John was amused but not surprised to see that the other members of the Facility’s Executive Committee looked just as haunted and restless as he did.
They had all known one another for years, sometimes even decades. And so as they took their seats around the conference table, complex, meaningful looks passed among them like carrier pigeons, and accomplished much of the committee’s work before anyone had even said anything.
“Now I know what you’re all thinking. ” began Kevin, the current Project Lead, “and I know that you all already know this, but just for the record, let me make this clear : Yes, the Dreamer is waking up. ”
A restrained murmur susurrated through those assembled.
“All the signs our statistical models predicted are present. The entity’s energy fields are increasing in power while decreasing in flux and shrinking in size. The gravitic and temporal anomalies have all but vanished and the entity’s ‘body’ has started to stir in its magnetic bottle. The ‘message’ traffic in its ‘mind’ is already more directed and coherent than we have ever recorded before and they have been following John’s predictions as to their rise in complexity perfectly. There can be no doubt about it. The moment we have, um…. anticipated… all these years is finally coming. The Dreamer will dream no more. May God have mercy on our souls.”
“More to the point, ” said Steven drily, “May the Dreamer have mercy on our souls. And the rest of us as well. “
Aileen laughed indulgently. “Why so worried, Steven? Do you have some reason to think the entity might not be entirely pleased with us?”
Hanford chimed in, “I know that if I woke up after a long nap to find myself with tubes and wires in every orifice and a small apartment built into my ‘brain’, I would not be in a particularly forgiving mood. ”
“Not to mention high definition recordings of all my dreams going back to the 1950s. ” added Sheila with a sigh.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, people. ” warned Kevin. “This entity is a complete unknown. We do not know if it even has anything we would recognize as motivations or desires, let along something as petty as a thirst for revenge. ”
“The thing about aliens… ” said Trevor. “…is that they’re alien.
“Exactly, Trevor. Well put. ” said Kevin with a nod. ”
And with that my brain suddenly ran out of gas. Man, this fiction shit is hard.
Don’t worry, I know what else needs to be covered about the Dreamer and I know the basic outline of how the meeting is going to go from here.
What happens after that, not so much. This is a rather big idea I have on my proverbial hook and it is not going to be easy to land.
But I am having fun so far, brain shutdown aside.
I am tempted to just tell you all about what is going to happen next in the story, but if I do that, I will never actually write the damned thing.
All my impetus to create must go into the actual creation of the thing or I lose all motivation. That’s why I can’t make notes or an outline beforehand.
If I wrote notes or an outline, then the idea would be out of my head and I would never want to see it again, much less stick with it long enough to get it written down properly.
I can’t justify or explain why that is. It’s just the way my particular muse works. And if you want to excel at your art, you do whatever it takes to get your muse to cooperate.
Happy muse, happy life.
Now to let the little grey cells rest.
More after the break.
Writing versus blogging
I mean, obviously, blogging IS writing. But you get the idea.
Writing fiction is so much harder. There is so much that you have to imagine. When I am blogging like I am doing now, all I have to do is express my thoughts in words.
That’s way easier for someone whose head is always teeming with words like me.
Too bad I can’t just blog for a living. That would be the sweet life. Just doing like I do but making a comfortably middle class income doing it.
That’s not impossible, of course, but it’s not bloody likely.
For one thing, people don’t read blogs as much as they used to. Back in The Day, when the Earth was still cooling from the impact that formed the Moon and the people of the world lived like children and the Internet was largely just text and imagines – yes, even before YouTube, children – everyone was trying to be a blogger and blogs were very well read and influential.
But now, I would probably be better off trying to be a TikTok star.
I wonder if Canada will become like a TikTok haven once the USA has banned it.
Who am I kidding, a) the parent company will probably figure out a way to make TikTok owned by a US company on paper, and if not, b) getting around a “ban” like that would be a trivial task for the billions of nerds of the world.
Hell, just use a fucking VPN.
Anyhow, where was I? Oh right, fantasizing about a life where I earn a living.
I know I could do it. It would not even be that big of a deal. The world is full of earn from home type possibilities and some of them aren’t even scams.
Or so I have heard.
Plus there’s my massive talent and enormous intellect and winning personality.
So I know that building up the idea of earning a living to the near mythically ascended state of being is not rational and not helping me. I would be far better off thinking about all the really stupid and lowly people who nevertheless have jobs and telling myself, “Well if they can do it… “.
But I would have to leave my little bathetic bunker to do that!
And that’s always been the real issue. I keep choosing to cling to the known rather than take any amount of risk by going outside my tiny, tiny world.
I can’t even learn to use VRChat because I panic when I try. Ditto Discord.
Is there any help for me at all?
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.