Some of my best story ideas hit me when I’m mowing the lawn, taking out the trash, or driving to work. You just never know. Back in 2012, NASA announced a very special press conference to unveil a finding by the Mars Science Laboratory – commonly called the Curiosity Rover. Rumors abounded, but the coolest one was the “F” word that shall not be mentioned. Okay, I’ll mention it. Fossils.
The conference came and went and it wasn’t fossils. However, all I could think about was how awesome it would be if they did announce fossils on Mars. Just think of the paradigm shift that would have for the NASA budget. So I put together a rough Chapter One of the story. I still have that file. It’s very rough. However, I expanded it and kept going until it eventually became a real novel. I left it with a mild cliffhanger because I always loved how movies like Inception ended – the intriguing cliffhanger. However, I soon realized that it was quite the cliffhanger and I wanted to complete the story. Three years later, we now have Blue Hope – the completion of the story started by Red Hope.
If you’ve never seen the Curiosity Rover, pictured above is an exact duplicate housed at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The nerdy guy shown there is for scale purposes only. It’s an enormous machine by space standards and runs with a heart of plutonium. The Curiosity Rover represents all the best scientific instrumentation we could cram into a mobile laboratory – sent to another planet and expected to function perfectly. And it is functioning perfectly.
You can find my new book, Blue Hope, available via Amazon using this link:
John Dreese - Author Blog 