New Claire Soliloquy

I wrote a gorgeous passage last night lying in bed with my trusty Mirado Black Warrior and notebook. I didn't want to waste time firing up the desktop, fearful of losing the immediacy of the words. I now have two critical Claire soliloquies written that I'll fit in when they're needed. This latest inspiration revolves around Niagara Falls and it came upon me that this location will play a pretty important part in book 3 if I ever get that far. What I wrote last night is a bit of dialog wherein Claire tries to explain how her talent works and how it doesn't. How it doesn't work is how the current research being done in the field of remote viewing describes the process. It's completely contrary to all that, in fact, which is great for me because it frees me up from having to have a rigid procedure and using existing terminology. I get to create my own descriptions of it from scratch. Awesome! Or daunting since I also get to create all my own experiments for David to conduct...and I'm not on David's level of genius by far. And I'm not a scientist. So that's the hard part.

The easy part will be when I get to the point of describing what Claire can do that no one else can, it's going to be so much fun to write. I'm really going to get to stretch out and light up the page. But I'm not there yet, and I have to be extra careful to strip Claire's day-to-day activities to their bare, ordinary essentials with a minimum of color so as to make her extraordinary passages really pop and stand out from the rest of her life. That will take a lot of restraint for me. I'm worried about readers getting bored with Claire's life in the first oh, say, six chapters. Claire isn't all that interesting outside of her talent and her penchant for being a little dreamy and prosy. If I take out the dreaminess and prosy-ness to highlight her talent when it comes into play several chapters in, then won't those introductory chapters get dull? Maybe I'll force David to take the brunt of keeping reader interest. All of his interesting dilemmas manifest early on anyway, then he sort of drops away into his studies and doesn't reassert himself until...book 2, I guess.

One difficulty I'm struggling with is that David being a serious academic in the field of Cognitive Sciences and then going all rogue and delving into psi (however rigidly scientific his interest may be) is going to piss off a lot of cognitive scientists! I brought the subject up to my research partner and he thinks it's touchy. Cog Sci doesn't want to be associated with parapsychology as it's a young science and is still struggle for acceptance and funding and all that. So I'll have to tread lightly when David 'goes there'. Fortunately, it makes sense that his interest is piqued by Claire's talent, so I won't have to go to any extremes to justify it. One of my biggest fears, though, is getting the science all wrong. That would, undeniably, suck! I don't want a real scientist to doubt David's authenticity.

I might have to read some Jung for research. And Karl Iagnemma's new book. My list of research titles keeps growing!