Erik Geiger's Blog

I've always enjoyed reading short story introductions by my favorite authors, because it gives me a look inside at their process for writing.
Roger Zelazny once wrote one in which he explored an idea he got from Hemingway which is that an author could elect to omit any part of a story, and that the story would be the stronger thereby, so long as the author understood the role of the omitted portion. I like that idea because of the narrative freedom it offers a write.
It also struck me that one implication is that I could use this blog in writing what I call pick-up scenes for my novel, that is additional material for which a close reading of the first draft has shown me the necessity. I can write a given scene on this blog, treating it both as a stand alone piece and as part of a larger whole, to be integrated later.
Here goes the first such installment in this experiment. This is original work and is protected by U.S Copyright law, and my .45 automatic.
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How long I sat in the musty comfort of the wood paneled library, I don't recall. Eventually, I dozed off reading, waking only hours later with a brown tabby sleeping on my lap. As I watched her paws twitch and jerk while she dreamed of chasing and killing small helpless creatures, I reflected on what I'd read, trying to assemble a coherent whole from my own journal and various bookmarked chapters, highlighted passages and countless marginalia from a double dozen books on topics ranging from Buddhism to evolutionary psychology to dream interpretation.
It was a strange sensation, sitting there, trying to rediscover what I'd lost with my memory, trying to deduce what I'd done to myself that brought about my amnesiac condition.
Most of what I deduced that night, proved to be true, at least in the sense that I accurately reconstructed a subset of my past beliefs. Somewhat less of it was literally true, in the sense of having later been verified by experimentation and reproduction of experimental results.
The gist was that I belonged to a small group of academics in fields ranging from mine, Anthropology, to comparative Folklore, to Psychology and Neurology, to Physics.

Musing, stroking the sleeping cat on my lap, I recalled how we'd concluded, each in our own ways that the consensus reality, that narrow, homogenized bubble in which most of us live was inadequate to preparing the individual for the task of understanding ourselves and realizing the outer limits of our own potential.
Each of use had then gone our separate ways to explore the fringes of our own fields, magpies searching for shiny bits to illuminate our own nests. Periodically we came together and presented our findings to one another, then we chewed them over, trying to synthesize these disparate elements into a coherent whole.
It sounds, on the surface of it, like a dry, dust academic process, and at times, my journal indicated, it was. There were other times when it was a raucous, drunken and salacious festival.
The journal piqued my memory to a few of these:
Drinking single malt scotch and extemporizing Limerick to accompany illustrations from the Kama Sutra, for example.
Gradually, we made some discovered or synthesize some useful techniques. We awakened in ourselves greater powers of observation, recall, clarity of thought, powers of deduction. Physical disciplines - I lost 30 pounds over the course of 2 years without diet or exercise.
Then we started to die.
Caruthers, the Physicist, was the first, dead of an apparent automobile accident. A year after him Addams, the Psychologist, caught in a gas main explosion. Six months later, Jackson. A month after that, my wife, the philologist of the group.
There were only three of us left at that point. Me, Steve Jackson, whose specialty was comparative Folklore, and Wilkinson, an anthropologist like myself, and as it happens, the man who murdered my wife, and the others, although I didn't find that out until later.