writing OMBLOCK 001

Section 0001 Entry 0002. Date: 2005 July 24 Sunday.
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After quite a long break from the OOLONG MORBLOCK series I got down to work on it again today.

Decided to focus on the character Ibrahim Chess and to produce a tightly plotted strongly controlled book containing the following elements:-

Jeopardy, luxury (for example, raw squid guts and chicken sashimi -- the luxury of good eating), decision junctions, perversion of expectations, desire, new development, things get worse, effort followed by setback then greater effort, life background (for example, people getting the flu), riot and a generous helping of fantastical explurgaranza.

I got a plot idea. The astrally enabled are seen as dangerous because under certain circumstances some of them can glorst, becoming not ghosts but glorsts, the difference being that glorsts can physically interact with the material world, exerting perhaps ten percent of the strength of a normative human being.

Catastrophe having precipitated a state of emergency, the government of Oolong Morblock rules that every astral must take drugs to nullify their powers. The option of grogs is ruled out because grogs are too dangerously addictive. Accordingly, the use of the steroid Zoner Ten is mandated, a steroid which works as an upper, cutting the need for sleep and making people a bit hyper.

The unexpected side effect (the perversion of expectations) is that the familiars of the astrally enabled get out of control. Also, the city's self-writing graffiti becomes much worse. The out-of-control familiars precipitate a scene of riot.

The government decides to drug all familiars with grogs, treating them as expendable.

Section 0001 Entry 0003. Date: 2005 July 25 Monday.
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The members of a certain minority have a tendency to occasionally explode. On exploding, they become glorsts, glorsts being similar to ghosts. The key difference is that glorsts can act on the material world with about ten percent of their living strength, and often do so with malevolent inent.

This is the premise I've settled on for TO FIND AND WAKE THE DREAMER, the first book in the projected TALES OF OOLONG MORBLOCK series.

The minority involved is the astrally enabled, who constitute two percent of the city state of Oolong Morblock, a city which presents a facade of neon lights to the modern world, but which has complex gothic foundations from which crocodile impulses can sometimes escape, with devastating effects.

The astrally enabled are referred to as "astrals", or, as hostility toward them increases, as "glorsts".

My first big fantasy series, the ten books of the CHRONICLES OF AN AGE OF DARKNESS series, was driven by the Cold War. I get intermittent questions about whether I'm going to continue the series, and my answer tends to be no. Chiefly because the Cold War is over so the underlying dynamo is gone.

My new idea, the idea of glorsts and glorsting ("glorsting" being the explosive self-destruction of a human being which results in the formation of a glorst) seems to me to be just a couple of steps sideways from history as we are living it now, complex and volatile in a satisfactory way.

I've already begun work on plotting and writing TO WAKE AND FIND THE DREAMER. Meantime, I continue with the drudgery of proofreading my way through the final text of BAMBOO HORSES, with a little help from Microsoft's Word, but not much. At a certain point, Word threw in the towel, claiming that there were too many spelling and grammar errors for these to be displayed any more. Which strikes me as gutless nonsense. I have over a gigabyte of memory on the machine I'm working on. How can I possibly have run out of memory?

At the same time, I'm pressing ahead with CANCER PATIENT, and am coming close to having a full text for this medical memoir.

Meantime, on the medical front, I'm taking daily exercise to try to build up my slightly depleted body - the big muscles in my thighs being the portion of my anatomy which has taken the biggest hit - and I've made an appointment with a dentist. I need to get my tooth fixed, the tooth I broke back in ... when was it? February, I think, just before starting chemotherapy.

My dentist put in a temporary filling, promising it would last for some months, and that he would fix it promptly if it didn't last. And he told me to come back when "other issues" had been dealt with. Well, having been through chemotherapy and radiation therapy, I've more or less got the "other issues" behind me, at least, I think, for the purposes of having dental work.

My repaired tooth - I think I'm going to end up having a cap to repair it - is going to be, for me, a significant step back on the road to normality.