'Pantsing' -- going in with little or no plan -- actually is a thing among the NaNo crowd, but there are plenty who do plan, some in exhaustive detail. I think I overthought the planning part on my last attempt, and that one still isn't complete.
]]>1) Not all of the solar and space-weather fleet is in LEO -- SDO is in geosynchronous orbit above New Mexico, SOHO is at L1, and STEREO is somewhere over on the far side of the Sun right now (albeit one of them hasn't been heard from in about a year). Mind you, none of those are very likely to be around by 2030. Also, there are ground-based observations that have at least some predictive power.
2) There are some indications that we might be entering a period of lower overall solar activity over the next few decades, though to be honest it's a complicated stochastic system that varies a lot on a timescale of decades and centuries and we only have about thirty years of really detailed observations, so it's hard to be sure what's going on, except that the last solar minimum was unusually long and deep and the current maximum is on the feeble side. It wouldn't be unreasonable to use a lull in solar activity as part of a near-future scenario, anyway. As a consequence of which monitoring gets cut out of the budget, and then the Sun comes roaring back ...
]]>There are lots of psychic/magic powers in Lee & Miller's Korval series, which is still ongoing, and also -- with a different slant -- in the Doyle/Macdonald Mageworlds books, which aren't.
]]>http://solarmonitor.org/full_disk.php?date=20140911&type=saia_00193&indexnum=1
]]>On the other hand, my G+ stream seems to be full of 'Indie' authors earnestly trying to sell each other SEO advice and editing services, and that does start to feel like noise after a while.
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