Category Archives: Writing

Do not adjust your set

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So now that it’s November, where have all my travel blog entries gone? Well, in short, I decided to do NaNoWriMo. Thus a large portion of my writing juice has been taken up by working on my novel Chronozone Zero; a book that’s been in progress for oh so many years. Anyone familiar with NaNoWriMo would rightly point out that this is cheating. This is true, but I really fancied doing NaNo and the last thing I need is to start another novel. I am also not keen on imposing yet another foolish dare on my long-suffering Lucy while we are meant to be exploring the great Down Under. The upshot of it all will be that I shall (hopefully) finish a book I have wanted to finish for some time (and Lucy, having read the preview, is also impatient for).

On a similar subject, I finally finished the 3rd draft of Cloudgazer just in time to be free for November. Lucy completed reading it last night ( in two days, no less! She’s posessed of a reading prowess that I cannot begin to comprehend). I will be doing another short edit some time soon, before seeking out a wider proof read audience.

In the meantime, stay tuned for more posts on Oz, I promise to do another in the next day or two!

The Harrington Experiment

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As established already*, Liang Oscillation is the behaviour exhibited by the continuum of spacetime when altered. The quantum states of particles are defined by the 5th ‘meta dimension’, which is best thought of as the path of spacetime. When a Chrononaut alters past events (or visits them), they enact a change on the shape that spacetime occupies in the meta dimension.

Plotting a space-time graph, we can imagine the history of a complex system to be represented as a line. From an abserver looking at this history the system’s history is fixed. To the present, the past is a straight line and the future is non existant. Now, if we make a small change to the system at a point some time ago, spacetime will ‘veer off’, as a sequence of chaos amplifies to make a very immediate change. This ‘butterfly effect’ was predicted by Chaos Theory as early as 2.0.C. However, unknown at the time, a curious property of the meta dimension is that the path of quantum probability has an ‘optimum’, almost like a river settling into a valley. This leads a change in the system to eventually reverse and invert repeatedly, our ‘line’ of spacetime waving up and down until the deviances slowly converge and the system’s distant future is largely unchanged from how it was originally; hence the ‘occillation’ Dr Liang postulated in 2.9.C.

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The Absence Theory; or, “Where Are All The Time Travellers?”

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The most compelling evidence for the impossibility of Time Travel has always been the complete lack of people from the future, when such things will inevitably come to exist.

With the advent of Chronoportology, it became clear that the reason for a lack of travellers from the future was to do with the availability of information, or lack thereof. As the destination of a time jump required accurate, specific information, the earliest jump date possible was generally around the time that Chronoportology itself was invented. In many minds this rendered time travel largely useless, but helped guard its integrity from some forms of abuse by unscrupulous individuals.

In any case, the act of Chronoporting is not something undertaken lightly; involving a gravitas and severity that was previously associated with the deployment of nuclear warheads. Each ship is made to withstand the intense warping and fracturing of no more than one return journey, with one notable exception; the Temporal Navigator Novodantis.

The Editing Task

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Last November, I completed National Novel Writing Month by reaching 50,000 words on my fantasy-scifi adventure “Cloudgazer”. To say I was pleased is an understatement; to say I spent most of December 1st with a big grin on my face would be more accurate. Finally, I felt as though I had something complete, something to be proud of.

A colleague of mine was also a ‘Wrimo’, and completed ’09 successfully. When I asked him how it went, I was somewhat startled when he declared he was going to have to just bin it and rewrite the whole thing. Surely, I thought, that is some sort of kneejerk reaction that should be resisted. There must be something of merit in there. I knew mine certainly had.

And yet, when I got stuck into my editing over the past four weeks, I started to see why one might draw such a conclusion. I love what I have written. There’s parts that shine, snippets of dialogue and lines of prose that I might even go as far as to say are brilliance. But it’s awkward, terribly so. There is a lot that doesn’t make sense or doesn’t fit, and I have considered that their only fix may lie in a fundamental re-writing of the background history, and by extension, the entire plot.

But I’ve been warned about this sort of thing, and I’m prepared. When editing, it is a little like tidying up. You usually have to mess things up worse before they become neat again. In an ideal world, I would be concentrating on this, but at the moment that simply isn’t possible. Too much to do. But interesting things to follow soon.

A New Year

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I just watched Yes Man. And then everyone went to the pub, but I came home cause I was all like “nah I got stuff to be getting on with…”. Obviously I learned nothing.

I have felt the need recently to vent into writing but every time I go to make an entry I forget what it was I wanted to say. Chances are that means that nothing’s really bothering me, which is a good thing, right? Or perhaps I’m just in bit of a writing drought; I haven’t worked on any of my books in months at least.

Finishing the monument that was Tales of Wobells over the course of December was probably why for the most part. And maybe a little time for relaxing with Lucy. But as 2009 kicks off, I find myself wishing I were doing more. I want to get out there and ‘soar’. I just have this continuing sensation of trundling down the runway, but those wings aren’t kicking in with the lift just yet.

Speaking of which, got a flying lesson to book sometime. Can’t wait.

A sorta different approach

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Last week I turned twenty five, which is a really bad idea and I don’t recommend it at all. But I had a day out in London and an excursion to Thorpe Park with some friends so it was rather fun as birthdays go.

Anyway. As is now tradition for me at this time of year, I’m working on my yearly summary. It’s a kind of super diary entry for myself to record my past year of being 24 and what it was like, all the little things I might forget. Hopefully I’ll finish it before I have to do the next one.