Wednesday, January 19, 2005

Business, Books, and Writing.

The word for today is 'philopolis'. The origin is Greek for tribe and city. Why is it the word for today? The reason is that I have been writing a lot of alternate history in the last few years. One of my biggest and most ambitious projects has been writing about an alternate timeline where the Byzantine Empire (aka the Eastern Roman Empire) revives from Morea. Instead of Constantine being the last Emperor ruling from Constantinople and falling to the Turks, Demetrius does and leaves the more capable Constantine in Morea. Specificly, the aim for that TL was to get Machiavelli over to this revived BE/ERE and explore his writings under the new Morean Empire. It's been fun, but very, very hard. Since I tied the knot last summer, I've not had the time to do as much writing as I used to. This alternate Machiavelli is about to emark on a history of the Roman Empire (which the Moreans and indeed even the Byzantines saw themselves as up until the end) - much like his history of Florence that Mach did in OTL. He's going to come up with a odd ball nation-state concept. We'll see how it plays out. I'm haven't started writing this episode as yet. I like to play with the ideas first.

_Collapse_ remains interesting. I'm up past page 100. He did a tour of the Bitterroot Valley in Montana from different perspectives and now is in the midst of discussing Easter Island. I was delighted with the discussion of the statues and how the locals, ticked with Thor Heyerdahl being unwilling to talk with them about the statues, went and raised one for him. I'm about a fifth done with the book. I'm guessing Sunday I'll finish. Then on to the phytoremediation book.

That leads into the whole business thing. I've been discussing that with chemist and biologist friends. They're keenly interested as are some professors that have been doing research in the arena. I'm the one far back on the learning curve and I am playing catch up. I'm setting the pace though, so I have some control. Amazingly enough.

The second business with potentially some more lucrative prospects is jsut getting underway. We shall see. I've been talking about it with my father since he's a genius with electronics, esp with respect to miniaturization. I'm also talking with others. We'll see what we can pull together. If this takes off, expect to hear of me big time. heh heh heh.


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