Building VR world

So the idea started to grow in my mind and as all writers know it begins to take you over, constantly filling your mind with scenarios and tiny snippets of dialogue.

"What would happen," Fraser asked, talking in general about VR, "if you woke up in Virtual Reality. Say you fell asleep or it you were still connected to it. How would you know it wasn't real?"
"What if you had taken so many drugs the night before, or you were really drunk and didn't remember connected yourself to the VR," I said expanding the idea.
"Well wouldn't you just disconnect yourself in your sleep, when you turned over and anyway where do the wires go? Are they stuck in your brain or what?"

Clearly a plot problem had already arisen.

"No, there can't be any wires at all, they must be something simple like a pair of sunglasses and they link to really small hand held computers made by Toshiba and they are called Toshes, and they are phones and credit cards and money all in one."

(The present Toshiba wasn'€™t available then and it doesn'€™t yet connect you to the virtual reality world. But I would still like one! And it really wasn'€™t that hard to predict since time was on my side.)

So Chapter one originally began with our hero, Cameron Pride, waking up in the middle of the Dave Drooszhbah's hugely successful virtual reality chat show - although he had really woken up in Bron Lainey's apartment and the thing was, there was a dead body in the room. And the police are on the way. The dead woman is Lyn Yin Bron Lainey's girlfriend and Lainey isn't there.
However waking your main character up anywhere doesn't work for the opening of a novel unless he woke up dead floating face down in a swimming pool on Sunset Boulevard - nope already been done. So although in the first draft Pride does wake up in the apartment and has to escape from the police, in the final draft, that chapter is moved to about number 6 and some preceding chapters fill in some of Pride's background and some stuff about the war amongst the Allardyces and Lt Schumacher trying to find out what is wrong with one of his satellite imaging
systems.
One of the minor problems is that all your characters should have a connection with each other and at some point meet, but I was saving Schumacher for the next book by this time called the rather original Heavy Duty Two.

But more of that later - of course it doesn't help now that a certain publishing person lost the first five chapters of HD2 in a taxi somewhere in Glasgow nor that the hard drive containing just those same chapters was later fried. Also included in that lost envelope was an additional chapter of Pride when he left his first wife the ruthless CEO of Utah Konica and owner and manufacturer of the greatest quantum computer ever made - The Cray Seven