Warning: this post reveals parts of the story that will appeal to geeks, but it reveals things that some readers might regard as story spoilers.
I’m writing this post as an aid to my thinking as much as for reader’s information. I’ve just started editing Chapter 6, rewriting the work I wrote in spring 2007.
I’m trying to finalise the laws of time-crystallography. Physicists use ‘crystallography’ to mean the science of how crystals form and what structures they take. I use time-crystallography to mean what Sam and other characters can see when they look down a Time Crystal, how Time Crystals in the Macroverse communicate with Crystals on Earth, how the whole thing works.
One of the problems (or you might say the benefits) of writing this story is that I get to decide these rules. It’s a bit like creating the laws of physics for a new universe, only not so difficult. Part of the problem is that I want the scenario to be physically credible and internally consistent. If I’ve understood the folks in the Coventry Writer’s Group, they think you don’t need to be credible or consistent when writing children’s fiction. They say that children will just accept anything. Fill_Up_With_Silence says much the same thing. I guess this means I’m aiming at the adult audience.
This is the spoiler. Essentially Time Crystals are linked to each other, and to Crystals in the Macroverse, by anti-energy strings. That is what holds open the Time Tunnel and allows people to see and hear through Crystals. Each fragment that makes up his cave wall is linked to one of the Time Crystals.
I’m grappling with the problem of how much Sam can see while looking through a Crystal. Flo Swann said that she first understood the time bubble idea when she saw an image of the inside of the bubble as being in colour and the outside as being in black and white. I’m thinking of using this idea and letting Sam see things outside the bubble. (You see how useful it is to have readers comment on your work? Thank you, Flo!)
So my problem is, how can Sam see outside a time bubble if the character holding crystal fragment cannot? It’s not consistent. From the author’s point of view, it would be handy in the early stages of the story if he could see outside, since it would give him greater knowledge than people on Earth, so adding to their sense of him as an angel.
I thought that he might be able to see outside by looking slightly off-centre as he looks into the crystals in his cave wall. Essentially looking down a crystal for Sam is like looking down the wrong end of a telescope. He can see and hear things on Earth. They look small and sound faint, as if they are very far away. He has to look straight down the centre of is crystals to see them. If he looks off-centre he sees and hears nothing.
Or maybe looking into a crystal is a bit like looking into a kaleidoscope? As he tilts his head he sees out of different faces of the crystal? (Twisting his head instead of twisting the collar of the kaleidoscope. Just thought of that. How useful it is to write this blog!)
But the time bubble would still get in the way.
More spoilers. The visual opacity of the bubble is caused by ionisation of the air, at the surface where time stops. Francesco Romani will explain this later in Volume 1. But the real problem is that time is frozen outside a time bubble, so radiation cannot travel outside, so Sam cannot see things outside. How to get round that? I think I (and the reader) must accept that he can, even though it’s physically inconsistent. The same thing applies when he looks into historical crystals. They have frozen time instead of creating it, for example the frozen cow, but he can see through them all right. So I will ignore the issue of how photons travel without time. Or perhaps I can actually find a plausible explanation, since time works differently for photons.
So the only remaining problem is how he can see beyond the time bubble barrier. I doodled using Flash to produce this image:
Each of the crystal shards that make up Sam’s cave (bottom) is linked to a different fragment on the frozen Earth and in history (top). Also each of these is linked to two others (except the End Fragment).
Note that originally there was only one crystal that Sam could look down, and he could see all the other fragments by looking into it from different angles. (This whole scenario has been through MANY iterations!) That was simpler, but the idea of Sam being inside a cave made of many shards has complicated the picture. At present I imagine the whole bundle of red strings being bundled together with the black strings and lying inside the Time Tunnel like some sort of fibre-optic. That’s consistent with how the crystal machine worked before Michael broke it.
Now I need to work out
- how to communicate this model visually to the reader
- how Sam can see out of the time bubble that surrounds each fragment (top in diagram)
And so my problems get worse instead of better.
Well problem 1 is a matter of writing skills.
I solved problem 2 while cleaning my teeth after breakfast. I stood up and swayed about a bit, and realised that Sam might see different things as his head moved closer to the crystal, like moving in and out of different focal planes. When he leans forward towards a crystal he sees more.
