Tag: Long Summer

Pram

I reached that point. I went into the novel, strolled around the forest of words and found the trails I’d marked. One was marked Pram.

What was I to do with Pram? No, that was a flawed position; what will Pram do and what will happen to him? Walking about after writing yesterday, I reviewed what he’d done and what had happened.

Then Pram spoke up. He knew what was to happen, what he was to do, his role in the greater arc. He understood how he’d not understood himself, how he’d sheltered himself and hid, safely in the middle despite his colossal size, happy to be considered above average but just far enough above average to gain some trust and some attention, but not too much. He saw better than me how his personality and quiet choices of non-choices dictated his endpoint, and he saw how others saw him and had recognized, accepted and planned for his inadequacies. That directed his destiny. He saw it as not giving up, but as acquiescing.

He dictated a few thoughts to me. These sentences were the seeds that sowed the scene and grew into a chapter, becoming a turning point.

I compared him to me afterward, seeing the similarities and differences, how much of myself was vested in him. He’d been a good corporate soldier but could not stretch himself enough to seek another beginning. He didn’t fear new beginnings but didn’t care for them. He’d had new beginnings before. They hadn’t worked out. He was tired of trying.

He lived almost one hundred years. His parents remained alive and together, and the latter was unusual in Pram’s era. He’d been born well-to-do and had been comfortable in his role. He thought he loved his work. Turned out he’d been placating himself about what he believed and accepted. But then came an unfolding of his protections, welcoming a new understanding of himself. Gladly he went on, happy to understand who he was.

5

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.

0

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 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.

0

It Gets Exciting

I’ve been struggling with Handley, which is uncharacteristic of me. In a key scene, a pirate vessel, the CSC Narwhal is going after the stasis ship, the River Styx. I knew the scenes, having visited them in my head, writing some aspects in my mind. I’d been looking forward to writing the scenes because I knew what a keystone scene they were to the novel’s arch. Yet, they suddenly fell through a hole in my brain in the last three days. I’d bring the doc up to write once, twice, thrice, and then wrote or edited other scenes and chapters.

Yesterday, I’d had enough. I spent several minutes castigating myself. Has to be done, you idiot. Just write it, I told myself. Suspecting I was worried about how it would go or that I was overthinking it, I told the writer, just fucking do it. Get it done.

I began just writing the essence of what was supposed to be happening. It’s been so long since I’d struggled to write as I did then. The process felt like I was plucking eyebrow hairs.* My God, those were clumsy, awkward, lifeless sentences. The writing was so dense and abstract, and not in an interesting Kafka way. After sipping coffee, I walked away, shaking my head at myself, appalled by the moribund words on the screen. Then, deep breath, try again.

Thank God the cafe  was almost empty and nobody was near me. I’d hate to have to apologize to others for the awful smell that the shit on the screen was surely exuding.

Work it, work it, work it. Ever shape model clay or work bread? Felt exactly like that. This was a lump. I kept kneading the scene, trying to form something out of it. After twenty to thirty minutes of this, the scene suddenly became emerging from the material. After an hour, two hours plus into the writing session, I had two pages written.

That was all.

But it was enough. Showering and shaving today, I envisioned the rest of the scene and the chapter’s subsequent scenes. They grew alive in my mind. I became eager to write. I hurried through feeding cats, harvesting potatoes from the litter box, cleaning up in the kitchen, and getting ready to leave. Consumed by the mind writing, I forgot to put my Fitbit back on after my shower, misplaced my glasses and vacillated about what walking shoes to wear. My focus was too far into the novel.

But here I am, quad shot mocha with fine latte art by Meghan at hand, at the coffee shop, ready to rock.

Time to write like crazy, at least one more damn time.

 

*NOTE: Yes, I have plucked my eyebrows, or tweezed them, if you prefer. Once upon a time, I was said to resemble a smaller version of Tom Selleck when he was doing ‘Magnum, P.I.’ If you recall him from then, he had a uni-brow going on; so did I, and my wife convinced me to pluck it because she was certain Tom Selleck plucked his.

Yeah, that was long ago.

4

The Chi Compulsion

A storm was rocking the house. Rain did a Keith Moon impersonation on the walls and roof. My wife could not sleep. She was listening to BBC World News on the clock-radio.

“Want me to talk to you about my novel in progress?” I asked.

“Yes.”

That always puts her to sleep.

So I talked to her. I told her, I just wrote the first chapter to part three of a science fiction novel, even though parts one and two are not finished. Part two needs much more work. But I ‘saw’ this chapter and felt like it needed to be written. It’s like a guidepost about where I’m going. So I wrote it and put it into the novel.

I’ve been researching and writing about Chi-particles, I said, and then talked a little about general and special theories, chemical elements and quantum mechanics. I don’t know much about them, and that part of the discussion was finished quicker than an amuse-bouche.

I went on about my current obsession, Chi-particles. Chi-particles are imaginary particles, with imaginary mass and energy, that travel faster than light, and faster than the theorized tachyon particles. They exhibit properties of light, time and mass. They gain real energy and real mass as they slow down.

Yeah.

Calling them particles is incorrect but that’s what I called them in the beginning so that’s what sticks as part of my world-building history. My imaginary physicists later investigated and theorized that Chi-particles are sub-sub-sub atomic particles.

They are the universal building blocks. Chi-particles are in everything.

My wife was now snoring.

I continued, however.

Chi-particles actually have structures with a nucleus and other sub-level Chi-particles in orbit about them. Their Chi-structure is what drives atomic structure. Everything has Chi-energy. Chi-energy directs whether something develops into a chemical element, energy, dark matter, etc. They direct when something ‘comes alive’ and direct its levels of self-awareness, growth and sentience.

They direct what species the animated, organic matter becomes.

I sketched the Universal Theory of Relativity, in which the quantity of energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared (Einstein’s theory) is equal to the square root of Chi-particles imaginary light times Chi-particles imaginary mass.

I folded the entire thinking into wave function collapse and thoughts of ‘now’, time and the past. From there, I developed several other ideas and kept talking.

One idea is a future technology called star dating. It’s still rudimentary but I see it as a small but critical point in the novel. Essentially, background radiation leaves residual energy on everything, which then can be measured, in a sort of hybrid process between carbon dating, counting the rings on a tree, and using layers of dust to establish global events or using background radiation to understand the Universe.

Next to emerge was Chi-particle entanglement. I’ve thought about this before but needed to more fully vet it. As I walked through what the hell that meant, I came to realize that Chi-particles travel in a petal pattern. I started thinking about energy fields and ley lines.

Ah, yes. Much more came together. Some stuff didn’t work, I realized. They needed more thought. Then an epiphany rewarded me. Dazzled by its audacity, I started laughing in bed. But then, I easily impress and amuse myself. It’s all far-out. Hell, it’s fiction.

The alarm went off. It was six twenty-seven. Time for my wife to get up to dress and head for the Y and her exercise class.

I pulled the covers up to my chin and snuggled into my blanket nest. I wasn’t ready to get up. I wasn’t going to get up. I was warm and drowsy. I wanted more sleep. I’d been thinking and talking, off and on, for over ninety minutes.

My wife rolled over, turned off the alarm, re-settled herself and returned to sleep.

A cat meowed in another part of the house. I wanted more sleep but…

The cats needed to be fed and tended. Taking my Chi-particle thinking with me, I went off to feed them and then, because they were on my mind, presented these posts.

Now I really want a nap. But…there is writing to do, and movie matinees later today. I need to write so I can return and do other things. Therefore….

Turn on the coffee.

I can nap later.

3

Big Data Spoke

A far future science-fiction exercise.

Collecting, collating and compiling data from Human databases and streams – government, social, medical, financial, historic, personal, personnel, death, birth and health records – revealed startling evidence.

Humans were dying less. Even those who could be resurrected, cloned, recovered, re-invigorated or re-born, were dying far less often. Fewer still were dying and remaining dead. Suicides were recorded with four zeroes after a decimal point. The population median age, already well over one hundred, was rising sharply, with less people deciding to even be reborn as a younger age with their adult memories intact. It seemed like that fad had fast faded.

Okay. But birth rates had also plummeted, falling like the temperatures on Castle Frozen when an Arctic front roared over the mountains and down across the plains. Less than two children were being born for every hundred people. Most of those children were not being permitted to age into maturity and adulthood but were kept as children for their parents’ entertainment.

The Council for Peace and Prosperity met on Castle Prime’s equatorial climate-controlled island to discuss general trends and concerns. The big data study on birth and death was a minor agenda item on the third day.

Most weren’t worried, arguing this was a burp, a blip. Yes, all were part of longer, greater trends, but the sharp drop-off was new. Those in the business of helping the dead return to life weren’t concerned; their business reviews were based on subscriptions and not a per use basis. Subscription rates were remaining steady. No losses were being recognized but the resurrection was a mature technology and had developed into a commodity. Profit margins were smaller. That was a concern.

Analysts also had deep dive data to present. Wars, warfare and violence remained at high levels but more people were avoiding killing one another. That unnerved attendees. It pointed to a training issue to many. Soldiers and officers needed encouragement to kill more quickly and readily. Perhaps studies were needed to understand what kept them from killing others when engaging them.

Such suggestions were quickly shot down. Studies like that were for the weak-willed or when appearances were needed that something was being done to mollify investors and voters until their attention wandered or other matters distracted them. No, studies weren’t needed in this situation; investors and voters didn’t know about these big data reveals. They would remain corporate secrets.

Second: population growth was required. Cloning was the natural solution. Adult clones were a ready market. Children had smaller and well-defined needs that were already being fulfilled. Adults were big children who eagerly embraced new toys and trends. Adults were willing to spend more on their toys, too, especially if said toys could be positioned as status symbols about wealth, power or influence. Most adults were sufficiently weak-willed and insecure or had such low self-esteem that they would be swayed by such bland and routine practices.

However…archaic laws remained in place against cloning a person to live more than one life at a time. Right now, cloning was permitted for only very small population segments and narrowly defined pre-existing conditions. Even that cloning was done well outside of the public eye.

Those laws needed to be changed. Immediate potential campaigns inspired the Council attendees. Contract pop and sports stars to headline campaigns. Say, they could be doing different activities on different planets, like skiing, surfing, fucking, dancing, performing, interviewing, whatever, marketing could work out those details. The point would be that doing these things simultaneously enriched the individual experiences and compounded their impact. The key behind the campaigns – there would naturally need to be several because to cover all the pop-culture segments – was to encourage envy about living a fuller life by living multiple simultaneous lives and fertilizing your life base. Having it done illegally by someone(s) popular and successful was the natural launching point. People loved lawbreakers.

Likewise, clone the best of the service members. Offer small bonuses for permitting the cloning. Simultaneously, initiate campaigns to overturn the cloning laws. Analysis would reveal which planets and societies could be open to such change and which would be the greatest influencers. New interpretations of founding documents and religious works could be published that seemed to encourage cloning as a religious right and even an expectation by whatever deities people worshiped these days.

Third, begin a whisper campaign. Stir up the rabble: birth rates were down because governments were encouraging certain races, ages, classes, corporations and planets to give birth less as part of a greater conspiracy to reduce those populations, thereby undermining their impact and participation. People always hated and distrusted governments and were easily inspired to rise up against them. Blame regulations, too. That always fired up the fringes, and then the flames would spread.

Beautiful. It was all coming together. Off the record, they agreed that more wars could be initiated. Step up the activity against pirates, rebels, independent planets, and smaller corporations and systems. That would increase the death rate and probably the birth rate.

Sure, this wasn’t a problem; it was an opportunity. Open the floodgates and rake in the wealth.

 

2

It’s Like —

I’ve been further defining the ideopat.

The ideapat is used as part of a telepathic process among the Travail Avresti Forus and Seth, and the Travail Favrashi Forus and Seth in my novel in progress, ‘Long Summer’. 

It’s more than telepathy. Calling it ‘telepathy’ demeans its full range. I felt, in order to be logical and consistent about its use in the arcs, character development and plot, I needed to further define and understand the ideopat.

First, within the ideopat is the phena. Phena is derived from phenomon. The phena is the emotional piece of the ideopat. To help understand it, I think of how drops of waters come together to form torrents. This is generally how the phena comes across on the ideopat. It’s a perception of separate processes and impressions aggregating into an over-arching view.

Generally; exceptions exist. In this way, I think of vision and human differences with their vision. The classic example for me is the ability to see a fastball and the ball’s movement through the air. Not everyone has that ability but some do, and that makes them special.

Good; that was a decent start.

After deeper thinking, I found this video a friend had posted on Facebook.

You can argue, as many have, about whether this is a vortex, and point out that some of the planets are in the wrong orbits, and whether this is true, but it stimulated my thinking. That’s why I’m sharing this. Seeing it, I thought, yes! This gives me greater insight into the ideopat and its structure and motion. There’s a position of recurring motion on one level that doesn’t take in the greater points of view about what’s happening within the ideopat. Beautiful.

The Forus and Seth can also use the ideopat to experience the world through one another’s. After some thought about the development of the skill and individual abilities, I decided that they would need to provide this aspect with a name. Eventually, I came up with sensta as the visual and auditory flows within the phena. As Travail Kidder mature, the sensta is the first aspect of the phena they experience. Their reaction to it guides their further development and direction. Some are overwhelmed. When that happens, they’re trained in how to close the sensta. Of course, closing the sensta to them closes the phena and the ideopat. So they can’t be Forus or Seth but must be named and become something else in the society.

Then I recognized that those for those with the wherewithal to know, the pentha is like an atmosphere, with richly developed layers.

That’s a brief insight into the pentha. In my notes, it takes up a few pages.

The pentha is just one piece. Next up was the ideopat’s true telepathic aspect. The Travail refer to this as the

Now, among this, a very few can perceive the mutex and the saiki. The mutex are the combined threads that make up the flows which become the exopatheia and phena. (Note: the Travail call the threads the sper.) For those who can perceive this level of the ideopat, it’s like seeing the results after white light passes through a prism. What others can only experience the pentha as the white light, they see the resulting rainbow. The greater the ability for them to perceive and segregate the mutex and spers, the more powerful their telepathic abilities. For the normal Forus and Seth, they don’t perceive the mutex and spers but know one another through exposure, repetition and ultimately, familiarity with others’ ‘telepathic voice’.

But one step past all of this, on the very highest level of ability, those that can see sense and see past the pentha, exopatheia and mutex, and find the individual spers and follow them back to the actual person where they originate. This psychic representation is called the saiki. This is so far beyond the skill levels of most that a majority of Travail Forus and Seth don’t believe they exist, that those who thought they’d seen them in the past must have been imagining them. So the saiki is dismissed.

But Travail Avresti Forus Ker has developed the ability to perceive the saiki. He’s not only seeing the saiki of the Travail Forus, but also the Seth and the rest of the Travail, not just his race (the Avresti), but the other races as well. He’s even perceiving the saiki for the Humans and then for the Monad.

And most interesting and frightening for him, he can see the saiki of death. That makes him wonder: is there a saiki for life as well?

And then things really start getting interesting for him.

After that, I set about writing the limitations and further defining the exceptions.

Most of today’s writing session was devoted to fleshing this out and documenting it. I only actually wrote a thousand words in the novel. A few hours have passed. I still had half a cup of mocha remaining when I stopped writing. Just finished that as I wrote this post.

It’s been a good day of writing like crazy.

 

 

7

Grokking It

I grok the story but don’t know if others can. It’s the writing challenge: you see, hear, feel and experiences these stories being told in details and colors and sounds technology can’t approach. Your job, Writer, is to capture these events, people and places, and organize it in a coherent, satisfying and entertaining matter.

That’s my interpretation of writing. Yours may vary.

Grok is a word that Robert Heinlein created in ‘A Stranger In A Strange Land’. It’s a classic novel. His expression, grok, has spread like wildflowers in the spring, going far beyond a word in a novel to have other meetings. The essence of grok remains the same for me: to intuitively grasp and understand a matter. It has larger and more expansive definitions and usage, but that’s the essential distilled for my use.

I’m encountering the grok gap while I’m writing. It’s a pretty familiar with whatever I’m writing. I grok what’s happening in my novel. I need to explain it to everyone who isn’t me. That meant spending a few days further defining terms and relationships. The big one is the ideopat. It is telepathy among the Travail Avresti Forus and Seth, and the Travail Favrashi Forus and Seth but telepathy is but one component among the names, gults, vhylla and races. I needed another term for one of the other components because it doesn’t fit with human knowledge and experiences.

While researching my invention, which ended up being termed the phena for now, after reading about consciousness, phenomenon and epiphenomenon, I grok and researched it for a while. After all, phena and grok share commonalities. The insights I encountered about what grok meant and was used in the original novel opened my thinking. Such sessions are always the most satisfying and treasured for me.

I hope you grok what I mean.

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