Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Brain Jello

I'm in the midst of converting the alpha draft of MythOS into the beta for my beta-readers. I just finished chapter 15 of 17 and my brain is a melted puddle of goo.

There is a section in here that relies on quantum computing and quantum encryption. It has to be very carefully written if it is going to be scientifically right (or at least not wrong), understandable to the reader who doesn't grok quantum effects in relation to computation and encryption, and have the desired plot effects.

I got most all of that right* on the first pass, but this time through I realized that the number of observers in the loop was not what I had initially thought it was and that put a logic hole in the story. Patching it while maintaining all the other stuff across a 5,000 word passage meant holding the whole thing in my head and pulling out and rearranging pieces very carefully. It cooked my brain and now I need to sit and drool for a while before tackling the big emotional and plot moments of the endgame.
_______________________

*I hope--I have both physicists and IT professionals in my beta pool and they will definitely let me know about it if I messed up

2 comments:

~ Mari said...

:salutes you with my glass of Riesling: :comforts:

Anonymous said...

:notes that there is a peculiar effect of damming the backflow when driving a cloverleaf interchange in reverse that builds up to a breakthrough of dynamic proportions:

:salutes with scotch on the rocks: