Thinking it through

I have to wonder, sometimes, if some people think anything through. Hell, I admit there are times I don’t. I try. Your survival time doing things like rock-climbing (especially as I did, opening new routes no-one had ever climbed before) and diving in ocean caves and cracks 30-45 feet down, tends to be relatively short, otherwise.

I’m still here, so far. I also volunteer as an Ambulance officer (we don’t have any paramedics here, we’re it) which has a few calculated risks, but a ton of forward planning – you get a call-out, and especially here it helps if you know where you’re going (GPS here is quite imaginative), and who you’re going to, and what the likely condition or problem is so you can work out what kit you’re going to possibly need and at least have some idea of the treatment.  Practice, scenario training, thing possible problems ahead… means thing are less difficult to think of, when stress happens.

I suppose I do think ahead, more than most. It’s a big part of plotting novels, which after all is my trade. Books work better when logical consequences happen – which means when decision points occur you have to work through, logically, what the short medium and long term probabilities are.  

I’ve been fighting my way through the vindictive machinations of a local petty bureaucrat here on the island. I keep getting her wrong, because I struggle to see just how anyone could be that short-sighted and that unaware of the consequences for her and her employers. And to be fair, they seem equally unable to see the logical consequences.  I’m planning write a book about my move here. I’ve made no secret of this. A minimum of research would tell you it’s going to be quite widely read.  If your medium term job depends on good publicity, and your employer’s survival depends on it, you’d think I’d be the one person whose cheerios you would avoid pissing in.  But that was plainly too much logic. Oh well, let the chips fall where they may. We’ll cope.

Talking of not thinking things through in the publishing world: I found this article about the staff meltdown at the dreadful, awful news that their company was going to be publishing Jordan Peterson’s next book a magnificent example of what the hell is wrong with modern publishing.  I gather they expect to sell around 5 million copies.  The company buys a lot of LGBT + alphabet soup books apparently. The staff bitching about Peterson seem to have trouble grasping that one 5 million seller means… the company can afford to spend on books that may well sell… well, very little, no matter how those staff members love them.

My grim scenario is were not that far off hungry and poor in a lot of first-world societies.  One misstep and there we go… I wonder how they will cope? Perhaps reading Jordan Peterson would help.

Anyway, on the other amusing news of the publishing industry full of these ‘geniuses’ – Penguin Random House is apparently in the throes of acquiring Simon & Schuster.   Just think of the naming possibilities Randy Penguin SS?

Image by birgl from Pixabay