Oct 17, 2021
Rebuilding Our World
As I write this, it is 2:30 in the morning, and I have been awakened by concerns, plans really, about how to re-start life.
Now, this might be nothing more than the result of gas pains brought on by the milk I consumed earlier today, mixed up with research for a novel I’m outlining. (Shades of a Christmas Carol and Scrooge’s “You may be nothing more than a bit of underdone potato”, anyone?)
But in my novel, there is a community trying to rebuild their corner of the world after an EMP goes off, rendering life as we might know it very, very different. So of course, my mostly-asleep, suffering from gas pains, brain decides to conjure up thoughts of all the things that need to be recorded. For those that need to learn how to do things later.
Raise sheep, my brain insists, we’ll need to know how to do that afterwards.
Build stone walls that don’t topple. (I blame this one on Sharon Stone. Before I got too tired to keep my eyes open, I was listening to Sharone Stone’s bio, and she was talking about how her father taught her to build a stone wall that didn’t topple over.)
Then my still-trying-to-sleep brain wondered how we would save the blueprints to start over. It showed me images of flash drives stored in Mason jars. Massive binders full of all that information printed out, because what good would those flash drives be without power and computers to read them?
For some reason, I saw the woman that would start this project, and it wasn’t me. It was Lynn Ames. Lynn is an author with highly intelligent, sparkling brown eyes. I imagine she’s smart as a whip since her background is in politics and journalism. My brain decided that my character in my novel had to be like Lynn, and it was going to be this character that would embark on a mission to save the knowledge her community would need. But before the EMP.
Like “When Technology Fails” by Matthew Stein (the title of which just took me 15 minutes to look up because all I could remember was some of the content and the author’s first name. Getting older kinda sucks!)
So now that I have all this flushed from my still-sleepy brain, I’m going to try and go back to sleep. And hope I don’t dream of building greenhouses and seed banks.
Wish me luck.
3 A.M
