I apologize for the long silence. I have no worthy excuse. We're all busy. I should have made more time.
Innocence & Silence is live, by the way. I thought I'd concluded the best and worst times of Mark's life, and set up a villain for the next series, which I intended to feature a different character. My well-laid plans, like Mark's, fell apart almost immediately and I wrote the rough draft for what looks like a new trilogy with Mark and Verai. Mark and Verai will be fighting for their lives and souls for a minimum of two books. I know this because I've already written the rough draft for the first book and they're not even close to dealing with the latest crisis. It begins with Mark being caught off-guard. In Mark's defense, he thought all the big stuff was over with, and besides, he doesn't remember much of what was really going on. His deadly new enemy, the self-proclaimed Lord Dellai, handily captures Mark with some insider knowledge and the use of a traitor who doesn't know he's a traitor. Readers will become better acquainted with some minor characters, meet some new ones including a very naughty jester, and encounter some wicked new masks.
Writing this new book required me to use more kinesthetic senses. In my opinion, they're under-utilized in fiction. Most writers are pretty keen with the visual stuff, and write about smells, taste, touch/pleasure/pain, and sounds as it occurs to them. That leaves out an entire range of sense. I think it's excluded because we take it for granted until that sense is altered or taken away from us.
For about a year I had problems with vertigo. A variety of explanations were explored, but despite MRIs, tests designed to trigger micro-seizures, and attempts to medicate the issue away, no cause and therefore no cure was found. I had to just weather through until it went away on its own.
While the various doctors I saw tried to get at what might be going on, they asked me about the quality of my spells. Did the world seem to turn away, and if so, was it to the left or the right? Did I feel a rushing sensation? Did my vision dim at the same time? Did I have any numbness? It made me realize that there's quite a spectrum of experience when someone is afflicted with that seemingly-simple term dizziness.
Drunkeness is a good example. This is something that many people have experienced but haven't thought to apply that experience in a deep way to writing. Sometimes the floor seems to tilt unexpectedly, creating a stagger as the drunkard attempts to navigate the unpredictable slopes. (What's actually leaning is the sense of balance in the brain.) People who get dangerously drunk get 'the spins,' and those intensify when the victim lies down. The spins can become so intense that it aggravates the nausea that comes with alcohol poisoning. If you think about it, the spins are a form of motion sickness that's entirely internal and has nothing to do with the external world. The sense of how a person's body relates to the outside world becomes so distorted by alcohol that the body physically reacts as if the world was in motion, even though it and the body are relatively still (lying down on a stable surface, like the floor after the poor drunkard topples over.)
We also have a sense of where our body parts are in relation to the rest of us. When we're born, we don't automatically have that sense. Confinement and cushioning in the womb hinder the development of that sense, and I imagine the growing brain is busy doing other things. So newborn babies spend a lot of time kicking and waving their arms around at random without really being able to direct themselves. Even something simple like deliberately making a fist requires a sense of where the fingers are in relation to the palm. Luckily (and cutely) babies have a reflex to grip that seems to be inborn, but their ability to hold onto things fails them when they try to actually manipulate the thing that's in their grip. It makes it even harder to pass an item from one hand to another. That requires the ability to sense that their hands are a certain distance apart, bring those hands together, and that they relax the grip on one hand (not too soon) and tighten the grip on the other (not too late).
Gravity helps us figure out how we're oriented (right side up, upside down) but so does internal tension. When stretching my legs, the tension in my muscles and tendons and the sense of orientation in my joints all inform me about how deep my splits are and how close my fold is.
Point control on a blade is monitored in part as a kinesthetic sense when fencing or swordplay becomes internalized and the blade feels like it's an extension of the body. Taking a closer look at that helps distinguish what's truly kinesthetic and what's mental extrapolation in the form of useful imagination. We all know there's a difference between using a stick to poke at something and poking at it with our fingers that goes beyond the feeling of touch in our fingers. We may feel that the foil is an extension of the hand, but what the brain really feels is the orientation of weight by the blade in the hand, not what the blade is doing internally in relation to the world because we have no actual nerve endings inside the blade to connect to. A person who has a prosthetic limb experiences kinesthetic sense of their artificial limb in a different way than you experience the use of a living limb that is more profound than the lost sense of touch. And someone who has a damaged joint manages their movement and sense of orientation differently than someone who has a healthy joint.
Someone I know who was in a serious car accident experiences kinesthetics in a fantastically different way than anyone else I know. Although he recovered from his various limb injuries well enough to walk, he walks very, very unnaturally because the connection between his brain and his legs has been permanently damaged. His brain doesn't see his knees as joints that can bend anymore. He can bend them to sit just fine … but he can't bend them while he walks. The legs feel numb and are basically stilts as far as his brain is concerned, and so he walks like a man walking on stilts. He also relies heavily on his cane because his sense of balance is so poor. It's hard to tell whether his sense of balance is compromised because he can't tell where his legs are, or because the brain damage altered his inner-ear communication, or both.
All kinesthetic stuff, and all good stuff to be aware of when writing whether our characters are hale and athletic or debilitated or poisoned. In fact, gymnasts and other athletes with aerial components to their physicality have to be experts at kinesthetics. Their minds have to analyze how to respond and move while flipping through the air. Our brains are designed to accept that data and put it to exquisite use, but so few people practice any kind of aerial-component arts, it isn't very well developed, so when they fall they flail and usually hurt their hands, elbows, knees, hips and heads instead of falling safely or rolling out of the fall. Dancers become experts at managing their center-of-gravity. Skiers and runners learn how to accelerate and slow down in complex and interesting ways in relation to the ground. When I threw javelin I had to learn how to aim using my whole body, a skill that took me months to develop to a reasonable enough skill level that I could throw hard without endangering myself or others. Artists paint not just with their hands manipulating a brush but with their whole body sense and feeling of connection to the chair or the ground. If their posture is incorrect and their body sense is off, the painting doesn't go well because the flow is wrong.
I'm going to try to lure in a guest blogger to talk about some alternative ways of sensing things for my next sense blog post. In the meantime, thank you for your patience, and I'll write again soon.