This bumper sticker pulled me in because I just finished watching “The Almighty Johnsons” series on Netflix, and Ullr (Mikkel/Michael) was attempting to rule.
Sunday’s Bumper Sticker
Philip Said
I used a foggy background for this quote because I think the quote illuminates the fog of writing. It’s applying your experiences, and things others describe to you, to imagine another’s experience to tell a story.
Saturday’s Theme Music
Someone shared this vocals & guitars only video of Queen on FB. I enjoyed it and thought, let’s share it as today’s theme music.
Hope you enjoy this recording of Freddie Mercury and Queen performing “Killer Queen” as much as I do.
A Good Day
Today was a wonderful editing and revising day, mostly because there was little of either required. It’s a good day, I thought.
Having a good day feels like a reward. The bad days must be endured, and they often end up being productive. I mean, by a bad day, a day where I feel tired, depressed, and flirt with thoughts about not writing ever, ever again.
I know, though, that the writing on good, bad, indifferent, and mediocre days isn’t likely to be any different. Bad days mostly refer to my attitude before I start writing, editing, or revising. Once I start and my focus is on my writing, my attitude doesn’t matter.
For all that I know, what I read, edited,and revised today could have been written on a bad day. There’s a good chance of that being true, because I covered almost seventy pages today. I generally write one to two thousand words a day, which typically amount to less than ten pages, depending on dialogue and density. I probably covered a week to two weeks of writing, so there were probably some bad days in there.
Now I’m done writing like crazy editing like crazy. Time to go do other things, like eat.
Shocking Moment
It was sort of a shocking moment, but it’s only a moment, a single incident with a single person, but —
Well, that’s the prelude.
I was buying a coffee drink. It’d been rung up. I was paying for the $4.75 drink with a ten.
The cashier said, “Oh, hang on. I put in that you were paying with a five. I need to figure out how much I owe you.”
I know from previous conversations that the cashier is nineteen years old and that she’s enrolled in our local college.
After a few seconds of allowing her to puzzle through it, I said, “I think it would be $5.25 back.”
She looked at me.
I said, “If I’d paid with a five, you would have given me a quarter back, right? But I paid with a ten, which is five dollars more, so you just give me five dollars more back. Does that make sense?”
She looked relieved. “Yes,” she said. “It does.”
Wanderfloof
Wanderfloof (floofinition) – a housepet with a penchant for wandering.
In use: “Although she’d been his cat for six years, the pet door let her roam as she wanted. As he held the wanderfloof one day, a neighbor expressed surprise, because she’d been feeding and taking care of the cat for the last several years. She’d always wondered where the cat went when it disappeared for hours.”
Another Michael Said
To paraphrase this for my current phase, edit every day, even it it’s just a paragraph.
Grounding Myself
Here we go, more self-indulgence. What’s new? This is a vanity blog with a primary purpose of understanding myself and my thinking through writing and coping with my writing efforts, with secondary purposes of entertaining myself and sharing ideas with others.
I struggled with how much to share today. I’m telling what the series, Incomplete States, is about. I decided that I typically don’t have many visitors, so I have little to worry about. I expect this post to get eight views and five likes, and perhaps two comments.
I was thinking about all of this in connection with where I stand with editing and revising the second novel, and by extension, the series. I felt a need to ground myself about where I’m at in the series, where it is, and where it goes.
To begin, consider three questions.
- Do you ever feel disconnected from your life, as though things have happened that you don’t remember or understand?
- Have you ever thought, didn’t I already do this?
- Is there ever a time that you feel like you’re a completely different person, resulting in a struggle to fit in? Perhaps you think, I was a male, and now I’m a female.
If you feel that you’ve experienced these things, it’s possible that you have an entangled LERE. A LERE is a Life-Experience-Reality-Existence. Entangled LEREs are caused by Chi-particle issues. Chi-particles are imaginary quantum particles that are lack mass and energy and travel faster than light. As they slow, they acquire mass and energy, becoming a fundamental quantum particle before devolving into some aspect of classic physics. Chi-particles exist as isotopes and variants just as elements often exist as isotopes and variants, which affect their behavior.
This is the situation that my characters experience in the four book series, Incomplete States.
I was exploring and thinking about the series as I walked this morning. Specifically, I thought, oh my God, what have I done?
No, that’s not true. That was inserted for comedic effect. It’s sometimes true that I think this, but that wasn’t the case today.
Today brought a more rational review of the books and the story arc. I’d conceptualized, what if there is only now, no past, no future, and no cause and effect? What if the arrows of time are a convenient commodity we use to explain our existence (including our Universe) because it fits with our organic biology and creates a simple framework for being?
When I think about this, I’m forced to think about multi-verses, but also to challenge the ideas that our Universe is expanding. We believe we observe its expansion through light shifts because that cause and effect is the prevalent belief of our existence, along with the arrows of time that go from the past to the future, shooting through now. In my reality, E = mc2 is a fallacy that we cling to because it fortifies our foundations of being.
We hang onto the concepts of a greater being in the same way.
None of these things are easy to lose. Grappling with not accepting them and actively rejecting them is hard to keep in mind when you’re writing. I kept wanting to return to cause and effect and our universe’s foundations.
As I played with those concepts, I introduced characters who were undergoing the symptoms expressed in the opening questions. Unlike you, they often also remember what else happened. They remember other worlds and other lives that they lived and then come to a grudging grasp that they’re still living in these other worlds and lives.
All of this is told through their stories. Throughout, the things that happen to them cause gaps in logic, cause and effect, and expectations. They endure twisted memories and confused understanding, resulting in a knowledge vacuum.
Humans dislike vacuums. We always want to explain what’s going on via some mechanism. That mechanism can be via magic, religion, science, and technology. Those are the broad categories. People also suspect they live dream existences, but struggle to understand which part of their LERE is the dream existence, and which is the reality, coping with the possibilities that maybe both are dreams, or maybe both are realities. They struggle with plots to explain what’s happening to them, plots that involve governments, conspiracies, virtual realities, and other intelligent life forms.
The existences, experiences, and coping become a huge matrix, but the matrix is different for each of the six main characters. The delta between their matrices fluctuates.
That’s where the tension resides, evolving into wonder about which theory filling the vacuum is correct, and how the stories will resolve.
I had several writing rules I employed while writing these four books. Chapters were addressed as episodes. Cause and effect can be perceived, but readers can’t depend on it. Consistently inconsistent logic would be employed. Life — or reality — is a vacuum, and our search for understanding and explaining it all is a farce. What we interpret as life through our experiences forms a reality that’s a slice of existence that doesn’t linger.
I don’t treat my science as junk science. I treat it seriously in the novels. I don’t expect it to hold up to scientific reviews or validate string theory, loop quantum gravity, or the theory of everything. I offer no math to support my science, although I’ll point out that in my concept, anything anyone offers to support or tear down my science is wrong because of the inherent observer’s bias held by being in and part of this universe.
Yeah, it’s fun. It makes me laugh. That’s what writing’s all about, innit? Entertaining ourselves.
Hopefully, after reading the series, the typical reader will think, “I see.” And then they’ll wonder, “But what is it that I see?”
Flooftentious
Flooftentious (floofinition) – a pet’s behavior characterized by assumption of dignity after something silly or an event that casts them in a bad image has taken place.
In use: “When falling to make a jump as planned, cats’ flooftentious reaction will be to sit and groom their face, or to look around with an expression that states, “What? I meant to do that.””
