Novel Planning — Working Document
A slim novel of six interconnected daydreams. A mind on a train, assembling itself through drift, fiction, memory, and sensation — until it arrives, quietly, in the presence of another person. No hierarchy of reality. Just continuity of sensation.
Hover over nodes to see connections. Each vignette is a node of equal weight; consciousness drifts between them like tuning a radio.
Click to expand. Each carries its own pressure, colour, tempo — but they are all part of the same atmosphere.
attention · reflection · motion
The narrator rides the train from Newcastle down to the Central Coast, looking out the window at the landscape. A soft spine for the book. He is on his way to meet his friend Andrew for a bushwalk. The book begins here and ultimately returns here.
Looking → drifting → arriving. The mind loosens; vignettes slip in as continuations of perception under different conditions. The trajectory ends when he steps off, sees Andrew, and the book closes.
Understated. He steps off. He sees Andrew before Andrew sees him. Maybe Andrew is adjusting something, tying a shoe. The landscape present but not grand. Power comes from everything the reader has carried into this moment.
breath · thought · landscape resistance
A memory of a previous bushwalk with friend Andrew. The narrator anticipates the coming walk and recalls a past instance. They pushed through thick bush, climbed hills, sat breathing heavily at lookouts, got slugs on them. A real walk, philosophically charged.
Effort → expansion → quiet recognition. Philosophy under exertion. Ideas fail slightly against the landscape. Thought interrupted by breath, by climbing, by noticing light on leaves.
Let the philosophy be porous. Let it leak into the scrape of bark, the rhythm of footsteps, the heaviness of breath. The reader shouldn't feel like they've learned something — they should feel like they've been inside a thinking body in a landscape.
storage · signal · rewriting
A younger version of the narrator and his female partner travel rural Australia installing mesh network repeater nodes — small hard-drive repositories in trees, old motels, pastoral locations. These hold data for after civilisation collapses: birdsong, music, maps, photographs of leaves, river systems, literature, history, repair guides.
Control → care → surrender → revelation. They install, catalogue, archive. Then they return to a familiar tree emitting an unfamiliar signal. The tree has infiltrated the data — biology and technology merging, the tree authoring its own content, corrupting and upgrading the archive. Nature is writing its own message.
Root may be the deep centre of the book. The ASCII art intrusions in the novel itself can be understood as evidence of the tree writing into the text. This book could be one of the mesh network text files, already touched by the tree's process. That's the nested ontology at work.
absorption · summer · letters
A younger version of the narrator, a slacker hanging around Newcastle in summer. Couchsurfing between ex-girlfriends' places, reading cheap secondhand Australian paperbacks in parks, going to the beach, attending rooftop parties in balmy evenings. He maintains a correspondence with the Boxer via letters.
No strong arc. Time feels loose, meaning accumulates quietly. Scenes begin mid-moment, drift, dissolve. A life lived lightly while thinking heavily. The quiet accumulation of a self through what is read and felt.
Shows the mechanism of identity formation most clearly: read, drift, absorb, re-express. The paperbacks are seed texts that dissolve and reappear. He occasionally misremembers a book — details bent, tones shifted — showing the process of being rewritten by what you consume. A human version of Root's mesh network.
impact · repetition · endurance
A social outsider travelling through regional Australia, fighting in unofficial backroom pub fights for cash. He travels with a woman — a courtesan/prostitute he met and asked to travel with him. Stoic, quiet, unemotional. Based on a character study Craig wrote for a short story competition.
Endurance without resolution. Not heroic, not symbolic in an obvious way. What's left when the old structures of meaning have dissolved — a man who still chooses discipline in a world that doesn't reward it with meaning.
Keep interiority minimal but not empty. Observations, physical sensations, small contained thoughts. Let meaning emerge from what he notices, not what he explains. He interrupts the book's drift — the reader feels: "I can't just float here, I have to feel this."
image · simulation · aesthetic overflow
A bushranger wearing a jetpack. A woman in a holographic, reflective fabric skirt. They are in a vaporwave food court. Part video game, part art installation. Cyberpunk, solarpunk. The most surreal vignette — and yet, ontologically, just another daydream.
Appearance → saturation → quiet dissolution. It arrives vividly, holds, then fades like a screen dimming. No strong narrative arc needed. Possibly a character that escaped one of the paperback novels, expanding beyond its boundaries.
Stretches the reality spectrum to its furthest edge. The dream acknowledging itself as dream. If Root shows the tree writing into data, this shows a system that has gone further — generating something entirely new, aesthetic, synthetic, alive. Without this vignette, everything stays within "recognisable drift." With it, the reader realises the book drifts beyond recognisable realities.
Like Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America — the title circulates through the system as data, artefact, memory, aesthetic object. Each appearance slightly "off." Never identical. Always becoming.
The title on the cover of a secondhand book. Font slightly off. Blurb doesn't quite match the contents. Maybe he never finishes it, but a line lingers. A cultural artefact. Casual. Half-held.
their_most_august_public_organ.txt — partially corrupted, interspersed with strange symbols, subtly rewritten by the tree. No longer clearly "a book." Something evolving. The novel itself may be this file.
The slacker mentions it casually: "I've been reading this thing…" The boxer doesn't respond to the title — he responds to a feeling from it. The phrase passed between people, slightly abstracted.
Reflected somewhere — a discarded book, graffiti, an unprompted thought. Unclear whether he's remembering it, imagining it, or if it's just appearing. Almost disembodied.
Surfaces in conversation, imperfectly. One of them misquotes it. Or laughs at how strange it sounds. Or tries to interpret it and gives up. Philosophically slippery.
Signage in the food court. A looping audio fragment. Stylised typography. Detached from origin. Glowing. The phrase fully unmoored, pure surface.
No hierarchy of reality. Each layer could be the centre. The oscillation between layers is the experience of the novel.
Image fully unmoored. The system generating something entirely new. A character possibly escaped from a paperback, now inhabiting a rendered environment. The dream acknowledging itself as dream.
↓Technology preserving reality, then nature rewriting that preservation. The book itself may be a text file on this network, already touched by the tree. ASCII intrusions in the novel = evidence of this process.
↓Identity formed through borrowed fictions. Books dissolve into the reader, who re-expresses them in letters. Reality and fiction blur. The self as a remix of what has been consumed.
↓The body insisting on reality. Impact, repetition, endurance. A degraded echo of war without ideology. Interrupts the drift. The reader has to feel this, not just float.
↓Philosophy under exertion. Two bodies thinking together in landscape. Ideas fail against terrain. Moral ambiguity confronted by nature's indifference. A memory within an anticipation.
↓Attention in motion. The starting surface. Looking, drifting. But not ontologically prior — just the first frequency tuned. Any layer could be the spine. The reader quietly thinks: "maybe this is the real layer" — then: "no, this is" — then: "maybe none of them are."
The key principle: These layers are not stacked from "most real" to "least real." They are flat. Any vignette could be the ontological centre. The train is not more real than the vaporwave food court. The bushwalk is not more real than Root. The book refuses a hierarchy of reality. Three or four vignettes can pass between each other without returning to the train. The oscillation between layers — that strange state where the reader quietly wonders which is "true" — is the experience of the novel.
Not plot connections. Transfer points. Residues. The last thing one scene touches becomes the doorway into the next.
The same physical rhythm appears across vignettes. Breath as the one thing that persists across all ontological layers. Never stated. Just present.
Things looked at, looked through, reflected in. Each surface is a membrane between self and world.
Information transmitted across distance. Human, technological, biological. All forms of signal interference.
Two people sharing space without fully resolving their proximity. Intimate but never over-defined. Tender in a way the book can hold without naming.
The natural world doesn't care about human questions. It just grows, scratches, persists. That contrast is quietly profound.
The lost certainty of WWII-era absolutes. Distance from clear good/evil. What remains when narrative authority dissolves.
Same phenomenon across different substrates. The unifying logic of the entire book. Not connection — resonance.
Every attempt to hold something stable results in transformation. Memory, data, fiction — all rewritten by the system that carries them.
How each vignette hands something to each other. Not logical consistency — daydream connective tissue.
| Train | Bushwalk | Root | Paperback | Boxer | Vaporwave | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Train | — | Anticipation ↔ memory. The walk exists inside the train before it happens. Breath on the hill ↔ stillness in the carriage. | Landscape sliding past = signals passing through. Motion generates both. | Window-gazing dissolves into reading. Attention loosens into absorption. | Stillness of the carriage body ↔ stillness after training. Two kinds of waiting. | The window's doubled reflection → holographic surfaces. Glass as portal. |
| Bushwalk | Memory recalled in transit. Arrival point for the whole book. | — | Walking through landscape ↔ couple walking through landscape. Same terrain, different mission. | Philosophy discussed on walk ↔ ideas in letters. Different angle, same territory. | War's lost narrative (abstract) ↔ war's degraded echo (embodied). Body vs philosophy. | The bush's indifference ↔ the food court's synthetic indifference. Nature and simulation, equally uncaring. |
| Root | Signal moving through space. Train as transmission vehicle. | Humans in landscape, thinking. Care for the world. | — | Letters as low-tech mesh network. Human signal distribution. Preservation impulse in both. | Regional territory overlap. Both moving through pastoral Australia. | Tree-writing evolves into full aesthetic generation. Corrupted data → synthetic world. |
| Paperback | Observational drift ↔ reading drift. Same looseness, different medium. | Same philosophical territory from a different angle, refracted through books. | Letters = human mesh network. Ideas about preserving the past feed Root's mission. | — | Direct correspondence. Letters. Ideas ↔ action. Intellect ↔ body. Hub of connection. | A half-read page expands into a fully realised surreal scene. A character escapes a book. |
| Boxer | Two kinds of being in a body in motion. Disciplined vs. passive movement. | Embodied answer to what the walk can't resolve in words. | Travelling through same pastoral territory. Regional overlap. | Letters. Intellectual exchange. He receives ideas; he returns physical truth. | — | The bushranger as historical fighter echo. Violence across ontological registers. |
| Vaporwave | Window membrane → holographic membrane. Looking through surfaces. | History flattened, rendered as aesthetic. The end of narrative fully realised. | The tree-writing system's furthest evolution. Data becoming autonomous image. | A fictional character escaped from the paperback world, now fully unmoored. | The bushranger: myth of violence reskinned. Aesthetic combat. | — |
Not references. Carriers of continuity. You're not saying "this part is like Sebald" — you're saying: this part walks like Sebald would walk.
Psychogeography and train travel. The landscape as intellectual and perceptual territory. Movement as a way of thinking.
Applies to: Train vignette, overall approach to landscape-as-thought
Single block of text per page. No neat chapter spacing, no lines of dialogue broken out. The page as a pressure system. But broken by ASCII visualisations rather than remaining pure monolith.
Applies to: Page form, typographic approach
A lovely, slim hardcover where 70% of the page is text, 30% is room to think. Spacious. Refined. Intentional. "This will not waste your time, but it will ask something of you." Holding a stone rather than a brick.
Applies to: Physical form, restraint, economy of language
A phrase recurring across contexts, carrying slightly different meanings each time. The title as a living object inside the book, circulating through systems: books, files, letters, memory, image.
Applies to: TMAPO title recurrence across all vignettes
The book walks. Not describes walking — it moves at the pace of thought in motion. Photographs, documents, memory and fiction blurred. The past leaking into the present.
Applies to: Overall pacing, bushwalk, train, tonal register
Philosophical framework for the bushwalk conversations. The collapse of narrative, the dematerialisation of the world, technology's displacement of lived experience.
Applies to: Bushwalk philosophy, thematic underpinning
Critical theory as situated thought. Philosophy that knows its own conditions. The impossibility of culture after catastrophe.
Applies to: Bushwalk themes, moral compass questions
The compositional method. Not rules — instincts to hold while writing.
Not a storyline. Not a thesis. A condition of reality:
Meaning, memory, and perception are always being rewritten by forces beyond us — and we are part of that rewriting.
An intellectual biography of the narrator, assembled through drift, fiction, memory, and sensation. A mind composed of versions of itself. Identity as a mesh network of selves.
Don't think: "Where am I going next?" Think:
What is the last thing this scene touches?
A surface. A sound. A thought. A rhythm. Let that touch be the doorway. The book moves like a hand brushing across different materials. Not cuts — drift. Not chapters — handover. One vignette doesn't end; it hands a residue to the next.
These should feel like pressure peaks — moments where language can't quite hold itself and spills into form. Not decoration. Not illustration.
Each page is a small climate system, not a container of information. The book generates states, not delivers meaning.
One continuous flow vs. light, minimal sections. If sections, they should feel like they emerged naturally:
All vignettes start to resolve at the same time toward the end — not resolution of plot, but resolution of pattern. Different instruments revealing they've been playing the same piece.
Recommended: write straight through. This book wants to be discovered as a sequence of transitions. The first-pass drift can't be faked.
For each vignette, hold:
When you sit down to write, don't think "I need to complete this." Think: "I'm entering this field… and I'll leave when the pressure changes."
You see Andrew before he sees you. Maybe he's adjusting something, tying a shoe, looking away. The landscape present but not grand. Understated. Slightly off-centre. Human.
The entire book has been the long inhale. This moment is the quiet exhale. Not resolution of ontology — a return to presence. The question of what's real no longer matters. What feels real is recognition, presence, that small human moment.
All of this… was the mind preparing itself to arrive.
What should someone feel opening any random page?
A book that sits on a bedside table, picked up at odd hours, read in fragments. It doesn't demand attention — it invites drift.