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Let’s see. What should we talk about today…. How about the fact that I just finished DRAFT 20 of A GROWING CITY! Yeah. That’s commitment.

Okay. I’m pretty excited about it. The truth is, I love writing and I’m kinda sad that the really free creative part of writing the script is drawing to a close. Now, pretty much everything else will be derived from what already exists. So, it’s a happy & sad moment.

That’s not to say the rest of the process doesn’t involve creativity because it does. (Sentences with double-negatives bother me. I don’t know why. They just feel awkward.) There’s the perfecting the script so amazing people like +wonder russell can’t help but say yes to it when she reads it; so that, according to the criteria she set forth in a previous G+ discussion, she’d do it for free. Don’t worry. When we make A GROWING CITY everyone involved will be paid. Of course, I will get paid last, opting for the back-end option (there are so many ways to read that wrong:(.

And then there’s the joy of finding amazing places to film. We need houses, lots of abandon houses. We even need a place that looks like it’s been burnt to the ground (I sure hope that scene doesn’t get cut for budgetary reasons).

Did I mention the shot list. This is where the story goes from being in my mind to having some kind of external physical reality, where I take the idea and begin to tell the story visually.

So, yeah. It’s bitter-sweet. Mostly sweet though.

I feel like I’ve written about the financial state of A GROWING CITY enough. (If you’d like more elaboration about it, let me know and I’ll be happy to continue. Also, I plan to interview financial experts during my fundraising campaign, so there will be more then as well.) Now I’d like to discuss detail.

As I mentioned earlier, the electricity issue has been solved by a character named Adam Nordberg. When he was a teenager, living on a farm in Montana, he came up with a way to harness what is known as “Zero-point energy”. This is highly theoretical and dismissed by most physicists because it seems to contradict the laws of thermodynamics.

Zero-point energy, in a nutshell, is the idea that the particles in an an atom will only move so slow, even when cooled to absolute zero. Thus, if you were somehow able to harness that motion, which never stops, you would have a source of electricity that would never end. It would also be completely safe since you could use any atom, not necessarily something that puts off radiation or greenhouse gasses.

In the script, I could go off on how awesome this invention is. I hope to make sequels to A GROWING CITY in which I go into more detail on the life and nature of Adam Nordberg, his son, Nordberg Industries, and the meritocracy he set up, but there isn’t room for that in A GROWING CITY. This story is about one city and a group of people who live in it during a time of incredible change.

Rather than having a million side stories, I choose to drop little hints here and there about the existence of the larger world. For instance, all cars are electric. Every appliance in every house is electric. I think Nordberg’s name is mentioned three times, but only in passing. Simply by talking about things that are not directly related to the story, it implies the existence of so much more.

One of the ideas that caused some trouble in a previous draft of A GROWING CITY was the notion that the U.S. government decided to consolidate resources to states east of the Mississippi. A lack of police and fire departments cause some obvious problems, most notably, when a fire breaks out, no one is there to put it out. So, entire cities burn to the ground. Stephen King did a good job of this in The Stand.

I had the great fortune to speak with Tad Williams, and on a separate occasion, Robert Jordan and I asked them both about world-building. They both said basically the same thing: the ripple effect. The following is an interesting exploration into the ripple effect.

But, the consolidation became problematic when I thought about electricity. If there’s no electricity, everything that currently runs on power either dies or another energy solution needs to fill the gap. A quick consult with a techie friend of mine and we came to the conclusion that, in the future, all power generation will be done locally. Think: solar panels. So, people’s houses were safe and usable, so long as the sun was out.

But, streetlights, gone. And here’s the real issue, running water. Without electricity, there’s nothing to power the water pumps. That means, no showers, no washing dishes or laundry, no water to drink or to cook with. And, I found myself constantly picking up after this: They bathe at the beach. They use local desalinization plants in their houses. They only wear clothes until they get dirty and then they simply scavenge for new clothes.

Eventually, the ripples became so problematic that I was either going to have to make something like MAD MAX (great film, almost impossible to do right) or abandon the idea. I chose the later. Thus, in the current version of A GROWING CITY, the United States doesn’t officially abandon the west, but as the economy crashes, the rich people leave to safer ground. Also, I remembered that A GROWING CITY is actually an episode in a much larger story. One of the major plot points in that story is a genius kid named Adam Nordberg invents unlimited, clean, local, safe energy. That solved the problem mentioned above.

In the last post I mentioned that the dystopia in which A GROWING CITY takes place is caused by an economic collapse. The severity of that collapse, among some other issues that I can’t talk about without revealing spoilers, is one of the reasons that I’m having to do the current rewrite.

In the previous version, the United States continued to dilute the value of the dollar by printing more and more money. We call this inflation and it’s implicit in the way the world is doing capitalism. However, one possible long-term result of this is that eventually the buying power of the dollar goes down far enough that the rest of the world no longer accepts it as a valid currency. When that happens, the United States is no longer able to import anything because the way we do imports is by paying for the commodity with the dollar.

Thus, the first draft of the script began with various clips of U.S. presidents (Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan, W. Bush, Obama) talking about their various economic policies, culminating in a fictitious future president announcing that the U.S. is defaulting on all its debts and replacing it with the Amero. That still happens in the current version (not really a spoiler . The President then goes on to say that the U.S. will be consolidating its resources to the states east of the Mississippi river, offering free relocation to anyone who wants to move (not in the current version).

This post is about long enough, so I’m going to put off talking about the various logistical problems that began to arise in the previous version of A GROWING CITY in the a future post.