@DH Hanni: Just keep working on it. We all have our personalities, and our paths. For someone who sets the bar high and is their own worst critic, the period of frustration can last longer. But the final result is almost guaranteed to be above average, or even better than that. You will find your voice, you just need to be patient and believe in yourself as a writer ps. Our stories are always about us, deep down. Something we want to let play out. That's why writing is so therapeutic, imo.
You've just described the very paradigm under which banks currently operate in the real world. Real banks are no longer warehouses for money. They haven't been for a long time. Yeah, there's a vault with some money, but that vault and it's contents represents a negligible fraction of the money handled in a virtual manner by any bank. Banks are businesses that allow the two sides of a transaction to function with anonymity. You get a home loan from a bank, you think the money for that loan is sitting in that bank? No. It comes from an investor who uses the bank as a broker of sorts because you loan is part of that person's investment portfolio. The interest you pay is the dividend the investor realizes on his/her investment. And this is just one example of one kind of transaction. The paradigm of bank would be the same in that world as this.
It's why I use a Credit Union. But more importantly, when your currency is the amount of time you have left to live, and that time is kept on a recorder in your arm, what possible need could you have for a bank?
Because there is currency in play that is not held within a person's countdown clock. If you're a billionaire in the rich zone, do you keep all of your time on your arm? I would think not. How else would you invest it? If all the currency in existence is locked within the arms of the users of that currency, then there is no money in circulation. No money in circulation, no economy. When you pay for something with your time, it has to go somewhere before it's collected. remember they had those little silver boxes wherein the time was also stored, the boxes everyone took when they crashed the truck into the bank? Not only is not all the time on the arms of people, only a tiny fraction of all available time would be stored there.
Credibility goes hand in hand with good storytelling. A plot hole, like some think exists in the time bank issue (I've not seen the movie or read the story), suggests it wasn't explained by the writer and either needed to be or needed to not be in the story. If the reader finds something in the plot that is implausible enough to damage or ruin the story, it suggests the writer didn't tell the story well. But it's circular. If you choose a story element that you can't make the reader believe (within the story), then the choice was wrong. If you have an implausible thing in your story, it shouldn't stop you from writing, because chances are there is a potential story surrounding that implausible thing that would work. But if you mis-match your implausible thing with the story surrounding it, that is likely where the failure would occur.
I think it is all about the delivery and how you create the mindset of your audience. I watched the movie "Salt" the other night and had to turn it off because it was about the most stupid thing I have seen in quite sometime. The physics of the stunts was wrong, amazing life saving coincidences, deus ex machina, poor directing. I get pissed off think about how bad that movie was. Then, two nights ago, I watched "Predator" with Arnold Schwarzenegger (for the umpteenth time) and fecking loved it (again). Or, if that doesn't work for you, compare Salt and Borne Identity. Same genre, similar action scenes, but one movie sucks like a Dyson Vacuum. Why is that?
Well, that assumes that the number of slaves that you can save with the MHM are worth more than the MHM costs to create and operate. Plus, there's the value, to evil dictator types, of having privileges of priceless value that can be granted to some and denied to others. Historically, it would certainly seem to make sense for slaves and laboring classes to always be kept fed, sheltered, rested, and at their maximum health and productivity. But that has certainly not historically been true. I suspect that a person who is clean, fed, safe, sheltered, and healthy is a person who is likely to look around and seek something more. And dictators don't like that.
Is that sexist? Hmmm. I liked "Salt". Hate Schwarzenegger movies. I find them rather dorky. I also did not like number of a Jolie action movies. "Salt" was one of the first ones in that genre I did actually like. I find this all a tad fascinating.
I guess my point was that I never watch an Arnold movie and say, "Pffft, that's bullshit. That can't ever happen." But other works of fiction don't set me as the audience up correctly and I become critical.
So, not only is there the writer's talent addressing the improbable, there is the additional element of the reader's POV.
When you watch Predator, you don't take it seriously (well, some might do that). It's so tongue-in-cheek. The Bourne Identity and Salt are more serious, the former less so though, if I remember correctly. Then there's the casting, some films are just cast better than others. Perhaps the same can be said about a novel. If there're great characters and, say, funny dialogue, bs and plot holes are more likely to fly than in a novel that takes itself very seriously. I love Predator, I really like The Bourne Identity because of Franka Potente, and I nothing Salt. It was like Finnish lager, tastes like water though it does get you drunk, so it's not all bad.
Not that I'm pointing any fingers, but I got the feeling that Screams of Silence, Cries Unheard was getting that "this would never happen" or "this could never work" kind of treatment, so, yes, I know where you're coming from. Concerning the film In Time, didn't that come out just a couple of years ago, like 2010 or 2011?
Look at what sells well at the present: Vampires Zombies Werewolves Romantic Comedies Anything in the fantasy genre People love the improbable. Having said that, I know what you mean. My brain, which leans towards aspergers, loves logic and finds it hard to dismiss anything that isn't logical. On the other hand my imagination loves anything that takes us out of the ordinary, and I learned at a young age to use fiction to escape an abusive home life. These two things can actually work well together in fiction writing, I love mixing logic with imagination.
I gotta say I'm pretty much like this as well. I'm anal about logic and realism, which sometimes feels kind of silly since it's fiction, after all. But let's say that in the frame of the story, there has to be logic, or a facsimile of it, some way for the reader to establish the rules. I know I myself feel kind of lost if there're no rules in the novel I'm reading. There's less suspense when you don't at least borderline know what's possible, what's not. Held back by the improbable? In my and T.Trian's WIP, Earth's superpowers have built a colony of space stations around Earth. Highly improbable, but hopefully we explained its existence in such a way that it's not entirely implausible.
What's so improbable about vampires, zombies, and werewolves? They're all over the place. Romantic comedies, though - that's the stuff that just can't happen.
