I’ve told some of you about how everything I write comes true. Sometimes it’s just coincidental, like when I wrote about a scientist who broke a liquid helium machine at Fermi to kill a demon in The Hidden, and a day or so later, a liquid helium machine had a problem at CERN. Ok, so that’s just a coincidance (sic, c.f. Robert Anton Wilson). So was when I wanted to create a backstory for a Rosetta Stone type of journal and remembered a Romantic poet who died in a fire trying to save his books, screaming “By the immortal gods I will not move!” who also happened in real life to be a translator.
But then there was, in the same story, a character I created who was a University of Chicago linguistics prof who transplanted a village of Guatemalen Abuelitas to Chicago to learn their nearly extinct Mayan dialect and then a month or so later found out about a University of Chicago linguistics prof who transplanted a village of Guatemalan abuelitas to Chicago to learn their nearly extinct Mayan dialect. Don’t worry, so far as I can tell, none of them have ben murdered by the professor in a ritualistic manner. Yet.
And that’s just the beginning of all of these synchronicities. When you start lining up the coincidences, and there are so many, you’re tempted to stop defining them as coincidence and start narrowing down the conspiracy, or begin to apply the hipcrime vocab definition of coincidence, “You weren’t paying attention to the other half of what was going on.”
So this has struck again. I’ve just finished my warm up to Inside, and I’ve edited Inside up to where I had written before, so now it’s time to strike out and put new words at the end of the manuscript. My next scenes? An attention seeking pastor at a conservative church burning Michael’s painting because he found it offensive, and both sides of the argument try to manipulate the media for gain. Well, substitute “Koran” for “Michael’s painting” and you’ve got today’s news cycle.
Either the world is reading my mind, or it is handing me research material again. Any way, this is going to get interesting.
A quick idea for your next fictional effort. How about a story about a St. Louis political blogger who wins the Lotto. Just sayin’.
Implausible, Mr. Deming, we cannot suspend disbelief that much. How about a story about a political blogger in St. Louis who requests that he be represented as a lotto winner in a fictional work, and then someone else really wins the lotto shortly after, and he is amazed at the coincidence?
JMyste