When I was a teenager, my dad and I would play slow chess. His job involved regularly rotating shift work, which meant that we often went weeks at a time where our days didn’t really overlap. So, to stay connected, we kept a chess board in the kitchen. Every day, Dad would make a move on the board while eating after he got home, and I would make mine after school. It was a fun way to stay connected when our lives were otherwise out of sync.

We didn’t know it at the time, but we were also inventing what would become an important ritual between us.

Over the course of my lifetime, science fiction has gone from a niche-market storyform aimed at geeks and propeller-heads to a cultural juggernaut consumed by the masses. So you would think that, as a one-time card-carrying member of the Junior Space Ranger’s Adventure Club, I would be delighted by the scifi-rich world I now find myself living in.

But I’m not.

In all the hubbub of getting the project section going, I’ve been ignoring the more bloggish portion of the site. But after putting together the Countdown To Launch, it became impossible to ignore it any longer. So this is my inaugural blog post, in which I’ll try to guess what the hell I intend to blog about.