I want to write something, but I don’t really feel like working on the novel. I’ve reached that point with it, where I begin to feel lost because of 1) its length, and 2) the patchwork manner in which I write longer pieces. Once it gets past the point of a 15-minute read, I lose track of where I am and what’s happening. Especially when there are big holes in between bits that I’ve worked on.

What was that scene, though? Oh, right, he watches the island fall from the sky. In order to Chekov the scene properly, he needs to visit the base of the tethers, one of the hideously gargantuan, and yet surprisingly thin cables that holds the island in place. When the cables are blown, it floats for a while, held in place by its huge mass/inertia. Until the stratospheric wind begins to shift it and it slides out past the edge of the magnetic field. It then starts to tip as it goes over the invisible edge, until it is flipping and spinning madly like a coin, a 10km wide, 200,000 ton coin populated by 80,000 people.

In order for this to happen, he needs to wake up in a hotel bed and be led on something of a tour of the city, though he is not an important personage and is therefore left more or less to his own devices. He has no real role in the delegation and is simply waiting to be contacted by whoever it is that’s meant to pick up the document. But, they won’t come on the first, or ever the second day, beacuse that would be too visible, too obvious. After two days of sitting in on intensely boring negotiations he has no idea about or interest in, he eventually recieves a note telling him to go out to the Magnetic Field, where he will be met by the contact who is to take the documents. But(!) he goes and he waits, musing on the insane engineering of the island (perhaps with that expositional interlude I wrote (by hand!) back in March, or whenever. Oooh, maybe the exposition is in the form of an informational film being played in the visitor’s centre on the edge of the magnetic field. It is a tradition for visitors to launch coins straight up into the air from a launcher thingy and watch them be dragged out by tendrils of invisible force.

He waits, and then is approached by someone, and of course he has no idea that this someone is about to kosh him on the head and abduct him, but this is what happens. He then wakes up to Walrus 3 leaning over him. As he is talking to Walrus 3, Walrus 4 busts in, kills Walrus 3, takes the briefcase and drags Jacob along with him. Someone needs to do the big Explain at the end, after all, and needs to set up the final scene with the boom-and-tumble.

Oh, right, and there’s the whole bunch of stuff before he even leaves the island, the diving game, Walrus #2, more feeding, more musing on the shittiness of modern architechture.