Worldbuilding Wednesdays: Interior Design

It’s our worldbuilding bloghop day, and these week’s topic is ‘Interior Design.’ To see more about the blog hop visit Rebekah Loper’s blog at: http://rebekahloper.com/

Interior design. Well, my space city Tiberius Base is full of interiors. The characters COULD go outside and play but they’d have to wear spacesuits to avoid unfortunate consequences and no one wants to wear spacesuits.

The culture of Tiberius Base has not yet been established. Most of the people on the Base at story-begin are hired construction crews who are about to move on, and an administrative staff who works for Fortunate Dragon company.

Our main character, Ping Yuan, has a rather spartan apartment. He is lucky to be high enough in rank to have his own quarters. Lower-ranked unmarried persons are assigned to a communal dormitory. Since the company wants everyone working on the station to marry and have kids, marriage will provide an employee with the right to larger quarters.

The living spaces on the station are quite plain until a finishing crew works on them. They handle ‘interior design’ tasks as well as putting up walls to divide larger living quarters into rooms. Ping has not bothered to have his own quarters ‘finished’ since he hopes to marry sometime in the near future and will be changing quarters.

The Base is about to obtain some 400 low-level workers to do various tasks for the company and for the private enterprises beginning to be established on the station. These workers are pre-sorted by the labor provider so that groups of workers with the same native language and culture can be obtained. It is assumed that the workers will bring their own culture along with them. The company approves of that. Culture helps unite the inhabitants of a space city.

Individuals who arrive at the Base early in its existence can have their quarters fitted out to their own preferences by the finishing crew. Computer designs are available reflecting many cultures. It is also possible to purchase home decor items from shops, most of which are on the Dock level at the early stage.

There are some aliens living on the Base. Some are Tsanans who mostly look like balls of colored light. They can teleport, and no one is quite sure where they live or what they eat. There is a family of Mender merchants who have quite fine quarters and offices for their business, made out in Mender cultural fashion. There is also a Lizard and his staff. He has been assigned quarters which he decorates to his own specifications. He has an interest in Terran history especially the American Civil War. One of his ancestors was on Earth at the time and fought for the Confederacy. Other Lizards fought for the Union. When the South surrendered at Appomattox, the Lizards on the two sides wanted to keep fighting. The feud continues to this day.

Most of the workers about to be obtained at story-begin are Catholic Christians. Fortunate Dragon company is cool with this even though atheism is encouraged among their own people. The company provides a crucifix for all living quarters of these workers. They even turned a half-finished structure that was intended to be a museum of atheism into a Catholic church. They were very disappointed when they discovered they could not plant audio ‘bugs’ in the confessional.

Businesses also use the services of the finishing crew to create a unique look. There is an Asian vegetable-noodle shop that has a lot of Korean-style artifacts on display, based on the culture of the owner of the place. Ping, our main character, spends a lot of time at that noodle shop, because the girl he likes works there.

The Base is in a stage of transition right now, and the story, among other things, tells the story of how the people living on the station manage to form a functional community.

Foreign influences: alien artifacts are sometimes collected as a hobby. American artifacts such as American flags and portraits of most-admired presidents like Washington, Adams, Lincoln and Reagan are displayed by Terrans of many cultures to signal admiration for American-style democratic republics and American-style multiethnic nations. (Many America-admirers can sing the American national anthem in their own native languages.)

My current effort on my writing projects involve creating an outline using author K. M. Weiland’s book Outlining Your Novel Workbook. The Workbook is full of useful questions to answer to explore your proposed story in enough depth to know what to put in an outline. I have written 45 or so pages in a composition book so far doing this and I have made some useful additions to my story idea as a consequence.

 

 

Keto Living: Dana Carpender’s new Fat Fast Cookbook

Dana Carpender the Low-Carb/Keto cookbook author had come out with her second Fat Fast cookbook and so of course I ordered a copy. I loved her other Fat Fast cookbook.

What is a fat fast? It’s not a real fast as taught by Jimmy Moore and Dr. Jason Fung in the Complete Guide to Fasting. Fat fasting is a temporary restricted diet designed by Dr. Robert Atkins, author of The Atkins Diet Revolution. The Fat Fast was designed for patients who were already on Atkins’ diet at the strict Induction level and who had stopped losing weight when they still had weight to lose. The Fat Fast was, like the Atkins diet itself, based on scientific research. It is a restricted calorie diet, unlike most low carb dieting, and featured food rich in (healthy) fats. It has been shown that people lose more weight eating more fat than eating carbs or protein.

Under Atkins there were about 3 or 4 food items you could eat on a fat fast, but when Dana Carpender tried the fat fast she started created recipes that fit the nutritional profile of fat fast foods.

In this new cookbook there are many new recipes. One problem I have with this book is many recipes have as a main ingredient Shirataki noodles. These noodles are a great low carb noodle substitute but they taste weird compared to real, carb-filled noodles. Also, they are hard to get. My local grocery doesn’t carry them so I have to go into town to get them. They also are hard to store. They can’t be frozen but must be refrigerated. In my fridge it is cold enough on the shelf I stored Shirataki on that a package was frozen and destroyed.

But on the good side there were other recipes that I do want to try. There is a recipe for low-carb chocolate milk based on full-fat coconut milk. I haven’t tried the coconut milk version but have tried one in which I replaced the coconut milk with heavy whipping cream.

There is also a recipe for Vichyssoise which uses cauliflower instead of potato. I’m going to try that recipe as soon as I can get to a grocery store that sells leeks— recipe also calls for one leek.

Now, I myself am not really planning to do a lot of fat fasting anytime soon. I do daily intermittent fasting in the overnight to morning period. But the fat fast recipes can also be a part of any LCHF ketogenic diet, which is what I eat (or should be eating) during my eating hours.

I think the best way to stick to a ketogenic diet is to have a lot of recipe books for ketogenic diets on hand. You don’t need to do lots of exotic recipes every day. Just find a few recipes you really like, and make them regularly. I personally stockpile ingredients for some of my favorite recipes so I can make them without a special trip to the store. This is important during the winter where I live, since during snowstorms we can’t always make trips to the store.

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Saturday is the day of the week I cover healthy/ketogenic diet issues as well as intermittent fasting. Usually. If you want to know more about ketogenic diet and fasting, I recommend the podcasts of Jimmy Moore. He often has Doctors on his podcasts, and discusses the scientific research that backs up approaches like ketogenic diets or fasting. I listen to his podcasts on most days, it helps me keep on track.

Jimmy Moore’s Fasting Talk Podcast.

Jimmy Moore’s Other Podcasts.

Celebrate the Small Stuff: minor characters

Fiction authors all want us to identify with the main characters. But we don’t all do that. When I read Harry Potter I identified with characters like Neville Longbottom and Luna Lovegood. And Snape. I always thought Snape was misunderstood and not the bad guy Harry assumed he was.

Every character in a book is possibly a character that a reader will like the best. And that’s why great authors spend time on smaller characters as well the big ones. Sometimes a well-thought-out secondary character is what makes a book unforgettable.

I have always picked secondary characters to latch on to in fiction. Melanie in Gone with the Wind, for example. She was such a good and loving person. Scarlett needed someone like that in her life.

And then there was Valentine in the Ender books by Orson Scott Card. Not quite good enough for Battle School. And then her little brother Ender was chosen, so she spend her childhood with the brother she hated instead of the brother she loved. Her life turned out to be more about Ender than it was about herself. And Ender normally had bigger things to deal with than his sister.

Sometimes we get lucky and an author writes a book about a minor character we like. I love Bean in Ender’s Game, and then Orson Scott Card wrote some books that told Bean’s story.

Have you ever liked a minor character as much or more than a main character in a work of fiction?

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This has been a post in Lexa Cain’s Celebrate the Small Things blog hop. Lexa has been ill and not able to participate for a while but others on the list have been doing it every week anyway. Visit Lexa Cain’s blog to see the posts— her Celebrate the Small Things participants are in her sidebar under a couple of other blog lists— scroll down. http://lexacain.blogspot.com/

Literary agents as biased gatekeepers

If you read books by a mainstream ‘big’ publisher, you are reading the work of authors who have agents. For most traditionally published authors, getting an agent is the first step to getting a publisher. So the agents function as a gatekeeper helping to decide what books get published.

My most recent copy of Writer’s Digest has profiles of a number of agents looking for new writers. They tell what they want— usually more ‘diversity’ and more LGBTXYZ characters— and what they don’t want. For some agents that is ‘Christian.’

That set me to thinking. In all the years I’ve been reading Writer’s Digest I’ve never heard an agent or publisher say, ‘No Jewish fiction,’ or ‘I don’t want to see any Jewish stuff.’ I’ve never seen one who said ‘No Buddhists need apply.’ Now, I bet some of these agents and publishers in fact didn’t want to see any work with religious content of ANY faith. But no one feels free to admit those biases in public.

But bias against Christians— no one is afraid to admit to that these days. Now, I believe an agent that has the impulse to say ‘No Christian stuff’ would be a poor agent for a Christian author— he wouldn’t have good connections at the Evangelical Christian publishing houses. But I do think it is sad that agents have no fear of admitting a prejudice in public.

Fortunately the rise of Indie fiction means the big publishers are no longer the only game in town, so getting an agent that isn’t bigoted against your faith isn’t as urgent.  There are alternatives. And there are a few agents who specialize in Evangelical Christian authors. (I don’t know that there is any hope for the Catholic authors, as far as agents go. There aren’t many Catholic publishers with a fiction line.)

For the reader the rise of Indie fiction means that there is a greater variety of books to be found. If only it were easier to find the good stuff.

Worldbuilding Wednesday: Your world needs history

History shapes us all. Even though I was born after WW2, I was affected by the events of that conflict. And so I know that fictional characters will also be affected by their world’s history.

In my worldbuilding for my WIP Tiberius Base, the Terran Empire that most of the characters are part of is not a real empire with a central governing authority. The planet Earth is called Oldearth with a certain degree of contempt, because the world has gone silly due to the continuation of anti-overpopulation measures into a time when the planet is facing an underpopulation crisis. The Terran Empire consists of a bunch of different authorities based on different colony worlds. The Emperor of the Empire, called the Asian Emperor because he unites the royalty of several Asian nations in his family tree, is a figurehead and knows it, but ‘rules’ out of some royal palaces on Oldearth. The pope also is based on Oldearth but most men who rise to that position worked on Terran colonies before becoming Cardinals and later Popes.

Terrans are part of a very loose group of humanoid races that maintain the Interstellar Archives. The Archives rate differing races as to their dominance level. A race that is considered submissive is not allowed to colonize whole worlds but must be content with being given a continent to settle on some other race’s world. The Archives determine which colonization projects are allowed/accepted but have no warships to stop an unapproved project.

There are two humanoid races that play a part in the story. The Menders have been visiting Terra since the days of ancient Egypt, usually to buy horses to add to their own breeding stock. Terrans and Menders are usually allies.

The Lizards, also called Ulangin, are a problem. A Lizard is making a claim to the whole of Tiberius Base, because the Base’s core is a hollowed-out asteroid provided by a mysterious true-alien race called the Diggers. The Lizard has permission from the Archives to study Digger artifacts and so he claims the whole Base.

Ping, the main character, and his boss, Master Liang, are from a political entity which grew out of Communist China. They are ideologically Communists and Scientific Atheists, but their main business is business and their ideology isn’t allowed to interfere with that. The core of the story is that these atheist men decide to import Christianity to use as an instrument of social control over the workers they are bringing in.

The calendar used in the story is the AD calendar based on the approximate birth date of Jesus Christ. The year of the story is about 3227. I think. Haven’t worked that out much yet. Or much of the history. I do know that the United States no longer exists, but the American idea of self-government and God-given rights live on. People who believe in these ideals are called Americans even if none of their ancestors were US citizens.

The most American of the Terran worlds is called Mayflower. Some of the workers at Tiberius Base are to be imported from that world. Mayflower is divided up into states, like the United States. Some states are founded by distinct groups but the lines blur as people move to other states. Two states are full of alien immigrants, who adapt fairly well to the American way. One unique group on Mayflower is a group of German-Americans who happen to mostly be people with African-dark skin and blond, tightly curled hair, as a result of a group of children of this ethnic mix being prominent among early settlers. These are among the people imported as workers to Tiberius Base. The other workers, also German speakers, do not see anything odd about the brown skins. But some don’t like that they speak German ‘funny’— influenced by an Amish dialect.

Rebekah Loper who leads the Worldbuilding Wednesday blog hop has given some suggested questions to answer and for a change I am not ignoring them.

1. What historical event has lead to your inciting incident? The inciting incident is when Master Liang assigns Ping to obtain a crowd of workers for the station. The whole history of planetary and space station colonization plays a role in this, and not just the history of Terrans. It has become the custom for brokers to ‘sell’ groups of workers for colonization projects. The workers are tested for fertility, rated as to useful job skills, and the languages and trade languages they speak are noted. The groups are given monetary values based on many factors. Some groups, like the Amish, are highly sought after because of their primitive-farming skills and their ability to form tight-knit communities.
2. What historical event has most affected your character’s life? My main character Ping is an ordinary citizen of the Interplanetary People’s Republic. The history that has most affected his life is the custom that has developed of providing boarding schools to train young workers so that parents and grandparents are freed of child care duties. (Today in China workers find jobs in the towns and their children are raised by the grandparents in the countryside.) Ping was parted from his parents in that way and has learned to look on his work superiors as father figures.
3. Has your character witnessed any significant historical events personally? Ping has never been in the right place to witness such events personally. Though he has seen video footage of many historical events, such as the destruction of the Mender homeworld, and important battles of the American Civil War which were filmed by the Mender and Lizard participants. (A Lizard character had ancestors who fought for the Confederates in the Civil War. His ancestors adopted the surname Lee after Robert E. Lee. They are still feuding with Lizard clans whose ancestors fought for the North, especially the clan named ‘Grant.’)

This has been a post in the Worldbuilding Wednesdays blog hop. Join up here: http://rebekahloper.com/

Make a low-carb/ketogenic bread substitute

For the person on a ketogenic/low-carb diet, there are two kinds of substitutes for bread: the products that CLAIM to be low-carb but have grain/gluten ingredients and are only slightly better than regular bread, and the kind you can eat freely on a ketogenic diet and aren’t very bread-like.

The reason we don’t like REAL ketogenic bread is that we are addicted to the carb fix we get from bread. No carbs, no grains, no fix. It’s like asking a heroin addict to be content with a vitamin B-12 injection.

OK. Real ketogenic bread. The classic recipe was called Diet Revolution Rolls (and Diet Revolution Bread) in Dr. Atkins first book, Dr. Atkins Diet Revolution. Google the recipe name and you can find the recipe, even a YouTube video that shows how to make it.

Diet Revolution Rolls require separation eggs and whipping up the egg whites. I know how to do this but I dislike it. It’s a chore, and if you get one little speck of egg yolk in your whites they won’t whip up.

So I came up with a new recipe. I call it ‘Dutch Baby Rolls’ since I adapted it from a recipe that uses Dutch Baby (a kind of big pancake) as a pizza crust. I just made it in my Yorkshire Pudding Pan in four servings and it came out very well. I have a small Yorkshire Pudding Pan — well, three of them— that I bought for making Diet Revolution Rolls in a variant sometimes called ‘Cloud Bread.’

So: you will need to get yourself a Yorkshire Pudding Pan to make this recipe. You might also try searching under Muffin Top Pan. Choose between pans on the size of the holes, and the depth of the holes. My pans have a depth of 1/2 inch, but I saw one with a 1 inch depth and am buying that. I use a 4 hole size since I bake in a small convection oven with the convection feature turned off.

The rolls in a batch of Dutch Baby Rolls will poof up and be high enough that you can slice each roll in half to use in making a sandwich. NOTE: if you whip up your batter and let it sit a long time, it won’t poof. If you accidentally set your oven for 325 and not 425, they will not poof. We like poof! Get it right.

The recipe is cut down from the Dutch Baby Pizza recipe on page 270 of Jimmy Moore and Maria Emmerich’s book ‘The Ketogenic Cookbook.’ Buy the book! (NOT an affiliate link.)

Dutch Baby Rolls

2 large eggs

1/2 cup heavy whipping cream

2 Tablespoon unflavored egg white or whey protein powder

1/4 teaspoon sea salt or Herbamare (salt flavored with veggies)

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 425 F.
2. Spray olive oil based pan spray on your Yorkshire pudding pan.
3. Combine eggs, cream, protein powder and salt in bowl. Mix with electric mixer 1 minute.
4. Pour batter into Yorkshire pudding pan. Fill holes not quite full. You don’t want a spill.
5. Bake for about 15-16 minutes

Variations: you can substitute unsweetened almond milk or unsweetened coconut milk for the cream if you can’t handle dairy. Also, you can sprinkle a few poppy seeds or sesame seeds on the top of each roll before baking.

Reheating instructions:
I store my rolls in the fridge, by the way.
Cut roll in half. Place cut side up on a cookie sheet. Preheat your oven to 325 F. Not 425 like above. Place a small pat butter on each half on the cut side. Bake 4-6 minutes. You don’t want to burn them.

Variation: Place bacon bits and a slice of your favorite cheese on the ‘bottom’ half of your Dutch Baby Roll. In 4-6 minutes at 325 F, your cheese should become melty. Easy substitute for grilled cheese!

Taste: I used to make a cream puff recipe which called for lots of flour. I ate them like they were rolls. I think Dutch Baby Rolls taste a little like that. They are great for days when all I want to eat is a sandwich or hamburger-with-bun.

The mistake authorbloggers make

Recently I read an online article that critiqued a blog by a freelance writer. She (the blogger) set up a blog to win over more freelance-hiring customers. But most of her blog articles were about life as a freelance writer, and many were aimed at other freelance writers— her competition.

We authorbloggers do the same thing. We write for other writers and not for our readers. And that makes our blogs of less interest to the readers— our customers. A writing-oriented blog might make a reader feel bad because he himself isn’t writing stuff and most everyone has at least an idea for a novel.

We could always dedicate our blog to endless bland reviews of other writer’s books. I’ve seen blogs like that. Some, those dedicated to ‘romance’, might work well for the reader who consumes obsessive numbers of romance books. But I don’t read those kind of blogs myself.

The sci-fi/fantasy author might write about movie and television sci-fi and/or fantasy. You might get caught up in fandom wars, though. And there is always the chance that you will attract people who watch the movies and television shows but won’t read a book. Or at least not a book that isn’t based on their favorite sci-fi/fantasy movie or television series. But it may be possible to win a few over. But I believe it’s better to concentrate more on books than movies.

I know a few authorbloggers who write sci-fi/fantasy for the (evangelical) Christian market. Sometimes they review books from a more Christian point of view. This can be helpful for Christian readers looking to see content concerns addressed before they buy a book. But it can be kind of dismal counting up the swears and almost-swears, the drinking or cardplaying or absence of same, and rehashing the same old ‘is fictional magic evil’ debate.

I have a broader view of what Christian fiction might be. I not only include other followers of Jesus Christ like Catholics and Lutherans and even LDS to the ‘Christian fiction’ universe. (I am not saying that LDS theology is valid, however.) I like fiction by Christian authors that isn’t there to be ‘safe’ and non-threatening to the Christian reader.  I want science fictional universes where God can exist but where things can explode and people can die unexpectedly.

I believe we authorbloggers have to keep our reading base in mind when we blog. It’s not a sin to write something other writers might read. I participate in a weekly blog hop on worldbuilding which might mostly interest authors. But I don’t want to forget that many of my desired blog-readers are not authors and don’t intend to become authors.

Question: if you are an author-blogger, can you think of some reader-friendly blog post topics?

 

Dear Abby’s bad advice about Christians and Gay-Straight alliance clubs

Jesus. He’s a Friend of mine.

I don’t read the dreadful Dear Abby column much anymore, because I don’t subscribe to a newspaper. But I do read it sometimes at my mother’s house, because she does still subscribe.

As usual DA gave awful advice to a young Christian girl who wanted to join a Gay-Straight alliance club at her school. Dear Abby said yes, and that if her church was ‘good’ they would accept it, and Gay ‘Marriage’ as well.

OK, here is the actual truth: if your church accepts Gay ‘marriage’ they are putting the demands of the LBGT movement ahead of the words of the Bible and of Jesus Christ, who did not come to take away the Law but to fulfil it, and who cherished REAL marriage enough that his first miracle was at a wedding. If your church rejects the Bible, you need a new church because your church is one of the dead churches. I predict your pro-gay-marriage church also does not have good prolife activities or an evangelism effort.

If you are a true follower of Jesus, you will put Jesus and the Word of God in an honored place in your life. Your gay friends will call you a ‘hater’ and demand you join a church that they approve of. If you have gay tendencies yourself, you will REALLY get a lot of hate and namecalling if you try to follow the Bible’s teaching about sexuality and marriage. But Jesus never promised that the world would love us, and tell the truth about us.

Biblical Christians believe that if your sexual impulses are all homosexual, God is calling you to a chaste/celibate life. That’s not a bad thing. Read the Epistles— Saint Paul was called to that kind of life. In the Catholic church, our leader, the Pope, lives that kind of life. It’s not a shameful thing but a high calling.

When a representative of the LGBT community demands you give up the Biblical truth or be called a ‘hater’, that is just a political ploy. It’s like when the Democrats, the party of the KKK, accuses the Republicans, the party that ended slavery, of hating ‘black’ people. It’s a lie. It’s just a politically useful one.

As some of you may already know, I am gay/have same-sex attraction. I turned my sexuality over to Christ when I became a Christian and joined the Catholic church. It gave me a lot of joy in my life I didn’t have before. But it attracts some people who call me names. Some even called my cats names. Personally, I think the name-callers may have a lot of hate in their lives. But if they turn their heart over to Jesus Christ, they can let go of any hate in their lives.

The thing about a Gay-Straight alliance club is that the members take it as an article of faith that the demands of the LGBT movement must be agreed with, and that ‘wrong’ Bible verses must be rejected. They believe that those who don’t reject these Biblical verses are haters. So, they are a group that spreads bias against Biblical Christianity, including the Catholic faith. We should not spend time with groups of these people. They will not listen if you tell them the truth. They will just try to weaken your faith and if that does not succeed they will reject you. It’s better to deal with your gay friends one on one. They may have more respect for your faith than a group would.

Karma: Curse of the East/Celebrating Mother Teresa

It is fashionable in some quarters today to admire the Eastern religions and think they are somehow better than Christianity. But if you really look at the nations of the world that practice Eastern religions like Hinduism and Buddhism, you find problems.

If you are a believer in Eastern religions and believe in karma, what happens when you look at a starving child in the street? You think that the child has bad karma because of evil deeds in a past life. The child is being punished for its wickedness in that past life. So you ignore the child’s pain. The child deserves it.

I once read a book by a Western advocate of reincarnation belief. He believed that Nazi war criminals were living new lives as starving African children. The starvation and pain of those children was OK because the kids were ‘really’ Hitler or Goering.

What does a Christian do when confronted with a starving child? Blame the starvation on the child’s alleged previous life? No. The Christian is called upon to pick up that starving child, feed it, and if possible save it. The child has one and only one life and will not get a free do-over provided by a benevolent universe if we ignore it.

Mother Teresa was a Christian troublemaker in India. The people of India were fine with poor people, even children, dying in the street. Or at least,  they were used to it. But Mother Teresa picked up the poor and the dying and took care of them. She taught members of those ‘superior’ Eastern religions a valuable lesson about Christian charity.

Many of the problems of Eastern societies have been blamed by observers on an indifference borne out of Eastern beliefs about reincarnation and karma. I do not know how true that is. I know people of Eastern religions can be generous. Many people in the East give generous donations of food to begging monks— which supports many orders of Eastern monks. I am sure they could be equally generous to poor people should there be any charities for the poor available.

But Christianity, and Western Civilization in general, have a lot to teach the East. It’s sad when Western youth despise our own Christian faith without even properly trying it, and run off to seek wisdom in the East. The East has its own problems.

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Normally I’d be posting in the Celebrate the Small Things blog hop today. But the leader of that venture, Lexa Cain, is taking some time off due to illness. Please pray for her!

This week I am celebrating Mother Teresa and her work among the world’s poor. Let us pray that the Lord will raise up many people to continue her good work!

When Readers are Illiterate

Random Kitten

With the Kindle I used to have, if you put it on a certain setting the Kindle would read the book to you in a computer voice. It was kind of annoying so I didn’t use it much. But it gave me the idea: illiterate readers are our future.

With Kindles, illiterate kids can ‘read’ books. Schools, who all too often produce illiterate kids by demanding that any method other than intensive phonics be used to teach reading, love electronic devices. I remember one school district that was going to provide all kids with either a laptop or a smartphone to use at school. Whether the parents liked it or not.

Educational systems will almost certainly go for giving reading disabled kids Kindles that read to them. And then— why should those kids learn to read? It’s like teaching handwriting so kids can write by hand instead of using the devices that the financially better off always have available. (Poor people don’t need to write, evidently.)

And so, the number of illiterate readers will go up. I wonder how long it will be before they do surveys on what kind of books the illiterate reader prefers. And writers will study articles on how to appeal to the illiterate reader. Some writers will make a specialty in writing books that appeal to the illiterates. Why not? Writers already write books that appeal to the uneducated that don’t mention, for example, obscure historical figures like Julius Caesar or Martin Luther.  That’s probably what the YA category is for.

And the day will come in some future era where the skill of actual reading is a rare skill like fixing the plumbing. And no one can take walks through cemeteries to read the headstones.