I’ve been reading a lot of SF&F short stories lately and this has had me thinking of short stories I might write and then about the creative process.\u00a0 Ironically, I don’t spend a lot of time talking to authors about their creative process.\u00a0 Must they be in total silence?\u00a0 Do they accumulate ideas and then write them?\u00a0 Do they need music?<\/p>\n
I do need quiet.\u00a0 I’m a thinker and I like to process things and research things before I pull the trigger.<\/p>\n
For example, I’ve been thinking about garbage mining.\u00a0 Yes, garbage mining.\u00a0 It’s the way of the future, you know.\u00a0 But what would be involved with that and where would it go?<\/p>\n
Few people think about garbage mining, even though it has become a staple of our economy.\u00a0 Especially since scientists figured out how to break plastic back down to its basic molecules\u2014back to oil, really\u2014garbage dumps are the new gold mines.\u00a0 Plus there’s all that scrap metal to be harvested from old cans and lids, etc.<\/p>\n
Yep, De Beers still loves its diamond mines but it loves its garbage mines even more.<\/p>\n
But garbage mining is not easy.\u00a0 In fact, it’s extremely difficult.\u00a0 First, the entire dig site must be enclosed in an airtight tent, to ensure that no methane and other gases are released in the process.\u00a0 This gas requires processing and storage, also.\u00a0 It’s another profit center, but not as much as plastic and metal.<\/p>\n
Working inside the tent is a bit like working on another planet, a gas giant of some kind, in which the air is not breathable.\u00a0 The miners wear airtight, chemical resistant suits that aren’t quite as bulky as an astronaut’s but hot as hell, even with the cooling systems on-board.\u00a0 You see, as garbage breaks down, it gives off a lot of heat.\u00a0 As the miners dig, that heat is released.\u00a0 Much of it is captured and converted to energy to assist in processing, but not all of it.<\/p>\n
Additionally, the miners are essentially working in a cloud of flammable gas.\u00a0 This means the equipment they use must be specially configured with spark arresters and shielded to ensure that a digger doesn’t blow up the whole site.\u00a0 That happened a lot at the beginning and still happens about twice a year.\u00a0 Garbage mining kills a few dozen men a year, but so did oil drilling\u2014you know, before we were mostly tapped out\u2014and other forms of mining.\u00a0 Cost of doing business.<\/p>\n
Garbage mining has been bad for one form of business:\u00a0 body disposal.\u00a0 When they started digging in Fresh Kills, the dump that used to take in all of New York City’s trash, they found 436 bodies in the first decade.\u00a0 The city government was appalled.\u00a0 Of course, it’s been nearly a century since that dump was last used and no one responsible is still alive.\u00a0 Still it was surprising to find how many murder victims and missing persons were simply dumped with the garbage.\u00a0 At least with DNA testing there was some closure of the files, if not for the families.<\/p>\n
With all of the copper and plastic in the dumps, not to mention the explosion risk, security around dumps is about the same as a military base.\u00a0 Every load of new trash is processed to the n<\/em>th degree.\u00a0 Nothing ever gets buried anymore.\u00a0 It’s just processed or ground or recycled or broken down until something new can be done with it.\u00a0 So no way could a body get through.<\/p>\n That’s not to say, though, that some idiots don’t try, which is where I come in.\u00a0 McAllister, NYPD, Homicide.<\/p>\n So that’s one direction in which I could go.\u00a0 From here, it would be a standard mystery, though a bit more futuristic.\u00a0 I may play with this story here on the blog and see how many different ways I can slice it but, in the meantime, what is your<\/em> process?<\/p>\n Z<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve been reading a lot of SF&F short stories lately and this has had me thinking of short stories I might write and then about the creative process.\u00a0 Ironically, I don’t spend a lot of time talking to authors about … Continue reading