Always Surprised

The Missus has told me on numerous occasions that my astrological character — Gemini, born in the Year of the Rabbit — has doomed me to an intense, lifelong hatred of being bored… and a desperation to be otherwise, even unwisely so.*

Assuming that she’s right (generally a safe assumption), then a corollary to that proposition, of course, must be that I like nothing more than not being bored. Indeed, that’s one of my favorite things — maybe my single most-favorite thing — about writing fiction: how reliably the result catches me by surprise. (I’m no longer surprised to be surprised, which isn’t quite the same thing as saying the surprise has become boring.) It almost never ends up quite as I’d imagined when I first set out on the project, and the surprising element(s) almost always seem improvements.

(To qualify: I don’t make everything up as I go along. I do plan, some. I just try to… how you say…? to stay alert to the possibility of sudden changes in direction.)

When I started working on The Propagational Library, here’s what I had in mind:

• I wanted to write a science-fiction(ish) story: I’d been reading and re-reading SF again, so I had that much to go on.
• I wanted the story to occur mostly in space: I’d also been reading a lot of non-fiction about the history of the universe, the stars and galaxies and such, and watching re-runs of BBC and PBS mini-series on the topic.
• I wanted a story focused not on characters and plot, but on ideas (not that I necessarily enjoy reading such stories; I just didn’t want to write an essay). Specifically:
• A question I’ve occasionally thought about: why write (or create at all), given that it’s all (everything: space, matter, time, energy) going to end sometime?
• The notion that what defines a given cultural artifact (story, painting, song, etc.) isn’t the object itself — the sensory thing — but all the ideas behind it, including:
• how it’s made
• what it “means”
• what it represents in the real world
• what it “stands for”
• etc.
• The puzzle-challenge of how to preserve human art and culture long after (preferably forever after) the passing of the human race…
• …even after the end of the solar system, even the end of the universe of space and time itself

So I didn’t have a specific plot in mind, and certainly no characters to act it out. I had no idea how all of this would tie together. I stewed about it for a few days. Clearly, to collect every physical object ever made by artists, writers, composers, etc., would require not just time travel, but also some kind of giant (infinite?) storage facility — a supersized version of Borges’s Library of Babel. (That, after all, held only all possible books. *yawn*) And anyhow, if the warehouse, or whatever it was, existed in physical form, then it would cease to exist at the same moment the universe did.

So now the rest of the puzzle came down to:

• you’d need to be able to travel back and forth in time;
• you’d need some way to capture all artifacts of human culture, regardless of their physical medium, in some non-physical form; and
• you’d need to be able at least once to escape the (temporal, spatial) bounds of the universe altogether.

Furthermore, because I didn’t want the story to play out in some utterly far-distant future — when the total universe winks out, and “humans” (if any) look and behave like the gods only know what — I needed a way to wipe out the human race and all traces of its culture now, or nearly so.

Given all that, I figured, I had enough to just sit down and start writing. Which is what I did… on the morning after I had a peculiar dream. In this dream, some sort of formless human-type creature drifted among the stars, towing a cloud of silvery particles. The Earth had been destroyed, rather suddenly and unexpectedly, and only this creature (with his “luggage”) remained… a librarian, and a vast, sparkling, immaterial nimbus.

Those of you who were around back in February, when I started writing the story, may remember my wondering why I was writing it as I did — posting a first draft of each (very casually researched, imperfectly polished) chapter, on the day that I wrote it. What was my hurry?

The answer to that riddle didn’t come along for a while, and eventually (in the chapter in which [ spoiler redacted ]) got incorporated into the story itself.

I remember that I couldn’t wait to start that chapter; that little twist had occurred to me completely out of nowhere, and I wanted to share it as soon as possible with whoever had been following along. (I even remarked on it at the time: eager, but uncertain if what I planned to do in the next installment was as cool as I thought it was, or corny and obvious — apparently “cool” only because I hadn’t had time to look at it from a distance.)

But then I had my favorite surprise in the whole process: suddenly realizing [ spoiler redacted ] — the “big reveal” in the last chapter. Again, I have no idea if that surprise is honestly interesting, something that would’ve tickled me as much if someone else had written it.

But, ah well, what the heck. It kept me from getting bored. *hops away to nibble at next carrot or head of lettuce*

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Aside, for regular readers: I’ve posted (I think without fail) a Mid-Week Music Break entry every Wednesday since January 4, 2011. I started the practice:

• because I really like music,
• because regular readers seemed to like it when I wrote about music, but also
• because I knew my work on Seems to Fit was about to heat up, and
• hence I wanted to spend as little time on blogging as possible (given that I had no desire to give up the Friday posts), and
• yet I still wanted to keep posting something regularly.

Over the last couple of months, the music breaks have come to feel more like an obligation, and to absorb way more of my time (and forethought) than I’d originally meant them to: looking up back stories of performers and individual songs, researching lyrics… They’ve become scheduled research projects: an obstacle to creative work.

I won’t give them up entirely. But starting today, the series will just shift to occasional status. At the very least, I’ve got other things I’ve been wanting to write about here — including posts in long-neglected other series. More importantly (to me), I’ve got other things to write off-line, too.

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* She may have told me on many more occasions than that, even. But who knows? once the message sank in, I’m afraid I rather nodded off *grinning-ducking-and-running*.