The Podcast

Timmayyy writes:

Nice work on the setup.  When does the action start?

Aludra writes:

Come on, Pete. Quit stringing us along. I want to see some action!

Epidrene writes:

Great job on the world building, so far. What I’m really looking forward to are some of the action set pieces that I saw in your excerpts from Loss of Innocence.  You’ve proven you can write things other than action now, so let’s blow something up!

Patience!  Good things come to those who wait. 

Brenda writes:

I can tell that you are a man who cares deeply for his family by the way you write. That is rare and precious in this day and age. Few writers could write the agony that Anthony is going through in his domestic struggles with the kind of sensitivity that you do. (And by the way, Kate is awesome, as usual.)

Awww, shucks.  Thanks for writing in, again, Brenda.  I appreciate the feedback.

Eric the Red writes:

Pete, you said that you initially wrote this to practice your craft…and it shows. If you were trying to plot something in a way that was internally consistent, then I think you failed. There are several things that don’t work here, chief among them is your dialogue between Mendoza and the tug builders. You don’t think that a colony such as that would have highly trained specialists doing their fabrication work? … Kate’s quasi-Brooklyn accent is atrocious and insulting in the podcast.  Both of you seem to be equating work on a shop floor as something that requires lesser intelligence, and you chose a stereotype accent to represent your misconceptions.

I’ve made a policy of posting both the bad and the good in the weekend mailbag so that no one makes the mistake of assuming that I’m doing this as an ego-boosting exercise.  Hopefully the above comment convinces everyone of this.

Eric, let me say that you don’t have the entire plot in front of you right now.  There are several, compelling reasons that I plotted this novella the way that I did.  At this point, you don’t have enough information to tell me what is internally consistent and what is not.  If you stand by your opinion after reading the complete novella, then I’ll certainly be willing to listen.  Right now, though, you don’t have all the facts.    And as an aside, I asked Kate to do a different accent to differentiate the workers.  Since she’s from the Northeast, a Brooklyn accent is what emerged.  Had I done the podcast, it would have been a Southern drawl.  There is no intended stereotype here; each of us would have done the accent that we could pull off.

What if?

Helios writes:

JFK would have been the driving force that put us on Mars in the 1980s.  We lost decades of progress because of his assassination.

TubOfRottenCherries writes:

He would have been the first President to get a *censored* stain on the dress of his mistress.

Gyra writes:

We would all be dead now, because he would have pushed Khruschev past the point of no return.  He had a mafia mentality, and that was not fitting for the role of the President.

Bob the Best Big Bear in Boston writes:

We love the memory of JFK here in Mass.  If the CIA hadn’t killed him, we would have kept our commitments in Vietnam to a minimum, the civil rights movement would have been more peaceful, and we would already have a city on the moon.

Real ID

Nina writes:

Pete, of all the things that you could complain about, this is by far the most harmless. If you want to criticize the Bush administration for the Patriot Act or for the Iraq war, then fine, but this might actually be beneficial.

First of all, before I let you put words in my mouth, I have carefully not criticized the Iraq War.  I have questioned our reason for being there, but as I’ve said before, I’m all for American Imperialism.  I’ll answer your other concerns in a longer answer below.

Julie writes:

Pete, you’re just being paranoid. Grow up and quit acting the wounded libertarian. Your politics are fashionable in an absinthe-drinking, woo-haw I’m a writer sort of way, but real people aren’t that idealistic. 

“Woo-haw?”  I don’t know that I’ve ever heard that before.

Stephanie writes:

What harm does a little information do? It’s not like the government is going to put you on a spam list for Nigerian princes or something. I agree with AmbianceForce when he says that it will make things easier on us.

Every last one of you (including the others that I did not post) completely, totally missed the point.  What gives my government the right to collect this information?  Not a damned thing.  As long as they know who I am, where I was born, where I live, and how much I make, I’m fine with it. The first two items tell them that I have a right to vote in elections, the third tells them where I am so that I can be appropriately represented by local, state, and federal officals, and the last gives them something to assess taxes against. Other than that, they need to know NOTHING. When those four items of information are tied to everything that I am in a computer system, ranging from my buying habits, my internet search history, my political leanings, and my choice of creed, then I have a real problem. Of what possible benefit is that to a government that is only concerned with the powers granted to it specifically within the constitution?  Therein lies the problem–our wonderful, benevolent, quasi-Republic has mutated beyond the boundaries set by our founding fathers…to our detriment. That information only becomes useful to our overlords when our government steps beyond the boundaries that were placed against it.  REAL ID is a tool that is being sold to us as a means of increasing security, but it amounts to a tool that allows the government to exercise more direct control on our day to day lives.  Anyone who thinks differently refuses to learn the lessons of history.