Emmeran: Blog

So I got sick this week. How sick did I get? Well sick enough that I had chapters written and just waiting to be uploaded to you guys and forgot all about them.

I was feeling pretty bad about not writing but when I saw that this morning I realized exactly how sick I'd been; I couldn't even focus enough to make a few mouse clicks. Hell I even fell asleep on the crapper the other day, it was pretty awful.

Feeling better now and chapters are queueing back up. Sorry folks, this month has been rough. I went and tore my knee up to start the month and end it with basically 96 straight hours of sleeping. My dear lady threatened to call the ambulance but I told her I'd hide out in the woods if she did. I also threatened to cancel her "Fabulous Fifty" Birthday Party which is being held today.

During the summertime my mother would lock us boys outside.

Who could blame her, there were four of us (sometimes more with cousins) and we had a bad habit of running in and out of the house at every youthful whim.

So she locked us out, smart move on her part, we had a tremendous amount of space with more things to do than most kids. We had barns, fields, ponds, horses, pastures, and groves of trees. The list goes on and on and boredom was only a problem when we let it be.

Our day always started with chores and then breakfast, up early and well fed. There would be a list of tasks that Dad left for us (we usually got them mostly done). After breakfast out of the house we went, rain or shine go find someplace to play or read or build or something. Ring the doorbell if you need Mom and ring the bell if there was an emergency.

Well the bell was really an iron triangle hanging on the porch, it had an iron striker and would put up quite an aural calamity.

This triangle also served as the Dinner Bell.

Now dinner was the mid-day meal and it was usually a proper meal designed to fuel growing young boys who worked and played hard all day. Dinner came around mid-day and was not to be confused with Lunch.

Lunch was basically a hearty snack; a sandwich with an apple and maybe some chips. Lunch's were packed for you in a bag, Dinner was served on a plate and you sat at the table to eat it. We were usually handed a lunch bag when we were kicked out of the house every morning to eat when we got hungry during the day

It may sound like we were overfed but that would be a misconception, we were all extremely active and skinny as a rail; strong but slender. That's what happens when you are in almost constant motion. Add in the fact that sugar was basically banned from our house (again four young boys) and couch potato was not a term you would use for us.

Back on topic.

The dinner bell was rung when she had dinner ready for us, the time would vary depending on her tasks for the day but it rang every day. We usually ate outside at the picnic table.

At the height of the long days of summer we'd get another lunch bag after dinner and out we went until Dad came home and she rang the bell for supper. Chores had best be done when that supper bell rang if you wanted to eat with everybody else.

For the purpose of my story "Ten Pound Bag", I'll be ordering the the meals as: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Supper

There was often an afternoon snack thrown in there at "Tea Time" as the Brits know it and supper was always the last meal of the day.

This was important in my area of the world for multiple reasons but if you were invited to Sunday Dinner at the Kuchera's house you knew to show up around noon for a big afternoon meal. By the same token if you were invited for supper you would show up just before sunset.

So if my uses of the meal terminology confuse you refer back to this for guidance. There may have been some errors made by me in the first draft but when I start reposting those should all be straightened out.

-Emmeran

While I have a lot of experience in the financial markets I still had to do a lot of research to back up what I wrote in this story. The value of Gold and Silver was one of those areas.

Our intrepid hero, Z. Narrater, brought some of his winnings with him when he jumped time but since he didn't know he was going to do the time warp he didn't bring it all. He ends up with 200oz of Gold and 400oz of silver; a whole ton of wealth it would seem based on current day prices.

The problem is that during the 1820's gold prices were fixed at the international level (blame/thank Sir Isaac Newton). Regardless of that prices of the metal fluctuated wildly on the frontier and local inflation was more related to availability of goods than gold price. For example steak was cheap in Texas but hyper expensive in NYC and vice versa for gold.

Gold prices were fixed but their value versus the price of goods was not and that is important. Charts are available which help explain it more fully but by my calculation the localized value of Z. Narrater's nuggets is about $1.5~2 million in todays dollars. It's not the fortune he left behind but none of us would turn it down.

Silver follows the same trend, in 1820 it basically cost you 16oz of Silver to get 1oz of gold. Again there has been historical fluctuation of values but up until we went all free market in the 1960's & 1970's that had all been pretty standard since the days of the Greeks.

Another important point of consideration is that the Panic of 1819 had just occurred and the valuation of everything was wildly out of whack. What caused that economic catastrophe isn't important to us but what is important in this context is how it impacted the value of his holdings.

Please comment as you like, this is still the first draft of the story and I may adjust things on the rewrite.

(Charts available on Patreon or you can simply search the internet for Gold vs CPI.)

I'll start with a link to my blog post on "Technical Details and Probability vs. Possibility". I'm playing that card on weapons as well.

While I grew up with guns and was a career Marine, weapons for me have always been simply tools of the trade. I don't read up on them, I don't know exact specs off the top of my head and I usually don't talk about them.

Heck I can't even tell you model of my own shotgun, I simply know that it's a .12 gauge, Remington pump-action shotgun. I took that gun off of one of my knucklehead Jarheads a couple of decades ago and have had it ever since. I clean it monthly but I don't really ever use it. So that's pretty much my deal with firearms.

Technically I know the weapons I've been trained to know and use, I also know far too much about air-launched weapons but those aren't of much use here.

I did do basic research when putting together his weapons collection, most of my research revolved around weapons I'd like to have to decorate my own home. So basically I went window shopping (via the internet) and drew up my own personal wish-list.

For this story I had him purchase custom replica's so they all shot the same round, which is what I would do if I had the money so that's what Mr. Narrater did. It also makes for easier story telling as I don't have to track how many of which type of round he has in supply.

Please feel free to PM me with corrections/recommendations or even ridicule me in the comments regarding this topic, it's never going to be my area of expertise so I won't be the least bit offended.

I always appreciate the input,
-Emmeran

Hitting the Location Lottery with Rulo, Nebraska for the Ten Pound Bag story.

Who woulda thunk it?

I simply got lucky.

This newspaper article led me to Rulo back in November of 2020:

Ioway Tribe creates 444-acre Tribal National Park on Nebraska-Kansas border

I read that article and was fascinated by the idea of an old-growth hardwood forest on the edge of the prairie/plains. My Sweet Editor and I actually started looking at farmsteads in the area available for purchase before ultimately deciding that the pandemic real estate boom would be a very bad time to make an acquisition.

However when I decided to write a story Rulo seemed like a great place locate it, after all it gave my character a location with three important resources readily at hand. He would have water, hardwood for building and lush prairie for farming; a magnificent location and within my home state. This wasn't supposed to be a complicated story, it was just a little thing to get me going on writing.

Everyone knows that just like anywhere else in the world 'you can take the person out of the place but you can never take the place out of the person'; we all love our childhood homes and my childhood home was Nebraska. (Yeah I know, exceptions to every rule but the rule is pretty damn accurate overall.)

Great spot I decided, let's make it work right there in Rulo as he nears the end of his trip to his new home up in north-west Wyoming. Mileage and hours driven between stops were calculated and it all worked out perfectly. Another bonus is that the historical weather pattern was very close to the climate that I live in, makes it easier to write when you aren't relying on memory or second hand observations.

So there we go - my story would occur in Rulo, Nebraska for a lot of reasons that made good sense to me as a beginning writer. As a beginner it's good sense and it's common advice to keep it simple and close to home and that's what I did, but boy did I ever get lucky.

Rulo is in Richardson County, Nebraska; it is the furthest southeast county in the state, being hemmed in by Kansas to the south and the Missouri river to the east. It is also home to small but very usable coal veins, oil fields and hard rock quarries. All of that on top of the fertile fields and hardwood forest and all of this within a fairly small area. A literal paradise for a bold and intrepid settler.

On top of that our Lewis and Clark map showed me that the spot I chose was in the "Half-Breed Territory"; my protagonist wasn't encroaching on any tribal lands and the US Government had absolutely no say over the area in 1822. He landed in "No Man's Land".

I didn't know any of this when I decided on Rulo, I just got lucky.

It's really all about location.

And Luck.

-Emmeran

Published data for natural resources in Richardson Co., NE is available on my Patreon for my typical charge of a cup of coffee per month. In other words a buck a month.