My WIP won't let me sleep!
It's 3 a.m. and I'm thinking of a 16-year-old boy named Ian.
It's the morning after his birthday, a Monday, and his mom has let him go to the DMV to take his driving test. He emerges from the beatup Ford pickup triumphant --- he has passed. He drops mom off at work and as he eases up on the freeway to go back to school, pulls a set of fuzzy dice out of the glove box.
As he wraps the connecting string around the rear-view mirror, he thinks of his 11-year-old brother Todd, who died when Ian was 9. Todd won the fuzzy dice at a carnival and boasted to Ian that when he got his first car, he'd hang the dice inside. "I got your back on this," Todd says to the dice when a horn blast scares him -- he's swerved right in front of an 18-wheeler. The big rig careens into another lane, and Ian overcorrects, heading straight for the concrete barrier.
This is where the story splits into what I the author know and what the reader will know.
In the story, Ian will get control of the car again, panting and shaken, and pull over for a moment. Then he will work up his nerve, get back into traffic, and go to school.
I, as the author, know that the Ian who got into the truck is dead. Ian is split into his last four universes, having evolved over time to pare down his multi-strand existence into the final few. The Ian who died was an errant strand, a universe that pulled away from the others at the death of his brother. I know that in that world, his mother was overprotective, and his father distant, and Ian became an only child.
For the living Ian, his final three strands are so closely woven, and his consciousness is now so close to rushing toward the divine and the ultimate goal of the Single Stream, that he will become clairvoyant, seeing his other strands, one that is slightly ahead of his current time, allowing him glimpses into his future, and one that is slightly behind, giving him constant feelings of deja vu.
At school, Ian is still slightly askew, as he has been waiting until he got his license to ask the girl Christina out on a date. When he walks into chemistry class (because don't all romances start in chemistry class?), he sits next to her in his usual spot as her lab partner.
And she looks at him like he's crazy. Her boyfriend Chaz asks what he's doing, and when he says, "I'm sitting by my lab partner," something buzzes in him, that feeling we get when we know we've forgotten something important, like that the oven is still on. He looks down at his notebook and it clearly shows that his friend Robert is his lab partner. He mumbles an apology and walks across the room.
Robert says, "You snooze, you lose," and that he shouldn't have waited to ask his crush out. Now she has a boyfriend. The reader feels righted again, for a moment.
When he gets home, his 18-year-old brother Todd comes down the stairs and the reader will hopefully get the same sliding feeling that Ian should have gotten. But he just waves to his brother like it's nothing out of the ordinary.
And now we know something has definitely begun to happen, and the reader will be more alert than Ian for a while, as Ian has settled into his new strand, while we have not. When we meet the mother, and she is completely different than the glimpse we got earlier, hopefully we will be hooked.
The story gets complicated very quickly after this, as Ian is waylaid by the feelings of deja vu and clairvoyance. He see ghosts -- phantoms that are bleeding through between these closely woven strands of his parallel universes, no longer competing for his consciousness as he is so close to his single stream.
He will talk to religious people, he will try to figure out what is going on, through comic books and sci fi. He will try to save Christina, when he sees glimpses of a terrible future for her. Ultimately from the book will emerge a new picture of how our brains, our consciousness, religion, and the afterlife intertwine.
I may have bitten off more than a Young Adult novel can chew. But it's fun to plan, and working on it gives me a sense of the divine, as though I myself am oddly evolving in my understanding of how the world might could work and still have room for all the major religions, science, our 6th sense, and the many moments where we experience feelings we can't explain.
But now, hopefully, sleep!
It's the morning after his birthday, a Monday, and his mom has let him go to the DMV to take his driving test. He emerges from the beatup Ford pickup triumphant --- he has passed. He drops mom off at work and as he eases up on the freeway to go back to school, pulls a set of fuzzy dice out of the glove box.
As he wraps the connecting string around the rear-view mirror, he thinks of his 11-year-old brother Todd, who died when Ian was 9. Todd won the fuzzy dice at a carnival and boasted to Ian that when he got his first car, he'd hang the dice inside. "I got your back on this," Todd says to the dice when a horn blast scares him -- he's swerved right in front of an 18-wheeler. The big rig careens into another lane, and Ian overcorrects, heading straight for the concrete barrier.
This is where the story splits into what I the author know and what the reader will know.
In the story, Ian will get control of the car again, panting and shaken, and pull over for a moment. Then he will work up his nerve, get back into traffic, and go to school.
I, as the author, know that the Ian who got into the truck is dead. Ian is split into his last four universes, having evolved over time to pare down his multi-strand existence into the final few. The Ian who died was an errant strand, a universe that pulled away from the others at the death of his brother. I know that in that world, his mother was overprotective, and his father distant, and Ian became an only child.
For the living Ian, his final three strands are so closely woven, and his consciousness is now so close to rushing toward the divine and the ultimate goal of the Single Stream, that he will become clairvoyant, seeing his other strands, one that is slightly ahead of his current time, allowing him glimpses into his future, and one that is slightly behind, giving him constant feelings of deja vu.
At school, Ian is still slightly askew, as he has been waiting until he got his license to ask the girl Christina out on a date. When he walks into chemistry class (because don't all romances start in chemistry class?), he sits next to her in his usual spot as her lab partner.
And she looks at him like he's crazy. Her boyfriend Chaz asks what he's doing, and when he says, "I'm sitting by my lab partner," something buzzes in him, that feeling we get when we know we've forgotten something important, like that the oven is still on. He looks down at his notebook and it clearly shows that his friend Robert is his lab partner. He mumbles an apology and walks across the room.
Robert says, "You snooze, you lose," and that he shouldn't have waited to ask his crush out. Now she has a boyfriend. The reader feels righted again, for a moment.
When he gets home, his 18-year-old brother Todd comes down the stairs and the reader will hopefully get the same sliding feeling that Ian should have gotten. But he just waves to his brother like it's nothing out of the ordinary.
And now we know something has definitely begun to happen, and the reader will be more alert than Ian for a while, as Ian has settled into his new strand, while we have not. When we meet the mother, and she is completely different than the glimpse we got earlier, hopefully we will be hooked.
The story gets complicated very quickly after this, as Ian is waylaid by the feelings of deja vu and clairvoyance. He see ghosts -- phantoms that are bleeding through between these closely woven strands of his parallel universes, no longer competing for his consciousness as he is so close to his single stream.
He will talk to religious people, he will try to figure out what is going on, through comic books and sci fi. He will try to save Christina, when he sees glimpses of a terrible future for her. Ultimately from the book will emerge a new picture of how our brains, our consciousness, religion, and the afterlife intertwine.
I may have bitten off more than a Young Adult novel can chew. But it's fun to plan, and working on it gives me a sense of the divine, as though I myself am oddly evolving in my understanding of how the world might could work and still have room for all the major religions, science, our 6th sense, and the many moments where we experience feelings we can't explain.
But now, hopefully, sleep!