Category: Science fiction

The Writing Bucket

I’ve been receiving a number of queries about when the next novel is coming out. So – updates.

  1. Alas, I’m not working on the next mystery in the Lessons with Savanna series. That would be the third novel in the set, ‘Personal Lessons with Savanna’. Continuing the story begun in ‘Life Lessons with Savanna’ and extended in ‘Road Lessons with Savanna’, Studs is being framed for murder in Texas. I promise to update the Facebook page this week. Thanks for being fans.
  2. I’m looking forward to working on ‘Personal Lessons with Savanna’. Between recovering memories, coping with creeping insanity and being framed for murder, so much is going on with Studs. It’s the sort of developing character and story that excites writers. A third of the novel was completed before the great computer breakdown of 2016 forced me to send the Envy back to HP for repairs, living without my machine for three weeks.
  3. Work continues on ‘Long Summer’. I’ve been  writing the first draft for eight months. I’m not certain when it will be done. I’m hopeful it’ll be soon but, I’m a writer. As a writer, I’m always hopeful, optimistic, pessimistic, doubtful, depressed and exuberant. It’s a fun soup to dwell in.
  4. ‘Long Summer’  is very challenging to think through and write. While involving time shifting via a modified Alcubierre Drive (which involves, as well, exotic new materials and a whole other set of theories), it’s about the concept of now. Keeping that in mind as the parallel story lines twine together via the major characters and their alt existences causes me to pause and probe, asking myself, “Wait, which of the alts is this?” It’s imperative that each alt’s story is kept true and coherent. As I’m not a very coherent writer, you can imagine the babble in my head.
  5. All of that time shifting involves just the Humans, the ones known as Earth Humans, with the ones known only as Humans (from Aition) far less directly involved. Besides them, though, are the other intelligent life forms and their customs and civilizations. The story centers around a few of the Sabard and Travail, but the Monad’s plots and intentions drive much of the surface tension and action – or so it appears….
  6. ‘Long Summer’ has become so big as a Word manuscript that Word turned off several functions, like spell check and auto-correct. To counter that, I broke the novel up into its parts as manuscripts. It reduces my ability to move back and forth through scenes, parts and chapters, and demands that more documents be opened simultaneously, but I’ve recovered those Word functions. Overall, I consider that a win.
  7. I want to finish ‘Long Summer’ not only so that I can move on with writing ‘Personal Lessons with Savanna’, but because I need ‘Everything In Black And White’  copy-edited and published, along with ‘Spider City’, ‘Fix Everything’, and ‘Peerless’.  Besides them, new ideas have filled the writing bucket. There’s still that coffee shop musical percolating in my mind. I still want to do more with the Stellar Queen and the Magellan.
  8. Besides all this writing, my personal reading keeps falling behind. A friend dropped me an email yesterday. He finished reading the third novel in the Ferrante’s Neapolitan series and raved about it. Having read the first two, I want to read the third. Dozens of books besides it reside on my bookcases, night stand and other places, waiting for my attention.
  9. Meanwhile, I’m moving forward with paperback publication of the four published novels, so those of you bugging and encouraging me to do this, you win. I will do it. Soon. Really. I promise. I’m not crossing my fingers, either.
  10. But, I decided as well to have the covers for the Lessons with Savanna series redone. Time, energy and focus is necessary for that to happen, so bear with me.

Okay, with that out of the way, time to write like crazy, at least one more time. Back to the Wrinkle, Brett and Philea.

1

Change, Resistance, and Complacency

Writing science fiction, one area I end up studying and contemplating is change. I was happy to come across this Harvard Business Review (Walter Frick) interview with Tyler Cowen. Cowen’s newest book, ‘The Complacent Class’, addresses how America has become complacent and averse to change in recent years.

I’ve watched this develop. NIMBY – Not In My Back Yard – was the rallying chorus to battle many new construction suggestions. Property values and appearances take precedence over more pragmatic uses of land, usually in the name of property values, especially when one small set who don’t live in the area will benefit to the detriment of those living in the area and fighting the action.

Yet, we can see the concrete results in places like Oroville Dam. Oroville Dam was headline news during some of February as record rains struck parts of California. The dam’s spillway was opened but damage caused it to be closed. With water rising behind the dam, the emergency spillway was employed but the visibly fast erosion taking place concerned many. Fears that the dam was going to collapse caused mass evacuation. Many area residents were pissed because the water behind that dam in their back yard benefited others living hundreds of miles away.

Almost as an extension of NIMBY, Homeowners Associations (HOAs), have developed to protect individual neighborhoods and developments here in southern Oregon. A large part of that is the agreement to establish a new development is centered around having an open green space, or mini-park, as part of the development. That park, and the attendant common areas, need a management focus. Hence, the HOA is used. To protect property values, the HOA restricts changes and uses. Home owners are limited to what they can plant; fruit and vegetable gardens are generally off-limits, frustrating people who want to grow their own produce. Some common interest developments address this by creating a community garden.

So, from the economic and social ramification of residing in America in the early twenty-first century, to watching and thinking about politics, to imagining our future, Cowen’s book entices me.

______________________________________________________________

HBR: And all this is happening during a time when we see a lot of change in technology, particularly in IT and machine learning, and, potentially, artificial intelligence. How does that progress fit with your thesis?

Well, there is a lot of change, but it’s concentrated in some areas. Look at a classic 20th-century notion of progress: how quickly you can move through physical space. That hasn’t gotten faster for a long time. Planes are not faster. With cars, there’s more traffic. It’s actually harder to get around, and that makes the physical world less dynamic. It’s harder to build things in the United States.

The thing that’s much easier to do is sit at home and have all of life come to you. You speak to your Alexa or your Echo, and you have things be ordered. You use the internet. You watch on Netflix. It’s made us all much more homebodies, feeling we don’t need to change things, more comfortable in our consumption patterns. And obviously that has big private gains, or people wouldn’t be doing it. But there’s nonetheless a collective effect that I think is worrying when our physical and geographic spaces become less dynamic, less mobile, less intermixed. And that’s the America we’re seeing today.

Read the entire short, engaging interview at HBR.

 

4

Chi-mind

Time for some pseudo-scientific bullshit. There’s your preamble.

All substance, no matter its state, has chi-particles.

Chi-p have imaginary mass and energy and travel faster than light. As they slow, they gain real mass and energy. Slowing chi-p begin aggregating and develop into the ‘strings’  of string theory, M-theory, etc.

Chi-particles ignite ‘life’ and inspire consciousness. Multiple types of chi-p exist. The chi-p embedded in the majority of Humans is one type of chi-p; other types of animate organic matter have different chi-p embedded. There are still other types of chi-p for ‘inanimate’ matter, energy, and dark matter.

The chi-mind is the confluence of chi-receivers, -processors and -transmitters within entities. In some inanimate matter, like granite, these are hive minds. Each chi-mind is depended on the other chi-minds for full appreciation of the fabric of awareness the chi-p convergence creates.

The question that arises to me about the chi-mind is, what is its structure of existence? Why, it’s chi-matter, of course, with imaginary mass and structure. LOL.

Animated, organic entities have a more sophisticated chi-mind structure. While the chi-mind works below the subconscious and conscious levels, the chi-minds interact to establish a shared sense of time and reality that’s often lacking in the inanimate chi-mind. Humans (along with the other intelligent, civilized life-forms, such as the Travail, Sabard and Monad) have a more developed chi-mind than other creatures. As the chi-mind and SoNS develop sympathy through increased and prolonged interaction, abilities to grasp chi-p takes root among some individuals. But, their ability to cope with their chi-mind perceptions are often taken as symptoms of insanity or developmental issues.

There are natural reasons for that interpretation of those people. They’re seeing, hearing and experiencing things that others can’t. Some of it frightens or excites the people interacting with the chi-p, which frighten those around them. Sometimes, they’re so entangled with the chi-mind perceptions that they act out. They believe they’re in another time or reality.

Brett is blessed (cursed?) with a chi-p isotope. It exhibits different properties and mutates others’ chi-p, bastardizing how their chi-mind interprets reality and time. This impacts how memory is affected. Under chi-string theory, only ‘now’ exists as a commonly agreed construct predicated on synchronized chi-mind perceptions, transmissions and receptions. Un-synchronized chi-mind activity can create conflicting impressions and understanding of reality, affecting all underpinnings, actions, perceptions and behavior related to these conflicts.

Whew. Needed that.

I find that I need to write to think sometimes outside of the novel’s construction to understand what I’m conceiving, elaborate and clarify, and shift the thoughts from being abstract concepts into more specific terms. Going to the blog versus a word document seems to engage and promote a thinking shift for me.

Yes; I see and understand that now. Writing in a more public forum requires me to focus more intelligently on what words I use to explain what I’m thinking. It inspires focus and concentration. Then I’m left with deciding, leave it as a draft or post it.

I needed to do this now for this novel because the characters and their disparate story lines are beginning to weave together. I needed to better understand my high-concept’s tangible impact on their situations and actions.

After writing something like this, I sit and drum my fingers in debate for a few minutes about what to do with it. Most often, I leave these as drafts, or copy them and add them to a Word doc called Blog Drafts because they are rough thoughts. Even though I write to understand, and that’s been accomplished, I can’t delete them or not save them. They must be saved so I can return to them, to mitigate forgetting what I conceived, thought and developed. After all, they’re thinking aids.

At the bottom of this are my fears. I worry about being exposed as an idiot. As often done, I’ll flip a coin.

Heads, I publish.

2

Downstreams

Some mental activity racing along my axons today.

  • Love that first slurp of my quad shot mocha at the Boulevard. The baristas know my preferences and do a great job of blending everything and then topping my coffee drink with with a skim of dark chocolate powder. I love the contrasts of flavors in that first tasting. Sensational.
  • It’s National White Shirt Day! This day recognizes the end of a 1937 UAW strike at GM for better working conditions. I have my white tee shirt on, under my natural wool sweater.
  • I don’t recall any dreams from last night. That’s unusual. Wonder why. Sleeping period, six and a half hours, seems about normal.
  • I’ve been reading a series of articles on sleep and whether we’re evolving from being biphasic. The latest article was on Van Winkle and provided a brief summary of the last eight thousand years of sleep.
  • I realized Part I of my  science-fiction novel in progress requires some serious editing and revising. I first realized that about a week ago and tried rejecting it. My writer within was willing to overlook changing it; the resident interior editor was reluctantly accepting of it. However, the reader in residence said, “Oh, no. That needs work.” Trust the reader. After we argued a few days, the writer and editor agreed with the reader’s points. However, the writer came up with some interesting ideas to explore in parallel.
  • The editor, though, urged us all not to make any changes until it’s all done. He pointed out that Part I is the way it is because the stories and concepts were still being explored. True; I write to understand myself, to order and structure and expand my thoughts. He pointed out that since I’m still writing the other parts, I can save myself some potential work by fully completing an entire draft before making major revisions. I accept his contention and put it on hold until the first draft is completed.
  • The novel in progress is ‘Long Summer’. Science-fiction, it’s not quite a sequel but is collateral to ‘Returnee’, as it stars Brett and Castle Corporation, and continues with many of the same themes of technological alienation and isolation, and socializing with yourself via virtual beings you develop to help people cope with life as they live far longer.
  • Talking with the barista today. “Fun plans?” she asked. Because, it’s Saturday; in her working and school world has meaning that has left my writing world. I don’t segregate the days into weeks and weekends any longer. I barely notice the date. “Movies,” I answered her. “We’re going to see ‘Lion’.” She wasn’t familiar with it. I mentioned Dev Patel and a few of his movies. Yes, she remembered ‘Slumdog Millionaires’. It didn’t occur to me until later that she was eight years old when Slumdog was released.
  • That conversation pointed me onto new vectors of changes and the differences in my values, perceptions and experiences as a sexagenarian and the same in her as a young adult. It’s the same conversation I had as a young adult with those forty to fifty years older than me. I was twenty in 1976. Those who were sixty in 1976 had been born just after World War I ended. They fought in World War II and remembered the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. Grandparents had been part of the American Civil War. The Soviet Union was founded during their lifetime and the Cold War dominated world politics.
  • It’s interesting to put into perspective. What I think of as ‘normal’ isn’t the same as the previous generation or the next generation. Besides when we were born forming us, so do our education levels. More strongly and interesting, we saw how where we live and our education and economic situations affect national politics during the 2016 presidential election. Now, this article on FiveThirtyEight tells about how where we live affects our deaths. It’s a telling insight to me.

Cheers

1

The Edge of Tomorrow

My wife had her book club last night. This is important in the sequence of events. With her present, I would not have watched ‘The Edge of Tomorrow’. It stars Tom Cruise.

She does not like Tom Cruise.

Tom Cruise is, meh, to me. His acting doesn’t wow me but that means I set my expectations low. When they’re exceeded, I’m pleased. Most of his roles don’t require deep emotions. They’re generally action oriented. He’s required to show bewilderment, determination, and fearless resolve. He handles that fine.

I wanted to see ‘The Edge of Tomorrow’ because it’s a science-fiction film. Besides black humor, British humor, and drama, I enjoy science-fiction the best. It’s great if all of it can be combined in one film. I acknowledge, too, that I’m being redundant, calling out black humor and British humor as though they’re different. Well, they are; some British humor is silly humor.

I never read the original novel the movie was based on (‘All You Need is Kill’). I knew, from exposure, the general premise that Tom, as Major Cage, was trapped into repeating the same day again and again, and it was during a war with alien invaders. I winced when I saw his name was Cage and he was essentially caged by events, but that’s a personal problem for me. I knew, too, that he becomes a better soldier and saves the world through his groundhog day military life. I didn’t know the details.

I won’t share any more, though, so as not to give away further plot. I enjoyed the movie more than anticipated. It had fewer holes that I expected, and I didn’t find myself re-casting it. I particularly enjoyed Tom’s betrayal of Cage in the movie’s opening twenty minutes, as his paradigms are shifted for him.

Anyway, fun film, not too gritty or gory, not really violent as it’s all CGI. It’s worthwhile watching with a glass of wine when your spouse is out.

1

Today’s Theme Music

This song popped into my head yesterday while cleaning in the bathroom.

I don’t know why.

I rarely understand what causes the selections that stream into my iBrain for me to watch, hear and think about. It’s a bona fide mystery.

But it’s a fun tune, a bit older, of course. I know it from the movie, ‘Earth Girls Are Easy’. That was released in 1988. Let’s see, call it a romantic, science-comedy with musical overtones. It was an astonishing cast: Jeff Goldblum, Geena Davis, Charles Rocket, Jim Carrey, Damon Wayans, with others.

This song is ‘Cause I’m A Blonde’, by Downtown Julie Brown.

1

Protocol Three

Pram has declared Protocol Three. You know what that means: the sierra is encountering the rotating blades.

Meanwhile, Handley and company have found their target. Fermenting in my brain cells for several weeks, I’m looking forward to writing these scenes; their plans are going disastrously awry, and they’re ignorant of what is about to happen. Love writing my characters into disasters and confrontations. Some, like Tang’s confrontation with Pram, I never see coming. Such surprising encounters are engaging, especially when they organically develop from just letting the characters carry the scene and be themselves. And then, what happened next astonished me but made absolute sense from the characters’ POV. Very cool.

After this is written, it’s back to Forus Ker, Seth Nor and the Humans, where they’ve been killing Brett, and Philea and the Wrinkle, where she’s meeting Forus Ker and Seth Nor. I can see and hear these scenes so clearly, I’m impatient to write them, but I don’t want to be hasty. Relax, I order myself; they’ll be written.

The common rule of thumb for movies is that one page equals one minute of screen time. That’s what I learned but The Working Screenwriter says, “Not so,” and gives specifics of movie scripts and running times. Anyway, I’ve noticed that scenes and dialogue take place in my head very quickly. I’ll visualize and realize them in thirty to ninety seconds.

Great, right? So they all pile on, scene after scene after scene. But writing these thirty to ninety second one bites takes a few days of writing and editing, and typically require two or three days. One, I’ll often write to capture the essence. Then I return to pad it with relevant details. In parallel, I’m editing and revising for pacing, grammar, sentence structure, et cetera. Then, I also find that something realized during the writing of such scenes trigger an impact on another scene. Sometimes that scene is already written and needs revision to add the tidbit.

The other scenes then must be held in my head or scribbled onto a notebook page, or have a brief entry typed up in a doc. All those paths fortunately work for me. Sometimes one of them stumbles but I find that with a little work, they start making sense again.

So much to write, so little time. Three…two…one. Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.

5

The Now

“What is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain, I do not know. … My soul yearns to know this most entangled enigma.”

I hear you, Augustine.

Writing science fiction that involves thinking about now, the past and present, and the various theories attempting to unify and explain everything, I ended up standing my thoughts on their head: instead of believing the past exists and the future is the potential outgrowth of the past, only now exists. We create now as it happens; without us to establish order to existence and reality, there isn’t any existence and reality, except that which we know now.

Yet, in creating now, we begin creating echoes of now that drift toward the past, creating a past. We believe, therefore, it was, ha-ha. As we conceive of structure to explain what’s going on, we’re creating what’s going on, establishing it as something more substantial, as it were with the laws and rules that we believe to be immutable. As others theorize, it’s our limitations and practices that actually establishes our expectation of how time flows, and causality paradoxes.

Yes, I know, this smacks of Sartre’s POV regarding essence and existence and others’ existentialist thinking. I get a kick out of running it through my mind’s treadmills, taking it back to its ultimate point: in the beginning, there was one. The one thought of others, and the others came to be in the moment called now, and that first one was called God.

God never liked the name God, and used multiple other names as he, she, and it did the same thing with other races, species, places, times and realities, becoming the first each time, and then creating a new now from which others created a past. It was natural he/she/it would become associated with the Trickster and the Mischief Maker.

Of course, just like the Big Bang Theory of how our Universe came to be leaves us wondering, what was there before the Big Bang, we always ask, what was there before the one called God?

He/she/it always answered, “I was always energy. Then, I thought, I think, therefore I am.” Others claimed they thought of it first, and phrased it a little differently. God knew better but wasn’t worried about gaining credit. He/she/it knew that fame was as fleeting as now, as certain as the past, and as secure as the future. And yet, he/she/it knew it was a fragile response, because if he/she/it was energy back then, that’s still something, and if he/she/it is right about being the first, then where did that energy originate from which he/she/it came to be?

Ah, there’s the rub. He/she/it likes to think of themself as a nested existence, beginning with nothing, and conceiving of themself as the first particle and then doubling up until he/she/it achieved sufficient energy to perceive themself, but he/she/it stews over such an answer as much as Augustine stewed over defining time.

All this thinking about physics and now isn’t new; others have come up with various structures of a Now Hypothesis, and are attempting to prove their hypothesis. For me, it’s all just a nice little fun diversion from the serious business of novel writing.

That’s all, for now.

 

0

New Words

Skoth and fald have entered my writing vocabulary for my science fiction novel.

Skoth: skin clothing. Smart clothing which mimics Human skin’s respiration functions but also can shield and protect the body, and cover people so they don’t seem naked, while sculpting and shaping their forms according to their settings.

Fald: fake world. Artificial planetoids constructed to be planets for human activities, called falds to differentiate them from bioships and starships, moons, satellites and planets, and the other places Humans occupy in the far, far, far future.

These are both essentially future marketing terms.

0

Complications

I’m involved in the part of my novel that’s labeled ‘the dance’ in my mind.

The multiple story lines have snaked into a knot. Each of these story lines are represented by a character with a third person personal POV. You’re in their thoughts; you know their lies, perceptions, fears, histories and plans. Now, all of that is running up against the others’ realities and activities.

I end up with multiple documents open:

  • the main document, with the chapters embedded, the actual work in progress, used to confirm scenes and sequence;
  • the bible, so I can look up terms, characters, and details without losing my place;
  • a map of where we’re at and expected to go;
  • and then a document for each of the story lines in progress.

I find myself writing one of the story lines but then switching to another doc and another story line, so as to keep it all integrated and true to the character and their story line.

Then, there are complications, because I love complications. There are the secrets that I know that even the characters don’t know, and that the readers certainly don’t know. There are secrets that the writers and some characters know that others don’t know, and some secrets the readers know that none of the characters know. Complications arise from politics, visions, time and memory. Writing it becomes a breathtaking, cerebral exercise to keep the complications from running me into the ground.

It’s all so satisfying and fun.

Oh, I think, I hope some readers someday find this novel, read it, and enjoy it as much as I enjoy writing it. I wonder what they will see in it that I’ve written that I never noticed.

Time to write like crazy, at least one more time, just for the sheer joy of it.

1

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