#WritersCoffeeClub Oct 6: What might an inattentive reader miss in your work? The serious subtext and research behind the humor. "The Wine and Cheese Pirates" is a romp, but it also explains the economics of grey markets in the presence of unreasonable tariffs. There are unintended consequences when one chooses to implement economics that went out of favor in the 1800s with good reason. If one irrationally sets tariffs too high it creates an incentive for smuggling otherwise legal goods to profit on the arbitrary profit margin created by the tariff.
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I would be astounded if this isn't going on all over the world right now. The inherent danger is that once the grey market logistics are in place it becomes easy to use off the books supply chains to ship black market goods, as well. That too is probably happening right now. In "The Adventures of [Unfortunate Panda-Face] Wilson in the First Dimension**" I look into the differences between logographic symbolic languages and alphabetic languages using Emojuese, a language consisting of symbols with culturally agreed upon idiomatic meanings, Emojis, and Angstlish as it was spoken before the advent of the cerebral cortex InnerNet allowing people to communicate directly in most cases without text or vocal intermediation. This of course results in a pidgin language that attempts to combine both languages in ways that often impeded communication. The difference in the level of terror associated with Emojuese:🗡️ 🥷 ❔[Dagger][Ninja][Question Mark] and the alphabetic Angstlish: "Nobody Knows, Inc., LLC of the Isle of Man" is orders of magnitude greater for Emojuese users in part because rather than being spoken or written the symbols just appear inside their heads. There is a lot of comparative linguistics going on in the background that has little to do with the plot, but is there just because I find it interesting. The clown car has a lot of very sophisticated moving parts under the hood in most of my writing.
