A Sense of Doubt blog post #3403 - Writing on the plane to Keflavik

A Sense of Doubt blog post #3403 - Writing on the plane to Keflavik

I like to write on planes. I usually cannot wait to get my laptop out and get busy.

On domestic flights, the in flight wifi is pretty good and often seats come equipped with power hooks ups to plug in my laptop.

Maybe it was just Icelandair or maybe because it was an international flight, but as shown in my writing below, I could not get the wifi to connect and my battery was draining FAST.

On the flight home, I did not purchase the in-flight wifi and figured out how to optimize the battery performance giving me 5-7 hours of battery life and not just 2-ish hours.

In the past, I have often made Wednesdays a writing featured post day. In keeping with that tradition, here's a writing post.

The stuff I wrote is full of SPOILERS for a book (book series probably) I have been working on since 1995.

Yes, 1995.

I know I do not have a ton of readers for my blog, and so I am sharing this journaling experiment despite the SPOILERS because it may not even be read by anyone (if you do read, leave a comment!), if anyone does read it they may never read my book and so SPOILERS don't matter, AND who knows if I can finish the damn book anyway, once again making spoilers irrelevant.

I am not unique in using a journal technique as a warm up for writing, as a place to brainstorm, as a document of work progress and process. Still, I tend to like my journaling.

Starting just below is the stuff from the plane ride to Keflavik, Iceland.

Thanks for tuning in.

2405.23-00:05 (Iceland time - actual time in my time zone was 16:05 on 2405.22.)

On a plane to Keflavik, Iceland, and then onward to Heathrow, London.

Haven’t journaled on this book in some time, but I am suddenly inspired, and the Internet on this flight – which I bought – doesn’t just suck, it basically doesn’t work. So, I can’t do much else. And so this dilemma proves one of my personal mottos: store things on the hard drive so as to be able to work offline. We all rely on the constant connection to the Internet so much. Our lifelines are severed without it.

There are also do not seem to be electrical outlets on this plane, so I have limited battery power. Currently about two hours of battery for a seven hour flight.

I am not sure I want to run the battery all the way down as I might work during my layover in Iceland. I may also have breakfast and coffee. I hope I can find somewhere to plug in at the Keflavik airport, which is outside Rek..., which I do not remember how to spell, and I cannot even get the Google mainpage to load. (ReykJavik — it was in my time settings, which I found later). Though the main Google page magically appeared one time, and then crapped out.

Oh well. Two hours of battery. Oh, down to 1 hour and 42 minutes suddenly. I bet the Internet is draining the battery as the wifi router tries to connect. I just disconnected it. Maybe that will slow the battery depletion. Nope. Just dropped to 54 minutes, which might be a poor estimate. Battery is at 57%. So, I just put the laptop in airplane mode because even with the Internet disconnected the wifi router might have still been drawing power. I am going by the percent meter on the battery not the time estimate. But it is plummeting. 53%.

The flight attendant said that there’s an electrical outlet in the screen, but I think it’s just the USB for charging phones and things like that. I don’t think I can plug my laptop into it.

So, wasted money on the in-flight Internet. Maybe I won’t buy it on the way home. Also, maybe I will see if I can buy a hook up to power my laptop with the Anker battery. Or just have a full charge because I did not this time, and that’s unusual for me. And then, obviously, I can’t run the laptop for the entire flight. Yeah, 49%. What’s taking so much power? Google Chrome. Just closed it. Maybe that will slow the drain.

So, fittingly, I put on Valtari by Sigur Rós.

Damn, the shitty wifi borked my laptop. I had to two ctrl-alt-del to get to task manager. Apparently, it closed all my folders. 47%. Still dropping, much too fast. Screen brightness? 46%. But time jumped to 1hr 39 minutes from under an hour. Yeah, screen was muvh to bright for the battery.

Thankfully, I have a new book and inspirations. Holding at 46% and 1hr 39 minutes, for now.

I bought and downloaded a new Kindle book: Infomocracy by Malka Older (?), can’t check it as I have no Internet. Holding at 46% and 1hr 39 minutes, for now.

I liked the opening, and it got me in the mood to work on Cyberspell. Oooh, 2hrs 13 min and 45%. Definitely, screen brightness and CPU drain from Google Chrome trying to load shit with no wifi.

Infomocracy like a lot of “future fiction” (not sure this should be called “science fiction”) drops the reader into the world with lots of salient details and description that slowly becomes clearer and apparent. Astute readers of this kind of fiction know to hold many concepts in abeyance, trusting that they will be explained. It’s a technique I plan to use, but the trick, which Older does well, is not overwhelming the reader. There needs to be forward movement, action, dialogue, the scene, which Older does very well in the first scenes.

Oooh, 2hrs 21 min and 44%! Time estimates improving.

This was my great problem with all the early drafts of Cyberspell. WAY TOO much detail and exposition and not enough action, except in the Natalie chapters, which were much more action driven.

Like many books, short scenes rules with lots of stopping places because of people’s attention spans and our modern world. So, instead of long chapters and one POV character at a time, it makes more sense to do a series of short scenes and back and forths and slowly build up POV characters. Older starts with two and goes back and forth. Then two characters in one scene split up, and she has three.

Oooh, 2hrs 28 min and 43%! Time estimates improving.

This technique is similar to something VE Schwab did in ADDIE LA RUE, which I loved. Addie was our sole POV character for 100 pages or so, and then she meets Henry and seamlessly, Schwab lets Addie walk away and shifts us to Henry’s POV. Like Older’s book, it’s all third person limited, so this works much better than it would in first person.

2hrs 12 min and 42%! There’s a drop.

Though Lauren Beukes’ Broken Monsters is more of a touch stone for my other work-in-progress, Opposable, I didn’t much like the POV character dump to start. She juggles five POVs unless I am forgetting someone. She doles these out one by one and then rotates in whatever order suits the story, so not all five repeating after the first set of five. But I was a bit lost as to why I am getting into all these other character’s heads. The cop and the daughter connect. But none of the other characters connect until the end and they never meet until well over halfway deep into the book.

I like Older’s method, so at least some characters start in the same place. Kind of like GAME OF THRONES. ALL of the POV characters are together at Winterfell in the opening sequence.

Unfortunately, my characters are not all together, but I can do some things to set those connections.

Okay, so, for what inspires me and my new CYBERSPELL ideas.

2hrs 22 min and 40%! Gaining time. And it’s 5:45 my time. The Internet worked long enough to reset the laptop clock to ReykJavik time, which is 12:48 a.m. And there’s the spelling in my settings.

2hrs 13 min and 38%.

I will surely quit before my battery runs out, read some, try to sleep some. I have five some hours left to go in the flight. Three-four hours of reading and sleeping sounds good.

Switching to () by by Sigur Rós.

2hrs 03 min and 37%.

So... inspiration and new ideas.

I liked the very first scene in Infomocracy and the way Older named all kinds of things we don’t fully understand yet, though some crystallize as the scene unfurls, and then there’s a scene that bears some similarities to the scene I want to do with Thomar, the assassin, the kid, and the magic sword.

Staring off into space and thinking is going to cost battery.

1hr 59 min and 36%.

So, do the same kind of thing as I drop details in that scene but keep the action and dialogue flowing. Just enough and slowly make things clearer with occasional short explanations, such as why technology is doesn’t work or is avoided in the Badlands as well as how magic is avoided because it’s unreliable and attracts monsters. Though there’s passive tech and passive magic that is used safely. The sword is not passive. It’s not like anything they know about. It’s an ancient artifact.

Had to take a drink of water. 35%. Time estimate is missing. Oh 1hr 17 min. That may adjust. Yeah, 1hr 47 min. 34%. When I put it to sleep briefly, to reach ahead and get a drink from my water bottle (that must stay upright as it has a small leak), the time zone went back to Pacific because I am not connected to the Internet.

So what if the sword is looking for the right person. So when Thomar is trying to learn about it from the assassin, he doesn’t know much because it doesn’t do much for him. He knows enough to know it may do more for others. In fact, the sword may have told him as much.

Thomar tries to grip it with a gloved hand and nothing happens. The assassin also knows one has to grasp it with bare flesh.

When Thomar grabs it with his bare hand, the thing lights up with a flash and then dulls to a blue glow. The guard above the hilt (I need to check names when I am back to the Internet) curves these barbs back toward his hand and pricks his flesh, sucking up some of his blood. The guard then twists back to its normal shape as the sword glows and hums and a variety of things.

1hr 52 min and 32%.

Thomar is transported somewhere, though he goes no where. He may drop the sword at this point cutting the connection. Not something to do with the assassin there, even though he’s tied up. But Thomar get s a flash of the “other dimension” where he is via the sword (kinda like “inside” the sword). And the sword may say something, like, “there’s something I want to show you.”

And maybe there’s a guide. If not this time, the next time. Someone he knows? Or a child similar to the kid he’s rescuing from the assassins who have kidnapped him.

1hr 42 min and 31%.

So, I had a blaze of inspiration: here’s a way to slowly parcel out what has happened to the world in a series of “flashbacks” that Thomar doesn’t understand at first.

1hr 45 min and 30%.

I was thinking about how the similarities to D&D are intentional because the original idea of the book is that these people are playing D&D and suddenly they change the world into their D&D game world run by an AI (the World Spell), and AI that’s not “crazy” but it has its own agenda and its brain patterns from some actual humans.

What’s funny here is that there was no Internet gaming (or very poor attempts) when I started writing the book in 1995. We were all still on dial up then. But now, lots of things have come to pass, like powerful handheld devices, being “on” the Internet all the time, some limited VR, great connected networks, and lots of things that were not foreseen.

So, what if the sword is part of a network of ancient sentient artifacts that are connected to the World Spell. There’s different factions and different agendas. But the sword is very clear on what Thomar must do. He must stop Sears from re-writing the World Spell and locking in his version of reality. He must use the “disc,” the program Sears is writing to rewrite the World Spell to either heal the World Spell and set up a world of freedom, agency, justice, and fairness, OR wipe it out entirely and “reboot” back to the way the world was before the CHANGE.

1hr 29 min and 28%.

The sword is willing to show Thomar all about his former life, how the world can be, what the world could be if Sears succeeds, and then allow him to make his choice.

This way I can get the reveal over with sooner. Eventually Thomar understands everything, though not in that first scene. But eventually, I can make the D&D connection quite literal. They are playing in a networked space with new and power computer systems and they Trigger the TIDE and the CHANGE.

1hr 27 min and 27%.

And, I can do all this in short scenes and start alternating characters in ways that connect.

We start with Thomar and all that stuff in the first scene. And there’s a teleport. 

??? Maybe it’s not the kid who teleports. Maybe it’s a combination of the kid and the sword. DECIDE. ???

1hr 27 min and 27%. 18:30 hours: 2405.22-18:30.

1hr 18 min and 25%... just a minute or two later. It’s still estimating all over the place.

Sears had hired Thomar to kill the assassins and bring the kid back to Chicago alive. He doesn’t know about the sword. He believes from what rumors he acted on in hiring Thomar that the kid has an innate teleport power. And I could go this way. I could also do some fun “power up” deal. So the sword and kid combo allows for unlimited teleporting. The sword can power up the kid, so he has a certain number of teleports in manna points. The farther he ports the more points he loses. The more times he ports the more points he loses. Once out, he needs to power up with the sword again. But Thomar has the sword and Sears doesn’t know about it. In fact, the kid is under strict instructions not to tell Sears about it. So then what? ANOTHER DECISION POINT.

1hr 18 min and 24%.

Thomar connects with Mi Mei after leaving Sears. We either stay with him or with Sears (because Sears is a POV character; it only makes sense).

Mi Mei has stashed the disc copy on Thomar while he’s in Sears’ tower without Thomar knowing. She reconnects with Thomar on the outside to get the disc. Thomar is also able to leave with the sword because it has all kinds of ways to hide itself from people for which it wants to remain a secret.

1hr 10 min and 23%.

How to connect up all the other characters, I am not sure. And maybe I do not need to use all of them, like I am rethinking Natalie and Gimr.

1hr 12 min and 22%.

It’s 18:42.

Those were most of my ideas. Maybe it’s time to read what’s in this and one other file to fill my head, and then shut down for the rest of the flight.

Just want to remind myself of this:

EASTERN EMPIRE - renamed as THE GOTHAM EMPIRE

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2406.13 - 10:10

- Days ago = 3267 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.