How Economics 101, a Novel Got Started

Several years back, I got disgusted with the prevalence of certain themes in popular literature and started planning a novel in which two good Mormons get stranded on a desert island for a week or a month and, ohmygoodness, don't do the hankypanky.

That idea turned into my first attempt at a novel, in which two grad students at BYU go do fieldwork in an island country and find themselves stranded on a desert island for a really long time. Then I decided to use the novel to explore the economics of really living completely off the grid long term.

But the setup doesn't work at BYU for several reasons, and arranging for them to be married without leaving the island requires some elements that reach into fantasy. I initially intended to use the parallel realities conceit, but I found myself having to claim too much of my own opinions and interpretations as doctrine.

Any such claim is too much.

Passing personal opinion off as Church doctrine is basically the sin that Jesus kept calling the Pharisees, Sadducees, Lawyers, and the members of the Sanhedrin on. It damages yourself, and it is quite likely to damage others.

So I started moving the whole story to a planet called Xhilr, which has two moons, and where most modern society uses base sixteen instead of base ten (and twelve/sixty, etc.). And years have 352 or 353 days, with two short years in seven. (Fortunately, there are twelve months there, too. And weeks are seven days. And days are almost 24 of our hours, although 16 of theirs.) And I got lost in telling about a very bad monopolist who used microcomputers to capture the information industry.

And their restored gospel has a book of scripture named after a prophet called Eien-ni Phueru, or, E-P, for short. (Which was a misunderstanding on my part.) And the whole thing just kept getting further out-of-hand.

Had to lop a parse, so to speak, and back up to my initial draft. Now I'm working on moving it to Xhilr much more carefully.

I'm planning to discuss the calendar and their units of measurement in some other novel (maybe), and depend on translator's license to corrolate pieces of their history with ours. At minimum, I don't want to slow this novel down with a bunch of speculative math.

I mention the two moons and the differences enough to make it clear that Ehyephoot-ism and Mormonism are two different things, and I plan on avoiding giving a formal name to their Church.

But I do point out the parallels in a lot of places, because religion is a huge part of the story.

(This is from a post to the Facebook LDS Beta Readers group.)

It can be read here, although, as I say, I'm still in the process of moving it offworld. [JMR201804031534: Move half complete.]