This Phone May be Tapped

It's so surreal to me that within a month of posting A) a big huge missive about a citizen's right, nay, duty to bear arms and B) a two-week survival extravaganza that 9 armed militiamen in my home state of Michigan should be picked up on charges of seditious conspiracy.

These are the people on the wrong end of what I'm talking about.

See, I can reconcile my own faith in guns and emergency preparedness with my fairly liberal ideology by looking at the Government as a service provider, my stockpiled spam and bottled water as my consumer alternatives, and my guns as my advocate counsel for consumer rights.  e.g, should "the Revolution" ever happen, then I have means to survive without having to endure checkpoints or registration or whatever, and should some anxious young turks get the idea to barge in my door guns blazing, I can make them think twice as they duck for cover.

 

Ha ha ha - wish OUR department had one of those, amirite?

But this lot of tinfoil-hat crazies decided that the end of days was near upon them, and so it was their good Christian duty to, according to one of their nefarious schemes, kill a policeman, then kill everyone at the funeral in an attempt to make "the masses" rise up against the government.  Screaming "Wake up SHEEPLE, 9-11 was an INSIDE JOB!" was not explicitly part of the plan, but I think it's a safe bet.

Arthur Schopenhauer (Arty Farty to his friends) once said "Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world."  I can't help but think that this is the case with these sort of wackjob groups.  I've spent time in the part of Michigan that these guys come from, and there's not much there - a lot of trees, a lot of cornfields, a little incest, a sprinkling of meth labs, that's the upshot.  It would be easy, given such a small and insular world, to watch the news (not gonna name the specific channel) and think "OMG gubmint gonna come down and take my jeebus!"

More like MSNBC is the fascist and NObama is the president and the money bag says "Freedom" and lady Liberty is a hot chick with a gun and an eagle kicking some ass! Fucking Liberal fascist communists!

I used to dip my toe in that pool myself - these were the baby internet days, before all the 2012 crap - the prophecies of Nostradamus and the Anarchists Cookbook were in vogue, and you could not find anyone vaguely right of center who didn't think that Bill Clinton was the Antichrist.  In defense of these friends and I, we were smoking an awful lot of dope at the time, and we grew out of the sentiment. 

Still, the circumstance is comprehensible, if deplorable.  I don't know a lot about the Michigan 9, but I can make assumptions - not particularly well educated, not well traveled (Army tours if anything), and utterly convinced of their own righteousness.  All they ever needed was a few good books, a plane ticket, and a thai fusion restaurant in their town.

Or so I'd like to hope - one of the guys was my age, 33, and I'm amazed at the divergence.  I always am when I see someone my age doing something so radically different than what I am doing, and I would dare say that the arrest of these people did sort of wake up this sheeple...sherson..shoop?  I'm still not sure of all the forms of that noun, but I do feel my world has been broadened a little bit by my glimpse into the lives of these miscreants.

Oh whatever, I'm just here for the free buffet

I don't know what's to be done with these 9 alleged terrorists (and yes, that is the right term to use here - this isn't like calling anyone who disagrees with your politics "the T word" - they were plotting acts of terror).  My sensibilities of the legal system are not so puissant as to know what sort of trial or penalties they will face.  I hope the penalties are severe, and constructive - these guys were organized, equipped, and ready to defend themselves.  Couldn't that be put to some good? 

Alas, where are the covert black-ops mind-wiping super-soldier projects when you need them?  Goddamn LIE-berals, cutting military programs AGAIN!

 

Universal healthcare?  Not if my Universal Soldier can stop it!

Unsolicited Advice for New Writers from Someone Unqualified to Give It, Volume 25 - Block Party

As a writer you will inevitably suffer from writer's block.  Hopefully, it won't happen very often, and it won't be very intense because writer's block is a lot like acrophobia - if you've got acrophobia, you probably shouldn't be a trapeze artist.  Similarly if you're prone to big huge fits of writer's block, well, that means you have to force it regularly, and any proctologist will tell you that that's no good.


Writer's block can hit you for a number of reasons, and I'm not going to sit here and adjudicate your fitness to be a writer by saying that you're blocked because you're terrible.  Writer's block can hit because you've got the flu, or because it's the middle of tax season and you're more preoccupied with your 1099's than your plot lines.

 I have the gift of rhyme - some of the time. 

 Writer's block presents tough questions to the writer - are you working with old stale material?  Are you forcing it?  Should you be looking at this project from a different angle?  Just asking these sort of questions can sink a project, but failing to ask them might mean that you turn out unreadable schlock. 

You've only got two options when writer's block hits:


1) Writer's block hits, and you soldier on and write regardless. 

On the plus side, when you've finished with this display of persistence, you can sign off on a good day's work.  This works really well if you've got an endurance-sport sort of mindset, and if your writing method always calls you to write one more word, one more page, one more chapter before stopping.  If you're the persistent type, play to your persistence and keep on writing. Yes, it is possible to write when you can't write, as I'll explain in a moment.

As a minus, by the time you feel blocked you're already at the limits of your endurance.  You may have to go and write something else - I've mentioned this sort of circumlocutory fix before (a sort of misdirection - if you're working on a novel about Southern Dandies, write a few paragraphs about Northern Yankees and then try coming back around), but more as a jump start than a fix.  Now, you need to put your ability to write for long stretches to good use.  If it would only take you 3 hours to write what you think you have to say, it will now take you 5 , but you'll have it said by the time you're done. 

Unstoppable - but also prone to drinking binges.

2) Writer's block hits, and you say fuck it and slam a fifth of cheap gin. 

This is a bit of advice from the "if it don't fit, don't force it" school.  Admittedly, it sounds more fun than sitting at your computer staring at a blank word doc, but the dangers of blowing off and not writing are pretty serious. 

Arguably, if you're 100% sure the piece isn't going anywhere, then you can knock off for the day with no harm done. This is especially true if you've got a few pages down but can't force any more out.  That doesn't even sound so much like writer's block as just good old fashioned fatigue, which goes away with a spot of rest.  Taking some time off can be refreshing - you relax, you stop fretting, you stop forcing, and sometimes the ideas just come, which is great.

Then again, sometimes they don't.  Sometimes a writer doesn't just give up on a day's work, but on an entire project, and ultimately anything resembling a writing career.  It's so easy to turn one day off into two, two into a week, and so on, that taking the afternoon off only works for writers with an ADD style - "bender" style writers who knock out ten or more pages in a sit and then recoup for a few days anyway.  That's a tricky writing style in the first place, and if that's the way you write I have to put in a good word for discipline, but you're also just the type of writer who can blow off for a few days, sit back down, and pick it up like nothing happened.

Early reviews of your work were less than encouraging

Of the two approaches, I really do think the first is best in that Puritanical Protestant work ethic sort of way.  The idea of taking a break and coming back always sounds really good, but you've got to know your limits before you try it.  If you don't have the essential discipline to return to the task at hand, then stay at your desk and keep pounding something out.  Remember: the stuff you're writing to get over the block doesn't have to be Shakespeare, it just has to be words on a page.  Type it up, set it aside, and then get back to the task at hand.  Alternately, keep slogging word-by-word through the project you're trying to finish since in the end, that's the only way it will get done:  one word at a time, your writer's block be damned.

The trick really is to approach the  writing from a different angle, either from a place of rest and rejuvenation, or by making a flank-attack by getting your hands, eyes, and brain going through the motions of writing by writing something else, then coming back to what you ought to be working on, which is the piece you want to write, which is the focus of your writer's block, which you now know how to get around. 

I couldn't follow that last bit either

Suburban Survival 5 - White Light, White Heat

Now at last we come to the end of the Suburban Survival series - if you go back to when I started this, and print out that and every subsequent blog, you'll have a good grasp of how to prepare for an emergency and how to handle yourself when it happens.

You'll need this post too, of course.

Most everything I've posted so far has assumed temperate weather conditions - either revolutionaries wait until June to attack, or a sleepy wet July storm knocks down a tree and powers down your block.  This is not going always going to be the case.  Anyone in Michigan knows that at least half our power outages come from heavy snow (the other half come from scavengers stealing copper), and anyone in my old home state of Nevada can blame insanely high temperatures and an overworked power grid for their mid-raid WoW logout.

In inclement weather, you need shelter, and you're in luck - you have a house!  This is "Suburban Survival," after all, not "Hot Tips for the Homeless."  That being the case, we're not going to spend any time talking about building lean-to's and dug-outs.

 Sure, come inside, get warm - you like music?

Whether it's heat or cold that ails you, stay indoors.  The roof will keep the sun off of your head, and the snow off your back.  The only special consideration you need to consider in hot weather is if you should open a window, and I say go for it, especially at night or if a breeze is blowing.  The only time you'd worry about the windows being open is if you're trying to keep out the early morning heat, if there's a risk of wild animals or C.H.U.D.s breaking in, or if there's a lot of dust kicking up.  By all means - get some fresh air.

Winter preparations are a bit more tricky - you need to relocate everybody into as few rooms as possible, because YOU just became your own central heating unit.  You hum along at about 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and while that's not enough to run an army of super-powered death bots no matter what the Wakowski's say, it is slowly going to warm a room, especially with the way you run your big yapper. 

While the room won't get warm warm, it will gradually become more comfortable than the surrounding rooms, especially if you've got multiple people in there having some sort of end-of-the-world orgy - but the goal isn't to do jumping jacks  until you're living in a furnace: the goal is to not spread your waste heat around.

The greater the discrepancy between a heat source and its surroundings, the faster the heat leaves that source - that means you, in this case.  By keeping everyone in one insulated room, under covers, you're slowing the dissipation of heat.  Move the beds into the living room, bring all the blankets you can find, seal off every room that's not to be occupied (NOW we have a use for plastic and duct tape!), and just remember that every joule of heat you spend in the hallway is one less kept in the living room - see what I did there?  Living room?  Sometimes I am so clever.

I brought a blanket!

So one way to keep warm is to stay in one place, move your body as needed, eat a ton (to build up a protective layer of fat and to have ample calories to burn), but a better way is to bring a heater along.  You have two considerable options.

A kerosene heater is going to keep you warm and toasty.  They've got a very particular smell to them, which some people like and some people find repellant, but they work very well (that smell means fumes, by the way - you're going to want to crack a window every once in a while).  You can pick one up for as little as 100 dollars, and fuel hovers right around gasoline prices.  I personally recommend the boxy one-way heater over the omnidirectional kind because it's out of the way, but suit yourself.  Kerosene will eventually go bad, although I personally haven't seen this happen.  Still, it couldn't hurt to rotate your fuel store once a year or so.

You could also theoretically run an electric heater so long as you have a generator - I don't think this is a great option, but it is handy.  First of all, a lot of people have them in their bedrooms as a little booster on cold winter nights, and if you're willing to buy a generator, who am I to tell you what to use your juice on?  Second, there's almost no chance of burning your house down or choking on fumes with an electric heater.  But even if you get the energy efficient kind, you're still converting a lot of electricity to heat, and that's not an exchange you want to make.

Do NOT build a fire indoors - if you have a fireplace, that's awesome, and an obvious exception to this caveat.  We lose a lot of poor people in Detroit every year because they light a hibachi in their dining rooms, or burn charcoal on a garbage can lid.  First they choke and pass out from the fumes and smoke, then the house burns down around them.  That's probably warmer than you want to be. 

 A deep pit would keep you out of the wind...

Generators are not a fix-all.  It's emergency power to run a few lights and a radio when the electricity goes out.  You can buy one that's all fancy and hardwired to your house, or you can get the kind that starts like a lawnmower and basically feeds an extension cord that you run in the back door.  Just remember that it is emergency power - it is not your new power company.  Generators come in a wide range of capacities, out puts, and fuel capacities, but in a real emergency situation, it's not going to be enough because it could never be enough.  Use that power sparingly!

To get to your generator and your heater, you'll need a light to guide you and maybe even something to make your hands work.  To this end, you need to keep three things at the ready:  Flashlights with batteries, glow-sticks, and hand warmers.

 Nothing Outlasts the Energizer

Flashlights seem really obvious - but you need to be a little disciplined about battery storage.  Keep one or two flashlights around with batteries in them - these are your day-to-day flashlights for walking the dog, finding a contact lens, and sexy Rosie O'Donnell-themed strip teases.  Then, keep at least one more nearby with fresh batteries NEXT TO it.  Don't put them in the flashlight or they'll slowly drain out just like your normal utility lights will.

All you old ravers can also get a lot of mileage from your glowsticks. Although you only get a few hours of trippy party light, they'll do in a pinch, and they won't run down sitting in your junk drawer.  It's not good for reading fine print, but it will help keep you from stubbing your toes in the middle of the night.

Finally, keep a case of Hot Hands around.  They cost next to nothing, and you never know when you'll need a little extra warmth.  Anyone who has ever had a case of dead hands (not that kind, party boy) knows how valuable a few extra degrees in the right spot can be.  The inverse of this for you desert dwellers is to keep some first aid ice packs around.  These only cost a little bit more than heat packs, and they're indispensable for warding off heat stroke.

There's always more to be said about this sort of thing, but I think I've done my part to keep the readers of this blog alive.  I've mentioned plenty of stuff, but you can actually bring in a survival kit for under 100 bucks - canned tuna, gallon jugs of water, a shovel, and a few good blankets will do the trick, but with a little more expenditure and a little more forethought, you can actually survive an emergency in comfort.

By thinking ahead just a little bit, you can turn these little once-a-decade emergencies into a real good time.  Have some friends over, keep a couple bottles of vodka in your survival package, and play charades by candle light.  Before you know it, you'll all be back at your day jobs joking about the wonderful emergency you had.

That or cannibalizing each other when you realize that no help is coming and the world as we've known it has ended, in which case I recommend replacing that vodka in your kit with a nice Chianti.

Obvious joke is obvious

Suburban Survival Part 4 - Dig a Hole

The last three Suburban Survival segments were all about the input (air, food, water).  Today, we're going to talk about output.  This isn't a pleasant subject, but then if you're so put off by this matter then maybe you're not meant to survive the robo-pocalypse after all.

 Not sure what you mean.

When The Situation happens, you'll probably get one use out of every toilet in your house. You might be able to stretch it out if you practice a "if it's yellow, let it mellow / if it's brown, flush it down" policy, but that's a best-case scenario.  Unfortunately, the inevitable flush means that you're also dumping at least 1 gallon of water for every toilet in your house (remember: tank water is drinkable if treated).   Bad move! 

Worse still, that one flush is all you're going to get without pouring additional water into the bowl. This is colossally dumb - the last thing you want to waste is your water.  Besides, all this implies that somehow, magically, the "away" that you flush your waste to is still there, and that the pipeline by which you flush things "away" still works.  There is no guarantee.

What are you getting at?

There are a number of emergency toilets that you can buy on the open market, but all of them basically boil down to being a five-gallon drum with a plastic bag inside - this will work for a while, at least until you run out of plastic bags.   If you're only willing to plan for a week's worth of disaster, and really that's the upshot of this blog series, then this is the way to go.

That being said, tying everything up in a plastic bag is fine so long as A) you have enough plastic bags and B) eventually you've got somewhere to put all those plastic bags. When you run out of plastic bags, or when the members of the sewer and water department are taken out and shot for their counter-revolutionary ideology, you're going to have to go in the yard. 

Digging a real outhouse is well beyond the scope of this article - it's kind of a big deal, and a fairly involved construction project.  It's a rather deep pit with a carefully calculated location away from the water table and wells, downwind of your location, it requires you to build a privy building (meaning you need lumber and nails) and you'll have to learn how to carve a crescent moon on the door, which is harder than it looks.


So no, you're not going to dig an outhouse - you're going to go out back and take a shovel with you.  The deeper you can dig, the better - that hole has to be at least deep enough to accommodate the excreted mass plus any paper (you did stock up on toilet paper, right?)  The hole also has to be narrow enough that you can squat over it without falling in - think deep and narrow.  Think basically about the size of your toilet bowl. 

After you're done, don't just fill that hole in - you'll need a masking agent.  Cat owners, you're in luck:  kitty litter will do.  Unfortunately, you probably don't have enough litter for human use unless you buy it at Costco by the pallet.  The best thing to cover up the stank of your post-apocalyptic doodie is lime.

How much lime should you use?  As much as you need.  Think about how offensive it is to see that someone didn't pick up after their dog - now multiply that by a factor of about a billion and you'll know how horribly repellent a pit of human waste is on a hot summer day (for those of us who have lived on farms, it's bearable, but again, this isn't really for the farm dweller - this is for the swinging suburbanite who just wants to survive a blackout). 

 

So...football? 

Lime is cheap, so don't scrimp - it's better to use too much than too little at first, and eventually you'll figure out how much you need. 

But hygiene, cleanliness, waste, and personal care extend beyond just digging the most disgusting hole in the world.  Just as your bathroom is more than a toilet, so too must your survival strategy include more concern for cleanliness.  

Inorganic trash (packaging, broken electronics) is ugly to look at when it's strewn about your lawn, but it's not going to hurt anything.  Keep anything you might be able to use, but exercise caution - you may be making a rat's nest.  If you can't keep an eye on your discardables, then they are officially garbage to be gotten rid of, and you will either have to carry it far away from your home, or bury it.

The trash you need to be really careful about is naturally your own waste (described above in nauseating detail) and food waste. Bury your bones and bury them deep!  It won't take long at all for raccoons, feral cats, stray dogs, and mutant dire bears to figure out where the delicious piles of bones and old meat are, and they'll come around with diseases, fangs, claws, and laser-eyes if they smell your empty spam cans.  Plan on bi-weekly disposal of organic matter - if you're only planning for 5 days of emergency, then you can bag it up tight and put it in the garage.  Longer term, you'll need to dig your own landfill - either one big pit very far away from your house (at least 1/4 mile minimum) or lots of little holes dug deep and buried like the privvy-pits described above.

Your back yard is so fucked.

I'm looking for a new suit, but...what? 

All this handling of waste and garbage is going to get your hands awfully dirty, so a brief mention of personal hygiene is in order.  If you know for a fact that the lights and water are only out for a couple days, suck it up and treat it like a camping trip - you'll be fine.  If you think you're out of luck and nobody is coming to your rescue for a week or more - well, suck it up again, because you'll be fine.  Daily showers are a really nice luxury, but you can live without them.

The most important thing to do is wash your hands, and to this end you should stock up on soap and sanitizer.  I'm not a big proponent of sanitizer for daily use - I'm pretty sure it's in part responsible for the emergent super-bugs we're starting to see, and the stuff just smells like OCD in my opinion, but in an emergency it's absolutely life-saving.  Wash your hands before handling any food, and after using your  doodoo pits.

The other thing you need to keep clean is anywhere that's fungus-prone, namely your feet and your crotch. We're so used to showering every day to scrub away the deep, deep shame we feel every time we look in the mirror that our bodies natural defenses against skin infectants has been rendered feeble.  In the long term, you'll go through a pretty rough and stinky patch of misery, but your body will eventually sort itself out in that department.   For the short term, change your socks and underwear twice a day. Use baby powder or corn starch on your feet and junk to absorb excess moisture - only you can decide if you can spare water for washing, but the answer is probably no.  If you run out of skivvies and socks and the water still isn't running, you're in deeper trouble than I can help you with.

All this survival stuff is well and good if the power goes out in the middle of a nice afternoon in May, but we're seldom so lucky as to get apocalyptic social collapse that coincides with vacation.  On Friday, I'll talk about the fifth element of survival.  No, it isn't love.

 Ooooohhhh, okay, I...wait...

Unsolicited Advice for New Writers from Someone Unqualified to Give It, Volume 24 : Whatchu Talkin' 'bout , Willis?

Ernest Hemingway once said that "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn."   Scholars have been debating the merit and truth of that quote ever since, but none seem to disagree with it too heartily.  For all the hand-wringing over the "great American novel," it seems we've had one in our midst for the last 126 years.

Alfred E. Finn - What, me riverboat? 

Huckleberry Finn was Twain's big attempt at writing in dialect, and for all the excellence of the novel, it shows.  In the opening chapters, Huck's country twang is as thick as molasses - by the end, it's settled down into a mellower, lilting drawl.  Jim starts out sounding like a bad caricature of a Vaudevillian blackface actor doing a bad caricature of a black slave, but sort of comes around to some degree of intelligibility by the end.  

Speaking as an editor now, I can tell you that it's a pain in the ass to go back and fix things.  If you get a good idea for a change on page 185 and you think it should be retroactively implemented all the way back from page 1, you'll groan and grimace and, to be honest, probably not do it, or do it half way.  This means that you, and by you I mean we, are too lazy to hit ctrl+F, go back to page 1, and type new words over old words.  Have another bacon sandwich, butter fatty.

To write an homage to Whitman, mash the keyboard with your hand now...

Back in Twain's day, that sort of revision would have actually required one to write things out longhand, then adjust the movable type machine, then probably get polio and die.  This is why it's excusable for Huck and Jim's dialects to shift a little bit over the course of the book, and it's also why you, young modern writer, should know a thing or two about writing in dialect. 

There are three keys to applying dialect to your dialogue:  consistency, accuracy, and purpose. 

Consistency.

If you're going to drop g's, drop every g.  Don't have someone go around "Fuckin' banging everything in sight like a dog in heat."  They are fuckin' bangin', or fucking banging - not both. If your character's first person subjective pronoun is pronounced "Ah," she should never refer to herself as "I."   

Accuracy.  

If I were so inclined to write from the perspective of a 19th century antebellum southern aristocrat, I would not make him sound like one of his slaves, nor would he sound like a Yankee gentleman of similar means and station.  Unfortunately, we don't have audio recordings from the 19th century, and so we have to guess. We have some historical records, we can treat modern southern dialects like descendants of a "southern prime" and make some inductions, but mostly it's an educated guess, and my character is pretty much going to sound like Foghorn Leghorn.  

Purpose. 

Why do you want to put your dialogue in dialect?  Unless there's something essential in the tone and timbre of the dialect, just leave it out.  The odds are fair-to-good that dialect will be misconstrued as an attempt to ridicule the speaking character (something Twain himself has been accused of more than once), and that's only so long as the reader actually gets the sound of it right.  In my 9th grade English class we read "A Raisin in the Sun," together aloud, and I was "treated" to an interpretation of Mama Younger that sounded a lot more like Jamie Presley than Claudia McNeil.  No, it wasn't intentional - it was a bad reading.  

Not your father's poor black matriarch.

Dialect can add a lot of flavor to a story, but it can also be a seductive trap.  In your quest for authenticity you run the risk of perpetuating parody.  In your quest for consistency, you risk alienating a reader (not to mention breaking your spellchecker) by writing line after line of grammatically rough prose.  

But if you can be consistent and accurate and aware of your purpose at all times, the payoff is there.  Remember to treat your subject with respect - don't write in dialect because you want to make fun of the way the character talks - reflect it, and decide if what they're saying is more important than how they're saying it.  If it's not, there's a good chance that you're dipping into mockery.  If it is, then let the meaning of the expression show through the sound of the words. 

Suburban Survival Part 3 - Nom Nom Nom

To recap thus far, I've already told you that if your air is fucked, so are you, and that you can slake your thirst by keeping water on hand and recycling rain and river water by filtering and boiling.  That alone would keep you alive, albeit miserable, for about 3 weeks.

 Harry Hamlin - now there's a tall drink of water, am I right girls?

You'll be very, very hungry in a very short while.  Most people can stand a day without eating and just be a little cranky.  Most can even go two days and just be even crankier, irritable, and weak.  Three days, and your pets and loved ones start looking like hamburgers and hot dogs, and after four days you'll pretty much just be fit for laying around and moaning about how much you want a hamburger, which will rapidly increase your chances of those same pets and loved ones turning you into one.

Happily, food in America is cheap, easy to get, and packed with preservatives - there's no need to suffer.  There's no need to even be mildly inconvenienced.  There's no need for you to stop shoveling fat food fatly into your greasy fat maw for even a fat second, you fatty fat fat McFatterton.

The first thing to remember is that you have perfectly good food in your cupboards and refrigerator. When things go downhill, the first thing you should do is have a dinner party.  Seriously - get everything perishable out of your refrigerator and tank up.  Your refrigerator will keep food acceptably cool for about 8 hours with no power if you don't stand there slack-jawed staring at the shelves complaining about how you don't have anything to eat, so for you, 2 hours.   Take out everything you can prepare (remember, you probably have no gas or electricity, so just get rid of anything that isn't ready to eat) and chow down.

After that, think about the food in your cupboards, and don't turn up your nose at the junk - it has calories, and in an emergency, calories are your friend.  I appreciate that you've been trying to slim down and all, but those days are over. 

Same with shaving your bush - I'm sorry, I really am.  Svelte bodies and smooth-shaven privates are for people who live in societies, and society just took the last train to failureville. 

More like HAIRY Hamlin, amirite? 

Remember, when in doubt, throw it out.  You have no electricity, no running water, and no gas.  If something looks fuzzy or smells funky (pic related), get rid of it - even if we get Obamacare, you won't be able to get the stomach pumping required after eating a plate of bad shrimp as all the doctors are going to be the first people devoured by the rampaging zombies.  

The stuff in your fridge and cabinets is going to go fast - you're going to be bored and turn to food for relief, and you're going to have to pre-load your belly for the rough times ahead.  You'll need backups, and this is where a little bit of money and a lot of common sense come in. 

 Tastes as good as it looks.

Thanks to 9-11, the tinfoil hat survival crazy industry has exploded (no pun intended).  Stores like Survival Acres and Survival Center sell big huge kits of emergency rations, and you can even get, no kidding, a survival bucket on Amazon like this one which comes with 90 servings of food plus all sorts of emergency supplies like tools, duct tape, gloves, pots, water, and so on, or this one which boasts an impressive 275 servings of food - buy two and your mama could eat for weeks.  Well, days.  Okay, a day.

Naturally, this food is kind of nasty.  On top of that, much of it is freeze dried, and that means you're going to have to use your precious water to prepare it.  On the plus side, water eaten is water drunk, so you're not wasting it - you'll need to drink less, and so you can still quench your thirst, make your food, and play on your slip-and-slide.  Just to be safe, if your survival food requires you to reconstitute it with water, then double your water supply. 

MRE's are not much better in the taste department, but on the upside most of them are open-and-eat, or they come with their own safe heat source and require nothing external for preparation (because the only thing worse than eating mushy stale vomit is eating cold mushy stale vomit).  On the down side, they do eventually go bad - look at the package, it has an expiration date.  Not only that, but by the time you get it, it's probably already seen a good long life on a supply shelf in Afghanistan.  The MRE's you can buy at the army/navy surplus or on ebay are oftentimes just about expired.

Oh good, Monty Python survived the apocalypse.

While survival rations are fine, there's no substitute for real food - even if it's not that great. Most canned goods officially have a shelf life of one year, and while I cannot in good conscience endorse eating expired food, I do know I myself have never contracted salmonella from an old can of soup.  Of course, I am fucking bulletproof - I've worked in food service on and off for 17 years.  I've worked at taco bell.  If you can get it, I've had it, and the things I can eat without the slightest discomfort would absolutely obliterate your little girly guts.   

Look out for cans that puff outwards - that means botulism, and it is super deadly.  Dented cans are fine so long as they don't leak, and again, when in doubt, throw it out. Fuzz is always a bad sign. 

There are a few other by-and-large immortal foods out there - peanut butter stays good indefinitely, as does honey.  Crackers go stale but are edible long past expiration.  Some things are just stupid to tempt fate with, like mayonnaise, but canned meat like tuna and chicken (and of course, spam) will stay good for a long, long time.  Best of all, these things can all be eaten raw - yes, cold tinned chicken is really gross, but it's high in protein, very cheap, and nobody is going to call you a loony for stockpiling it - just tell curious guests that it was on sale. 

Cake or death?

So here are your options:

Survival bucket:  lots of different kits, most have very long shelf lives, but most require water and a heat source.  

MREs:  Risky, usually almost expired by the time you get them, they do go bad, and they are expensive. 

Immortal Food:  Peanut butter, tinned meat, canned soup, powdered milk, and crackers can all be stored for a long time without going bad (though they may go stale).  Forget the jerky and dried fruits unless you're going to be disciplined about rotating them out every 6 -8 months.  They do in fact go bad, albeit very slowly - jerky and dried fruit only have a long shelf life when you compare them to fresh meat and fresh fruit.  Also, dried food = drink water.  Foods that make you thirsty are not full of win in this scenario.

Whatever you do, one indispensable must-have is vitamin pills.  Most of our vitamins come from fruits and vegetables which will be in short supply after The People's Glorious Revolution.  In this day and age, when you can go to Costco and get a 50-gallon drum of multivitamins for $9.99, there is no reason to catch scurvy.

So just remember:  When in doubt, throw it out;  calories are your friends; stock up on vitamins; don't trust whitey; lord loves a working man; if you get it, go to the doctor and get a shot, it'll clear right up.

If you've exhausted your food supplies, and you still don't have a plan, AND nobody has come to rescue you, it may be time to draw lots to see who gets cannibalized first.  How did you let it come to this, you lazy butter fatty?  You couldn't walk into town to rummage through the charred ruins of the supermarket for a can of Bumble Bee?  You disgust me.  Know what?  You deserve to be dissolved in an atomic fireball.  I don't know why I bother. 

Monday is, as usual, UAFNWFSUTGI, but Tuesday I will pick Suburban Survival back up with one of the most important, and most overlooked, facets of post-plumbing survival. 

Go ahead, guess.  Can you guess?  I bet you can guess.

Blog, Interrupted

Due to a lot of work-type stuff, I'm going to have to skip a day on SSS.  Posting will resume Friday with the next installment in the Suburban Survival series.

Unsolicited Advice for New Writers from Someone Unqualified to Give It, Volume 23 - The Rejection Letter

Dear (insert writer name here):

Thank you for your submission to Metaphorward, the College University College of Arts and Letters' Literary Journal.   We have reviewed your story, entitled I Poured my Heart and Soul in to This, but we are not able to accept it at this time.  We wish you the best of luck placing it elsewhere.

 

I'm on a boat.

If this is your first rejection letter, it won't be your last.  That's not an insult - the editors of Metaphorward only want to encourage new writers, even though we only publish about 6 of them per year.  That means that, by volume, Metaphorward produces more rejection letters every year than we do copies of our journal.  

Rejection letters can be hard to take, especially when you've worked really hard, and to that end the editors of Metaphorward would like to point out that publishing is kind of a crap shoot.  Once you get a few publications under your belt, you'll have some momentum, and it gets easier to get your work out.  Until that time, you will get a hefty stack of letters like this one. 

While this is probably a crushing heartache for you, please remember that it's not personal, and in fact it's probably not even a reflection of your talent.  We turn down lots of good pieces, but we have a very particular mode for the fiction we publish based mostly on whether or not we trust the interns doing our sorting, and also if we feel cranky because Starbucks was out of soy milk that day.  

You may also think that we're sitting around having a laugh at your expense - this is not true.  While occasionally make fun of the real stinkers we get, most of the submissions we receive are perfectly competent and well written, but maybe they run long, or use a font we don't like, or are about something other than graduate students resigned to a mediocre middle-class life that involves being bored by the people around them and taking the groceries out of a hatchback and deciding that it's basically okay, and that their dreams were kind of stupid anyway, and maybe having an affair.  

Words to live by

Honestly, you'll almost never learn why you were rejected, (insert writer name here), and Metaphorward has no intention of telling you either.  Try not to sit up all night staring out the wall listening to Great Gig in the Sky while drinking a fifth of cheap vodka.  Don't over-think it.  If it makes you feel better, you can pretend that they just didn't understand your genius or something like that. 

Most writers keep their rejection letters up to a point, but be careful - looking at that big stack of terse little post cards attached to the first sheet of your best story can be cripplingly depressing.  Some writers have gone so far as to wallpaper their writing rooms with rejection letters - this is fine if you have a particularly grim sense of humor, or if the letters inspire a sort of productive anger in you, but otherwise if you're going to keep them you should just put them in an old shoebox or two and file them away.  

You're not the first, you won't be the last

If you take anything away from this rejection letter, (insert writer name here), just remember that it's all part of the writing process.  If this was your one big story that you just have to have published then by all means keep sending it out, but be warned that others may not feel the same way about your work as you do.  Indeed, sometimes the stories over which we are most passionate are those which are so rich with internalized meaning that though they are powerful and evocative to you, they mean very little to an outside reader.  This can be very hard to take, but take it you must, or you will not persevere.

And in the end, so much of writing is perseverance. You must keep writing - one more word, one more page, one more chapter, until the thing is done - and then move on to the next.  While criticism is helpful, you must remember that it is not you who is being criticized, but the story.  Once you can make the distinction, rejection letters will be easier and easier to endure, and you will be well on your way.  

All the best, 

Vytautas Malesh
Editor-in-Chief
Metaphorward - the College University College of Arts and Letters' Literary Journal

Suburban Survival, Part 2 - Tap the Bottle then Twist the Cap

In my last blog, I started off a little series on survival for the suburbanite who has no interest in looking, acting, or living like a survivalist.   I talked about the most important element in terms of maintaining human life (that being air), and offered that if your air supply is contaminated or absent, there's not a damn thing you can do about it.

 So lost without you.  Also: dead.

Let me go ahead and start today by talking a bit about the criteria by which I'd like to evaluate one's survival options: 

First things first, when it comes to survival gear and tactics, it's got to help you to survive - I'm dismissing the sort of feel-good duck-and-cover crap that people would have you to believe in order to maintain peace and order with a false sense of security, and to that end I've already told you not to duct tape your house shut.

Second things second, what I'm going to talk about in this series has to be the sort of stuff the well entrenched and established comfy suburbanite would actually do, and that doesn't include building a bomb shelter, stocking an arsenal, or drawing a diagram of which part of your shih tzu can be cut up into loin, chuck, and roast.

 Adorably delicious.

To that end, everything I'm going to suggest is going to A ) involve activities that can be explained in 5 simple steps or less, B) use things you probably already have in your home, and C) won't take up more than a sterilite tub or two in your guest closet, a corner of your basement or your garage. 

That being said, the biggest space killer is water, and it is the second most important thing that you need to, well, not die.  There is a rule of 3 when it comes to survival:

3 minutes without air


3 days without water


3 weeks without food.

(Spoiler alert - now you know what the next Suburban Survival post will be about. )

But the matter at hand is water, and it's one of the easiest to take care of.   Water is abundant, it doesn't spoil (caveats apply), and these two factors make it very, very cheap.  Unfortunately - water is big.  It takes up an awful lot of space, and it is F'ing heavy.

Now I know what you're thinking - you've saved every episode of Man vs. Wild on Tivo and you cannot wait to start drinking your own pee out of an old tin can.  I cannot stress enough that this is a terrible idea.  Your pee is mostly water, yes, plus a whole bunch of stuff that your body decided it didn't want the first time around and is going to be awfully displeased to see the second.  Your pee is basically, and I'm trying not to be too vulgar or gross here, liquid poop. Specifically, liquid poop with salt in it.  It should be consumed only as the last possible resort, or if you are in a German porno. 

 Gott in Himmel!  Ich Liebe Das!

And when I mean last resort, I mean last.  You should drink the water out of the back of your toilet first.  You should maybe consider drinking the water in your toilet first.  Let me say this again:  DO NOT DRINK YOUR OWN PEE!

We live in amazing times - even your grandfather couldn't always have counted on twisting a tap or pushing a button and getting clean drinking water, and your grandfather was so busy killing japs that he never even had time to notice that he was drinking bath-warm paddy water, what with the shell shock and all.  But he came home from the bush and was able to wash away all the horror he'd seen thanks to Ivory soap and the friendly folks at the water department.

And then you , you spoiled baby, you have to pour it through a fucking ten dollar euro filter.  What's the matter, fancy, tap water not good enough for you?  In my day, we drank water out of puddles.  That's the way it was, and we liked it!

Next issue: Better Made

So at the very least, fill up some old Faygo bottles with tap water, and put them down in the basement - they will stay cooler, and they will be out of the way.

The golden rule* is one gallon, per person, per day, but if I may be honest, this is over-cautious.  About half of your daily water intake comes from food.  Your job is to replace what you sweat and pee out, and unless you're continuing to train for a marathon in the middle of the apocalypse, you can live off of a liter a day with at most mild discomfort for a good long time.

So you should keep:  AT LEAST 1 liter per day per person, and plan on needing water for 1 week.  That's just under 2 gallons per person, and 1 week should give you enough time to come up with some manner of plan.  That or your just fucked, and the water you've saved will only serve to keep you conscious so that the Doom-bots of the Great War can find you holed up in your basement and laser-blast you into your composite molecules.

 Do not be fooled - stay in your homes!

Rotate this stockpile of water every year if it's store-bought bottled water, or every 6 months for kept tap water (that's nothing against water from the tap, and mostly an indicator of how hard it is to clean your own containers).  Tiny little super-tough bacterial and viral survivors can slowly reproduce even in a seemingly barren environment like a jug of tap water.  Over a year, there's a chance that enough germs will build up to make you sick.  When in doubt, throw it out. 

If you absolutely cannot be bothered to store water in your home, there are alternatives.

How a post gets made.

For one thing, all those tasty beverages you enjoy like canned iced tea, milk, and soda pop? They have water in them.  So do beer, and whiskey, and wine.  If you try to survive by meeting your hydration needs of alcoholic beverages (and to a lesser degree, soda pop) you're going to feel like shit, but you'll stay alive.  Your urine will turn a rich amber color, you will be lethargic and probably cramping up, you should count on some liver damage, and most of the time you'll be drunk and weak, but you'll be alive.

For another, look around your house for hidden water reservoirs - your water heater (it is NOT a hot water heater - why would you heat hot water?) and your toilet tank are filled with perfectly good tap water.  Make sure you let your water heater cool down  before draining it, and you should probably ditch the first few nasty silty quarts that come out, but it is potable.  The water in your toilet tank has nasty connotations, and it's going to taste quite stale what with years of accumulated rust and sediment, but unless you seriously installed that thing wrong, you can drink it with no harm done, in a pinch. If you're squeamish, you can treat it as I'll detail below.

Precious bodily fluids, Mandrake.

Finally, you can collect rainwater - years of industrial pollution have made rainwater unfit to drink, but there are steps you can take to salvage it.  Collect it in good clean buckets and then run it through a decent water filter - oh come on you fucking yuppie, I know you've got a Britta.  It will remove solid particulate matter and some of the heavy metals (do remember that heavy metals build up over time - a week of drinking rain water is not going to give you the brain-crazies).  Get the best one you can - this is your body's own plumbing here, no time to scrimp! 


Once you've filtered it, boil it for at least one minute (3 minutes in the mountains).  For added safety, dilute a tiny splash of chlorine bleach (8 drops to a gallon - a little more won't kill you, a lot more might).  Pour it into clean glasses and enjoy your lukewarm survival juice!


If you are lucky enough to live by a river, stream, creak, or brook, the same rules may apply - what the toilet is to your house, rivers are to modern industry.  If you have even the slightest doubt, do not drink river water, even if treated.  If your river is sluggish, stagnant, or just generally gives you a bad vibe, don't drink it.  If you know you live downriver from any sort of dump site or industrial manufacturing, don't drink it. If you look at that river and think "I don't know if I'd swim in that," well what the fuck, why would you want that inside you? DON'T DRINK IT!

A thousand gallons of babbling death, per minute.

There's no way to judge water cleanliness by looking - we've all had nights of drinking where our urine came out crystal-clear, and if someone handed you a glass you wouldn't know it from water, or vodka, or 6 molar hydrochloric acid. Filter it, boil it, bleach it.

There's a lot more to know about taking care of your water, but when the pipes start coughing air and spitting silt because the little green men finally decide to take over earth, this post should keep your thirst at bay long enough for you to meet up with a plucky band of survivors and then force the invaders to retreat by giving them our nasty earth germs - maybe even from a dirty glass of water.

Or, you know, your mom.

Wow, really?  Permanent?  As in forever?

*gross, dude.

Roll Up Your Sleeves

I don't know about you, but I remember the big blackout of 2003 as a pretty awesome micro-vacation - I was in the middle of a conference call and everything went dead - thinking the problem was on my end, I expected to resume the meeting in a matter of minutes, but then I noticed that I couldn't hear the odd and ubiquitous hum of electric devices up and down the street.  It didn't take but five minutes to figure out the situation and, like every other American, think "OMGZ T3h TERARRISTS WONZZ!!!11one"

8-14-2003 - NEVAR FORGET!!!

So I had some friends over, we drank up the beer while it was still cold, we smoked some dope, we ate everything in the fridge, and took turns using the alley as a urinal.  It was primitive, dirty, dark, and a little unnerving, but it was also kind of fun. Those of us with car stereos knew that it wasn't a terrorist attack and that power would be restored shortly (just in time for MONDAY am I right girls?  Oh, you don't have to be crazy to work here, but it helps ha ha ha) so we just kicked back and got by, watching the stars, listening to the crickets, and stubbing our toes on every piece of furniture in the house since none of us thought to check the batteries in our flashlights. 

But while 3 days was nice, anything longer would honestly have been inconvenient to say the least.  Despite the powers that be keeping quiet on the whole thing, there was some looting in Detroit, and elsewhere I'm sure.  While I have said before that I keep a shotgun handy, that same shotgun wasn't going to be a big help in getting fresh water or food, or in finding out if my friends and family were okay short of turning to a life of crime (which, of course, would be a perfectly viable option on day 10). 

The 2003 blackout made everyone ask a lot of questions about their own preparedness for emergencies, and I can't think of anyone who didn't in some way come up lacking.  In Detroit we got caught with no water, very little food, no electricity, one gun, and one non-functional flashlight.  It's like a zombie movie, except without the wholesale slaughter of reanimated loved ones.  

But...but Mittens, it's ME, your mum-mums!

And I find that as more and more time passes, most people I know are prepared less and less.  No water stores, no MRE's, no generator, no flashlight.  It's like all we remember is the fun little three day vacation, and we've forgotten that we all had to go in the yard like dogs. 

Somebody, somewhere, is masturbating to that. 

Well, frankly, I remember this inconvenience because garden season is coming up.  For the last 3 years I have not had a garden because I lived in the goddamn desert, but now that I'm back where the dirt is black and the leaves are green, I damn well mean to start one.  Tomatoes, squash, peppers, potatoes, carrots - a nice little parcel of produce.  

Can you guess when I started gardening?  You're mostly right if you said 2004 - I did have a flower garden (girlfriend's idea) in 2003.  But the one thing I knew I could do was grow food out of the ground, and if there's nothing else you can do in a blackout scenario, well, you could be worse off.  

In England, they're called "chavs," and it's not a nice thing to say. 

What I mean to do over the next few blogs (exempting Monday's UAFNWFSUTGI) is to create a mini ten-ish page survival handbook. 

You're not going to learn how to turn your own pee into Crystal Light, nor will you learn how to skin, gut, and prepare your pets.   I am making a survival guide for the domestic survivalist, the person who likes civilization and creature comforts, the person who would enjoy a little break from the world as he or she waits for the power to come back on, but wants to be ready if it doesn't.  

Think of this as a survival guide for the suburbs, or rather, for the suburbanite - because if there's one thing a suburbanite can do, it's buy things. 

To that end, I will cover important elements of survival in a breakdown / blackout / revolution scenario going from the most vital to the most indulgent by covering what you can buy, make, and have ready ahead of time that won't require any special skills and won't make you look like some sort of gold-hoarding Luddite sitting in a cave with a big chubber for the End of Days. 

God, just pick one.  Jokes like this take more effort than they're worth.

This is going to be a learn-as-we go process.  I'm not claiming any sort of authority beyond good horse sense and a great reluctance to die, so the data in this blog will generally pop up the day after I learn it.

We'll start today by talking about the most important thing you need to live:  Air

If your air is gone, you're fucked. If your air is poisoned, you're fucked.  The last thing you should worry about is the first thing you need, because honestly there is not a whole hell of a lot you can do about it.   

Gas masks work if they fit, if the filter is not expired, and if you are wearing one at the time of the introduction of an airborne agent.  This is not going to happen, because you are probably napping in a hammock in the back yard, or hosting a cocktail party.  If you do own a gas mask, or are interested in picking one up, then you are probably already in the advanced survival class and there's not much I'm going to teach you.

If the terrarz or the fascists or the blackocratic jewosexuals or whoever you think is going to "get" you hit you with an airborne agent, well, you're probably going to die.  That's the first thing to remember about survival - if someone really wants to get you, they're going to get you.  It's something we learned back in the 80's: in the 50's they had a lot of civic defense videos and duck-and-cover bullshit, but by the time I was born we knew it was feel-good crap.  If the Russkies hit the button, you wouldn't even know, and that's how we learned to stare down the threat of thermonuclear war.  

I will use any excuse to show this picture. 

Long story short, if you don't have air, you die, and there's not much to be done about it.  

Thankfully, gassing people is F'ing hard.  Do you know how much air there is around you?  Billions and billions and billions of gallons! If there's a chemical fire up the street and you get a whiff of it, you know what's gonna happen?  Not a goddamn thing.  Unless someone is launching a VX rocket at your house, the only way to really suffer an airborne chem attack is to be in an enclosed space when the substance is released (think of the Tokyo sarin attack of 1995). 

To that end, your best bet is to always have a way out - know the exits, know where you could get fresh air.  Remember that fresh air in this context doesn't necessarily mean dryer sheets, spring meadows, or unicorn farts - it means air that isn't going to kill you.  This might mean sucking in the ghastly stink of the NYC subway tunnel.  It's a lot better than mustard gas, so long as the C.H.U.D.S. don't get you. 

Know your escape routes.

So to recap: 

Air - very important to live.  Not a lot you can do about it.  When in an enclosed space, know a way out.  Stinky nasty air is still fresh air in the case of toxic airborne agents. The best defense against air contamination is escape.  Nothing in this blog is going to help you deal with ABC agents, chemical fires, or asbestos-laden industrial fallout.

On a parting note, forget the duct tape and trash bags.  If it's gas, the barrier won't do anything.  If it's dust and debris, put a damp rag over your mouth and get away fast.  I'm pretty sure it's not even possible to make an airtight seal with cellophane and duct tape, and even if you could, well, congratulations - you have just hermetically sealed your own coffin. 

At least you'll be busy as you die.

Unsolicited Advice for New Writers from Someone Unqualified to Give it, Volume 22 - Make it Real

Like every other American male, I watched about ten minutes of the Oscars last night, feigned interest, got up and drank a beer, and went to sleep.  I'm not exactly the most red-blooded macho American sort of guy, but I'm going to go ahead and say that Oscar watching is definitely in the realm of man-card revocation.

Unless you're watching for the fashion. 

But even then, not in an "Oooh" and "Aaah" sense, more like in the taking notes sense. I'm a strong advocate of dressing well, and the actors at the Oscars are almost without exception well-dressed.  Of course, guys have it easy - evening dress or at least a suit with a bow-tie.  Their tailors do most of the work.  The ladies, egad, so many dresses that so totally look like bunched up old curtains.

Ahem - how about them Lions?  Go sports team!

Football...FOOTBALL!

But since I don't live in a cave, I did know that the best picture nomination was supposedly between mega bank-breaker Avatar and his ex-wife's barely-seen but apparently awesome flick The Hurt Locker.  I didn't see either.  The Hurt Locker wasn't at any of the 8,000 multiplexes in my state, and Avatar was, as I've said before, a bunch of wishful thinking and Hollywood noble savage Liberalism that I will rent on DVD so that I can fast-forward to the power armor scenes.  

I was lukewarm on my wholesale rejection of Avatar as ridiculous pop-lib crap, because I seldom reject a movie just on the basis of its politics.  I love Tombstone and Red Dawn even if they are borderline fascist and jingoist, respectively, because they're great-looking movies that fucking rock, and frankly I'm half fascist myself.

Mostly on my dad's side, but I think my mom's great grandmother dated Mussolini.

But my problem with Avatar can be summed up in one non-word:  Unobtainium.  James Cameron, you needed a mineral that was hard to obtain and so you named it unobtainium. Your services are no longer required.

And that's just symbolic of the problem as a whole - blue "nature people" against the Eeeevil machine people who don't live in harmony with goddess earth mother gaia - look, it's just shit. 

A lot of writers start out looking into Fantasy and Sci-Fi because they like being taken to dream worlds beyond human experience, and that's awesome.  The mistake they make is that they get confused over which side of the writer/reader line they sit.  It is fantasy, but it is not YOUR fantasy - that is, when it's time to make the work of fantasy art, your fantasy ends and the work begins.

So the problem with something like Avatar is that it makes a blatant and stupid allegory that anyone only buys because A) it neatly conforms to their own noble savage ideology or B) the bright shiny lights shut off anything resembling the logic portion of their brain.  The allegory itself is one that movie makers have gotten away with for a long time - after all, people have called Avatar "Dances with Wolves in space" and "Billion-dollar Fern Gully," so clearly this idea that people who wear loincloths are better than people who wear pants is a popular one.

Avatar, circa 1600

But beyond being a stupid and obvious allegory, the world doesn't go very deep, and here just so I don't offend every fan of Avatar in the world, because there are apparently 10 billion of you mouth-breathers, I'll talk about fantasy and sci-fi generally.  Plus, I hate being wrong and since I only know about Avatar from reviews, criticism, and eyewitness accounts, I'd hate for some Avatar fan to write me a caps-locked comment of misspelled vitriol and then pee their pants because they missed Saving Grace on account of my ignorance.

I could just as easily talk about Halo, the popular video game.  in Halo, see, you've got this guy, and his name is Master Chief.  And he never says anything, but he's totally cool, and so he's like an earth soldier, or whatever.  And then there's these Covenant guys, and they're against Master Chief, so like, you know, it works on a lot of levels.

World Building has become less and less popular in hardcover fantasy - I don't mean that fewer and fewer fantasy writers are doing it, but I mean that what's getting published seems to be stuff like Harry Potter that is light enough to engage children and familiar enough to entertain adults.  This isn't the kind of culture that would make Lord of the Rings a best seller - this is the kind of culture that thinks Achilles died at the end of The Iliad because they cribbed the whole thing by watching Troy.

A bright shiny nickel to anyone who knows what this image depicts beyond saying Achilles is fighting Hektor.

I'm a big fan of world-building. If you're going to write a fantasy book, I believe you must go back to square one and actually get down and do a cosmogony, important genealogies, all the kind of stuffy academic anthropologist shit.  Of course I advocate this because I think its fun, and I get a flavor for the authenticity, but why shouldn't I encourage someone else to do this as well? 

The answer is that big fantasy books with long back stories aren't best sellers.  Modern airport readers want the familiar fed back to them - they want archetypes, they want action and adventure, and a sense of inclusion.  Your big huge appendix with maps and charts and all that crap at the back of the book just makes them feel talked-down to.  They don't have time for all your family trees and your lines of lineage and your fancy places that actually could occupy real time and space. 

 

TL;DR LOL

But if you're reading this to make money, I don't know what to tell you - you should stop now.  If you're writing to make money at all, you should stop now - it's probably not going to happen.  It's equal parts luck, skill, talent, networking, ass kissing, and perseverance to have any success as a writer, and the luck and networking parts of that combination are getting slimmer every day as publishers sell less and less books, lay off more and more people, and are less willing to risk publishing esoteric genre fiction.

I can only encourage people to write what I think is good fiction - to that end, aspiring fantasy or science fiction writer, read your history, read your mythology.  Look at maps, trace important genealogies through history (blood lines are still much more relevant than you think, and if you doubt it, wait until someone in your family dies to see the hullabaloo made over inheritance).

If you're going to include fantastic creatures, put them to work - If there's a terrible monster in the dark wood, how did it shape the trade routes and politics of the nearby towns?  Do they go around it?  Do foolhardy adventurers seek to kill it? Did the army adopt it as a unit symbol? 

108th Airborne scores 10 points for Gryffindore.

Be consistent in your application of magic or super / psychic powers.  "Magic" is not a keyword for "inconvenient problem goes away."  There was a particularly bad example in the old X-Men animated series in which Storm, Rogue, and Gambit were all trapped in this crushing cube sort of thing and, rather than have him stand around like a feeb, the writers and animators decided that gambit should start shooting energy from his fingers.  Even people who have only heard of the X-Men know that's not canon.

Did that sound like sniveling fanboy-ism?  Get used to it - if you want to write fantasy or science fiction, a large part of your audience will be obese neck-bearded basement dwellers who obsess over continuity details.  They are the reason that Star Trek is still popular, and you are trying to get a piece of that market share.  Don't insult them - give them something to chew on, something worth reading, and maybe they'll consider it something worth buying.

Most appropriate image ever.