Back to work on the sequel. I'm scanning my notes and the random, always painful-to-read rough draft and realize the WIP has a thread I hadn't remembered carried over from book one. Fertility. A powerful, epic concept when the desired end-result of a biological weapon is the extinction of a targeted group, as it is in this book. At first glance, totally unrelatable to time. But it did start me thinking about the impact of such a weapon on men vs. women.
A biological clock is a fundamental division between genders. Women spend their entire lives past puberty absorbed in the rhythms and cadences of their own bodies. This internal timepiece dictates emotions, desires--even choices substantial enough to last a lifetime. When this clock is at its end and has served its purpose, we feel adrift. Lost, until we can find alternate means to reestablish what time has stolen. Men, however, have no physiological way to mark the days, months or years. Does that make them less attuned to the changes around them?
Is a strong sense of time, one that guides and pulls some more than others, a conditioned response to missed events in their lives or something far more internal? Advances in medical technology have found ways to harness this time, trick the human body into behaving in alternate ways, but is such a thing within our control?
All around us, nature is guided by these rhythms. The sun, the tides, the seasons--all beyond our power to regulate. Someday, will the pendulum return on all the ways humans believe they can manipulate the natural world?
And does this explain why men don't notice new caramel-blond hair streaks or a two-shades removed taupe slathered on the wall? Can they claim the biological clock defense for missing a birthday or anniversary?
Women would find a way to alter the tides before that would happen.
Today :: lost in a sea of nineteen different colored post-its
