*dad voice* yello!

STACKEDNATURAL ⇉ 258/327 (part 2)

Emily as Bat Child, formerly Vesper Childers in a move of sincerity confesses "Look, I don't wanna throw a wrench in tomorrow, but it's also my birthday. "

And it pissed me off so badly that I spent the ENTIRE WORK DAY today compiling evidence from every project my team has ever done for her, pulling past emails she’d sent us, putting together an entire case proving that she had been the problem all along. That she got projects mixed up, that she’d made requests that were nonsensical, literally everything you could possibly imagine. Screenshots of emails, reports we’d submitted, EVERYTHING.

This woman in particular has been terrorizing my team for years, her name is almost a slur in my office, I had simply had ENOUGH of her.

I put all of this evidence together and sent it to all of my bosses at 4:30pm. Then I took a long break to eat a sweet treat and drink some tea.

After my break, my bosses all called in an emergency meeting with me and they said they read my report and fucking loved it. And I sat on a teams call with my boss’ boss as she wrote my nemesis the scathing email I had always fantasized about sending, using the evidence I’d compiled, and hit send.

An author doesn’t have to info dump all of this in the first chapter. But there’s a helluva difference between a small agrarian village one bad harvest away from starvation, and Picard ordering ‘Earl Gray, Hot’. (Although the local blacksmith and the annoyed personnel in Engineering being asked to fix another replicator after an irate captain kicked it may share a certain common spirit lol.)

And again, the grain is a metaphor. Except for when you very much should figure out the design of your fictional country. I find designing societies from their food source up interesting. Others won’t. But there should be something that a writer finds interesting about their fantasy that they want to explore. Find your grain.

Terry Pratchett read an interesting fact about clowns and eggs once, and decided to make that everyone’s problem. He famously read constantly, always looking for interesting things to put in his books and in some cases build his plots around. Your writing would benefit from the same mentality. The reader doesn’t need an entire encyclopedia thrown at them. But you should put thought into your setting and how it interacts with your culture, history, and society. If you don’t, or even worse if you aren’t sure how all of these interact, then it doesn’t matter how interesting you make your characters or plot. Readers will identify situations in your story where the characters and plot are in conflict with the setting you didn’t pay attention to. 

It’s not that you need to fill out a hundred page questionnaire on your worldbuilding. It’s that your intellectual curiosity and eagerness to explore how things work will enrich your story for the reader. GRRM is absurdly good at the things he’s good at, a list that includes great character arcs, deftly controlling the reader’s sympathy, and intricate plots. His worldbuilding though is abysmal.** In contrast, elements of Anne Mccaffrey’s writing didn’t age well. Her first published book looks like a debut novel, her prose and characterization could have been improved on, and the pacing has issues. But she thought about how her world worked in ways that GRRM simply never bothered to. The effort she put into designing a society that would incorporate dragons into it’s structure, and the consideration she put into the needs of these dragons and their riders and how those would put stress on the social and political systems, is phenomenal. I do genuinely enjoy GRRM’s books lol. But if you wanted to read a novel that had dragons as a feature then Anne Mccaffrey’s Dragonflight is what I’ll recommend every time. Her characters actively use the clues given in how their society is designed to figure out their response to the overall plot, in a way that’s so much more rewarding then having GRRM pencil in years-long winter and then just ignore the implications. 

Absolutely get invested in your characters and your plot! The reader will enjoy them all the more for the passion you bring. But your writing will always benefit from your curiosity in how the world you design works, and in how the characters and plot are actively informed by the setting. That’s the larger point. Cultivate that curiosity and willingness to explore and experiment, because that’s what will keep your plot, characters and setting from coming into conflict with each other. 

*No it’s not, figure this out lol. Get Tim’s number. Has he figured out grain can be fermented yet. Is he free on Saturday. 

Okay, that’s not entirely true. They did have wheeled toys for their children, like tiny little oxen you could roll along the floor. But they never invented the wheel as a means of transport.

You might think this is odd. The Inca were a very advanced people with cities, elaborate art, temples, and a “writing” system that actually involved using knotted cords and has changed our entire definition of “recorded language.”

But now I’m gonna show you something, and ask…

Does it make a little more sense now why they never bothered with the wheel?

If you were writing a book about people who lived in steep, inhospitable mountains, would it have occurred to you that “a series of terraces, via which things can be manually lowered or raised” would make more sense than wheels?

The Romans, technically, had steam power, in the form of a little gadget called the aeliopile. It was basically a party trick to demonstrate the laws of physics, for them– as far as I know, no one made a serious effort to use it to power locomotion.

This was partly because The Tech Just Wasn’t There Yet ™– even in the early days of steam power, boilers tended to explode, because it takes a huge amount of metalworking knowhow to make a boiler that can hold enough steam for thousands of tons of metal.

But it was also partly because… it wasn’t necessary. During the Pax Romana, when communication between different parts of the empire was easiest and collaboration between scientists would be most possible, the best way to send things from point A to point B was by ship. Sailing was, by the standard of the day, easy, fast, and safe. Sure, sometimes you’d sail into a storm– but there were no pirates, because the Roman navy took care of them.

Steam power only made sense as a technology you’d even want in an age where the ocean was too dangerous to travel. No one ships goods overland, pre-steam, if they can avoid it– it’s a lot of danger and effort for not much benefit. But in the early 1800s, when the steam engine was invented? The oceans weren’t safe to travel anymore, and hadn’t been for centuries. Piracy was rampant, both from independent bandits and agents of various European countries. Wars were constantly breaking out between great naval powers. It would be easier, and safer, to transport goods overland, if there was a good way to do it.

When the English got into steam power they had already developed a coal mining industry. And like beatrice says, one of the first things they did with the steam engine was pump water out of mines.

One of the subsequent was steam boats. Boat that goes regardless of the wind, without needing to be in range of an unobstructed mule-path with mules to drag it along like the old canal barges, and so forth.

Game-changer, but still following the existing concept of ‘boat’ and using mostly the existing navigational matrix of waterways and ports.

Trains are pretty far down the line! No one is going to jump directly from steam technology to a train system unless someone else did it first and laid out the conceptual track. Trains are very much something that are only obvious in retrospect.

No matter how Great and Powerful, things aren’t convenient unless the underlying conditions to make them useful exist before they’re adopted. Otherwise there is no extant need they can realistically fill.

A lot of states trying to modernize in the 20th century fucked themselves up real bad (or were fucked up by their colonizers but the number of self-owns is tragically high) by either trying to forcibly apply Great Modern Solutions to entirely the wrong problems, or to apply them without having done the underlying infrastructure development that would make them of any material use to anybody.

This kind of thing applies less to grain domestication as such because we a writers mostly have a decent intuitive grasp of what grain crops need and what they’re good for, but otoh it is as has been demonstrated very easy to create a ‘medieval’ city with no apparent access to the grain markets necessary to not instantly starve.

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When colonizing the Americas, many colonizers forced the indigenous peoples to adopt farming. Or, if they HAD farming, to switch to European style farming. And it turns out that European farming requires infrastructure that the cultures involved did NOT have!

In Canada, people were forced to settle and farm. They lost access to histories and stories that were tied to physical locations. They lost access to the variety of goods they were formerly able to access through migration. They were no longer self-reliant when it came to clothing or housing, because those resources were intertwined with food gathering.

In Paraguay, people were forced to switch from low-effort crops to high effort ones. The Guaraní had periods of rest and relaxation, balanced with periods of incredibly high group effort. But, when rest periods were lost, people stopped being willing to work together in the same ways. People got HUNGRIER, because the food they grew before was more nutritious. And dietary diversity was lost, because they had designed their society around moving every 5 years, and gathering changing resources from the former settlements as the jungle recovered.

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Is your setting actually a good fit for grain?

If they live in a jungle, it might be better to have limited agriculture. Food is LITERALLY growing on trees, all around them, so they probably only want to grow (at most) a few staple crops that don’t take up a lot of space.

If they live in an area with a short growing season and low population density, grains are probably too much work for not enough reward. Herding or hunting is much more efficient.

abuse in caregiving professions (like teaching or nursing) is not solely a result of power dynamics. it's also because people who go into those professions tend to have a idea of themselves as Good People. recognising or acknowledging their own capacity for harm contradicts that idea. so they mentally put 'people who have inconvenienced me' into the 'Bad People' box (which conveniently doubles up as the 'People I Am Allowed to Hurt' box), and just like that, the world is made simple again.

i read ross greene a lot when i was working with 'difficult' or 'behaviourally challenged' children. his refrain is kids do well if they can - meaning, in short, that most kids act out only when the demands of a situation exceed their capabilities. punishing them for this is not only cruel but also completely pointless, because they also don't want to be doing what they are doing.