I’m starting to realize something about Sweet Heart Catalyst: I’ve bitten off a really big chunk to chew. Or however the saying goes. It feels like my last story was so simple by comparison; all I had to worry about was cold weather, ice roads, iron mining, heavy equipment, a space station, and two guys in a truck. With this current story, in addition to cops, guns & serial killers, I also have different countries & cultures, different languages, vast social inequality, an ugly and longstanding conflict over land and resources, a couple of terrorist groups, drugs, human trafficking… well, at least the weather’s nice there.
I don’t know why, but I don’t seem to be very good at coming up with ideas that will fit inside a short story. It’s what I ought to be doing–writing more short stories, and submitting them, so that I can maybe get a few more publishing credits under my belt. Instead, I always seem to come up with stories that are complicated and huge, and will take me eons to write.
One of the things I did to make this story more complicated was, I made my main character a psychic. So in addition to being able to see, hear, smell, touch & taste just like regular humans, he also has this extra sense with which to perceive the world. I decided that it’s not magic, that there’s a scientific explanation for it (I’ll let everyone know what it is, just as soon as I figure it out). I also decided that it’s not some all-encompassing, omnipotent super-power (because that kind of stuff just bores the snot out of me). It’s more like this: imagine if you are the only person who can hear, while everyone else around you is deaf. You have an advantage over other people, sure, but it’s not like you can be listening/paying attention to every single sound in the world, all at the same time. It doesn’t make you invulnerable or invincible.
So that was all well and good–except that I’m not really psychic, so I didn’t have any idea what the world would really “sound” like to my character. So I had to start learning. I decided to use the metaphor of sound, so that in his world, there’s conventional, auditory sound, and then there’s also psychic sound. Then I had to learn the rules of psychic hearing and speaking. I’ve decided that everybody emanates thoughts and feelings, but only those with special abilities are able to hear them, and to control their own emanations, to be quiet when they wish to. The rest of us are just mindlessly babbling along, loud and proud without even knowing it, and we can’t hear anyone else either.
All that noise would drive my character nuts if he had to hear it 24-7, so therefore he has “shields”, which are kind of like earplugs, but with a volume knob, so he can “listen” a lot, or a little, or not at all. Then there’s the matter of different “channels”–can he listen to one person nearby while ignoring everyone else, or “speak” to another person without having everybody else hear it? Yes–but it just takes skill and concentration. And the hardest skill is to not just “speak”, but to project a thought, emotion or suggestion into somebody else’s head in such a smooth, unobtrusive way that they don’t even realize it’s “foreign”. My character knows how to do this, but in only one way–he can “turn invisible”. Or rather, he can make the people around him believe that he has disappeared. It’s not easy; it’s not like all he has to do is press some figurative mental button, and bingo, he’s gone. It involves intense concentration. It took me a while to figure it out. But now I know how he does it.
Now I just have to worry about figuring out the rest of that big list in the beginning of this post 
