Category: Thinking, thinking

Those Characters

As I wrote about my dreams and my personal life today, I drifted through thoughts about my characters. I’d worked hard to develop each to be unique but each has their own hook.

Handley, the space pirate, is embroiled with inner disappointment and dissatisfaction with who she is and what she’s become. She wants more but doesn’t know what she wants. She thinks herself brave. Physically, she is brave. Morally, she’s a coward.

Pram, the colossus and employed terraforming supervisor, is self-assured and relaxed. The changing situation challenges him in ways he never expected to be challenged, which leads to self-inspection and growth, but also causes a hardening against trusting others.

Brett, the footloose fourth-waver, hates dying and being resuscitated, regenerated and resurrected, but he also dislikes life. His alienation had been growing throughout his life. He’d never noticed because he’d taken refuge in memory and sex. Both are artificial, external constructions that are extensions of his personality; they’re not real, but they’re safe. Eventually, as it happens so often, his familiarity with them and they with him breeds a contempt that drives him to actively seek a change. Even he’s unaware of how the depths of his needs.

Philea is a trained scientist. She loves her math, her physics, her learning. People aren’t a need nor desire. She’s enamored with the puzzle of the situation. ‘Doing right’ is secondary to ‘finding answers’.

Forus Ker, a Travail, is the most complex character on the surface. He changes the most as he actively seeks to understand himself and develop his skills and talents while embracing the role his people (or destiny – or is it a God?) has thrust upon him. He never wavers from trying harder and doing more.

Then there are others. Monads, who believe in their manifest destiny and are contemptuous of others in their species and in other species who don’t recognize and accept their superiority. There are the Sabards and the complex role they’ve established for themselves and the altruism they consistently demonstrate. And there are the other Travail, who have come the farthest in grasping how wrong their understanding of existence is and how little they truly understand.

On some days, before I begin a new section, I need to consider which character is in the lead for those scenes, and what they know and when they know it, and then, the overarching characteristics and behavior that drives their decisions and actions. Few of them are pure in their intentions. Sometimes their emotions (save Philea, so far) dictates behavior counter to their best interests. Other times, especially with Handley and Forus Ker, they’re following orders that they don’t understand, but which they decide they must do.

Then, as other characters, are space, time and technology. Things break down, evolve, or dissolve with sudden revelations. They are also considered as each new scene is begun. Sometimes I realize that I’ve overlooked one aspect or another and go back to rewrite on the floor. I feel like I’m looking at sprawling mosaic that’s telling the history of a complex encounter. I slip in to get the closer look necessary to see, hear and explain to the reader what’s going on. But once in a while, I get trapped in the mosaic and find the need to extricate myself and gain distance once again to see the other parts.

Once separation is established and clarity is recovered, I take a deep breath and go back in.

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Reasons

There’s a reason for the man you hate,

and another for the one you embrace.

There’re reasons for where the sun shines,

reasons for why the blind man’s blind.

Reasons for getting drunk as a skunk,

reasons for staying chaste as a nun.

There’s a reason for why that man lies,

and another reason for why that woman dies.

There’s reasons for hoarding gold,

and reasons for selling your soul.

Just remember reasons always abound,

and try to find reasons that remain morally sound.

 

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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.

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On the Other Hand

The question rattling around during my walk was, “Do you need to understand love to understand hate?”

It was strictly a writing question but properly prompted by St. Valentine’s Day posts. I’d reach my own satisfying answer but desired another’s input.

Shannon was the barista working at the coffee shop. A bubbling avowed Christian, her dress today startled me, partially because she wore a crown of roses in her hair. “Hello, flower girl,” I greeted her.

Shannon bubbled as she does. “I love Valentine’s Day. It’s my favorite holiday.”

“You like all holidays, don’t you? I know you love Thanksgiving.”

“Thanksgiving and Valentine’s Day. I love love. I don’t have a boyfriend so I bought flowers and gifts for my room mates to celebrate.”

“So…do you need to understand hate in order to understand love?”

Shannon considered the question. “I grew up in a very loving, Christian family. I didn’t really encounter hate until I was a little older. Then…it helped me…appreciate love more. I don’t think you need to understand hate to understand love but encountering hate makes you appreciate love more.”

I thanked her, understanding her take. It’s like loving life more and appreciating it more after near-death experiences or personal losses, or being thankful for what you have after having nothing or almost nothing.

Not all will react the same, of course. I know some people who avow they’re thankful for what they have because they had nothing. But they’re so angry and bitter that they once had nothing, that in many ways, they strike me as still having nothing, because they can’t let go of how they once lived.

There’s always the one hand, and the other, on how these things can affect us. That’s what I go through with my characters, thinking through and feeling their reactions in response to their past and present, understanding where they’re at and why, and then telling their story.

 

Note: my conversation with Shannon is presented in abridged form here. She spoke, and I listened. I hope I correctly portrayed her point.

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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

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Today’s Theme Music

I am not a Justin Timberlake fan. Nothing against him; he’s not my cuppa.

That doesn’t stop his music from entering my neural stream and getting jammed into my brain. In some net surfing this morning, I discovered a 2014 NPR story on the Harmony Project. I liked this quote:

“I feel like music really connects with education,” she says. “It helps you concentrate more.”

The speaker was tenth grader Monica Miranda, who was in her third year of the Harmony Project. Her statement struck me as an interesting insight. When I walk, I often mentally write or problem solve. I wonder if I’ve developed a habit of remembering music when I walk and think to help me concentrate more? It may have been a subconscious practice I developed that became reinforced with success. It’s something for further research for me.

Anyway, ‘Can’t Stop The Feeling’ from 2016 is running on the mental loop today. Maybe if I unleash it on you, it’ll escape my mind (or I’ll escape it). The song, I mean.

Not my mind.

Or maybe that is what I meant.

Now I’m all confused.

On to the music.

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After

After resting, after thinking, after dreaming, rising and eating;

after reading, after meditating, after wondering and sometimes, a little praying;

after driving, after walking, after ordering my coffee and sitting;

after yesterday, after childhood, after last week and last year;

after contemplation of who I am and what I want,

and after reflecting on what I’m doing,

it’s time to write like crazy,

at least one more time.

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The Flight

I often have a very good general idea of what I’m about to write when I sit down to write it. That’s due to process; I typically write in my head before I sit down and visualize the piece. I do this with more than just fiction, but with almost everything that I write.

But, with fiction writing, I notice that sometimes I’ve written so much in my head that I’m a little disappointed with needing to physically write it. I also become a little lost, because, hey, it’s written in my head. Therefore, it already exists in some form.

In those instances when this happens, I drift on the eddies of my thinking and writing, just flowing along. I’m not on a stream of water but a stream of air, a kite on the breeze, wings extended, looking over the terrain. Then, seeing something, it circles back and dives.

I feel like that bird. Circling, the place where I want to begin writing is my target. If I don’t try thinking about it but instead let it return to me yesterday, then it often arrives with a powerful rush. Then, like a kite, I dive in on my target.

So it was today. Four hundred fifty pages are done. Six chapters, six of the first seven chapters of Part III, are being written in parallel. The seventh was written about six weeks ago. As the story comes on more fully realized in my thinking, I jump back into other scenes to correct details, add set-up exposition, or nuance something to foreshadow events. I’d written so much of these six chapters yesterday in my mind, though, because there were there even after I stopped for the day. They stories go on even though I’ve stopped writing. Then, I added and edited later in my head, making mental notes to myself about revisions.

That’s how it happens when I’m writing with the flow. The story is so real that I feel like I can turn and walk through a door and be in the place, or turn on the television and see it, or even pick up the book, open it, and begin reading.

Sometimes I become a little disconcerted with this. Confusion sets in as to whether I already wrote it or someone else wrote it and I’m just remembering their work.

Nevertheless, I love this organic style of writing, jumping back and forth through the stories and novel as it’s all played in my mind. It’s sweetly beautiful and amazing to visualize, hear and known. It’s something that others struggle to do. I’m sure engineers, physicists, mathematicians and software coders do something similar, along with writers, artists and musicians. Others, though, I know from conversations, are awed that it happens, that all these details can be imagined and experienced as real and then put onto something tangible that can be shared with others. It is, as our POTUS would say, a great, great, beautiful thing.

The skill, or ability, didn’t come overnight, though, which amuses me. I’ve worked on this like a batter hitting a fastball, an artist learning how to observe and interpret, a student musician, or physicists and philosophers contemplating existence. I’m always working on it but I fail as a writer to convey the fun and satisfaction of seeing, creating and meeting the challenge of realizing fiction.

Done writing for now. It was a great day of writing like crazy. Now I must go clean the shower.

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Her Mission

He was young, maybe, I don’t know, sixteen or seventeen, using limited impressions: long light brown hair, no split ends, clear and firm white flesh, a slender jean-encased body with a hoodie.

She was black and young looking, on a leash. Racing along with her long ears flying and flapping, she was pulling him down the street. Riding a skateboard, he hung onto her leash with one hand and clutched an acoustic guitar in his other hand. “Wait, Rachel, wait,” he called.

Pink tongue exposed, she slowed and glanced back in a questioning canine grin. When he said no more, she turned her head back and accelerated her young, muscular body, intent on her mission, regardless of what he wanted.

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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.

 

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