Love, lies and subplots

Relationships are fascinating to explore in stories. Particularly how people repeatedly sabotage their own relationships, and not limited to romantic connections either. This article in Psychology Today is typical of how subconscious behaviour affects how we communicate with each other, and the response we get in return from our partners. Most of the time, we don’t realise we are doing it and this inevitably results in us repeating the same patterns, including the lies we tell ourselves.

Although my books are predominantly fantasy, a key feature is a love story subplot. Gereinte doesn’t reach this point until book two, when he falls hard and fast for the most extraordinary love match. And in book three, Allan and Demaris are faced with hard choices that affect the decisions they make.

Nerys has made all these mistakes in her first encounter with love, when she falls for a lowly lad, who turns out to be part of a plot to discredit and destroy her family in the Prince of Carentan. When she arrives in Tordre, she is raw and emotional, not yet healed and this in part affects how her relationship with the Blue King unfolds.

Observation is the first thing that raises the red flags – what is going on at her wedding? She notices unusual behaviour but dismisses it, despite her discomfort and hopes that things will change; she has a duty to her family and to her country. Shocked by what she has discovered, Nerys is in denial for the first part of the story. When she realises things are not going to change any time soon, she gets angry and starts to bargain with her husband in an attempt to get him to allow her to return home and see her family. A period of depression leads her to a crisis point and a number of unexpected events force her to a point of no return. No spoilers here if you want to read what happens to Nerys, but I will say that she learns from her experience and eventually finds love in the most unexpected way.

Read Nerys’ story here.

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Is it coincidence or Quantum Entanglement?

Now don’t get me wrong, I love a spooky story. I’ve written about ghosts, monsters, dimensions of time and space, aliens, mythical creatures and all manner of weird stuff. You could say that I peddle my wares on the weirder side of life. So why would I want to give you a rational explanation for the mystery behind the inexplicable? Sorry… did I say rational? Rational maybe, if you happen to be a quantum physicist.

In this engaging Ted talk, Jim Al-Khalili explains the strange world of quantum biology and uses quantum physics to answer some of life’s bigger questions like, ‘how does a robin know to fly south?’.

Quantum entanglement was famously described by Einstein as ‘Spooky action at a distance’. Entangled particles behave in such a way that when something happens to one, the other is affected, even when separated by distance. Entanglement happens when two particles meet and have some form of physical interaction. Quantum entanglement could even explain connections between mind and matter, connections between the minds of many people, the relationship between the conscious and the sub-conscious mind and the exercise of free will. It gives a scientific explanation to phenomena traditionally cast as supernatural; telepathy, remote sensing, psychokinesis and weirdness that skirts around the fringes of Sci-Fi; teleportation or faster than light travel, quantum computing.

Ever had an inexplicable sense of connection to another person and wanted to understand more about love and romance and the validity of unseen mystical connections? This article from Space.com describes quantum entanglement as ‘love on a subatomic scale’.

In the New Scientist this week, Stuart Clark considers ‘Universal (un)Truths’ and What if… quantum weirdness were weirder? Well, here’s the thing… it is. “There is nothing stopping the quantum world having different levels of underlying correlation – only a universe with exactly the right level of weirdness produces life.” So there you have it. Weird things happen because nature is ‘quantum mechanical’. And that really is the best answer the scientists can give us.

According to this article in Forbes, “quantum physics tells us that our fate is not written in the stars”. Well – I don’t believe in fate, but I do believe in physics. So now you have the scientific explanation behind weirdness – thinking back to that time when your phone rang and weirdly… you knew who it was before you even looked at the screen – was it coincidence, or quantum entanglement? I’ll let you figure that one out.