Concept and Application

I applied to work at Meijer today.  The same one Rachael worked at last year when we were scrambling together money to get married.  Now we'd like to scramble together some money to not end up broke.  Because being broke isn't fun, guys.

You can't exactly be successful at writing and be broke.

Hey, that right there?  That was untrue.  Plenty of people do it.  They're called starving artists, and they're all over the place because our culture has created people who don't want to settle for doing something meaningless with their lives.  They would prefer to suffer in order to do something meaningful.  And for most people the most meaningful thing in the world is art.

But I wasn't planning on talking about art.  I was planning to talk about money.  And how it fits into the world of your story.

In Talas Ke, I took money out of the equation.  Kind of.  I decided it was a barter society with no concept of currency, because I believed (and still kinda do believe) that such a society is better off than one with the hulking abstracted behemoth we call "money."

Maybe I'll outline the way money got to where it is today.

You see, somewhere close to the origin of written language, people decided to start quantifying value.  It likely started with bushels of grain or something similar.  One bushel of grain had a certain amount of value, and people tended to agree on what that value was.  They would trade the bushel for something (or a couple somethings) else of roughly equivalent value to the bushel.  Then, we had the bright idea to start using more portable symbols of that value, worth the standard value of the bushel.  This tended to be easy to move into, because of precious metals and their great worth in societies just developing technology that benefited from such material.

At some point banks came into the equation, and at some point banks started to do two different things:  they would lend out your money (for which, ideally, they would pay you) and they would allow you to carry a waiver that told another bank you were in good standing and could withdraw money from that other bank even though it wasn't physically your money.

And money continued to abstract until the point where today it's more a digital numeral than a physical thing you can grasp in your hands.

So what will you do with that in your story?  Is your world one where the people have begun to abstract the value of an object and give it a number?  Or is a simpler one?  How simple?  Think about it, and if you're creating a world based on development past the one ours has, think about how money might change from where it is now.

Honestly, I can't imagine the behemoth will survive much longer.  That's why I don't think about it too much.  But it's a good thing to consider when you're world-building.

So there.  There's more significance to this blog post.

-shrugs-