I’m working on a paper on “The Cognitive Science of Scenes and Sequels” with my friend Kenny Moorman. We’re attempting to harmonize “scenes and sequels” from professional writing craft with the findings of the cognitive science of story understanding … and I’m presenting it at WorldCon in a little over a week.
It’s been slow going due to the amount of research involved—at least seven narrative disciplines affect our work, and relevant papers and projects go back fifty years—not to mention my periodic struggles with writer’s block whenever I switch projects (as two other writing deadlines are overlapping this one).
SO! I’ve been working on the paper a lot of late, scribbling on printouts over coffee, then editing over dinner, staying up late at night to harmonize details. And I was plugging away at the “WC:AD” (WorldCon ACademic) paper when I hit a new section my collaborator had added on “the Lorentzian Argument.”
Huh, I thought, I’ve been working on general relativity, where Lorentzian metrics show up; I wonder if this is the same Lorentz? Surely, I thought, I could take a stab at the section. Then I saw Kenny had moved the section on “Implications for the Transgender Narrative” to just after “The Lorentzian Argument.”
He’d done so on purpose. There were notes there. There was a deep connection between them.
I realized there was no way I could fill out this section; I had to move on.
Then I woke up.
-Anthony
Pictured: Working on WC:AD at Monterey by the Mall. I wonder if the strength of the margarita has any effect on the bizarreness of the dreams?
P.S. In case it wasn’t clear, our paper doesn’t have implications for the transgender narrative, nor is there a Lorentzian argument in narrative theory—at least, that I am aware of. My brain made it all up probably because I’m also studying general relativity and transgender issues in the background for other projects.
