Tag Archives: ideas

Nuts and Bolts and Progress!

Posted on by
1

I try to do too much at once. I have been sitting on the same story now for over a decade. Obviously, it’s evolved. It’s nothing at all what it was when I originally envisioned it, but my problem is that I have a bit of a hard time committing to any particular version of the story. Who knows if, come tomorrow, I’ll see the story from some new, unforeseen angle and what to redraft the whole thing through the filter of the new vision.

Also, I can’t fully settle on what events should happen when. Lots of ideas, but they’re all disjointed. There’s a few overarching themes I have in mind, but very little substantial glue to bring it all together and hold it there in a way that feels quite natural. At least not just yet.

What is becoming more and more obvious to me is that certain things cannot be planned. There are a great many things which can only be discovered during the writing process itself. I’m finding myself increasingly guilty of letting ideas evolve exclusively in my head on their own to such a highly specialized extent that they suddenly start having very little in common with the heart of the rest of the story as a whole.

Instead, when I take to writing my ideas out in the direct context of actual story material, no matter how simple and incomplete they may be at first, they’ll at least have the benefit of being cohesive with the over arching vision. I’m now facing a turning point where I may need to open myself to some serious pruning. Eventually, the lofty and abstract concepts I’d like to feature in the story will make their appearance, but will they express themselves to the same refined extent which they currently exist in my head, or will they take an unexpected turn and show me something new instead? I’m getting closer to finding out each and every day.

Speaking of which, I’ve been busy the last couple of days. I’ve written a chapter for my story, Elyen, and will be looking to get some feed back from friends soon enough. If all goes well, I’ll share it online for anyone who’s interested in actually reading what I’ve been working on, rather than reading me talking about what I’ve been working on. Keep an eye out for that in the coming weeks.

Also, I drafted up a short poem called “Intentions” (originally called “Pretentious”), hosted on Wattpad. If you get a chance, please check it out and let me know what you think! It’s a quick read.

https://embed.wattpad.com/story/10888194
.

Nothing To Do With Thermal Lensing

Posted on by
Reply

I have an idea, but it’s hard to explain. It’s about heat and life and stuff.

And, after a few days of being stagnant in the keeping-up-with-blogging department, I feel as though that is precisely what I should ramble about today: my difficulty explaining things.

The idea that I had been struggling with trying to share has lead to a deeper vice of mine, and that is that I struggle with describing things that are of a somewhat unfamiliar nature, period. If it were up to me to describe what snow looked and felt like to members of an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon in order to not be cooked alive (for whatever reason), I’d be screwed. Doesn’t matter how well acquainted I am with the concept, it’s others whom I must enlighten.

So, when I want to write a book that’s intended to be chock full of interesting, weird, abstract concepts, and each of those concepts reinforce other strange ones, I am forced to go at it from a developmental approach: Start with the basics, establish a foundation, then build up.

The reason I find this difficult is because I want the reader to be plunged right in. I want to throw a reasonably diverse mixture of both familiar and unfamiliar ideas at them from the outset, so that way, there’d be things they can latch on to, and there’d be things they’re left wondering about.

From there, I fully intend on developing those unfamiliar threads in such a way that they gradually evolve in the reader’s mind, like a jigsaw puzzle slowly coming together, until they eventually become something they find intimately familiar. And/or, in the weaving of other concepts and threads, I will put a foundation together in such a way that all of the unfamiliar bits (which, to be fair, I would only mete out a reasonably little at a time) become instantly clear all at once, as though the reader were given the cipher for a crucial code they’ve been unable to solve for a long time.

So, my idea involving heat and life and stuff could be an unknown concept that instantly pops when the right information comes along, or one that slowly evolves over time, or, more likely, one that’s best left alone until the right fundamental principles that the universe of the story happens to abide by are first established. But therein lies another difficulty: it seems to me almost that all of the story’s universe’s fundamental principles are, themselves, unfamiliar and abstract.

So.

What does my story, Elyen, have in common with anything a human from Earth alive shortly after the turn of the 21st century might find familiar?

– The main characters are usually humanoid, so there’s often strong physical resemblance
– There are, more often than not, weather events that are similar to what we might expect here on earth
– Though the grander setting is nothing at all like Earth, from the perspective of a given humanoid character on the ground, the existence of mountains, bodies of water, forests, plains, desserts, etc., are all Earth-like enough for most readers to connect with
– Fantastic technologies exist which should be explainable in a way that fans of Sci-fi would have little difficulty appreciating
– Various forms of magic exist that fans of Fantasy will have little trouble understanding

I’m sure there’s more, but that’s just a cursory list for now. Here’s a list of some of the concepts I’m toying with which, I believe, are less common and therefore much trickier (but not impossible) to explain:

– “The Singularity” is the name of a type of major event that happens at various points throughout the history of the people of the story (yes, as in, there’s been more than one such event in Drendain history)
– Drendast is the name of the planet most of the events of the story takes place on. Drendast is a mega Aether-world, so large that it has multiple stars the size of Earth’s sun revolving around it, and not the other way around
– Most of the characters and beings on Drendast are photovores, naturally evolved [or, in some cases, genetically engineered] to subsist solely on the nearly perpetual light from the planet’s suns
– Physics on an Aether-world like Drendast are conveniently exotic. ‘Anomalies’, such as tri-pole magnetism, are taken for granted here
– The overarching philosophy behind the story incorporates, among other things, an offshoot of Taoism, which, if I understand anything at all about, only proves to me that I understand nothing at all
– Drendast happens to serve as a kind of ‘hub’ within it’s local multiverse, bridging connections via Conduits (think wormholes and you’ve basically got it) between universes both near and far.

And there’s loads and loads more concepts besides that.

The point is that I don’t always know where to start when it comes time to describe something. When I want to talk about a race of beings based on heat (rather than, say, carbon), I soon find myself struggling to explain their environment and behaviour, both of which involve (from the what I assume is a typical human perspective) altered states of reality, vaguely spiritual themes, Immersion (another very key concept I’m aiming to expound upon in the near future), and so on and so forth. Not easy.

Suddenly, explaining just one thing (what this race of heat-based beings are all about) is no longer just one thing, but many things, each of which are equally tricky.

I’m long winded. I’m still new to this whole blogging thing, and I don’t think I’ve quite figured out the most appropriate and tasteful format for presenting ideas, especially in terms of length, so, my biggest concern is not going on and on forever. To this end, I think I’m gonna start explaining concepts in parts. Starting after this blog, if I want to share a complex idea, expect to see it presented in chunks.

Or maybe I can do up a sort of wiki reference page, since I’m almost certain to reference earlier blog entries when presenting new ones related to Elyen. Something for me to look into. Anyways, that’d be all for now.

Infectious Ideas

Posted on by
Reply

So, as part of the thematic foundation for The Story I am working on, I keep rolling over the ideas of death, life, reincarnation and other various afterlife-related thoughts. Here’s the thing: Elyen, the story, focuses very heavily on multiple universes. That’s key. Couple that with my fascination for:

1) anything to do with FTL phenomena,

2) the impending technological Singularity/birth of smarter-than-human AI,

3) quantum computing,

4) evolution,

5) chaos/entropy vs order and control, and

6) the relative nature of time/eternal vs temporal phenomena

[Edit: 7) the wonder of biology]

…and we get an incredibly rich mixture of concepts from out of which can emerge any number of plausible philosophies, including those along the death-is-only-the-beginning line of reasoning.

To give a type of example — and just to be clear, as abstract, pseudo-technical and intellectual-sounding as these concepts and my particular take on them (including the following example) may sound, I have absolutely zero factual proof that any of what I have to conjecture is actually valid — think about the following event:

You’re walking down the street, on the sidewalk of course, and you come up to an intersection. It’s a busy and bustling city, so there are traffic lights and such to direct the flow of vehicles and pedestrians safely in turns. You wait for your right to proceed across the street. Once the light changes, you begin to do so. Suddenly, a vehicle approaches heading directly towards you from your left side on, moving dangerously fast and showing no signs of stopping.

In any number of universes, you could be distracted at that moment. You could be listening to your ipod with the headphone volume cranked up. You could have initiated your crossing a few seconds earlier or later (depending on your proclivity towards j-walking or not paying attention right away when the light changes, for example). Others could be crossing with you, walking faster or slower. Road conditions might be slippery. The exact conditions could have been anything. This is just one time that you happen to find yourself crossing one particular street out of potentially hundreds, maybe even thousands of times crossing the very same street.

What happens? Theoretically, everything. But only one possible outcome will ever actually be realized by you, personally. What that is remains utterly unknown until it happens. Obviously, certain possibilities appear to be incredibly more probable than others, but there’s still always a statistical chance of experiencing a fluke. More to the point, let me ask you something: Have you ever had a close call? Ever find yourself in a situation very much like this? Nearly struck by a vehicle who’s driver failed to slow down and come to a stop or swerve out of your path as you were about to cross? Ever actually been struck in a situation like that?

Ever die from a collision like that? Or at all?

What kind of question is that? I’ll tell you. In my view, I actually do seriously question how life and death works sometimes. I do believe death can visit us all, perhaps at any moment if it’s our time, but I do also acknowledge that I could be wrong about that. Yes, I see the graveyards filled with the bodies of those for whom death has inescapably brought about the end of their physical lives. Many countless people who once lived no longer do, but I don’t believe that things are nearly as cut and dry as they may appear to be.

A time or two, I have experienced a close call, as with the above example. In these moments, I feel a rush of fear and excitement, the tell tale fight-or-flight reactions brought about by a surge of adrenaline. Again, I have no proof of this, but I’ve come to suspect that there’s more, much more to that feeling than simple physical responses.

I believe in parallel universes, as stated already. In a vast number of those universes, I died. And in those brief moments, I believe that I’ve felt it. At least, other versions of me (including yours truly) did.

Here’s the thing: all matter can theoretically exist in a wave-particle duality. What we see around us are atoms and molecules that have been “collapsed”. As in, if a brick is a brick when we look at it now, it’s still going to be a brick if we look away, and still going to be a brick when we look back a short time later. There’s exceedingly little possibility that the brick might spontaneously become a puddle of water, or a small animal, or any other truly non-brick thing without some interacting conversion process affecting it first. The substance it’s made of is fixed, and once it is fixed, it won’t spontaneously unfix and refix as something else (presumably).

When it comes to the future, however, the unknown of events which are yet to be, it works kind of like this: In front of you is a picture. It’s really blurry. However, the longer you look at it for, the clearer it gets. If you look at the picture long enough, and if the clear picture is of something you recognize, then, in all likelihood, you will eventually identify it before long. However, while the picture is blurry and still of something as-of-yet unknown, it might as well be a blurry picture of anything.

So what if it really was a picture of anything? What if the blurry picture was a composite of thousands of differing, but perhaps similar, images, all morphed into one? However, as it becomes clearer, the number of pictures from which it is comprised begins to drop down from thousands, to hundreds, to tens, to a few, until eventually, finally, just one.

What if that is how the future works? Full of possibilities counter-weighted with probabilities, and as we near each successive, seemingly instantaneous moment, each new frame or slice of unfolding events, each new “now”, the picture unfolds revealing it’s singular clarity, but not without first having whittled down the possible other outcomes which might have been instead.

What does this have to do with anything? Well, in a multiverse where the unfolding events involve a street, a pedestrian, and a car failing to stop at their red light all brought together, the “pictures of the future” involve all the possibilities mentioned above (distraction, slippery conditions, loud music, etc.) and many, many more besides. However, the way that the entirety of the events actually plays out can only involve one fixed, final, irrevocable outcome for someone experiencing them.

Per universe.

My argument is that similar, nearby universes played out similar events and arrived at slightly — or perhaps greatly — differing outcomes. Perhaps countless numbers of them.

In any number of those outcomes, for those of us who are alive now and reading this and able to relate to the experience of a close call event like in the example above, is it really all that much of a stretch to believe that we’ve died in some of them? To press the point, the “closer the call” was (the more anxiety/fight-or-flight responses we felt, etc.), perhaps what really happened was that we felt the reverberations of our own deaths more acutely than in situations where the events leading to our deaths in other universes were much more remote.

I believe that universes abide by a proximity principle, and this may, perhaps, be one of the only ways we sub lightspeed-existent human beings have of interacting with other such otherwise unreachable places in the truly wide, fascinating and mysterious world that we may find ourselves in.

So, I’m not saying we’re all free to jump in front of cars, but I would hazard a guess that should a car strike us and kill us in one universe, we would instantaneously snap into awareness of ourselves in a universe where we did not die. This idea may rightfully be challenged by the idea of fate and whether or not we all, in fact, have our inescapable, predetermined time to die. At this time, I have no thoughts to weigh in on that matter, but I’m sure I’ll dream up something that seems sensible for the sake of The Story soon enough (I swear, I don’t purposely try to create alliteration in my phrases, but it does seem to happen a lot).

Also, it is an inescapable fact that universes in which we die, assuming they’re not also universes where it is routinely common to come back from being legally dead, are also universes in which we would leave behind loved ones. That’s never fun, for anyone involved. So, just to stress the point, don’t jump in front of cars. All I’m saying is, if it’s not your time (if there even is such a thing as “your time”), you won’t even realize how often you die on a regular basis in nearby universes anyways, so even if this idea infects you and blows your mind open a little, don’t fuss about it. Seriously. Why? ‘Cause you live in a universe where you’re too busy living, and that is honestly awesome. So go on, live and be, let whatever happens will happen. Just be sure look both ways when crossing the street.

[Edit: There’s much about these notions that have bothered me to think about in the years since initially musing about them. One example is the case of serious injuries. At what point can/does/should transference to a different, safer, but highly similar universe happen? I have no answers, only hopeful ideals]