Information: Dark Matter Volume 1

Author's Note: What if?

Ari has been part of my imagination for a decade now. Initially she was a peripheral character in a novel about Colin (the spaceman you encounter in Chapter 1) and Theo (his alien infestation). I actually started that novel and as I wrote initial scenes for that novel I became intrigued by her character. She seemed more an agent than Colin. So I rewrote the scene where they met from her point of view and I was smitten. I now have about 200,000 words and two draft novels that tell her story. Colin and Theo are still waiting for their story, though scenes for it keep drifting through my head. Currently, should it ever be written, it sits between the first and second volumes in Ari's story.

I've never wanted to be a librarian, though I have worked in other roles in a number of libraries, most notably four years in the Burnaby Library system delivering books to shut-ins and the institutionalized. What has always intrigued me is the way information is organized for recall and the ability of librarians to do that work. It's the core to information management and produces a very specialized body of knowledge about how human beings think about and store information. As information has exploded in quantity and type it has always seemed to me that in the future librarians would be central to the effective functioning of almost every major institution. Of course that means it also becomes central to private and criminal enterprises as well. Then there is the issue of data leaks and the people who obtain and leak confidential materials. What does that mean as well? Wouldn't librarians be vital to that way of thinking? Finally, what happens if the universe itself is a body of information? I don't know what that means, but it strikes me that if so, then librarians are on the cusp of the secrets of life itself—perhaps the high priests of ultimate meaning, mediating between humanity and the universe.

That's a lot of thinking and I'm not sure Ari is up to the task of taking on all my questions about information management in an information rich and even cosmological information environment. But she is going to make a valiant try to do so and I think she becomes someone very special in the process. At least, I think she's special and I'm currently the only one who counts (though some very early test readers seem to be quite taken by her as well).

What I am publishing to WattPad is drafts three and four of my material. Draft 1 sketched out the plot. Draft 2 tried to iron out some of plot problems and create a good dramatic environment. Drafts three and four are my efforts to turn out something relatively polished that reflects the real character of Ari. I note that as I work on drafts three and four that the plot is simplifying significantly and I think that is an improvement. Those plot twists and turns that kept me up at night (or more accurately, were for two years my nightly accompaniment as I tried to drift off to sleep) strike me as both excessive and even problematic when the intrinsic challenges that face Ari are big enough to carry the story. But they were fun to think up and provided the scaffolding upon which Ari developed.

This is a slow work and I sort of apologize for that. I like to keep a rigorous writing schedule and I do. Unfortunately, most of what I write is not fiction. I once calculated that I write about a half a million words a year. The vast bulk of that is careful academic work in the fields of ethics and gender studies, or business, or theology. I'm not well published because the work is highly experimental and the standards are extremely high. I see that academic writing as my primary life work and there are three published books and a number of manuscripts in process. Ari and Colin, and other even more nebulous characters in still other universes, are my opportunity to think, what if? in ways my formal writing does not permit. However, the demands of my primary writing mean delay in writing Ari's story as insights and research opportunities turn my time to my formal interests. So Ari languishes unfinished. When my mother died I also found that my fiction writing dried up for a couple of years and my academic production halved. Mothers and sons—that's complicated stuff. But I will get Ari's story completed sooner or later. I have come too far not to finish. I may be slow but I am determined.