3 Cats Stalking

Free - Another Way to Get the Word Out

Response to my new book, "Was a Time When," has not been enthusiastic. Seems like everyone else is coming out with a similar message of the difficulties the future holds, and I am a small cricket chirping in a strong wind. During the month of April I only sold two copies over the Internet.

So I decided to try another marketing scheme: give away the book for FREE! Amazon has a feature in their KDP Select Program where I can offer my book(s) for free up to five days out of every three months. I scheduled WATW to be available for free download for 24 hours on May 1.

I was not (still am not) sure what kind of announcement Amazon made about the offer, but I sent out notices to my three close forums (jojobians, penwheels, and boomers) and posted on my facebook page about the upcoming event. I did ask my friends to let me know what they think about the book when they have read it.

I have received six emails thanking me for the opportunity to download and/or commenting on the book so far, all giving me encouraging words about the book. What surprised me was that there were 362 downloads of the free book so Amazon must have gotten some kind of word out. Hopefully some of those copies will be read and some of the readers will talk to others and recommend the book. Since May 1 I have had one copy purchased then returned and one copy borrowed. I look forward to seeing how well the book sells the rest of the month.

If there is some indication of good response, I will plan another day soon and will let everyone know it is coming up. Somehow, people in today's world need to realize there will be problems in the near term, and they need to think of ways to survive. I believe my story shines a light on some of the more evident problems.

Sam Penny, the Prudent RVer

Free Kindle Book of "Was a Time When"

May 1, next Tuesday, check out my new e-book "Was a Time When" on Kindle. For one day you or a friend can download a copy for free, $0.00. I am participating in a marketing plan with Amazon where I occasionally offer my books for free, and this is my first try.

I ask that those of you who download a free copy read the book and send me an email (sam@wasatimewhen.com) telling me what you think of the book and the idea. If you want to post your comment on Amazon you can do that. I also ask that you tell others about the book, and if you think it is worthwhile, recommend that they go to Amazon and get a copy for themselves.

Learn more about the book at www.WasATimeWhen.com.

Sam Penny

Preppers

A friend sent me a URL to an article about the "Preppers" who are preparing for the end of the Mayan calendar this next December. It was interesting, but I wrote back to disagree with the basis for the article. My comments were the following:

I looked the article over. The part about the Mayan calendar I discount for several reasons, mostly my training in physics tells me the fantasies of how this might happen just don't fit.

However, I do agree that some number of black swans in the near future will tip the world into a sharp decline. Actually, my book, Was a Time When, takes about 85 years for that to happen, but that is still a sharp decline compared to what the majority of our society expects.

As far as the tips for what to have on hand, I think they are a bit off. The preppers have some quantity of supplies, maybe enough to last them for a year or so in the extreme cases. That will simply not be long enough. They need to identify and learn a lifestyle that will allow survival after the dust has settled.

I read of people collecting guns, and indeed there may be a period when guns will be of use, but the manufacture of gun powder will cease, and then the guns become heavy clubs at best. A good bow with arrows makes more sense, plus the knowledge of how to make more arrows.

One of the most drastic losses will be the medicines. Even the more common ones, like aspirin, will become very rare or even non-existent. Hint: grow a willow tree and learn to chew the bark. All the prescriptions that I take will first become terribly expensive as the companies who make them go out of business, and then they will simply disappear. All the medical procedures I have been going through recently will no longer be possible -- it takes lots of electricity and supplies to run a hospital. Of course, this is a quick solution to part of the population problem. People like me will die off.

The good thing about an RV at this time is that as conditions change, you have the opportunity to move your base of operations -- provided you can find and pay for the fuel. Also, at this time the RV is one of the least expensive lifestyles, at least if you don't require Prevost style living.

Thanks for the feed. It is interesting that there is indeed more and more articles of this type beginning to appear. To me it means there are more people out there who are thinking about the possibilities. Of course, people still do not know what to do, except to deny that there really is a problem and/or they can't do anything about it anyway.

Regards,
Sam Penny
the Prudent RVer

New Good Things to Read

Not only did I recently publish my new novel, Was a Time When, but there have been several exceptional blog posts on the Internet you should all check out.

Crash_Watcher has a link to a really great YouTube video (34 minutes but it is worth it) in his blog entry titled Peak Fossil Fuels and Limits to Growth in 34 Minutes. As he warns, even the knowledgable set might need to watch it several times to get the whole idea.

Alice Friedemann writes in the CounterCurrents.org blog about Why Do Political And Economic Leaders Deny Peak Oil And Climate Change? This is one of the more complete reviews I have seen about why our society wants to keep denying there is a problem, and how this reflects back into our political system. Unfortunately, the wall that keeps us from taking rational action on the problems we face is pretty high.

Tom Murphy's article The Way is Shut in his Do The Math blog is a great summary of his search for some way to solve the energy problem of the future and talks about his plans for taking action in the future. You might also look at his past posts that study the various possibilities for alternate energy. On thing is for sure, liquid fuels are going to become a real problem since there is nothing that comes close to what we can get from petroleum.

In my novel I approach our situation as a given and build a scenario on what the world will be like if we essentially do nothing to solve our problems. Tom apologizes for using fear as a tool to get people to pay attention, but I conclude that unless people have some real idea about what life could become, they will simply say it cannot happen.

Read all these articles and my book. Then you decide where we are and where we can go. We really have few options, and they are fast disappearing.

And Tom's points about asymetric risk should be carefully considered. If you think we "doomers" are all wrong, and it turns out we are, you have not lost too much -- you will have spent less money and will be living a more conservative life. But if we are right and you are in danger, doing something about it now might make a big difference and you could lose a lot.

Think about the future and have a good day.

Sam Penny, the Prudent RVer

 

Five Year Status Report on 2-10-2012

Time flies as you get older. I checked and it was just over five years ago that I started this blog. My intent at the time was stated as:

Recently I became most concerned with the risks associated with resource depletion, climate change, and over-population. Scientific research is showing that unless we quickly respond to the challenges that each of these pose and begin to mitigate those risks, our life-style could suffer catastrophically.

To make matters worse, we live in a time when all three risk areas are converging in a complex fashion. Scenarios that I have done and studied support the conclusion that the combined effects of these risks could even threaten the existence of the world's civilizations.

Often the discussions of these problems are too single-minded, they do not address the interactions between them. That is where I will try to fill in the gaps.

I asked myself, has anything changed?

Resource depletion is still a big cat stalking our civilization, though there are still those who refuse to consider the problem. Not only is depletion showing up in fossil fuels, but also in rare earths, water, land, and a wealth of other resources that are fast disappearing. Here in the USA many think we are becoming more efficient and dropping demand, and the recent boom in natural gas drilling and production will solve the our energy problems. They ignore the fact that the boom is about to bust itself with the low prices and that the problem is the rising fuel consumption worldwide.

The "Export Land Model" proposed by TOD's westexas and detailed by Crash_Watcher is still alive and bringing the time of greatly limited exports closer in time than anyone wants to admit.

Nope, the only change I see in the trends for resource depletion are the acceleration of effects of depletion.

Climate change is the second cat that just keeps growing. I see no way the countries of the world can ever agree to limit their impact on the climate, so the PPM of the greenhouse gases will keep rising until the supply of fossil fuels gives out and we have no good way to produce the gases. Now we are beginning to see that methane escaping from the thawing tundra and sea-beds could take up the climate-forcing and it could be even worse.

One of the effects of climate change is to expand the range of extreme weather possibilities, and we are seeing more and more severe weather events around the world.

Nope, the trends in climate change appear to be on a straight line with temperatures rising around the world. Kiss the lowlands along our coasts goodbye and get out while you still can.

Population Overshoot is still the biggest cat, and it will fall the hardest. It is a personal problem for all of us, or at least for all our off-spring and future progeny. Wars may cut down some populations, but they are far too inefficient. Even nuclear wars are not very effective. Pandemics with new and unforeseen viruses will be effective at some population reduction, but again pandemics become harder to spread as people quite traveling around and meeting other people.

Nope, the trend to solving the over-population problem will be starvation. Resource depletion will take out industrial farming (no fuels, no fertilizers) and eliminate the means for getting the food to large populations in the cities. Water depletion will eliminate much of the land we now farm, like in the southern California desert. Climate change will change the places where crops can grow faster than the farmers can adjust. The infrastructure to grow a crop like wheat or corn is huge and complex -- it will not be replicated to adjust.

And there is this fourth cat I did not think about in January, 2007: the world's screwed-up economy and debt-based financing practices. When I started this blog the housing bubble had not burst, the 2008 depression looked to be avoidable, the banks looked solid. Now what I see is a bunch of banker-types running around trying to patch things up and hold the system together.They all base their plans on returning to economic growth like it was before 2007, ignoring the fact that resource depletion, climate change, and population pressures are about to change the entire world around them.

Nope, I do not see a significant group trying to develop a better alternative for our economy, so our society is faced with going further and further down a dead-end road to ruin.

Over the past five years I completed a scenario of how I thought all these catastrophes would interact and what the world would be like at the end of this century. I wrote a novel entitled Was a Time When to tell of that scenario, and that book is now available on the internet at Amazon.com.

My conclusion at this time is that the trends I began to discuss on this blog in 2007 continue, and in some cases are accelerating. So I say the status as of this date is ON SCHEDULE.

sam

"Was a Time When" Available as Printed Book

My new book is now available as a printed book at CreateSpace.com or Amazon.com. It also got a great review by Crash_Watcher.

Now it is on to the book launch business.

sam

"Was a Time When" Published on Kindle, Dec 27, 2011

It's done, or at least the Kindle part is done. I published my new book last night as a Kindle book. It is available at Amazon for $3.98 and ready for immediate download.

The paper copy book will be available around mid-January.

I am very interested in getting some professional reviews of the book. If you have a blog where you discuss books or the fate of the world in the next 75 years, let me know your background and how to reach you and I will send you a review copy, either a .pdf or a paper copy (when available), free of charge.

For your information, here is my product description.

This tale began in 2006 as the autobiography of my fictional great-grandson, Sam, yet-to-be-born in 2015.

Sam would live through the greatest cultural transition ever experienced by the human race. I encased his memoirs in a short story telling of an expedition of Neu-human archeologists from a thousand years in the future, 3100 A.D., who return to the Pacific Coast searching for their roots. They find Sam's recorded life story and hear a first-hand account of the “Great Collapse” of human society as they had come to call it.

Sam Hardy's life begins at the peak of the tremendous spurt of technology and social advance in the second decade of the 21st century, powered by what many still thought at the time would be an infinite supply of energy and a stable world of commerce and trade. Sam writes the history of humanity's course through the transitions that result from expected natural disasters, resource depletion, climate change, over-population, and economic and cultural failure as his family and tribe struggle to learn to live in a new world of limited resources and crashing dreams.

There are many possible worlds our progeny could face, but in my mind the world described here unfortunately seems to be one of the more probable. My goal is to tell of some of the changes that can be expected as our society searches for its future, and as those technologies and resources on which our civilization depend fall away.

This is a tale of retrospection, as seen through the eyes of someone who lives through it and remembers that there Was a Time When things were so different. And yet, in Sam's final words, there is still hope:

“So this is goodbye. Maybe I have been wrong in my pessimism and damnation of humanity, and there really is a future for mankind on this planet. At least I have joined a group that is beginning the steps to future recovery. God willing, I will have the chance to watch that future blossom. I pray this band I join will build the roots of a better civilization than what my peers built for the last one.”

I will be discussing the book and offering ideas on other options and how to cope with the future at www.WasATimeWhen.com. Come by for a visit.

"Was a Time When" Pushed into January, 2012

Well, I almost made it. I approved the format of the layout the first of this week, and I will get proof copy around the first of the new year. So, the book should be available sometime in January.

There is always something that gets in the way. This time it was the copy editor who was defining the layout who decided my title "Was a Time When" was not sufficient, and called the book "There Was a Time When." I had already been through that loop, and wrote back to explain that several others around the world had already made use of that phrase, so it was not a good choice for me.

A small change, but it takes time to get things right.

Be patient, I am.

sam

 

Earthquakes -- still a possibility

Ten years ago I was very interested in earthquakes and wrote a couple of novels about what it would be like when the New Madrid once again fractures. I have just put those novels into Kindle format and they are available at kdp.amazon.com. The following is the press release I sent out about this 200th anniversary of the big event in 1811.

 

200 Years Ago a Great Earthquake Killed Up to 20% of the Population Around New Madrid, Missouri - What If That Earthquake Happened Today?

Sam Penny's Novels, Memphis 7.9 (Revised), and Broken River

(now available on Kindle) describe what would happen

in a repeat of that same event today.

200 years ago, on December 16, 1811, the first of four in a series of great earthquakes stuck the New Madrid Seismic Zone under the Mississippi River, wrecking havoc over 650,000 square miles in what is now the central United States, shaking the foundations of cities from Toronto, Ontario to Boston, Massachusetts to Charleston, South Carolina.

In 2002 and 2005 Sam Penny published two novels, “Memphis 7.9 (Revised)” and “Broken River,” which described a scenario of the conditions that represented his best estimates of what the world in the affected area would be like should a similar seismic event occur today on the New Madrid Seismic Zone. Both of these books are available through [url:http://amazon.com]Amazon.com[/url]. Penny has just published Kindle versions of the books as well.

Back in 1811 over the next two months another three gigantic earthquakes struck the New Madrid Seismic Zone under what was then the western edge of our country – what now is the center of the United States of America. The first event is estimated to have been a 7.9 magnitude event focused near what is known today as the bottom of the Missouri boot-heel. A second earthquake the same size happened six hours later thirty miles north under New Madrid, Missouri.

The third earthquake on January 23, 1812 was of smaller intensity, but it was followed on February 7, 1812 by the largest event on the thrust zone, again under the shattered village of New Madrid. Aftershocks continued to shake the region for the next five years.

The 1810 census reported the population of the affected region to be about 5,000, plus as many as 20,000 slaves. This covered the cities along the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, including Louisville, New Madrid, and down to Memphis. That census did not even consider the sizable Native American Indian population in the area.

Some estimates suggest that as much as 20% of the total population was killed as a result of the seismic activity and pestilence that followed. It was a small number back then, but today over 32 million people live in the threatened region; 20% would be 6.4 million.

Both of Penny's books received Honorable Mention at the MidSouthCon Science Fiction Fair and are noted for their detailed descriptions of the effects of seismic shaking along the New Madrid Seismic Zone.

Penny says, “My books are based upon analytical studies of what the new world will be like in Memphis and along the Mississippi River when such a seismic event takes place. It is not a matter of IF, but of WHEN.” The USGS estimates that in the next 50 years there is a a 25 to 40 percent chance of a magnitude 6 or larger earthquake, including a 7 to 10 percent chance of another series like that of 1811 and 1812.

The books consider both the immediate dynamic impacts of the strong seismic events that will happen in the region, as well as the effects upon society as the infrastructure of civilization falls apart around the area.

“I am pleased with the response of some who live along the New Madrid Seismic Zone in their preparations for an obvious event in their future,” Penny says, “but I am still concerned with the lack of preparation in the overall region for what could be their fate in the not too distant future.”

Penny's books are available at Amazon.com and at www.prudentrver.com. The Kindle versions of the book are available exclusively at kdp.Amazon.com.

"Was a Time When" Scheduled for Release by End of Year

Lifting that last little bit of hype, and cleaning up that last little piece of mal-adjusted grammar, just takes so much effort. This is my third, and according to some my "best," novel over the time-space of thirteen years, and I easily forget how much effort must go into that final stretch. But, I am still on schedule to have the book into POD print on Amazon and downloadable for Kindle and other ebooks by the end of the year.

If I miss and slip into January, so be it, but I will do my best to meet my schedule.

I do have a website up and running, but with few resources and links. It is called www.WasATimeWhen.com and you can go see it now.

My daughter and I had an interesting bone of contention about the title. She said it should read "Was a Time When" and the article "a" should not be capitalized. I thought it was okay to make it "A" and have pushed back on her. I am compromising: the cover will be "a" and the website domain will be "A."

So I have been providing copies of the pre-final-edit version for reviews and comments. I have been very pleased with the response and the suggestions for improving the book. In fact, I plan to make some modifications to the final copy to cover those suggestions. I am also making use of the professional editors at createspace.com (formerly booksurge.com) to create a really clean and professional looking book.

It is all looking good, and with a little bit of luck, I will have released the book on Amazon before 1/1/2012.

Just a note, for those who are into history, December 16, 2011, is the 200th anniversary of the first of the five great earthquakes to strike the New Madrid fault back in 1811. My new book has a repeat taking place in the 2030s, but that is for literary convenience and part of my story line. It could happen at anytime.

sam