"Sunday morning, bloody sunday morning" was the first sentence in what was going to be today's blog post. As it turned out it somehow lead me into a short story about interpersonal relations between two people confined together for an unimaginably long period of time set against the background of high-concept hard-SF. Because it seems like it might be pretty bloody good I can't post it here; that will immediately make it inadmissable for the competition I am preparing entries for.
I wrote a good portion of the hard-SF intro (hard meaning attempting to base it on the fundamentals of real science, as opposed to the space-operas of soft sci-fi), before realising I had made a fundamental mistake. The entire story rested on the concept of relative time speeding up to an observer travelling close to the speed of light then, just as I tried to expand the concept in my mind by yammering about it to my fiancee, I realised my mistake. Of course time would appear normal to the traveller at the speed of light, but relative to him stationery observers would be moving extremely slowly. If I travelled out to the stars and back again at the speed of light only a year or two would pass for me, but millions of years would pass on earth. This realisation resulting in me spitting damnation and the desperately trying to fix my mess ; and more importantly fix my story. It's done now. The seams need hiding somewhat but it's getting there – trust me.
We sat in the park in the beautiful sunshine, read Asimov and made notes in my girlie little pad. She made a daisy chain and I scratched the little fleaflies off my knees. In my notebook I wrote I dreamed of a different world where all was the same except that the word 'plunger' had been replaced with the word 'plumb' and only I was aware of the disparity. I'm not sure 'disparity' is the right word here, but that was a real dream I had. I was entirely bemused that not only were people saying plumb to mean plunger, there seemed to be a higher than normal number of reasons to use the word. How often do you have cause to use a plunger, let alone actually see one or think about them. The fact is there is one in our bathroom, but it's not something I thought I was particularly interested in.
Science fiction is more interesting and exciting than I ever could have imagined ; now in retrospect I think my whole life might have been contrived in order to arrive me at this point. I am reading a huge amount, planning a wedding and a future, being happy and creative, and my belly is full. I've also just sorted out the majority of my tiny little office space and am actually sat at my desk writing this. Until now that was impossible due to the insane amount of crap I have accumulated and the boxes they live in. There is a bug on my laptop screen. It's gone now.
No comments:
Post a Comment