This Day In History, 2004: SpaceShipOne

One year ago today, pilot Mike Melvill of Tier One made history by piloting SpaceShipOne into outer space, the first privately-funded human spaceflight. A few months later, SpaceShipOne made two more flights into outer space within a fourteen-day period, winning the Ansari X-Prize.

Leigh On Writing

Writer Stephen Leigh has a fascinating post on his own writing process here, for those who are interested in how writers write. His process seems to be a mix of doing some planning beforehand, letting a novel take you where it wants to go, and making sure to write every day:

I write relatively slowly but steadily. To me, writing has to be a habit, something you do every single day -- not just on weekends, not just when the Muse strikes you. Every day. Without fail. And if you do it every day, you don't have to produce massive amounts of words to make significant progress. I tend to average 500 - 600 words a day -- that means that sometimes I do 1,500 words while other days I'll be in minus figures because I'm ripping stuff out that doesn't work for me (getting rid of awful prose is also writing). Average 500 words a day, and you can write a fairly thick novel every year...

A lot of wisdom in what he says.