Dumping on Mexico

I got a couple of comments on the farm subsidies article, which was posted on my friend Fred's blog "Seeking Liberty," and when I went to read them, I found that Wordpress automatically generates links that readers of blog articles might be interesting.

So I found this one here:

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/15/dumping-on-mexico/

It elaborates on the point I made about "dumping" subsidized crops on Mexico, which undermine Mexican farmers that cannot compete with them because they can't get the same kind of subsidies our farmers can.

No comments in the article about illegal immigration--one logical consequence of Mexican (and I believe other Central American) farmers not being able to make a living anymore and understandably not wanting to starve to death--but some people in the comments section pointed this out.

Intertextuality and "Escape from the Wastelands"

Purchased Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (Bilingual Edition) from a local bookstore yesterday, probably the first new book I've purchased in years. 

(Thanks to Amazon.com's ZShops and Half.com, it's easy to find books I wanted used for much less.)

I intended to use it to add intertextuality to my novel Escape from the Wastelands, which will hopefully make it deeper and more financially successful.  Thus far, I've read read some of the introduction, but based on some passages quoted, I've already gotten some ideas for the early career of antagonist Grendel Black.

Grendel (the monster) is described as being a creautre from the moors.  Grendel Black's homeland is in the northwestern part of the world of Escape and I've given little thought to its geography other than making it somewhat similar to Scandinavia.  I think I'll add some moors there and make it so that he hid in the moors after his family was killed in a clan war.  In an Old World (pre-apocalyptic) ruin in the moors, he found a partial copy of Beowulf and, having read about the fell deeds of Grendel, took the name for himself.

(A member of the Lawrenceville writing group suggested this be a name he adopted for himself and this seemed like a sensible suggestion.)

The moors will also be Grendel's base for his early career as a mercenary and "regulator" (an Old West term for a hired gun cattle barons used to protect their herds), paralleling Grendel's raids on Heorot from the moors.

In the long run, the three-parted aspect of Beowulf can also provide a basis for the career of my protagonist, Andrew Sutter.  Andrew will first defeat Grendel himself (the planned first four books).  Then he will defeat an insurgency led by Grendel's sons in his old homeland (analogous to the Sunni Triangle in Iraq), with the land itself being an analogy for Grendel's mother.

The third foe, analogous to the dragon and like the dragon faced many years later, Andrew will beat but die in the process.  Not sure who that foe will be--I had pondered a cross-dimensional invasion (enemies more technologically advanced but significantly few in number--think the time-traveling South Africans of The Guns of the South, who aid the Confederacy but then betray it), one of Grendel's generals who had been turned into a vampire, or even a falling-out with the allies who helped make Andrew Emperor in Grendel's place.

(Considering how Beowulf ends on a rather ominious note--without Beowulf, the Geats have no king to protect them from their gathering enemies--the possibility of a renewed war and the fragile post-apocalyptic civilizational renaissance ending is nice and dark.)

I've been feeling a bit under the weather lately (had what might have been an attack of food poisoning early Wednesday morning), so I might sign off, lie down, and read more of Beowulf.  Then I'll have more of substance to add to this.

Productivity Update

I just added a new chapter to The Revenge of the Fallen Reboot, which I had allowed to sit unupdated for nearly a month.  The lead-up to the great battle in Morocco in which Megatron attempts to free the Fallen from his tomb (under Jbel Toubkal, a mountain near Marrakesh) and Starscream makes his bid for power has begun...

Unfortunately, I'm rapidly approaching an impasse.  In the film, Sam, Mikaela, and Leo end up in Egypt when Jetfire creates a "space bridge" (some kind of wormhole) and takes them there.  Since I replaced the "wake up Jetfire in a museum" plot with the plot I remember from the original Transformers animated series (Starscream digs Jetfire out of a glacier), this isn't going to happen.

At present, my plan to get the kids to Morocco (to have them there for the final battle, like in the movie) involves them accidentally getting swept onto an American military aircraft that's headed there.  Thing is, unless the soldiers boarding the aircraft are in a VERY big hurry, they'd get noticed and put off the plane.  I'm disinclined to have them stow away, lest Sam get "Flanderized"* into someone mindlessly self-sacrificing to the point of being a suicidal idiot.

(*A TVTropes term in which one character trait gets amplified to a ridiculous degree.  It comes from Flanders turning more and more into a religious zealot to the exclusion of other traits in The Simpsons.  It could also be applied to Quagmire's sexual perversity, which was less pronounced earlier in Family Guy.)

After all, I already had him attempt to trade himself to the Decepticons for a kidnapped Mikaela, Mr. Banes, and Simmons, in a move that other characters and readers recognized was idiotic to an extreme.

Any ideas?  I've only got six chapters left and hopefully I'll be able to finish it before July.

Also, I posted an author's note in The Wrath of the Half-Blood Prince that both provides a glimpse of what the Potterverse would look like 17 years after Voldemort's (permanent) defeat in that world's 1979 and linked back to this blog.  The note serves a dual purpose of expending my last ideas pertaining to that story and (hopefully) attracting more readers here, since this blog did not exist in 2008 when I wrote "Wrath."

My final piece of non-original work is another alternate version of the Draka timeline on my alternate-history forum.  In the novel Under the Yoke (second in the original trilogy), there's a scene where a Draka character states that if the Domination didn't have atomic weapons, the United States could have forced them out of Europe and Eastern China, which the Draka conquered in that timeline's version of WWII.

Thing is, the Draka's primary ability to threaten the North American mainland is via submarine and the Alliance for Democracy is dominated by the US, Britain, and Japan, all of whom have extensive naval-warfare experience.  The Alliance nuclear arsenal is also more powerful and more advanced than that of the Draka.

So, I figured in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Alliance could have launched a successful nuclear first-strike on the Domination, using their superiority in aircraft and ships to destroy the Draka sea-based nuclear deterrent before it could do significant damage.  It's improbable they could sell a "war to the death" to their electorates so soon after WWII, but driving the Draka back to their pre-war start lines with the aid of the still-not-entirely-enslaved populations of Eurasia would be an easier sell.

But after the war, with "frontline" Alliance states like Britain, India, and Japan taking worse nuclear damage than the US and the Domination truncated and with its ruling-class and slave-soldiery taking a severe beating, the Alliance might well weaken or even dissolve.  And the Draka, descended from history's losers, might well be inclined to revenge...

(Plus I'm thinking that post-Draka Europe might well be dominated by Communists and other extreme leftists and form a third power-bloc.  That'd be a real downer ending there--the rump Alliance and the resurgent Draka blast each other to bits and the world ends up going Red.)

Here's the link: Limited Alliance-Draka War.

I may update the timeline later tonight.  Right now, it's gotten 550+ hits on AH.com and considering how I've been posting blog posts there as well as on Facebook, I think I'm recruiting more and more of them as readers.

Now, as far as original fiction is concerned, I have submitted Chapter Five of Escape from the Wastelands to my Kennesaw writing group.  I have already tweaked it based on some comments received from two of my fellow writers.

Given my decision to get some serious intertextuality going with Beowulf, I think I might order a copy of the actual epic and see what I can glean from it.  Dan Simmons' Ilium and Olympos got a whole lot of critical acclaim through intertextuality with the Iliad and Shakespeare, so perhaps intertextuality with Beowulf will raise my planned post-apocalyptic-paperpack series to new levels of credibility (and hopefully, when the time comes, higher sales and movie deals).

I have also just gotten a rejection slip from Asimov's for my short story "Picking Up Plans in Palma," which takes place in my Afrikaner universe.  This rejection slip was rather different from older rejections I've gotten from that magazine.  It's still a form letter, but my name is handwritten into the salutation, editor Sheila Williams signed it herself, and the letter states that the story is "not quite right" but they'd like to see more fiction from me.

Considering how "Palma" is basically an alternate-history spy story with only vague science-fiction content (the "MacGuffin" of the story is plans for an orbiting battle-station and a character fears having an orbital projectile dropped on him), I think if I can get something as good as "Palma" that's more explicitly SF, I might have a good chance of selling it.

Awesome.

Another "Predator" Film--"Predators."

I read about this one in Entertainment Weekly at the gym (I think).  It's called Predators and is another film set in the Predator franchise.

(No surprise based on the titles, eh?)

Here's the trailer:



Adrien Brody as an action hero? That could be interesting. He did a fair bit of that in King Kong.

Also, this one is apparently a direct sequel to Predator, skipping over all the of the sequels.  I think Robert Rodriguez intends this one to be a reboot of the franchise.  Given the titular resemblance to Aliens, that would make sense.

I personally didn't mind the two Aliens vs. Predator films, considering how often the two faced off in comics and in written fiction, but it would have been better to set those in the future.  Most of the AvP stuff involved human settlers on other worlds and never actually came to Earth.

Comment and spoiler, even though this came from Wikipedia:


The notion of a human who'd been abducted and survived in hiding for years reminds me of a movie I saw on UPN many years ago when I was probably in middle school.  It was called Death Ring and was a hunting-humans thriller in the vein of "The Most Dangerous Game."  There was a character who managed that by luring an earlier group of hunters into a quicksand pit, lived in the jungle for several months, and helped the protagonist face off against a new group of hunters.

Not sure if Rodriguez borrowed the concept or came up with it on his own.  Given how Death Ring is a B-movie starring the relatives of famous action stars and probably didn't get seen by that many people, it was probably the former, but who knows what films Rodriguez appreciates.

Something Funny, Especially for My Female Readers

The following image got posted on my friend Katherine's Facebook wall.  I figure you all would get a laugh out of it, especially the readers who are female and read Cosmo-type magazines (or disdain them).

I posted this on my Internet forum and apparently it came from Cracked.  So that proper credit is given, here's the link:

http://www.cracked.com/funny-4420-advice-about-relationships/

New Diet Very Helpful to Autistic Fellow

My co-worker Thomas wrote this article about a young man with autism who, after going on a drastically altered diet, became essentially (no offense) "normal."  He made his diet the center of his Eagle Scout project.

http://www.griffindailynews.com/view/full_story/7298555/article-Diet-makes-a-world-of-difference-for-teen?instance=home_news_lead_story

I'm not going to claim to be an expert on autism, but given the drastic nature of the results, going on a similar diet (no gluten, casein, egg, and soy) might be very beneficial for those with the disorder.  I do not know if it would work in all cases, but it seems to have worked very well with Mr. Cannon.

DragonCon 2009 S.M. Stirling Interview

When I was at DragonCon 2009, I went to a seminar by noted author S.M. Stirling.  This blog did not exist at the time, so I posted my thoughts on meeting him at my alternate history forum (where Stirling was a member, prior to getting banned after a tiff with the administrator).  I realized this evening that my readers would appreciate celebrity interviews, so here I go...

His panel primarily focused on the first three "Emberverse" novels (Dies the Fire, The Protector's War, and A Meeting at Corvallis).

Here're some facts I learned about the Emberverse:

*For starters, the series could have been set in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia because its geography is similar to the Williamette, but he wanted to be as far away from Nantucket (site of the Island in the Sea of Time novels) as possible and he thought it was too close to the big cities that would become death zones when electricity and other modern technologies stopped functioning.

*There is an Emberverse story set in Russia in Warriors, an anthology by Tor books.  An Amazon.com review says the story is entitled "Ancient Ways" and features "a Cossack and a Kalmyk warrior join(ing) forces to rescue a princess from the city of Astrakhan."  I remember him saying (I think on AH.com) that in Mongolia, they're cutting arrowheads out of old rail lines and thinking about how they really don't like Chinese or Russians, so there might be a new Mongol horde in the works.

*The publisher of the Emberverse books is interested in a shared-world DTF anthology, but not in August 2009.

*He also said he visited Nantucket Island for several weeks and all the skill-sets mentioned in the Nantucket books are there--this was in response to reader criticism that the Nantucketers had everything they needed to survive when their island is transported back to the Bronze Age (the plot of Island in the Sea of Time).

*He said Sony has inquired about a Dies the Fire miniseries, with each season being one year. His agent is discussing a DTF web-comic that would be turned into a graphic novel.  He warned, however, that writers below J.K. Rowling's level don't get creative control. Creative consulting is the best most writers get.

(A DTF miniseries would be so cool.)

*He said the lesbian assassin girl from DTF's name is pronounced "Ti-Phane," not "Tiffany."  It's spelled "Tiphaine."

*It is possible he will return to the Nantucketverse, but right now he is a little busy. He has three Emberverse books planned (The High King of Montival, Tears of the Sun, and The Given Sacrifice) and a new series whose first book is entitled A Taint in the Blood, which based on selections on his web-site is about vampires.

I did ask him some questions, during the panel and afterward.  Here goes:

1. The reason for the confusing titles of Protector's War and Meeting at Corvallis was he originally intended for the PW to start much earlier in the second book than it did.

2. Signe Havel's conversion to neo-paganism between A Meeting at Corvallis and The Scourge of God was the result of an "epiphany." He said she no longer fears an attempt by Rudi Mackenize (her late husband's illegitimate son) to take over the Bearkillers (the neo-feudal power her husband Mike Havel founded and over which she rules as regent for their son) and in any event, her faith is not the same sort of Juniper's.

(Making Signe Havel a Norse pagan seemed rather abrupt and strange.  I had figured, since Rudi is a Wiccan, she would stay a Christian and encourage the Bearkillers to adopt the faith in order to make it so Rudi would have problems usurping power from her son with Mike.)

3. The Walker clan are troublemakers in the Emberverse as well as the Nantucketverse. There is a "General Walker" who serves the Church Universal and Triumphant (an anti-technology cult commanded by the Unabomber, who escaped prison during the Change, took charge of the cult's in-case-of-the-apocalypse compound, and created a horse-archer army) as well as the villian William Walker in Island in the Sea of Time.

4. In Drakon, it's mentioned that the Draka and Samothracians (the descendants of the defeated Americans) sent colony fleets to one solar system and the two fleets fought it out, but it's never said what happened next. Stirling said the Samothracians won because they had a better ship.  Also, the Samothracian assault on the Draka-ruled solar system that is mentioned in the book changed little in the overall strategic balance of power.

I also learned some stuff about the man himself.  At one point in his life, he was a bouncer.  It's not like being in the film Road House. Mostly it's having drunks puke on you.  He ended up quitting after two days.  At one point, he also living in a shoddy apartment with a hole in the floor over a pair of transvestite hookers.  That couldn't have been fun.

He's also diabetic--if things go to pot (as depicted in many of his stories), he dies.

My Forays Into Podcasting and Web-Comics

In many ways, I have already entered the Internet Age.  I've got a blog, for starters, while my first experience writing for an audience larger than my relatives and my peer group was writing fan-fiction for the television show Prey, which I watched in middle school.

(Debra Messing played the female lead, then when the show failed, went on to star in Will and Grace.  Good for her.)

That, plus the fact that my first two finished novels--at least in terms of word count--were alternate-universe Harry Potter fan-fiction.

However, I'd never listened to a podcast before.  My friend Nick had a podcast entitled "Pizza, Pop Culture, and Prayer" based on a Catholic Sunday school class he taught, but I never got around to listening to it.  And now I've searched iTunes for it and it is no longer there, so I guess I'm SOL.

Friday, my friend Daryl came to visit and when he found I had not listened to his advice and downloaded the podcast "Writing Excuses," he took over my computer-chair and subscribed me himself, which got me an episode dealing with "breaking the fourth wall" (when a character addresses the audience, like in the end of Ferris Bueller's Day Off  or Robin Hood - Prince of Thieves).

That episode was not especially helpful, beyond an interesting tip about idiomatic expressions in certain cultures (the French and Korean equivalents of "speak of the devil and he shall appear" deal with wolves and tigers, respectively, but the sentiment is the same).

However, I took a look at older "Writing Excuses" podcasts and there's a whole lot of interesting stuff there.  I ended up downloading 16 of the older podcasts available on iTunes.  The web-site has ones even older than that, although I don't know if I'll be able to save them to iTunes and put them on my iPod.

I'll probably blog about the most interesting ones over the next few weeks.

I've also put some serious thought into webcomics.  Writing and publishing a book is hard; putting together a film is even more difficult.

However, hosting a web-comic is not all that intensive in terms of cost.  I'd need to buy a domain and hire an artist to put it together, but that wouldn't be all that expensive.

(Well, the domain name at least.  An artist, especially a good one, is going to be pricey.)

Which comic I create, should I seriously decide to create one, will depend on what caliber artist I can find.  Here are the options:

Abdul, Abdul, Abdul-It's a parody of Scooby Dooby Doo where a bunch of college students and a 30-something Arab doctor travel around the country in a van for whatever reason.  Since it's a comedy, I've got to come up with a lot of jokes, and thus far, I've only come up with three.

1. Poking fun at the stereotype of Arabs as terrorists or troublemakers by having Abdullah ("Abdul" is actually a prefix meaning "servant of" and nobody is actually named this--"Abdullah" means "servant of God" and is an actual Arab name) engaging in behavior that seems suspicious, only to be entirely innocuous.  For example, he's seen bundling strangers into the van and it turns out they're impoverished patients on whom he is operating for free.

2. The gang goes to Arizona.  Abdullah is suspected of being an illegal immigrant from Mexico and is nearly deported.  A bit of timely humor with Arizona's illegal-immigration bill, although the fact it's been amended to cut down on potential abuse ruins the humor a bit.

3. A promiscuous character has part of the back of the van curtained off and is constantly, ahem, entertaining guests there.  There is a scene where Abdullah has his prayer-rug spread in the back of the van so that he can pray toward Mecca while they're driving.  The, ahem, entertaining is getting so loud and obnoxious that he interrupts his prayers to swear at them and tell them to be quiet.

To make things even more funny or offensive, I'm imagining Abdullah looking like an older version of Gandhi from Clone High.

The Blasted Lands Cycle-I came up with the idea when I was in high school--I remember doodling a bunch of post-apocalyptic mercenaries in a Hummer facing off against a carnivorous dinosaur when we were watching The Neverending Story in Spanish class (in Spanish with English subtitles, IIRC) toward the end of the school year.

The premise is that there's a nuclear conflict between the US and a more militarized Europe on one side and a resurgent Russia and its anti-American allies in the other.  During the war, the Russians deploy an advanced weapon that they think will create an electromagnetic pulse over the United States.

Instead, it tears open a hole in space-time extending all the way back to the Age of the Dinosaurs.  As if the post-nuclear US doesn't have enough problems, now there are a whole bunch of dinosaurs roaming around.

The story follows a retired military type named Alex Wolf in service to a coalition of cities around the Gulf of Mexico that survived the conflict.  He loses his job as a result of some bureaucratic foolishness and is hired by a Cuban-American businessman to rescue his family from a gang of white supremacists, who have taken over an old prison in western Florida in alliance with a bunch of biker gangs and are holding his family for a ransom he cannot afford to pay.

So Alex, his Singaporean sidekick who was in the US when the war began and can't get home, and a bunch of other mercenary types leave Mobile and head into the Florida Panhandle, where they run into a group of survivors of the US military in the ruins of Pensacola trying to fend off waves of Haitian "boat people" settling the ravaged US (with the aid of a single Russian destroyer, far from home and up to no good) and various back-from-extinction unpleasantries.  And it turns out the white-supremacist warlord type murdered Alex's family some years prior, so there's going to be, in TVTropes terms, an "extreme melee revenge" in the final fight scene.

I went to Destin with my friend Nick and some of his friends from Ohio in the spring of 2006.  Given this was in the general area, I took a lot of notes.

Whether I go with this one depends on what caliber artist I can find.  If the art is cartoony-looking, that's no big deal for a comedy (look at, say, V.G. Cats), but hard to take seriously with a post-apocalyptic military epic.  An artist who can do the type of artwork I'm envisioning would be frightfully expensive to hire and might not be willing to go for a percentage of the money later.

So which one do you think sounds better?

TSPLOST Awaits Governor's Signature

http://www.ajc.com/opinion/transportation-down-budget-to-494204.html?cxtype=ynews_rss

http://www.ajc.com/news/georgia-politics-elections/transportation-funding-the-rocky-487827.html

I refrained from blogging about this for awhile because I was writing an article for my paper on it and I'm not supposed to compete with my own company.  Now that article has run, I feel better blogging about it.

This thing has been going on since soon after I first started working for my newspaper.  I remember it failing by three votes at the last minute in 2008, which meant the amendment would not be up for a vote in 2010.  That was somewhat irritating, although it might well be a blessing in disguise.  In 2012, the economy will have turned around and the voters might be more willing to vote for a tax increase when times are good than when times are bad.  Plus, the way the tax is structured, getting the projects together for each region to vote on will take time.


For the record, since this is a Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax (SPLOST), it's not the same as a tax increase coming down from On High.  The people of the regions will vote directly to tax themselves (or not), on projects that are in their immediate area. 
One reason I support this is that it could provide a funding mechanism for passenger rail in Georgia.  Right now, there is an $87 million federal earmark to build and maintain passenger rail on the Southside for a few years.

(When the matter first came up, I think it was Atlanta-Lovejoy or Atlanta-Griffin for three years.  Now, since the current plan is Atlanta-Macon, it might not cover as long a period of time.)

Large-scale transit projects generally do not pay for themselves and thus require an outside source of funding.  This applies to roads, ports, and airports just as it does to large-scale passenger rail.  If I recall correctly, the only portion of the AMTRAK system that's self-sustaining is the northeastern line.

A regional SPLOST--although given the way the state is divided up, you'd need multiple regions involved--could be used to pay for the Atlanta-Macon line that's currently the first phase of Georgians for Passenger Rail's proposed network of passenger rail lines throughout the state.

Come 2012, it will be the task of rail advocates and those who support other necessary transportation improvements to convince the people of the regions to support the TSPLOST.  However, if gas prices return to their pre-Great Recession levels by then (they're trending upward now with the economy recovering), this will likely encourage people to support mass transit and other gas-saving solutions.  After all, hybrids and even full electric cars got a lot of attention when gas was $4 per gallon.

Though large-scale government projects seem antithetical to small-government conservatism, the state is facing a lot of transportation problems, particularly gridlock in the Metro Atlanta area.  If passenger rail was put in place, this would likely "thin out" traffic on the highways as people who do not need their car for work but live in the outlying areas will simply be able to take the train in and out of town.

(This could also make it easier for people to live in Atlanta itself and commute to jobs in outlying areas, although this would not be an option for me since I need my car for my job.)

Either way, that's less traffic on Atlanta roads, which will help with local air pollution and congestion.  Less demand for gasoline means lower gas prices as well.

Sometimes very big problems need very big solutions.

An Unusual Addition to My Blog-Roll

All of the blogs on my blog listing up until this morning have belonged to people I know in real life, mostly friends from school or people I've come to know relatively recently.

"A Slightly Odd View of the the American Civil War" belongs to a member of my message board whose handle is 67th Tigers.  He takes a revisionist view of Union General George McClellan, defending him when most people criticize him.

(The orthodox view of McClellan is that he was overly cautious and erroneously believed the Confederates outnumbered him at critical points.  67th Tigers compares McClellan favorably to Grant, although I have not examined his arguments closely enough to deduce why.)

History is a science and therefore one should be ready to overturn old paradigms based on new data, but I tend to be leery of revisionist views in general due to the typical presence of a political axe to grind.

For example, the "revisionist" view of the Cold War became popular during and after the Vietnam War and was largely held by opponents of the war (and people opposed to US prosecution of the Cold War in general).  It seems to me that people took their conclusion (Vietnam War and anti-Communism, bad) and tried to fit the facts to the paradigm rather than basing their paradigm on facts.

However, 67th Tigers does have a whole lot interesting data on his blog concerning troop numbers, when particular units opened fire in particular battles, casualty ratios, etc.  Considering how my novel Escape from the Wastelands is roughly at a Civil War tech level (the exceptions being airships and the occasional pre-apocalyptic "Old World" weaponry), it would be prudent to have this resource available for research on the battle sequences.

Plus, maybe some of my blog-readers are Civil War enthusiasts.