I was doing the dishes when the following happened.

I thought I'd like to listen to some music. So I thought: "if only there were a device that could project music to my ears right now because of my thinking that I'd like that to happen". After a moment, I realized I had a version of such a device: my Google Home. So I told it to play some music (speaking is an analog interface that works as a bridge between us thinking and the external world becoming aware of our thoughts). Grizzly Bear, a band I've only recently become aware of.

Google Home understood me (and my accent) on the first try, which was nice for a change. Then I realized the Google Home was set to a low volume that was no contest with the noise of washing dishes. So I asked it to set volume to 6 -- loud enough now. I don't want to listen to too loud a music; for me 6 is pretty loud (part of it is that we live in a flat, and we don't want to disturb our neighbours too much). The song came on and I liked it right away.

Then I thought: this could make for a good first scene of my supposedly-planned novel. It's a good moment that foreshadows what is to come without being too on the nose about it. It's also a day-to-day occurrence, something that people could relate to right now, in the present, so people may miss its significance until later in the novel.

Then suddenly an offshoot of that thought hit me: perhaps using events of my life, and projecting them to the future, would be a good way to have a credible stream of events for the movie; perhaps there's something about them life-like, and that would cut through even when altered into the realm of fiction; some part of the event, the part that is somehow relatable (for example) or interesting would still be there after being made something else. And perhaps also my plans for my life, and L's for hers, would make a good plot or setting for the novel. Why not? We are in a different country, we are trying to improve our lives, and slowly we're getting there. It's interesting enough. Why can't a happy couple be the protagonists of a story? I'd like to read such a thing.

In some sense, there'd be something really intimate to such a book. It'd be about some version of our dreams; somewhat transformed, but still something quite unique to us. If some other person were to go through this exercise, that person would end up with a very different set of characters and stories. Perhaps this could be the soul of a book, even as the plot carries on sometimes elsewhere.

So this could be the setting for Between Burnt Beaches (hmm, I'm not sure about that title). After all, my ideas about machine learning and A.I. that are in BBB are also driving my current plans for my career; sure, my plan may be unfeasible, but still. Perhaps the novel could be about the future as I secretly imagine it to be, when I don't feel silly about it: a future where I'm researching A.I. and I'm somehow close to the current events in the field.

Perhaps I should write that now; write about my hopes as if they were to happen, and then sit back and see the actual future pale by comparison; or just become completely different in some fundamental ways. It'd have some value, perhaps, as a snapshot of the moment; and, once again, perhaps that would add value to it. It could become more interesting even as it gets more wrong, in a sense; say, 50 years from now. Some people buy futurologist's books; at least some people buy science fiction just because it's futurology. This would become futurology slowly (as it starts at the present time), as the plot jumps ahead by some increment of years only; and it would also flow into the field of "alternate presents" as people (someone?) reads it in later years. So in a sense it would be a completely different book each year; sure, all books do this in some sense, but this would have a special something to it.

Foreground - that'd be a better title, perhaps. It's a bit common, it could mean anything, but I guess it could also be distinctive enough. It was good enough for the title of a song.

In Foreground, I could write this, my diary, as it projects into the future. Even if I don't write my novels, in my diary I could write them; I could mention their plot, and what I'd like to do with it, without actually doing it. It would be another novel about writing, in a sense; but it could perhaps be unique. It'd be about dreaming about the future as it could be now; dreaming as far as I can. I could write this diary, part fiction, part reality, and be writing that novel. Perhaps in that blog I invent Flancia, and describe it thoroughly through the plans for the novels I may or may not write; and then I end up in Flancia, living there in my day-to-day life. Flancia could be a better Switzerland, while we're there; or a better Spain, if we ever move there.

This sounds to me a bit Borges, and I guess it could strike a reader the same way. And José Luis Morges, a version of Borges (a better version?), is in Flancia since long ago.