Write What You Know

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How can you write about inventors without trying to invent something? I’m not talking about slapping something together on a lark. I’m talking about dedicating part of your life to making something that’s never existed before. That last sentence sounds a lot like novel writing.

To often the story has the inventor grab things off the shelf and make a gadget that saves the day. Deus ex machina. And the thrown together invention always works, never fails and does the job completely.

Inventing is a struggle. Day after day and long into the night the determined inventor battles to overcome what others just excepted. overlooked, or ignored.

They say that necessity is the mother of invention, but they never mention that bastard cost, the dead beat father of creation. The Wright brothers sought out every book they could get on heavier than air flight. Then they did experiments and found that the “Book” on flight by a famous German scientist was wrong, based on experiments with equipment they constructed.

Tesla used higher mathematics to build his inventions. It takes work to invent, not tinkering.

Go read the Popular Mechanics article on Van Halen and his inventions concerning guitars and music. Don’t touch that big blue thing.

Sometimes progress is measured in explosions and the learning is if you survive the blast and don’t do it again.

Stay strong, write on, and invent.

Professor Hyram Voltage

Sometimes you have to set aside what you want to do, to do what you want to do

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Authors often brag about hiding in their writing cave scribbling away, not seeing sunlight for days, not socializing, just cranking out words.

I must be a lousy writer. I run six to seven zoom meetings a month. One set of meeting for a screenwriting group and another for an amateur radio club I belong to. I’m president of the club and it’s hard work trying to keep the club from falling apart when you can’t hold face to face meeting or even see other club members. Some of the club members are older and have health problems, and they’re lonely.

I’m also on the hook to deliver a talk on How Antennas Work on Friday. Let’s see you try to describe a complex physical phenomena (electromagnetic propagation) to a group of people without using mathematics. To paraphrase Horace Greeley; describe a spiral staircase, without using your hands … in sign language. I’ve got three days to get this talk ready.

What could be more important than writing. A life long dream. Since high school, I wanted to bounce radio signals off the moon. Not many people can do it or have done it. It takes skill, learning, and work. My family, school, job and things in general got in the way. In the last four years I have lost family and friends. I’ve come to realize that my time here could come to an end any second now.

So I have plunged head first into this thing called Earth Moon Earth communications. I have built and purchased antennas only to discard them for better ones. I have purchased new wireless equipment. Upgraded almost everything in the system. I’m getting close, but so much more needs to be done. I’m running on a lack of sleep. I go to bed sore and exhausted every night.

My life is out of balance, but I will bounce signals off the moon.

Hey I wrote a book, EME can’t be any harder.

Live your life to the fullest. It’s the only one you got.

Stay strong, write on, and reach for the sky, even if it’s only the moon.

Professor Hyram Voltage