30 September 2005
First person or third person? It’s easier to tell the story as first person narrator, but seems more commercially acceptable to use third person. My writing teachers always said third person for novels. Do I take the leap and try to do it as a third person story?
My main character is doing oral history/genealogical research. Which is it? Is he doing an oral history of the old people in a town? Or is he interviewing people in a nursing home? Or is he interviewing members of a family that is paying to have a genealogy done?
What connects crazy Aunt Hattie’s story to the big breakthrough of a long sequence of accidental witnesses stretching back to Biblical times? How do I make the leap? It’s easy to investigate and find that her story is actually linked to a real event. But what is it that connects it to the whole history of alien involvement? This has to make the bridge from casual reality to science fiction so seamlessly that people don’t even realize that it’s changed. How do I make the connection and to what?
If I’m in third person, I could simply jump to the alien mind and my researcher could be just one more dupe that gets drawn into the web as an accidental witness. Perhaps the real story is taking place above/around us and he is discovering it because there is a faction among the aliens that want to be discovered.
This shifts the story line to one in which the aliens are revealed as not being benign, but as having some significant plan in which earth is the what?? Battleground? Too Ron Hubbard. Pawn? Playing field? Weapon? I can’t tell. Or are we not an insignificant sideline of the ultimate plan, but the plan itself? Perhaps we’ve exceeded our usefulness and are now simply being kept until we exterminate ourselves. What do you do with the leftovers after the experiment is finished? How do you recycle a planet?
My main character is doing oral history/genealogical research. Which is it? Is he doing an oral history of the old people in a town? Or is he interviewing people in a nursing home? Or is he interviewing members of a family that is paying to have a genealogy done?
What connects crazy Aunt Hattie’s story to the big breakthrough of a long sequence of accidental witnesses stretching back to Biblical times? How do I make the leap? It’s easy to investigate and find that her story is actually linked to a real event. But what is it that connects it to the whole history of alien involvement? This has to make the bridge from casual reality to science fiction so seamlessly that people don’t even realize that it’s changed. How do I make the connection and to what?
If I’m in third person, I could simply jump to the alien mind and my researcher could be just one more dupe that gets drawn into the web as an accidental witness. Perhaps the real story is taking place above/around us and he is discovering it because there is a faction among the aliens that want to be discovered.
This shifts the story line to one in which the aliens are revealed as not being benign, but as having some significant plan in which earth is the what?? Battleground? Too Ron Hubbard. Pawn? Playing field? Weapon? I can’t tell. Or are we not an insignificant sideline of the ultimate plan, but the plan itself? Perhaps we’ve exceeded our usefulness and are now simply being kept until we exterminate ourselves. What do you do with the leftovers after the experiment is finished? How do you recycle a planet?
22 September 2005
What I’m thinking at the moment is that the story will be one of discovery by an old hippie, seeker of truth. Has been a Christian, Hari Krishna, Pagan, Atheist. Now, through some discovery, has become an accidental witness to the “truth” that even he must struggle to comprehend. Would have been easier to write in the sixties when he could blame it all on Timothy Leary.
I. I am no sage, nor a particularly wise person. I’m certainly no prophet. I’ve always been a seeker of truth in one of its many forms, however, and that, I suppose is what has led me to become a researcher. No, I’m not trying to find a cure for cancer, nor to get the next great scientific breakthrough. You see, I’m a genealogist.
II. Where can the research problem come from that leads into this adventure? Researching a little known family tree line and finding an account by an ancestor about the strange thing he saw that sparked his discovery. Perhaps doing primary research, gathering family stories from an old woman. She suggests that something is going on somewhere. And someone ought to get to the bottom of it.
III. There is a sequence of events that has led up to her story that I uncover a bit at a time. First, an old newspaper article verifying the substance of the story. Then a family Bible that records on this date Emily saw something. In the record, there is a key word that leads to additional research and that takes him along a paper trail of documents that lead back to the Roman Empire. It seems that not only have these people been seeing things for years, but that it is part of the same family for as far back as time can tell.
IV. Carefully work in a commentary regarding the Alien’s conflict that keeps getting the human race involved in places that they are not supposed to be. It is not the human potential to great good things, but the tendency toward gross incompetence that keep having people show up where they are not supposed to be. We discover that one of the aliens is actually facilitating the accidental witnessing.
I. I am no sage, nor a particularly wise person. I’m certainly no prophet. I’ve always been a seeker of truth in one of its many forms, however, and that, I suppose is what has led me to become a researcher. No, I’m not trying to find a cure for cancer, nor to get the next great scientific breakthrough. You see, I’m a genealogist.
II. Where can the research problem come from that leads into this adventure? Researching a little known family tree line and finding an account by an ancestor about the strange thing he saw that sparked his discovery. Perhaps doing primary research, gathering family stories from an old woman. She suggests that something is going on somewhere. And someone ought to get to the bottom of it.
III. There is a sequence of events that has led up to her story that I uncover a bit at a time. First, an old newspaper article verifying the substance of the story. Then a family Bible that records on this date Emily saw something. In the record, there is a key word that leads to additional research and that takes him along a paper trail of documents that lead back to the Roman Empire. It seems that not only have these people been seeing things for years, but that it is part of the same family for as far back as time can tell.
IV. Carefully work in a commentary regarding the Alien’s conflict that keeps getting the human race involved in places that they are not supposed to be. It is not the human potential to great good things, but the tendency toward gross incompetence that keep having people show up where they are not supposed to be. We discover that one of the aliens is actually facilitating the accidental witnessing.
19 September 2005
Accidental Witness
Premise: All the religious events of the world were actually alien interventions in a managed world greenhouse. We see evidence in some of the Biblical events like Enoch walking with God and being “no more”. The marrying of the Elohim among the daughters of men. Elijah taken up in a fiery chariot with Elisha watching. Moses body being wrestled over by Michael and Lucifer with Joshua as a witness. Jesus meeting with Moses and Elijah on the Mount with Peter, John, and Andrew as witnesses. Paul seeing the light on the road to Damascus. We couple that with wise and sometimes conflicting prophets of other cultures like Zoroaster, Mohammed, Buddha, Confucius, and others.
The explanation is that an alien race, greatly long-lived, has orchestrated the growth of earth from primitive cultures to the present. At times the power structure among these aliens shifts and there are shifts in what the program proves to be. And there is the uncertain growth patterns of the world itself. “a great, seething, raw and powerful intelligence that has no personality.”
The trick will be to make a compelling story out of it. There should be a specific goal or task that needs to be accomplished before the world gains its personality. There is a grand design, it just doesn’t happen to involve the mythology that we have created around events that we weren’t supposed to know about, but there were accidental witnesses to them.
I’ll work in the Greek gods and the Titans preceeding them. The alien race moves outside the bounds of time. The universe is a big seedbed of these wild planets that the group of aliens tends like a garden, some with more success than others. From that rises the story.
Premise: All the religious events of the world were actually alien interventions in a managed world greenhouse. We see evidence in some of the Biblical events like Enoch walking with God and being “no more”. The marrying of the Elohim among the daughters of men. Elijah taken up in a fiery chariot with Elisha watching. Moses body being wrestled over by Michael and Lucifer with Joshua as a witness. Jesus meeting with Moses and Elijah on the Mount with Peter, John, and Andrew as witnesses. Paul seeing the light on the road to Damascus. We couple that with wise and sometimes conflicting prophets of other cultures like Zoroaster, Mohammed, Buddha, Confucius, and others.
The explanation is that an alien race, greatly long-lived, has orchestrated the growth of earth from primitive cultures to the present. At times the power structure among these aliens shifts and there are shifts in what the program proves to be. And there is the uncertain growth patterns of the world itself. “a great, seething, raw and powerful intelligence that has no personality.”
The trick will be to make a compelling story out of it. There should be a specific goal or task that needs to be accomplished before the world gains its personality. There is a grand design, it just doesn’t happen to involve the mythology that we have created around events that we weren’t supposed to know about, but there were accidental witnesses to them.
I’ll work in the Greek gods and the Titans preceeding them. The alien race moves outside the bounds of time. The universe is a big seedbed of these wild planets that the group of aliens tends like a garden, some with more success than others. From that rises the story.
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