Mobius, Inc.

*disclaimer: this is a rant from my imagination, though I'm curious to hear how other people imagined Mobius. Please let me know by leaving a comment below*

Mobius, Inc. is the name of the company who recruits Alex, the protagonist in Force. When I thought up the building itself, I wanted it to be unique and mysterious.

I thought for a long time about what to name the company, and I toyed with various words like Infinity and Myth Inc. None seemed to fit the "mysterious" factor. I didn't want too much to be given away by the name. At the same time, I wanted a metaphor that would suit the company's founder (who I will get into in a later post).

I finally came up with the name of Mobius right around the time I had to physically write the company's name down. I typed it without realizing it, and when I read it back, it worked.

I also started thinking about what sort of logo this company would have, and I immediately remembered a piece of art I saw while living in Kelowna. Actually, this is one of my favorite pieces of modern art I've ever seen.

The sculpture is outside the Kelowna library, and is decorated with characters from all sorts of languages - quite fitting for the locale, in my opinion.

Anyway, this was the source of my inspiration for Mobius' outside sculpture, however, i modified it slightly. Instead of having it covered in letters, i had it covered in quotes. I wanted this in order to help convey Alex's overall clumsiness, as well as her thirst for knowledge. She is particularly attracted to the Douglas Adams' quote "The art of falling is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss," as it reminded her of how often she trips on things. (On another note, I had originally thought I might have her learn to fly, and the quote might come into play again, but I'm nearly finished the sequel and still haven't found this necessary for the story.

Once I established the bronze infinity symbol, the rest of the building fell into place in my mind. It would be circular, and modern. Inside the floors would wrap around the outer walls, creating a large open space inside, where I decided would hang the fossilized "dinosaur" skeleton down the center (again, more on that in a future post).

I wrote all about the building, and even kept more details in my head without knowing i had seen a similar building before. I went to see The International when it was in theaters, and the big shootout takes place in the Guggenheim. When i saw the Guggenheim, I knew this was Mobius, or at least a fair approximation of it. The funny part was, I had already finished Force and was well into the second book before I noticed the similarity. Mobius is taller and thinner, and the exterior has way more windows, but the interior is essentially the same. The only big difference is that Mobius has a glass elevator, around where the "bulb" part sticks out in the Guggenheim. I've included two pictures below, one of the interior of the Guggenheim, and one of a different building which is more like the exterior.

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The image of the Mobius strip is from http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/4/1/5/7/3/ar123710316137514.jpg
The image of the Guggenheim interior is from http://www.jmg-galleries.com/blog_images/121506_guggenheim_II_520c.jpg
The image of my idea of the Mobius exterior is from http://www.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/5848181/2/istockphoto_5848181-round-office-building.jpg

Set the Scene

As promised, here is a bit of background about myself, and about my first novel, Force.

I graduated from the University of Victoria with a Bachelor's of Arts in English. A lot of people have asked me why I got an English degree, and to be perfectly honest, it was because it was the degree that got me out of school the fastest. At the time I had to declare, I had spent two years prepping to go into teaching, then when i realized that wasn't for me, I took another year of random courses trying to figure out what I wanted to do. At the end of the third year, I still had no idea, so I ended up taking my English degree.

In school, my least favourite thing to do was write essays. I never did well on them. The only thing that was somewhat tolerable about writing an essay was that, in the English department, you can pretty much say whatever you want, so long as you back it up. That was the only reason I got through a lot of it. I made a lot of stuff up.

So needless to say, I've never been much of a writer. I've dabbled here and there. The most I've written of anything up until now, was the beginnings of a novel (which I later reformatted into a script), loosely based on an alternate future of my own life, stemming from grade eleven, where something didn't happen, but very nearly did. (Isn't that nice and confusing?) Anyway, I never got anywhere with that story, despite working on it here and there over a few years.

Force came about from a sleepless night. I kept tossing and turning, trying to fall asleep, but my mind kept racing with ideas of this woman who could see magic. I had just finished the Twilight series, as well as The Girl's Guide to Witchcraft trilogy, and found I was wanting more. These books are fantasy for women, a genre that doesn't really exist right now. The closest thing before the Twilight era (which has bred numerous doppelganger books) was a series I read a few years back called Enchanted, Inc. My brain wanted more: more fantasy, more magic, more romance, more chick power.

So finally, after a few hours of restlessness while this concept brewed in my end, I turned my laptop on, more out of frustration than anything else. My plan was to just jot down the ideas so i could safely go to sleep without forgetting them, but I ended up writing the first two chapters. It was 4am before I finally tore myself away, and i literally had to tear. I had to work 4 hours later.

When i got home from work that day, I kept writing, spewing out thousands of words in one sitting. It never stopped. Less than three weeks later, I had written the 70,000+ word manuscript that is now Force. It's not as long as I would have liked (I was aiming for 100,000 words; Twilight is 130,000), but it is still quite substantial for a first novel. Plus, I kept notes of ideas while I wrote, which has now spawned the sequel (currently I'm 55,000 words into that, though I've been slightly delayed due to the fact I've been without a laptop for over a month), and also will breed the final book in the series. Both are untitled at the moment, and i will blog about them soon enough.

So that's the background of how Force came to be. I will leave you with my proposed jacket blurb (the writing you would find on the back cover):

"If you had asked me about myself a few weeks ago, I would have told you that I'm your everyday, girl-next-door, struggling to pay off student loans working in a job I hate. Sounds pretty normal, right? That was before I started working for Mobius, Inc., when my whole world turned upside down.

Why? Well, shortly after starting work at Mobius, I began seeing "force lines," strange energy-filled cords floating through the air. Unfortunately, no one else seems to be able to see them, or store their energy inside themselves like I can. Now, I find myself being chased by a deranged fallen star, watched over by a seven foot tall leprechaun with a penchant for Guinness, and occasionally conversing with an inanimate fossil suspended in the lobby at work. Needless to say, I feel anything but normal."

First Post!

Hi! Welcome to my blog!

I created this blog as a way to keep track of my new hobby - writing! This past January I wrote a novel, which i am in the process of getting published. I am also working on the sequel, and hope to write a third book in the series soon. The whole process has been, and still is, enlightening to me.

Trying to get a book published is hard work, and this blog will document that. Also, I hope to keep people up to date on my writing status, and maybe even write some impromptu other things which I will post here as well.

Anyway, that's all for the first post. I will detail more of what is going on in my next post, including the status of Force, as well as the yet-unnamed sequel.