Since last post, I’ve completed a first draft. Interesting decisions were made. I went with a first person female voice mainly because I haven’t done one in so long and liked the idea of a strong female lead in an underground compound comprised mostly of men. Like I’d anticipated, as the story developed it became more about how technology makes people even lonelier despite having more access to humans than ever before. What I hadn’t expected was the strange kind of personality disorders that developed as the piece went on, something I attribute to the plasticy–for lack of a better term-world the characters inhabit.
I thought it would be very difficult for me to transition from writing straight realism to something a bit more off kilter, but since my work has always been deeply concerned with place and setting, the Large Hadron Collider facility served as the anchor for me mentally in this piece. My LHC is quite different from the real world LHC–in fact, as the story progressed, it slowly became more of a dubious reflection of the real life American office world more than anything else–but as I stated in the previous post, this freed me from the scientific jargon that would have overwhelmed the piece had I kept it straight realism. That’s not to say that jargon didn’t make it in. There’s virtual worlds ala Second Life, a mathematical theorem based on the first Apple computer chipset, the LHC observation theatre is called the Bergsonian, and the protagonist goes by the username “The Digital Narcissist” in AlternaLife, my stand in for the aforementioned Second Life.
So to sum up, things are going well at this point, but I am a meticulous reviser and will probably exchange this piece with other writers I trust before moving forward. Before I finish up today, I thought I’d leave a few links to some of the research that proved invaluable during the initial writing process.
Virtual Child Birth in Second Life
Stephen Hawking Claims Collider is “Crucial” to Human Survival
LHC Comes Online; World Fails to End
