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By Leslie, May 15, 2011 6:42 am

I’m well into the guts of The Box, my YA SciFi adventure, and I’m discovering that money is great motivator. I know, I know…it took me this long to figure *that* out?

Money is a motivator for me, certainly, but also for my characters.  My fictional world in The Box is parallel to Earth. Only special people can move between worlds and the population of my fictional world is pretty small. I need a wealthy ruling class so that pretty much limits  the economy of my fictional world. No vast powerhouse of productive workers. Nope, I need a clever economy that leverages the advantage of a small, intelligent, and technically advanced people…..

Q: What economic system is stable for a small, isolated population and can support a high standard of living?

Cue Jeopardy music

Hmm, what we want is an economy that allows much of the population to live in comfort, if not outright wealth. Most should not have to work too hard and have plenty of time to make trouble. LOL. It should also play into their sense of entitlement and fundamental superiority. Oh, and they are also right next to a  large, fat, cash cow (the Earth).

Ding, ding, ding…out of time! And the answer is…..

An offshore banking (aka money laundering) economy!

Oh snap! This will work nicely! Lightly-regulated, offshore accounts can be found in countries like Switzerland, Lichtenstine or the Cayman Islands. If my fictional world can entice  wealthy Earth people to deposit funds into its high interest, private, off-world banks then my fictional aliens are both dependant on Earth and maintain some control over some very powerful Earth people. Hmm, lots of inherent conflict in that one! I like it.  It gives me a range of careers to play with and instantly creates a potential caste system. All excellent motivators. I can take the economy into the shadier parts of  offworld banking or keep it on the ethical side. I can also pit the ethics supporters against the off-worlders with, shall we say, more flexible ethics. ROFL.

The first page of The Wealth of Nations, 1776 London edition

To quote Adam Smith:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.

You gotta love him for providing some excellent motivation!
Hmm, now all I need is a map!  Maybe, I can even add some crystal waters and white sand beaches….mmmmm

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By Leslie, September 29, 2010 12:21 pm

Last week I drove from Northern California to Colorado Springs along Hwy 50. I’ve read a number of pioneer and goldrush memoirs about the trials of the Great Basin crossings and now for the first  time in a long time I drove that path for myself. Alone.

I wasn’t sitting behind an oxe or slogging through the sage brush, over ridge after ridge but I got the basic sense of things. Long spans of open desert cut by high ridges that the pioneers had to cross to get to California.

That is a grueling trail. It must have been hellish in 1848.  It’s pretty damn lonely in 2010 and I love to drive alone. I turned onto Hwy 50 in Nevada and glanced down at the GPS on my Mini…HOLY COW…250 miles??? Yikes, not a lot out here.

OK, no comments about driving and taking pictures. Look, I wasn’t even going very fast…yet.

The landscape that rolled out in front of me was stark and forbidding. Beautiful, but I was very happy to be in my air conditioned Mini sipping water and listening to Audiobooks. I chose the Diary of Lewis and Clark for that crossing. Appropriate, no?

Hwy 50 also runs the old Pony Express route and there are the decaying remains of Pony express stations at regular intervals along the side of the road. They are small, no bigger than 10 feet on a side at the crumbled rock foundations. Our forefathers were cut from pretty tough cloth.

As I drove, I couldn’t help but think about the men and women who risked everything for the chance to strike it rich in the gold fields of California. What a spectacular leap of faith, to just set off into a an unknown world, facing who knew what terrors.

Makes me feel soft and squidgy and I look at the stern picture of my own Great Grandmother, a pioneer in Montana in the late 1800s, and wonder if I would ever measure up. I honestly don’t know. I’d like to think I would, but how would you know unless you were dropped into that?

In Utah, I pulled off the side of the road at the most spectacular overlook down a canyon that appeared nearly limitless. My pictures don’t come close to what I felt looking down this canyon, but a part of me didn’t want the drive to end.

Gee, I guess that’s why I love time travel books, eh? lol.

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By Leslie, September 12, 2010 5:21 pm

This week I take my second road trip in Mimi, my 2009 Mini Cooper S.  I was supposed to be racing Mimi with my son in a Road Rally but I decided to hang out with my writer peeps in Colorado at the Colorado Romance Writers Fall Annual Retreat. I plan to learn a lot and have a lot of fun.

Philip, Mimi and I go ‘way back. We love to go fast! I can’t wait to hit Hwy 50 and the Great Basin that the gold rush pioneers struggled over to get to California. I’ve certainly studied enough diaries of that crossing writing A Fault in Time!  I’m going to go a lot faster, but there is one stretch on Hwy 50 with 249 miles between towns. Yikes! I’m bringing water and a camera!

Here’s Philip and Mimi in our first training day. I know, it doesnt look like much but he kept that car in a circle with the throttle only, no steering wheel action, no brakes. Just gently depressing and letting off the accelerator. It was fun!  Next month, we’re doing a road ralley!

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By Leslie, September 9, 2010 7:15 pm

Boys see things differently from you and me.  It was a great exercise in POV from the teen boy perspective.

I made wilted mixed greens in bacon for dinner….

His response?

MMMMMMM  “Bacon salad!”

Teen boys are different!

From CrossFit

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By Leslie, April 26, 2010 12:35 pm

My husband and I just completed circumnavigating the globe to avoid the effects of a volcano while enjoying a vacation in Greece. You know the one. Over the past week, I’ve spent several days in the airports of various countries and the waiting rooms of those airports, in transit. Most times an airport is an airport is an airport – until it’s not. And then it’s as if the world was tilted slightly and viewed through the lens of a fun house mirror. Things that looks familiar are strange and the strange are very odd, indeed. But what is the strangest are the things that are the most familiar, yet different in one or two key ways.

I sat in a starkly fluorescent transit room in the David Ben Gurion Airport watching a bank of rumpled and flat-faced security personnel observe my husband’s very American demands to check our baggage through to Athens. We were not at home and familiar rules just do not apply. And while I knew that, my gut expected the familiar.

No, we were not threatened and we were not doing anything unusual, by our standards – but by theirs, who knows? I may never know exactly what he said that finally made them see that those bags, yes those, were ours and should be on this plane, with us. It sounds so simple and I am certain they were reasonable people. We all spoke english – of a sort – but in no way did we share any experiences, other than those that made us human. It was chilling.

And exhilarating, because I realized that this could be what a time traveler would experience. My fingers itched to start typing.

There is a sense that things are similar and the rules known – up to a point- and you do not know where that point is. Then you hit it, and your world view tumbles.  Almost as if the rules of society can be visualized as an irregular surface and you as a time traveler, or world traveler, edge along in the dark assuming the people are essentially thinking the same thoughts and seeing the same things, but there is an abyss in the road and everybody can see it, except you, of course.