So, three months (give or take) later, I'm mostly mentally recovered from my news, as long as I stay firmly planted in the delightful land of Denial. Basically, my new motto is to live my life and not think about brains too much.
The problem is - my main character is a neuroscientist. He must be, or the book does not exist. The book may never exist, but if it is to have a chance, Reid must be a neuroscientist. Aside from the problems this causes my application for citizenship in Denial, this is also difficult because the applicant to Denial (me) has a mental block the size of the Great Wall of China when it comes to math and sciencey stuff. So, the things I need to know, which for another writer would mean a few hours sojourn to Google-land (no idea why I'm going with the citizenship lingo today - forgive me, will you?) mean for me months of pouring over scientific articles with dictionaries and Wikipedia at my side in order to figure out what any of it MEANS. And by the time I've made it through the articles and taken my notes and figured out what it all means, it's taken me long enough that I don't remember any of it. Well, maybe 15% of it. So, it's a ridiculously long process.
So, now I sit, probably three years or more after the idea for the book with the best title ever came to me, the book born out of more than a decade alone, out of thousands of nights of loneliness and the things people do when they're alone and lonely and need to survive it, trying to bang out as many of my crazily detailed character profiles as I can in two 12-14 hour days, answering questions like what the circumstances were surrounding R's birth, or what kind of clothing does E wear, and that all sounds rather simple, but when R is a scientist and E is a painter and R's mom is a poet and his dad is in prison and E's parents are a Rabbi and a Cantor of Egyptian and French origin, it means things like figuring out where two people like that would have met and that means looking up student visa laws and maps and a million other things I didn't think about when I decided I had to write this book and no other before I could write any of the other books in my head like #2, which is already named Bouquets of Ampersands, another great title.
And you may doubt my ability to write a book anybody would want to read from these blog posts nobody reads (unless I have in fact become a famous writer and my readers have found this blog a decade after I've written this post and are pouring back through my old entries and shaking their heads at my dreams, both awake and asleep) and that is understandable. Writing these blog posts is like having a coughing fit. There's this thing inside of you and you sit on the couch or stand in the shower willing your body to get out this thing inside of you until it comes in fits and spurts and travels through your body and out your fingers that have to punch the "o" super hard because I returned the lovely, expensive Alienware laptop and kept the cheap Acer instead, for grow-up responsible reasons like MONEY. Whereas a novel, on the other hand, involves lexicons wherein I write down lovely words and files upon files in the computer where I analyze sentence structure and spend thousands of hours pouring over those words and coaxing them into something worth reading and, if I'm right, something worth loving.
So, why brains? I have no idea. Ask the zombie. Ask Reid. And tell me, after you're done, which is more real and which is more fictional.
