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My parents are both still alive.  Both of them are octogenarians.   And they still give me presents at Christmas.  This year I spent my Christmas money on toys.   Yes, I found a Big McIntosh  and a Pinky Pie with special painted scenes on their sides.  I couldn’t resist.  This old man still buys and plays with toys.  Should I be ashamed of myself?  No way.  I’m in my second childhood.  I need a chance to play with my toys.

I bought a gingerbread house kit from Walmart once again, and we put it together on Sunday while my oldest son was home on leave from the Marine Corps.  This little photo essay is inadequate for fully understanding the scope of the epic mess we made, the sugary sweetness of eating the thing as we built it, and the challenge it was to my diabetes and diet.

I did not realize when I bought this kit that the gingerbread house was already put together and glued in place with sugar paste.  So the first step this time was chocolate frosting and candy decorations.

Last minute special touches only cost $1.95.

My son the Marine did the Christmas tree on the side in green frosting, not realizing that we had a package of green marshmallow stuff in the kit for that purpose.

I am told that the best part of the process was tearing it all apart and devouring it at the end.  I even ate a tiny piece myself.

I married into a Jehovah’s Witness family, so I have not celebrated Christmas since 1994.  They believe real Christians shouldn’t celebrate a holiday that has its origins in pagan Roman traditions because first century Christians did not celebrate birthdays or Christmas.  I suppose they have a point.  But being a Jehovah’s Witness is not really who I am any more.  The faith has left me more or less alone and isolated, and I don’t have much to do with them any more. My son is in the Marine Corps, a situation that caused him to be disfellowshipped and thrown out of the faith.  I am celebrating the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas with my son, home on leave.   He came home in time to help with my hospitalization recently for a heart scare that turned out to be nothing.  While all of that was going on, I self-published my novel Snow Babies, a book that is built from a lot of old Christmas memories and holiday regrets. We always need to do more to help others.  We need to come together more and care more and feel more and remember. Christmas is a time when people traditionally respond to those needs.  So I am living with that heightened sense of a special time of year again, for the first time in a long time.  And it means everything to me.  So that is it for the moment.  This is my merry time, and I have to hold on to every bit of it that I can.

Well, being in the hospital with heart monitoring machines is not the way I wanted to start the holiday season.    But I didn’t have a heart attack after all.   And it gives me fiction fuel for the future. 

So, since I have established Tuesday as a day to publish novel writing, I am going to put up a chapter of Aeroquest every Tuesday as I rewrite the novel in a third draft, post-publishing as a major tactical error with the criminals at Publish America.  My 7-year contract with them was up in 2014.  Don’t buy their version of my book as it is overpriced nonsense with serious errors in it.  Read it here.  Or don’t.  But this is going to be my next blog novel until I finish it, or alien invaders turn me into dog food for their pet flooporaptors… uh, maybe I meant to say flooporaptor food?

Canto 1 – Escapade

When you look out the portal of a space craft, especially a large portal like the main view port of the Leaping Shadowcat, you get a glimpse of the great orchestra of light and silence that has been playing its music in space since the dawn of time.  The diamond-bright stars glow with an electric significance in a great sea of black, littered with the silent notes of the Galactic Symphony being conducted by God himself.

Ged Aero stared at this silent music as he contemplated his brother’s plan.  Ham Aero had proposed the impossible.  How could it be the only solution?

“You can’t deny it any more, Ged.  The Galtorr Imperium is no place for a man like you.”

“…but the unknown, Hamfast?  How can you expect to get by beyond the edges of known space?”

“Others have done it in the past.  You know that civilization still has not absorbed even half the worlds that Martin Faulkner visited five hundred years ago.”

“Yes,” said Ged, pulling at the front brim of his dirty brown fedora as if to hide his eyes and the doubt that was in them, “but he was an explorer.  He knew how to live in space without any human contact for years on end.”

“What he can do, we can do.”  Ham pushed a fall of thick yellow hair out of his eyes.  It had been far too long since he had had a haircut, but only their mother had been allowed to do it, and she was now gone.  “We have to.  Prejudice against you has reached the point that it will be fatal.”

“Okay, I know that.  But I’m learning to control it.  I don’t have to change all the time.  I can stop it when I need to, and maybe even start it myself.  I don’t know why it happens, but I think I can make it work for me instead of against me.”

“Yes, well, mutations like yours are almost always fatal in the end.  You’ll slip at the wrong moment, and the Imperials will have your head on a platter.  What did they call your disease?”

“Lycanthropy.  Werewolf disease.”

“That’s my point exactly.  We both know it’s really something else, but the torches will come out to burn you the next time they see you change even a little bit.”

“Unknown space, Ham?  Does it have to be unknown space?”

“Yes, Ged.  Unknown space.  It’s my spaceship.  The decision is ultimately mine.”

It was a beautiful space ship.  It was a safari cruiser of the Xenomorph Class, a smooth airfoil shape with silver skin and a photon drive that could leap across parsecs of space in practically no time.  It could land on planets with atmosphere as easily as it could glide through the electric sparkle of space.  It had a good, sturdy ground ATV and accommodations for as many as twenty five people.

“So how do you plan to navigate the unknown?”  Ged knew Ham was a capable starship captain, but they had no reliable navigator.  And the third member of their minimum crew of three, the engineer, was not even aboard.

“Goofy can do it.  He’s more gifted than you believe.”

“Don’t tell me your friend Trav Dalgoda is the engineer we’re waiting for!”

“Okay.  I won’t tell you.”

“Are you insane?  You’re going to jump out into unknown space with that Lunar Tick as our only means to fix the ship and set our course?”

“Yeah,” said Ham, grinning.  “It doesn’t sound too smart when you put it that way.  But he is an original thinker and a good problem-solver.”

“He’s also wanted on four planets and owes ten million Galtorrian credits to the biggest Vice Lord in the Thousand Planets.”

“Yeah.  It was easy to talk him into jumping out with us.”

“Oh, I’m so glad it was easy.”

The two brothers had started calling their boyhood friend, Travis R. Dalgoda, “Goofy” when, as an academy graduate, he started wearing an eye patch over his left eye even though he could see through it perfectly.  It didn’t hurt that he always wore that silly Donald Duck sailor’s hat that he got on his one and only leave on the Disney planet.  He also had a thing for ties with weird pictures or sayings on them.  Trav was one of a kind.

“I guess I understand your plan finally,” Ged said morosely to Ham.  “You’re going to bring an end to my suffering by committing suicide in deep unknown space.”

“Yeah,” said Ham staring out the view port at the silent music of the stars, “Something like that…”

At that moment, a blazing piece of space junk trailing sparking debris came fluttering toward them like a wounded sparrow.

“Oh, gawd!  Get to the co-pilot console, Ged!”

Whatever it was, it was maneuvering, using powered flight.  It was apparently seeking them out.

“Any bets that this burning space-ball is Goofy?” Ham asked as he strapped himself into the pilot chair.

As if in answer, Trav’s voice came over the ship-to-ship commo.  “Ham-boy!  You gotta help me.  I picked up a band of followers on my way out of system!”

“Yep.  That’s Goofy,” moaned Ged.

“I’m pickin’ up bad guys!” shouted Ham.  He flipped on the commo.  “Goof?  You got six of them on your tail?”

“Oh, is that all?  My sensors are out.  I figured it was more like fifty.  Pinwheel Corsairs, ain’t they?”

“Yes.  I make them to be Tron Blastarr and Maggie the Knife.  What’s your beef with them?”

“Oh, they’re friends of mine.  I helped them loot a cargo out of Mingo Downport.  They just didn’t like the ninety-ten split I left them with.”

“Typical,” muttered Ged.

Ham launched the Leaping Shadowcat into an arching intercept course.  Ham had never done a high-speed docking maneuver before, that Ged knew of, but the young pilot was about to learn fast.