In between blog posts, a day or two or three goes by and I find myself thinking of all kinds of things to write about … and when I go and sit down to write it, it’s gone. What happened to the facts that were in my mental cache? I think, though, that as I write some of those inner thoughts are extracted and retrieved from whatever dead ends they’ve run into up in my brain. Dunno.
My wife expects me to figure out (by looking on the wall calendar) what events are coming up for the next day or two, but when I (inevitably) forget to check, she will remind me that there’s something coming up that I need to do … take this class, attend that meeting, have breakfast with so-and-so, etc. She’s also the motivator … when it’s 90 degrees outside, she says, “I’m going gardening.” She says nothing else, but I know that I’ll be treated much better the rest of the day if I agree to go out too … sometimes I can help, sometimes I probably do more damage than good. If she didn’t go outside, I’d probably stay inside and write all day. I do try to stretch and exercise frequently.
Writing is a process/art that used to be a forte’ of mine (at least, if I ever had a forte’). I still feel creative; I still feel I’m a decent writer. My wife may have a different opinion on that point. I can get good stuff down on paper …. but organizing thoughts and trying to have it make sense is hard. In the beginning, I list the major events of a story, e.g.,
- George has miraculous ability
- Spunky discovers Geoge’s miraculous ability
- Nobody else knows
- Where did this ability come from?
- How else is ability used (what is driving this).
- The World is safe and happy.
The Expansion
I didn’t use formal outline form here … but the main point is that new information and/or additional, more detailed, information should be recorded somewhere, just to help keep track of what’s what.
- George and Spunky go further and further back in time (why?).
- How does time travel work?
- Rules of time travel — can go back instantly, forward only in real time(?)
- You can change the future but you’re supposed to try to minimalize the damage.
- The Future cannot be any further than your current day. That is, I can go back two hundred years and then return to today, or yesterday, but not tomorrow or beyond.
- Thinking now that travel to future needs to also be instant, not real time. Otherwise, if Person A goes back in time X years, and Person B doesn’t, they won’t meet up again because it’ll take X years for A to get back to now.
- Whom do they meet? (I created a list of twenty or so people across generations.) This special ability that George has comes from some object in his possession … and it was handed to him by somebody who received it from somebody else … down through time. The birth/death dates overlap. Note interesting things …. Shakespeare and Galileo were born the same year (1564) … Beethoven’s (who died in 1821) and Abe Lincoln’s (born in 1809) lives overlapped on the timeline. Thus, Beethoven could have given Lincoln this object (or vice versa) in some way.
- Spunky meets Beethoven — and in fact, Spunky helps Beethoven finish his Ninth Symphony.
- Spunky meets Shakespeare. There’s a lot we can do with this.
- Meanwhile, bad guys are trying to capture this object. They keep getting foiled, but they try.
- George is assigned the task of getting rid of the Black Plague, which is complex enough on its own, but when you consider implications …. and how to find where it started …
- There’s a surprise ending that I won’t include here. Stay tuned. I’m maybe over-optimistic that it will be done by Christmas. Naw, I don’t have an artist yet (unless I draw them) for the pictures. I’ll have to ponder that. And we have a ridiculously busy summer coming up.
Most of what I write these days is BLECH, but fortunately I can no longer read my own hand-writing so I don’t realize how bad it is.
But I still have some gems that occasionally pop up.