Hi friends,

It’s February, and I’m back with the final edition of this newsletter!

I intended to send this out at week 10 of the project, comfortably before the end of 2022, and it’s now…week 16 🤦 and the beginning of February 2023 ⏰😱. But…all’s well that ends well! I’ve just posted a story that I’m very proud of, and I’m so excited to share it with you all. So without any further delay, here it is: the illustrated interactive “Life Story”!

(An aside: I know the title “Life Story” is supremely unimaginative — if you have any better title ideas, please send them my way!)

When I sat down a few weeks ago to assess the remaining work on this story, I looked over the scenes I had yet to write and categorized them as essential, unnecessary, or somewhere in between. I figured the in-between scenes could be stretch goals to be attempted if I was running ahead of schedule (as if that were a possibility!).

This scene was one of the in-between ones: not strictly essential to advance the plot (or so I thought at the time), but an opportunity to make the characters richer and more complex. I’m way behind the targets I set for myself a few weeks ago, but I’m glad I decided to write this scene anyway.

I had been looking forward to this scene for weeks, and it was one of the most fun to write. Writing this scene was my opportunity to spill all of my reservations about Life. And spill I have!

Lots of scenes in this story are written from the perspective of a child or an elder, and I have tired to make the dialogue reflect those stages of life, giving the children simpler vocabularies and limiting Mira on her deathbed to the short sentences that are often all a dying person can muster.

This week’s update is a short one, not to mention tardy (why do I want to giggle like a small child hearing a rude word whenever I think of “tardy”?)

This week I set aside plot and voice and character and conflict to focus on a different kind of writing: coding!

I spent the week building a small Life layout engine for the web. The layout engine operates on a regular webpage. Whenever it sees a <pattern-anchor data-pattern-id=“my-pattern-id”></pattern-anchor> element, it looks up my-pattern-id, then renders the pattern on the page so that it is near the anchor, but does not overlap the text (at least, not to start with).

The game advances only when the page is being scrolled. This means that when users are trying to focus on the text, there won’t be distracting animations.

When I announced this newsletter, I said it would be a work-in-progress, not a serialization of a finished, polished story. This week, it seems, is when I follow through on that promise.

In the first edition of this newsletter, I shared a scene in which the protagonist learns about the game of life. Now, seven weeks later, I’m sharing that same scene again, but rewritten (with different characters) and expanded (to almost twice the length!).

I’ve known since week two that I would have to rewrite the opening. When I first drafted the scene, I was imagining a story organized around a loving and supportive relationship between the protagonist and her mother. But once I adopted the search for superstability as an organizing theme for the story, I felt I had to change Mira’s relationship with her parents. It seemed that her interest in the mathematics of stability could be best explained if her non-mathematical life was chaotic, unstable, and uncertain. That would include her relationship with her parents. Instead of opening with the protagonist and her mother, I’ve introduced a new mentor figure to help eight-year-old Mira navigate the pages of Scientific American: Mira’s Uncle Mark.

I’ve also used this rewrite as an opportunity to linger a bit longer with Mira as she learns Life, to give readers a greater chance of grasping its rules. This scene is the primary opportunity for readers to learn how Life works, so I want to make sure it offers a satisfactory explanation without being too didactic. If after reading this scene you have no idea how Life works, please let me know! (A quick response to this email will do — just copy-paste “I read the scene and I’m still confused!”). If it needs to be clearer, I’ll come back and do another pass over it.

This week’s update is a short one: just a single scene.

I sat down to write a fight between Mira’s parents. I knew this scene would have to do most of the work of explaining and justifying Mira’s lifelong interest in the resilience problem in Life. This scene would have to show the extent to which, as a child, Mira feels herself pulled in different directions, buffeted by forces that threaten to tear her apart.

As I thought about this scene over the course of several weeks, an image occurred to me: a stable Life pattern (Mira) with two gliders or spaceships approaching (her parents). The spaceships graze the stable pattern, and in doing so, they disturb its equilibrium; they pull off bits of it. They manage to survive and continue on their way, but what they leave behind is altered, damaged. This, I imagine, is the way Mira sees herself, and she wants to fashion herself into a pattern that would be able to persist and survive and thrive through the spaceships’ encroachment.

With this image in mind, I began to think of a tug-of-war fight, each of Mira’s parents wanting something different for her, neither paying much attention to what she herself wants. Here’s what I wrote:

I sat down this week to plan out how much writing I’d need to over the next few weeks in order to finish and publish the story by the end of the ten weeks. As soon as I compared my list of scenes with the available time over the next few weeks (given travel, Thanksgiving, etc), it was clear finishing them all would take more time than I could scrounge.

I spent the next morning in a funk. The only way I could finish everything in time was if I wrote twice as fast as I normally did. And I had no idea how to do that. I felt trapped. Hours passed.

Then, I thought: fuck it. I can’t force the writing to happen. I have to let ideas develop at their own pace, or they won’t develop at all. I took two scenes off the list. I let myself relax. Instead of trying to force ideas to flow, I made myself available to follow whatever ideas appeared. I surrendered.

And, surprisingly, ideas came. The writing picked up momentum. Two hours later, I had a lovely scene. (It seems relevant that one of the key ideas for the scene came to me while I was dashing out in between writing sessions to buy toothpaste before the pharmacy closed. Having ideas is about being receptive and open and prepared, not about force and control).

I’ve had a fair amount of focused time this week to devote to this project, and it feels like it’s been time well spent.

So far, I have outlined twelve episodes from Mira’s life, starting with her introduction to the rules of Life as a young girl, and ending with her death at the age of eighty. I know this outline will continue to change as I develop the story. Still, I feel for the first time that I have a path — hazy and uncertain and likely dotted with holes, but a path nonetheless — towards both exploring philosophical questions, and telling a good story.

I’ve decided every scene should feature at least one pattern or phenomenon from Life. The pattern might be something Mira is simulating, or something she’s trying to construct, or simply something she remembers having seen in the past. I want the meaning of each scene to arise from the interaction between this pattern and whatever events are unfolding in Mira’s interpersonal world. If this works, the story will be a two-stranded construction, with the two strands — life and Life — twisted together and cross-linked like a length of DNA.

Last week, I wrote a scene in which Marnie, on her deathbed, describes the superstability conjecture and makes a tantalizing claim about her progress towards resolving the conjecture.

After drafting the scene, I thought I should do some fact-checking on the process of dying to make sure I was representing it correctly. I realized quickly from this Atlantic article on last words that the deathbed monologue I had given the octogenarian Marnie was not at all realistic. I would have to cut her speech down, which meant I would need to introduce the idea of superstability earlier.

The more I thought about superstability, the more I liked it. The question of superstability touches all the most interesting philosophical questions raised by Life: questions of causality, agency, identity, etc. I began to think about framing the entire story — really, the entire life of the main character — around a quest to resolve the superstability conjecture. A character whose environment was unstable might reasonably be drawn to — even obsessed with — superstability.

The upshot is this: I have a new main character! Say goodbye to Marnie (for now, at least), and hello to Mira!

Nerd alert!! 🤓 This week I learned that there is no known superstable configuration in Life. I like looking at pretty patterns, but it’s these mathematical-philosophical questions that really get me excited.

Reading about superstability, I found myself wondering whether anything similar could exist in our world — Real Life, not the Game of Life (I always wonder this, sooner or later, whenever I learn about a new and strange property of Life).

On its face, real-life superstability seems impossible. Then I remembered fractons, exotic theoretical crystals with the curious property that they supposedly cannot be moved. I don’t even know what to make of this. I could swear I remember learning in high school physics that all motion is relative to a frame of reference — that if I’m inside a closed elevator which can move perfectly smoothly, there’s no way to tell whether the elevator is at rest, or moving at a constant velocity. (What happens if I build a fracton inside a moving elevator? Will the elevator grind to a halt? I have no idea. It seems like the old saying about the irresistible force and the immovable object).

via GIPHY

Welcome to Life Story! I’m Justin, and this is the first of ten dispatches chronicling the writing of a short story about Conway’s Game of Life. Thanks for joining — I’m so glad you’re here 😊.

This week, I’m sharing the first two scenes I’ve written. Here goes!

Marnie gripped her pen tightly. She had been moving rapidly, filling out the form with neat capital letters. Earlier, she had skipped this question. Now, after completing the rest of the form, she had come back to it and was hovering above the line of boxes labeled FATHER.