but not in a useful bionic ear sort of way. I can’t hear people whispering about top secret conspiracies a mile away. Rather every time I coughed or sneezed it was as though someone had fired a cannon on that side of my face. And regrettably this hasn’t changed. Yawning is also fun as it sounds like a thunder storm coming.

It’s the social side of things that bothered me most though. People stare, they can’t help it I suppose, and friends ask stupid questions. The one thing I have learnt out of this is that I am just as self conscious as anyone else. So much so that I took the traditional male route to try and hide it. I started wearing sunglasses and growing a beard. In short I started to look like Cousin It. Usually I don’t do either, as sunglasses irritate the bridge of my nose and beards itch abominably.

However, now that my mouth is almost straight again, I’ve shaved off my facial hair – my Mach Three nearly died in the process. It was a balancing act between trying not to look like a freak and trying not to scratch my face off and I’ve finally reached the stage where I can stop scratching.

Anyway, that’s been the story of my last three weeks, and I hope that if any of you come down with this truly strange condition or have friends or family who do, you’ll be a little better prepared to handle what comes.

The good news is that the stats are good. Not great but good. Eighty percent of people who develop Bell’s Palsy will make a complete or good recovery within a matter of weeks or months. The bad news is of course that some won’t, and also that something like seven to fifteen percent of people will get it again at an average interval of ten years. Still that's another decade away!

The great news though, is that it’s not a stroke.

Cheers, Greg.

Time Travel - Movies - 7 Days

Hi Guys,

Back to my time travel theme again. This time 7 Days. (Yes I know it wasn't a movie it was a tv series, but I still think it had some interesting insights into time travel and paradoxes.)

7 Days for those of you who aren't familiar with the show, was a sort of time travelling adventure series in which our hero Frank Parker was sent back in time seven days to undo the various calamities that kept destroying the world. And it did raise some interesting questions. Would Frank ever win the heart of the lovely Olga? (No.) Would the right wing reactionary Ramsey ever show a human side? (Actually yes, briefly.) Would the world ever stop blowing itself up in some new way? (And what did they do before they had project Backstep?)

But as well as these the show did point out some interesting aspects of time travel. For a start, and the reason a chrononaut was needed to pilot the ship, the Earth is travelling through space, spinning on its axis and orbiting the sun, while the entire solar system is itself travelling through space. So to go back in time seven days is to potentially arrive at a point in space many tens of thousands of miles from the Earth, unless you can somehow adjust for this movement, and so travel through space as well as time. Few other movies, books or tv series have considered this issue.

The series also showed the Butterfly Effect in action, in a somewhat amusing fashion, as our dashing Chrononaut goes back in time to undo some calamity and also places a bet of a football game, only to discover that his money has been wasted. The changes he made somehow affected a completely unrelated event, i.e. the game.

But the series also raised some time travel related questions, and chief among them, where was the other Frank Parker? If he goes back in time seven days, then surely he should be in a time period when a previous version of himself was living. Yet he never met himself. So did the original Frank vanish each time he arrived? Or were multiple copies of himself living on the Earth in secret?

The fuel source was also another interesting puzzler. Ignoring what it was, one of the limitations of time travel was that each trip used fuel and they only had a limited supply of it. Yet that makes no sense. He kept going back in time seven days, and at that point the fuel he used to make the journey was still there. It had not been used. So potentially they had an unlimited supply of fuel and never actually had to worry about using it up.

Anyway, I quite enjoyed the series but always found these questions in the front of my mind whenever I watched an episode.

Cheers, Greg.

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Burger Joint.

Hi Guys,

No time travel this time. Travel of a differnt type but equally unsuccessful.

Yes I had a car crash about two weeks ago (and no that isn't my car or caravan - it's a brilliant photo I found on the Photo Morgue). Thirty years of driving without a crash and then a drunk woman smashes into my rear end. Go figure!

So here's the juicy details. No one killed, though my back which was already damaged from a ruptured disc and slowly recovering, has taken a serious knock. I've been unable to sit down for any length of time until now. My car which is sadly old and not worth a lot of money, teetering on the edge between repair and write off. My nerves somewhat shattered. Burger and fries for Thursday forgotten about. Burger king out by maybe ten bucks.

As for the crasher. A young woman, mother of two, drinking on a Thursday evening at seven pm. Driving with no licence, in a car she didn't own, and that wasn't insured. Driving with no lights on, distracted by the mobile phone, failed to stop at the red light at which I was idly twiddling my thumbs waiting for the green. Honestly if there was another mistake that she could have made that evening I don't know what it was.

And what have I learned? I'm reliably informed that whenever something bad happens you should always try and learn from it. So here goes.

1) Follow Brady's Law at all times. You know Murphy's Law of course - anything that can go wrong will go wrong and usually at the worst possible moment. Brady's Law is that Murphy was an optimist! So be prepared.

2) Carry your mobile phone with you at all times. I can't tell you how much I missed having the cell with me on the side of the road as a hysterical woman driver kept apologising and calling everyone to say that she'd had a crash save the police, no matter how many times I asked her to.

3) Be insured. I may have to pay an excess, don't know yet, but at least other then that three or four hundred bucks or what have you, I shouldn't be too much out of pocket. And if the worst happens and the car's written off, at least I have a little cash in my pocket to go shopping with.

4) Takeaway foods are bad for you!

Cheers, Greg.

Time Travel - Movies - The Bootstrap Paradox.

Hi Guys,

In this post I'm going to look at one of the more interesting paradoxes often seen in tales of time travel - the so-called bootstrap paradox.

This paradox occurs when objects because of time travel actually have no origin. No beginning. There are a couple of variants. The first is the reverse grandfather paradox, where instead of the time traveller going back in time and killing his grandfather, he has intimate relations with his grandmother and ends up becoming his own grandfather. Fry from Futurama did this after accidentally killing off the man he always believed was his grandfather, in essence meaning that when he was born he actually had no grandfather. (I have to admit I quite like Futurama.)

But the concept is probably best seen in the movie - "Somewhere in Time." Christopher Reeves meets an old lady somewhere in the future, and she gives him a watch. He then goes back in time and meets her as a younger woman, and gives her back the watch, so that she can then complete the cycle and give it to him when she's older again.

Now the heart of the paradox here can best be understood if you ask yourself one question, how old is that watch? The answer is that there is no answer. There can be no answer. As far as can be determined the watch never began. It simply arrived at some point in time and then kept re-arriving there. So from some perspectives the watch may be ageless, it may also be all ages at the same time, and from other perspectives it could actually be infinitely old. After all if you stop at any point along the time continuum during the period when the watch is in either character's hands, you have no idea how many times its been through that cycle - old lady to young man to young lady to old lady to young man etc.

There are of course more violations of physics than just this occuring. For a start the watch is not aging as it goes through the cycle. If it was, even very very slowly, the watch would eventually turn to dust, and the old lady would have nothing to give the young man. But of course that would also mean she could never have received it as a young woman and the paradox / cycle could never have begun.

So the watch has to somehow be unaffected by time. But more than that it has to be completely unaffected by everything. So if the woman became angry one day and threw it at the wall, it might chip the wall but could never in turn be chipped by it. Because if it were, then with every repeat of the cycle that chip would become worse. Theoretically therefore the watch actually must be indestructible.

And of course if the watch was a wind up type, the coil could never be overwound so as to damage the watch and stop it working.

I wonder how much someone would charge for a watch like that? (Though of course the watch could never be sold since it has to be back in the old lady's hands later on to give to Christopher Reeves. - Maybe you could borrow it though?)

Cheers, Greg.

A Plea For My Friend - Helen.

Hi Guys,

A bit of a change of theme in this post. No time travel, but in a very real way this post does concern time - the time we have available to us.

A few weeks ago an old and dear friend passed away after a year and a half long battle with cancer. It was a long and a difficult fight that she waged with her disease, and it took a terrible toll on her even before it finally killed her.

But this post isn't about the battle. And it isn't even about Helen. I could write a book about her and still never find the right words to praise her for the intelligent, warm and witty woman that she was. It isn't even about the prevention of cancer and the terrible waste of lives caused by smoking and bad diet etc. Helen's cancer wasn't one of those cancers associated with lifestyle choices. This is purely about taking care of yourself medically and seeing the doctor when you're ill.

Helen had ovarian cancer. Its a type of cancer that's often referred to as a silent killer - silent because you don't know that you have it until it's advanced. It is symptomless, or so they say. In fact the first symptom my friend took seriously enough to visit the doctor for, was shortness of breath. This was caused by a secondary tumour growing so large that it was actually pressing on her lung. By then of course, it was too late.

But there were other symptoms. Ovarian cancer isn't truly silent. It's just that its early symptoms are vague and often mistaken for other things. Things that people often don't feel the need to visit the doctor for.

Symptoms, and this is taken directly from the American Cancer Society website, are seen in the early stages of the disease, even before the cancer has spread. They include:

Bloating,
Pelvic and abdominal pain,
Trouble eating or feeling full quickly,
Urinary symptoms such as urgency or needing to go often.

And the advice that they give is that when the occurance of these symptoms is unusual, when they are present almost daily, and when they last more than a couple of weeks, that should be a warning sign to women to visit their doctor and get checked out.

It's highly likely that these symptoms will be due to other more minor ailments, but for those unfortunate few who do have early stage ovarian cancer, an early diagnosis is everything. The sooner you catch it, the better the odds of beating it.

So that's my plea on behalf of my friend. Don't ignore minor symptoms. Don't simply assume they're signs of a tummy bug or what have you. If they're unusual for you, if they aren't going away, if they're happening daily, please go and see your doctor.

Remember the old mantra - an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Cheers, Greg.

Time Travel - Movies - The Time Machine.

Hi Guys,

Sorry it's been so long since my last post. Life intrudes as it so often does.

This time I'd like to turn my attention to movies and some of the ways in which writers and directors have looked at time travel, both the paradoxes it creates and the ingenious ways in which they try to get around them.

In this post I'll look at the movie The Time Machine, based on the book by HG Wells. It's important to note that I'm talking about the movie since it takes a departure from the book in several important aspects. In the case of this post, it's in the way that the hero is prevented from changing the past.

As those of you who've seen the movie will know, the hero is prevented from saving his fiancee by the intervention of time. Every time he goes back in to the past to save her, he is prevented by the machine never arriving at the right time. The reason given is that since he invented the time machine purely to be able to go back in time to save her, if he then saved her he would negate his reason for inventing the machine in the first place. In short he would create a paradox.

On the face of it this seems like a cunning plan to prevent a paradox from occuring, but it leaves us with two problems. The first is of course, how does the machine know? Or failing that, how does time know? Conceivably he could be going back in time to do any number of things such as investing in a company who's stocks he knows are sure to rise. So how does the machine know that he is going back in time to save his fiancee? The fact that it does know implies that the machine or time is both sentient and probably telepathic. It knows his plans, knows it will create a paradox, and actually works to prevent them.

The second problem is much more difficult to get around. There were multiple ways in which he could have saved his fiancee. His plan which was very simple, was to go back to that point in time and rescue her from the gunman. But he could have done a great many other things to prevent her murder. He could have gone back a little further,perhaps to that morning and rearranged her day so that she would not be walking along soon to become crime scene later on. He could have gone further back and arranged for her to be perhaps overseas on a holiday at the time of her impending murder. Assuming the gunman was later identified he could have gone still further back, and had him arrested, prevented him from getting hold of a gun, or even stopped him from being born.

All of these actions would of course have created the same paradox, and so presumably the time machine or time itself would have had to have stopped him. But how? The machine would have had to have known at every step what his plans were. Or it could have simply prevented him from ever going backwards in time at all. In the end to completely prevent paradoxes from occuring it could only have done it one way, it would have become a one way time machine - it could only go forwards.

I'm sure you'd agree, that's not the sort of time machine we want to imagine.

Cheers, Greg.