Up in the Air

Day 29 of Writing

An important action sequence takes place in the air. It was inspired by 9-11, but it is not at all what it seems. I have been thinking about 9-11 as I look up at the skies and see no planes. We are not that far from three major airports (Burbank, Van Nuys, LAX) so that it is quite noticeable. It was worse after 9-11 when everything was grounded. Now the cause is that no one wants to fly and expose themselves to Covid-19 while trapped in a metal tube.

I remember well when Belle got me out of bed that Tuesday morning in 2001, telling me I had to see what was on TV. It was early in the morning for me. The first tower had been hit, and we were glued to the television for hours. The second tower was hit, then word came out about the Pentagon. There was lots of information that turned out to be wrong, such as reports about car bombs on the National Mall and at the State Department. We watched in horror as both towers fell. We learned about United 93 and much later about the heroism of the passengers, whose actions saved the U.S. Capital building.

It was like watching an over the top disaster movie, except it was real and broadcast live. It imprinted strongly on everyone who watched it- the Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century.

What we are going through now is much slower, and the impact will last much longer. Close to 3,000 people died in the terrorist attacks on 9-11. Covid-19 has taken more lives than that just in the United States, and it is killing people everywhere, not just here. The terror attack did somewhere around $10 billion in infrastructure damage. That is a drop in the bucket compared to the ultimate costs to the economy of this pandemic.

There were a lot of 9-11 heroes, especially the fire fighters, of whom 343 lost their lives. The heroes in today’s disaster are the nurses and doctors on the front lines, risking their lives to help others while facing critical equipment shortages that impair their ability to treat people and keep themselves safe.

With all this going on, I began work on the chapter titled “The Unfriendly Skies.” I have to get a main character from a military transport plane to a passenger jet while both are in flight. Determining the appropriate craft took a bit of research. I chose a 777 because they will still be in service in a decade, and can handle the long haul flight required.

How do you get on board a jet in flight without depressurizing it? I had no idea, but on the Internet I was able to find schematics of just about every aspect of the 777. By studying these carefully, I found a way. I don’t know if it could be done in reality, but it is good enough for the story. It makes sense and does seem at least plausible. It does not involve going through the wheel well or through the cargo hold.

I knew much less about military transports, but the Internet once again provided. The U.S. has a fleet of C-17s. While the last one rolled off the assembly line in 2015, they have a long service life, and should be around well into the 2030s. I found lots of pictures of the interior of the C-17, allowing me to get a pretty good feel for what it looks like inside.

There has been talk about upgrading the engines on them, but that it would probably take a decade. Works for me, since the story takes place a little over a decade into the future. The potential upgrade explains the line in the book, “He was hustled directly onto a modified C-17 with the new faster engines.”

The way the character gets from one aircraft to the other was inspired by the Jet Wings developed by ‘Jetman’ Yves Rossy. He began work on it in 1993. He has been developing different prototypes since. Earlier versions had to be launched from a helicopter, but his latest version has an autonomous VTOL system that lets him take off straight up from the ground. He can even hover in it. You really should check out the videos on YouTube, especially the Dubai ones. It is amazing to watch, especially the one where he flies with fighter jets. It is as close to flying like Superman as you can get, since you steer it with your body. In my story, the Jet Wings are much more advanced and go much faster than the 125 mph of the current Jet Wings.

‘Jetman’ Yves Rossy

 

What’s Up with Us

I have been working on the book for a month now. Belle is working from home and we have the official shelter in place order.  In California they have called out the National Guard to help distribute food.

It has been mostly cloudy and cold in the San Fernando Valley, alternating with brief days of sunshine. Unfortunately, that means the barometer changes a lot, which is a trigger for my symptoms. I am spending a lot of time in bed writing. With our central heater broken, we had ordered an extra portable heater from Amazon but it is taking so long we just went and bought another from a hardware store.

Although we just got the official order, Belle and I have been essentially sheltering in place for awhile now. It is not something we are used to here. Unlike places that can get huge snowstorms that keep you inside for days, that is just not the way of life here. We are always on the go, with things going on all the time. We pay the big bucks to live here for the sunshine.

Being stuck at home is very uncomfortable. This is already much less fun than I imagined, and I suspect this is only the beginning. I can’t imagine how hard this is on people who are single. If I did not have Belle I can’t imagine getting through this.

 

 

A Car Chase From My Bed

Day 22 of Writing

I wanted to have a car chase set in San Francisco as an homage to the 1968 film Bullitt. That movie featured one of the most famous car chases ever. It influenced all car chases after it.

I love car chases, when they are well done. The series The Rockford Files did a great job with them on a budget, and, of course, the second Matrix movie had the most amazing and perhaps most expensive car chase I have ever seen. They built an entire freeway for it.

What could I do differently? My story is set a little over a decade into the future, a time when cars in cities are all autonomous. Traffic is smoothly controlled, with cars interweaving at intersections rather than having to stop at lights. My car chase disrupts this perfectly controlled world of traffic.

There was an autonomous car chase in the better than expected I, Robot with Will Smith, but it was in a long tunnel with just robots. I wanted my chase to be outdoors with traffic and pedestrians and lots of potential obstacles, including cable cars.

Car from the 1968 film Bullitt sells for $3.4 million at auction

Movie car chases tend to jump around impossibly all over the city, and Bullitt is no exception. I did not want to do that. Having done travel writing, I know the key is to hop on a plane and go to wherever you want to write about. I can’t do that now, and San Francisco is more locked down than Los Angeles.

Fortunately, having been there many times, I know the city fairly well. We also live in an age with amazing tools that are game changers for writers. These tools are transformative, completely changing the way we do research.

I often have to write from bed when my pain levels get too high. I write on my trusty laptop. I have Alexa by the bed and I can ask her for basic information or to do conversions like kilometers to miles. This allows me to continue writing without missing a beat. I also have my smartphone for more complex questions with Google Assistant. I can do all this by voice while continuing to write.

For my car chase, I turned to Google Maps. I worked out the route, which is not an easy thing to do in San Francisco with their seemingly randomly arranged and randomly changing one way streets. The measurement tool lets you trace out the route and see exactly how far they are traveling for each segment and for the entire route. Then using Street View I was able to travel the entire route and see what it looked like from the driver’s perspective. These are amazing capabilities I could not have even imagined in my early days of writing.

The car chase was fun to write as we see it from three different perspectives- My main characters in the chase car, traffic control, and the two people in the ambulance being chased (three people, actually, but since the patient is unconscious he really doesn’t have any perspective). Google maps was invaluable in figuring out which hospital they would try to get to, and exactly where they are at each moment in the chase.

What’s Up with Us

I don’t know exactly when the grocery store shortages began, but early in the month sometime. We have been to grocery stores several times this month, and have yet to see one with toilet paper in stock. On our last trip we were able to buy a single roll of paper towels.

We accidentally stocked up on toilet paper in February when we both bought jumbo packs on separate trips. Belle was working at Cedars-Sinai beginning in late January and we knew by then that a bad storm was coming. Toilet paper shortages had not occurred to us, though.

I have never before approached grocery shopping with such a mix of fear, excitement and dread. I do find it upsetting to see so many empty shelves. The rows with paper goods are stripped bare. You can tell what people choose as comfort foods, as those are mostly gone. There were plenty of Kale and Cauliflower based items on the shelves, though.

A few days ago Covid-19 was officially declared a pandemic. Disneyland is closed. A national emergency was declared four days ago. Shelter in place orders have gone out in the Bay area but not here yet. Belle and I are all ready essentially sheltering in place, and I suspect it will be officially mandated here soon. Yesterday the governor told restaurants to switch to take out only. I am really going to miss going to restaurants.

 

Dreams and Dramatic Tension

Day 22 of Writing

The Relentless was inspired by a dream. It was very vivid and very exciting, and it stayed with me after I woke up. It included the basic premise, but almost everything else has been changed since. The original dream was part cheesy rip-off of The A Team, with a team of military commandos being falsely accused, escaping, and then joining a super secret government program. I never even liked The A Team.

I used to be a lucid dreamer, before the meds I am on now that keep my brain functioning. I still have plot heavy cinematic dreams, some so good I wish I could record them. They are visually dense, and when I could lucid dream I could walk around in a dream and explore how detailed it was. The dream engine in our heads is really astonishing.

I liked the basic premise of an unstoppable group, but changed them from being military to being spies.  Sadly, my dream characters were pretty one dimensional, so I spent a lot of time developing them and making sure I had a diverse team in terms of skill sets, background and experience.

One of the big challenges in a story like this is creating dramatic tension when your main characters can’t be killed. Sure, when you watch an action movie or TV show (with perhaps the exception of Lost), you are usually certain that the main characters, no matter what peril they are put in, are going to survive. That is even more certain in this story.

That means that the usual approach of putting a character in a life or death situation lacks any dramatic tension. The way I solved that problem is by putting the people around them in danger. No matter what, my heroes will survive, but what they do has potentially deadly consequences for others.

They can also be hurt, which does offer some dramatic possibilities. Nothing bad that physically happens to them is permanent, but it can be very unpleasant at the time. How dark things will get on this front is undecided.

 

What’s Up With Us

We are in better shape than many, thanks to an important decision made in January. My wife Belle hated her job. The main reason she had it was because of our need for health insurance. Well, everyone needs health insurance, and in most countries they get it, except for in America. Quit your job and you are stuck with the very expensive Cobra option.It is a terrible system that is currently costing us dearly. We have to have it because I have a fairly severe neurological disorder, and without my very expensive meds, I don’t function at all. Without insurance, my drugs are way more expensive than we can afford.

My wife is an excellent speaker, entertainer, and magician. It is what she used to do years ago full time, and what she wants to go back into full time. Terrible timing for that, as it turns out. You can’t book her now, but someday you’ll be able to again. She really wants to be performing. In the meantime, you can learn more about her at BelleDaily.com. She has a blog there about her magical adventures.

By early January, she had just had it with the hostile and abusive workplace with incompetent, unethical, and cruel bosses. Yes, she had two bosses, and yes, that never works. She walked out. She probably could have sued but she just wanted it to be over. Wescom in Pasadena was the worst place she had ever worked, and she has a long resume.

The plan in January was to focus on her magic performances and developing new original magic effects. Because February is typically slow for shows, she decided to do some consulting to fill the gap. First, though, we needed a vacation, and we took off for a week in Vegas. Turns out that was the last chance for awhile.

On the drive out she interviewed for a consulting job she did not think she would get. I got to listen to her interview as we drove across the desert towards Vegas, and she is very good at it. By the time we got home she had the gig, working for one of the top ten hospitals in the country- Cedars Sinai. That would turn out to be quite fortuitous.

She began working there on January 28^th. They had new offices under construction and she moved into the new office a few days ago. She will start working from home in a few days.  She used to work at home until she got her last job. As a writer, I also work from home, and I missed having her here with me.

One of the advantages of her job is that she gets briefed with confidential information every day on the status of the health crises here in California. We are able to stay ahead of the curve in terms of protecting ourselves, since she has access to the best and most up to date information.

We also live in a gated community that has a lot of Filipino residents, many of whom are nurses. Things got locked down here pretty early, with information going out to residents on how to better protect themselves. Home owners associations can be awful, but other than hating trees that aren’t trimmed into the shape of a blow-pop, ours is pretty good.

Another bit of good luck is that my wife Belle bought a package of N-95 masks months ago for her workshop projects, where she builds and improves and refurbishes her magic equipment. The package was open so it could not be reused, but we can still use them. There are only three left and we’ll hold onto them just in case things get worse. Based on what I know, they almost certainly will

Introduction

Day 14 of Writing

My name is Geoffrey Williams and I have been a writer my entire life. My earliest works were done in pictograms on the wall with fingerpaint. In elementary school I wrote on paper with pen. In college I wrote with a Selectric typewriter. Shortly after graduation I began writing on the TRS Color Computer. When the Amiga computer came out, I used it to write, and what I wrote mostly was about the amazing things you could do with this computer. This established me as a technology writer. Technology and writing have long gone hand in hand for me.

This blog covers the writing process for the novel, The Relentless. It has a lot of tech in it. Each entry talks about the writing process, and the second part covers what my wife Belle and I are experiencing during the pandemic.

The Relentless is a science fiction action spy thriller. One of the central features is that it turns the normal tropes for these genres on their heads. It has humor, and has fun with this concept, but it is not parody. I love and respect these genres. I’ve read them since I was in my early teens.

This blog will explore the science that the various high-tech gadgets are based on, where ideas come from, how and why the book is structured the way it is, how the virus outbreak changes the process of writing the novel, the challenges of writing a novel with sometimes severe neurological difficulties,  and some of the personal challenges my wife and I have faced while sheltering at home.

It was becoming clear that we were facing a crises that could well lead to disaster. I wanted to do something challenging that would take my mind off of things.

While I have read many books on writing fiction, and have had training in screenwriting, writing a science fiction novel is a new experience. I am learning a lot about the process. I want to remember what I am learning, so I am writing it all down and thought I might as well share in case anyone is interested. I am writing this quickly so it won’t be as polished as something intended for more formal publication.

I won a regional fiction writing award in my teens, but I chose not to become a fiction writer. The problem with being a fiction writer is that you have to write it first, shop it around, and hope that you get paid.

Instead, I spent my writing career writing non-fiction across a broad array of categories. In non-fiction, you get an assignment, you write it, and they pay what they agreed to pay you (most of the time). There is a lot more stability in non-fiction if you are trying to make a living at writing and enjoy eating regularly.

I began getting published with entertainment related articles, as I was working full time as a stage performer. I wrote a book on magic that made money. Writing became more of a profession when I began working as a tech journalist. I did some work as a photojournalist, did lots of interviews, did some travel writing, some script writing (for industrials, not movies), wrote hundreds of magazine and on-line articles, and wrote a number of non-fiction books. In fact, I just finished two new books and was prepping the publicity tours, which have now had to be canceled. I also have another book written and going into editing.

I have been working on a number of novels over the last few years, outlining them and working out their structures. As to actually writing them, I kept putting that off. “I’ll begin after I finish the next book,” I kept telling myself. There was always a next book. Now seemed the time to start turning them into actual books. It is a novel virus, after all, so what better time than to begin a novel?

One of the things that I found is helping me the most is my training as an actor and director. I got my degree in theater. As an actor, you have to learn a lot about developing a character. The character in a script comes alive once the actor interprets it, with help from the director. In a novel, the author has to be both actor and director, bringing the character to life using words alone.

I act out a lot of the dialogue to make sure it makes sense for that character. I hear their voices in my head, something I learned to do when learning scripts and totally unrelated to my neurological condition. When I did not have someone to feed me lines I would imagine them speaking in the voice of the actor I was working with in that scene.

Generally, a novel has to get you from point A to point B with a lot of waypoints along the way. That is the big picture, but how you get from A to B depends upon the characters. They have to drive the narrative instead of you forcing them to do things that don’t make sense for them. Figuring out the characters was the very first thing I did after I had my big picture concept.

I had always been taught that once you get to know your characters, they begin writing themselves. I just thought that was one of those things people said. I did spend a lot of time imagining my characters and getting to know them as people. I am somewhat amazed that it is true. As I am writing, I know what they need to say, but I just let them say it in their own voice. It does feel like they are writing themselves. It is kind of thrilling to see them come alive.

I previsualize a scene in my mind, and sometimes I will work out a storyboard for it, which is typical of the way you figure out how to shoot a scene in the movies. This is where my background as a 3D animator became very useful. I learned Lightwave when it was originally bundled with the Video Toaster, and have used a lot of different 3D software over the years. It made me better at visualizing scenes in my head, and it was always thrilling to see the final version before my eyes that had once been only in my mind.

I have very good visualization skills and can see the scene in my mind in detail and move the elements around. I watch the scene in my mind over and over again, tweaking and trying to make it better. Once I can see the entire scene, then I just describe it. I know it well enough that the scene seems real to me and more like I am just describing something I actually observed. It is a similar process to journalism in that you need to describe an incident that you observed in a clear but interesting way.

What’s Up With Us

I have been working on writing The Relentless for two weeks now. I began formally writing the novel on February 20th. Yes, of course, I dressed up. It was formal. Actually, I did not dress at all, as I began writing from bed, which is where I have written almost everything so far.

I have an often disabling neurological condition, so writing from bed is not that unusual for me. Our central heating went out, and because everything was so uncertain, we decided to hold off getting it repaired. After all, this is Southern California where we seldom even turn it on. Maybe that was not the best choice, since we have had a lot of cold and rainy weather for the last few weeks. Changes in the barometer, along with stress, are triggers for my symptoms, including a lot of pain. Lying in bed with my laptop was the warmest and most comfortable option. Sometimes my wife would join me in bed and we would bang on our keyboards together.

The first reported case of Covid-19 here in California was on January 25th.  At that point we were still a few weeks from going on high alert. On February 5th, Santa Clara County became the first to declare a local health emergency. We started to become more concerned. On Valentine’s Day, San Diego declared a local health emergency. That was a bit closer to home.

By this time we had already begun practicing social distancing. There was a Valentine’s party that upcoming weekend and we had already decided to be prudent and take a pass the week before. A few days ahead of the party, it was cancelled. We stayed home and were Valentine’s together.

We went out to vote on Super Tuesday. The social distancing was not great. Los Angeles County was introducing a new election system. The lines were long. I wonder how many people were exposed during that election.

My wife and I miss going out, but at least we like hanging out with each other. We’ll stay on the safe side and stay clear of others. How long this is going to last I have no idea.

It was clear by the time I started writing The Relentless that things could go very badly in California. Los Angeles declared a local emergency on March 4th, the same day of our first recorded Covid-19 death in California, and the same day Governor Newsom declared a state-wide health emergency. For a population of 40 million, the State of California has just 200 test kits. That is not a good sign.

As to the picture at the top, yes, I do sanitize my phone with anti-bacterial wipes. A  lot.