WAKING UP IN BALLARD

My mornings in Ballard are almost always the same. I’m awake at about 4:30, get up, shower, take my pills and freshen Rookie’s food and water, then fix a light breakfast for myself, load the laptop, power plug, and whatever I’m writing at the moment into my carrying bag. Then open the sliding door and look outside to determine what kind of day it’s going to be. To my left I can look past the neighborhood houses toward Phinney Ridge and see lights sparkling a sea of green trees. It’s a wonderful view and makes me glad I’m back home again.

At 5:30 I go downstairs, pick up the morning newspapers and deliver them outside the doors of the other residents. Then, just before 6:00, carrying my computer, its out the door, across the street and wait for the early bus that will take me to downtown Ballard and Tully’s Coffee Shop, where I plug in the laptop and use their free WiFi to go online, read my email, then settle down to write for the next few hours.

My current projects are primarily scripts: Cybernet is a TV series that has a Seattle background, which was once called Silicon Valley, a Dallas style primetime soap opera that was originally written when the computer boom was just beginning. Upon reading it I think it still works for today in Seattle. My other script-in-work features Magnus Ridolph, a far future detective created by my friend Jack Vance and set in the background of his Alastor Cluster books. Would make a great TV series. I also hope to do screenplays based on his Demon Princes and Planet of Adventure series of novels.

WIRELESS IN BALLARD

When the opportunity to return to the Seattle neighborhood where I grew up I and made the transition to my current location, in Ballard in late April 2006.

But, while l like it here very much, the Internet is no longer free. However I’ve discovered that there are free wireless connections all over the city. There are the public libraries, of course, and you can even online on several transit buses. Seattle has hundreds of coffee shops where for the cost of a cup of coffee with free refills I can sit and go online for hours. Almost every morning I arrive at Tully’s when they open, plug in my laptop and go online to read and write emails and do research, and work on my novel and screenplay.

Wireless is wonderful.

Hello!

Welcome to my blog!

My first real connection with the Internet was in 1994, the year after its invention, when I published my first website. That was the year I began writing Internet for Kids. It took a little convincing my editor that the Internet was something viable. Most “experts” dismissed it as a passing fad. Both Newsweek and Time delegated it to being in the class of the hula-hoop and much ado about nothing. Even Bill Gates and Microsoft were uncertain to its potential. Of course Bill was the person who once boldly predicted that 64k of memory was all a computer would ever need.

Looking back I see that I’ve survived the boom and bust years of the net. Today, like computers, which were also initially dismissed as unnecessary (as was the telephone). The Internet is everywhere. I have a Dominican priest friend who is in a remote past of Guatemala and we exchange emails like he was just down the street. The registered population of My Space is currently over 80 million, more than the states of California and New York combined.

So what’s it all mean? I doubt that anyone today has any idea of what the next twenty or a hundred years holds. It will definitely not be what we expect. My own suspicion is that the Internet will continue to grow—on its own, becoming a new form of artificial intelligence, or more probably an alien intelligence. Which is what I’m now exploring in my current in work novel, Mindwave (formally titled Mindworm), and is the reason the book is taking so long to complete, optimistically by the end of 2006.

On these pages I’ll talk about the Internet, the craft writing, my experiences growing up in the Pacific Northwest, and my later adventures down south in Hollywood as a scriptwriter, and what it feels like being back home again in Seattle—which, thanks to Microsoft, has become the new Mecca of the Internet and is also flourishing as a film community. Which has inspired me to get back to writing screenplays as well as books.

Ted Pedersen's TIMETREKS