Another one that needed archiving here on the blog… -Jack

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(this was a response on the other social media page, to this viral thing where some Euro thinks Americans are crazy to think America is as diverse as different European countries)

The thing where Europeans don’t grasp how diverse America is makes me laugh.

But anyways I’ve been to England, France, Germany, Czechia, and Denmark. I’ve been to every US state except Hawaii, Alaska, Maine, and the Dakotas.

Other than speaking the same language (sorta) there is as much difference between San Francisco and Oklahoma City as there is between Prague and London. The difference between “the south” and everything else alone would blow your Euro mind. I say this with love as an adopted Alabaman.

Then even in that one region of America, the difference between the groups is a hoot. Cajun is in the south, but it is it’s own thing. That’s not even getting into the racial differences. Then you’ve got the rural vs. urban divide that exists everywhere. Tennessee is wildly different from Mississippi. Both of them look at Virginia like WTF, while most of Virginia points to the north and says don’t blame us. Then there’s Huntsville, where you can meet somebody who looks and sounds like a total redneck, but who does calculus in his head for fun.

America has got a couple hundred subcultures with deep philosophical divides between them, which follow geographical and historical lines a lot more than they follow state borders.

Then we’ve got the ethnic subcultures and their geographic enclaves in America. Something which we’ve had since the beginning which Europe is suddenly trying to deal with for the first time and not doing so hot. Hey, you smug Euro bastards who’ve been sneering at America’s crime rate from your–what up until recently have been–peaceful homogeneous oatmeal countries.

Anybody who thinks every part of America is the same, that tells me they haven’t gone very far off the freeway.

Big chunks of America are culturally Latin (and there’s big differences between being Mexican in Fresno and being Cuban in Miami), or culturally American black (and there’s big differences between ATL and LA) or culturally Scandinavian (and tell a Yooper that he’s the same as a Minneapolis liberal and you’re gonna get stabbed), or New Englanders (hell, within the Boston city limits there are more social divides than regular people can keep track of). Hell, I come from a place where you were either Portuguese, Mexican, or Okie. And the difference between those was the same as the difference between France and England, only in one valley.

Now I live in the Inner Mountain West, as in cowboy country (you know those lists of rodeo kids where the names are so cowboy they go viral? Those are literally my neighbors) which to me is normal, but to big chunks of America it is so different and alien that they think Yellowstone is realistic.

On that note, spare me the excuse about how us Americans all watch/listen/read the same entertainment, because A. only kinda. and B. you guys consume our entertainment products too. I got annoyed while I was in Europe trying to listen to European music in the rental car because most of your radio stations were playing boring American pop (which again, is subdivided by those geographic/cultural things I pointed out above, but is dominated by lame artificial LA crap mostly)

And we consume your entertainment products. That’s why I visited all those countries, to cater to the European subcultures who like my books. (don’t worry, most of the proper Europeans still hate my stuff!) 😀

But back to my current region, there are huge cultural differences between roughneck Wyoming and Mormon Utah. Same region. Hell, same town half the time, wildly different cultures. (and don’t get me started on the ProgMo liberal Mormons of the super urbanized Wasatch Front, because they’re all going to hell and the rest of us know it)

But, but, but you Americans all eat the same food! Yeah, the national chains. Which turns out, you guys have too. But again, get off the freeway a bit. Depending on the town you can get some really good Vietnamese/TexMex/Somali. Same way the good food in London is Thai or Indian, and the “traditional” British food I ate was a friggin’ war crime. Y’all need to treasure Gordon Ramsey for helping you fix your shit.

People say America is like 50 countries in a trench coat… eh… It is more like 200 countries bouncing on a trampoline. America is actually more like India with its clumped together mixture of hundreds of groups reclumped again under a few umbrellas. Some US states do have national pride/identities, but within those states there are subcultures who don’t, and others who are all in. (Texans and Floridians know exactly what I’m talking about).

Then one thing America and Europe have in common, all our sane normal people hate the big lefty cities which dominate us politically. So hundreds of subcultures, clumping under two distinct umbrellas. Us, and Those Meddlesome Fuckers. So culturally the people of rural Idaho have more in common with French farmers who are spraying cow shit on government offices than they do with the liberal Californians who now infest Boise.

That’s another cultural difference between America and Europe, we move around. A LOT. Europeans had centuries to clump into their chosen regions (or invade one, or get kicked out) so the like minded could be born and die in the same spot. Most of the American subcultures are like eh, fuck it, I’m gonna move a thousand miles to a very different place and work there instead. And we do that constantly, so the whole construct is always shifting.  

Then geographically, we win. Period. We’ve got a bunch  of stuff Europe doesn’t have, while having everything Europe has except for fjords maybe? I think. I’d have to check. Alaska might. Hell if I know.

Ultimately US states are crazy diverse, and the difference between states is nuts. The further you get away from the national chain shopping center right off the freeway off ramp, the more apparent this becomes. The homogeneous parts of America were the bits that we all agreed that we liked and adopted. Which ironically, I saw the exact same thing driving across Europe, as I bought Kinder Bueno in every single country. 😀

-Jack Wylder, here. Thought Larry’s comments on this needed to be preserved

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Every now and then I see some pedantic weasel get all snooty how listening to audiobooks doesn’t count as reading. I just saw some dork acting smug and superior because “Reading is active. Listening is passive.”

Lol no. 😀 That is not how this works AT ALL.

Here is a peak behind the curtain of how this actually works. I’m one of those authors who’s style translates extremely well into audio. I do really good there. In fact one time one of the main execs at Audible needed to do a presentation about writing for audio, so he asked me in particular to help him come up with a list of tips and tricks. (and we’ve done episodes of WriterDojo about what I told him). So I’ve given a whole lot of thought to this topic, and I’ve learned from a lot of very smart people.

Eyes, ears (or fingers if you read braille) those are just the input device to feed story into your brain. There are different tricks we authors can do to make the story more interesting for either. Once the story is in your brain, if the story is good enough the reader/listener is going to go into a certain flow state we like to call “immersion.”

The whole active/passive thing is ridiculous, because when you are actively immersed in the story whatever input device you’re using becomes irrelevant, and you go into autopilot, and either way your brain is busy digesting that story.

You can “actively” read, but if you’re immersed, it’s automatic. In fact, while your brain is reading this line, your subconscious is already skipped ahead one line and is processing it too, and your brain is still processing the line above. (this is why profanity is 3x more powerful in written form than audio, because of the difference in the nature of the input device). On the eyeball side we’ve got visual tricks. On the audio side there is the added benefit of a narrator who can add emotion and emphasis.

But if you hook electrodes to someone’s brain who is in that active flow state where they are immersed in the world, and their imagination is processing and they’re creating visuals and are emotionally engaged, same parts of the brain are lighting up. And this is when you get pissed off when the doorbell rings and reminds you that the real world still exists.

The difference between absorbing your story from books/audio and TV is that the visualization component is being done for you.

Anybody who thinks you can’t read a book “passively” has never meandered their way through a boring read, nor if they think audio isn’t “active” has never been sucked into a good audiobook.

Getting people into that immersive state is my job. The reason I’m good at both audiobooks and regular books is that I’m a story teller first, writer second. Writer is just my preferred delivery method, and if I’d been born a thousand years ago I would’ve been the dude telling stories around the campfire at night.

The 5th book in the Saga of the Forgotten Warrior series, Graveyard of Demons, will be out in November. However, Baen offers what is called eARCs, which are electronic advanced reader copies. These are the early, not quite finished versions which usually go out to book reviewers, but Baen saw that some fans are eager to get the book early, so they make them available to the public.

https://www.baen.com/graveyard-of-demons-earc.html

The reviews so far are great. The final book in the series, Heart of the Mountain, will be out in February.

This one definitely needs to be preserved…- Jack

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On Rocket Man’s site I wrote: Assassination attempt on one candidate. Coup on the other a week later, leaving a puppet with dementia under the control of a shadowy cabal who really runs the government… If I put this in a thriller novel you guys would get mad at me for being too cliche.

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Somebody asked “If we’re going purely by cliches, then what comes next?”

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Oh boy, good question… Okay, professional writer hat on (and yes, I’ve got a trilogy of thrillers) after the assassination attempt and coup, here is how I would write this election story if I was going as ham fisted cheese as possible. Let’s see what actually comes true-

While Dementia Potato is being kept in the closet, heavily medicated while the government is run by a shadowy cabal (the Harvard prom committee), THROATUS locks up the nomination at the Democratic National Coup, err… I mean Convention. In a shocking turn of events, her running mate is a another woman. So that way if you’re against it you’re an extra misogynist. Also, it’ll be a white woman, because of the How Dare You Factor of bringing up all the DEI stuff. It’ll be a senator/congresswoman from a swing state.

But what’s more important than voting for the first All Female Power Team? Voting to REELECT the first female president! That’s right. A little while after the coupvention the news cycle will have tired of endless BJ jokes and will need to mix things up. So Dementia Potato has to go.

And by go, in a kind world it would be “retired due to health issues to spend time with his family”. But since I’m writing a ham fisted thriller, that’s not good enough. They’re gonna call the guy who snuck into Epstein’s cell and request something “dignified and tasteful”.  A state funeral and National Time Of Mourning would be way better than skulking off into retirement. And also, that way if the old man is dead, then it would be So Rude to bring up pesky stuff like his actual record of total and complete failure. And instead he would be remembered as a Great Statesman Unifier, and not a corrupt child sniffing goober.

So now you aren’t just voting against a woman, but you are voting against First Female President and all the historical melodrama which accompanies this. The stage is set. The media goes 110% on the gas lighting. NOW the left is super worried about having a really old man running for president. Trump slept with hookers. Kamala is a basically sainted Mother Theresa and SUPER SMART.  

Now if I’m writing an action thriller, this is where there’s another attempt on Trump, though probably way more subtle with fewer chances for positive optics. If you’re trying to destroy a guy have him go absolute gangster rap fist pump defiance in front of a waving flag and screaming bald eagle isn’t the way to go (In the book I’d even have  a member of the shadowy cabal insisting that they use an AR-15 the first time because it helps their gun control initiatives).

In my book the PoV would either be the last honest non-DEI hire at the Secret Service who gets a couple bad ass fight scenes before the action finale set piece. But since this particular book is clearly being written by a dork who burned out his brain with too much cocaine who now struggles with writing good characters and satisfying conclusions, like Stephen King, then it’ll probably be something lame. Like a fake heart attack, food poisoning, autoerotic asphyxiation, or hell… give him Covid. Lol. If we’re going absolute ham fist, the left would love that storyline. It has come FULL CIRCLE.

If I’m writing this, the good guys would win, and the left would slink off in defeat… for now. (that way I could write the sequel) But in Stephen’s version Kamala will turn out to be the most popular candidate in history and get 94 million totally honest votes at 2 AM, but like I said, we all know he’s shit at endings.  
Hell, I’m gonna bookmark this cliché thriller story outline to see how much of it comes true.

Another one Larry did on the Book of Faces- Jack

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What are your favorite bits of Chevron powered government overreach that you’d like to see get sued into oblivion now?

In my various jobs I’ve seen unelected bureaucrats make up all sorts of goofy nonsensical shit we had to obey or else.

When I was young and working on farms, factories, or construction I saw OHSA regulations that made job sites LESS safe. “Why are we doing it this stupid way?” “Because that government asshole who has never done this himself said we’d get fined if we don’t.” “Oh cool, let me unnecessarily insert my hands into this thing that can chop them off for the mandatory safety check then.”

I’m a rural westerner. Dear Lord, don’t get us started on the BLM. 90% of their bullshit isn’t law. They just make up wacky shit on the fly. Ignorant fucks who live in cities hundreds or thousands of miles away think they “protect the environment”. Lol no. There can be some obvious terrible problem, but some fucker in DC will say nope, you have to leave that terrible problem there to grow bigger or else we’ll fine you or shoot you if you try to fix it. If you’re in the west and you see some land that’s got some obvious issues or is about to burn down it’s government land.

Then I went into accounting, and the dirty secret of that industry is 3/4 of what companies pay accountants for is to do government mandated paperwork to send to the government which nobody in the government will ever read, and to respond to government audits which are usually useless. IRS just makes shit up as they go. And the shit they made up last time? They changed it this time. Either way, shut up and pay your fine.

But it isn’t just the agency that takes your money directly. Oh no. (honestly, the IRS was one of the more professional agencies I dealt with in my career! Not even joking. The others are worse.) Then there’s the dozens of other agencies that meddle in your industry who you also have to appease, even though sometimes they contradict each other, and all of them can fine you.

Then I worked in the gun business, where I got to discover the wonderful world of ATF inspections, where holy fucking shit, the dumbest people in the universe who don’t know how anything works at all, pretend to be mechanical engineers and lawyers. But Chevron said they’re “experts” so clearly that must be true, and if you disagree they’ll shoot your dog and burn your house down. The list of dumb shit the ATF makes up on the fly could fill a book (literally. I did write this book).

But surely, the ATF is the worst right? Oh no. Not even close. Because then for my next job I went into military contracting! Where the rules are whatever the DCAA or DFAS say they are today. And sure, you violated that secret impossible to know rule on accident, so we’re going to ruin your company and put hundreds of people out of work… but the big megacorporation did the same thing, only on purpose, and a million times worse? Oh well. Fuck you. Lockheed builds missiles. You don’t.

On that note, as an accountant I got companies through audits from probably eight or ten different federal agencies. The DCAA audit is by far the most annoying. This is the industry where the customer actually knows exactly how much profit you expect to make, and then you have to guess what everything will cost in the future, and if you guess wrong, they will fine you. Hell, if you guess in a way that actually SAVES the government money, they will fine you. If you charge the government too little, they will fine you. They will fine you for bookkeeping errors. They will fine you for typos. (keep in mind of the hundreds of government spreadsheets I saw, I never saw a single one that didn’t have serious computational errors on it… which I got to fix for them for free… or they’d fine me).

I once actually had a DCAA auditor sit behind me while I typed on my computer for about 4 hours to WATCH ME TYPE. At the end of this month long colonoscopy which cost the tax payers tens of thousands of dollars in government employee salary, they had found one mistake where I had UNDER CHARGED the government something like $16.

Keep in mind, none of this shit was a law passed by congress. It’s all stuff that the agencies made up based upon a vague idea congress gave them.

But the worst, the absolute worst, dumbest motherfuckers in the entire US government? The SBA.

The motherfucking SBA who I will despise with the fire of a thousand suns until the end of time. This is an agency congress created to HELP small businesses, and instead its a wretched hive of scum and villainy, who because they can just make up the regulations as they go, will always find a way to reward their friends and punish everybody who competes with their friends.

And they make up these arbitrary rules, which their employees don’t understand, and then if you fail to comply with the rule correctly, but they understand it wrong, they will actually actively try to destroy that small business, RATHER THAN ADMIT THEIR MISTAKE. I’ve got a saga about this particular one that would take ten thousand words to tell, where I fought with the SBA making shit up on the fly and lying about it for 6 straight months, and the only reason we got it solved was my company brought it to the attention of @BasedMikeLee who then stomped on their heads (with glee, which is why that dude has earned my vote).
So how has Chevron fucked you? 😀