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This is another one of my random musings. I was sitting here thinking in the wee hours of the morning, just thinking about how in just a few more hours my wife is going to be on a dive boat out in the ocean from the Bahamas. We thought at first, essentially she would be totally out of contact for 5 days. But a quick check of the coverage maps revealed that out in the ocean, there are these tiny islands near where she is diving. They look like sandbars on the map, tiny islands compared even to the Bahamas. And on these tiny little dirt clods, someone has stuck a cellphone tower. So, maybe I will be getting daily reports on the observed sea-life.
I began to remember the stuff from the Tech Bubble days. I remember sitting at the base of a waterfall in Yosemite National Park with my first cell phone. It was about the size and weight of a brick (no kidding, it was that big). I phoned my parents from the base of the waterfall and said, "Hey mom and dad, I'm in the middle of nowhere, hear the waterfall?" It was just amazing to me that you could phone from the middle of a forest. That phone was subsidized by the company I was working for at the time, which allowed a young family to afford it. It was an era of intellectual irreverence where the sky was the limit. I just had to put up this old picture from that era. And yes, I actually did wear these clothes to work. The company wanted my mind, not my social compliance.
In fact, the company found 250 compulsive, obsessive, perfectionist souls, gave them half a billion dollars, wired their cubes with fiber optics when everyone else thought 10 megabit networking was fast, and wired our houses with network connections to the company. We never slept and we worked ourselves into the ground. Some of us didn't fare so well with the governor removed from our engines. It is truly scary when a company profiles their prospective hires and people you may rarely run into become the people you work with everyday. You are surrounded and drowning in your own flaws everywhere you look. It was fantasy money and fantasy goals that drove fantasy expectations. It was the bubble, where seeing your family required precision planning. I used to take my daughter to work some evenings. It was always easier to talk to her if I got her to do my work so I could focus on talking to her. She was better at multitasking. She drove her Montessori teachers at that time, who felt there was a definite sequential way that everything had to work, totally out of their minds when she would lay assignments in 3 different subjects out on the desk and work them simultaneously. They used to complain about it to me. I lived in a bubble. So I responded, huh? The bubble was good for my wife as well because after halfway finishing 5 different degrees, she found one she liked; she finished it and her career took off like a rocket. Yes, her company footed the bill with fantasy money.
The thing about living in a bubble is that you can't see the walls. You don't realize you are in a bubble. I took my daughter to see NASA (the space center) south of Houston (my parents lived not too far away at the time). We visited their bookstore and one of those strange happenings occurred you never connect to anything else. Two elementary school teachers were talking about a book they had found, saying how great it would be for their 6th grade class. My daughter turns to me and says, "But dad, you read that to me in first grade." I just shrugged. I didn't really connect that with the fact that for some reason, my smiling child was breaking pencils in half occasionally during her Montessori elementary classes. Puzzling. We were still in the bubble.
As the bubble progressed, schools began to crop up based on new ideas. New ways to teach that would really propel kids learning. My daughter went to the new middle school. They used and taught the use of computers extensively. My daughter seemed to figure out a neat web trick to protect images on a website. It took some poor guy at Yahoo a while to realize he was trying to squeeze that bit of tech from a seventh grader. He kind of lost interest when he realized who was at the other end of the connection.
Well hmm. I guess new isn't always better. The bubble popped. And innovation had the life crushed out of it. Meanwhile, my expectations of the new school had the life crushed out of them. What a disaster. A bit of screaming at the science curriculum (by my kid). The school was a disaster. The tech industry was a disaster. Fantasy money disappeared. School improvement money disappeared. And so on. And it was just a downhill slide for California schools.
So now for the punch line. Many of the target readership of my book were born around the time the bubble popped, around the time innovation and unbridled intellectual curiosity were crushed to death in favor of survivalistic strategies in approach to life, education, work. The bubble money is gone. Normal funding is failing. What will be the future for these teen readers? How will we ever rekindle the innovative spark in them? There are no large sums of money to be thrown at it. But there are many of us bubble survivors still around. And we still dream. Which is why I wrote my book. To instill a few dreams. After all, dreams form the basis for innovation.
In writing The Saeshell Book of Time serial novel, I intended to empathize with the journey a gifted child takes and metaphorize it into a science fiction/fantasy novel. I also intended to pass on a bit of philosophical thinking that can help those children analyze and cope with events they encounter in the world. After having been through three major drafts and having read some literature recently on giftedness, I realize one thing that I probably didn't do well is incorporate a sense of the heightened physical senses that sometimes become part of that journey. Mostly, the novel focuses on the heightened empathy.
I thought a bit about why that happened. Having heightened senses myself, you would think that I would include some of that in the novel. But then I realized there are two problems. The first is that humans really can't convey emotions or observation by our senses in our language. How do people write about sensory information? They use a metaphor that is meant to convey the information. The metaphor is usually a description of a person's reaction or an analogy for something all people experience inside when their senses are stimulated in a particular way. There is only one problem with these two methods of conveyance. What if I am not wired like you are? What if I experience things differently. I'll talk about it more in a minute, but just try and tell someone about being wired differently and see what you get.
If you experience things differently, there is no shared experience that can be conveyed between you and another person via some symbolic metaphor. It just doesn't exist. There is very little way to carry the actual raw data of the experience. I could say, for example, that certain color combinations are practically like a narcotic to me or that certain frequencies of sounds can cause total paralysis of my mind. You write that and people will say huh? That guy is kind of messed up. Which leads to the second aspect of this.
Negative feedback throughout your life, which causes you to suppress your senses and simulate in your mind what other people perceive. Imagine a simple scenario: My wife has a lightly scented pleasant smelling hand creme that she puts on in the next room. Husband's reaction: complaining and running for the nearest fresh air outlet. Wow, that can lead to a pleasant conversation. Or perhaps I'm out browsing the world and discover a tree, where the patterns of the veins in the leaves combined with the colors is extremely fascinating. Hey, dude, IT'S A TREE! Or perhaps in the overload case, where the patterns become so intricate that it produces a kind of pain in my brain, which copes by seeing nothing, frustrating people trying to share it with me. You get the idea.
So as I sit here trying to increase the characterization of the characters in the novel, I realize that due to this mental conditioning in my upbringing, which is refreshed on a daily basis in one way or another, I totally ignore a whole dimension in a character's persona. And I am at a loss for a way or the guts to express it.
If I could dream,
I would dream of a land,
Filled with perpetual childhood and fairies,
Where knowledge was a touch screen away,
And dreams materialized into reality.
Energy would be plentiful, and power even me,
And a motherly computer would put me to bed at night,
Filling my mind with imagery.
New friends would be a button push away,
Filled with minds that care,
The machine that would make them would pop them out,
Filled with dreams to share.
We would talk of knowledge and things to explore,
We would stare at the stars at night,
A single thought would send us there,
Admiring new forms of life.
If I could dream, I would fall asleep,
And dream even more,
But if people discovered my secret dreams,
They would know I was a Child of Sophista.
This is one of those blog entries you will just have to suffer through. I was sitting here musing just thinking about my latest frustration and for some perverted reason, I decided to start making a list of things that truly frustrate me.
1. First of all, there is the "I don't care frustration." This can occur in several contexts. For example, you are watching some technologically sophisticated show. Like tonight, I was watching Disney's World of Color show. I sitting there looking at beautiful colors being projected through lighted water streams. I don't know, just call it my weirdness, I find myself just sitting there checking the color purity so I could try and determine if they were using some kind of high intensity LED technology. I knew better than to try and discuss this aloud with adjacent people because I knew I would get the response, "Who cares, it's enough it works and looks cool." Another version of this is when someone says, "I just use it, I don't care how it works."
2. I step outside and I am immediately struck by the beauty of the day. The colors of the leaves are intoxicating they are so vivid. All around me, in the life scurrying around and in the weather, there are patterns I can see. It is one of those rare times the outdoors has become a symphony. The numerous patterns all seem to dance in a coordinated rhythm. Because I can see the trees over a large distance, I suddenly see pressure waves as patterns form in the way the leaves are blowing. It's so weird that no matter happens with a fluid such as air, that sound waves are generated in it as a result of any action. I wonder if I could listen to the waves being generated and their pattern, if, for example, could I be told a tale of how a certain weather pattern was generated and where it is going. I know if I tell someone my weird idea that they are not going to think about it anyway. Likely, if they don't tag me as a total nut job, they will just throw at me some equations (those impossible to understand fluid equations) and just walk away.
3. I don't know why, but ever since I was little, the first thing I ever do when I meet a person is that I map the person's mind. It's fascinating how different people think. I think I really started doing this in my over crowded third grade classroom. There was a box in the teacher's mind. If you went outside that box you got smacked. So it was good to know where the bounds of that box was. I learned from that, that if I ever accidentally crossed that box's boundary, the fastest way to quell an aggressive response is to give a person a path to humiliate me. If I did that, it stopped them in their tracks. And I secretly win, because I controlled their mind.
Anyway, that's a digression. I sat down the other day and tried to map the profoundly gifted mind based on the knowledge I've acquired so far. I sat there and thought, "Gee, this kind of person probably thinks on a mathematical level 10 times greater than I do (Yes, my mind frequently wanders like that, its one of its more amusing properties). When I think that way, it always makes me feel like even more of an idiot in math (I have a love/hate relationship with the subject). It's times like that that my perversity really shows. A math problem pops into my head. I have a burning desire to know the answer to this problem. Probably a stupid misunderstanding on my part. I wondered if such problems ever pop into their minds, even at a young age. I am going to be obnoxious and write out the problem. I know you didn't want to hear the problem, but the beauty of a blog is I can write it anyway. I was thinking about the number pi. It's irrational. So that means that as you compute it, it approaches asymptotically some real number. So I take a compass, set it to an integer length, and then draw a circle. Then I compute the circumference, you know the old formula drilled into your head early in your educational life, 2 times pi times the radius. Hmm. I don't understand. The circumference is an irrational number. That means that as I calculate the circumference, the ends of the arc that is just about to become a circle approach each other, asymptotically. But they can never touch because it is an asymptote. Yet I know they do. I just drew it. As far as I know, if I were to measure the circumference around the circle, a physical measurement can't come up to be an irrational number.
4. Oh well, now I feel truly stupid for not knowing the answer to the paradox. So now I will stop musing and go back to thinking about mundane things where I belong.
This feedback is from a highly/profoundly gifted kid and their program administrator. My impression of gifted verses highly gifted kids is that highly gifted kids tend to have an emphasis on cognitive thinking and less emphasis than gifted kids on the emotional perception of things. This is just my impression based on very limited experience.
I base this on the fact that the emotion impact of the storyline seems to have no impact here but in other gifted kids seemed to have a much stronger impact.
Feedback #1:
Kid1 overall impression is that the premise of the story was interesting but he felt like it was written for a little kid because of the "Mommy" and "Daddy" stuff, simple sentence structure and lack of depth in the discussion of topics like DNA, atomic structure, war and death. He felt like it sounded like someone trying to explain these topics to a preschooler. Kid1 asked if he was going to be required to read more of it. This is from a kid with about 50 linear feet of double stacked sci-fi fantasy in his room and who finished your book in under one hour.
Wow, this paragraph packs a lot of information, even more than meets the eye. Mommy and Daddy is used by a first grade character. Almost all the characters are seventh grade and younger. If they are older than first grade when they use those terms, it is to represent extreme endearment to their parents or adoptive parents.
One characteristic of gifted students that this targeted toward is that they feel emotion strongly.
Simple sentence structure: There are two different reasons for that. Stretches of simple sentence structure is meant to convey extreme emotion or rapid action. This akin to a person pumped up on adrenaline and not being able to string long sentences together. In the remainder of the text, I by choice did not use complicated sentence structure. I wanted the Lexile for the text to place it at mid-fifth grade level to mid-sixth grade level. Most middle school books target that level. There is no drawback to using that level. Philosophical, emotional, and social ideas can be conveyed very well at that level. Gifted students are all over the map in terms of reading ability. Having a reading disability myself, I feel that the simplest language that fully conveys those ideas is the best. My focus is on conveyance of the ideas.
Though for some other people, the book is science heavy, this is not meant to be in the slightest breaking ground on basic DNA or atomic structure. There is a section in there where I talk about simple chemical repair of DNA. There are some references on emerging techniques for that. But those are very scientific papers and what I considered beyond the range of gifted middle school students unless that is their particular area of talent. The story mentions that the repair compound is a methylated compound. You might want to research the references and see if a methylated compound could be used for this purpose and if not, what are the classes of compounds that perform this function. Since this is a fantasy book, I am not sure much of what is discussed there is even possible according to physics. So I'm not sure what the point of going into nonexistent science would be.
As far as life and death, I offer no opinions whatsoever. What you have there is a bunch a questions. For example, if you disintegrate a person resulting in a complete mathematical description of them, and then used that description to bring them back exactly as they were, would they be the same person or one that thinks they are. Is it okay to kill a person if you can bring them back to exactly the same state as before with no memory of them being killed (even though they suffered in the process of dying)? Is it possible to produce a deterministic result when all brains evolved in a randomness driven process? You see, this is really a book of philosophy with a nice little story wrapped around it. It presses the emotional limits of the reader. It's designed to make the reader to want to consider the nature of life and their purpose for living. Do the character's emotional needs resemble yours in any way? The book is a gateway to interesting ideas and topics, not a treatise on them.
I guess one of the most disturbing things about the feedback is that I wrote the book to take the reader down a particular path and instead the reader chose to go down a different path. I will have to think about how to put in a bigger hint about what the true argument of the book really is. I'm also sad that it may not be realistic for me to reach this demographic, given what this highly gifted kid thinks is important.
There is more feedback but this was getting long so I am cutting it off for now.
Demographic: 6th grade boy, Northern CA.
This feedback is for Installment #3.
My favorite character has changed from Paul7 to Elof2. My favorite chapter is chapter 14, Paradise Lost because the whole 3rd part has been building up to it and in that chapter all "explodes."
[That was a very intense chapter. I'm glad you liked it and it didn't scare you. I was worried when I originally wrote it that it was too scary.]
