Wins, Waste & Sin

Sated needs and salvaged waste are irreconcilable human demands.

A poster which still creates happiness in my heart. (Gilbert Williams, ~1969)

Hello there.

This week’s newsletter contains one pleasant surprise, two observations and some extraneous commentary on a non-writing activity. Yes, I try to have a life outside of Substack.

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The Surprise

I started out writing by ignoring other people’s advice¹. I wrote a long novel without a job, instead of writing short stories with one. I’m now betting on long odds in the publishing casino with its cut-down cousin, whilst writing a second novel, a daughter of the first.

In my backward way, I’ve recently begun submitting short stories (~1500–2500 words) for judging by those more experienced than me. Anonymity, even impartiality, is often assured; subjectivity is obviously not – especially for solo judges. Prizes are welcome, but not essential. Recognition is everything - for all involved parties.

My current crop of undercover stories have more humanity and less speculation. They deliberately stray from personal experience. They certainly don’t seek external permission to do so. The human capacity to imagine creates infinite possibility. Don’t waste the chance to be pulled into such dreams, whether through word, sound or vision. Creating self-imposed fences around a mind is what many still believe turns a child into an adult, a.k.a. an obedient tax-paying consumer. I beg insist to differ. Such freedom of choice doesn’t imply selfishness, lack of conscience, empathy or ethics, or even an anarchic world. It might take intelligence to seek out such a choice, but it’s typically the human fiction of money which denies it.

“Some people see things that are and ask, ‘Why?’.
Some people dream of things that never were and ask, ‘Why not?’.
Some people have to go to work and don't have time for all that.”
― George Carlin

I now try, whenever possible, to enter my short stories into a suitable competition. (Writers are frequently told they don’t compete with each other, even if their stories undoubtedly do). Notable results were at first non-existent, then a rarity, but now their frequency is ramping up. My 10,000+ hours of practice appears to be paying off.

The latest result to delight me is from a Writer’s & Artists’ short story competition (also publishers of an eponymous writers’ reference book bible). I’m one of fourteen longlisted writers picked from an initial tranche of 725 entrants. There is further to go before more potential can be mined. It will be another fortnight before the finalists are announced. No matter the result, you'll have an opportunity to read my submitted story. That's a promise.

“Some people have no idea what they're doing, and a lot of them are really good at it.”
― George Carlin

Two Observations

• The personal: My most viewed story to date is one paying homage to the obvious themes within the military SF sub-genre. I wrote it for fun from a prompt, and now I’m surprised at its success. Comments include: “Excellent story.” “I loved it!” “A great action-oriented piece.” “Fun! Great voice.” “A really great pastiche.”
  I guess writing in a less complex way can pay dividends, even if only in the short-term. But is it really that simple: “write what you enjoy”? What if your writing – and consequent audience – varies so much that you can’t adopt such a wholesale approach? Let me know your thoughts.
  

• The local: I’ve been part of my community’s sustainability efforts since returning from abroad, including: helping to prepare the village allotment for this season’s fruit and vegetable growing; facilitating a ‘future energy landscape’ consultation for renewable energy generation; volunteering to pick litter from the surrounding roadside verges. What’s noticeable about these initiatives is that a very small number of people (I don’t include myself - I’m just a follower) help sustain the vitality of a community – less than 1%. The vast majority of people who reside within it are either passive, or unable, or unwilling to help.

“Think of how clever the average person is. Then realise half of them are stupider than that.”
― George Carlin

Some Commentary

As mentioned above, I was helping to pick roadside litter yesterday afternoon. Here’s what three of us picked and sorted in 90 minutes from just one ~200 metre stretch of a rural road:

Aluminium cans, plastic or glass bottles and snack wrappers constituted the bulk of the ~200 items. That’s an average of one item per metre of road. It equates to ~400 million items strewn throughout the British road network right now. That’s roughly six items of roadside garbage for every UK resident.

Some more observations:

• About half of what was collected was recyclable - including all drinks containers. The remainder was unrecyclable plastic wrap or other consumer waste.

• The commonest drink brands were those marketed to young adults.

• The immediate surroundings of an undesignated parking area had the highest density of waste, despite there being a rubbish bin provided.

• About a fifth of the plastic bottles collected contained human waste.

Every British household has appropriate means and services for regular domestic recycling. So there’s either something preventing people taking home the items they’ve drunk from (whether or not they’ve also urinated into them), or they think that it’s someone else’s job to collect their litter.

District authorities and England’s Highway Agency have a statutory duty to collect litter, but only by making ‘reasonable efforts’. Local councils can claim the expense from these agencies for doing so. But, in practice, that means local volunteers doing it instead – for free. In effect, taxpayers are performing unpaid work to compensate for the lack of services which their taxes should be providing. The disjointed and unaccountable layering of different agencies allows for this set of circumstances to arise. The lack of enforcement (and public naming and shaming) of what is a criminal offence doesn’t help.

Perhaps volunteers like me picking up other’s litter for free makes the problem worse. Perhaps young adults living at home don’t want their parents to know what they’ve been eating and drinking late at night. Perhaps delivery drivers are being pressured by employers so much they don’t have time to find a toilet. Perhaps a significant minority of people in Britain don’t care about their environment and know their actions will go unremarked and unpunished. They've ceased to care about maintaining collective responsibility and pride for what is theirs, unlike what I’ve witnessed in some other European countries. Or perhaps they no longer think it’s theirs to take pride in.

In the meantime, some lucky people will unwittingly pass through one of the cleanest stretches of road in Britain, until one of them throws something they no longer value out of a vehicle window – either today, or tomorrow, or sometime soon - without fear of recrimination. It’s an inevitable consequence of learning not to care, because they think no-one else does.

“The planet will be fine. It’s the people on it who are f*cked.”
― George Carlin

That’s all I want to say this week. I'm off to plant seed potatoes, spinach and brassica. ‘Tis the season.

Until next time…

1. There is a ton of writing advice out there, as the majority of earning authors can’t hope to make a living wage without dispensing it in one form or another to other writers. In fact, the median income of paid authors is about half the living wage (assuming a normal working week for every week in a year). Because you don’t go broke from unpublished or unpublishable writing – you just remain invisible – this top-down activity can in no way be described as pyramidal.