#PublicDomainInfrastructure

[shiradestin]

Some Categories To Learn On Public Transportation?

     One of the ideas I had while writing about Project Do Better (link below…) was for special Study Compartments on mass transit, like the roomettes on Amtrak, I guess, but just a small space with a desk for students/educators/lawyers/business people, etc to get work done during their travel time.  This new category, alongside free “standing passengers” and other categories of free or reduced…

[babyfloors]

Wondering Wednesdays, Baby Acres, Chapter 2: Infrastructure, with words!

July 21, 12021

books

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Coop

4Freedoms

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health

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mywritings

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PublicDomainInfrastructure

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writing

This post starts the rough draft of  Chapter 2 of my non-fiction WiP, Baby Acres.  

This chapter will have about 2500 words, (hopefully educational words!!)  500 of which have already been written as the Introduction, but will quite likely have to be thrown out and refitted with the new evolution of the book.  We shall see.

And  again, by way of disclaimer, the overall goal is now to explain why we need both equ. + justice, & why in 4 phases.  This chapter will transition to a chapter (2-5) for each phase, showing what Phases I-IV could look like as part of a possible roadmap for a fully inclusive society for all of us.  This vision is laid out in the hope that All HumanKind  will eventually have each person’s basic needs  met, without taking anything from anyone, and without violence, intimidation, nor coercion of any kind.  

Chapter Two:

( Chapter 2’s outline was last week…)

Chapter 2 Introduction:

The first stage of this project involves building empathy, and bringing each one of us to see each one of our fellow human beings as … a human being. Each one meriting humane treatment, and human dignity.

That empathy building phase was Phase 0 (yes, I’m a computer scientist by first training, so I start with 0…).  Phase I is meant to go for fifteen years, potentially from the years 2022 to 2037, building a movement to strengthen some of our most crucial and obviously key pieces of our social infrastructure, which are in the public domain. During this period, one of the ways that we can both build conceptual support and also literally build our physical infrastructure that needs support, is by borrowing an idea from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, which worked during the Great Depression to create jobs while educating young (white) men at the same time. What we want to do now, is to educate, facilitate service, and build a community-service frame of reference, while also upgrading our public infrastructure, just as FDR did in the 1930’s via his program.

Bringing back an updated version of FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), or Roosevelt’s Tree Army, as it was popularly known, could provide a stepping stone between the empathy- building work that must always be on-going, and the support-building work of bringing our society to a consensus on the needed support for the most basic of our public social infrastructure institutions, like Public Libraries, Public Transportation, Public Education (especially in the financial and legal areas, where so many consumers fall prey to financial predators, and end up in debt due to lack of knowledge),  and Public Health. These four systems under gird our entire societal structure, and need support perhaps the most urgently, in return for which we potentially get the most payback for all members of society. While we do the difficult work of building the necessary consensus to get there from here, a simpler step might be to bring back some form of the CCC, updated to be far more inclusive, and used as both a means of providing employment to young people, and also to educate them, much like the Gap Year in Europe.

But instead of having our new high school graduates backpack around the country, they could be sent to work in urban public library branches, light-rail and subway/Metro stations, local urban public schools, or inner city health clinics. As they rotate from one part of the country to another, say, monthly, they learn first-hand of the conditions in places they are not from and have not lived, while serving communities they have never met, working alongside peers from different walks of life, and seeing a side of their native land that they did not grow up with. In short, learning the realities, and different perspectives, of this large and diverse nation of ours.

— (Next Wednesday: Chapter 2, section I …)

I’m considering this Rough Draft as the block of clay from which my book will eventually emerge, obviously, and some ideas for phases III and IV are still becoming more  fixed in my mind as I write, so the final version will likely look pretty different from this Rough Draft, and will need updating once I get to the very end.

And once again, yeayyy( !!)with regard to audience, I may have at least a couple of comps:  Walden Two meets The War on Poverty: A Civilian Perspective (by Dr.s Jean and Edgar Cahn, 1964).  I know that lots of people consider Skinner’s writing to be stilted, but I like the tilt of most reviewers, in that the idea is that a community should keep trying policies that members agree upon until they find what works for all of them.

As for genre, I’m still wondering:  Non-fiction,   System Change, Causes, maybe even Inspirational, but I doubt it.

Last week’s installment of this series…

Action Items:

1.) Consider some ideas you may have on how our society can solve the problem infrastructure upgrades in the next 15 years,

2.) Share them with us in the comments, here, please, and

3.) Write a story, post or tweet that uses those sources and your thoughts.

Dear Readers, ideas on learning, especially multiple #LanguageLearning, on-going education and empathy-building, to #EndPoverty, #EndHomelessness,  #EndMoneyBail & achieve freedom for All HumanKind?

Support our key #PublicDomainInfrastructure  & #StopSmoking at LEAST for CCOVID-19: 1. #PublicLibraries, 2. #ProBono legal aid and Education, 3. #UniversalHealthCare, and 4. good #publictransport Read, Write -one can add Stayed on Freedom’s Call via this GoodReads button: ,

Vote, Teach and Learn (PDF Lesson Plan Book)!

and my

Babylon 5 review posts

, if you like Science Fiction, and a proposed

Vision

on Wondering Wednesdays: for a kinder world…  

Shira Destinie A. Jones, MPhil

our year 2020 CE =  12020 HE

(Day 1 … Day 5)

Stayed on Freedom’s Call (free copies at: https://archive.org/details/StayedOnF…) includes two ‘imagination-rich’ walking tours, with songs, of Washington, DC. New interviews and research are woven into stories of old struggles shared by both the Jewish and African-American communities in the capital city.

Shared histories are explored from a new perspective of cultural parallels and parallel institution-building which brought the two communities together culturally and historically.

Please leave a review, if you can, on the GoodReads page.

Shira Destinie Jones by ShiraDest is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

[shiradestin]

Some Words Not To Use On Public Transportation!

Ok, I know that many people, for some reason, like to learn the groser’ias (groserias are ‘foul words’ in Mexican Spanish…) first in a language, for some perverse reason.  (from which comes one of my favorite comments in the series  El Ministerio del Tiempo,    when SubSecretario Salvador  asks why the first thing that people learn in a language are always ‘los tacos’ or the bad words…)   And,…

[shiradestin]

Review: James Wood's How Fiction Works

      I read this book back in 2013, but never wrote up my notes, which languished in my Research Notebook until now.  I’ve never forgotten his advice to “Do Conrad’s” thing and get the characters “in” to the story, and in motion, especially by introducing them via some sort of motion.  Aside from that advice, to me, this book seems to be a good set of pointers for a more advanced writer, or at…

[shiradestin]

Some Smaller & Bigger Options On Public Transportation?

     An idea I mentioned last week about  creating special Study Compartments on mass transit, a little bit like the roomettes on Amtrak,  as small work spaces with a (standing?) desk for students/educators/lawyers/business people, etc to get work done during their travel time, fits well with this week’s notes.  The suffix “et” in Esperanto means “small” or makes a word a diminutive, just as  a…

[shiradestin]

Writing Process Wednesdays: Genre Questions  

    I’m starting to think that figuring out the genre might also be better left to after the rough draft is written, but if you plan to pitch, everyone says it’s best to write to a genre expectation from the outset.  That worked for me, for this book, since I wanted fearful dreams and daring sacrifices, making psychological thriller seem like an interesting possibility.  That also tends to be one…

[shiradestin]

Writing Process Wednesdays: Painful Cuts  

        I now see that sometimes what appears to be a scene excerpt, when first imagining the dialogue, may later turn out to be important character voice and thought pattern, but not work as part of the book.  Character bible folders would have helped, earlier, for this, rather than sticking this page into my research notes, for whatever odd reason I did that.      I also see even more clearly,…

[shiradestin]

Can Language Learning Build Support For Public Transportation?

I met one of my dearest friends, for a few years, riding on the bus while reading a copy of Harry Potter Y La Piedra Filosofal.  I had one of the most transformative experiences, seeing an entire group of strangers help translate a ‘poem’ for people they’d never met and would likely never see again, on a bus.   Learning languages lets us help each other, and connect with each other.  The easier…

[shiradestin]

How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy, by Orson Scott Card

      On scene transitions, direct, and indirect, he says ask the purpose of each transition, and location or time gap in the story.  Fold emotion and character development into transitions, and always show pov chars w/diff views, attitudes, & connected w/prev.scene.   Contract with the reader: Pg 1 -> Pg 300: resolution.  spend more time on (and base story structre) around what draws one in the…

[shiradestin]

Quality Public Transportation?

The suffix “-ec” denotes a quality of something, as the last six lines of today’s notes show. An abstraction can be formed from a noun, like ‘beauty’ (beleco), or ‘youth’ (juneco) quite easily. Given the interest readers have expressed over the years, I thought I might share some of my newest language learning journey here on my blog.  Once I have found others to help with Project Do Better, I…

[shiradestin]

Review: Together We Will Go, by J. Michael Straczynski

      I saw this one in the library and I was stunned to see that it was written by the same JMS of B 5, which it is, so, of course, I had to check it out.  This book is by creator of science fiction series Babylon 5 and may go best with idea of Going To The Sea as a euphemism for committing suicide, in episode A Voice in the Wilderness, Part I, of that series, if at all.  Honestly, this book…

[shiradestin]

Writing Process Wednesdays: Never Give Away The Plot  

        Never tell people pestering you where you are in the novel writing process, because it will never be good enough.  And they will not understand, anyway.  And once again, separate research and character bible notebooks are a must.      So, this novel in progress, Who By Fire,  certainly is a learning experience:  Still working on my craft… Shira Action Items: 1.) Share your thoughts,…

[shiradestin]

Writing Process Wednesdays: Research vs Writing  

        I learned, by reviewing my earlier notes, that research cannot really be done all at once, and even story outlining cannot be done all at once.  Both are semi-iterative processes which rely upon one another, since as you learn more, you think of new story ideas, which then generate more research questions, and so on, back and forth.  Obviously, one has to find some way to end this cycle,…

[shiradestin]

Writing Process Wednesdays: Focal Relationship vs. Protagonist Wounds  

      I also see that trying to tie together the advice of books and websites, many of which are speaking to new writers eager to put their stories into words without planning, is not always easy.   Much of the advice is good for the kind of writer who forges ahead confidently with everything already in mind, but not for me, as I like to plan out and sequence, and need to know where things go and…

[shiradestin]

Writing Process Wednesdays: To do list separate from journal notes  

        This draft was scheduled about a year and a half ago, and I still have not got the time nor the energy to properly put in all of the right links to the newly published First Rough Draft of the Prequel to Ann & Anna, which has now become my WiP working title: Passing.  Feel free to correct me in the comments, Friends.  I have had the idea for this novel for some time, but had been…

[shiradestin]

Writing Process Wednesdays: The Pitch Promise  

    This seems pretty obvious, now, but that is in hindsight, and after two years or so of writing a larger variety of works than I was used to back when I took these notes.  This note refers to the idea that what you say in your logline, your back cover copy, and of course, in your query or your elevator pitch for your novel, makes a promise (or set of promises) to the reader that the book needs…