Speeding fines doubled when workers present

As some of you know, I have written many words over the past few months toward the makings of a novel that I call, "The Mind's Aye." Over 98 thousand words at current count. I have wandered through a few plots while building up the novel and figured out that I needed to write an outline to keep me focused on the main plots, leaving subplots to make themselves known as I write. Here 'tis:

Plots of “The Mind’s Aye” [Overall, a satire about horror / murder mysteries]:

· The novel opens with the description of a 62-year old woman, Semina, holding a poem in her dead hand.

· Two murderers, Bruce and Lee, seek victims based on the hated stereotypes they project through body language (their first victims we see are two preppy, retired yuppies idiotically playing golf in the midst of a bad thunderstorm). Later in the novel, some of their dead victims unexpectedly get revenge on Bruce and Lee.

· Two email friends, Archie and Belle, carry on an extended email conversation. One of the email friends, Archie, will be killed by the murderers.

· A blogger posts entries every so often. No connection to any other plots or subplots until near the end of the novel. The blog entries just show evidence of the blogging world.

· Ghosts appear in the novel first to habitually tell their stories to the reader and then to gather at a summer festival on the border between Russian and Mongolia (near the trans-Mongolian rail line) on the night of a new moon in order to figure out how to end their days wandering among the memories of the living. The story of the summer festival gathering of the dead is told by Anne – daughter of Belle’s husband, Colin – who has an uncanny way of seeing the world in ways others cannot, e.g.:

Colin's oldest daughter, Anne, just returned from the Trans Siberian Rail "experience". She and her Mother, (Colin’s ex) were on a 6-day trip through Russia and to China when they were taken off the train in Mongolia because her Mother (who is a world traveler and has lived as an expatriate in Berlin for 18 years) failed to get a visa for 14 days (instead she got one for 4 days).

They were taken off the train! Nobody spoke the language and I would have had a nervous breakdown; Anne is very smart and somehow managed to get them out of there, sooner than later, in a few days, and on the way to China.

Anne lives by Murphy's Law (if anything can go wrong it will go wrong). She took Colin to see an opera in NYC, the opening act a guy dropped dead, had a heart attack and fell off a ladder (opera canceled to say the least). At La Scala in Italy, the lead singer lost his voice so a man in the audience volunteered to sing (under the stage) and the lead singer mouthed the performance. There is always something with her...

· Vague references are made to characters from my novels, “Helen of Kosciusko,” “Milk Chocolate,” “Sticks to Lying,” and “Are You With The Program?” The characters, after their vague re-introductions, interact with characters in this novel, including the living and the dead. Turns out that Bruce and Lee come from the other novels.

· The author is both a living and dead character in the novel (revealed why during the course of the novel). The author tells the full story of the crazy woman attack mentioned in the epilogue of “Are You With The Program?” The crazy woman’s husband is one of the two murderers (Lee), a former Army sniper/scout [based on a real person] who married the crazy woman [a cross between two real people] when they were both in high school; he received several years of special training but flipped out after he was deployed overseas to kill alleged enemy combatants (we, along with Lee, find out the “enemy combatants” were low-level civic leaders opposed to expansion of U.S. business interests in their parts of the world); his mother in-law is named Semina. Lee kills Semina because she keeps blaming him for ruining her daughter’s life years after her divorce from Lee. After escaping from Bruce and stalking the author for weeks, Lee kills the author in a fit of jealousy, seeing that the author still has strong feelings for both Semina and her daughter (i.e., his ex-wife).

· After the author dies, he becomes acquainted with Belle's email friend, Archie. Both of them know the plots of this novel and meet up with the dead people at the summer festival, including some of the people that Bruce and Lee killed, as well as a few recently dead famous people (Aldous Huxley, Michael Jordan’s father, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, …), who aren't ready to be forgotten but attend the festival out of curiosity. Most of the dead find release from the world of the living during the summer festival (using tricks from the book, “Consciousness Explained”*). Turns out some of the American dead, because they never learned how to connect with their past (their ancestors from Europe and Asia), with no real sense of history or geography, have to return to the United States in the fall and attend an American-style football game at a secondary school in a suburban community called Colonial Heights. As a reward, the winners get to have their memories taken away from the living so those dead ones can live in forgotten peace. The losers will continue on as fond, almost heroic, memories to the living – fathers, mothers, football players, cheerleaders, etc. – roles the dead played but did not believe in when they were alive. A young woman, Ellen, who passes by the football field on the cool night of the full moon will stop and sit in the metal bleachers to record the ghosts’ football game as a fictional short story she’s writing, not realizing that she’s telling an actual story.

· The two murderers, Bruce and Lee, reconnect with each other at the end of the ghosts’ football game. They had separately been tracking Ellen and each planned to individually kill her because she is a niece of the author. They greet and agree to kill Ellen together. Some of the dead see the pending attack of the murderers on Ellen. Through the force of their will, through the energy they possess as memories recorded in Ellen’s Livescribe Pulse pen, they trip the two murderers and cause them to kill each other instead of Ellen, thus becoming entries in a policeman’s logbook and a reporter’s notebook, then a lead story in the local newspaper, a wire story for “News of the Weird” and spreading out to international blogs commenting about the strange, mysterious story of two people accidentally killing each other in the middle of the night instead of their intended victim. Bruce and Lee end up wandering the memories of the living for decades as they go from blog entries to ghost story anthologies to storylines for multiplayer games to 3D characters in an immersive mental illness reenactment training suit/mind implant for police psychiatrists. Although they had acted the part of killers during their lives, they had unfulfilled dreams that now haunt them every time their killer stories are relived. Bruce wanted to be a famous author who traveled on speaking circuits and met a lot of interesting people. Lee wanted to spend his days mountain biking around the world and working for the preservation of wild spaces where bikers and hikers could see untamed plants and animals in their native environments.

· As the author wraps up the novel, posthumously, so to speak, he meets Semina at a party for the winners of the ghosts’ football game. Even though they’re dead and have no emotional capabilities (just the desire for new experiences), they decide they don’t mind being held to this planet by memories of the living because they led the lives they wanted to live – she because she talked the talk and walked the walk of the life of a loving Christian woman (having no enemies because she loved and embraced all races, genders, and religious practitioners), and he because he fulfilled all his dreams, not the dreams and wishes of others – and thus will wander the world of the living with gladness as long as the living want to keep memories of them alive. After all, isn’t that the true meaning of reaching heaven or nirvana? Being remembered for what we did for ourselves, and by extension for others, not for what we didn’t do, could have done or should have done.
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* It's an interesting book. I like the fact that the book sets the stage for the understanding that the classic "stream of consciousness" does not exist. A brain is constantly sorting through inputs from parts of the body and sending signals back to various body parts (muscles, glands, organs, etc.) to be ready to respond to anticipated external stimuli. Consciousness is our way of thinking that the back-and-forth signal-sending is one deliberate act after another, an ordered pattern, when in fact the brain often goes through multiple, simultaneous arbitrary decisions and automatic responses, tossing aside a lot of meaningless and/or important body part responses before our "consciousness" becomes aware of it. Thus the so-called "Eureka!" moment, the joining together of seemingly incoherent patterns into one meaningful one all of a sudden. If a ballerina has to coordinate many muscle movements at once in order to perform an effortless "pas de deux" with someone else, then a thought is similar, the coordination of many brain synapse firings to perform an effortless calculation and subsequent conclusion. Therefore, "consciousness" or "thinking" is only a concept for the practice and exercise of our brain muscles (i.e., synapse firings). When you let go of the concept and tell yourself that you have neither consciousness nor unconsciousness nor subconsciousness, then you open yourself up to a whole other level of brain usage. You can give your brain the opportunity to solve many problems at once, multitasking, as they say in today's jargon. The dead people in the novel fully understand this because they no longer have body parts. They only exist as synapse firings (stored and recalled memories) in people's brains.