Victimized by Technology

That was exciting, I pretty much took March off.  It's that ADHD thing spiked with a touch of incurable curiosity. 

The story's milieu is onboard a destroyer in the South Pacific during WW II. I had a rough outline and a few random ideas.  However, unlike Marathon Watch, I had no first hand knowledge of WW II ships, weapons, tactics or battles.  That means I had to delve into the realm of the author dreaded R-word: Research. In past years that would have required endless days at the library and perhaps visits to one or more museums, but this is the age of the internet - that black hole of focus and concentration.

My typical day went something like this - I would set off at 8AM trying to verify the range of the US Mk II torpedo. Along the way I would find interesting comments about anti-aircraft guns, depth charges, Fletcher Class destroyers, the Japanese 18-inch guns, the state of the art in Radar and Sonar, the Navy's rating and specialist system, berthing compartments, the samurai warrior culture, depth charges, ship repair facilities, the number of ships lost in the Pacific, and twenty-four other topics that I can't remember but which at the time seemed irresistibly interesting. The nefarious authors of this internet information cornucopia always included the dreaded hyper-link. For more information all one has to do is click; it's so easy!

The IHL (Internet Hyper-link) is a weapon of mass mental destruction and researchers report that IHL's are 100% fatal when used against curious people with ADHD.  Due to IHL's, my day would end in a cascade of ever increasing disasters.  About 6PM my browser would crash because I had too many browser tabs open. Marsha, my wife, would call me to dinner, and I would ignore her.  I knew she was pulling my leg since I had only been at my computer for fifteen or twenty minutes - max. 

Never at a loss for a back-up plan, I would reboot my computer and turn to my ever-present yellow note tablet to see what I was supposed to be researching. The top page of my note pad would be crammed notes, links, ideas, and half-thoughts written in three different colors of ink and in at least fourteen different angles. As always, items of special interest were crammed into a corner and the writing would curve down to avoid the edge of the page.

This wasn't as disorganized as it seems.  Some entries would have a nice little box drawn around them and the really important stuff would have arrows or stars next to the entry.  Using this advanced form of organization, I could quickly ascertain that I was looking for data on water temperature near Samoa in February even though I couldn't remember why, but it seemed interesting and that entry had a box, two stars AND an arrow.  About an hour later, Marsha would retrieve me, feed me cold leftovers, turn off my computer and hide the power cord.

After about ten days of this, I had learned so much about so little that I realized I knew absolutely nothing about everything.  That's just about the time, I learned something about modern medical science. My doctor had switched one of my medications to a new wonder drug that could cure anything, and as I would soon learn, that included ADHD.  This particular medicine takes about ten days to build up in the blood stream, and it has only one side-effect: it makes the patient drowsy.  By the eleventh day, I was sleeping about twenty hours per day which, considering the progress I was making on my research, didn't impact my effectiveness one iota. Besides my ADHD was completely gone!  On the twelfth day, Marsha managed to wake me up and suggested I go back and talk to the doctor, who promptly put me back on the old prescription. 

Soon the fog cleared and I was wide awake trying to figure out what to do next.  As it turns out, all was not lost, Scrivener (remember the writing tool from the previous blog?) came to my rescue.  One of the neatest features of Scrivener is that it allows you to save and organize research material.  You can cut and past stuff right from the internet into folders and pages, save pictures and write notes. In Scrivener, I had a treasure trove of information on almost any subject I would ever want to know about relative to the US Navy during WW II. All I had to do was reorganize it a little bit and I was ready to go. 

It was time to start drafting.

My goal is three chapters in the next week.  Let's see how that goes.