Writing

Writing, and maybe Inspiration

Like probably every human that is not a profesional writer, I find it fairly difficult to get into a writing flow-state. I then use this as an excuse not to write, and to think I’m bad at it. I’ve never been great at expressing emotions, and even when speaking frequently the words just seem to come from some place other than my brain.

I have recently been inspired to give this writing thing another go. You don’t get better at something by avoiding it, and, as they say in the business, “scared monkey don’t make monkey”.

I once had a book idea

Looking back on it, it still seems like the strangest thing. We were driving back home from the hospital in Peoria from one of my daugher’s many appointments (she had a number of heart defects that still require regular checkups, but thats another story), and I think my brain sorta just clicked into some strange creative gear.

The premise of the book was that a human scientist invented a way to transfer a human’s memory bank, and thus debatably their conscienceness, to another human. However there were a few caveats to making the process work reliably:

1. the recipient needed to be fairly young, say between 5-6 years old, for a whole host of reasons that could go into the book.
2. the recipient should be either an identical twin, or full clone of the “donor”.

This discovery, and its implementation, led to widespread changes in human sociological constructs – from marriage, to professional application, sports, politics, space travel; literally the entire world changed due to this technology.

My flow state thinking about this world, and all the people-impacting-changes and stories that could be told, kept branching and leading me to strange new nuances of the story. Humanity would need to weed out dementia-causing illnesses like Alzheimers, perhaps brutally? Any suicidal tendencies would also need to be rooted out of the idyllic gene-pool, because you wouldn’t want to invest a 10-lifetime memory bank to someone who might just dead-end it.

I still remember driving across the cornfields in Illinois, literally chuckling as I thought about all these things. What would the process look like? I imagined it being turned into some quasi-religious rite-of-passage, where an innocent, normal-looking 5-6 year old is led, robe clad behind some curtain, and emerges with 10 lifetimes worth of knowledge and memory of previously led lives, as if they were its own.

The scientist who created this tech was still alive and being “snap-shotted” to new recipients some 2,000 years later. He’s seen his technology change the world, and is the only one who is still around from the beginning of it all. And as he’s about to be given another award for this world-altering technology, he looks around at all the new problems that have been created, and he regrets it all. So he changes his ruling-class-approved speach and does the one thing he knows that might help end the practice; he urges people to rise against it, pulls out a revolver, and ends his life on live television.

Sheesh.

Anyways, that was the premise of the book. And I’ve sat down, maybe once or twice, to try and start it. I never get very far. I dunno, maybe its too much to tackle without some form of warm-up or practice.

So thats what I’m going to start using this blog for: practice.

There is also some professional development going on here, maybe. My current employment is basically predicated on my ability to transcribe what I learn when I do a thing, so that others going down whatever path I’m on will have an easier & more successful time than I. Writing & summarizing these notes does not come easy to me. But as they say in the business, “practice makes porpoise”.