I am

This is John Clare's I am.

John Clare

I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And e'en the dearest--that I loved the best--
Are strange--nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil'd or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below--above the vaulted sky.

I found it to be quite a powerful poem when I first read it and it inspired some of my writing back when I was at school. I found myself to be quite interest in the minds of people and loved psychology. A bit of background here, John Clare was committed to a mental asylum in his later life and the poetry he wrote during that period reflected powerfully how he felt. You get an insight to his thinking. My original idea for a novel was based on a guy who was insane and killed somebody who was very close to him and in prison he kind of explores why he did what he did, at the same time wishing he could escape somewhere so that he couldn't burden anybody and so nobody would burden him. Reading about people's suffering I suppose in a way makes us kind of a sadistic, yet at the same time it is able to move us and think about something we might not thought about before and that's what a piece of writing can do. I bring up John Clare, because there are parallels between my original novel idea and what I finally ended up writing, although the two ideas are very different. I figured it was appropriate to revisit the poem.

Technology...and oh...Happy B-Day.

Monday was my 22nd birthday. It was the usual kind of birthday, gifts, spending the day out and watching a film in the evening. The film was 'Let the Right One In', a very good Swedish vampire film. I can hear drones when I say 'vampire film', but it's different to say, The Vampire Chronicles, True Blood or dare I say *gulp* The Twilight Saga. It follows Oskar, a young Swedish boy who is bullied at school and has no friends, he would like nothing better to do than to make his bullies pay and whilst he talks to himself about it, he lacks the guts and strength to actually do it. He meets a mysterious girl, Eli, who like him, has no friends to call her own and she insists that they can't be friends with each other either, but they do. She helps him gain the confidence to strengthen himself up and eventually stand up for himself. All in the meanwhile there's a string of murders happening around them. It is a powerful tale of friendship and bullying met with some kind of poetic justice. In a way, the vampire excuses the dark and vengeful side of human nature, to do what we wish would could do, just without the means or guts to do so. Or at least, I found myself enjoying the film, I totally recommend it.

Anyway, I got some decent gifts and look at what came in the post this morning! A little chest to put all kinds of treasure in! I've put a load of pens in there for now. Anyway, I should talk about something writer-ee here, well, I've made good progress with plot and technology. I've got every building generating their own electricity through central hearths, as many viking houses used to have fires in the center which would provide a means to warm the house and provide a spot to cook food. Houses in Northeim work by a more modernized version, they still warm the house and provide cooking space, but they also boil steam to turn turbines in order to generate electricity to power things like radios and lighting, or in the case of the radio station, the decks used for interpreted audio and transmitting radio waves to people's radios.

Now I see it pointless to reinvent the radio here, whilst creating new worlds a certain level of invention is needed in order to create new concepts to fulfill the needs of a society, but if they're going to discover how to transmit and receive radio waves then the technology will not doubt be very similar, even when it comes to how an audio desk (in the radio is sat out), because a lot of what works on an audio desk is very logical, for example, the use of separate channels for different microphones and deck. But I feel, some level of primitiveness is needed as it isn't quite polished technology just yet, radios don't use speakers, they transmit audio through a horn and audio data is received via a horn too, like talking into plastic cups on a piece of string.

The technology is in the device that translates audio in waves or vice versa, and there's the use of a long piece of script that contains data that looks confusing to most people but is actually machine code, kind of like programming a primitive computer. I feel actually, I'll need to put more research into this, but it is actually good to put ideas down properly in order to figure out exactly how the technology will interact with the rest of the world and how they were invented if backstory is needed, what is actually happening under the hood is perhaps a lot less important, after all, does the reader need to know how a radio works? I think what matter is that the technology is realistic within the world you've set it in.