Editor’s Mail

Bill Ingle for Wisp

“Contributions welcome
for the next issue of Wisp on the 7^th June!”

Procrastinators beware! If you’re like me, you’ll think the 7^th is the drop-dead deadline, and try to get something in as close to the last minute as possible, say on the 6^th.

Wisp will come out on the 5^th, however, before you get to the 6^th, so that you must say to yourself: “Aw shucks. I’ll have to wait for the next one.”

If you’re not careful, this could go on indefinitely. You have to mentally move the drop-dead deadline to the 5^th, and get your piece in by the 4^th, although Wisp might then appear on the 3^rd, considering its nature.

The dead Victorian newspaperman in my head wrote at the last possible minute, night after night, for years. The presses would be ready to roll, everything all set in type except for the leader.

He’d come in to the office, sit down at his desk, and — as the tension in the room was just beginning to really amp up — write his leader. Done, he’d hand it to a fellow, who immediately began translating it into type.

Finished, the machinery — the presses — powered by well stoked steam engines, would kick into action.

Eventually, the end result of all of this would end up in a couple of horse drawn wagons, the horses eager to get going.

Some habits die hard and can even carry over into other selves. Is this not a good rationalization for a little procrastination?

That old fashioned newspaper had a regularity to it that was a piece of its world. Sure — there are daily newspapers today, morning and evening — but they exist in a world of instantaneous electronic communication and extremely sophisticated presses. There’s no clip-clop of horses on city streets in this world; watches tend to be electronic and worn on the wrist and fleetingly glanced at; they are not the handwound ticking pocket watches you might stop, take out your pocket, open up, and scrutinize for a long moment before reversing the process. Everything changes, of course, but in this case they’ve become accelerated, at least if you view all of this linearly.

So we decided to blend the two times together a bit. We’d whip up a new probable reality just for the fun of it.

Travelling to Victorian London via Main Coordination Point, we quickly put our plan into action.

Dressed in period clothing and well studied and rehearsed, we began soliciting venture capitalists of the day and soon raised a substantial sum.

We hired steel manufacturers, engineers, and designers, and purchased land. We began immediate construction on our power station, the world’s first. We had to secure rights for our primitive electrical lines; no one had heretofore imagined power lines and poles but we got our way. (Money talks, even back then.)

We started work on the cellular system before we’d even finished the power system. Before long Victorian London sported ugly cell towers everywhere, an occasional microwave dish heightening the strangeness of our creation in that time and place.

We began shipping in massive quantities of cellphones through the portal, then hired actors and actresses to popularize cellphone use even as we plastered billboards everywhere, employing 21^st Century advertising techniques on an innocent population.

We sold tons of phones and made gobs of loot, more than enough to fund our next adventure.

Bill I.