The Mind Traveler project

In the same hour that I completed my first big literary project, I began the next.

The working title is The Mind Traveler and the concept came from a vivid dream about a man named Eric Pierce who visited his own future in his mind, adjusted to his surroundings, and then was forced back to his present only to find that he had not been "out" nearly as long as he had been gone. In the future, he meets his wife and must make choices between avoiding uncomfortable social realities or pursuing the love he craves from those he needs. In the process of belatedly growing up, my protagonist--a science fiction savant and a lonely bachelor--faces jealousy, betrayal, and abandonment from those he loves as well as his own darker side, an even more terrifying prospect.

This project is unique from my earlier project in a couple of ways. For one, the narrative is from first person perspective, which I have never attempted before. Secondly, the narrator is a man, and I have never been a man. Also, this work allows for more imaginative ramblings than my first because of my character's career as a science fiction novelist, as well as his journey into his own mind, which is basically the great and wild unknown.

I am, as yet, twenty two pages and 1.5 chapters into this project, so it's still in the excitement phase where I love everything about it and have a lot of optimism for its success. When I reach the one-hundred-page mark, I will force myself to update you, no matter how depressed I may be at that point. :-)

Here's a taste from the first chapter:

One thing I missed about the old telephones was the clanging sound they made when I hung up on a critic. Of course, I wouldn’t have to hang up on them if I didn’t call them in the first place, but it was so hard to have one’s life’s work denigrated and misinterpreted without the opportunity of defense and explanation. I pushed the END button on my cell phone as emphatically as the fragile little button could be pushed. It was yet unsatisfying.

One from the second chapter:

We ate lunch outside on glass dishes with silverware. The sun baked the air and, by proxy, us. It certainly kept the lasagna warm while we ate. Mom and Greg talked to each other about Greg’s goals and his new girlfriend, Tracy. I couldn’t help but smile at the way her name came up in a discussion about goals, as though she were priority one on Greg’s life to-do list. Mom turned to me at this point and in between sips of lemonade asked me if I was seeing anyone special.
“No,” I answered, leaving out that I had met an elf in the street yesterday. They wouldn’t have been interested—or amused—by that.

And another from the second chapter:

I looked in my bathroom mirror at my pale, thin face. The skin beneath my eyes was becoming lilac-tinted as I slept less and worried more about the foreordained falling out I was about to have with the only family I had. My shaggy red hair was getting too long. I pinched a strand near my forehead and pulled it taut to see how long it really was. I wanted the impossible: to look like the warriors I wrote about. Try as I might, my long hair more resembled a woman’s than a man’s. It would help, I thought masochistically, if I could grow some amount of facial hair to complete the look. But there was no arguing with the mirror; nobody ever wins against a mirror.

And now, empty room, you are all caught up to where I am in my writing projects.