Sometimes, e.g. when I look around a Skytrain car and see people’s faces lit in the unholy glow of iPad screens (see “Digital bedlam”)—when I notice the wires dangling from people’s heads, the animated conversations with invisible presences on the part of people sporting no visible gadgetry at all, the poke-poking and thumbing of games and messages and searches for the meaning of life—it seems to me that these changes in our behavior have been sudden. Just last week the world was identifiably the one I grew up in—people who spoke and gesticulated into thin air were nuts—but this week I’m living in a sci-fi world where all these people are crammed in here like sardines on this hot-season afternoon in Bangkok, and yet they aren’t really here. They’re clearly someplace else. And they’re in contact with wherever else they may be. 

But the change hasn’t really been all that sudden.

I wrote “Getting Away from It All”  back in the late 1980s. It provides a nice retrospective on the transition from portable tape players and multi-layered go-go bar cocoons to our current world, where easily 70 percent of the people on any given Skytrain car are plugged into smartphones and other digital devices, busily gaming, texting, browsing the Internet, listening to music and generally being anywhere except where they are now and doing anything except engaging with what's right there in front of them. Some renegades instead watch the incessant commercial crap thoughtfully provided by the BTS on the double video screens they’ve installed in every car, not to mention the giant screens that monopolize the view at the Siam Station platform.

What’s interesting—all these changes are early days, and those still to come are bound to be more radical and even quicker to arrive.

Where will it all end, eh? Whither the individual, whither the collective? Whoa, and whatnot. Woe. Whatever.

Mass communion: Modern people worshipping their smartphones.

(The Telegraph article instead suggests they’re taking photos.)

"Getting away from it all" is a lesser chapter in Bangkok Knights (now out of print).

Following my post regarding Nigel's attempts to kill me, I remembered another myna story, a magazine piece I'd written years ago. How did mynas come to figure so large in my life?

I’m lying there by the pool with last night’s wine pouring out of me, dozing and reading Roddy Doyle by turns, my own Muse stirring within, a touch of the Irish in her voice, rousing me, from time to time, to sit up and drip ink and sweat all over my notebook, brain bubbling away and the whole of the Marina Phuket staff whispering in the shadows as though they have never before heard of mad dogs and suchlike out in Phuket’s midday sun, and I’m lying there just as though I’ve never heard of skin cancer or even heatstroke. Then I hear the dinosaur.

Just a faint roar from the other side of the jungled hillside. A Tyrannosaurus rex. I know this because much of the wine pumping from my pores was imbibed at Dino Park the night before, and I am already acquainted with this Hollywood-standard dinosaur theme park, mini-golf, and restaurant/bar, complete with life-sized dinosaurs of various persuasions and a volcano that erupts every now and then, causing one to spill wine in one’s lap and look around to see who else is thinking of fleeing wildly in all directions.

But that was last night. Now I’m sitting by the pool and I’m watching a myna bird strut across the poolside patio, and it looks just like a dinosaur walking. Not that I’ve ever seen a dinosaur walk. But I have seen Jurassic Park, where the velociraptors or whatever walked — I now realize — exactly like mynahs. Scientists have pretty well established that birds in general are the dinosaurs’ closest living relatives, mind you, so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised to see this myna do the Thunder Lizard Strut.

My club sandwich and fries arrive. Within seconds, I have six myna birds gathered ’round, all of them trying to look as much like dinosaurs as possible. Like big dinosaurs. Literally, they have erected their plumage till they look twice as big as they really are. Chances are they’ve been watching the Discovery Channel, out front in the lobby, and are inflated with the knowledge of their proud ancestry. The subtext, of course, is this: “Back away from the food, human, and run. Hope that we are diverted long enough you can make your getaway.”

Seeing that I intend to hang tough, they employ new tactics. One of them hops right up on the little lounge-side table and leers at my food while two others sneak around behind me on a diversionary mission. But I’m on to them. Foiled again, they begin to get really imaginative. I’ve already been treated to a cacophony of jungle noises, some of them reminiscent of Jurassic Park. One of these avian muggers starts barking, no doubt hoping I’ve been savaged by a pit bull as a child and will now abandon the goodies and run for my room. Another is making a noise like a motorbike horn. Yet another, a ratty street thug with a switchblade, probably figuring I’m deaf or something, has taken to whetting his bill on the poolside pavement. I experience little success in teaching these individuals how to pronounce “bugger off,” although you’d think that would be easy for such obviously talented mimics.

I survive both the attempted mugging and the hangover, as it turns out, and get to enjoy both club sandwich and fries. But, in the course of one day at this excellent Phuket resort hotel, I see lots more wildlife, some of it even more exotic than the dinomynas.

Take the flying lizards, for example … No, no — the hangover has fled by this time, and I am on a strict tea-and-lemonade regimen. I swear. I’m taking tea on the front porch of my room and reading and, on some level, I’m aware of dead leaves drifting down from the jungle foliage. Just as I happen to look up, then, one “leaf” resolves itself as a 10cm lizard, which is at that moment landing on a tree in front of me. My first flying lizard. I sit still, trying to see it better, but it senses my presence and, as lizards will, it scoots, quick as a thought, to the other side of the tree.

Strange to think that the mynas are more closely related to dinosaurs than is this flying reptile, which could be a miniature version of some Spielberg monster. In fact, many millions of years ago one ancient group of Archosaurian reptiles, which included dinosaurs, developed the capacity for real flight — these were the creatures that went on to evolve into the birds. A second group of archosaurs, the pterodactyls and so on, evolved the power to soar and glide, but their wings were mere skin, and lacked the features that made actual flight possible. The flying lizards at Marina Phuket represent a third distinct evolutionary experiment with flight. They also are capable only of soaring and gliding. Either side, between their front and rear limbs, six or seven elongated ribs fan out to support tight drums of skin stretching from arm to leg. Just before the lizard lands on a perch, it swoops sharply upwards, settles, and then folds its “wings” in against its body to go about its business just as though it was your standard-issue lizard.

Visitors get to see all this without ever leaving the hotel grounds. And this is not even to mention the friendly squirrels, or the various tropical birds that flit among the foliage of what amounts to a botanical garden. Or the many vivid butterflies. Depending on the season, visitors may be treated to a squadron of scarlet dragonflies, for instance, engaged in a brief dogfight over the pool with a giddy aerial circus of yellow and orange butterflies.

There’s plenty more as well. And, of course, if you tire of this living fauna, there’s always Dino Park, just over the hill.

Alternatively, a half-day trip will take you to Phuket’s Khao Phra Thaeo forest reserve, which harbours plenty of wildlife, which you may even see, if you have the patience to sit still long enough for the animals to appear. Or you can travel off the island to Koh Sok National Park, on the neighbouring mainland. Gibbons are not uncommonly sighted by hikers here, while wild elephants and tigers still inhabit the remoter recesses of the forest. And there are all the islands up and down the coast, where you stand a good chance of spotting sea eagles, hornbills, crab-eating macaques, and otters at play in the surf. Beneath the sea, of course, there are coral reefs and tens of thousands of marine animal species. Special treats for visiting scuba divers are the whale sharks and manta rays that frequent some of the offshore islands and rock pinnacles.

Or you can just hang around your hotel, depending on where you stay, and see what unlikely creature pops up next, raising the question of whether this thing is really real or merely a side-effect of too much wine and the midday sun.

But read on, because I have a new, improved theory. Recently, in fact, I myself almost fell victim to an especially devious homicide attempt.

A couple of myna birds have taken to nesting in a cozy niche outside my eighth-floor kitchen window. Enthusiastic progenitors of their species, they raise new broods at the rate my Sara tends to need new shoes. They are also strongly territorial, especially when they have young. Thus Nigel, the male, flies shrieking at my head every time I stick my head out the window, which is at least once a morning because I like to annoy him. Sometimes he’ll swoop three or four times in quick succession, close enough I feel the wingwash brush my face, before he settles on the ledge outside. At that point, he cocks a calculating eye at me all the while he makes rather pleasant chuckling sounds.

Slowly but surely, in fact, I felt we were becoming friends. I was wrong. This was merely Nigel in plotting mode. Never trust a chuckling myna.

I’ve long had much respect for the intelligence of certain birds (see, e.g., “Big bird brains rool, OK!”). But Nigel stands in a class of his own. This day, after the usual vicious dive-bombing raids, he parked just outside arm’s reach. Nothing new there. But then he started hop-skipping in a strange way—the feathers on his head gone all punky and him peering awkwardly back over his shoulder at me—till he was three meters away along the ledge. Then he stopped to perform an admirable impression of the Hunchback of Notre Dame, toppling up on one leg, if you can believe that, and gazing back over a shoulder with great malice.

In Canada, when I was a kid, we’d sometimes come across partridges in the forest that would feign a broken wing, dragging themselves away from their nest as though to say, “This way for an easy meal.” (This neat, and entirely instinctive, trick actually gave the game away, of course, telling us exactly which way their nests lay). So my first thought was this: Given the consistent failure of intimidation, Nigel has conceived this all-bunged-up act as a means of diverting me from his nest.

I retreated to make tea before sticking my head out again. This time he performed just one pro forma diving-bombing and then went straight into his new schtick: “Look at poor me, I’m a twisted wreck of a bird. Yeah, and why don’t you just come out here and try to get me, eh?”

And I saw more than malice in the glitter of the one eye Nigel aimed back over his shoulder—it included a distinct hypnotic quality. He was virtually willing me out onto that ledge.

My blood ran cold, his plan revealed to me with brutal clarity. As I climbed out to sidle in pursuit along this 10cm-wide precipice, he planned to whirl up and go for my eyes.

No question. Nigel intended to kill me.

It was only later, over breakfast, that it struck me. How many other unwitting residents of this fair city have been lured by mynas out onto window ledges and then sent plunging to their untimely deaths?

I neglected to get video footage of this behavior (of which, incidentally, I can find no record on the Web). But I’m going to encourage Nevil to try again, and, supposing I do get it on film, I’ll post it here.

“Just be careful,” says Sara. “I'll bet Nigel’s working on Plan C already.” And her voice tells me the smart money’s on Nigel.

Vertically walleyed: A new affliction, an occupational hazard for the digitally connected and cool, a neologism of sorts coined right here and right now.

“My students tell me about an important new skill: it involves maintaining eye contact with someone while you text someone else; it’s hard, but it can be done.”

That’s from a great NY Times article by Sherry Turkle, “The Flight from Conversation.” And this advice has expanded my notion of what’s fittin’ and what ain’t in this modern digital age. And it has led me to wonder how many other surprising rules of courteous, or at least cool, behavior I might collect.

More rules for the cool and maybe even courteous

What follows isn’t as interesting as Turkle’s observations, but maybe it’ll encourage others to ante up rules of their own.

One rule that’s needed, in my opinion, and evidently in Doug Savage’s: If you’re going to use your phone in a public place, try to find somewhere you won’t disturb others.

Also in terms of telephone etiquette, I believe it’s becoming increasingly accepted that you should send an SMS first, asking whether it’s okay to interrupt with a phone call. Mind you, my own experience suggests that, more and more, all that ensues is an exchange of SMSs, with emoticons doing a wan job of substituting for non-verbal input.

Here’s another situation that has yet to find its proper etiquette. More and more often, these days, you find yourself in the middle of some classic “absent presence” situation. You may be parked in a restaurant with four or five friends, e.g., and they’ve all buggered off somewhere via their iPhones and iPads, except for one who’s asleep; and you know you shouldn’t, but you yourself enter into an SMS exchange with your brother in Vancouver.

Before doing this, however, you announce, “I really do apologize. I know this is rude, and a sign of the times, with civility being corroded by all our gadgetry and digital connectedness combined with effective absence and everything, but I do have to take just a minute, okay? I have to say something to my brother in Vancouver.”

Whatever, eh? Nobody’s really there anyway, so they haven’t heard what you said and, even if they have, they merely wonder at your eccentricity and take to thumbing their keyboards even more furiously. (See my earlier post, “From absent presence to omnipresence.”)

Then there are the people who, right in the middle of what you thought was a conversation, will hop onto smartphone or tablet computer to seek  the answer to a question, maybe provide a gloss on something they’ve just told you. Let’s say you’ve never heard of Rachel Weisz. Next thing you know you’re being presented with photos of her in various states of dress, with a Wikipedia bio, maybe even with her phone number. Wait. Did the first outbreak of “Saturday Night Fever” occur in 1977 or 1978? Just hang on a sec’. Not that you really give a damn, but the answer will arrive momentarily.

This kind of thing doesn’t conduce to real conversation. What unfolds is more an exchange of information, rather than the exchange and mutual development of ideas. This is how Sherry Turkle, in the NY Times article cited above, characterizes real conversation: “In conversation we tend to one another [my italics]... We can attend to tone and nuance. In conversation, we are called upon to see things from another’s point of view.”

Technology eroding our native capacities?

The new modes of connectedness may be having uncertain effects on the way we think and our very capacities to do things. For example, there appears to be a growing inclination to rely on the Web as a one-stop shop for anything we need to know or remember. It reminds me of those who’ve grown up with calculators and see no need to remember the multiplication tables or how to perform long division. It reminds me of my longstanding reluctance to consult a thesaurus except as a last resort, since I’m afraid that too much dependence on it will gradually erode my native capacity to think creatively about word choice. In fact, the Web begins to resemble something like a collective memory and collective consciousness, and the main individual intelligence and experience we wind up cultivating may be skills needed to access the Cloud.

Prophets of doom vs. Pollyannas

All my doomsaying also reminds me of all the scholarly Pollyannas who perennially refer to Socrates and his warnings regarding the growing popularity of the written word. He was convinced this fad would eventually destroy our capacity to remember things on our own. Of course to some extent he was right, but there are good arguments to the effect that we’ve gained far more from written language than we’ve lost. And maybe today’s Pollyannas are right, and we’ll gain far more than we lose from the new technology and the concomitant changes in ourselves as individuals and communities.

Maybe.  

Anyway, does anyone have other new rules for the digital age they’d like to propose? Just by way of priming the pump:

* How to Behave: New Rules for Highly Evolved Humans (Wired, 15/07/09).

* Rushkoff’s Rules for the Digital Age.

* Business Etiquette: The New Rules in a Digital Age (Google this for a PDF version).

Special bonus video: Here’s a somewhat dated interview with Sherry Turkle regarding what was then her new book Alone Together. 

Now the AP Stylebook has reversed its position. And in the streets there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth as right-thinking editors everywhere protest the onslaught of lexical entropy to the point, some fear, we'll be left to describe human experience with nothing but "whatever" and "huh!"

In breaking news, Shakespeare has been disinterred by a team of archaeologists and mediums in search of authoritative opinion on this matter. All he had to say, reportedly, was, "Whatever, eh? I'm dead, and I don't give a damn." This has already inspired nearly a score of PhD dissertations aiming to determine the extent to which Shakespeare was Canadian, and how this could be.

Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes Bookstore

While I’m waxing reactionary, can anyone tell me why all the world has sunk into using “in excess of” (three words) when “more than” (two words) or “greater than” has sufficed for generations? Does “in excess of” carry extra heft, some perhaps only spurious authority, because of its relative complexity and Latinate pretention, excesses of which characterize both bureaucratese and bad academese?

Or am I missing a genuine semantic distinction? Would Shakespeare care, if we woke him up again and asked?

I’m supplying links to those that have gone before, and invite ideas from you—“you” being that mythical creature, the real, live visitor to Collin’s blogsite—for other occupational hazards that afflict writers. Contributions from writers, writers-to-be, readers and the general public welcome.

1. Godwotterous writerly brain syndrome

2. Some good things to do with an internet addiction

3. Emotional opportunism/spiritual callousing

4. Can the novel survive the demise of novelists?

5. Plagiarism

6. Freeing the teabags

7. Ersatz creativity I: Boozing

8. Distractions: New frontiers in creative foreplay

9. Addictions, spinal deficiencies and disciplinary infinite regresses

12 nouvelles de John Burdett, Christopher G. Moore, Colin Cotterill, Stephen Leather, Pico Iyer, Timothy Hallinan, Dean Barrett, Eric Stone, Tew Bunnag, Alex Kerr, Vasit Dejkunjorn, Collin Piprell.

Heaven Lake Press and John Burdett, Stephen Leather, Pico Iyer, Colin Cotterill, Christopher G. Moore, Tew Bunnag, Timothy Hallinan, Alex Kerr, Dean Barrett, Vasit Dejkunjorn, Eric Stone, Collin Piprell are proud to have donated proceeds from the sale of Bangkok Noir to support the education of the 5 students below.

Michel Hudon (m.hudon51@videotron.ca) has translated "Hot Enough to Kill," my contribution to Bangkok Noir. He has also translated my book Bangkok Knights, now out of print in English, and he's looking for a publisher.)

As I should be looking for someone to republish the English version, supposing I ever get off my lazy butt, eh?

Or try yet another comic version of Bangkok's darker side:

Print copy (Amazon).

E-book (Smashwords * Kindle)

But there’s a fix, one that doesn’t mean we have to begin reproducing asexually if we want to persist to the planarian extent. Of necessity, I’ll argue, we’re already, always and forever, living in our “afterlife.”

Having our sex and living forever too

Here’s my theory, for whatever it’s worth, and in full knowledge that I may well have reinvented the bicycle yet again (and that these arguments will make Bill the Mathematician’s eyes bulge with indignation).

First I’ll ask you to read the following epigraph to a short story involving serial suicide leading to redemption I wrote many years ago and never got around to publishing. (What’s the hurry, eh? At least in light of the cosmological scheme about to unfold before Bill’s bulging eyes.)

One way to make sense of quantum theory is to view our universe as an infinite number of overlapping, superimposed realities which are split apart into separate, alternative worlds each time an observation is made, with the result that the universe is constantly splitting into innumerable near copies of itself. …

[O]ur own bodies are part of the world, and they too are split and split again. Not only our bodies, but our brains and, presumably, our consciousness is being repeatedly multiplied, each copy becoming a thinking, feeling human being inhabiting another universe much like the one we see around us. … This vast multiplicity of realities raises an intriguing question: why do we find ourselves living in this particular universe rather than one of the myriad of others? Is there anything special about this one, or is our presence here simply random?

Paul Davies, Other Worlds: Space, Superspace and the Quantum Universe

Immortality for secularists

Let me introduce you to Joe Atheist, and let’s say circumstances conspire to kill him. He’s walking down the street one sunny afternoon and he’s flattened by a piano that drops from just outside a fourth-floor apartment.

In adjacent Universe A1, Joe quite likely dies a similar death at about the same time, circumstances in A1 being much the same here as they are in the first universe—and as they are in an infinite number of other adjacent worlds wherein Joe dies in this way.

As we move from the infinite number of Universe A1s to the infinite number of Universe A2s and then to the A3s and so on, things get more and more different. Joe A remains much the same person, and his consciousness is virtually identical across them, and events leading to his close encounter with the piano remain similar.

At some point(s), though, circumstances become different enough—perhaps metal fatigue in a bolt on the block and tackle doesn’t become critical till a second later, and the piano misses Joe by inches. Or Joe sleeps through his snooze alarm and takes a taxi instead of walking. And this Joe goes on enjoying life till he’s killed by a rogue cleanerbot 15 years later.

Generalizing from Joe’s experiences, maybe the conscious me that prevails, no matter what happens to any given instance, or probability, of me parallels the quantum particle that is really a superposition of every probability, of all potential positions and momentums, of every state it could be in, where one particular observation collapses it as this particle, with this position and momentum, determining one state of affairs as that one prevailing.

The “original” Joe Atheist is dead—in some sense, maybe to the extent that this universe, from Joe’s POV, is no more—as perhaps are Joes A1 through A1+n dead in a succession of adjacent universes. But Joe’s consciousness effectively persists in Joe A11 and in 11+n Joes who are aware only of a close call, and they thank their lucky stars.

In short, every time Joe, or you or me, is killed, a cognate consciousness persists in the next most adjacent universe(s) where circumstances are sufficiently different to avert that particular death. Your continuous sense of self persists in adjacent versions of your selves, always with “your” sense that there’s just one of you.

Given that every event, every decision in the universe, causes that universe (whichever universe is currently “that” one) to branch, and so on and so on, successively adjacent worlds proliferating constantly without end, we can say that each and every one of us conscious beings is necessarily immortal. Every time one of our determinates snuffs it, our sense of self and consciousness segues seamlessly right into the next most feasible universe, and we’re never any the wiser regarding the no doubt infinite occasions of our demise, which are never really untimely, since we see now that death holds no real sting.

The question arises, of course, how do we empirically test this fine hypothesis, potential solace to one and all, including skeptics of every ilk except for those who won’t buy the infinite-universe model we’re dealing with here? If we do buy it, then the only reasonably ethical test that springs to mind is suicide, just to see what happens. Indeed, scientific rigor would suggest a series of suicides.

The problem is that we have no evidence our consciousness has any awareness of its cognates in adjacent universes. So you will always be conscious of yourself in the here and now, not in your experience of the not here but instead there. And you can never actually die, no matter how hard you try to kill yourself, since in the manifold of constantly bifurcating universes circumstances will never conspire to have you succeed in killing yourself, at least from the POV of your consciousness. Okay?

So we’re left, I would argue, with no more than a logically persuasive theory of necessary and inevitable immortality. Empirical proofs will have to wait.

In summary, and referring back to the Paul Davies epigraph, above, it’s hard to see how we aren’t all immortal—that every time circumstances “kill” us, we don’t really die. Our sense of self persists in some adjacent universe, probably a bunch of them, where things are different enough we’re still pretty much who we were but in circumstances where we didn’t die. And even if that next version of us is killed right afterwards, we’re still conscious in the next manifold of adjacent worlds. And so on, with some version of “me,” related more or less closely by family resemblances, slipping and sliding, bobbing and weaving and always there, somewhere. Always alive. Never conscious of ever having actually died.

Like it or not, death is always circumvented by a persisting contiguous consciousness in some other universe(s).

In fact, each and every one of us is always alive at various different ages, maybe all of them, in all kinds of different circumstances, in an infinite number of universes. All at the same time. Where unfortunate happenstance extinguishes any one of these expressions of a personality, at any age, adjacent versions remain self-conscious yet unaware of this, though they may well go, “Whoa! That was a close call,” as the car that nearly hit them speeds away. Or the piano flattens the person right in front of them.

An infinity of other (potential) universes, meanwhile, has never included any version of who “you” are, and never will.

That much is plain. (And that loud pop-pop, just now, was Bill the Mathematicians eyeballs exploding with indignation.)

Heaven and hell for secularists

Corollary 1:

Live hard and live fast, for we are, each and every one of us, by nature bulletproof.

Corollary 2 (also a caveat regarding Corollary 1):

To the extent you can act in ways that make your current determinate self and the universe with which it is coupled a better one—i.e. in terms of the prospective conditions it would provide for a happy outcome in your determination in a next-most didn’t-die adjacent world, you should live “well,” i.e. in a moral and ethical manner. And--to the extent that makes it more likely your own next determination will try to act in a similar way--you thereby optimize the chances your person (consciousness, “self,” personality) will then manifest in worlds progressively more conducive to a good life. (And I reinvent the bicycle, again and again, without end. See Robert Thurman’s Infinite Life for a Buddhism-inspired take on immortality.)

Behaving badly, of course, will tend to have the converse effect.

And Bob’s yer uncle, eh? Not only have we provided a palatable concept of immortality for Joe Atheist, we’ve established secular grounds for a heaven and hell.

I’ll leave my arguments for the non-existence of Richard Dawkins for another occasion.

* A friend has sent me a link to “Quantum Suicide: How to Prove the Multiverse Exists, in the Most Violent Way Possible,”something I’ve read only after writing the foregoing. It presents a nice take on the suicide test we’ve proposed.

* A recent Boston Review essay considered a few thinkers and their various takes on the afterlife. Go ahead and read it, if you enjoy philosophers dancing on the heads of pins.

Savage Chickens cartoon used with permission.

The second multiple universe cartoon is from Max Tegmark's website.

Adopt a new writing program? Sure. Classic avoidance behavior, combined with the “let’s buy a new guitar because the old one doesn’t work” syndrome. Or was Scrivener something my writing project direly needed? Could this be the Rx for godwotterous writerly brain syndrome?

I’ve been thinking about the plasticity of the brain, and the notion that everyone from musicians to London taxi drivers grow relevant volumes of brain—in some cases, I’m going to imagine, positively Schwartzeneggerian neural structures—to cope with what they need to know and do. I’ve also been thinking about the way my speculative trilogy has been going (call it science fiction if you must), and I fear my own brain is evolving in parallel with the novels.

My question: Might my brain be starting to resemble what the Brits describe as an architectural folly? That’s right. Mirroring the trilogy, it could be effectively growing turrets, niches full of neo-classical statuary, ramparts and doodahs on all sides, probably surrounded by a godwotterous garden in which you could lose an army. What kind of writerly Muse would want to live in a joint like that, eh?

I have another question, one perhaps best addressed to a psychiatrist. What happens when—supposing I finish it—this unlikely novelistic epic succeeds? Will the neural scaffolding then remain, a rambling, ramshackle folly standing in a garden full of grottos and gazebos and arbors and obelisks? Not to mention pink flamingoes and gnomes? Christ. What will I be able to do with a brain like that? Except maybe embark on another trilogy. The horror, eh?

Given the number of digital and hard-copy files, and notes and working drafts that have accumulated over the years as I scribbled bits in the interstices between bread-and-butter gigs as a writer/editor, even my freakishly refashioned mind would have to fold at the thought of making sense of it all. (Better, perhaps, I simply burn the lot of it and set out afresh.)

Except that I’ve been given new hope.

I’m now working in a program called Scrivener, which I heartily recommend to writers and researchers everywhere.

I’ve long resisted the idea of having software programmers decide they know better than I do how to proceed. But Scrivener doesn’t work that way. It has itself evolved over the past few years in light of feedback from working wordsmiths, and it’s an entirely unobtrusive, unpresumptuous, endlessly flexible godsend. It works. Magnificently, it works.

Here’s a link to a review that helped swing me.

I’m not even getting a commission.