When in doubt, write.

When I started out the day, I had big plans.  Well, maybe not big plans, but I had at least three blog entry ideas in my head, and even a few vague aspirations toward working on the screenplay.  Once I sat down and logged in, however, I ended up wandering.

I read my morning comic strips and checked my e-mail.  I responded to a few messages, and followed enticing links in one which led to the downloading of free ebooks.  The further I wandered, the less inclined I became to write, despite an attempt at an entry about Dreaming of Dior and being an aspiring but somewhat reluctant fashionista.

In the midst of the wandering, there has been reading.  Of an actual paper and ink book.  Having started last night, I am thirteen chapters and eighty-seven pages into WWW:Wake by Robert J. Sawyer.

The story begins with a fifteen year-old American girl living in Canada who has been blind since birth traveling with her mother to Japan to receive a high tech implant behind her left eye.  The implant is supposed to essentially unscramble the mixed signals her brain is getting from her retina.  There is a much more comprehensive and surprisingly not confusing explanation in the book.  Or maybe it makes sense to me because I know a thing or two about dysfunctional eyes.

Meanwhile, a Chinese doctor is faced with the horrifying decisions involved in containing an outbreak of a new strain of bird flu easily transmitted between people so that it does not become a pandemic.

The action taken, while necessary, is potentially an international public relations nightmare, so the Chinese government blocks all communication to and from the outside world ... inspiring a few determined hackers to try to find the reasons and a way through the firewall.  (We're up to three storylines if anyone is counting.)

In chapter thirteen, the author hops the reader across the globe again to California to witness a web cam chat between a chimpanzee in San Diego and an orangutan in Miami.

Laced through these seemingly unconnected narratives is the not quite story of some sort of entity, some sort of being, struggling toward consciousness for the very first time.

While I am certainly intrigued, I am becoming concerned that if there are any more threads to follow, I will end up with a knot rather than finely woven fabric.