A-Z holiday

 Having a small break, well a month actually, from the grim reality of my sefuty world.  April is the month of collective madness as a bunch of bloggers, last I heard it huge! enter the A-Z blog challenge. 

This year I am going to A-Z'ing about world building each day (except Sundays) over on kissafrog.  Not a new world but this one of ours which has enough amazing magical strangeness about it to satisfy any teacher of world building:)

World building fascinates me – such power for the creator.  However, there are rules, and for successful world building the rules are clear enough.  There must be logical/reasonable geography and history, culture, life forms, myths and legends and, if a fantasy or fairytale, there must be magic both natural and controlled (magic also has rules, did you know?)  Higher beings, who control the magic or who know the secrets.  A whole lot of other stuff as well, such as leaders,politics, technologies etc.

So on this mad merry go round I will have some of the above – the reason for the geography, some flora and fauna.  I will discuss a little sociology and anthropological aspects, not much I don’t want to bore you. There will be some natural magic and some invented, some mention of the special few who control it.

 
I will be discussing the origins and uses of some of the words on albertaross, and will be back here in May.

I haven't written all the blogs yet just the first week's , if something pertinent to sefutychronicles comes up I will post here as well.  I might still have guests on the Red Carpet during April - so not entirely closed.  See you soon


Follow my world build on kissafrog and albertaross

Who is to live and who to die?

So okay – in my Sefuty Chronicles’ world I trashed the planet and caused devastating wars over diminishing resources!  I divided the survivors into three.

 1)      Those who made it into purpose built cities before the doors shut (for ever). 
2)    Those who hid behind rings of land mines on the promise that they would be rescued soon! (50 years) 
3)     Those who managed neither and were left to survive or not by their own ways.

I have not written about the whole world, other countries are mentioned but these Tales are a localized affair set in a locale I know reasonably well, and so some solutions may not ring likely to other nations.  Bear with me, the problems are still the same.

Whether or not the climate change disaster was caused by mankind or by natural changes matters not when the world is home to billions of our own kind.  We don’t really care if the ancient life forms millions of years ago went through the same and became extinct.  Now it us and it is  personal.  9 billion die before my Tales begin as one old man put it

‘By the time it was finished, the victors of the world stood on a mound of billions. We committed the greatest genocide of all time.  To save ourselves we killed them all.’

He was by anyone’s standards a good man before the Wars, and he struggled to do good after the Wars.  But things had changed. 

The next problem I had with this new world I was inventing was by how much would our nature change when the chips were truly down. How much does our civilized code depend on the basic security of food, health and shelter. Does the fact that the fall from our pampered world to bare basics would be huge make any difference to that code.

Each of my groups of survivors would need to tackle their changed lifestyles in different ways and this took much pondered time.  Studying historical events, anthropological theories, listening to people and tossing the mix together.  Testing my ideas.  I enjoyed it and what does that say I wonder?!

Population Control

Food Security

Law and Order

All these are the matter for heated debate and none more so than population control.  You scoff, why is it needed if the worlds population has crashed to Neolithic numbers? Well in the first two books of the Chronicles the City folk have no land to grow food, the mined areas have no room for expansion. Population control and food security walked hand in hand.

Population control is an emotive subject, complete with a dark history of coercion and eugenics, which has rendered the management of it almost a taboo subject.  There have been world summits over the years.  Many strands mooted as to how best manage the worlds rapidly climbing population little has happened, because we are scared of the subject. (a subject for another day) 

In my diminished world some of the problems remain. 

*  If there is not enough food or water who decides on who has the right to it?

*  If survival depends on the co-operation of the many what place is there for the ones who cannot/will not contribute?

*  If survival depends on the next generation who is to be allowed the right to produce that generation?

*  If medical expertise has vanished who is to be saved and who not?

*  Do people make their own rules or try and follow the old rules?    

You can see some potential trouble brewing in these questions. I wandered into murky depths and had to tease out some moral and ethical as well as practical solutions. 

Dried dung works quite well!

Well I deprived my new world of electricity. At first it doesn’t seem so bad after all I grew up in an era before fridges or freezers and we all could preserve food  - but wait a minute – the reason my world lacks electricity is because fossil fuel has vanished - no gas for cooking, so how would the food be heated that will be turned into jams and chutneys, into bottled goodies for the lean times?

Yes well – it can be done and those lucky enough to have a range or open fire could as long as they have the wood – or dried dung works quite well.

My world lost its transport systems. Okay in a town? Well no. Looting is inevitable once everyone realised there was no more food deliveries. Riots are panicky things –like a cornered animal – new rules and those who cannot kill to defend and feed their families are going to go without at best or die themselves.

So would it better to live in the countryside. Better chances of surviving? Grow your own food (fingers crossed on the weather), cut your own wood (hope you’re not in a treeless zone) get up with the dawn and sleep at sunset unless you can find some source of burnable oil (do you have an animal that can be rendered down?) Those starving folk from the towns are soon going to be knocking on your door!

So now those who are left can clothe themselves for quite a while from the shops. They can provide bedding for themselves. If, of course, they haven’t been taken over by gangs and cartels with enough guns to back up their claim of ownership. Oh I am so gloomy!

In the meantime the survivors freeze or melt as air-conditioning and heating systems go down. Having just recently had our temperatures across the UK go down to minus 16 degrees (okay I know many of you have worse!) I think a whole stack more survivors die. Recent heat-waves across Europe indicated an increasing mortality rate with every increased degree of temperature.

Back when our early ancestors colonized the globe they wandered into extreme climatic conditions and slowly over time acclimatized. Is there time for the progression from soft livers to hardy intrepids? I think so, but many would perish on the way. In later Chronicles mention of those who lose the survival battle, begin to spell out the many ways there are to die.

How hardy are we when it comes down to basics, how do our social structures cope? are questions for another day. As mentioned before, there had not been any planning in Ellen’s world, when I first sat down to write. Ellen was meant to be a short story so what need? I managed to save some of my characters from all the wars, riots and plundering by encasing them in rings of land mines – yup land mines. Now there’s a crazy idea!

Actually the mining was carried out by the government of the day to protect those who agreed. To save them from the fighting, the disorder the mines laid down for just as long as it took to restore law and order, then the army would removed them, No harm done. Indeed.

Except of course no one came back to remove them. Not for 50 years.

Do not -I repeat - do not get ill

When I decided on a  post climate change world for my first novel, Ellen’s Tale, I blithely thought petrol, oil.  Then I began to think electricity.  The whole of modern civilization crashed around my ears!

Think about it, think about what vanishes. The list is endless and I still probably haven’t thought of it all.

Phone your insurance company when its computers are down – you don’t exist.  Phone the bank to check your hard earned money and its computers are down, the money might as well not be there.  Are they keeping the written records in a vault somewhere?  I do hope so.

Come the demise of fossil fuel, will you rush to the bank?  They don’t keep the cash there.  File an insurance claim? Forget it.

Phone for help? Phones are down. Get news of the apocalypse? Only if you have a wind up radio.

Do the weekly shop- there will be so little food there. Refridgerated containers? Gone. Intensively farmed goods? Gone.

Do not- I repeat- do not get ill.  Hospitals and all their wonderful complicated machines and research centres? Down. I mean even the lifts won't be working?

Trains? Planes? Ships? No. No. No.

Well those of us who can garden or farm will be okay?  Garden? Yes - until an unseasonable local drought hits – there will be no running tap water to help, so those veggies will die if you don’t have collected rainwater or a well. Know how to farm? Fine but are you going to plough the fields by hand, kill each fresh bug or blight individually because the chemicals needed to spray are all fossil fuel based.  Where the fertilizer? 

Can hunt but then so can anyone else with a gun – and despite our gun laws quite a few people in UK possess guns (other countries I cannot comment on!) anyone else with a gun can be shooting, maybe not to kill the odd rabbit, but to have your garden sprouts!  And when the bullets run out? When the guns break?

No worse, you say, than before the industrial revolution.  We did then, we can do now.  Yes-well - apart from the fact that we are mostly an urban animal now with barely a touching knowledge of nature, the population in the UK stands at 60+ million whereas before the industrial revolution it hovered around the 6-7 million mark.  Where’s the food coming from?

A quick resume of what we need electrics for would include

Transport – even gas and diesel need electrics to start an engine

In the home – heating- cooling – washing -lighting – communication – entertainment

Industry - driving almost every moving part as well as all above mentioned

Medicine /research as mentioned

I am sure you could come up with more

I fondly imagined that as I had grown up post Second World War, I and other baby boomers would cope quite well. Hah!

We have been mechanized too long.  Mechanized too well. Spoilt!

There is more!

Red Carpet Day: Terri Morgen

RED CARPET DAY

Terri Morgen

author of

Playing the Genetic Lottery

Terri Morgan is a freelance journalist who's work has appeared in dozens of different magazines and newspapers. She is the author of four sports biographies for young adults, and the co-author of two others. She is the co-author of two books on photography: Photography, Take Your Best Shot, and Capturing Childhood Memories, The Complete Photography Guide for Parents. Playing the Genetic Lottery is her first novel. She lives in Soquel, California.

Guest Post

When people first discover my novel, Playing the Genetic Lottery, is about a 32-year-old wife and mother who grew up with two schizophrenic parents, one of the first questions they have for me "is this autobiographical?" The answer is no.

I'm much older than Caitlin, my protagonist, I don't have any children, and both my parents were quite sane when I was growing up. In fact, my mother still is the picture of mental health, while my father is deceased. The next question is generally "How did you come to write about schizophrenia?" That answer takes a little longer to share.

I've always been fascinated with people, human behavior, and trying to figure out what makes people behave the way they do. One day my friend Kathy, who is also fascinated with the same thing, called to tell me about a woman she'd met. The woman, who was the oldest of seven children essentially raised her six younger siblings because both their parents had schizophrenia. Knowing that I'd written 8 non-fiction books during my career as a freelance journalist, Kathy suggested I work with this woman on a book. Suddenly, a light bulb went off in my head. Even though I hadn't written anything but non-fiction for the past three decades I said "no, I want to write a novel."

The words came out of my mouth before I even realized what I was saying. But once they were out I was obsessed with the idea. I started reading everything I could get my hands on about schizophrenia, and had lots of conversations with friends who had schizophrenic relatives. The one person I didn't talk to, however, was Kathy's friend. I was so worried about inadvertently stealing her story that I wouldn't even let Kathy tell me her name. Once I had enough material I sat down and started creating Caitlin and her world.

 The book seemed to have a mind of its own. I had a general idea of the story I wanted to tell when I started, but the novel kept evolving as I finished more and more chapters.

 The topic of schizophrenia wasn't completely new to me; as a journalist I had encountered a number of mentally ill people while covering the courts and crime beat, and writing general news stories about the homeless in our community. I have also known several people who are schizophrenic, and, being interested in human psychology, had done a little research over the years just to satisfy my own curiosity. But working on the novel taught me so much more about the disease and the impact it has on families. It also reinforced the fact people who are unfortunate enough to develop this devastating mental illness are individuals, people who have families and friends who love them, and should be respected like all the other people we share this planet with.

Terri Morgen - Author of Playing the Genetic Lottery.Read excerpts from my novel at www.terrimorgan.net. Now available as an ebook at smashwords  www.smashwords.com/books/view/104186 and at amazon

Excerpt from Playing the Genetic Lottery

 

Caitlin Kane knows more about the impact of schizophrenia than most people could imagine. Both her parents were afflicted with the devastating mental illness, a disease that tends to run in families, and Caitlin and her brother grew up trying to navigate the chaos of living with two schizophrenics. Her  tumultuous childhood left Caitlin determined to forge a peaceful and serene life for herself. Now 32, she is living her dream. Married to her best friend, she and her husband are raising two bright young children in the suburbs of Seattle. While her unusual upbringing has left Caitlin with emotional scars, she enjoys the love and support of her extended family and her challenging career as a pediatric nurse. But no matter how hard she tries, she can't shake the obsessive fear that the family illness will strike again, robbing her of her mind or stealing away the sanity of one or both of her children.

Chapter Five

             School started up again, and Jon and I were at our third elementary school. I was in second grade, and Jon was in fifth. A month or so after classes started, Dad stopped going to work at the hardware store again and started spending more and more time pacing through the apartment, talking to someone neither Jon nor I could see or hear. The discussions grew more heated as the days passed, and Dad would frighten us as he argued with his demons, repeatedly, and loudly, insisting that they leave him alone.

Mom, on the other hand, was actually doing pretty well. Her doctor had her on a new medication, and although it made her gain some weight, it seemed to leave her healthier than she'd been for a long time. She was painting steadily, and she started picking up dinner shifts at a Mexican restaurant nearby. She was bringing home money again, along with left over chips and burritos that Jon and I would take to school for lunch.

Mom was at work, and Jon and I were in our bedroom, trying to do homework while Dad was stomping around the apartment yelling that we had to hide. Suddenly, the door to our bedroom was thrown open, and Dad barged in. "Come on," he shouted. "Come quick.”

He grabbed my arm and pulled me off my bed, my schoolbook and papers flying off my lap. "We have to get out of here. They're after us.”

Jon's eyes widened.  "Dad, calm down.”

"Don't tell me to calm down," Dad shouted. "This is an emergency. We have to get out of here. NOW!”

Dad was dragging me out of the room. My feet went out from under me, and I slid on my side as he pulled me towards the living room.

"Help me Jon," I screamed. Jon rushed over and tried to knock Dad's arm away from me to loosen his grip on my forearm. Dad lashed out with his other arm and knocked Jon away. Jon's legs went out from under him, and he crashed onto the floor. By the time Jon got back on his feet, Dad and I were out the front door. Jon ran after us.

"Get in, get in," Dad screamed as he pulled me to the car. I was screaming too, and Jon was yelling "Stop it," at the top of his lungs. "Both of you get in. They're coming to get us. We have to get out of here now.”

Jon could have made a run for it while Dad was struggling to shove me into the back seat. I would have, if I had been him. I would have run as fast and as far as I could have from Dad's maniacal delusions. But my loyal, protective, older brother didn't abandon me. He climbed in the back seat behind me and pulled me close.

Dad fired up the engine and peeled out of the parking lot in reverse. The tires shrieked as he slammed the car into drive while we were still backing onto the road. He floored the gas pedal, and we took off.

"They're after us, Jon, they're after us. You have to help us get away.”

Jon must have realized arguing with Dad was futile, so he took the only other option available, and pretended to cooperate. "OK Dad. What do you need me to do?”

"Keep a look out the back window. See if you can spot 'em while I try to lose 'em.”

"OK Dad.”

Jon turned and knelt on the back seat, peering over the back dash and out the rear window. "I think it's clear Dad. There's no one behind us.”

"They're too crafty, son. They're still there. Keep looking.”

I strapped on my seat belt, certain we were going to crash and gripped the armrest on my left hand. I was still crying, but more quietly now, more confident that Jon would be able to reach Dad and get us out of this nightmare. That confidence began leaking away as Dad sped up, blasted through stoplights, took turns without slowing down, while continuing to rant that "They're after us, they're trying to catch us." Jon was gripping the back of the seat, but was unable to hold on when Dad abruptly turned to the left. He fell towards me and landed partially sprawled on my lap. We both yelped in pain, loudly.

The noise distracted Dad for a moment. He looked into the rear-view mirror and began yelling again when he realized Jon wasn't in position to watch for our tail. "Get back up there, son. You can't quit. They'll get us if you do.”

Dad turned his head to see if Jon was complying, and the car began veering to the right. We screamed. 

"Watch the road," Jon shouted.

Dad turned his head back and jerked the steering wheel to the left. We were inches away from sideswiping a minivan. Then suddenly we were racing into oncoming traffic. "Look out," Jon screamed again, as horns blared. The other driver swerved in time, somehow, missing us by inches. Dad corrected and swerved back into his lane. Jon slide down onto the seat beside me and belted himself in.

Flashing blue and red lights filled the car. "Oh shit," said Dad. "It's a trick. They've got the cops in on it now, too.”

"No Dad," Jon said. "I can hear them on my radio. They're here to help us. Pull over.”

"It's a trick," Dad repeated and sped up again. "I'll lose them at the light.”

He raced towards the intersection, where the traffic light signaled red. "They think I'm going to stop," Dad said and started to laugh. "I'll show them.”

The last thing I remember was Jon screaming "NOOO.”

*****

It's blogger messing up the formatting again! - many apologies.
Thank you so much for your visit Terri - if anyone missed Terri's interview she can be found on the last Red Carpet Day