Drunken Epiphany: Let's Outlaw All The Cars

The other day I watched the Republican Presidential candidates talk over each other in the clamor to solve problems they didn't seem qualified to understand, and it got me to thinking how many of the world's current ills could easily be solved by outlawing all motor vehicles.

That's right, it's about time for the US to build a National Metrorail System.

Yeah, I know it sounds crazy, like I'm advocating for an amped-up RPG run-through of Rush's "Red Barchetta."  But hear me out and tell me this madness doesn't make sense on some instinctive level.

Outlawing vehicles would mean no more reliance on oil or oil production, from anywhere.  No dependence on foreign oil, no hand-wringing over using domestic oil reserves, and no useless debates about whether or not to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.  Because we would no longer need any of it.  You didn't really think a politician was going to figure out a solution to that problem anyway, right?


Did anyone have any idea there were so many of these already?
(Source: Wikimedia Commons CC-BY-SA 3.0)

You think a world without cars is impossible?  You have an aunt in Poughkeepsie and you live in San Francisco?  Guess what?  The government might just have to stop spending so much on the defense budget and begin what they did in the 1950s: reinvest in an upgrade and modernization of a national public transportation infrastructure.  Not highways necessarily, either -- start building train tracks across the landscape linking major city to major city, high-speed bullet trains (we're looking at you, Japan and China) that will finance themselves through ticket sales and mass-commuter usage.  A National Metrorail.  Am I repeating myself?  Never mind.

But this gets better: gone are those other pesky and feigned political debates that get shoe-horned into the oil-dependence arguments about alternative energy resources.  Because let's face it, all that noise is about the backdoor maneuvering and big-business shell game of who will end up reaping profits among the renewable-energy cartels-in-waiting.  Wind farms, low-yield nuclear reactors, plug-and-drive cars, and even the retro-70's debate over grain alcohol would be properly marginalized as things that will only matter among the punditocracy in their self-perpetuating haggle pedestals at CNN and Fox News.  And the only people who benefit are the industry insiders who line up for the dole of government contracts, tax-expenditure financing and bankruptcy law bailouts when their big ideas fail to work.

Outlawing vehicles would also mean no more subsidies to the auto industry, and would keep individuals from digging themselves deeper into debt by having to finance a car.  Even a used car needs gasoline, insurance, and roughly one fourth of your annual wage.  Not a promising move for the young and upwardly mobile who will already have like five million dollars in college loans to repay.

The only people who would lose out on this would be salespersons at the showrooms, because most of the cars sold in the United States aren't manufactured in the United States anymore.  And as the people responsible for suckering me into a new car purchase in the first place, I don't really have much piety in my heart for those guys anyway.

I know, I know.  All those jobs in the auto industry, at the remaining plants in Detroit and elsewhere, right? 

A special corner of job-retraining hell will be reserved for the auto insurance industry mafia who bilk us annually for ever-increasing premiums and ever-diminishing terms of coverage.  Make no mistake on this point -- I've had it in for those assholes since I was a teenager, and nothing would give me more pleasure than to see the insurance industry tycoons have to downgrade from their fat-cat gated communities and luxury SUVs to maybe just a couple of Schwinn bicycles hanging on the racks at a condo.

No more vehicles would require a radical redesign and de-urbanization of our cities so that the mom-and-pop corner store, the sole-entrepreneurship, and the good ol' neighborhood become the new communal pathways of familiarity.  Walking to the mall, to school, or to a neighbor's house would bring us together in different and more meaningful interactions, such that suddenly it's not so easy to smash a window and steal Grandma's PS4.

But the trickle-down benefits wouldn't stop there.  Some naysayers will chortle at this idea and call it Lilliputian.  "Who," they will say -- that collective pro-business "they" who constantly agonize over inanities and stay beyond the reach of any comfort a Starbucks latte can provide -- "will ship our Rubbermaid products and cases of Softsoap to the local Target all the way from the distribution centers in Chattanooga?"  Yeah, I guess I really am messing with big-time transportation and logistics issues here, huh?

Well then, these supply-line economies would need to be reconfigured to support local suppliers, resulting in a boom of small business investments.  And if it isn't locally available, it would be shipped in -- but not on gasoline-consuming trucks.  More on that later.

Emergency response systems likewise would be reengineered to support smaller communities, with local police substations and firehouses dotting more and more of this sun-dappled new landscape, and ensuring that our technicians responsible for showing up between 8 and noon for the vital TV cable hookups don't suffer calamity along the way.

Wait, the naysayers will decry.  We won't be able to travel such far distances anymore, and thus visit and bond with family and friends as often as we used to.  Seriously?  In this age of social media, Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat have already won.  When was the last time you picked up the phone to talk to someone, and was that someone under 60 years of age?  Those apps on our smartphones are the new superhighways of socialization, not voice communications and sure as shit not the open road of Kerouac-era adventuring.

And all that sudden walking and bicycling?  Weight problems reduced.  Maybe not gone, as we have to account for infirmity, illness, and video game addictions, but surely weight will be reduced somewhere, by some few; perhaps even plenty few.  We may even become accustomed to more daily exercise in our lives and can finally compare with the leg muscles, if not the overdeveloped biceps, of any nearby construction workers.

Climate change!  There's another box we can check off if nature can take back the highways.  The pollution caused by our carbon footprint could stave off climate change within a decade of enforcing the Anti-Motor Law.  There would be some pretty upset folks needing a job description update over at the Federal Highway Safety Administration, but it's a public policy cost that could easily be accommodated with a simple name change: the Federal Highway and Metrorail Safety Administration.

There, that wasn't so hard, was it?

Oh sure, we'd need the highways for probably some secret-squirrel military/homeland security stuff and escort vehicles with crew-served weapons (I'm looking at you, Department of Energy).  But our highway patrol would literally be a highway patrol chasing down outlaw cars and providing real-world fodder for at least a few more Mad Max sequels.

No more dependence on foreign oil; no more drunk drivers destroying innocent lives; no more fuel emission byproducts polluting our air.  We would need to collectively suffer in stoic silence as we would watch Emilio Estevez in Repo Man with wistful regard, but we would eventually find the strength to soldier on.

You wouldn't think a fucking car would be the cause of so many modern ills, from credit ratings to the disappearing ozone layer, but there you have it.  I just solved most of the problems we are facing with one broad stroke.

Well shit, where the hell are those Nobel Prize guys when you need them?  Okay, I'll settle for a YouTube snippet on TEDTalks.  Hey, is this thing on?

It's hard out here for a blogger.

Author Spotlight: James Cormier and Exile: The Book of Ever

So it's time to spin the dial and let the arrow land on a fellow writer who toils ceaselessly for love of the craft: the author of YA, fantasy and pretty much anything that he finds interesting: James D. Cormier.

I met Jim on Twitter a few months ago and followed him into that hell of an alternate universe called Ello, where we are still slogging through the mud trying to convince ourselves that it's Normandy on D-Day instead of wet sand in the see-saw area of the local park.

Jim has his first novel, Exile: The Book of Ever, Part I, out on Amazon as an e-book and it's available for free until this Sunday, so if what you're looking for is an engrossing novel of a young heroine in a post-apocalyptic world who must overcome great odds and face perilous treks, get over here and download your copy today.  And it wouldn't hurt to leave a review, would it?

Without further ado, we dive into the mind of Jim...

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1. How did the writing bug bite you -- was it a gradual interest or a thunderclap of inspiration?

I've wanted to be a novelist for as long as I can remember. I think it probably started in a way that will be familiar to a lot of fantasy fans -- I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and a deep desire to build worlds of my own was born.

For a long time I questioned whether being a writer was a "realistic" decision, and as such I sought out a career as an attorney before finally deciding to go after what I really wanted. I think it was all for the best, however: I'm a better writer because of it, and my life experience to this point has certainly informed my writing in a positive way.

My approach has certainly been gradual, in the sense that I've got a lot of fits and starts under my belt; I've got notebooks and hard drives filled with notes and outlines and partially-finished manuscripts. The story for Exile: The Book of Ever, my first novel, was certainly more of a thunderclap, however: the idea came to me and I started writing the same day. It's funny how it all works.

2. Your first venture is a story in the post-apocalyptic genre with strong faith-based symbolism and lore -- do you think the role of religion is ignored in post-apocalypse stories, or were you more interested in a what-if extrapolation?

The initial concept for The Book of Ever was based on my own speculations about what it would take to survive in a post-apocalyptic world of the type described in the book. Ever Oaks and her people live centuries after a nuclear apocalypse that destroyed or affected most of the world, and while the immediate dangers of radioactive fallout and things of that nature have subsided, they live in what is essentially a 19th Century state of technology.

A lot of the post-apocalyptic fiction, film, and TV you see focuses on people who are basically trying to live the same lives they lived before the apocalypse in a world that is no longer hospitable to that lifestyle, people who are trying to survive the immediate aftermath and figure out how to live now. I wanted to explore the idea of a group of people who embraced the idea of living differently, and who had a definite set of values that set them apart from the mainstream, and see how they fared against the ruins of a civilization reduced to barbarism and the struggle for basic survival.

Have you ever played the game of looking around at people, either friends or strangers, and asking yourself how they'd fare if the world ended tomorrow and they were forced to survive without 21st Century technology and resources? I think we all know two types of people: people who'd make it work, and people who'd be hopelessly out of their element.  With Exile, I focused on a community that had prepared for the apocalypse centuries before, and which survived it and, relatively speaking, flourished in it because they focused on timeless values like preparedness, community, charity, and faith.

I think the role of religion is either mostly ignored or focused on to the exclusion of everything else: your options seem to be The Walking Dead, which is gritty, realistic, and violent (don't get me wrong, though, I like it as much as the next guy), and books like Left Behind, which is an entirely Christian-centric view of the Rapture and the End Times.  I was interested in finding a common ground between the two, and exploring how people of faith might use their values, abilities, and beliefs to aid in their survival.

I also wanted the novel to be balanced, in regard to the Christian elements. My intention was to put the Christian elements in there for readers who were interested without turning them into a distraction for those who aren't. I don't view Exile as Christian novel, so to speak, but rather a novel with Christian characters in it. I may or may not have achieved that, but I hope that there's something in the story for everyone.

3. Which authors or books gave you the most inspiration to write?

How long do you have? Hah. Tolkien was a huge inspiration to me, of course, as was Tad Williams. If The Lord of the Rings made me love fantasy, Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn made me realize I wanted to write it. On the science fiction end of things, William Gibson was a big inspiration, too.

Outside of the genre, the writers that inspired me to write included Hemingway, Faulkner, and Michael Chabon.  Reading Chabon taught me that you could think outside the box and tell the stories you wanted to tell and stories that entertained and still be a great writer acknowledged for his craft.

4. Was your protagonist, Ever Oaks, modeled after a specific person or was it a composite sketch of different character traits?

She's a composite sketch, but her best qualities--courage, determination, faith, intelligence -- are reflections of my wife, who is the best person I've ever known and an example to me every day of my life.

5. The story of Ever Oaks continues past the first book -- was this a planned series or did you reach the story's end and feel that there was more to the character's adventures?

It was most definitely a planned series -- a trilogy, to be precise.  I did want each book to have its own narrative arc, but the story as a whole is only one-third finished.  Here's hoping I can fit the rest of it in two more books.

I know where they started, where they're going, and the broad strokes of what happens, but the middle of the story often ends up telling itself as I write.

6. Are there other genres that hold your interest or in which you'd like to write someday?

Absolutely!  My wheelhouse is fantasy and science fiction, both YA and adult, but I'd also like to write some mainstream literary fiction.  I'm working on a book of short stories right now that is pretty much literary fiction, for lack of a better term, though there are some magical realist elements to it.

I've also got a thriller in me of some kind, probably paranormal.  That project excites me, but at the moment all I've got are some incomplete ideas.

7. Which is the next book you're planning on reading, and why?

I just finished Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson, which was good but too long. I'll be posting a review at my website. I'm planning on reading Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood next, mostly out of simple curiosity: I've heard a lot of good things about Atwood, and wanted to check it out.

I'm also reading a couple of nonfiction books at the moment: The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans, and Rough Stone Rolling, a biography of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon Church.

8. Do you find it easier to write straight through as you work the scenes in your head, or do you edit as you go along? Which is more productive for you?

I tend to edit as I go. I find that blowing through a scene or chapter only results in missing things, for me, so I write carefully and try to think about the scene in detail as I write. I don't tend to write in drafts, so to speak; it's more a continuous editing process.

9. Going from lawyer to writer was quite a switch -- were there any moments of hand-wringing or cautionary self-assessment?

It was certainly a risk financially, in the sense that writing income isn't always as "stable" as receiving a traditional salary or billing hours as a private attorney. But I think it would actually have been harder for me not to do it: I'd been thinking about writing for so long that I had to at least try it out. I found that I wasn't nearly as able to focus on it as much as I'd like to while still working as a lawyer.

10. Anything else you'd like to tell us about your upcoming plans or projects?

I'm working on the sequel to Exile, Extinction, which is Part 2 of The Book of Ever. In addition to that I'm writing a stand alone sword and sorcery novel for adults, tentatively titled The Trials of Karthanas, and I've also got about half of a book of short stories written. So there's a lot on the stove at the moment--and I couldn't be more excited about it!

Thank you for such a wonderful interview!

**************************************

No, on the contrary, I thank Jim for taking time out of his busy schedule of writing and editing and feeding the two cats which every fantasy author receives upon publication of their first novel to instead ruminate on his responses to this interview.  Jim, we wish you the best of luck with your future books, and we look forward to Book 2 of the next Ever Oaks novel!

Again, Exile: The Book of Ever, Part I, available here from Amazon, and free until Sunday 11/23, so grab your digital copy now!  Of course, it wouldn't kill you to pay for it, either...

The Short, Unhappy Life of a Rushed Book Cover

I am, by nature, the most impatient of assholes.  Whether it's traffic on the motor bank lanes at First Federal, televised State of the Union addresses, or the unique corporate torture of only three out of 18 checkout registers which stay open at Target during peak shopping, I have just never liked waiting my turn, plain and simple.  Which can make for a damned unattractive trait in an indie writer doing his or her own book covers.

What's that?  Fuck the world, you say?  You want it all and you want it right now?  Okay, let me take you for a walk on the impatient side and impart the lessons that left me scarred and listening to Billy Joel for days on end.

The original cover, bland as a Sunday
pancake with no butter or syrup...

I slipped and tumbled into this abyss early this year when I was hopping to go live on Amazon with my first short story, which I had called, at that time, Squirters.  It was the first piece of fiction I was about to circulate, and I was as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs (I don't remember where I heard that line, but I readily admit I clearly stole that one).  However, thanks to what turned out be a very misleading title, despite 99.9% of the population expecting titillation and porn, I gave them a supernatural war story instead, and a pretty pissed off, otherwise expectant readership was born.  But poor title selection was just the beginning of this mess I made.

Because there's this: the tumult of book cover design goes beyond the usual headache of should I pay a professional or do my own?  A professional, just like any industry, will charge you based on complexity of the thought process, and unless you are buying one of the designer's stock covers, you will not get what you pay for if the road is traveled in fits and starts.  When I was in my teens, I had trouble selecting the exact snippet of a song that would best represent my individuality for my answering machine, so you can see my problem there.  And I haven't outgrown the habit, so indecision can kill this tete-a-tete collaboration really fucking fast.

You have to remain actively involved in the progress of the design, or even a customized job may not work out for you.  Even worse, if the soul of a bitchy art director is trapped inside your body trying to get out, you may also end up frustrating the book cover designer or graphic artist you're working with, and the partnership will end with someone flipping the bird, billing for time spent, and perhaps even a veiled reference to Yoko Ono will be muttered.

Well, I decided not to go that route, for those aforementioned reasons.  I don't have and have never used Photoshop because back in the mid-90's I failed to master the unique male compulsion for retouching photos of women's boobs and lady bits, so that skill set was out.  Plus, Photoshop is expensive and unless it is for a full-time career move, better to grab a Dodge instead of a Lamborghini for your first trip out on the back roads, know what I mean?  Instead, I patrolled the Google landscape and found my way to a couple of free (emphasis on free) graphics programs (GIMP, which you can download here, and Inkscape, downloadable here) and began one of the fastest and most intense learning-curve marathons known to man.

Once that was done, I needed what any red-blooded nerd trapped in his mother's basement with a bag of Doritos and an overclocked Alienware will need: images.  A plethora of images.  And here I was at a real roadblock because not only does my mother have no basement, but I hate Doritos and I can't afford another Alienware.  So I just tapped my Asus laptop on its smooth little forehead and told it, "Go fetch."

A big, big note here: if you are tempted to just find, copy and use any image floating through the digitalsphere...DON'T.  Just don't.  There is a mine field of copyright infringement lawsuits just waiting to shred you and your checking account to pieces -- and a phalanx of online, Starbucks-sipping, Arcade Fire-listening, website-chasing lawyers who have nothing better to do than try to make a quick one or two grand in billable hours filing on unsuspecting or impetuous writers (like me).  Basically, if you are not the person who took the photo or generated the original image, you do not have any ownership rights to re-use that image, in ANY fucking way, unless the owner of that image gives you said permission first.  (And you'd better get it in writing, too).

So the sources I decided to use for this maiden effort came from some Department of Defense websites, mainly because photographs taken by soldiers on active duty are considered to be in the public domain under Section 105 of the US Copyright Act.  NASA is also good, all those astronauts and their high-resolution cameras really have a public-domain gold mine going on if you're a sci-fi writer.  Specifically, the disclaimers on Wikimedia Commons will say something like the phrase below, corresponding to the following image:

This image or file is a work of a U.S. Air Force Airman or employee, taken or made as part of that person's official duties.  As a work of the U.S. federal government, the image or file is in the public domain.

So that's the first thing you should check, and then you can use the image as I've done below:

Credit: U.S. Air Force photo [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Note that even public-domain images need attribution, and Wikimedia Commons will actually have a link on the image page telling you what this attribution should state.

You may run into a lesser form of public domain that will say something else, like this:

The copyright holder of this file allows anyone to use it for any purpose, provided that the copyright holder is properly attributed.  Redistribution, derivative work, commercial use, and all other use is permitted.

Which is almost as good as public domain, except that you absolutely have to credit the copyright holder, because copyright is still with the owner of the image, not you.  So you do something like what I've done with an image under this license below:

Credit: By Georgios Pazios (User:Alaniaris) (Own work)
[Attribution], via Wikimedia Commons

Don't be alarmed by the selection of photos, I'm not planning on bombing any small industrialized nation anytime soon.  I searched for jet fighters and the results provided included the images above.  This can be done with any kind of image that you may be looking for, just like a Google search, except you're going through the Wikimedia Commons repository where most images which are uploaded were intended to be shared, albeit with one or two restrictions.  This will yield better search results than using Google, where a majority of your image search results will probably include copyrighted images.

My revised attempt; and guess what?
It still sucked...

Now, am I a patent and trademark lawyer?  No.  This is all based on information I read on Wikimedia Commons, and if some bloodsucker comes after me, I'm going to encourage them to go rifle through Jimmy Wales' coffers, not mine.  But his Wikimedia Commons page has great information on the images that it has to offer, I doubt that it is there to lead you astray, and it will even tell you if the images are public domain, if they can be re-used with credit given (which is a really small price to pay, so just pay it already), or if there are other restrictions which the copyright owners have imposed on sharing or using the images.  It's all explained in legalese that's as clear as mud, but bottom line, try to go for stuff that won't get you strung up by your thumbs in a courtroom.

There is also a much easier solution to this and that is going out and taking your own photos.  At least, it's easier from a copyright-holding perspective as long as there are no people in your shot.  But I'm a lousy photographer, I don't know a damned thing about filters or shutter speeds or whatnot.  And if you are taking photos of random people on the street, you'll need to get a release from each and every one of them before you can even think of using their faces or likeness for commercial purposes.  If you commission a model for a photo session, however, they usually sign such a release, but you are also paying them for that photo session.  See how complicated this can get?

Finally, a photo that doesn't involve
worrying about fucking copyright...

Notice that nowhere thus far have I mentioned the dark art of skill that needs to be applied to these creative bursts of hemorrhoid-like flare-ups.  Oh sure, you can go out and decide to comb through the offerings of eBay and learn everything there is to learn about designing book covers -- and if you're going to do that, go buy Chip Kidd's excellent introductory book, A Kidd's Guide to Graphic Design, which distills a good chunk of his vast professional knowledge into a very approachable treatment of the subject.  Seriously.  It is that good.

However, even after a revised cover, I saw the zero-sum sales on my KDP page and figured it was time for some professional CPR.  So after some perusing, I found a website and graphics developer at SkyRuby.com which charged me very reasonable rates to prop up what was at that point a dead body and try to at least make it look like it had once walked the earth as a living thing.  This is where I discovered how detail-oriented and obsessive I could be over even the tiniest details.

Call this chaper The Adventure of the Skull Moon...I could write an entirely separate post on the imagery that haunted my brain, just trying to get that thing right.  The skull moon was a key image in my concept of the cover design, you see.  But the original skull moon was this:

Revision No. 3; or How I Learned To Stop
Worrying and Prematurely Love
My Skull Moon...

I had decided to change the title and was using a half-assed placeholder title, but I still wasn't feeling that skull moon...it looked sad and maybe a little hungry, like a kitty cat that just wants to be let inside the house.  Those Special Forces soldiers aren't heading into danger, they're embarking on a mission of feline mercy to deliver a bowl of milk.  And the title?  Might as well have called it Waiting for Cuddles.

Problem was that I had already told the designer that I was happy with the outcome...but I wasn't.  It was like tasting jalapeno poppers for the first time: you don't really know it at first, but you keep eating them and suddenly get up from the table knowing that, somewhere along the way, you've made a grave mistake.  And this is a key thing to remember when you are working with a professional: don't be afraid to speak up.  You're paying for services rendered, you have to be able to say what's on your mind.  This isn't your marriage, no one's going to bitch you out for admitting you hate to get up early to take out the trash...um, yeah, anyway.  So I emailed her again the next morning and said, Hey, we need to talk...

The designer I worked with was very patient, and she charged by the hour but she brought mad skills to the game and worked very fast, and in a matter of just two hours (I shit you not) I had a much better skull moon, the best one I think I will ever find.

And what did I end up with?  A final cover, which now looks exactly like this:

Prey.  That's right. Prey.  As in, "pray" that this is the last
fucking change this asshole makes to his book cover...

The moral of the story is yes, I am a control freak, yes I drove my cover designer crazy andd you can, too!  But fuck it because you know what?  You will get a cover design that is much closer to what you envisioned than if you were to hand the reins to a publishing firm.  Publishing firms have their own designers and art departments and they decide on a marketing plan, not you.  They decide what your cover will look like, not you.  They may even decide to change the title of the book, and suck it up, buttercup.

I'm made of much more arrogant, self-centered stuff.  I want my ideas, my concepts, my execution out there.  This is not the way for everyone; I sincerely understand that.  For those who have already reached the hallowed halls of traditional publishing, giving up final cut, as it were, in exchange for the freedom to write more stuff may be exactly what they want and need.  But I'm having a hell of an adventure in this indie environment, and I'm in no particular rush to do anything except enjoy the ride.

I'm speaking non-pornographically, of course.