mars needs nerd girls

andi mccarthy, the heroine of nerd girls go 2 hell, is my favorite character to date. she pretty much writes herself. in fact, she almost never shuts up. so while i'm mostly working on rest stop, an idea for a sequel to the first andi book (titled mars needs nerd girls) has been percolating and, well, i thought you might like a taste of the intro.

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Space: The Futile Frontier

In 1983, a fleck of paint the size of your thumbnail hit a window on the space shuttle Challenger and caused an impact crater. The paint chip was traveling at 20,000 miles per hour - fast enough to have killed an astronaut, if one had been out for a stroll.

This is just one reason why the tons of trash orbiting our planet is a bad thing.

Another astro-factoid: Rather than waste precious water washing dirty clothes, astronauts on the International Space Station eject them into space, where they burn up in the Earth's atmosphere. This is the most brilliant, lazy, and human thing EVER.

Traveling at 40,000 miles per hour - fast enough to squish you into spaghetti sauce - it still took the Voyager probe 40 years just to leave our solar system. That’s more than 350 billion-with-a-B miles, a number that human brains simply cannot grok.

It will be at least another 40 years before Voyager comes within range of the next-closest star.

“But eventually we’ll develop warp technology,” say the Trekkers, which is BS, because we’re already pretty far into the 22nd century and most women’s clothes still don’t even have pockets. But just for funzies, let’s say we do…

At maximum warp, it would still take the U.S.S. Enterprise more than 1 million-with-an-M years to reach the next closest galaxy. And because our universe is expanding like my Uncle Dave on Turkey Day, every galaxy gets millions of miles further apart from the others every hour of every day - even Christmas.

If you still dream about being Han Solo, this will pop your balloon for good: The expansion is speeding up.

I personally know an alien. He’s my gynecologist.

Okay, not really, but it makes me feel all weird to say he’s my pediatrician, because who still goes to a pediatrician at 16?

It’s cool that he’s an alien, though. Even cooler than that - he’s an alien plus a science teacher from like 100 years ago who share a body and a love that dare not speak its name. The alien came here to study money, politics, religion, and sports - stuff they don’t have in outer space, I guess - then got stuck here when his bosses figured out those things are contagious.

Okay, here you go - last one, I promise: Doritos was the first company on Earth to purposely send an ad into space targeting potential extraterrestrial customers.

They heard. They came. They’re here now. Only you know what? These aliens are nothing like my pediatrician. Turns out they’re not that big on Doritos, either. But they’re just crazy about us.

That’s right - this is a cookbook.