{"id":2254,"date":"2015-04-10T07:53:03","date_gmt":"2015-04-10T11:53:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/?p=2254"},"modified":"2015-04-10T07:53:03","modified_gmt":"2015-04-10T11:53:03","slug":"friday-10-april-2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/2015\/04\/10\/friday-10-april-2015\/","title":{"rendered":"Friday, 10 April 2015"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold; color: #000099; font-family: Arial;\">07:52 &#8211;<\/span><span style=\"font-family: Arial;\"> I got a couple dozen chemistry and forensic kits built yesterday, just in time to fill overnight orders. I&#8217;m working on more biology kits today.<br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Arial;\">This week was consumed by taxes and kit stuff, so I didn&#8217;t get much done in terms of prepping. Here&#8217;s what I did to prep this week:<br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: Arial;\">I got Steven Konkoly&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/smile.amazon.com\/Jakarta-Pandemic-Prequel-Collapse-Apocalyptic-ebook\/dp\/B0047DX080\">The Jakarta Pandemic<\/a> Sunday, when it was a free download from Amazon.<br \/>\n<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Arial;\">I almost gave up on it early, which would have been a mistake. Here&#8217;s an email I sent to the author yesterday (which includes minor spoilers):<br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Hi, Steven<\/p>\n<p>As a prepper for more than 40 years, I downloaded your Jakarta Pandemic a few days ago when Amazon had it for free. (I&#8217;m giving away my age group when I tell you that my first reaction to the title was that you&#8217;d misspelled Djakarta&#8230;)<\/p>\n<p>I really wasn&#8217;t expecting much. I&#8217;ve seen so many post-apocalyptic and prepping novels by self-published wannabe authors that I&#8217;ve come to expect them to be mediocre at best and usually just about unreadable. I was surprised to see that you&#8217;re actually a pretty talented writer.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll admit that my first reaction to many of the points that &#8220;Gunny&#8221; raised in an early one-star review of the book was complete agreement. I liked Charlie Thornton as soon as you introduced the character and your initial representation of him as loony-toons nearly turned me off reading the rest of the book. I&#8217;m glad I continued. Gunny&#8217;s other points about Alex breaking his own quarantine rules and so on seemed valid until I realized that most people think they know what they&#8217;d do in a given situation but when faced with that situation may in fact take completely different actions. People are nothing if not unpredictable.<\/p>\n<p>Same deal when Alex faces down Manson and his goblins. I agreed with Gunny that Alex would have to be nucking futs to go into that situation voluntarily with an empty shotgun. I&#8217;d go into it with my shotgun in Condition One. Hell, Condition Zero.<\/p>\n<p>But as I read and thought about what you wrote I realized that you had in fact thought all of this through and were writing Alex as a nuanced character, as subject to doubt and inconsistencies as any real human. That&#8217;s when I realized that you were a real writer, so I immediately bought the first book in the Perseid Collapse series, just to make sure it was queued up and waiting when I finished the first book.<\/p>\n<p>After reading the Perseid Collapse, I went over to your website and downloaded book two in that series and then turned around and bought book three. Now I feel guilty because I have four of your books and got two of those for free.<\/p>\n<p>Incidentally, if I have one criticism of Jakarta, it&#8217;s that I found a lot of stuff that the proofer should have caught, from simple typos to sentence fragments. This was particularly evident in the last half of that book.<\/p>\n<p>As someone who&#8217;s been writing professionally for 20 years, I can&#8217;t imagine not using a &#8220;kitchen cabinet&#8221; to catch stuff like that. I&#8217;ve used volunteer proofers\/editors for every book I&#8217;ve written, and they&#8217;re very good at catching stuff before the publisher&#8217;s copy editor sees the manuscript. And not just typos and barbarisms, either. I&#8217;m currently writing a non-fiction prepping book, which I&#8217;ll self-publish in print with Amazon CreateSpace, and I have quite a few volunteers who make substantive comments on the content itself. They&#8217;ve made me rethink in several cases.<\/p>\n<p>At any rate, congratulations on your prepping novels. Any more in the works?<\/p>\n<p>Best regards.<\/p>\n<p>Bob<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Arial;\">So, what precisely did you do to prepare this week? Tell me about it in the comments.<br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<hr style=\"width: 65%; height: 3px; font-family: Arial;\" \/>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>07:52 &#8211; I got a couple dozen chemistry and forensic kits built yesterday, just in time to fill overnight orders. I&#8217;m working on more biology kits today.\n<\/p>\n<p>This week was consumed by taxes and kit stuff, so I didn&#8217;t get much done in terms of prepping. Here&#8217;s what I did to prep this week:\n<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I got Steven Konkoly&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/smile.amazon.com\/Jakarta-Pandemic-Prequel-Collapse-Apocalyptic-ebook\/dp\/B0047DX080\">The Jakarta Pandemic<\/a> Sunday, when it was a free download from Amazon.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/2015\/04\/10\/friday-10-april-2015\/\">&nbsp;&raquo;&nbsp;Read more about: Friday, 10 April 2015 &nbsp;&raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prepping","category-science-kits"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2254"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2254\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}