my pirate novel

8/18/12

this static page is now the front page of this blog.  i’m still adding to it when i have research to compile, but the main focus of my work is now writing all this research into a novel.  if you’d like to see what i’ve gathered, please click on a category in the cloud to your right.  or, go visit the blog and read what i’ve got written so far.

Adventures in Quantum Antarctica:  the videogame that changed the world

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7/18/12

to make it easier to read the story, now that it’s gotten to that point, i’ve made another blog that’s just for the writing.  please visit here to read what i do with all the information collected on this blog.

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i’m writing quantum fiction.

this is the place where i work out the ideas for a novel about quantum physics, the occupy movement, and a video game.  if you want to read the actual story, it’ll be under the category – story – but i haven’t yet started writing it.  what you’ll find at the moment are lots of research and the very first stab at creating a story with a plot and characters.

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2/3/12

this story is now a collaborative project between me, the writer, and jim yarbrough, the illustrator.  we’re going to be doing part of this gargantuan thing as a graphic novel.  now, i don’t have any credentials as a writer, except a string of unpublished novels, but jim has actual chops, is represented in several galleries, and has his art in collections around the world.  this is his first graphic novel for a very long time.  he’s been doing sequential art all along, but the last comic book he illustrated was back in high school.  to that end, we’ll be setting pivotal chapters as comic books, and are even planning to go off on an artist residency in order to concentrate on creating something special.  it’s great to see it growing, even a little bit.

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12/13/11

i thought i would update this.  since i began this blog, it’s been the repository for any article that interested me and wouldn’t fit in one of my other blogs.  so there are reposted articles about pirates, and antarctica, and quantum theory, and the occupy movement.  all these topics interested me, and i needed to save the references, so i stuck them here.

and then suddenly, as i was finishing up my latest unpublished novel, all the pieces jelled.  the missing bit was mmorpgs.  and dragoncon.

the reason i basically dropped what i’d been planning to do for this story is that i’m finding a big link between quantum mechanics and what’s going on with the occupy movement, or the year in revolutions.  it seems to me that the kind of consciousness you have when you ‘get’ quantum physics is very like the thinking of the people who are working to change the balance of power in the world.

i’ve always sat beside history as it was being made, detached and thinking it was someone else’s job to make it, letting a lack of confidence stop me before i began.  also, i always assumed the world was just the way it is and i had to deal with it, letting history overwhelm any contribution i could make.

while i was doing this, i had impulses – to write that astrology book, to assemble that history of dublin, to become a stockbroker, to move to oregon and marry a pastor.  i never did them.  but if i had, i would have continued to do what i do, and i would have a regular output, and at this point would be noted for my contributions.  whatever they might have been.  if i’d written that science fiction story in the late ’70s i’d be speaking on panels at all the conventions, and would have a track at dragoncon.  but i didn’t.

i’m not saying i’m that good, or that my ideas are special.  i’m saying if i’d caught the wave when i felt the urge, and swam with it, it would have taken me into shore.  that’s all i’m saying.  (there’s a lot of crap that catches the waves)

but now i feel that wave again.  and i feel it really strongly.  the world is about to enter into quantum consciousness and change utterly, and it really needs a fairy tale so that people don’t get scared.  so i’m trying to write a fairy tale for how to change your consciousness.

a fairy tale that shows you how to become a fairy your own self.

and it can easily happen.  all it takes is critical mass.

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1/22/10

i had an idea for a pirate novel.  it’s silly, but it’s stuck in my head.  so i’m starting in on it.  novels, for me, take several years.  there’s the year of thinking about it, the year of getting a notebook and jotting down things i think about, and the year, or so, of writing the story.  so nobody looking at this blog in 2010 should expect any actual fiction to come out of it.  i’m right in the middle of the first draft of my current novel, so it’s going to be awhile.  the cool thing about this blog is that, this time, i’m not going to go out and buy a notebook to fill with bits and pieces.  i’m going to do it all online.  so this blog isn’t going to look like my other blogs.

i tend to write dark comedy, transgressive fiction, stuff about the worst in people.  in my personal life, i’m all about bringing out the best in people, but inside, i want to kill them all off, so i write fiction, where it’s legal.  in my current novel, for example, all my relatives die horribly.

btw, i’m the author of a completed unpublished novel called ‘love has nothing to do with it (a thriller)’, consigned to the dustbin by a jealous husband in the days before the internet.  also an unpublished novel – splat – that was completed and serialized on the internet.  also an unpublished novel that isn’t quite done, and in fact is on hiatus – cathy eats her words – and a self-help demotivational handbook called lazy is good, quit your day job, which is in progress, and not much has been made of it since i started it before i quit my day job.  but all these things are out there, and they’re all written by me.  along with the current novel, now completed – train wreck:  the wrath of mom.