CRAFT: Out-of-character actions AND EMP

[shalanna]

Just thinking about this: how would you set up an out-of-character action that you need to have happen for the plot and that you need to have performed by Nellie Mae in particular?

One way that I've done this before is to set up a covert past for the character and refer to it obliquely early in the book. Let's say that Nellie Mae is a sixty-year-old grandmother who runs a bed-and-breakfast inn in the Texas Hill Country. But she's about to have to deal with a crazy person who takes over the inn and takes everyone hostage. Can you set it up such that when she manages to get hold of a gun, she can shoot the crazy person without shooting herself or the innocent hostage he's hiding behind?

Well, perhaps she was a tomboy and cowgirl in her teens, back in The Olden Days. She learned to shoot because her daddy had always wanted a boy, and so she went out with him to the range and shot pistols . . . or shot a rifle and knocked cans off the fence . . . or what-have-you. Or she was in the Waves/Wacs and learned to shoot there. Or she took a self-defense class after her neighbor was attacked several years ago. This is something you can choose and set up early by having someone tease her about bull's eyes or whatnot. Then readers can believe it when she somehow manages to grab a pistol that gets knocked to the floor in a struggle . . . and manages to target the baddie well enough that she gets him right in the kneecaps without hurting the hostage.

Or perhaps she isn't sixty at all. Perhaps she's a deep-cover agent for one of the intelligence agencies and has been wearing a disguise for several years. She's a sleeper spy and is waiting to be activated. So when the nutcase picks her inn at random (or after casing the joint on an innocent test-run weekend with some woman he brings along, and concluding that this place is an easy take), he's in for a big surprise.

You can plant clues that the action you need to happen isn't going to be out of character. Just plant them early, and don't let crit partners make you take them out. ("Why is this in here? Cut this. It doesn't have anything to do with the story. Speed it up. Tighten this out." No! NO! NO!!!)

What are some examples of how this kind of plant has worked for you?

Also . . . I just finished reading a thriller in which the bad guy has built a machine using Nikola Tesla's plans (uh-huh) and can send out a huge EMP (electromagnetic pulse) to kill all electronic devices in a large radius. The flaw in this story is that the author assumes that ALL electronic devices will be permanently burned up/disabled/ruined after this pulse. But the way I have always understood it is that if your device is not even hooked up, it can't possibly be affected. If your MP3 player or pacemaker or whatsit is not even plugged in and doesn't have a battery in it and is sitting on a shelf, the EMP is not going to "burn it up and make it useless." After the event, people would be able to retrieve generators from storage and hook up batteries that had been stored somewhere and power up devices that had not been affected. The power grid might be toast (and our power grid is getting pretty old anyhow, and that's worrisome--many areas of the country still have fifty-year-old substations, if I understand correctly from what I've been reading), but if you had a bunch of solar panels in the basement and knew how to hook them up, you could get up and running again. Am I right? Anyone know?

I'm a bit reluctant to Google-search on EMP because I don't want a visit from Homeland Security. After all, I haven't been published, so my argument that I am researching fiction might fall on hard-of-hearing ears. *sigh* Paranoia dictates that those who Google up stuff might get watched . . . I'm sure a lot of writers are on the "keep an eye on her" list. What a waste of resources, but I'll bet you it's happening.

Comments

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

From both story research and my own personal edification:

If it's close and powerful enough, an airburst EMP could damage electronics that have antennas. In some cases, maybe even anything with internal wiring, though this isn't likely.

Despite stories about how better things were made in the old days, a lot of electronics nowadays are made of sterner stuff than in generations past, so a lot of them will have more resistance to an EMP if not plugged in, or plugged in with a surge protector. This is much because a lot of modern electronics have built-in surge protection, better-insulated wiring, and so on.

Also, there's history to think about: when there were nuke tests out west, radio transmissions and other electronics might be disrupted for a time (as long as an hour in some cases, if I'm remembering right), but eventually would come back up.

This isn't to say that a lot of stuff wouldn't be damaged and destroyed, because it would. A great many computers would be knocked out, for instance. But I think the nastiest consequences wouldn't come from the sheer quantity of disabled electronics; rather, from what would happen if you lost a lot of computers and their networks (police, emergency services, food distribution, and so on). That would hit the ordinary citizen a lot harder than getting their TV fried in the long run.

[shalanna.livejournal.com]

Good info! I concluded that if you had spare parts and spares (an extra generator, or whatever) inside a makeshift Faraday cage in your storm cellar, that would probably survive fine. (O'course, who has a Faraday cage in the storm cellar?!) If military installations and defense contractors' plants are TEMPEST-shielded, that means they're protected from a certain level of this already, anyway. So the book really is out there in fantasyland when it makes various claims, but the general audience doesn't know (or care) any better and buys it, and thus the book works for most readers.

The crisis in that novel was as you describe, though--the baddie wanted to have things go into chaos, people stranded in useless cars on the street, the power grid down, no news or radio stations, etc. That was his whole point--chaos for a few weeks at least. Then he would do his Evil Plan. The ending of that novel totally failed for me because the character had been portrayed as such a baddie (he set FIRE to a CHILD to show some other idiots how Baaad he was, for example), but then at the end, he declines to zap the world because he finds out his current shack date has a pacemaker and "it would KILL her." Well . . . "Too bad about her" would be the expected response, but instead the Script Says that he sends her running for the hills and kills HIMSELF. Bogus!! Beeeep--wrong!! Why couldn't the durn apparatus have backfired on him, or something more fitting? Phooey.

But the book's premise was pretty cool. I just was thinking that if you had the kind of setup that this character was portrayed as having--a compound much like the Waco compound of the Branch Davidians--you could have a M. A. S. H.-style tent and extra pacemakers lying around, and so if the person you're worried about went into fib, you could probably rescue her by using that stuff. A sensible baddie would have made provisions for his OWN medical care, in fact. The book just was a typical "that didn't work for me" disappointment.

But I am STILL tempted to steal parts of its premise or plot. (*grin*) I'd like to explore a post-EMP world consisting of techies like us who went about rebuilding, and perhaps ending up with a "Brazil"-style retro-technology (as in the Terry Gilliam flick "Brazil.") However, that would be a technothriller, and a HUGE investment of time and planning, and I don't think I'm up to it. Maybe someday. Maybe for a short story where I wouldn't have to explain too much, but just be kind of obscure.

[fabricdragon.livejournal.com]

anyone who grew up in the country can be easily assumed to know how to shoot.
had to keep the varmints out of the vegetable garden, you know...

most women in farm country know how to shoot, and if you live in rattler country you know how to shoot WELL.. i would more likely have the woman mention that
"with the new developments and all you hardly ever worry about rattlers anymore. i used to carry a gun when i walked to school, just in case i had to shoot a rattler, or got a chance to catch some fresh rabbit for dinner... now folks assume you are trying to blow up the school..... "

as to EMPS. standard EMP will not harm a disconected and off machine unless it is very close by.... a sufficiently strong one, however, will. because the energy pulse will set up resonance in the electrical wires and etc.... *generating* a pulsed current. this is more of a problem in delicate or wire heavy stuff. like computers, than in old fashioned generators. modern cars wont run (the computer will be dead as will the wires) but some antique cars will run fine..

[shalanna.livejournal.com]

Yes, Granny knows how to shoot! I'm glad someone understands! (In the big city, they just don't understand our country ways.)

The older the car, the better, as far as I'm concerned . . . I want one of those old 1950s jobs with the huge fins! (grin)

I think you're correct about some stuff surviving. The book in question just wasn't realistic for me. I think the premise was a great one, though, and there really should be a great technothriller written about this . . . the thought of all that work makes me tired. *grin* I'm sure I can sneak this stuff into one of my mysteries somehow.

[imafarmgirl.livejournal.com]

You write the most random and fascinating posts.

[shalanna.livejournal.com]

*grin*

Random? Doesn't everybody write about their Hello Kitty toasters?

The toaster is a disappointment, though. It burns the toast and it gives off a foul odor of melting plastic. We've banished it for a while to teach it a lesson. Maybe I'll give it another chance in a couple of weeks. We didn't get a good kitty face on our toast at all! Maybe it was cruddy bread.

[imafarmgirl.livejournal.com]

That totally sucks! Don't they make appliances to work and last anymore?

Out of character, EMPs, etc.

[dennismhavens.livejournal.com]

Fabricdragon has it right. I grew up in Henderson, Nevada back when it was a burg of 3500 people and people said that _never_ would its city limits abut those of big ol' Las Vegas (maybe 50K folks at the time). Everybody from age 12 up had a gun, and we were all taught how to use them, for the very same reasons Fabricdragon talked about. We (my parents and two sets of uncles and aunts) used to have regular Sunday shooting outings in the desert, and my Uncle Walter, who had been a sharpshooter in World War II, taught us everything the Army had taught him about using and maintaining a firearm. Years later, I passed this information on to my wife and two daughters, after a crazy guy who'd lost his money gambling at the Vegas hotel where my wife worked as a PBX operator started calling to make death threats. Fortunately the police nabbed the guy before he could do anything, but we all agreed that the lessons hurt no one but a few empty tin cans, and narrowed the gap between a potential attacker and any of us.

Just make reference to your character having grown up in the desert Southwest, in a small town or rural area, and anyone who had a similar childhood will recognize the ring of truth, especially somebody of sixty or over. What was good clean fun in 1950 eventually became demonized (and impractical, as those towns grew so quickly after 1970).

As to grids, EMPs, etc., I was living in Ogdensburg, New York, just across the St. Lawrence River from Prescott, Ontario when the big eastern blackout of 2003 occurred. We lived in a 1910-era Arts and Crafts house, certainly a long way from modern. The whole town was like that. We went over to my then-wife's son's house right on the river for barbecue, as we couldn't cook with no power. We looked across the St. Lawrence to see if the Canadians were having any better luck than we Americans were: they weren't. Some people lit a bonfire on the shore over there (no doubt to have their own cookout) and things were otherwise as dark in Canada as they were on our side of the river. We returned home after dinner, walked in the door, and at the same moment our electricity came on! But it was quite a few hours before Matt, over on his side of town, had his power restored. Once ours came back, we never saw as much as a flicker; other people in town didn't have power until the next morning. So it strikes me that an EMP would do much in one place, and only a little in another. I have a satellite pic of that massive outage, and even then, at its worst, there are visible areas of light. So micro or macro, I think the effect would be both uneven and unpredictable.

One last thought, on paranoia. This was in the summer of 2003, after the ill-starred invasion of Iraq. 9/11 had occurred less than two years before. But in Ogdensburg, anyway, no one thought it was an Al Qaeda attack or anything like that: people thought it was another damn inconvenience like the big outage of 1965. The paranoia came later.