Funny how things seem to pile up when you're busy, and with Spring now Sprung and Summer upon us, the garden is making demands that keep me away from the keyboard, the woods and my Shelties insist on outings (strictly local and strictly within the 'lockdown' rules here!) ... All of which means that writing is currently something done in snatches when the muse is upon me, or an idea has taken shape for one of the books I'm working on. Plus there's always work needing doing on something around the house besides the process of checking the corrections and edits of the next book in the Harry Heron series, Harry Heron: Hope Transcends.
So the merry month of May has now departed and June is upon me and I somehow never quite got around to posting anything here last month. It wasn't a case of not wanting to, but rather one of having too many other little tasks to get organized. Looking back I had intended to write something about how the Covid 19 made me ponder the chances of humanity encountering a lethal virus on a distant planet -- when we eventually do start to travel. According to scientists it is extremely likely that we will, so it will pay us to learn a great deal more about how to prevent it before that happens. H G Wells had a point in his War of the Worlds when the Martian invaders are ultimately defeated and killed by what we call the Common Cold. This latest version of the coronaviral family, is perhaps, a timely reminder of our vulnerability.
This is one of the reasons I think that we will have to live inside a sort of biosphere, or biodome, once we do move onto a new world. It will serve two purposes, the first, obviously, being to provide a habitat to which WE are fully adjusted, and secondly, to protect the biosphere of the new host planet from us and our pathogens. I rather suspect that this may prove to be the toughest test in any move into space and new worlds. It is also a problem that will require a multi-disciplined solution involving a lot of expertise in ecological, biomedical and engineering fields just to mention a few.
For the moment, however, I plan to focus on getting Harry Heron: Hope Transcends onto the market, completing the revisions I want to make to another book in the same genre, and get the rough draft of another historical story completed. I think that ought to keep me busy until next year!