{"id":1068,"date":"2017-07-25T19:37:20","date_gmt":"2017-07-25T19:37:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/?p=1068"},"modified":"2017-07-25T19:37:20","modified_gmt":"2017-07-25T19:37:20","slug":"the-writing-life-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/2017\/07\/25\/the-writing-life-3\/","title":{"rendered":"The Writing Life"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><i>From a newsgroup posted dated April 17, 2012:<\/i><\/p>\n<p>I can&#8217;t remember what brought it on, but I was thinking about the Weird Shit Boys tonight.<\/p>\n<p>For those who don&#8217;t recognize the name, this was a project I started many years ago.  The premise is that the FBI really does have a team they send in when there&#8217;s something supernatural or mad-sciency, but it&#8217;s not Mulder and Scully, or the Men in Black, or Fringe Division, it&#8217;s the Weird Shit Boys &#8212; a middle-aged housewife psychic\/witch, a boy genius, an old, old man who&#8217;s been a weirdness magnet all his life and has an eidetic memory so he can match almost anything to something he&#8217;s encountered before, and a more or less standard-issue agent who rides herd on the others.  The FBI doesn&#8217;t admit these people exist, and they aren&#8217;t officially working for the FBI, but if you convince the FBI that you really do have a supernatural problem, the WSB will show up.<\/p>\n<p>Tonight I realized two things about the WSB&#8217;s world.  First off, nobody&#8217;s worried about the Apocalypse, or vampires taking over the world, or whatever, because if large-scale supernatural threats really happened, the way they do in Hollywood, then the world would have been destroyed centuries ago.  The good guys can&#8217;t <i>always<\/i> be there and win, so the odds are so high that it&#8217;s a virtual certainty that if an Apocalypse was possible, it would have already happened.  So the FBI doesn&#8217;t worry too much about this stuff, but on the other hand, you don&#8217;t want to just ignore it, either &#8212; thus the WSB.<\/p>\n<p>Sometimes, though, if the events are public, you need to be <i>seen<\/i> to do something, even if the event doesn&#8217;t really call for the WSB, so they also have the Paranormal Defense Unit.  The PDU is a bunch of guys in suits with heavy armament and fancy gadgets, but it&#8217;s all for show &#8212; they don&#8217;t do anything but show up, go through the motions, and issue a reassuring (and largely fictional) report.  The PDU guys aren&#8217;t full-time; they&#8217;re regular FBI agents with some theater background who get called out as needed.<\/p>\n<p>On the <i>tricky<\/i> cases, though, you call in both the PDU <i>and<\/i> the WSB, and try to keep them out of each other&#8217;s way.<\/p>\n<p>So having worked all this out &#8212; I have no plans to actually write anything about them any time soon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From a newsgroup posted dated April 17, 2012: I can&#8217;t remember what brought it on, but I was thinking about the Weird Shit Boys tonight. For those who don&#8217;t recognize the name, this was a project I started many years ago. The premise is that the FBI really does have a team they send in&hellip; <a class=\"read-more\" href=\"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/2017\/07\/25\/the-writing-life-3\/\">Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1068"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1068\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1069,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1068\/revisions\/1069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}