It's okay. Still an awesome read.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Atlantis would be communicating the hold request through the Orbiter Test Conductor? I dunno. As always, I'm loving your stuff; you've got the knack for first-person prose.

P.S. Complaining about procedures? Me? Nope. Not happening.

Great story so far. I went back and read the eariler ones, and I'm impressed. Keep doing your best

When you're in Chicago, be sure to visit the Museum of Science and Industry to check out the Apollo 8 CM.

What airline are you flying?

Ah at Schiphol Maybe I'll be there too around that time

Good luck and have fun!

How long will you be staying in Atlanta during the stopover?

Discovery will be hard to get to as it is on display the Udvar Hazy Center near Dulles, which is a good drive away from the District. At the least, it is a Metrorail to commuter bus journey.

The National Air and Space Museum on the Mall, however, is still excellent and contains lots to look at and enjoy. I'd also recommend that you get a proper tour of the US Capitol.

We have lots of good food in The District, depending on where you are staying I can recommended some good cheap dives for a quality meal.

Here's an idea. It might sound bizarre, but try doing a free Myers-Briggs type indicator test as your character. Go through the questions and think about how he or she would answer.

I've done this before, and it's served me as an interesting exercise to 'get to know' my characters (and to help classify and standardize their personalities).

Of course, having a healthy imagination helps.

I'm finding that some of my characters are surprising me. I'll have a clear path for them all laid out on a flowchart (nearly), and while writing it seems sometimes they will take off on their own direction. Does that happen to anyone else I wonder?

My own main character (who most definitely not me) has developed his own quirks, and a few of the others have taken on unanticipated traits as well.

Most of what I'm writing is a process of cultivating the hell out of what I'm going to write about. Most people get to 'know' characters out of watching movies or reading books; for me, it's the other way around. When I put something down, I've already got the complete picture of what that particular character is experiencing the moment I'm writing it down; be it fear, jubilation, anger . . . and my goal with this type of detailed writing is to pass the whole picture along without boring the reader to apathy.

The hardest part for me to start with is usually a name for a character; the rest of it I'll have some incidental knowledge of their character traits -- their personality, their propensity towards action or speech in any particular direction. Most of the time, this knowledge hits me as I'm going about my daily life, and it does lend a bit of entertainment at times to an otherwise monotonous working life when I 'play' with the characters in my skull.

(Let me be clear here; I'm not talking about talking to myself in a MPD sort of fashion; by all indications, I'm quite lucid and sane. )

To that end, it does take time for me to flesh something out. Especially if we're talking about a mundane topic. If my characters are in the middle of waiting for a planar alignment burn that's going to take more than an hour just to get to, I'm going to want them to have something to do; even if it's something as simple as throwing a tennis ball repeatedly against the wall of the orbiter or having a petty argument about the acumen of their favorite football club. That's . . . I guess . . . where my best dialogue comes into play sometimes.

Does that answer your question at all?

Does the ball reach terminal velocity or does it keep getting faster?