For twenty hours you’ve been sitting in near-complete darkness; your only stimuli being the blinking colored lights overhead and the gently-vibrating floorboard beneath your boots. Through the steel shutter over your window, you can just barely make out the tiny blue halo radiating from the point of your departure: Earth. From here, it would appear about as large as the moon might from your backyard. You are far from your backyard.
An authoritative voice over the intercom advises the shuttle’s occupants to prepare for docking, and you suddenly feel the inertial force of the shuttle’s braking thrusters. You are forced to extend a hand towards the seat in front of you to brace yourself – the sleeping man sitting next to you, however, was not so prepared. As he is jerked awake by his auto-locking safety harness, the shuttle begins to shake and whir. A few startled gasps escape from the mouths of a few less-experienced travelers, followed by embarrassed ahem’s. A final thud. Then, motionless silence.
A sharp hissing noise fills the shuttle as it depressurizes, making your ears pop. The formerly-sleeping man leans into the aisle, soliciting other weary passengers for a stick of gum. As the shutters lift from over the windows, you and the rest of the shuttle’s occupant’s excitedly survey your new, exotic, surroundings. The voice once again arises from the intercom:
“Ladies and gentlemen, we have arrived safely at Musk Interplanetary Spaceport. Local time is 0330, temperature below is 19.5 degrees Celsius. If the spaceport is your final destination, I’d like to thank you on behalf of our entire crew for flying with us. If you are continuing your trip to the surface level, please stay seated with your harnesses properly fastened for the duration of our descent, which will begin shortly. Thanks again for choosing us, and welcome to Planet W.
…
Wait – did you really read that? Gosh, I didn’t think anyone would make it down here. I suppose you could have just skipped past all of those italic letters to get down here, but I’m going to assume that you actually took the time to trudge through my ham-fisted intro. Don’t worry – the rest of the blog won’t be like that (unless you enjoyed it, in which case the rest of the blog will kind of be like that).
This first post is probably a poor representation of my greater vision for this site – and I think that’s okay. It’s going to be a bit of a mixed bag here, but fictional creative writing like you just read isn’t going to be at the forefront of things: it isn’t the purpose of the blog.
The primary purpose of the blog is to entertain. I want it to be a fun read. The addition of some role-playing at the beginning of each entry is just to add some flavor and context about whatever the actual subject of the blog post is. In future posts, I’ll keep that italicized section a little shorter; maybe just a small paragraph or a few sentences – just enough to set the scene. Why? Because I think it’s fun. The jury is still out on how long I’ll keep it up, though, so I’ll play it by ear. Feel free to comment and tell me how much it sucks. Or rocks.
The meat and potatoes of this site is going to consist of informative commentary. What that entails is… essentially anything I want it to. Thoughts, reviews, observations – whatever I’m in the mood to do. Planet W is my catch-all writing destination. My goal is to feed you interesting information in the most easy-to-digest manner possible, like a mother bird regurgitating a meal of worms right into the mouths of its young. Just like that.
Anyway, thank you for taking the time to read this far. I’m excited to get started, so I hope you stick around to read some stuff with me.
Welcome to the planet,
Ryan
Planet W 