It occurs to me that my blog should be about something. It could be political, literary or personal. It could be a meandering rant of incoherent rage and delirium tinged with occasional brilliance. It could be a mundane listing of things I did and/or thought about during the day. It could be a sparse affair, updated rarely or a long-winded justification of my daily existence. And, in fact, it might be all of these things. But what is it about? Who knows. Let’s just improvise our way through it and see what kind of creature it evolves into.

Today, I began in earnest my research for novel #3, working title: Cycler. It concerns the psychosexual adventures of a teenage girl who wakes up one day as a teenage boy. Before long, she discovers that this “condition” is in fact cyclical. She turns into a boy for one week out of every month. It’s a kind of Jekyl and Hyde version of PMS. In an effort to maintain some semblance of a “normal” life, the girl–let’s call her Jill–undergoes self-hypnosis every time she turns back into a girl so she can forget her days as a boy–let’s call him Jack.

In addition to reading all kinds of cool stuff about Neurolinguistic Programming, and self-hypnosis, today I came across the fascinating case study of a woman with multiple personality disorder. It’s an old study so they called her condition “coconsciousness.” What was so fascinating was that personality B had amnesia with respect to personality A, but A could remember B with perfect clarity. Granted, this case study was posted by The Survivalist Society, an organization devoted to the study of “survival after death and psychical research.” Not exactly the American Medical Association, mind you. But this is one of the great advantages of being a science fiction writer as opposed to a scientist. You can use all kinds of crackpot theories and discredited scientific paradigms to weave your stories because they’re fictional.

The above benefit, by the way, does not place science fiction writers in the same category as, say, the charlatans of organized religion. Main difference: we admit we’re making shit up. They don’t. But that’s a topic for another day.

So there you have it. Blog post #1. Let’s just see where it goes from here.

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