Chocolate Manhole Covers

A favorite author of mine, Larry Niven, wrote about one method he uses to comes up with ideas for stories (hence the Chocolate Manhole Cover reference).  It's sort of a 'What if?' philosophy.  You come up with something interesting, but not real, then analyze how that would affect the world if it was actually true.  How would it affect government, crime, relationships, history, laws, etc.

Before I even started work on the story of Cathexis, I thought, "What if there was a very rare metal, one so rare that you could never get more... like it came from a meteor, not from the earth.  And... what if that metal had a unique property?  It could take on a kind of psychic imprint.  In this case, the entire imprint of a person's memories and personality... or multiple people, as long as they kept it in contact with their body for a sufficient length of time.  That was my 'What if?'.  From there I started thinking about what this might mean, to a fantasy world.  After much more thought and many more 'What if' questions and answers, the Ardellen family story was born.

If you read my Cathexis series you will slowly come to realize that everything in the world is driven by this unique property of this strange metal, so rare there were only nineteen known items made from the meteor the blacksmith found.  That was 3,000 years before the story begins, and in that time Cathexis has changed the world forever.

Here is one dictionary's definition of the word Cathexis:

ca·thex·is definition

Pronunciation:  /kə-ˈthek-səs, ka-/
Function: n
pl ca·thex·es ; Pronunciation:  /-ˌsēz/
1 :  investment of mental or emotional energy in a person, object, or idea
2 :  libidinal energy that is either invested or being invested