This one's probably going to be short because I am already drinking wine, planning to interact with people around me, and I don't particularly want to write. Alright, so today was pretty focused, which was good. I had some time where I got to be social and focus on conversation rather than purely try to occupy my time with internal thought and conversation and writing. I think it helps a lot to have this external locus for attention. I even realized that when I'm having some types of conversations, the curious kind, I'm trying to gain something for myself even at the same time that I try to get the other person to process the world in a specific way - to have some experience of thought. This is somewhat of an interesting combination since the part of crafting the other's experience is almost subconscious at this point - the questions are well known to me. It gives the best of both worlds in the sense that I'm able to give complete attention to the person's response and to focus on my curiosity while posing an experiential opportunity to them. On the other hand, it means that my focus is not on crafting that experience, which means that perhaps it takes away from the attempt to encourage said experience to be positive. Then again, that could come from the focus on the responses which indicate the nature of the person's emotion during the conversation.

I just realized I didn't do very well on the health front thought today: bad calorie intake versus expenditure.

I was about to write that my focus in the conversation should be always on the other person or people participating, but I'm thinking that balance is more in order. It's also important to notice my own state during any conversation where I'm more than either passively or programatically engaged, and to some extent even in those cases a portion of awareness should be devoted to noticing my engagement as such.

Getting back on topic, I feel like I have a rough sketch of the universe I want to write about, the themes, the topics, the big picture plot ideas and meanings. Yet I feel like I have very little insight into the specific characters and stories related to those larger ideas. Part of this is clearly due to my concerns that the small things fall productively into the larger framework. I just now went off on a thought parade of sorts and landed on the idea, "what if lying were nearly illegal on side b." This of course is far from the intended destination of more concrete manifestations for the specifics of a story.

Maybe they can be playing around and trying experiments to learn more stuff about the rift. And, the experiments can be sucessful at an "unlikely" rate because of the secret help they're getting. That's at least a bit more specific. An early issue can be keeping the rift connection a secret, especially on the b side. Mass manipulation technology could be important to the plot of the first book.

That's kind of a separate thought, so I'm putting it in it's own paragraph. Mass manipulation technology could be important to the plot of the first book. And, I'm done for now... wine and lack of sleep are making me tired.