#scriptchemist

Having your character find a still-functioning laboratory with a chemist would be a great idea! I think that’s the ideal solution. @scriptchemist should be able to get you further information about what you’d need!

2/15/17

Hey, y’all and welcome back to the update. A lot of exciting stuff happened this week, so stick around to see what’s happening.

Announcements

@script-a-world would like me to remind you that we have @scriptastronomer for questions about the effects of planets and moons on fictional worlds.

Featured Posts

A Wild Guest Post Appears

@scriptmedic has recently had an opportunity to guest post on the blog Writers Helping Writers. In this post, Aunt Scripty talks about how to write your character’s pain well. She covers the scale of the pain, how often an author should bring it up, and how much it can ebb and flow.

Welcome to Columbia!

So if you were to build a floating city a la Columbia from Bioshock Infinite, what would you need to consider for your humans to survive? Well, good news: @scriptecology has a post with details on what you need to think about with people that high.Maybe make the launch day April 20th.

Pyromancers Sans Pyro

So, unlike firebenders, someone who wants a fire in real life needs a fuel source (Unless it’s an M. Night Shyamalan firebender). @scriptchemist helps out this asker with figuring out how a sorcerer could light up the night using realistic scientific principles.

“Is a Character With X a Spoonie”

What is a spoonie? According to @scriptspoonie , a spoonie is ““someone with a chronic illness or disability that regularly impacts their energy levels and/or ability to get things done.” With that in mind, there are many illnesses that can make someone need to budget their energy. In this post, the mods give us readers some ideas of what

After the End

Law school is expensive, takes an incredible amount of effort, and it would be such a shame it you were to be disbarred. And then your character is. Whoops. So instead of throwing all that time and money away, what else could your character do? @scriptlawyer has a few ideas for you.

Common Canadian Wildlife

If you’re unfamiliar with Canada, trying to figure out the wildlife you might encounter may be difficult. Luckily, @scriptcanuck has a quick list that you could use for reference.

Flower Here, Flower There, Flower Not Supposed to be There

So you’re going along, writing your story, and your character stops to smell the roses. But then you remember, your character is at the top of a snowy mountain in the middle of winter. Why the heck are there any flowers up here? Well, with a little bit of magic, maybe there could be some? What do you think @scriptflorist ?

Let's Talk Tropes

Tropes are all over the place. Tropes are essentially what help us identify a genre. So how can you use them properly? @scriptstructure helps us writers with some ideas to use our basic components to make a phenomenal new story.

Ask Box Statuses

@scriptkink ‘s ask box is closed due to her hiatus. She thanks you for your patience.

New Family

We have two new family blogs this week. Everyone please welcome

@scriptfirefighter - here to shed some light on, well, firefighters.

There are a lot of questions here, so I’m going to go one by one.

I wanted to know how would a person act of they didn’t know they had schizophrenia. 

There’s something called “anosognosia” that affects about 50% of people diagnosed with schizophrenia. While it’s a medical term, when used in a psychology context, it basically means that the character lacks awareness of their mental illness or is incapable of understanding that they have one.

So not knowing they had schizophrenia would not make their behavior significantly different from those who naturally have schizophrenia.

As for the symptoms of schizophrenia, check out my post here for the criteria.

I’m not 100% comfortable answering the meds question, but I am going to take Psychopharm in the fall - I’ll do posts on it then!

But there is one other thing I’d like to address:

I want to have a scene where the MC has to remake some of the meds to help another immune character.

This is going to be very, very hard for your MC to do. Antipsychotics are very complicated.

I asked Z and J from @scriptchemist to help explain some of the things you have to consider here:

Z:

1) Precursors. What are they starting with? If you have the appropriate precursors and just need to put a few pieces together and/or tweak a few bonds, that is a very different story than if all they have is a can of burning gasoline and some vinegar (also, sometimes even “just a few bonds” is ridiculously difficult with several sub-steps but I digress). For example, I’m assuming they don’t have halogenated nitro arene just lying around in their kitchen? 

2) Equipment and other reagents. A “standard” organic/med chem lab has a whole host of specialized equipment and reagents, the latter of which isn’t specific to this synthesis but so broadly used in so many procedures they have them on hand, such as solvents, hot plates/cold baths, reducing agents, etc. I’m sure there must be some way of jerry-rigging a reflux condenser but I’m having a hard time thinking of it right now. 

3) Yield/purity. Really important for drugs. That importance increases exponentially the further you are from your finished final product as you have to purify your intermediates before proceeding to the next step. My very first search for clozapine synthesis involves four steps from a particular arene, though there are other variations. That’s four steps of equipment, reagents, and purification. 

4) Dosage. Medicine is very precise in dosage and how that dosage is delivered for very, very good reasons. 5 mg of actual drug can be wrapped up in a 50 mg package with excipients to control the delivery; you don’t want to take it neat. And even if the character can somehow get a batch of 100% pure clozapine and appropriately store it, can they accurately parcel out the dosage? If one is supposed to take 10 mg of drug and accidentally takes 100mg…well. 

J:

While I am certain that some existing person could actually do this, the experience, equipment, and precursors are going to be impossible hurdles for almost everyone.  Those are rather complicated syntheses, and a huge amount can go wrong very quickly.  Even with the correct precursors and a full laboratory, I wouldn’t trust myself to get the right product in sufficient purity to actually use as a medicine. 

TL;DR: It’s really not feasible to synthesize antipsychotics in your kitchen.

Since you describe the situation as a zombie apocalypse, I’d honestly recommend that your character raid an abandoned pharmacy or hospital to get the medications (though I imagine they’d be in high demand).